The New York Times has a clever feature article explaining why Apple (and other firms) manufacture in China for a host of reasons, of which low wages may be a relatively small part. The ability to hire a massive number of trained people nearly instantly is one factor, regardless of how well those people are treated by the contractors Apple employs. For instance, Americans typically won’t live in dormitories and work six 12-hour days in a row, which is commonplace in China and other developing nations.

We haven’t been following the Golan case before the U.S. Supreme Court, but Techdirt explains how the Court has ruled that the United States can retroactively take works out of the public domain and put them back under copyright. The government’s claim is that this is necessary for a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyright, but the end result is that it could (and likely will) be used to shrink the public domain. We’re all in favor of copyright giving incentives to creators, but we can’t see how putting the works of dead people back under copyright will result in any new work.

David Carr of the New York Times neatly explains how Wikipedia’s blackout today to protest poorly drafted anti-piracy bills under consideration in the U.S. Congress leaves a ragged hole in the Internet. He doesn’t see Wikipedia as authoritative, but as fundamental: it’s the way to start to understand and research millions of topics.

From CNET’s coverage, the Consumer Electronics Show press day sounds uninspired. The PC world is getting into ultrabooks (think of a MacBook Air running Windows), there are new TVs that don’t look all that different from old TVs, smartphone manufacturers are trying out large-screen models that won’t fit in a pocket, 3-D printers are still kind of expensive, and cameras will increasingly have Wi-Fi. Oh, and Microsoft will no longer exhibit at CES.

According to this Washington Post article, Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina created only 50 jobs associated with running the facility, and Google and Facebook data centers in the state have also failed to dent the unemployment rate due to a lack of technical skills among local residents. Construction-related jobs are created, but they’re temporary. That’s not to say the data centers won’t help the local economies some, but not as much as it might seem, especially in light of the massive tax breaks used as lures.

Macworld (the publication, not the conference) covers the name change for Macworld (the conference, not the publication), talking with Macworld|iWorld’s vice president and general manager, Paul Kent. Along with the name change come some format changes, with more focus on music, art, and film. Training sessions, now called Tech Talks, now come at the lower price of $75. All in all, the changes appear to be the most significant since Apple pulled out several years ago.

The more that comes out about Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the more it seems that he fundamentally doesn’t understand how miffed customers were about his proposed split between the streaming (Netflix) and DVD (Qwikster) businesses. Even in this New York Times piece, he comes off as defensive and argumentative, claiming people were more upset about the summer price hike and citing the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements as examples of the country’s angry mood.