mediAgora

Help me write a blog post

2007-08-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Tom Coates wrote about the history of blog commenting:

I feel like my grandfather when I lurch into language like this, but in those days when people wanted to respond to someone else's post, they wrote something on their own sites and stuck in a link. In many ways I think that we should have stuck with that way of handling communication through webloggia, that we should have dug around and find new ways to optimise that process (á la Technorati), but when I look online today it's not where we find ourselves. One way or another we have to make do and work to improve the environment in which we find ourselves.

I seem to have been engaging in what Tim Oren calls 'old fart blogging' a bit this week too, but here we go again. What I remember from my early blogging experience was having conversations on group blogs with multiple authors, like Gonzo Engaged and the
Small Pieces gang blog - we'd add multiple authors and post our conversations to the same blog as separate posts.

I did finally turn on comments on my main blog
when I adopted the new hAtom Blogger templates, and fingers crossed they will stay relatively spam-free.

Using Google Docs yesterday, I noticed that there is a new 'publish to blog' feature that works with multiple blogging services, so collaboratively edited blog posts with change histories and inline notes can be made, re-edited and republished. This sounds like yet another way of having multiple authors, and worth trying. Do please help me expand on this post about blogging and commenting and conversation.

Click here to edit this with me in Google Docs (it won't get published back here again until I hit re-publish there)

Hm, this is odd, it won't work on epeus, only on mediagora - it seems to be using the old Blogger API, not the new Atom one, and not letting me select a blog reliably.

I think it depends on how you (the generic 'you') view your blog: are you firing off idea bursts into the void for other people to pick up or not, or are you trying to promote an ongoing discussion? coComment can help with aggregating conversations from diverse sites, but I haven't played with it to see how well it works in practice versus collaborative editing of blog posts or groupblogs or commenting directly on posts. -Steven Kaye 8/25/07

It says in the very top: "edited on August 27, 2007 7:33 AM by Richard Eriksson". It's currently 2:

Hope for rebirth

2003-12-23T03:21:00.000-08:00

Mark Eris rants: The year in which all intellectual property (All? No. One small village in Gaul still.....) goes digital, and thus becomes thievable within 5 seconds of being available. Download the record of the book of the film of the comic and the delete it after one view, because it`s a crock of shit and you`re glad you didn`t pay any money for it anyway. The robber baron cartels find themselves having to run fast enough to keep up with people, as sitting on the sidelines calling the consumer a thief won`t cut it any more, no matter how many 5 year olds they take to court. And they can`t take it. It`s been too many decades since they had to go outside the house, and all that rich food, slave girls from the ghetto and colombian health products have taken their toll. Come off the accelerated culture curve for a second and listen. Really strain your ears. And you can hear them wheezing, coughing up blood, collapsed to the floor shouting abuse at the customer who is always right from somewhere back in the last decade.

Lots more - read the whole thing.

The technical case against DRM

2003-12-05T04:06:00.000-08:00

Although the economic argument is more powerful - that DRM destroys value for customers and hence will be shunned by them - the technical argument is strong too.
This rests on one of the fundamental pillars of Computer Science - the Church Turing Thesis that states that any computer can emulate any other. When this is combined with the continual improvement in computing power available, it means we will always be able to run old software, or indeed protected software, by emulating the environment it runs within.
Simson Garfinkel describes how emulation saved the BBC Domesday Project, the authors of which I worked with at the BBC and the MMC.

"But that wasn't DRM" I hear the cry, "just obsolete hardware and data formats".

How about a systematic program that defeats the hardware protection for pay per use interactive experiences that works in a general enough way to encompass 25 years worth of hardware design?

It's called MAME and it has just been ported to the Nokia N-Gage cellphone/game gadget. It has emulators for various CPUs (and graphics and sound chips) to run the code directly from the original game ROMs - they look and feel just like the real thing
If Nokia are smart they will license this and the games and use it to promote the gadget - this company has licensed Atari ROMs for sale. After all, those 80s games are smaller than most MMS photos that get sent, and they're lots more fun than ringtones.

I hope Ed Felten and maybe can explain this to the assembled lawyers at the Berkman conference today. Most of them seem to like on compulsory licensing schemes.
I wish I had been able to take the chance offered to join them and present mediAgora to them. I look forward to reading the blogging of the event.

Here's a cartoon I made with the wonderfully silly Bayeux Tapestry Construction Kit

Sharing and Stealing - Jessica Litman

2003-12-03T03:50:00.000-08:00

Comment on Sharing and Stealing - Jessica Litman

It is a great essay until this paragraph::
"The key to the opt-out mechanism I propose is the selection of a single digital file format or family of formats capable of conveying copyright management information as defined in section 1202 of the copyright act. The format will probably incorporate digital rights management capability because the people who will be using it will desire that feature, but there's no need for any copy-protection to be hack-proof, or even exceptionally durable. It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players. I'll call the format *.drm for short."

This aspiration: "It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players." is impossible. CD players play unencrypted, uncompressed digital audio. A drm'd format would require new players.

TeledyN: How to Slay the RIAA

2003-11-03T03:29:00.000-08:00

TeledyN: How to Slay the RIAA: Music is not like painting or playwriting or really most of the other arts: Music is intimately temporal, epherimal, abstract and fluid. Music is here one moment, gone the next, and in the days before the mass-distribution recording, we expected music to be fresh, even the old favourites. As John Cage noticed when they first started to compare the electrical signals on recording wires, it is impossible for even the finest performer to exactly replicate a prior performance; John says he stopped listening to recorded music the day he attended a performance of some orchestral piece and a small boy seated behind him told his father afterward, 'That's not how it goes!' -- records are only that, a record, a snapshot of some moment in time, a moment past, stale, for the most part, forgotten as the artist has already moved on to something new.

With all this free sample music out there, constantly replenished and refreshed, sure there's lots for a small rural radio station to pilfer for their ads, but remember, if we ensure the meta-data is accurate and leaves a clear trail back to the artists, then there's no excuse for commercial or public uses of the music not to contact the performer and arrange for a custom deal.

It's all those custom deals that create friction and barriers to entry. How about a uniform, fair deal, like mediAgora offers?

Tim Oren has a meta-plan

2003-10-31T01:36:00.000-08:00

Tim Oren:

Desiderata for a business model Some of these flow directly from the market description, others need a bit of explanation:

Leverage the net for promotion and distribution as far as possible. Both to reduce the costs of creating new markets (building a peak), and to create a structural barrier to labels tied down by channel conflict.
Be neutral to the artists' and genre audience's choices of revenue model. Whether the model is CDs, MP3s, concerts or merchandise, support it. Support both bundling and variable pricing, whatever makes the market by minimizing transaction costs in the eyes of the particular set of artists and customers.
Disaggregate creation, production, promotion, and distribution. This will allow amortizing infrastructure across genre and artists, while it forms another structural barrier to labels whose models inherent aggregate promotion and distribution. Specialists may ultimately be more efficient than 'tied' services.
Emphasize individual value, to both the customer and artist. This should be the antithesis of one-size-fits-all top 40 demographic marketing. Give them what they want, and then show them some more things they want. Create loyalty and trust among customers and artists; increase the emotional costs of cheating the system.
Be adaptive. It''s a moving landscape. The BigCo's are stuck on the peaks and can't explore. Fill up the new ground by using both artists and customers as scouts.

OK, Tim, which bits am I missing from mediAgora?
Or put another way, isn't mediAgora an ideal component of the choice of revenue model?

Untangling the Web of Music Copyrights

2003-10-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Lydia Loren has a thorough paper on copyright complexity:
The crisis in the music industry has been brought about only in part by the digital revolution. The layering of copyright ownership interests and the complexity of copyright law, particularly as it applies to music, has also played a major role in the inability of the industry to respond to the rapidly evolving ways in which digital works can be distributed and otherwise exploited.

After detailing the tangle of legal rights in the music industry and identifying the vested industry players and their respective roles, this article describes the difficulties faced by users of new technology in attempting to comply with the law. These problems may explain, at least in part, the widespread phenomenon of what many in the industry see as infringement on a massive, and global, scale. Without low-transaction-cost solutions and reasonable absolute price for obtaining authorization for the digital activities of millions of users, we see a classic example of market failure. Users respond to this failure by effectively exiting the failed market, completely ignoring the overly cumbersome requirements of the law.

However, her proposed reform is almost as complex as the current system, and removes the simplicity of compulsory licensing, requiring more, not less negotiation, thus raising barriers to re-use.

Volokh on Media as Property

2003-09-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

The Volokh Conspiracy: ...say that virtually all TV viewers start using a hypothetical new technology that lets them watch all programs (cable or broadcast) for free, and lets them seamlessly skip commercials. Pro-I/P argument: This will mean much less incentive to create new works, and thus much less new TV programming. Anti-I/P argument: No problem; there's always some other business model. Shift from advertising and pay TV to, say, product placement (advertising Coke by having Coke cans appear as props in the show, or praise of Coke appear as part of the dialog) -- that will provide the revenue needed to make people invest in making more programming.
This argument does have some merit, in rebutting the extremist pro-I/P argument that "If it weren't for intellectual property, we'd have zero new works being created." Like most predictions that contain the words 'zero', 'always', or 'never', this is bunk: Some people will find some ways to make some money from the works even without intellectual property, and others will do it without a profit motive (consider blogs, for example). The extremist argument has always been hyperbole, not reality.
But this leaves the moderate pro-I/P argument that "If it weren't for intellectual property, we'd have much less investment in new works" -- and the "there's always some other business model" argument isn't really much of a response to that.

The flaw here (as Volokh acknowledges later) is that digital media re non-rivalrous and non-excludable:
Now of course one can argue that tangible property is different from intellectual property, for instance because it’s nonrivalrous; I won’t get into that debate now. But the store example shows that the argument that “there’s always some other business model” doesn’t really carry independent weight. Once you conclude that the seller has no legitimate property right in some kind of property (whether television programs or clothing), you can then pooh-pooh its claims by saying “there’s always some other business model.” But what’s doing the work in that argument is your initial rejection of the seller’s property right claim -- not your argument about other business models.

It seems that Volokh is the one doing a lot of work here to pretend these works are rivalrous and excludable. Pointing out the opposite is the boy that says 'but the Emperor has no clothes'.

Volokh has fallen into the trap of economic shallowness - that people act in accordance with the simplistic models of one-shot game theory, which says that the Prisoner's Dilemma will always end in betrayal.

In the real world, there is an iterated Prisoners Dilemma, and those who betray don't get to play for long, as their reputation precedes them.

Fans will readily pay for value perceived and received, especially when they know it will reward the creators. Creative work is not a commodity good, subject to uniform valuation and equilibrium economic assumptions, obeying Gaussian staistics, it is a fashion good, whose value varies wildly between individuals, and over time as trends ebb and flow, following Power law statistics. Pretending otherwise is the real mistake.

Ready for mediAgora

2003-08-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

Jack Rusher:
Suggestions presented by non-technical persons typically hinge on central control and accounting of the public Internet. The Internet was designed in such a way as to make this entirely unpracticable. Central planning is not a robust solution to these, or most other, problems.

The survival of the unit sale mechanism depends upon the creation of a robust micropayment system that will provide the market lubrication necessary to reduce the cost of legal acquisition until cheating is more effort than it%u2019s worth. There will, of course, still be piracy in that future, but it will be lost in the noise of commerce.

iriXx summarizes for me

2003-07-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

iriXx of copyleftmedia wrote a great article on copyright alternatives, including this nice summary of mediAgora:
The mediAgora project, initiated by Kevin Marks, demonstrates a new economic model which aims to provide a realistic and supportive framework for musicians to release their works while still earning a living. Marks defines mediAgora as 'a new marketplace for media', turning the established model on its head and redistributing the balance of power away from record company middlemen and back where it belongs, to the creator of an artistic work. Yet he acknowledges that promoters play a valuable role in getting an artist's work heard, and deserve recompense according to their contribution.
Under the mediAgora model, Marks defines a set of rules for the commission which his promoters would earn for distribution and publication of a creative work. His system is designed to work 'with the new realities of digital media, instead of fighting them', and so he suggests that customers can also become promoters - when someone recommends a work to their friends, leading to a subsequent purchase, or incorporates it into their playlist, they will also be rewarded by earning a small percentage on commission. Hence Marks states that 'there is no incentive to "cut out the middleman" and distribute straight from the artist either', as the mathematics of his chain of sales is designed to grant the distributor their full share of the revenue generated.
The economics of mediAgora are designed to work within a file-sharing environment, as Marks believes that sharing encourages sales. He is unwilling to use copy-protection systems, as he believes that this destroys the value of the work; instead he believes that the only way to encourage people to pay for a downloaded work is to make this process easier than a gratis download - his solution being to reward the customer. A person may play more than one role in the chain of supply from creator to promoter to customer, and indeed the mediAgora model does provide incentive for an artist to distribute their own works. But the most important implication of such a model is that the power is returned to the creator of a work, who negotiates the terms for promotional fees and distribution of monies. The middleman plays just the role which his/her title suggests, and is no longer in a position to wield oppressive contracts against the artist.
Copyleft licensing works well within the mediAgora model, which acknowledges that the artist, promoter and listening public all play a vital role in the music marketplace - and so may well offer a workable alternative under which all may enjoy their freedom to work, share and create. But mediAgora makes one additional requirement, that purchasers of a derivative work must also buy the original. Marks explains this as a solution to the question of how to reward a creator while permitting copying: 'Both copyleft and Creative Commons suffer from creating a hard separation between non-commercial and commercial re-use. This reinforces classical publishing models, which are designed around a hit-driven fashion business, with a power-law distribution. mediAgora's model is designed to work well for creators too small for conventional publishing to care about, but to be able to scale up smoothly. The model for derivative works is that you can create and sell one freely, but any customers who buy your work have to have bought the source work it is based on. This is similar to copyleft when both works are free, but it adds the notion of payment in a fair manner.'

Business & Trust

2003-07-22T18:24:00.000-07:00

Kottke's donut anecdote applies admirably to fundamental aspects of the mediAgora model: e.g. customers are not simply criminals waiting to happen, but potential participants in a trusted relationship. Donuts or music or film, most people aren't interested in cheating the system.

A while ago I was asked about DRM. This was my reply:

A few months ago, I purchased a digital version of an album that I liked online. I downloaded all the tracks, which were in a Windows Media Player format that allowed me to burn one copy of them onto a CD. I really liked that ability, because there were times when I wanted to be able to listen to my CD in the car, even though most of the time I'd probably be listening to it in the office at my desk, on the computer to which I'd downloaded the files.

Well, a week or two later, my friend Matt and I drove up to Vancouver, BC for the day. Somehow or another, while we were out walking around, my car got broken into. Fortunately for me, the car isn't particularly valuable and nothing in it was particularly valuable either, but that didn't stop the thief from taking my portable CD player which had my new CD that I'd burned in it (the player was probably worth $20, and the physical CD was probably not even $1).

Well, in one sense, this isn't a big deal. I can still listen to the album at work, where I spend 8 hours a day anyway. And, if I hadn't purchased the album digitally, if it had been a regular CD, I'd be out of luck; I'd have to go buy that album again. Also, it doesn't take a super-genius or a power user to realize that I can record sounds into MP3 format off my computer, so if I wanted to circumvent the Windows Media Player protection on that album, I could simply re-record each track and burn another CD.

The stupid thing is, though, that I shouldn't have to. The brilliance, the key, and the power to digital media is its reproduceability. However, for some reason, certain companies find this a huge threat. Admittedly, if someone took it into their head to illegally copy and distribute that media (and people do this), that will cause financial harm to a company. But all I want to do is have another CD to replace the one that was stolen from me. I get punished because whoever put the protection scheme on this album assumed I was going to behave criminally and use the album in an illegal way. Assumed guilty before I even had a chance to commit a crime.

Movie's power curve changing too?

2003-07-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds notes the fall off in box office and the growth of independent film, and the parallel with music, as I discussed in the Liebowitz piece below.

Couldn't put it better myself

2003-07-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

As the Apple Turns explains DRM:
this is the way that DRM always seems to move: it becomes more and more annoying to honest people trying to use their songs/ebooks/whatever in legal ways, whereas dishonest people will always find a way to steal what they want no matter how much protection is slathered on top. But hey, that's what makes it so much fun! Assuming this all shakes out as rumored, we eagerly await Apple's workaround to the workaround to the workaround of the workaround.

Derivative works need encouraging too

2003-07-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

Jon Pareles writes an interesting article about influence between media, and when one should pay money as well as homage.
The mediAgora derivations model simplifies this hugely.

Similarly, Lessig cites an asynchronous collaboration:

So one of the million things I've not had time to do while finishing this draft (answering a b'gillion emails is another) was to listen to this. As I described before, Colin Mutchler posted a guitar track to Opsound. Opsound makes its content available to others under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license. Cora Beth, a 17 year old violinist, took the track and added a violin track. The result is this.

As Brian Flemming commented on the post, "a great way to illustrate the value of CC to someone who perhaps doesn’t quite get it." Indeed it is. Listen to this, and you'll can't help but get it.

mediAgora make such collaborations possible too, but leaves open the opportunity for the Creators to get paid.

Liebowitz blames downloading. But downloading what?

2003-06-18T02:56:00.000-07:00

Stan Liebowitz has posted an updated and revised examination of the impact of MP3 downloads on record sales.

The bottom line: MP3 downloading is harming sales. No other explanations that have been put forward to explain the recent decline hold up under analysis.
Nevertheless, how far should we be willing to go to protect the record industry from a 20-25%
decline in business? Are recent proposals, such as the Berman bill going too far? My own view is that
such proposals are going too far. Should we switch to a non-market alternative as suggested by Lessig,
Natenal, and Romer? I believe that switching to a non-market alternative should be an absolutely
last-resort policy [...] Allowing record companies to protect their wares using digital right management technology seems to be a far more reasonable alternative.

I've just managed to read this through in detail; it is a thorough piece of work, as before, and measured in its conclusions, but it is still missing a few key measures.

Stan notes that the 'amount of time spent on activities' survey he uses to dismiss displacement of music by DVD or other activities, is methodologically flawed.

The librarying of DVDs rather than albums is not really tested. Seeing per capita DVD sales (and rentals) on the same composite chart showing the different music formats would be very interesting.

The cell-phone/text messaging/chat displacement should not be underestimated either. The amount spent on cellphone connectivity by the text-message generation is enough to displace a fair bit of prerecorded entertainment spending.

These quibbles aside, there is a key methodological problem at the core of the project. It works from the assumption that the RIAA records sold represent the totality of music consumption, and that any online music downloaded necessarily is an infringement of RIAA copyrights.

In fact, there is a great deal of music available online that is from artists outside the RIAA orbit, and freely made available, sometimes to promote CD sales, sometimes just for pleasure. This does reduce RIAA profits, but by displacement, not by theft.

A more subtle point is that network theory predicts that as interconnections between customers grow, the chance of a big cascade hit grows at first, but then as they are exposed to a more diverse range of advice and opinions, it falls off. The hugely increased connectivity that the net and cellphones enable may have caused the phase transition on the customer base.

This is discussed in Duncan Watts' classic paper.
In either of these two scenarios, the independent labels and musicians do better.

UK Musicians interested in mediAgora

2003-06-10T18:32:00.000-07:00

Miriam Rainsford's article on alternatives to standard publishing contracts for musicians puts a word in for mediAgora, as well as pointing out the UK problems with the MCPS monopoly:

One difficulty which bLiP records encountered in releasing the Madonna Remix Project album was that MCPS (UK Mechanical Copyright Protection Society) licensing is at present incompatible with copyleft licensing. Weston wished to draft his own license which would permit his customers to enjoy sharing mp3s of the album. When he approached the MCPS, their response was that a copyleft license would be "inappropriate."

On further enquiry it seems that, as an artist signs an exclusive license to the MCPS for royalty collection, the MCPS are then unwilling to extend this license to include file sharing. This is somewhat understandable when one considers that the MCPS takes an 8.5 percent cut from every album or digital distribution in the United Kingdom. The MCPS are willing for their members to use copyleft licensing as long as they sign a waiver for royalty collection. But what made Weston's job difficult is that, under UK law, it is illegal to press an album without an MCPS license. And an album license will not be granted by the MCPS if the album uses copyleft material.

The need for sensible defaults in derivative licensing

2003-05-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

DJ Z-Trip explains how hard it is to commercially publish his creative work, as it consists of mixing other peoples music in interesting ways:

As most of you know, I am in the middle of trying to make this album happen. It's a bit of a struggle due to the large amount of songs that require such heavy sample clearances. It seems like lately, trying to get OK's from everyone involved in the artists career, has turned out to be my new job....
[...]
Its hard to explain how my mixes are bringing new life to the game, but they are. Some of this music would never have gotten to the audiences ears had I not put it in my record crate. It could be anything? Brand new music, music that's been forgotten, old, new, whatever?or?. better yet (my favorite) a new fan of mine AND of the new style of music, or song, or artist I turned them on to. I get nothing but good feedback from how my mixing these songs makes people feel. Even though the artists I use to do this might not understand what is going on, it helps them out. If I've got people looking for old "Kansas" records after hearing me spin?. Then one way or another "Kansas" is winning.
But this is hard to explain to "Kansas"

This is is where we need a new model. Creative Commons works to disclaim payment, but not to claim it. Compulsories are there for songwriters but not for performers.

The model I propose for this is quite simple, and it can be thought of as an adaptation of both the compulsory licensing notion, and the doctrine of first sale to the world of infinite replicability.

Under the mediAgora model, each Work has a price set by its Creators. If Works are incorporated into another one, such as a mash-up, then the default price for the new Work should be the sum of the prices for the originals, plus whatever the Creator of the mash-up wants to set.

This can be done automatically, without any need for negotiation, though of course the possibility of negotiating is always there

For example, when I buy Z-Trip's mix featuring Kansas, I buy the source tracks as well. Kansas and teh oether sources get paid for the full price of their songs, and Z-Trip gets his margin for the work he did.

Some wrinkles and subtleties - you don't have to buy the same Work twice. Had I already owned the Kansas track, I would only have paid Z-Trip and the other artists in the mix.

The second subtlety is the Promotion Fee model, whereby some of the sale price is set aside to reward Promoters. Z-Trip would be acting as promoter for both the other songs, and would reap the benefits of the downstream promotion fees. Conceivably this could be enough that he didn't need to charge much if at all for the mash-up directly.

Taste Tribes

2003-05-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

Johnathan points me to Joshua Ellis writing eloquently about "Taste Tribes", his term for the loose clusters people from around common cultural interests

In the end, it is not the record labels and the movie studios who decide what's cool. We do. The media suppliers follow our cue, rather than the other way around ? which is the way it should be. Taste tribes may turn out to be the best way to filter out the bad media and let in the good ? to turn up the signal and wipe out the noise, as Peter Gabriel says on his most recent album. Which is great, by the way. You should go get it. Trust me.

mediAgora is designed to reinforce this natural tendency and harness it so Creators can be paid for their creations, and those who recommend them can get some remuneration too.

Major labels dig their own hole

2003-04-17T02:29:00.000-07:00

Independent record labels doing well while the majors crumble. Build your business model to break even further down the power law curve, then reap the windfalls if an act does better:

Caplan, who spent 21 years as an A&R (artist & repertoire) man with Sony-owned Epic Records, says big labels also have lost sight of what music is about - the artists, not the songs.

By seeking home-run hitters at the expense of solid team members, he notes, "They're just ceding a whole big part of the marketplace that we can go after."

Bricklin gets that it is all about payment, not enforcement

2003-04-17T02:25:00.000-07:00

Dan Bricklin writes a detailed and thoughtful piece on how artists get paid:
There is a lot of controversy about digital media, copy protection, fair use, and internetworking. In most cases from the viewpoint of legislators trying to react to lobbyists, as I understand it, it boils down to one question: How will the artists get paid? My answer is simple: The same way artists have always gotten paid. Let's examine that issue to see how it applies to today's world.

Winer wants a media revolution

2003-04-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer's Speech and Weblogs:
But gradually we're putting together the Napster system as a bootstrap, using the Web as a basis, and we can do it safely because our tools are used by creative people in totally non-infringing ways and in areas where the fat smelly guys are evacuating, the written word. They aren't smart enough to see our end-run. And even if they were, they'd have to convince the Supreme Court to revoke the First Amendment. Don't worry, they've tried, remember the CDA, passed by Congress, signed by the President, but overturned by the court.

Dave is on exactly the mediAgora track. We need to build payment systems from the bottom up to enable the independent creators to get paid, and encourage those who help people find them to pay too by cutting them in on the sales they generate. What they should sell is a perpetual right to have a good quality copy of the work, not a download, and not a medium.

Retarded CDs

2003-03-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

News.com has a story on copy-protected CDs:
SunnComm recently struck a deal with Microsoft to work together on a package of copy-protection techniques for labels. The smaller company will protect the ordinary CD audio tracks against copying, while Microsoft will provide tools to put additional copy-protected versions of the songs on the CD that can be copied to a computer hard drive or MP3 player but not traded online.
This so-called second session, containing files that can be used by computer music aficionados but not widely distributed, has come to be a key goal for the labels.

Second session technology is nearly 10 years old. CD Plus or CD Extra (Blue Book) adds a second session to the CD. Audio CD players play the Red Book session; computers can see it and the Data session as well.

Smart companies use the second session to add extra material - lyrics, videos, photos games etc.

The thriving 'singles' market in the UK largely consists of CD-Plus CDs. They succeed because they add the CD experience, creating extra value for computer users, who are thus willing to pay more for them.

Abusing second session technology to create CDs that are less useful in a computer is stupid. It will reduce the value of the CDs to the computer user, as Jupiter shows below, and make them less likely to be bought.

I hope whomever owns the trademark on 'CD-Plus' and 'Enhanced CD' refuses its use in this case - they should be called CD-Minus or Retarded CDs.

DRM Destroys Value - Jupiter has proof

2003-03-20T22:51:00.000-08:00

DRM Destroys Value - I've been saying this for a while, but Jupiter's new survey backs it up with figures:
According to the study, nearly twice as many online consumers are willing to pay $17.99 for a CD that has unrestricted copy abilities versus a CD at only $9.99 that cannot be copied.

That is a somewhat convoluted sentence, but it is pretty clear that DRM would cost the companies more than their profit margin to use (and it wouldn't stop copying in any case).

World of Ends

2003-03-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

David and Doc explain the nature of the internet in terms anyone can understand.

I QuickTopic'd this one too. annotate it here

Yet another 'destroy the internet to make it safe for music' proposal

2003-03-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've put Lionel S. Sobel's DRM as an Enabler of Business Models: ISPs as Digital Retailers proposal up on QuickTopic so it can be commented on point by point. You can read just the commented paragraphs. too

When did you stop beating your business model?

2003-03-06T00:17:00.000-08:00

The Harvard 'Digital Media in Cyberspace' project may be promising, but it's premises concern me.
it says
How can we control piracy and protect consumers' rights?

This very question is phrased in a tendentious form. They're customers, not consumers. Piracy is boarding ships and stealing the contents. If you're concerned about copyright enfringement, say so.

Should the government regulate digital media, or should the market be left alone?

There is no market yet. One needs to be created, and the government will not be able to do so easily. There is scope for private market creation though.

Must technology inventors be accountable to content creators?

No, but they will empower creators over publishers and distributors.

While the answers to these types of questions have been pondered, the future of digital media distribution remains uncertain.

Distribution is not the problem. Payment is.

Any potential solution must balance the interests of consumers, artists, entertainment industry and technology manufacturers—only then will we have a foundation for future growth.

My solution balances the interests of Creators, Promoters and Customers. The industries involved should adopt it, or something like it, or they'll be washed away in a classic Christensen 'Innovators Dilemma'

Wolff at the door

2003-02-27T00:55:00.000-08:00

Michael Wolff sees how pay per view fails, and talks to media execs:
The thing that I always try to say to the movie and music executives frothing at the mouth about this stealing issue (accusing my children and, one might fairly suspect, their own) is that everybody can’t be an outlaw. If everybody does it, it’s normal rather than aberrant behavior. It’s not so much the consumer who is on the wrong side of the law, but the entertainment industry that’s on the wrong side of economic laws.

For better or worse, the media business has created a world where consumers feel content is worth less and less and they are entitled to more and more of it. And now the chickens have come home to roost.

The veins on the necks of these execs are distended and throbbing, and they really have a hideous look in their eyes.

A VC on labels' failing business model

2003-02-19T23:20:00.000-08:00

Tim Oren extends the power law discussion to music. I wish I could get hold of SoundScan data or even mp3.com's download stats to plot some power-law charts. I've already pointed to Bentley and Maschner's study that shows album charts follow power laws.

Here's Tim:
As a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about business models, it's interesting to use the recent discussions on power laws to construct an explicit framework analyzing the MP3 challenge to the music biz. Probably little original here, but it's a way of seeing why these guys react so viscerally, and just how badly screwed they are if they keep along the same path.

[...]While we don't have rock solid proof, we certainly have suggestive evidence everywhere from the evolution of television, to the number of links pointing to blogs, that the small-audience tail of the power law distribution grows by displacing money and attention previously given to large audience plays, be they television broadcasters, AOL, or multi-platinum music albums. If the soundness of your business model, your portfolio risk management strategy, depends on the size of the big hits, then this is a scenario for being nibbled to death by ducks. The ducks being those harmless looking niche and back label artists and their low-rent business models. What our exec wants is 20 to 30 of them on his list. What he's going to get are 3000 of them, and none on his list. And the blogs? We're the word-of-mouth medium that's going to do the same thing to the media and promotional business that exists in symbiosis with the labels.

Whether the RIAA truly believes that direct theft by MP3 filesharing is the root of their problems, I have no way of knowing. There certainly seems to be evidence that it's a wash - displacing some sales, but causing others. What is certain is it's just collateral damage compared to the mortal threat of channel conflict pinning the labels into place, while their audience is eroded by a power law distribution with a much longer, commercially viable tail.

Praise and Questions

2003-02-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

Derek Slater likes mediAgora, and then asks:
Kevin talks about sharing music as a promoter as being something done between friends. In actuality, file trading is done between complete strangers. It could take other shapes, particularly if there were media companies provided more legal avenues to download digital media. But, it's likely that a lot of the trading will still remain in a P2P, stranger-to-stranger medium.

This may be so; the point is to provide an incentive for ongoing identity and reputation among Promoters, as well as rewarding those who add value by commenting on music, or collating it well. The determined non-payers will always have an outlet. Also, the need for 'media companies' is less clear lower down the power law curve - their cost structures don't fit, but independent Creators can be rewarded directly.

If that's the case, why won't this end up like Altnet? If you get on KaZaA you can get legal content through Altnet, but no one really does. Why? Because all of the legal content, pay-for-use content appears right next to the illegal, free content.
Sure, the promotion fee will make some people work within the system. But, will it make enough people do so?

Well, that depends on your definition of enough. Depending on how it is implemented, it could be set up as a way to legitimate existing downloaded content - it would then be feasible to offer amnesties and have a carrot rather than a stick for the existing downloaders.

If the music and movie companies aren't licensing their content online right now, why would they do it under this system? I know, there's Listen.com and such - but, really, we've got MusicNet, PressPlay, and Movielink. That's about it. What's going to change that under mediAgora?

I would not expect them to do so immediately - I would expect the independent creators to adopt it first, as they are excluded from the current system. My power law paper linked below suggest that there would be a lot of them, and that in aggregate they may outweigh the existing media companies. I suspect that in time the media companies would adopt the mediAgora system, where it made sense for them as an alternative to existing expensive distribution channels.

And what's to stop media creators from using DRM to limit legitimate private/fair uses other than copying? How will we embed in the system an incentive to not do that? Is the fact that limiting private/fair uses makes a product less valuable to the consumer enough to prevent such controls from being employed?

If I were running a mediAgora service, I'd make 'no DRM' a condition of participation for Creators. I've expiated at length before now on its futility. However I fully believe that it's inherent value destruction is enough to deter Customers, and this prediction has been borne out by the successive failures of all media distribution companies who rely on DRM (LiquidAudio, DataPlay etc.)

Distributions of weblogs

2003-02-17T04:50:00.000-08:00

I've done a detailed analysis of Power laws as applied to Weblogs, Newspapers and Movies.

The conclusions I come to are:

Weblog links do follow a power law
This saturates less quickly than other media, due to low barriers to entry
Therefore the many lightly linked weblogs outnumber the few heavily linked ones

You can discuss it here.

Small Bets

2003-02-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

David Weinberger explains the idea that the Internet provides a marketplace for small bets, and that there’s a lesson here for the recording industry.
[T]he recording industry isn't as dead yet as it should be. Recording companies make big bets. That's what they're best at: They invest heavily in marketing a Britney and slight the garage bands that are, well, better than Britney. The record labels have succeeded in their big bets by torquing the market through marketing and now through legislation. Meanwhile, the market for small groups is barely a market at all. You can sell your band's music over the Web, but it's hard for buyers and sellers -- musicians and listeners -- to find one another. If we had such a market, musicians would see no reason for sticking with the recording industry as it's currently constituted. Napster had the makings of a market. So does Kazaa. And the recording industry is right to fear file swapping, not because it's currently free but because the instant it gets monetized, it will become a genuine market that obviates the need for the recording industry and its big bets.

Nationalising filesharing

2003-02-10T13:24:00.000-08:00

Bennett Lincoff has proposed A Full, Fair And Feasible Solution To The Dilemma of Online Music Licensing

Overall, this is a very clear statement of the 'nationalize filesharing' model. It concedes a lot of the key points - that DRM doesn't work, that existing rights don't fit well, and that streaming and downloading are indistinguishable technically, and that the taxes should apply to actual use, not all computers.

However, it suffers heavily from the 'internet as broadcast system' meme that prevents clear thinking. On the net, we are all creators, and all promoters and distributors. Coming up with a new model like this one that doesn't scale down to individuals is not going to solve the problem.

It does not address derivative works, (mashups etc.). It does not offer an incentive to work within the system rather than without it for customers, implying complex registration procedures for anyone joining in.
(Comment on it at the link above - I made it a QuickTopic forum)

Making lots of recordings

2003-01-31T01:06:00.000-08:00

Phish's online service to allow downloads of every concert performance is a very good move. Imagine if every touring band did this, and you could download the perfromance you just heard when you get home...

Sites that could adopt mediAgora

2003-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Mixonic make CDs for you, CustomFlix do it with DVDs, and Cafepress are going to do both, as well as books on demand.
All three of them should adopt the mediAgora model for promotion.
Clay Shirky is close to getting it, though he ignores FireFly and others that did what he suggest a while back. The necessary thing is a payment system that rewards creators and promoters fairly. That is what mediAgora provides. Once it exists, the collaborative filtering, recommenation systems and so on can flourish.

Why we need mediAgora...

2003-01-22T23:50:00.000-08:00

Bowdlerizing for Columbine? - Why American directors have no moral rights to their movies. By Drew Clark
Cutting sex, violence, and profanity from movies is normally considered censorship. But if studios and directors like Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh win a copyright suit against 11 small companies that permit consumers to avoid such scenes, free speech will be the loser, not the victor.

Most of the companies are based in Utah and offer families "clean" versions of popular films. Since they each use different methods for bypassing potentially offensive portions, the directors' and studios' claims against some are more legally compelling than others. Clean Flicks, for example, makes a master copy of Saving Private Ryan, editing out the bullet shots in the movie's first battle scene. It then duplicates the revised version for rental or purchase by the "members" of its franchises. Another company, ClearPlay, creates a software filter or mask that is downloaded to a special DVD player. Once a consumer pops an unaltered Erin Brockovich DVD in the player, the software simply instructs the player to mute Julia Roberts' foul language. Trilogy Studios of Salt Lake City takes this process one step further: Instead of skipping over the nude Kate Winslet posing for Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, its latest software tells the DVD player to display a picture of her body clothed with a corset.

I hope the DGA lose these cases.

2002-12-24T01:02:00.000-08:00

Jonathon Delacour (any relation to Fleur in Harry Potter?) makes some thoughtful points about the Creative Commons licensing model, citing Sowell and smith among others:
I wouldn't be so skeptical if the Creative Commons Licenses relied less on a rose-tinted vision of benign collaboration and instead provided greater safeguards for the real interests of those licensing their original works; or if, to borrow Thomas Sowell's words, they replaced - to at least some degree - their "moral vision of human intentions" with a more pragmatic acceptance of the "inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings."

I think mediAgora satisfies this requirement.

Lessig clarifies the permanance issue.

2002-12-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

Stewart Alsop has some comments on Movielink. I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure he's right:
It's clear that the studios' motivation in designing MovieLink is fear of piracy. But they forgot to make the service usable, appealing, or compelling. So MovieLink will fail, people will argue that you can't sell digital content on the Internet--and the studios will have proved nothing.

Copyright Unconstitutional?

2002-12-13T06:37:00.000-08:00

Arron Swartz points to and summarily digests a deep article by Jed Rubenfeld on the (un)constitutionality of copyright from the Yale Law Journal. To summarize Aaron's summary:
Copyright is an enumerated power, but civil rights, like the 1^st amendment trump enumerated powers. As he says: Outlawing interstate Bible sales would be unconstitutional, even though interstate commerce is an enumerated power.

The Jed Rubenfeld suggests a form of copyright that he opines would be constitutional; people would be allowed to give away modified works for free, but required to to pay a portion of any profits to the original author. Sounds a whole lot like the MediAgora, doesn't it?

Tim O'Reilly's Seven lessons

2002-12-12T12:07:00.000-08:00

O'Reilly Network: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
Go over there and read this:
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

This fits very well with what I'm saying here.

we want to edit too

2002-12-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

Businessweek: Hollywood's Digital Love/Hate Story
Inersting article for the details, but not as insightful as Glenn's below.

...old-line entertainment execs [won't]be able to fend off tech innovation any more than they could keep at bay the player piano in the 1930s, cable TV in the 1970s, or the VCR in the 1980s. "When technology revolutions occur, people inevitably fight them," says Mark Stolaroff, an independent producer who spent the last five years helping low-budget filmmakers including Joe Carnahan (NARC and Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane) and Christopher Nolan (Memento and Insomnia) break through at recently shuttered studio NextWave Films. "And then suddenly, you turn around and realize, wow, everything has changed."

Media Feudalism Under Siege

2002-12-12T01:01:00.000-08:00

Glenn Reynolds says media work practices are like feudalisam, and will soon be just as obsolete:
A dirt-cheap Chinese-made SKS rifle (which I've seen on sale for as little as $99 - a couple of days' pay at minimum wage) would enable anyone, with only a few hours of training, to put paid to the flower of medieval chivalry, at little risk to himself (or herself - another consequence of technological improvement). Feudalism is dead, as a result, and titled nobility is scarce, and politically unimportant.

The same kind of technological change is happening in the media world, of course. Not long ago, making a movie required a lot of very expensive and specialized equipment, extensive training, and - most significantly - a lot of money. So did making a record album. Now that's changing, too.

In the past couple of weeks I've mastered one record album, released another, and captured still images from digital videotape to be put on the website that will soon promote a documentary on teenaged killers that my wife is making. A project like hers would have cost upwards of a quarter of a million dollars not long ago (in fact, that's the actual price tag of one project much like hers from the early 1990s). Now, with video instead of film, and digital editing on a computer, you can make a documentary for a price measured in thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

No P2P taxes please

2002-12-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Cory points to Neil Netanal's proposal(788k pdf) for a compulsory levy on computers or internet connections to pay copyright holders in return for fair use rights over digital media.

This idea is floating round a lot at the moment; it is flawed in a few ways.

1. By statutorily imposing a solution like this, it makes it much harder to establish a true marketplace for digital media - people are reluctant to pay twice. This will reduce overall spending on music.

2. Statistical measurement of a scale-free distribution like music (or the net) is hard to do well - because the central limit theorem does not apply, most sampling will count the large players accurately, but miss significant numbers of small players who may well predominate in aggregate. This kind of centralised scheme undoes the bottom-up formation and propogation of musical styles that the net can do, and puts us back into a top 20 world.

3. Any centralised taxation-like scheme is highly prone to capture by a few interest groups - ASCAP and BMI are poorly regarded by independent musicians for this very reason.

4. By legitimating only non-commercial repurposing of existing copyright, it does nothing to cut through the thicket of rights and licensing that acts as dead weight on those who create; instead it pushes derived works into a second-class non-commercial status. My model in which derivative works pass through the cost of the source works is far more liberating.

A far better idea is to establish a true marketplace for media that incorporates incentives for those who buy and sell within it to reward copyright holders.

Rodriguez on why Cringely is wrong

2002-11-29T23:41:00.000-08:00

Another Cringely quote:
Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.

Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.

Jonathan points us to this Robert Rodriguez interview where he explains how he made Spy Kids 2:
When movies started, —go back to the Buster Keaton age, when they were still making great movies—there were five people behind the cameras. It's just gotten out of control to where it's become unwieldy, and the process has gotten so complicated. That's why you see a filmmaker make one movie every three or four years—because it's such a hassle. It's such a drag to make a movie. And when something creative becomes a hassle, there's something seriously wrong with the process. George Lucas told me, "Because you live outside of Hollywood, you're going to come up with ways to do things and ideas that they don't think of there." When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change. And when you're outside, you look and you say, "This doesn't work at all. Who thought of this system?" And then once you abandon needing film, you question everything. You question the whole process, like "Why are we doing this like that? Couldn't we do the whole sound mix in my garage?" And we did. We did the whole sound mix of the movie in my garage, we mixed it all there. I edited it in my garage, shot at home, made it much more a home movie, which I wanted to do intentionally, because I wanted the movie to feel more animated, it being a family film. It has a strike against it because it has a "2" on it. The only way to make it feel not like product, not like it's just fallen off a franchise line, is by making it a movie, making it even more personal than the first one. And by doing all that work, keeping the budget low, you're forced to put everything in your person into it.

Cringely Prognosticates

2002-11-29T23:08:00.000-08:00

His column notes the 'darknet' paper and is an interesting (if pessimistic) read.
Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

Holiday reading

2002-11-27T10:37:00.000-08:00

The great micropayments debate, as portrayed by Scott McCloud and Sean Barrett in comic form.

'Yet another micropayment schem'e is one of the things mediAgora gets accused of. One distinction is that with mediAgora, payments flow both ways; another is that it is assumed that the payments aren't micro, and in return customers get a permanant copy of the work.

Joho the Blog: Fox in the Henhouse

2002-11-25T23:58:00.000-08:00

David Weinberger weighs in, quoting Chernin

The trumpeters of the Big Bully Theory may also be startled to learn that we have absolutely no problem with viewers shifting our content from their television to their PC, from their living room to their bedroom and to their bathroom and back again as many times and ways as they'd like.

First, "shifting" does not necessarily include copying. Second - and this is what makes my blood boil - he's granting us permission to shift "our content" where "our" refers to the entertainment company? It's not their content. When I buy a DVD, the DVD is mine and I can use it any way I want so long as I'm not reselling it or broadcasting it. The disk is mine. I can make a copy for my upstairs TV. I can mold it into a pretty little ashtray. I can roll it in a tube and sell it to Peter Chernin as a home colonoscopy kit.

Keep your hands of my property, you goddamn burglar!

Actually, you can resell the DVD - the doctrine fo first sale appleis here. You can't sell copies of it.

Breaking down Peter Chernin's Comdex Keynote

2002-11-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

Peter Chernin's Comdex Keynote speech (referred to below by Charles Witgen), while a really well written speech was so full of errors, omissions and outright lies that I spent much of the weekend breaking it down. I have taken a full transcript of the keynote and put in links to Big Content's long history of attacking individual copyrights and every new medium of expression that the technology industry has developed, as well as the more recent history of attacking the general purpose utility of the PC though both legal and technical means.

Microsoft sees the light

2002-11-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

Microsoft's 'Darknet' paper is remarkably level-headed on the subject of content distribution and the futility of DRM.
There is evidence that the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers. This means that in many markets, the darknet will be a competitor to legal commerce. From the point of view of economic theory, this has profound implications for business strategy: for example, increased security (e.g. stronger DRM systems) may act as a disincentive to legal commerce. Consider an MP3 file sold on a web site: this costs money, but the purchased object is as useful as a version acquired from the darknet. However, a securely DRM-wrapped song is strictly less attractive: although the industry is striving for flexible licensing rules, customers will be restricted in their actions if the system is to provide meaningful security. This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects. In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security.
Certain industries have faced this (to a greater or lesser extent) in the past. Dongle-protected computer programs lost sales to unprotected programs, or hacked versions of the program. Users have also refused to upgrade to newer software versions that are copy protected.
That link allows comments on it.

Retail churning with Chernin

2002-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

Charles Wiltgen takes Peter Chernin to task over his poor analogies:
According to the 2001 National Retail Security Survey, U.S. retailers lost 1.75% of their total annual sales -- over $32 million in the U.S. alone -- to shrinkage. The music industry has, of course, lost $0 million since they've only been denied potential CD sales.

So, if the retail industry accepts shrinkage (i.e. the stealing of real goods that cost the industry real money) as a part of doing business, and the computer software industry accepts piracy (i.e. the loss of potential software sales by people that you probably don?t want as customers anyway) as a part of doing business, maybe it's time that the media industry wakes up, smells the coffee, and starts treating consumers like an opportunity instead of a threat.

LawMeme on the right to edit

2002-11-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

Ernest Miller writes: When you buy a book you can highlight portions or rearrange pages. A friend can recommend that you rip out the boring chapters and read only the climax, and neither the author nor the publisher has a right to stop you. Why should movies on DVD be any different?
When a DVD is legitimately purchased or rented, consumers should have the right to play it with software that enhances their personal viewing experience. Parents should have the right to skip a second or two of gratuitous nudity in an otherwise family-friendly film. Film buffs should have the right to watch a film with an alternative audio commentary by an expert such as Roger Ebert, without permanently altering the disc.

This is the nub of the derivative works argument on mediAgora - I can make a work based on yours, as long as my customers buy your work too.

Digital collaboration

2002-10-31T13:27:00.000-08:00

In mediAgora, I go on at some length about 'derivative works' and 'source works' until most non-lawyers' eyes glaze over. Today, I heard a great example of exaclty the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Shannon Campbell is a very talented folk singer-songwriter in Pennsylvania, who posts MP3's on her site, including this one - Dreaming of Violets: (Mirrored on my site).

Scott Andrew LePera is a musician in the California Bay Area. He downloaded Shannon's song, and recorded his own accompaniment, giving this:
Dreaming of Violets (redux): (Mirrored on my site).

OK, you say, beautiful music, talented musicians singing together via their blogs,what's that got to do with your media marketplace dreaming?

Lets imagine a world with mediAgora. In this world, Shannon would have registered her song, and set a price for it (say 50 cents, including a 10 cent promotion fee). People who liked the free preview could pay for the high quality one and download it, and tell their friends and so on.

Scott could find this song, record his extra vocals and backing, and register it with mediAgora too. Say he charged 20 cents for the extra work, with a 5 cent promo fee.

I come along and hear the song on his weblog, and I like it , so I pay 70 cents. This gets me both versions of the song. I link to them here, on blogcritics and so on, and suddenly hundreds of people download the songs (note my fantasy thet hundreds of people read my weblog). Shannon gets 50 cents for each, Scot gets his 20 cents, and I get some of the promotion fee, with the rest going to them. I feel good and Shannon has to spend less time waiting on tables

Last time music was under threat

2002-10-31T01:05:00.000-08:00

A eulogy and lament for magnetic tape.

End to End marketplace

2002-10-29T01:03:00.000-08:00

Werbach does seem to get it. MediAgora can be thought of as an end to end media marketplace - it doesn't presume to know where the great content comes from, or whether it is the same for everyone, but provides a discovery and payment mechanism for it to emerge.

Cashets

2002-10-29T00:56:00.000-08:00

Cashets are a new kind of centipayment system that sounds like the original root of PayPal before their merchant terms got too high. No fees for buyers, 1% (1 cent minimum) for sellers.

Not a bad idea, but 1 cent merchant fee is still too high for doing small payments between people, like the promotion fees in mediAgora. PayPal lets you do costless transfers as a private individual. I suppose you could use this once the fees are aggregated, and it looks less onorous to sign up for than PayPal,especially as a merchant.

2002-10-27T05:05:00.000-08:00

Kevin Werbach is also commenting on the Lessig article, and broadband adoption, at his blog. He's also doing a great conference in December in CA, called "Supernova." Looks like it will chock full of good content and smart speakers...wish I could go...

Stallman on 'Trusted Computing'

2002-10-23T00:58:00.000-07:00

Who should your computer take its orders from?Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call "trusted computing," large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal.
[...]
"Treacherous computing" is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer.

Semiotic Democracy

2002-10-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Larry Lessig leads me to William Fisher's excellent essay on Digital Music It summarizes the pros and cons of digital online distribution very well, and includes this paragraph that explains one of the reasons I am so passionate about this idea:

Semiotic democracy. In most modern capitalist countries, the power to make meaning, to shape culture, has been concentrated in relatively few hands. One of the great cultural benefits of the Internet in general lies in its tendency to decentralize this semiotic power. In two respects, Internet distribution of digital music would contribute to that decentalization. The first, already mentioned, consists of the expansion of the set of musicians who can reach wide audiences and the associated diminution of the cultural power of the "big five" record companies. The second consists of the ease with which "consumers" of digital music can manipulate it, recombine pieces of it, blend it with their own material -- in short, can become producers.

Exactly. But they need to be able to make money doing it, which is where mediAgora comes in.

The False Binary of Copyright

2002-10-20T01:13:00.000-07:00

Reid Stott writes: this debate has become far too binary, and even the language of the debate has been hijacked. There are only two potential outcomes presented; either Hollywood and The Big Five record companies will gain control over all intellectual property so they can "protect" artists, or no creative person will ever be able to make a dime again. Or, if you are from the "information wants to be free" camp, either MegaCorps will control all intellectual property by raping "fair use," extending copyright terms nearly indefinitely, and electronically straight-jacketing consumers with copy-protection schemes ... or the world will rapidly advance into a New Renaissance where The People own all Intellectual Property, and all creations belong to the masses.
In describing the trip to these exotic and extreme locales, both sides fail to even note the middle ground over which they pass. And that middle ground contains the solutions they dare not utter, because they contain reason and compromise. And separation.
We won't be going there, except in a dream.

I have a dream that we can go there. I have a model to fill this void. Help me make it real.

Bob, David and Dan converge on our theme

2002-10-16T01:31:00.000-07:00

SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others

Bob Frankston:
Where is the important debate -- the one about how to "promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts"? The value of progress makes the fixation on preserving a problematic means of compensation seem petty at best and at worst not only does this fixation threaten to hobble our ability to make progress it also requires the kind of invasiveness that would have been unimaginable to those who granted only limited rights to congress and then quickly amended the constitution to explicitly give us (at least in the United States) additional protection.

Instead of treating everyone as a consumer/pirate who can do no more than divvy up a limited supply of "intellectual property" we should see everyone as a potential author/contributor. Why are we so intent on limiting these technologies instead of encouraging the exploration and discovery that enriches us all?

Exactly! We can all play the rôles of Creator, Promoter and Customer.

David Reed:
What would Macaulay have thought about granting those who have limited copyrights additional rights to take vigilante action to explore any and all personal computers with no liability for harm caused by accident (such as proposed in the Berman-Coble bill)?
What would he have thought if Congress decided to criminalize the very attempt to make tools to copy works that had exceeded their copyright term (such as the DMCA does)?

I'd like to hear that speech.

Dan Bricklin:
The right to create derivative works is important
I've been reading a lot about yesterday's Eldred v. Ashcroft hearing and listening to some commentary on the radio. People keep talking about the right to make copies. What they keep forgetting about is one of the most important things to our culture: The right to make derivative works. It isn't that I'm lazy or cheap and just want to take from you (the image that keeps on being portrayed, incorrectly, of those who value the public domain). It's that unless it's in the public domain I can't build on what you did.

A key element of the mediAgora model is that you are giving permission for derivative works to be created by using the mediAgora system. A derivative work can incorporate other works, and they are added to the price.

Making My Own Music

2002-10-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

Kevin Kelly has an army of preservers
So far music listeners around the world have digitized more than 850,000 albums and 10 million songs of all musical genres. Fans have already converted almost all music ever recorded.
[...]
Owners of an about-to-expire copyright have several favorite arguments for extending it. One is that it spurs creativity by making original works more valuable. But an extension actually restricts creativity by narrowing the shared universe of works artists can build upon. Another is that they need an extension as an incentive to convert old material into new media. As Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has pointed out, digitizing films is expensive. "Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" he asks.

I have an answer: movie buffs. Not only have fans moved almost all of music into the digital era, they have been busy moving hundreds of millions of documents onto the Web and are producing millions of pages of daily reporting and news in Weblogs. And without the help of paralyzed publishers, avid readers have already converted nearly 20,000 books in the public domain.

The passion of fans is unstoppable - and technology will make it only more so. Listeners, readers and watchers now have the means to do chores that companies themselves used to have to do.

The Recoriding industry explained

2002-10-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

Jack Kapica writes:
It's easy to fail in e-business; what's hard is failing magnificently.

The Big Five music recording companies have been transcendent in this respect.

Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry.

Lileks makes my point about source works

2002-10-10T00:28:00.000-07:00

In today's Bleat he says:
The link changes everything. When someone derides or exalts a piece, the link lets you examine the thing itself without interference. TV can't do that. Radio can't do that. Newspapers and magazines don't have the space. My time on the internet resembles eight hours at a coffeeshop stocked with every periodical in the world - if someone says "I read something stupid" or "there was this wonderful piece in the Atlantic" then conversation stops while you read the piece and make up your own mind.

Exactly. This is why creating a work based on a source work should be allowed by default, providing your customers pay the price for the source work too.

Fortune: Tuning out the Customer

2002-10-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

David Kirkpatrick writes:
Something has gone terribly wrong in the relationship between media companies and their customers. The use and enjoyment of music and video appears to be rising, as a multitude of new methods of digitally receiving and using it emerge. But rather than welcome the opportunity to develop new markets, media companies view the new digital tools with alarm. The companies are convinced that legitimate sales of their products are suffering as people download, copy, and share media, especially music. They're determined to stop it.

The media companies are now undertaking an assault on the customer. They shut down Napster, the most popular new technology application in many years. They have sued and shut down sites that listed lyrics to popular songs. They have begun selling CDs with so-called "copy protection" that should instead be called "listen prevention," because they often are unplayable on PCs and other popular listening devices.

Is Chiariglione on board?

2002-10-06T23:22:00.000-07:00

He spoke to the AES conference:
Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, Telecom Italia Lab's vice president of multimedia, commenced the 113th AES Convention with a rich and unprecedented speech supporting open access to protected content. Introducing attendees to his delivery network for the first time, Dr. Chiariglione outlined key precepts behind widespread sharing of protected materials. "The problem is this: Content is art, and it should be considered art," he said. "Six billion people have six billion ideas." He continued to say that the only solution to trademark fraud and piracy was to engender a system that rewards music labels, musicians and consumers equally.

Dr. Chiariglione's proposed system relies on standards that allow the production of protected audio with access available to any user who obtains the rights. He asserted that his system was not a "free to all" system, rather, a delivery network trading paid content rights for unfettered access.

"The future doesn't stop today," he stated. "Art must not stop today. We need to produce a way for artists to benefit from art to keep making art. Let's make technology and content friends of mankind. Unless people get value from their art, they can't make it. All artists should have means to produce their art and receive remuneration."

In coda, Dr. Chiariglione paid homage to John Lennon's ballad, "Imagine." He said, "Let me have a dream. Imagine no blocking technologies. It's easy if you try...Imagine six billion people sharing content."

Chiariglione is the 'father of MPEG'

Worst Buy?

2002-10-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

I'm cross-posting this at my weblog as well.

My friend George Mannes writes the excellent "5 Stupidest Things on Wall St." column at theStreet.com. Today he also reported on a new effort at Best Buy for selling cards in stores that allow you to pay in advance for music you then have to go home to download. I think this is the 6th stupidist thing on the street this week -- the idea that people should go to a store to purchase permission to download a virtual/digital product.

After buying these $10 cards, available only in stores, users can use the money on the cards to download the songs in the Digital Hits catalog on their own computer. In theory, as the catalog expands, consumers could consult a touch-screen kiosk at each store to get a sense of the available music selections. But for now, the Digital Hits card appears to be promoted with endcap aisle displays, brochures and sales associates carrying computer printouts of the current catalog.

The only reason this rates any consideration is the possibility that teens who don't have credit card or pay-pal accounts would be able to purchase this debit/credit in the store for music. But the lack of immediate gratification aspect (why can't you download it to a device in the store?) will tank the project quickly.

Additionally, the Digital Rights Management limitations put on the tracks mean that you're spending $1 so you can do what the label wants you to do with the music. Buying the same single on CD for $2 allows you to rip it, burn it, put it on a mini-disk or MP3 player, or whatever you want.

EMI songs can be "burned" onto a recordable audio CD twice, can be installed on three different computers, and can be downloaded onto certain portable devices an unlimited number of times. Warner songs can't be burned onto a CD, can be installed on only one computer, and apparently can't be downloaded onto portable devices.

I predict utter failure on this, because the trial runs against giving people choice of how they listen to their music in favor of keeping them from copying it.

RIAA Sues Radio Stations For Giving Away Free Music

2002-10-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

RIAA Sues Radio Stations For Giving Away Free Music
LOS ANGELES?The Recording Industry Association of America filed a $7.1 billion lawsuit against the nation's radio stations Monday, accusing them of freely distributing copyrighted music.
"It's criminal," RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. "Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?"
According to Rosen, the radio stations acquire copies of RIAA artists' CDs and then broadcast them using a special transmitter, making it possible for anyone with a compatible radio-wave receiver to listen to the songs.

It's from the Onion, but it does sound familiar, doesn't it...

2002-09-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not missing that Kevin. It's pretty much the same. Once people blindly blame Microsoft, the debate is over, and it becomes about good versus evil and monopoly vs competition, and not about technology. Microsoft doesn't intentionally break compatibility with 3rd parties. As I said before - follow the money. They're in a position now that such a break would immediately trigger a winning court case for the other side.
Typically, they fix problems, and that causes problems with the 3rd party apps. Helping 3rd party developers to avoid this stuff was my job for 3 years, so I can vouch for the effort made to inform people (as of 2 years ago). And the Hollywood/Music thing - well it was late and I was tired so sue me. ;-)

The point for Microsoft to learn from my comment, which you imply in your 2nd paragraph, is that people EXPECT the problem to have been caused by Microsoft. They've literally 'trained' people to think of Microsoft and Frustration with their computers in the same moment. Hence in this situation, they 'expect' that Microsoft broke software intentionally, or that they would decide unilaterally to keep people from copying content. That will be the company's biggest fight into the future, in my opinion.

As ye reap...

2002-09-28T23:56:00.000-07:00

Howard, you're missing the second part of Godwin's law - that once a comparison to Hitler occurs, all useful debate is over.

However, the situations are not parallel- Hitler is dead and buried, and Nazism is largely a spent force, but Microsoft is still a significant part of most computer users' daily environment.

If MS break binary compatibility for 3rd party applications, then that is bad code, but it can probably be put down to arrogance, hubris or incompetence on their part rather than malice. However, as they are a convicted predatory monopoly that has yet to be sentenced, it is understandable that people are suspicious.

Why Hollywood would care about music (rather than movies) is a bit of a non sequitur too, but insofar as it indicates that people are wary of Microsoft's operating systems becoming judge, jury and executioner for their alleged unauthorised copying, while the company itself so obviously benefits from due process, I take that as an encouraging sign.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Microsoft

2002-09-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

On another email list I belong to related to the NYU ITP program, people were claiming that an MS patch kept someone from downloading MP3s due to Microsoft's relationship with Hollywood. Everyone playing along here at home knows that MS and Hollywood are arms length at best.
The Village voice article talks about someone having problems ripping tracks after an MS upgrade, but that's probably bad coding. But it is amazing on a that on a tech list that inevitably the discussion turns to Microsoft bashing. You may be familiar with "Godwin's Law," named for Mike Godwin originally of the Electronic Frontier Foundation which indicates that in any newsgroup the discussion inevitably involves a comparison to Nazis or Hitler. I'm posting here a corollary to that, "Greenstein's Corollary" and it seems somehow amazing that no one has come up with this:
"In any technical discussion on a newsgroup or email list, where a technical problem exists and the discussion gets longer, the probability that Microsoft will be blamed approaches 1."

Having said that, my response to this Village Voice column and my list-mates who mis-interepreted the column to propose that MS is blocking MP3 downloads follows.

Ok, so we're reduced to Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Fine. Let's go for facts and experience instead. The article refers the RIPPING NOT DOWNLOADING.

I worked on the product. I know the beast pretty well. I know the PR angles too. I worked on some. Microsoft is not stupid enough, without the Government ordering them to (stay tuned - that will happen if we're not paying attention), to keep people from downloading content of their choice.

SECURE content. MP3s are not secure content.
Keeping SECURE content unplayable refers to the ability of you to be ripping content (or downloading content you paid for that is managed by digital rights) but not being able to play it where there is not a licenced file. In otherwords - you can DRM the songs you rip with Windows Media Player so they only work on the PC where they're ripped. That choice was ON by default until the PR hit was bad, and now that choice is OFF by default.

The question, then, is whether Microsoft took advantage of a chance to muck with your ripper. Mr. Roboto waded into the morass of Microsoft flackery to get the straight dope. After much cajoling—as well as several "We never got your e-mail request" kiss-offs—the horse's mouth came back with this simple statement: "This situation is not typical. For these types of situations, we advise consumers to contact Microsoft technical support at 800-936-3500." The spokesperson also recommended a visit to support.microsoft.com.

If I knew the MP3 ripper product name, I bet there would be a hundred google hits to fix the issue. The person had a 3rd party ripper - possible it was dependent, as many products are, on components built into a specific version of the OS or the Media Player. I can't tell you how many developers code to MS DLLs and don't pack their own DLL copy into their distribution and hard link them. IF MS updates that component, and the company doesn't issue a patch - the product breaks. Common occurance, but not proof of dastardly deeds, just bad coding. The article you quote says "maybe" this happens, and hedges its bets on a 'spooky' advice to call tech support. Bad Journalism and it's very easy to make it look like MS should take the blame, everyone assumes they're evil. That's an easy way out.

That said, there ***definitely are*** some stupid and *frankly offensive* terms in the latest upgrade click-through licenses that technically allow MS to download and "FIX" security holes they find in their software. As a CTO I don't let anything patch my software until I read up on it, and have tested it if possible.
IF you don't like this option, you
A) don’t use the patch - and as Mr. Roboto says, you leave a security hole open.
B) run something like Zone Alarm so you know who's downloading what when to your PC from the microsoft.com domain.
C) complain to your congressman or start a class action lawsuit (this is America, after all)
D) learn Linux or Mac
E) RTFM http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q327850 tells you how to disable auto update in the registry in Win2000, there's a similar article for XP that I can't find but did find previously (oooohhh very suspicious).

Bottom Line - follow the money. The PR hit microsoft would take for keeping people from downloading or playing their MP3s (their own legal ones or others) would be disasterous and take years to fix. It would cost them *more money than making Hollywood happy would make them money - always a good sign if you're trying to figure out sides. They won't provide software to Rip to MP3 due to the cost of licensing it for every copy of windows - that bill had almost as many 0's behind it as Bill Gates does. *

Let's keep the FUD to a minimum - I want proof before claiming that MS is keeping people from downloading files, just as I'd demand proof if the same allegations came at Apple or some variant of Linux that someone made.
So we're clear - yes I own MS stock, no I'm not selling it now, and no that is not imparing my judgement on this.

2 interesting Articles today

2002-09-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

The WSJ had 2 articles - Rockers vs. Beancounters details some musician's fights to claim their properly-owed royalties from the music companies. The California Legislature is having some of these folks testifiy today, with reps from the record labels on hand.

The artists contend that musicians are deprived of millions of dollars in royalties each year because industry accounting is riddled with mistakes and based on antiquated formulas delivered in vague language. The Recording Artists Coalition, whose members include Madonna, Sheryl Crow and Beck, is among the groups seeking legislation that would impose penalties on record companies for accounting errors

The second one is also interesting - Intertainer is claiming an Anti-Trust issue with the movie studios, who have their own MovieLink property to distribute films online.

It's not clear that Movielink, a joint venture of five major studios, displays the same characteristics as Premiere. Premiere had an exclusive distribution window and an agreed-on pricing formula. The Movielink studios have said that their venture doesn't demand exclusive windows, and that they each set their own pricing. But the Intertainer suit charges that the studios were in effect using Movielink to help set licensing rates for Intertainer.

What, a company giving a better deal to a subsidiary/jv than to a market competitor? In Hollywood? Only in the movies, baby. Have my people call your people, we'll work it out. Yeah, baby.

(Note, the WSJ articles are by subscription only. Sorry.)

r, K or RIAA?

2002-09-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

Janis Ian's clear exposition on the music industry made me crystallize a thought that's been at the back of my mind about the record business - they need to change their reproductive strategy.

Janis says:
Seriously, diversity is something record companies can't afford anymore - not the majors, at any rate. I'd go to this article, posted at Linux Journal, which quotes a Newsweek article (July 15,2002) by Steven Levy saying "So why are the record labels taking such a hard line? My guess is that it's all about protecting their Internet-challenged business model. Their profit comes from blockbuster artists. If the industry moved to a more varied ecology, independent labels and artists would thrive--to the detriment of the labels, which would have trouble rustling up the rubes to root for the next Britney. The smoking gun comes from testimony of an RIAA-backed economist who told the government fee panel that a dramatic shakeout in Webcasting is "inevitable and desirable because it will bring about market consolidation." That's really it in a nutshell. "Market consolidation" means the less artists they have to promote, the less ultimate dollars they'll spend. The smaller the playlist, the greater the chance that audiences will buy something from that playlist alone - because that's all you'll be able to find out there.

If you follow the biology link above, you'll see a clear distinction between r and K reproductive strategies. I'll summarize briefly - K strategies work in a stable, restricted environment that is near to carrying capacity (eg the Billboard chart and radio playlist, or record shop stock). In this case, the successful strategy is to have few offspring, and invest lots of effort on nurturing them and helping them to survive.

r strategies work in an unpredictable environment where you are not near the carrying capacity of the environment (the Internet). Here the successful strategy is to have huge numbers of offspring with a low investment of effort, let them loose and expect that enough will do well and survive to keep your species going.

If you're a K strategist that finds yourself in an less predictable and less closed environment than you thought, you need to move closer to the r model, and spread your seed more widely. It seems the Record Industry is doing the opposite.

You must remember this...

2002-09-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (The Hollywood Reporter) --- The Writers Guild of America West on Tuesday threw its support behind the Directors Guild of America after a pre-emptive legal strike was made against 16 of Hollywood's best-known directors by CleanFlicks over third-party editing of DVDs and videocassettes.

"We are astounded that a company would target some of our country's most esteemed directors in a misguided effort to claim a right to alter artistic work for commercial exploitation,"

"Here in Hollywood, we're shocked, shocked to discover that commercial exploitation of artistic works has been happening."

"Your points of gross, M'sieur"

Will the BBC allow freedom to edit?

2002-09-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Grauniad:
...rumours - albeit completely unconfirmed - do come out of Bush House.

For instance, there's the one about a complete change in copyright philosophy: where the idea is that the licence fee payer has already paid for, and in many respects owns, all the content produced by the BBC. Thinking this way, the BBC could then allow anyone who wants to use existing BBC content to do so. The onus then will rest on the commercial operations to take on board both BBC advice, and their content, and create something better. Such a radical plan, if the rumour is accurate, would place the BBC in a unique position.

Hopefully not -the idea that you can freely create derivative works for sale, as long as anyone viewing them purchases the source works too is a strong principle. I belive this is is the rich media equivalent of the implicit right to link on the Web, and could lead to a similar flowering of creativity.

I think this is a solution to the CleanFlicks/MovieMask dispute too - that they can distribute modifed versions as long as they distribute the original uncut one too. DVD's rarely-used alternate edit feature should make this easy, but being able to add your own commentaries or alternative soundtracks is very interesting and exciting, and could help promote films just as 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid' or 'What's Up Tigerlily' did.

Desperation

2002-09-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

This has to be the most absurd measure I've ever seen of attempting to prevent illegal distribution of music. Found via Blogdex.

I won't even go into detailing why this is so wrong, because I think it speaks for itself. Suffice it to say, the lack of trust that exists in media companies has arrived at a truly pathetic level.

Edit: On second pass, I'll include a quote, since I remembered belatedly that the NYT requires registration to view articles:

"Writers receiving review copies of two soon-to-be-released albums... are finding the CD's already inside Sony Walkman players that have been glued shut. Headphones are also glued into the players, to prevent connecting the Walkman to a recording device."

Artists' Rights Management?

2002-09-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

USATODAY: [T]he artists' rights movement has set the stage for combat that could revolutionize the music industry.

What started as a classic David-and-Goliath skirmish over contractual terms could be tilting toward a level battlefield as opposition on a wide range of issues swells against an industry mired in a sales slump.

"The record business is in rough enough shape that something might actually change," says Craig Marks, editor of Blender magazine. "If things weren't so uncertain, so bleak and in such disarray, the industry would be immovable, even with a gun to its head. If there was ever a set of circumstances that could lead to artists making inroads, it's now."

Studios not pirates are challenge, says IBC panel

2002-09-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

EETimes:l
The biggest danger to Hollywood's intellectual property is not Internet video piracy nor the intractable problems of encryption and digital rights management (DRM), but Hollywood itself, according to a panel of experts convened here by the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) and chaired by Brad Hunt, chief technology officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

In a Pogoesque paraphrase of "We have met the enemy, and he is us," Johnathan Taplin, chairman and chief executive officer of Intertainer Inc., a Culver City, Calif.-based on-demand video service company, said: "Technology is not the problem. It's the content cartel!"

Taplin claimed that Hollywood operates a de facto monopoly on content that bottles up movies so tightly that piracy becomes the best - and often only -- way to distribute them digitally. "There is a content cartel used to running over networks that it controls," said Taplin, charging that the studios, "want to be able to control the food chain from beginning to end."

He later complains that studios want 60% of the revenue, which doesn't sound all that unreasonable to me.

Sampling 'sampling my privates'

2002-09-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

This piece, though not new, raises a point relevant both to defenders of IP rights and those who would look for new models of handling them:

Sampling and audio montage have been around for decades, though digital sampling, was not widely available until the mid 1980s. Hip Hop was of course already well established at the time and offered a popular musical vernacular for the technology. The question is, given the time and distance, why is it some things are taken for granted to be intellectual property and other categories of intellectual property are more recipes for struggle than clear guidelines for artists?

The authors, Joel Schalit and Jonathan Sterne, go on to say:

We believe the answer to this question demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the concept of intellectual property and its attendant notion of copyright violation. Put simply, intellectual property is only a valid category after the fact, after a certain set of practices are defined as theft. This is because the very notion of intellectual property requires a stable conception of content and media; without such a stable concept, intellectual property becomes an empty category. New communications technologies often wreak havoc with conceptions of copyright until the medium in question has a well-defined industrial and content structure. This can sometimes take years, and as is clear with the sampling example above, even a well defined industry sometimes has to grapple with a new technology.

In short, if the very concept of property is unstable, these moments of crisis are assured to repeat themselves every time there is a rift either in art or technology to challenge whatever happens to be the current compromise. The entire piece is worth reading, as it looks at similar rifts in India and Japan, and how these were adjudicated.

Bricklin thinks it through

2002-09-09T22:30:00.000-07:00

The Recording Industry is Trying to Kill the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg

As well as pointing out the rise in cellphone use possibly causinga decrease in walkman use while travelling he makes these points:

Gifts
Not all giving others copies of music is to avoid payment. People make mixes of songs for other people as gifts. (PCs make this really easy compared to the cassette tape days.) Those songs are sometimes ones that remind them of times together because they are the main ones they listened to over and over again when working, riding in a car, at camp, etc. Those songs come from CDs, often purchased, that one or both parties own. The "gift" is the compilation -- the mix -- not the music, since they already have the music. (That's interesting, because a compilation can be an expressive thing, maybe even worthy of its own copyright protection.) Our use of music is evolving and it isn't just to save money.

What effects are there that are increasing CD sales?
The one I keep hearing about from people I know who buy many CDs is the learning about new musicians from friends, and sampling their songs through downloads and other means of sharing. Once they find out they like the musicians, they then seek out their CDs for purchase (recent and past) as well as go to their concerts. This is of great importance to the health of the music industry. Another area is buying CDs as gifts. A "real" CD is even more special today, and that makes it an even more special gift. You show you care enough to get the pretty shrink-wrapped copy, not the hand-labeled home-burned one.

Exactly. And exactly whet the promoter model of mediAgora is meant to encourage.

Someone needs mediAgora

2002-09-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

Ready when you are, JT

MS reveals its real customers

2002-09-04T00:32:00.000-07:00

The LA Times on MS's DRM policy
A number of privacy and consumer activists are concerned. More ominous for some are things Microsoft hasn't announced, such as changes in its small-type licensing agreements with those who downloaded a security patch for Media Player in the last month.
Those agreements give Microsoft the authority to disable bootlegged content or software Microsoft doesn't like--such as a peer-to-peer file-swapping application or copying mechanism--on consumers' machines.
That provision has made entertainment executives very happy, a Microsoft strategist said.
Virtually all of the proposals could be used to limit what consumers do, potentially eroding what generally has been considered the fair use of songs, television shows and movies.

Patterns in the record industry

2002-08-31T02:45:00.000-07:00

Stan Liebowitz writes on how his analysis of music sales shows a fall in album sales, which may be to do with MP3.

note on page 8 that I discuss movies, DVDs and videogames and do not believe their growth can explain any but a small part of record sales

You do not seem to have analysed DVD sales at all. You say:

if the official numbers are to be believed, listening to recorded music took up approximately 45 minutes of a person's time per day, whereas going to movies took up 2 minutes, watching prerecorded movies took up 9 minutes, and playing videogames took up 7 minutes. I do not believe it is reasonable to argue, at these low time-levels of usage, that changes in movie attendance, DVD usage, or videogames usage, for the population as a whole, could be responsible for more than a small portion of the changes in album sales discussed below.

Did 'listening to recorded music' include radio? Does 'watching prerecorded movies' include TV movies? How much time was spent watching TV? Aren't TV audience trending down? Might some of this be displacement by DVD?

An analysis of revenue and units of DVDs would be very helpful - Figure 6 looks like a classic succession curve, as seen with other technologies such as fuel sources, though with a shorter time span. Adding DVD sales, pre-recorded and blank VHS sales and recordable CD sales to it would be illuminating.

By citing the listening/viewing statistics, you are missing 2 behavioural points. Music is listened to repeatedly; Movies less so. There should be a discount rate applied for this.

Secondly, the library/collector model has shifted too. Watching my friends and colleagues, the same people who used to buy huge home audio systems and collect CDs, are now buying huge home Theater systems and collecting DVDs. The amount of time spent viewing or listening to them may not increase, but what they are collecting has. In addition, collecting classic TV series on DVD is a growing market. An examination of retail space devoted to each makes this fairly obvious to the layman, but studying this empirically would be worth doing to test the hypothesis.

p21: Of course, copying using cassettes requires having an original handy. That means either borrowing one or purchasing a legitimate copy. The difficulty of borrowing might have been sufficiently great that most copies would have been made from originals purchased by that individual.

Not necessarily. I remember in my youth carefully recording songs from the radio to cassette by listening to the chart countdown, when the order was approximately known. I'm sure many people were transferring older vinyl to cassette as well for portability and making 'mix tapes'.

The succession from vinyl to tape was based on flexibility - portability, as you say, but also the ability to make 'mix tapes' - music sequenced by the customer, not the label. This could be done with singles, by a jukebox, or stacking changer deck, but cassettes let these juxtapositions be recorded for others, as memorialized in the book (and film) High Fidelity.

The succession from vinyl/tape to CD was based on Quality as well as portability. With recordable CDs we now have both.
With MP3 players such the iPod our existing CDs become far more portable. Being able to carry hundreds of albums in my pocket means I am far more likely to listen to what I already have, as it will do shuffle play across my entire collection, or let me pick out one song from a thousand in short order. I think once you get over the ability to carry it all with you, you do want to buy more, as you are listening to more music, but listening to much less music radio, as I have a bigger playlist than they do, and I like all the songs on it.

Another area for investigation that I would love to see some solid stats on is the distribution of hits. Bentley and Maschner have shown that the Billboard chart exhibits a Zipf distribution and is thus in a state of self-organised criticality, where avalanches (sales collapses) of arbitrary size can occur.

My suspicion is that the distribution of album sales, whether cumulative or over an interval, would also show a Zipf distribution. The 'hit-chasing' model of the record industry makes a lot of sense if this is the case, as the records that hit it big will be hugely profitable. The ones that do less well - in the long tail of the distribution - are the ones that are relatively subsidised. However, the tail is cut off at the point where labels won't pick up a band.

I suspect that the widespread availability of music from unsigned bands via legitimate digital distribution can affect the overall form of the power law, by extending the tail still further, perhaps changing the power of the distribution slope, and reducing the number of 'hits' that way. If the cut-off happens further down, while the relative sales distribution may be the same, overall listening has moved out to an even longer tail of smaller bands.

Eric confides

2002-08-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

Eric responds:
DRM: say what you want -- the BigCos in this space are not going to go down quietly. DRM will happen -- in some form. But understand the large-ness of DRM. Its not simply BigCos fighting their distribution problem.....it also goes to things like, me sending you an email in confidence and being able to KNOW that you can't forward it to anyone. Identity required.
They don't have a distribution problem - as Dave put it, any 11 year-old can distribute these days - they have a payment problem, and a publicity problem, as the monoculture fragments.

The email example is deeply bogus. If I can read it, I can recite it, or retype it or grab a screenshot or whatever. If you don't trust me, don't send it. Look at your choice of words 'in confidence'. Are you really saying you would have more confidence in code than in people? Either you don't know much about code, or you're mixing with the wrong people.

I know I need some kinfs of identification for mediAgora- what I'm asking is what does 'Digital Identity' offer or define that beats easy to implement identity tokens I've aleady described?

Quote of the day

2002-08-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to come and take away their toilet paper - _they're_ going to die.

But anyway, traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. Nobody's going to hurt it.

--Bob Dylan
February 1966
(thanks to Adam Powell for finding this)

2002-08-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

In this article from today's WSJ (sub required, sorry), the Journal, which is usually more thoughtful, republishes the RIAA's press release like a spoon feed.

In more bad news for the music industry, a trade-group report shows that shipments of recorded music are down so far this year, and consumers who are downloading music from the Internet aren't helping matters....The study found that consumers who say they are downloading more say they are purchasing less music "by more than 2 to 1," the RIAA said.

I go back to my blog of 7/30/02 and note that the same WSJ noted that when BMG records bought Zomba, home to N'Sync and others whose popularity is "waning," it wasn't a good deal. So, are people not buying CDs because they are downloading, or are they not buying because they're tired of simple same-sounding pop drivel?

The distribution system is very broken. It used to be that radio would push the new tunes, but radio is so milquetoast that the number of new artists heard is minimal. And they all sound alike. Oh, and hey, in this wonderful economy, which am I buying for $15 - a CD with one song I like or 3 Frappachinos?

Internet radio could help solve the problem, but Congress is killing it with the CARP plan. Final thought on the WSJ article today:
"What has changed is a very significant increase of the number of people who download music and then copy it to other media," said Geoff Garin of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, which conducted the study. Ok. There's your opportunity. Make it work FOR you. News.com's version of this story had a very cool quote by Jonathan Potter of the Digital Media Association: "I'd like to introduce the recording industry to something called bottled water," he said, referring to an example of successful retail items that are also easily available for free.

Eric -Digital ID is it

2002-08-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

In response to Dave saying:
We have a recording business that was built around its ability to solve what was once a really hard problem - distributing music. Now any 11 year old with Internet access can solve it. So, the current recording industry has to change or fail.
Eric says
Digital IDs provide that possibility (via DRM)...ie, they provide for the recreation of a viable distribution channel; one that looks much different from today, but still allows company and artist to get paid.

You say DRM like its a good thing...

Eric, you've said before that Digital Identity is the key. Can you explain it in a mediAgora context, as I don't quite get it. In mediAgora I need to keep track of Works, Creators, Customers and Promoters. What does Digital ID tech offer me in each case?

Why not just use an email address for the humans, and a GUID made by, say, SHA'ing he concatenation of the MAC address and the time for registering the works. What do I gain by adopting some elaborate Digital ID scheme?

Streaming media listeners buy more CDs

2002-08-26T01:22:00.000-07:00

Arbitron found that listening to music makes you likely to buy it

[...]people who have watched or listened to streaming media online in the past week - bought more than one and a half times the number of compact discs (CDs) in the past year than the average American, according to a new study by Arbitron Inc. and Edison Media Research.

[they]bought 21 CDs in the past year, compared to the average American, who bought 13 CDs.

Record companies know this really; after all they pay 'independent' promoters millions to get airplay on FM. So why are they trying to shut down streaming music on the net?

Liebowitz vacillates

2002-08-26T01:17:00.000-07:00

File sharing: Guilty as charged?
Based on figures he read in USA Today, Stan Liebowitz changes his mind and thinks file-sharing is reducing sales. But he has a suggestion:

[O]ne of the things that the entertainment industry has always been really good at is differentiating products. With movies, you have the theater, the tapes, the pay-per-view, the HBO, then the TV. To me, the interesting thing is that historically, the record industry hasn't done much differentiation. What you might have expected was, say, a CD that was half the price of current high-quality CDs that just has a lower sampling rate. With MP3s, for example, when you rip a CD, you have a choice about whether you want to have CD-quality or near-CD quality or FM-radio-quality. When you're playing music on low-quality stereos, you wouldn't really hear the difference. So one of the things the industry could do with their downloads is have different prices. People with high-quality stereos aren't going to want to put the low quality material on, and the people who have lower quality stereos, with speakers that are incapable of producing the frequencies that let you hear the difference, then they'll buy the cheap ones. That would a way to broaden the market and increase their revenues. In a way it's surprising that the industry hasn't done that. And as they are trying to figure out their models for online sales, that would be one way of doing it.

Overview of protection rackets

2002-08-26T01:09:00.000-07:00

Lots of good quotes that tell the story:
"All this smacks of desperation," says Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company hired by major labels to measure online file-sharing traffic. "When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, 'I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it,' it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it."[...]

"The labels run the risk of angering millions of their best customers with these copy-protected CDs," Rep. Rich Boucher, a Virginia Democrat and Internet policy maven, said in a recent phone interview. "That's a business call on their part. But I think there's a role for Congress to make sure that copy-protected CDs are adequately labeled."[...]

"It just doesn't work," said David Bowie, whose latest album, "Heathen," was released protection-free. "I mean, what's the point?"[...]

"If you play it, we can record it in MP3," says Bob Fullerton of Pogo Products, which makes Ripflash. "And there's no legal way to restrict that, that I know of."

Dave Weinberger, wise as ever

2002-08-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

Blowing Copyright (Commentary)
I'm not looking for free music. I'm 51 and employed. I can buy the music I want. And I'm a writer; I'm in favor of people getting paid for what they create. The fact is I don't know what the law should look like . But I do know in my heart three things.

First, the industry's gotta change. We have a recording business that was built around its ability to solve what was once a really hard problem - distributing music. Now any 11 year old with Internet access can solve it. So, the current recording industry has to change or fail.

Second, I don't think any of us know how to change it. Our current common sense doesn't work. [...]

I think I know how to change it - as outlined here. But it does require new common sense - or 'commons' sense.

Third, and this is really what matters to me. The very thing the most conservative among us have dreamt of, have died for since the founding of this country, is now within our grasp: free markets, free speech, worldwide.

That's the idea!

Good suggestions at popmatters

2002-08-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

David Medsker and Neil Soiseth I love my CD burner, though it probably doesn't love me much. I make CDs by the pound, and in the process have helped scores of bands sell records. My friend Tony, after receiving a mix disc from me, went out and bought the albums from every single band that I put on that disc, and in some cases bought the entire catalog of a band. (You're welcome, Guster) The Recording Industry Association of America should be paying me referral fees for the bands that I've promoted on their behalf. Instead, they think I'm a thief and part of the reason the music business is in so much trouble.

They go on to propose something similar to Janis Ian. I think the suggestion above is better (and closer to mediAgora). You don't need everything on one site - after all the net isn't all on one site; that's why we have Google.

2002-08-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Hi all. Interesting comment, having some inside info. I know that it was a MAJOR decision for Pressplay to allow any burning whatsoever, and was only announced at the very end of the beta when the thing went live. They realized they had to differentiate from Musicnet.

The technology is there to allow burning, allow copying within a 'licensed' package. I know Kevin's arguement here will be - well then, don't package the thing, just set it free. While I agree in principle with that notion, I'm much more of a realist. I don't believe the media companies will move from A to Q that quickly - they have to get to B, C, F and find out the thing doesn't work, go back to D, then move on to G, etc. That's the history of formats in this world (beta, mini disks, 8 tracks, laserdisk).

I don't defend this as practical, but thats the mind set inside most of these companies, at least a year or two ago when they were my clients.

Other interesting side comment from Mary, who writes:
Today I hand you the proof Janis is right-- Bill Rose and the crew over at Arbitron and the Edison Media Research group has released the news that they have just completed a study which shows as broadband connections grow, the number of people who listen to Internet Radio is increasing. Those listeners are buying more CD's per year-- nearly double.

I don't know about you, but this type of proof makes the recording industry look more and more customer unfriendly.

A 'celestial jukebox' proposal

2002-08-21T02:31:00.000-07:00

Dan Krimm clearly explains the state of the music industry and argues for statutory licensing to establish a 'celestial jukebox'.
I am sympathetic to this, as I started out with ideas along these lines myself, before coming up with the mediAgora model which puts the Creators fully in control. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be tied to pay-per-listen and a streaming model. Local storage is going to be cheaper than bandwidth for a long time to come, and people prefer to own things than rent them. Selling high quality unrestricted copies means you can set the price at a sensible level and avoid micropayment miasma.

Another musician declaring independence

2002-08-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

Robert Fripp's Discipline Global Mobile
Business imposes limitations and restrictions upon music and musicians. This is inevitable. But the mainstream music industry often, even mostly, determines and directs the music which is available to the public. Business may legitimately recognise areas of public interest which are not being addressed, but should not make musical choices for musicians. Neither should business apply pressure to make musicians conform to industry "common practices" and concerns. Industry agencies do this in a number of ways, some of which are honest and some of which involve lying, misrepresentation and threats, even corruption of the musician's better nature. Some are subtle and invidious. Some are blatant. Some are the result of an inexorable and ongoing embrace. They are rarely innocent.

Q. Isn't that a bit strong?

A. The history of the music industry is a history of dissembling, conflict of interest, exploitation, and theft - legal, illegal and quasi-legal.

Help

2002-08-16T13:26:00.000-07:00

Various helpful colleagues (including Kevin and Tom and the Head Lemur and Colin Robertson) offered helpful feedback to my licenses question. Probably the simplest answer will be to assert copyright, but explicitly permit online distribution (Colin reminds me to be specific about what forms that distribution might take). He points me, though, to the Open Publication License, which may be a helpful alternative. Thanks, everyone.

Internet Society opposes proposed anti-copying laws

2002-08-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

They say:
The Internet Society strongly opposes attempts to impose governmental technology mandates that are designed to protect only the economic interests of certain owners of intellectual property over the economic interests of much larger portions of society. The current debate in many countries of the world regarding digital rights management (DRM) has illustrated the inevitable conclusion of technology mandates in law: a world where all digital media technology is either forbidden or compulsory. The effect of these mandates is to grant veto power over new technologies to special interest groups who have continually opposed innovation.
Read the rest there - it's a good summary.

In the Right Direction?

2002-08-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't seen her mentioned 'round here, add one of my favorite musicians, Aimee Mann, to the ranks of the relatively clued. She helped form the group United Musicians (sadly the web site seems a bit out of date), which states that it is "founded on the principle that every artist should be able to retain copyright ownership of the work he or she has created and that this ownership is the basis for artistic strength and true independence." Her upcoming album is freely available online as an audio stream until its release on CD.

Seems like a few steps in a mediAgora-ish direction-- recognition goes directly to the Creator. Also seems like something that could directly benefit from the mediAgora model. From this article at Harmony Central:

United Musicians is not a record label in the traditional definition. UM is a place where an established artist, who has masters in hand, can come and benefit from the collective's pool of business talents. UM will be collecting a distribution fee, plus a percentage for whatever services it provides.

"It's not a situation that's right for everybody, because it really is up to the artist to do a lot of the work themselves," Hausman explains. "At this point they have to be able to produce their own masters, tour without tour support, and get press."

Newer artists, he believes, won't fit well into the UM mold. "I think it will work only for artists who have a fan base that is identifiable and is fairly easy market to," Hausman says. "We're not set up to promote and market that way, unless everybody had an extremely modest sales goals [sic]."

The article was written 2 years ago. If that's still the case, mediAgora's extended concept of the Promoter role could possibly assuage a shortcoming like that. Something seemingly not addressed at all, obviously, is the additional concepts of incorporation/ collaboration. Baby steps, I suppose.

Licenses

2002-08-15T07:47:00.000-07:00

Friends, I have a question about licenses that one of you may be able to help with. In a project on which I’ve been working, I will need a form of license that permits free electronic distribution of the material covered, but would reserve the right of physical reproduction to the copyright holder and her or his assigned publisher. (We have a print-on-demand publisher already on board as a physical press.)

I haven't seen a license that offers this specific sort of arrangement. Have I missed an obvious element of one of the extant licenses? If someone could point me toward a license that works this way, or provide a license modified to suit our enterprise, I'd be most appreciative. I doubt mediAgora will be functional in time for our site going live, but this sort of arrangement looks to me like a possible bridge toward mediAgoric distribution.

Lies and Disinformation

2002-08-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

Causes do not depend for their validity on the integrity of the people who espouse them; as a theologian, I have to believe this, since so many spokespeople for Christianity have been manifestly flawed creatures, and some outright scoundrels and hatemongers.

So there may be more to the present dispute over digital reproduction management than the mouthpieces of the entertainment cartels say. But the threats and bluster they promulgate do little to assure me that their cause is anything but self-serving.

Take for example (thanks to Doc Searls) this snippet from a Cnet report:

Wheeler said the industry would take a similar approach when it comes to digital television. “You don’t get the programming and no restrictions on what you can do with it. The free lunch does not operate in copyright.”

RIAA representative Mitch Glazier seconded that notion, saying pleas for fair use rights mask a desire for widespread stealing of digital content. “Anybody who doesn’t want to talk about this as a stealing problem hasn’t created anything,” he said.

These statements misrepresent matters of fact both in copyright law and in the social reality of the present copyright argument.

In the first instance, as copyright emerges from the outset as a limited monopoly granted to a copyright holder not as a natural prerogative, but as an encouragement to contribute to the shared cultural wealth of the community. If “[t]he free lunch does not operate in copyright,“ then the lunch we should be withholding is the indefinitely-prolonged smorgasbord of delicacies served at the tables of the moguls, who are granted a free meal at the expense of the community to whom the right to mess with their own cultural inheritance belongs.

In the second instance, the Web and even the corporate media have been amply provided with examples of creators who oppose the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, the Buggy-Whip Protection Act, the Dinosaurs Anti-Mammal Protection Act, the Corporate Digital Vigilante Act, and other such desperate maneuvers of the obsolescent media control companies. If you want examples, start with Courtney Love and Janis Ian at the heights of creative production; Kevin and me, closer to the ground.

If there’s a sound historical, legal, and social argument in behalf of these legislative pirates, let’s hear them. But these appeals to ignorance and prejudice do the entertainment cartels no credit.

Jim Griffin: Splitting Up the Spoils

2002-08-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Blogcritics: Jim Griffin says
...the expectation created by advocates and purveyors of what is called Digital Rights Management software are squarely to blame. They sold a bill of goods to the industry, telling them they'd turn digital music and media and art into digitally controlled products with no marginal cost and infinite protection and data mining, with the result that big media waits and waits and waits for control that will never come. Michael Eisner hypocritically swears Disney won't release content unless it can be controlled at the same time he sends it down a cable wire into a flat-fee market of uncontrolled video cassette recorders, the same device Jack Valenti swore in court would kill the industry like the Boston Strangler.
Technologists everywhere need to become hyper-honest with industry executives who ask: No, we will not in our lifetimes harness and tether art. No, it wouldn't be a good thing if we could. Art and anarchy go hand in hand, and conditioning access to granular pieces of knowledge and art on the ability of a parent to pay is a bad, immoral thing.
Let's be clear: Digitization of music and media inherently liberates that content to find a shorter path to its audience, and whatever speed bumps we can shortsightedly build are quickly obviated by the new digital vehicles we build to move them. Control is not coming back, and there is no need to wait. The next vine is not a mechanism for control.

Good points all. His licensing idea is one answer, but I think mediAgora is a better one.

Bob Cringely gets it

2002-08-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

Bob Cringely writes:
I just bought a "Lord of the Rings" DVD at Fry's Electronics for $16.95. That $16.95 has to support not only the movie production, but also an immense manufacturing, distribution, and marketing organization that at the end of the day probably yields two dollars or less in pure profit to the intellectual property owner. So why not cut out that manufacturing, distribution, and marketing operation -- and its associated administrative overhead -- and instead just hurl a copy of the movie onto the Net, let it propagate as demand dictates, with that same two dollars making its way back to the film makers from every subsequent owner?
That's where we are headed, to a system where Microsoft doesn't control access to media as much as content controls its own use, and only the content creators get paid. And when it all comes together a decade from now, we'll see that for the very reasons I just described it was inevitable.