The handwriting appears to be on the wall for the Bay Street Theatre. Though it has had a very good run in its original location in Sag Harbor, the Village of Southampton is making an offer to lure it to take over the Parrish Art Museum building on Job’s Lane, and the offer sounds too good to refuse.

    The Parrish is to move to its impressive new home this summer, and the old building, which Southampton Village owns, will be in need of a tenant. The village is said to be ready to give the theater a lease for as long as 50 years and generous terms. Southampton might even sweeten the deal with promises of an associated cafe, outdoor theater, and a 400-seat main stage, with ample and accessible nearby parking.

    But what would be good for Southampton Village would be a loss for Sag Harbor. As State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., the village’s attorney, said at a Jan. 5 forum, the theater helped spark something of a revival for the village when it opened at the foot of Long Wharf some 21 years ago. He called its being in Sag Harbor critical to the economic health of the village and said he would do what he could to help keep it there. Former Sag Harbor Mayor Gregory Ferraris, who is now on the Bay Street board of directors, agreed it was not a coincidence that the “success of Sag Harbor has coincided with the success of the Bay Street Theatre.”

    Ultimately, money is what has motivated the theater’s board to grapple with a possible new home. Bay Street pays its Sag Harbor landlord $185,000 a year in rent, with increases every year, and it has sizable additional expenses. If it can reduce the rent, while taking over a larger theater than it has now, and in a location with a larger population base from which to draw patrons, so much the better. Nonetheless, for Sag Harbor, it would be a bitter curtain that falls.

   Advocates of a free and open Internet rose up last week in protest of bills in Washington that would greatly increase the government’s ability to police what is called online piracy. Citizens called and e-mailed their representatives, and Web sites went dark for a day to make a point. The political power of the Internet made news, and the bills were sent back to committee.

     Arguing for Congressional action, entertainment industry lobbyists say that illegal file-sharing costs them billions in unmade sales and harms the United States economy in lost jobs.

    The House bill, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act), and a related bill in the Senate, PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act), were intended to curb rogue viewing and downloading of copyrighted content, such as movies and music files. Opponents say SOPA could be used to unfairly punish sites, such as Google, for simply providing access to other sites, particularly sites offshore, where protected material is available illegally. Federal digital take-down orders could black out whole swaths of the Web, they fear, in an unprecedented and massive new form of censorship.

    There is no question that the recording industry in particular has been hurt by music’s move to computers. During the decade that file-sharing became popular, record sales declined sharply. But piracy (if you can call it that) is not entirely to blame. Where consumers once shelled out $15 for a compact disc, they now can pay just 99 cents for a favorite song. And you can listen to a universe of online music for free on a computer, eliminating the need to buy discs or to steal. For the movie studios, the loss of revenue has not come so much from people downloading new releases but from the collapse of videotape and DVD sales. Consumers can easily — and legally — watch movies or listen to music at home over inexpensive devices, and that’s what’s really putting the crimp on content producers.

    According to a widely cited research paper, online searches for movie piracy sites tailed down in recent years as inexpensive subscription-based services, such as Netflix, took off. So if illegal downloading isn’t the big threat the studios and music-sellers say it is, why the push for help from Washington?

    The backstory is that the studios’ contracts with Netflix and other streaming video services will be up for renegotiation in short order. Subscription costs are expected to jump, and this is expected to cause renewed consumer interest in seeing movies without paying for them. Hollywood, with the help of Washington, is trying to get out in front of a rush to find lower-cost or free entertainment. It won’t work.

   According to the key contributor to East Hampton Town’s 2006 dark-skies lighting code, East Hampton Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley is confused about a draft revision of those regulations. While stopping short of accusing her and Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson of lying, Susan Harder says she checked with an architect who supposedly was consulted on the revisions, and he told her that as far as he knew, he had nothing to do with it. The question of who said what to whom — or did not — obscures the central issue, which is just why and on whose behalf the Republican majority on the town board decided to mess with the lighting law in the first place.

    Attempts to improve 1970s-era protections of the quality of the night sky date back about a decade in East Hampton Town and have their origins in an almost-one-woman effort by Ms. Harder. In 2002, she asked, “Why can’t we get the night sky declared a scenic resource?” After a couple of years’ work, the town as well as East Hampton Village did just that. In the village, a 2004 law that requires lights to be shielded and not directed upward was passed without a fuss. East Hampton Town strengthened its lighting code in 2006, also with minimal complaint. “Keep that lurid orange glow to the west of us,” seemed the consensus.

    However, by 2010, when the last recalcitrant business owners were supposed to comply with the law’s generous “sunset” provisions on offending fixtures, it became a problem. Suddenly, there were objections: The rules supposedly were difficult to understand and compliance would result in inadequate outdoor safety. While the complaints may have been sincere, it is probably more than coincidence that the beefs emerged only when the affected business owners were about to have to pony up for required changes.

    Dark skies, or “smart-lighting” rules like those in place here, are important for several reasons. They preserve the view of the stars and allow for a welcome distinction between night and day when the sky is overcast. Animals — and people — are said to do better when night is night and day is day. An unobscured view of the heavens, if you take a metaphysical view, helps remind us of our place in the universe and encourages study and understanding of the mysteries of the heavens.

     Ms. Quigley appears to be spearheading an effort to completely undermine the East Hampton Town lighting code. As we have editorialized before, if the cost of compliance is the objection for a handful of business owners, the town might offer a bounty on outdated fixtures. Though reasonable adjustments to some of the language in the law may be warranted, there should be no wholesale dumping of the existing regulations.

East Hampton Village tends to get it right when it comes to aesthetics. The village once was dubbed America’s most beautiful village, and successive generations of elected officials have taken that honor to heart. In that spirit, and notwithstanding any claims to the contrary, the village board has proposed additional decorum on signs on private property — specifically those put up by real estate companies. If the law is enacted as proposed, real estate signs would be just a little larger than a page of this newspaper folded in half.

    The board is to consider the code change at an 11 a.m. hearing tomorrow that would limit on-premises real estate signs to one-and-a-half square feet; signs up to seven square feet are allowed now. The village has pointed out that similar laws are in place on Shelter Island and in Palm Beach and brokers in those places have learned to live with the restrictions. We would love to see this come to pass here, but there is one important caveat: The suggested code change is probably unconstitutional.

    Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has given real estate signs an exemption from outright bans, certain questions of fairness remain. For example, the village’s new law would limit the size of house-for-sale notices while allowing temporary construction company signs to continue to be as large as seven square feet. The village’s well-intentioned code change should be rewritten to withstand potential legal challenges — and be fair. This is a case where one size fits all is the only legal way to proceed.

    That’s the good news. The bad news is that you can forget about a similar restriction in East Hampton Town anytime soon. In the current political climate, code enforcers are not seeking compliance on obvious violations of elements of the sign code already on the books.

    We expect the village board to iron out the legal wrinkles in the proposed law. We doubt that the town board will follow the village’s lead, but maybe we’ll be surprised.

The East Hampton Town Board’s new interest in how Cablevision franchise fees are apportioned is a good idea, with the possibility that the hefty sum might be spread more equitably.

    By longstanding practice, nearly all the money the town gets annually from Cablevision goes to LTV, which provides public-access and educational television and broadcasts many town meetings and work sessions. The town board held a hearing last Thursday on Cablevision’s use of the town’s right of way for transmission lines, but much of the real action has taken place in private discussions between the town and the cable company. The town board has been looking to get more money for allowing Cablevision’s Optimum division to have a near-monopoly on television service and a dominant share of Internet use.

    The 2012 town budget anticipates $850,000 as the franchise fee, a more-than-40-percent jump over the amount paid to the town in 2011. The figure is based on 5 percent of Cablevision’s reported revenue in East Hampton Town, up from 3 percent.

    Whatever the actual sum turns out to be for 2012, the thinking around Town Hall lately is that the pass-through to LTV could be reduced. Until a review of LTV’s finances was conducted earlier this year, the town board (and the public) had just about no idea how the money was spent. The board asked for several clarifications of the data LTV submitted.

    With the town’s having cut other social-welfare, education, and cultural services, it seems only reasonable that the size of LTV’s share should also be on the table. Though its supporters are sure to disagree, the outsize payments to LTV that come with few strings attached and minimal oversight appear questionable.

    The pending one-month suspension of Larry Penny, the East Hampton Town director of natural resources, on what may be exaggerated charges, does not bode well for the environment here. Though Mr. Penny has the right to a hearing to contest the claims, the outcome appears preordained, and the town board’s move against Mr. Penny seems a precursor to his firing.

    Having presented voters with tax cuts cobbled together by tapping money from surpluses, the town board knows it will have to balance the books sooner or later by trimming expenses. This makes Mr. Penny’s income, roughly $100,000 a year plus benefits, a tempting target. That the board’s majority has in the last two years essentially declared themselves at war with environmentalists provides ample reason for concern that motivations beyond Mr. Penny may be at play.

    If the board acts quickly to solidify the Natural Resources Department in his anticipated absence, however, most fears would be allayed. The town board needs to name a temporary, qualified replacement to take Mr. Penny’s position should the suspension come to pass. If the board does not do so, it will become evident that the majority views the Natural Resources Department as an afterthought or impediment. And, if Mr. Penny is gone for good, the stakes become much higher.

    If the town board is being straight with the community about what it sees as flaws in Mr. Penny’s job performance and fires him, it must quickly hire someone whom it believes will do a more effective job of protecting our natural resources. And, if it’s even just for 30 days, someone must always be watching out for the town’s environment.

    East Hampton Town may be getting into the fuel-regulation business in a small way, but not without  concern about possible spills and unfair competition.

    The town board is headed toward approving an addition to the code that would make it legal to pump diesel from trucks at the Commercial Dock in Three Mile Harbor; gasoline sales from trucks are prohibited. The practice, which prompted a lively debate at a town board hearing in 2009, has in fact been going on for decades, but without significant controls. If the board approves the law, direct diesel fueling of boats from trucks would end at Lake Montauk and at town-owned docks used by recreational boaters.

    The Gann Road site was singled out because the largest vessels cannot get to the few private marinas with fuel docks at Three Mile Harbor and because it is in easy reach of the deep navigation channel. In Lake Montauk, there are several relatively accessible private fuel facilities with adequate spill containment and other protections.

    The proposed town law contains a troubling contradiction, however. It explicitly acknowledges the environmental risk and potential liability of truck-boat fueling, but would allow it nevertheless where no other source was immediately available. This is not the right solution.

    The community’s interest in clean waterways would be far better served if the town sought a company to set up a diesel facility at the Commercial Dock, meeting the same high safety standards as the private marinas. What East Hampton should not do is allow fuel truck operators to undercut established marine businesses — all of which have had to invest large sums of money to be able to sell fuel — and at the same time increase the risk of ecological damage.

    After years of legal struggle, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, Bloomberg Markets magazine got what could be the scoop of the decade. While Americans were squabbling over the 2008 $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, the Federal Reserve was secretly handing out more than 11 times that amount at a ridiculously low interest rate to the nation’s biggest banks. In fact, TARP distributed far less than its authorized amount: $392 billion.

    The $7.77 trillion in loans only recently brought to light were supposed to keep the financial system running, and, by most accountings, they were successful. Not only did banks survive, according to Bloomberg, they made money on the deal. The big problem was — and it is a startling indictment of the ties between Washington and high finance — apparently no one in Congress knew of the loans while new rules intended to prevent subsequent collapses were being debated.

    In the Bloomberg piece, the cost of this was made clear: “. . . taxpayers,” the authors said, “paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.” The banks, which argued against disclosing the loans, said that admitting to taking the money might have undermined confidence in them as institutions. This might have been a good thing.

    Let’s pause for a moment to consider together just how much money the Fed doled out at .01 percent interest: The $7.77 trillion loaned from its so-called discount window was more than half the value of everything produced in the United States in 2009. Unbelievably, the total is in the ballpark of the value of all the gold ever mined in all of human history at the metal’s 2011 sky-high prices. Consider, too, that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — combined — have cost $1.1 trillion over the course of the last 10 years.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s chairman, having tried to fight disclosure of the loans and commitments, has accused Bloomberg of getting it wrong. In a quibbling letter to House and Senate leaders, he said the reporting was filled with “numerous errors and misrepresentations,” and said that, at peak, the daily loans only reached $1.5 trillion anyway. Congress had access to monthly reports about the total borrowing, he said. Bloomberg has said it stands by its reporting and issued a point-by-point rebuttal of the Fed chairman’s criticisms.

    Mr. Bernanke sidestepped the entire issue of whether lawmakers were improperly kept in the dark about this huge handout as they considered the scale of the crisis and possible financial reforms — which did not come. Nor do the chairman’s objections explain why he and the banks sought so long and hard to avoid releasing the details — long after the chance of any hypothetical damage to the banks’ reputations was past.

    In retrospect, it would be laughable that the nation was convulsed over the much-smaller TARP if the implications for the credibility of our government were not so serious. Members of George W. Bush’s administration, which inaugurated TARP, were not let in on the Fed’s big secret. The net effect of the clandestine loans is that a real reckoning has never come for the giant banks, which ran up the housing bubble through collateralized debt obligations and other schemes. Inadequate regulations to prevent future financial catastrophes have remained in place because the people who would write new rules — Congress — knew nothing about what was going on.

    Not only are the giant banks now too big to fail, they are too big to regulate, according to some of the Fed’s managers. One hopes that, armed with the new information and knowing to what lengths the Fed and the banks went to avoid disclosure, Congress will look again at effective control of the financial industry. Regardless of what is done, however, it is apt to be too late for those Americans who have lost their jobs and their homes.

    Many people were pleased to see the excellent turnout Sunday afternoon at a gathering at the Town Marine Museum to talk about the Amagansett Life-Saving Station on Atlantic Avenue. This is a hopeful signal that the town-owned building may soon be restored, and the Life-Saving Service and its successor, the United States Coast Guard, at last be awarded the local recognition they deserve.

    The Amagansett station is unusual among historical sites here in that it is one of a very few that figure in the national narrative. Part of a string of similar posts along the shoreline, the station’s crews patrolled in relative anonymity until June, 1942, when a Coast Guardsman met a group of German would-be saboteurs who had been rowed ashore from a U-boat on a mission of destruction. Though one of the plotters turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the plan fell apart, the investigation had been touched off by a report from Amagansett. In recent times, the military tribunals used to deal with suspected Al Qaeda agents at Guantanemo Bay had their legal antecedents in the trial of the German saboteurs.

    A lot of money must be raised to restore the Atlantic Avenue building to its original appearance. The community preservation fund could help and might be considered a supplemental source, but the town board has been parsimonious about it, and there is a legal hitch to be overcome. Donations, should any readers be so moved, will be welcomed and can be made out to the East Hampton Historical Society and mailed to Box 51, Amagansett 11930.

    You have to wonder why the owners of small private planes want so badly for East Hampton Town to seek Federal Aviation Administration money for a deer fence. At a hearing last Thursday, pilot after pilot came to the Town Hall microphone to support the Republican board majority’s plan to pursue funding from the F.A.A. But why? Really, why?

    The possible answer may lie not in a concern for the town’s finances — there is plenty of money for the fence in a dedicated airport surplus fund. It may instead be because many pilots genuinely believe that without F.A.A. oversight, there is a risk that the airport would be shut down. Indeed, the head of a pilots association has pointed out that the leaders of several anti-airport noise groups have not said they would not seek the closing of the facility altogether. Taking money from the F.A.A. helps head off that possibility even though there is no credible movement apparent to see the airport boarded up.

    As David Frum, a former George H.W. Bush speechwriter, wrote recently in New York magazine, there are wealthy and influential figures on the right who actually, and in all honesty, think Barack Obama’s presidency represents some sort of an apocalypse. Similarly, reasonable pilots from East Hampton and Southampton really do think that airport-noise opponents could some day force the whole place to be turned into condos, or lord knows what. Both views are powerful, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.

    So if there is no chance that East Hampton Airport will be closed, who then would be affected if the town succeeds in gaining some degree of local control? The current sweetheart deal of low airport fees could persist or be changed regardless of F.A.A. funding. Limiting helicopters in some way would not appear to harm the private pilots who filled Town Hall last week. Nor would a ban on late-night or pre-dawn takeoffs and landings by loud jets put a damper on the owners of recreational aircraft. No, something else is afoot here, though exactly what that may be is not immediately clear.