This morning’s Observer column.
While the internet has been rampaging through the business models of the music, newspaper and movie industries, book publishers have been quietly hoping that if they keep their heads down the monster will go away. After all, print is rather low-tech and unsexy, and teenagers aren’t much interested in it, so the dangers of being ripped off wholesale by online text-sharing seemed remote…
Google’s latest patent application. Newspapers, watch out!
From the latest Pew Internet and American Life survey…
WASHINGTON, November 2, 2005- American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.
This morning’s Observer column…
Q: What’s a record company?
A: An organisation whose survival depends on suing those who are potentially its best customers.
I exaggerate – but only slightly. Scarcely a week goes by without some salivating music industry executive detailing the latest batch of lawsuits launched against file-sharing teenagers. In an interesting variation on this litigious theme, Candy Chan, an American parent of one of these errant youngsters, refused to settle on behalf of her 13-year-old-daughter, Brittany. When she announced this plan of action, however, the record companies decided to go after the kid directly.But in order to do this they had to find a way of neutralising mummy. So they petitioned the court to push Mrs Chan aside and appoint a legal guardian in her place.
Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up. The whole saga of music downloading is set to become a business school case study on the lengths to which an industry will go to defend a business model that technology has rendered obsolete…
Update: It looks as though sophisticated use of the Internet by bands is much more extensive than my reference to Arctic Monkeys implied. Here’ for example, is an intriguing Wired article about Myspace.com.
Well, well. Here’s an interesting interview in The Daily Princetonian with Bill Gates. The bit that grabbed me is this:
Q: There has been a lot of debate about the next generation Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies in recent weeks. It seems more and more companies are backing the Blu-ray standard. The current debate seems to harken back to the Betamax vs. VHS format war in the 1970s and 80s, where Betamax was ostensibly the superior technology yet it did not gain wide acceptance. Why is Microsoft not backing Blu-ray today — a technology that many consider to be superior?
Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.
It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.
For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.
At first sight, this looks encouraging. At last, a major computer technology company is standing up to the copyright thugs. The only problem is that the same Bill Gates has ceded veto rights to Hollywood studios over some features of the forthcoming Vista (aka Longhorn) release of Windows. Not much evidence of concern for consumers there. So either Redmond’s right hand knoweth not what its left hand doeth; or Mr Gates speaks with forked tongue.
Update: Cian Ginty of Gamestoaster.com writes:
Possibly overlooked by many people, Microsoft’s main reasons for not supporting the format may be because Sony is to use Blue-ray in their rival PS3 games console, which is to launch within a year after MS’s Xbox 360 console which should be out for Christmas.
From this week’s Economist…
Sales of music CDs and other physical formats fell by 6.3% in the first half of 2005. But sales of digital music (not shown in the chart) more than tripled to $790m. Music downloads and mobile-phone ringtones now account for 6% of retail revenues. Of the countries with the most music sales, the British bought the most per person, thanks to their attractive specialist music shops, and the release of Coldplay’s album “X&Y”.
One of the projects I’ve been working on for a while came to fruition last night with the launch of the Adelphi Charter. Or, to give it its full name, the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property. It’s an attempt for formulate a sane set of principles to guide law-making on IP in a digital age, and the project was hosted and sponsored by the Royal Society of Arts, which has a 200-year record of concern about intellectual property issues. I was a member of the international Commission which drafted the document.
The Charter was launched at a crowded event at the RSA, during which two of my fellow Commission members, James Boyle (on the left) and John Sulston, gave memorable speeches.
John led the team which decoded the human genome in order to ensure that it remained in the public domain, and in the process put the whole of humanity in his debt (a debt only partly repaid by his being awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine). At one point in his talk, he invited us to contemplate what would have happened if he’d failed — if the genome (which, after all, is “the book of life”) had been copyrighted by a commercial company. Anyone who wanted to read the book would, firstly, have had to pay a fee, and secondly (and more importantly) would not be able to reveal what they’d discovered as a result of reading it. It would, he said be “like reading a book review and going to a bookshop to buy a copy and being told by the bookseller ‘No — you can’t see it'”.
In his opening declaration, John Howkins, who chaired the Commission, reminded people that the publication of the Charter was, in a way, only the end of the beginning. The real work lies ahead — in persuading governments and the public that we have to think again about the way we grant and regulate intellectual property rights.
Being a member of the Commission has been an exhilarating experience because it brought me into contact with such a range of formidable people — ranging from thinkers like James Boyle, John Sulston, Larry Lessig and Jamie Love, to activists like Cory Doctorow and artists like Gilberto Gil, the remarkable musician who is also Brazil’s Minister of Culture.
Gilberto could not be present at the launch (he was in Paris on government business), but on Tuesday he came to the RSA for lunch — as did James Purnell, the UK ‘Minister for the Creative Industries’ (shown here on the right of the picture. John Howkins is on the left.)
Media reaction:
One of my proudest possessions is a copy of the original version of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program which Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wrote for the Apple II (and which was the reason that machine began to sell like hot cakes: people wanted the software and, when told they needed an Apple machine to run it, bought one of those too). If you look at Excel (and, before that, Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft’s first effort at a spreadsheet, Multiplan) you’ll see that each was essentially just an attempt to do a better VisiCalc. And of course they were able to do it because VisiCalc wasn’t patented. Dan Bricklin has been musing about this on his Blog.
Useful decision tree provided by the UK Museums Copyright Group. [pdf]
Er, Apple launched its