11.06.07
Lessig on Copyright, Business, and Culture
From the 2007 Ted Conference:
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04.30.07
Scribd: Reading Between the Lines
Scribd is a website with an interesting marketing angle: they want to be the YouTube of documents. For long time readers of mutednoise that statement is a bit of a puzzler – after all, the web itself was first conceived as a set of linked documents. A quick scan through the comments on a recent Om Malik inquiry about the company’s ‘hotness’ turned up a number of people who are also scratching their heads.
Many are quick to point out that the comparisons to YouTube are especially prudent given the number of copyright violations – sheet music for the Beatles, Harry Potter, etc. But is being able to see an original copy of the ‘Dawn of the Dead’ script really what’s fueling the growth? I think there’s more at play here.
I worked for several years writing software for a document control company. What I gradually learned is that there is a large difference between a document and data. A document represents a fixed set of data at a particular moment in time. Having these fixed ’snapshots’ can be highly valuable: while data is ongoing and without a fixed state a document provides the moors so that comparison and analysis can happen.
On the web data is able to exist naturally. It is constantly being scraped, mutated, appended, rearranged, split up, and recombined. By freezing that data into a state (in this case a PDF document) an authoritative (but not necessarily correct) version of the data can be presented across multiple forums in the exact same identical way. In this way, too, Scribd is like YouTube: they make embedding an entire document on another website as easy as cutting an pasting code. The ’snapshot’ of data maintains its referential integrity.
Is that a subtle benefit? Hell yes. However, its one that seems to be getting lost in the poo-pooing of the service. Scribd is providing some real value. It’ll be worth watching to see just how long it takes the doubters to realize it.
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04.02.07
EMI Tries DRM Free Music
As you might have seen across the web EMI is to start selling DRM free music. The move has long been rumored but today’s announcement does represent a definitive shift in major label strategy.
“Apple’s iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI’s new premium downloads. Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied”.
The speculation has long been that once one of the major labels breaks ranks it is only a matter of time before the rest follow. It will be interesting to see how long ‘doing the right thing’ proves to sound economics as well.
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03.14.07
Viacom, Google, and the Coming Corporate Terrorism
If you only read the feed (RSS) version of mutednoise you may not have seen the little Google Reader widget that is embedded on the right hand side of the page. It keeps a list of all the stories that I tag with ‘mutednoise’ throughout the day that I may not have time to comment on at the moment. As yesterday developed it filled up with news about Viacom suing YouTube (through parent Google) for a billion dollars. From Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch coverage (who is quoting the actual lawsuit):
There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.
After a great deal of unproductive negotiation, and remedial efforts by ourselves and other copyright holders, YouTube continues in its unlawful business model. Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused.
More perspective can be found at
- Infectious Greed
- ValleyWag (which advocates a legal ‘mutual destruction’ nuking)
- Charlene Li’s Blog (predictions for an outcome)
- Lessig (talking about the breakdown of the safe harbor clause in the DMCA)
- Om Malik (who correctly points out that Viacom is playing catch up and knows it)
- Fred Wilson (who wants to see someone put in their place for waving the legal stick so liberally)
…and that was just within the first few hours…
What none of these pieces mention is how this is affecting the next generation of policy makers and technology creators. Anyone in their teens to twenties are growing up in a world were these kinds of corporate bombshells aren’t obscure news buried somewhere in the Wall Street Journal. They view these as attacks on services they know and love. And since these services (Napster [the original version], Kazaa, Limewire, thePirateBay, YouTube, etc.) are participatory – meaning that the content found is largely user driven – it is very easy to personalize these legal attacks as not only being against the service but the users themselves. And the users are pissed (volume is a bit loud and the argument is flawed but the sentiment is real):
And on and on and on. We’ve never had a generation watch as the products and services that it really loves are repeatedly drug into court. It is changing the perception that these people have about the corporate world. If things work out they’ll go on to change policy at the government level to better reflect the reality as they see it. More likely, however, is an entire generation that comes to see civil disobedience as a practical necessity in the face of “greedy corporations”. I’m not sure that is a good thing.
02.11.07
Pirates Taunt Movie Execs
In conjunction with the upcoming Oscar Awards the group behind The Pirate Bay has audaciously put up OscarTorrents.com. It serves as a site specifically linking to pirated copies of Oscar nominated movies. If that doesn’t prove that the hubris has left the house, they’ve also dared the entire movie industry with their taunting:
To those worried about downloading in case they get sued: by our calculations, your chances of getting nailed are way less than your chances of winning the lottery. Don’t think twice about it.
To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you — but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we’re only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn’t us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.
You haven’t beaten us, so why not join us? Think of a new business model that doesn’t involve overpriced pieces of plastic and skanky cinemas hawking cheap carbohydrates while relying on $6/hr projectionists who can’t keep a film in focus — not to mention insulting your audiences by (to pick a few examples) surveilling us with nightvision glasses, searching bags, 30 minutes of commercials and bombarding us with ridiculous anti-piracy propaganda. Take a look at yourselves. Is it really any wonder we’re winning?
I can appreciate a certain amount of moxy. And the content industries need to change to deal with the economic realities posed by the web. But I disagree with this. There is a talk available on Google Video (and embedded below – I can’t believe I didn’t mention this earlier) by Lawrence Lessig about Culture and Code. At the end of the discussion, during the Q&A, somebody makes a statement that all the pirates have to do is continue their ways and wait for the old copyright champions, those stuck in 20th century models, to die off. Lessig correctly points out that what he is proposing is the equivalent of ‘digital terrorism’. (Given that many of these acts are perpetrated by self-described ‘pirates’ advocates for rational reform are already battling from a compromised position.) And if that’s how we allow the battle to be framed we are never going to win meaningful changes at the political levels.
via Boing Boing
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