Transparency Camp West: Observations

(image by Beth Kanter)

First, Kaliya Hamlin has written a great post on how to manage an unconference so that participants get the most from the event, and feel connected to the topic and solving a particular problem set as well as make stronger social relationships for future potential workings (in this case Transparency Camp West, held yesterday in Charlie's old cafe plus a few small conference rooms at Google in Mountain View).

I attended Transparency Camp West (#TCamp09) from Saturday Afternoon through Sunday's brief closing. It was structured more like a BarCamp or FooCamp (with minimal facilitation) than an unconference using the Open Space method (pdf) (which has a bit more social and activity facilitation and structure). I attended TCamp because I'm interested in, as well as want to help with, Transparency which I feel strongly is a very good thing for government to engage in.

The first Barcamp was formed as an alternative to FooCamp, O'Reillly's "friends of oreilly" camp held at their headquarters annually (note I have attended FOO and really enjoyed it.) That first Barcamp had the social cohesion that forms around the shared hurts which many there felt as insult and exclusion, because of an unfortunate and ill-worded blog post about FooCamp inclusion. So that particular Barcamp's lack of facilitation wasn't an issue. (Note that I didn't personally feel the insult because I know the people who run FooCamp and knew it wasn't directed at me personally. Yet I felt it for the other young folks there who couldn't understand whether they were the ones being called out as unworthy to attend Foocamp and therefore felt hurt. I spent a fair amount of time that first and second day of the first Barcamp consoling young developers, explaining that I didn't think they were the targets of that Foocamp blog post either.. but they were hurt anyway. And hurts do bring a certain cohesion.)

But subsequent Barcamps have suffered from the lack of a Beginning and Ending. They have a start and a finish, but they don't really begin in any formal way, where a facilitator helps the event process and participants to plan the event agenda, announce each session proposal, and then push for documentation of learnings, nor do they have an ending where the participants are brought back together to share learnings and insights, and close properly as a social group who may, hopefully want to see each other again one day. Barcamps often just start. Organizer announces a wall. And that's it. Dive in. Left socially flapping in the breeze.

When I've attended Barcamps in NYC or Austin or SF or other local barcamp styled events, I've alternately been pleased to see everyone show up and many present something interesting, and yet dismayed by the lack of social cohesion or shared learning and evolving that I know from experience is possible at an open space style unconference. This is especially true for the wall-rushing of the Bar/Foo style, which is great if your 22 and male, and want to dive head first into a pile of bodies to get your slot. But if you're not (and say female or not 22) then you would likely really enjoy the ability to announce one at a time your session without having to dive ass in the air into the sweaty bodies just to get your slot. Filtering agenda creation through that process has nothing to do with whether a session will be any good, and everything to do with 22 y old male "f-u" culture.

But think about an unconference as a story: there is a beginning, a middle and an ending when it's done well.

Open Space unconferences provide that social structure, without filling in the content. The participants do that. It's still an unconference but it's got social support in a way that Barcamps don't.

So why does it matter that Transparency Camp was more Barcamp than Open Space? Because it felt like they squandered the opportunity to get the most out of the participants brainstorming solutions and connecting socially around the tough problems that many, most notably the Sunlight Foundation are attacking. In fact, I didn't realize until the end of the event that there was any particular leader leading the event (I missed the beginning because I thought it would be really hard to get in but in fact the event was in a huge cavernous space with tons of room and comparably few people.. sparse even.. though the break out rooms which were tiny were often packed -- that said, I missed their beginning and only heard it later). At the brief ending, when the leader said, "Anybody have anything to say, or any criticisms?" to that giant cavernous room with a few people milling about at the end, it felt so awkward. No.. I'm never going to share anything under those circumstances. Certainly not criticisms.

::shudder::

I think he was a little out of his depth in terms of facilitation experience. Though I did love the singing he did to call everyone back into the ending time.

One thing the FooCamp/BarCamp method sets as an expectation is that everyone will "come present something amazing." Well, not everyone has something amazing to present. Or is an expert. But what TCamp had was a bunch of smart people in the room interested in a particular problem set: transparency of data.

I did work for a congressman long ago for 4.5 yrs, 1.5 of which was in Washington, but I'm a technologist now. I work with hopefully-structured data and make algorithms and create systems and interfaces.. I don't work in government currently -- hate bureaucracy -- but I do want transparency in government and so I'm strongly aligned with the Sunlight Foundation's mission. In other words, I gave TCamp a day and a half of my time as a non-expert in current government transparency to try to help as a civic gesture, not because I do it for a living.

So why not instead use Open Space, which sets the expectation that some will present amazing things, but the rest will attack a problem from different angles in a discussion format? This is a subtle, but very important social distinction about session formats. However, including both session formats requires an Open Space facilitation method to get people thinking in the direction of question and answer, not presentation broadcast and competition, so that they are socially aligned to work together, but also not so structured that it takes the life out of the budding, thoughtful ideas these participants might come up with around the problem-set.

In other words, it's a balance: structure and openness. This balance is cultivated in the Open Space, camp process where there is a real opening and closing plus announced sessions. Also important is the social evening event between the two days, where all organizers of the event should attend to give even the this time heft and importance as an integral part of the communal event, as well as to receive informal feedback on how things are going. Aside: when I walked into the TCamp evening event and saw none of the organizers there, and a sea of people I mostly didn't know, I though.. oh it's not that important to be here and I'm tired and want to go home and eat something simple and light and just chill. But before I saw that, I was fully prepared to spend the evening continuing to socialize around the Transparency Camp problem-set.

(image by Joseph Boyle)

I really enjoyed Dan Gillmor's session on governmental dissemination of information in an open, and individuated media world. Dan is thoughtful and sincere in his desire to chronicle and assist with the transformation from broadcast to social and individual media as we navigate this new world, especially around government data. I also liked the session on Lobbyists which was hilariously and spontaneously focused on how to understand and better map their activities. The session on transparent data, by Natalie Fonseca of Techpolicy, and how far should it go in exposing personal, governmental and corporate data was great.. though the strides were likely lost to Twitter's short horizon of maintained tweets. I do hope someone took notes about what we discussed and posts them. And Esther Dyson's session on genetic data sociality and exposure was terrific, if not totally on topic about government data transparency.

One last thing, overall I enjoyed TCamp and would attend again. But there were a number of incidents where I saw people puffing themselves up as they presented things (sometimes great, sometimes ill conceived) or otherwise talked in sessions (the amount of reactionary eye rolling confirmed for me that I wasn't the only one surprised and dismayed by this behavior across sessions). It may be that in order to be a technologist / player in Washington or other governmental locals, that being pompous is a job requirement in order that the old guard in WDC or California take you seriously. But considering the problem set: transparency for the common man, I felt there was some irony in this behavior. And since some of it came from Sunlight folks, it made me worried for them. I know we could do the typical Silicon Valley thing where some engage in something stupid, and we all don't say anything and two years later they fail. But Sunlight and these other orgs don't have two years to figure out that this behavior is counterproductive. They are non-profits and there is a public good to what they do, and they need to deal with this now, not figure it out in two years after no-one has said anything.

Thankfully Sunlight has people like the extraordinary Ellen Miller and the very thoughtful Esther Dyson, whom I hope can help school these youngsters in the idea that self-puffery gets you nowhere in Silicon Valley, or for that matter outside the Beltway or Sacramento. Not to mention it makes it very difficult to listen well. Simply presenting something without your own ego inserted in front of the presentation or your contributory statement is the best way to get us all to say: WOW, what a great idea.. I want to help too! And since what you are presenting is interesting, you must be smart too!

That said, I was very impressed with Sunlight's Policy Director, John Wonderlich, who was thoughtful, socially pleasant, listened well and didn't seem to have any personal agenda to advance his own ego and stature. Maybe he even pets small children and dogs on the head and helps little old ladies cross the road as he walks to work each day too, I don't know, but Sunlight could use more people like him because he really added to every session in which I encountered him, both in terms of smart thoughts and socially to make people feel comfortable with the thoughts and ideas being passed around.

The Life of a Tweet

Twitter (and the ISchool -- or one of my poor brethern -- I have a masters from UCBerkeley's iSchool) seem to be in the tweetsphere over one ill-found tweet tossed off by a student and found by her summer internship employer likely via search.twitter.com. For background, you can see this: FattyCisco.com. The poor girl is likely humiliated and horrified over what she thought was an innocent and also, likely, a fleeting thought that didn't really reflect how she felt overall.

We've all had those momentary thoughts where when we are ambivalent, we toss something out of our mouths and once it's out there, we think, wow, that doesn't even ring true or, it did for a nanosecond, and now it's changed, or gee, that's about 5% of the way I actually feel about this. But out of mouth, truly ephemeral (unless recorded in some form) is different than written down and searchable in the grand database of the Googlezon and search at twitter. Or maybe it's just a joke.

This is one of the problems with online communities and specifically twitter:

You don't know who's listening, and because of search tools, you are findable beyond your follower list
or your "community" of known tweeters (ppl you @ with or read) unless your account is private.

I don't think we have at all sussed out what it means to tweet in the long term, or what the power of the tweet is, or where the tweet goes and what sort of life it has beyond the first few minutes or hours of it's life in the Twitter / client context.

This is another example of something that happened recently:

A PR exec going to Memphis to meet with a client, Fed Ex, insulted the client on the way to the meeting. The clients wrote a letter to the PR company and him, his bosses, and cc'd everyone at Fed Ex as well. Ooops.

The problem is, tweets go to those paying attention at the moment, those who may save tweets in clients (i leave my twitter client open and check it now and then as I have time -- right now I have 15k tweets from the past couple of days), those pivoting on a single user, those searching for key words, those looking a related conversations.

But when you tweet, in your head, you're often just thinking about those you expect to read it, like only a few your followers paying attention at the time. What happens with some tweets (some reading by some followers) is not what can happen with all tweets.

The interface and interaction at Twitter's website doesn't lead you to believe that what happens most often there will happen in incendiary examples. And different twitter clients (an android or Iphone app for example) don't lead you to understand the permanent nature of tweets, through use, that say, search.twitter.com might, as you see something you deleted appear there anyway.

It takes experience with all these different modalities to inform you because there is no advance disclosure or warning of the elasticity of a single tweet.

What is most interesting is this pushes me to think harder about what the interface of "aged information" online looks like (and I don't mean google search results that move from page 1 to page 3 over time).

And I have to ask myself what it would mean to have what Judith Donath discussed on the panel, Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused, moderated Saturday at SXSW by danah boyd. Judith discussed having some kind of a "mirror" for you of your digital self that would reflect all your online presentation and communications and expression... just so you might get a sense of what you show people and what you project at a moment in time. Right now it's really hard to gather that sense of yourself. Right now, you don't really see it in any sort of complete way. But others see pieces of you digitally represented at different times. It would be like re-disclosing for yourself what you've done, discovering how others view you, in slices or on the whole, in order to see the effect you have. It would probably be helpful to know what had reach and where, and what was for now at least, forgotten.

But frankly, the privacy implications of that are huge as well. So, I'm thinking. No answers on that one yet.

Trademark Tyranny by Jones Day: We Don't Like Your Stinking Linking Expression

So it turns out that Jones Day, the utterly clueless lawfirm, sued a small real estate reporting company, BlockShopper, for talking about Jones Day the normal way we all do online: with the name of a person or thing, linking to that person or things website underneath the name. The settlement agreement (pdf) says future linking must to changed as so:

... instead of posting "Tiedt is an associate," the site will write "Tiedt (http://www.jonesday.com/jtiedt/) is an associate." (The agreement also calls on BlockShopper to say that the lawyer in question is employed at Jones Day and that more information about the attorney is on the firm's Web site.) Via Wendy David at Slate

The first way is perfectly normal and the way everyone does it online. The altered version required by the suit is just silly. No one does it that way.

Though some do some creative linking expression like so:

Clueless bullies with no thought but for their own pride

and

Federal ninny making decisions who doesn't get trademark, the web, linking expression or his own ass from a tale pipe.

Groups like EFF, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen and Citizen Media Law Project tried to file an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief but federal district court Judge John Darrah rejected it. And he denied BlockShopper's motion to dismiss before trial.

The only reason Jones Day "won" is because they are big, litigious jerks who found a judge that doesn't get social norms on the web. 15 years of social norms. Across the world wide web. For hundreds of millions of people.

PS. just in case Jones Day is worried (per their ideas in the suit that linking to them means the public could be confused), or anyone else is wondering, this website is not connected in any way with Jones Day.

She's Geeky

Hey.. She's Geeky is a few days away, and you can still sign up.

The list of great women attending is here: She's Geeky Attendees and Registration

Really looking forward to interacting with all those awesome girl geeks on Friday and Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

Obama New Yorker Cover Remix

Based upon the Kevin Drum/ Washington Monthly suggestion, I remixed this week's New Yorker Cover based upon Barry Blitt's Illustration. It is much funnier with the thought bubble and McCain. I think it will be easy for people in the current climate to misunderstand the original. But the remix makes it easier to get that it's supposed to be funny.

Associated Press C&Ds Rogers Cadenhead, Gets Boycotted by Bloggers

What's going on is this: Rogers Cadenhead received 7 C&Ds from the Associated Press, because he quoted from their articles in Drudge Retorted. My view in looking his quotes is that they fall absolutely under fair use (they are all within the range of a paragraph quotes from 39 to 75 words) per Saul Hansell of NYTimes.

Jeff Jarvis, Culture Kitchen and others have been reporting and opining..

AP has said: "when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste" they will go after people, but Saturday, Jim Kennedy of AP backed off some and said the C&Ds had been heavy handed and they would review their blogger policy. And now, their executives have decided to suspend the earlier decision to go after people like Rogers Cadenhead due to links to their articles (um.. those bloggers were doing AP a favor linking..) and quotes. But at least according to other's reports, AP hasn't withdrawn the C&Ds from Rogers.

Jim Kennedy also said they want bloggers to use "summaries" of their articles, not direct quotes (huh? Fisking is impossible and quotes are key to getting at issues!) and therefore will keep the C&Ds in place because they "... feel the use is more reproduction than reference..."

I've been watching this with a lot of consternation the past few days.. I think AP is wrong here, and until they remove the C&Ds and agree that quotes are fair use, I think the blogosphere, and the IP crowd are right to push back and call for things like boycott.

Richard Kastelein of Atlantic Free Press created Unassociated press and has even come up with a badge for the boycott:

Culture Kitchen is reporting on the boycott here with a great summary of events.

Updated: Jeff Jarvis reports on the giant hole.

Getting The Orwellian Hazing of a Lifetime by Citibank and American Airlines Advantage Miles

Ok, let me just get this out there first. I hate Citibank. It wasn't always like this. I got my credit card through them 15 years ago, because I wanted American Airlines miles. But lately, the past couple of years, Citibank has just gotten worse and worse. It's like they actively subscribe to that newish thing corporations have been doing where they treat us all a little worse and a little worse, to make incrementally more money. And we all take it, because it's just a little and we don't have time to fix them by going away.

It started maybe five years ago, when they told me I couldn't walk in a check from my bank (not a Citibank check) to deposit a payment on the credit card any longer. Since I would sometimes forget to do the online billpay or mail a check in time for the deadline, I could walk in to the branch two blocks from my house and pay. Well, no longer. They simply wouldn't accept them in person unless I opened a Citibank account. Well, that seemed like the worst marketing ever to me (coercion), to get me to open a new account there.

After that I mostly used online billpay, and generally did it at least 5 days ahead of the deadline, because my bank takes 2 days to send them a notice that the money is waiting at my bank. Sort of an internal bank-to-bank email, that prompts Citibank to collect the money. They ask for it right away, and it's essentially a cash wire. Then Citibank credits my account right away. No problem.

Until recently.

I started getting calls from Citibank about 10 days or so after doing the online billpay, to, get this: "verify my payment." I literally said the first month they called, "You're joking, right?" I mean, they had a cash wire from my bank. Some online billpays are done via bank check and take five days, but not to major corporations and other banks like Citibank. Those take two days, and are very efficient. The minute I hit the "enter" button on my screen to send payment from my checking, money is withdrawn and held by my bank to make the payment to Citibank.

After the call, where I reiterated that Citibank had cash in hand from my bank, and we hung up. I assumed all was fine. No way. They "held" the funds, just to "make sure," for another 5 days, twice declining my card (i had just gone on vacation and was maxed out, thus, a large payment). These declines were for $10 and $24.95. I called and was told about the holds. They said something about how they usually allow small amounts through, but when I pointed out that $10 and $25 were pretty small and how small were they talking, anyway.. they dropped that one.

Then, a month later it all happens again. I get this call to "verify payment." Now I'm mad. Apparently they are only looking at the last six months of payments (the person I spoke with could not see back any further in the history) and since the payments had each been a little more than the last (by at least $200, so in other words, one was for $2500, the next for $2800, and the most recent for $3000), I'm now suspicious to Citibank. WTF. Why is that suspicious? Especially when I've had the same checking account at my other bank also for 15 years. So I'm told that paying more makes me risky. Nothing else matters. Wo.

So, basically, they hold the $3k again for 5 days just in case. And in my calls to them, they tell me that the department that does security sets the heuristics (my word, not theirs) for holds and Security told the woman I'm speaking with that there is nothing they can do. So while she understands Citibank is getting cash from my bank, directly, and that it's generally bad for them to decline purchases because they are losing money (they didn't the second month decline anything due to the hold but did it the prior month post vacay), they have to follow the security department's algorithms (again, my word, not hers). Great.

So then yesterday, I go to buy gas. And my card, which now has tons of room and almost no new charges, and is wide fucking open for a skyhigh-priced tank of gas, gets declined. The pump tells me to go inside, to the attendant. Great. Do so, even in bit of rush. And he swipes it, and it says on the screen: Declined. So I pay with ATM (I only carry one CC card, though I have more at home). Get gas. Call Citibank.

They explain that the charge hit a limit for the amount of gas I can buy (WTF!) in a month, and that I bought too much, or it could be that that station hasn't raised their limits what with all the new high gas prices per gallon to allow people to buy more in a month. Ok. So I buy gas twice a month. Costs around $90 to fill the tank. Your kidding me right? I can't spend $180 a month on gas if I want to? And I do.

So I reply, well, what is the answer? She tells me, you should tell that station to up their limits for CC charges per month. Again, WTF. Like I'm supposed to know about the backend heuristics and algorithms that Citibank and Union76 use to combat fraud? And do something about it? I haven't even bought gas at that exact station in over 2 months. And she verifies this in my records. But I bought at another Union76 station within the last month (my engine/mechanic asked me to get either Union76 or Chevron or Shell gas.. what can I say, I'm following order because I don't freaking understand car engines).

So basically, with gas prices rising, Citibank and the gas companies have some weird heuristics, that we don't even know about. And I got caught in one. So I respond, "You and Union76 are big companies and you must talk to each other because I'm sure a lot of people buy gas there with Citibank cards. So why don't YOU work out the raised limit for purchases instead of me?" To which she had no response and wanted to know if there was anything else she could help me with. OMG.. the possibilities are so great.

Anyway, I called Citibank back again to discuss more things about my card, as I got the next bill in the mail, and just decided I hate them too much to stay there, even if the only reason I have the card is to get AA miles. Which leads to the second clusterfuck going on here.

I have several hundred thousand miles generated through the use of this stupid card, over 15 years. And I've only once actually used the damn miles. Because every time I call to use them, they laugh at me because I only called say, in February for a June trip to Europe, or 2 months ahead for an upgrade. Once, once, an upgrade actually came through but not first without spending three months on the wait list to get the upgrade.

In other words, AA may be the gambit to get you to use the card, but you can't really use the stupid miles if you have a life and can't plan, oh, years in advance to get a plane ticket (i usually buy tix to europe a few days to a month ahead, and everywhere else, like days ahead, because I have a life, thanks).

Anyway, that's the story. So today I worked out getting rid of Citibank. I liked it because I have the number memorized for online purchases (probably the biggest reason I've put up with Citibank's crap). But I will memorize a new CC number. And I'm going to plan a trip like a year ahead so I can use up all the miles (I'll probably have to take about 8 people with me to someplace like Antartica) because if I don't have the card AA will probably cancel all the miles I've earned. And then this whole stupid corporate hazing I've been experiencing, with increasingly stupid rules, for good paying customers that make them a lot of fracking money! will have been for naught. So, where do all my readers want to go?

Alice In Wonderland Remix

Luv this remix (noted on Cartoon Brew) by Nick Bertke. He says 90% of the music is remixed from audio from the Disney (1951) film. You can download the mp3 here.

If I Had Twitter

IF I HAD TWITTER (The Twitter Song)* **

If I had Twitter
I'd tweet in the morning
I'd tweet in the evening
All over this LAN
I'd tweet out danger
I'd tweet out a warning
I'd tweet out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this WAN

If I had a cell phone
I'd txt in the morning
I'd txt in the evening
All over gsm
I'd txt out danger
I'd txt out a warning
I'd txt out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this closed-source nightmare of overcharging dinosaurs

la la la

If I had a photo
I'd flickr in the morning
I'd flickr in the evening
All over this land
I'd flickr out danger
I'd flickr out a warning
I'd flickr out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Well I've got Twitter
And I've got a cell phone
And I've got flickr'd photos
All over this open web
It's the tweet of justice
It's the txt of freedom
It's the datasharing love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this LAND

* words and music adapted from Lee Hays and Pete Seeger

** corny parody of online culture by me.

Data Sharing Summit Report

Last Friday and Saturday the Data Sharing Summit was held in SF. I attended a bit on Friday, but not Saturday. It looked like a lot got done by the participants, and so they did accomplish a lot!

Kaliya Hamlin has posted notes and goals for the next meeting in one month.

Here is an excerpt of the results:

Do-able Now
* Portable Identities (OpenID, LiveID, FB-ID)
* OAuth (sever to server) delegated auth.
* Contacts Portability (FOAF, XFN, Microformats, like MicroID)
* Sync (feed sync)
* Social Network Portability (Open Social FB platform)
* Social Application Portability

Do-able Soon
* Standard Schema for Profile
* Standard Schema for Address books
* Media portability + metadata + permissions
* Linking ID’s of different ecosystems?

Looking forward to the Data Sharing Summit 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on May 15th.

South Park on the Internets

Hilarious South Park episode on losing access to your drug of choice: the internets. Note the giant Linksys router is the placeholder for the whole internet. Funny. Go watch it.

FCC Hearing at Stanford Today

I can't go, but I hope lots of folks out there who support and open and free internet do. Here's the schedule according to Save The Internet:

It is rare for all five members of the Federal Communications Commission to leave Washington, D.C., and they want to hear from you. There will be a public comment period - come speak up to save the Internet!

WHAT: Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Thursday, April 17
TIME: 12:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University
(471 Lagunita Drive, Palo Alto, CA) Map It!
For directions and travel information, visit: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=stanford_travel

FCC Public Hearing Agenda
12:00 p.m. - Welcome/Opening Remarks
12:45 p.m. - Panel 1: Network Management and Consumer Expectations
3:00 p.m. - Panel 2: Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications
4:30 p.m. - Public Comment
6:30 p.m. - Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m. - Adjournment

Note also that Comcast is proposing a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" according to ArsTechnica, who is skeptical. Don't see any users in that room, but if they don't invite us, I'd guess after Boston, we'd all get pretty mad and force them to include us. Either way, (FCC or voluntary code) I think it's going to be user centric in the end. We're just going to have to fight like hell.

Kevin Marks also makes a great point about Comcast: They are like The Producers who oversold their Broadway show, assuming it would fail, by getting 100 people to buy 10% of the who. Comcast, by overselling their network for internet access is doing the same, and then having secret levels above which they cut people off out of the blue, is pretty bad.

Revolution is Not An AOL Keyword

Eddan Katz wrote this piece: Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, and I acted as his editor, 5 years ago. We posted it to the bIPlog on the first day of the war in Iraq.

We had a real uphill-behind-the-scenes fight about it at the Journalism School, where the blog was then hosted, because some of the other folks on the blog thought it wasn't really under our mission to publish something about the war and culture and the internet. But we convinced them; we knew we would get it published when John Battelle, one of the profs, lent his support for us. And it got slashdotted. And Revolution was made into a tshirt. Which was all a blast after working on it all night messing with the language and placing links ... some of which are broken but I think it matters to keep them intact and original. I think the linking is a kind of expression in this piece.

Eddan and I thought up what Napsterization could be here at this blog, but in the end only I've posted to it. I still wish Eddan would, and maybe someday he will. He's really great.

Anyway.. here is Revolution. I got all misty-eyed when I reread it and moused the links, because it's passionate and it means something, even if some of it is a little out of date. Cause the war ain't over. I can't believe it. I just didn't think things could get this fkedup. But as Robert Fisk says, The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn. Right on.

Revolution is Not an Aol Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV
Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.
Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya
Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by
Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney
Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,
Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart. Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.
Revolution will not get rid of spam.
Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not
An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and
Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,
Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for
That refurbished iPod 20-gig.
MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida
Or fact-check the Drudge Report.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing
Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.
There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman
Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo
As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs
That he has been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire
Will no longer be so damned relevant, and
People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with
Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information
Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.
There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,
Linux-booting white hat hacktivists
And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or
Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,
Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Posted by Eddan Katz at March 20, 2003 05:45 AM

Trashing Our Social Relationships (with Porn) to Get Your Numbers Up

Ok, there's a lot in that title. Let me explain (though I did blog about this earlier).

First, yesterday at the Supernova / Wharton event, in Jerry Michalski's session on business and social media (can't remember exact title) we spent much of the time talking privacy, online communication, games and social networks (er, social graphs but i really hate the fad where we make up a new word for something that is already working just so we can dink around with a new set of conferences, etc. but I digress. Though I would point out that one friend who attended SGP said the women at the event all seemed to get it, and then men all wanted to run calculations on our "social graphs" entirely missing the point. Oh well.)

At the end, Jeff Clavier, who apparently was at the Social Graphing conf/camp in San Diego earlier this week, gave a wrapping up of what happened. He mixed in a little of his perspective due to his investing in apps on Facebook, and threw in some perspective on the Stanford class that did some experiments on Facebook apps and their results. One example Jeff gave was about an app maker from the class had gotten 5 million people to click into his app (though they all immediately disappeared just after) in 5 weeks (correction, not 5 days -- as Jeff said to me later, correcting this, "damned French accent" because many of us heard "5 days").

I had to wonder, why would five million people do that? What's the benefit to them? Apparently the app maker, some young guy, is thrilled (and it sounded like Jeff might want to work with him or even invest). His experiment (with all of us, the greater Facebook community, as guinea pigs) worked for him, though I'd guess it wasted 5 million people's time, for a couple of minutes each.

I commented about the aspects of Facebook applications inadvertently trashing our relationships, at times, in order to get their numbers up, and using deceptive practices and features to do it, and said it thought it was really uncool. But there wasn't time to explain what I really thought, or the background of why I think this, and so, here we go:

Ok, imagine you get some sort of email message from a friend in Facebook. This is a real friend, someone you do business with and/or socialize with and maybe have known for a long time (as in, a lot longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been out of his teens and been (on paper) counted as a billionaire). Or maybe it's someone you work with (note that there's a lot of caselaw around sexual harassment.. so accidentally sending porn spam to people you work with or work for you, or you work for, doesn't seem like the greatest thing you would want to do either).

The message asks you to click into Facebook, at which point, you are asked to "install an app" (and, why? Just to read a message do I have to install an App? Oh yeah, this is about getting the applications numbers up ... so you do it, because you want to see your "real" friend's message). Then, once installed, you are taken to Slide's Fun Wall App, which shows you some porn, and says, "Click Foward to see what happen."

See this screen shot of the first round of porn spam I got (NSFW btw so be careful opening it).

I almost clicked "forward", but scrolled around past the fold. Turns out, if i'd clicked the "forward" button, Slide would have forwarded that spam to EVERYONE I KNOW in Facebook. All 500+ of them.

Now, let me explain who everyone is. Yes, of my 500 or so contacts, maybe 300 are in the tech community (and as such, expect early-adoptor screw ups and experimentation). But 200 are not. About 10 of these people are people I grew up with (we've been together as friends since nursery school). They don't know what the "tech community" is, much less care. Some of these people are religious and I would venture have never seen porn before or it's very rare in their lives. They aren't early adoptors. They expect that any communications are going to be real, and not some tech community experiment to figure out some thing that later promotes some business/VC investment, in order to see how the world of advertising can advance.

Or, take all the people I do business with, or the people who I work with, or work for me, or I work for. It would be just great to send them some porn spam. Or my brother and sister. They would luv to get porn spam from me. Not. Or how about my extended relatives in Europe? I think they are ripe for a little porn spam. No?

So.. I unchecked all 500+ contacts that Slide had checked, and wasn't able to view the message further (what was going to come next after I was asked to hit the "forward" button). So I figured out one profile I could link to who was a friend, and then forwarded the message there, "...to see what happen."

Well, guess what? Nothing "happen." Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It's trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.

So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month -- guys, it's a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)

After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.

Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, "There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send." Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I'd have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.

Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the "governing" body, Facebook makes the rules and "Slide wouldn't be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren't forced to as well." In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn't want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.

Also both companies told me that blogging doesn't affect them, because they don't read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don't look at problems that a single person discovers.

So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.

And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.

Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.

Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That's really messed up.

In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.

One guy in the Supernova / Wharton session yesterday asked how many people were in my Facebook list, and when I said 500, implied that most regular people have say, 50-100, and therefore it's not a bad problem. Well, I'd say each relationship is probably pretty important and this is an appalling justification for these applications and social network's feature sets and behaviors.

So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what's going on)? Why aren't Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can't do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he's kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn't he know better than this?

Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: "At least 15 million minutes wasted" from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?

I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can't trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.

And where are the advertisers who might put pressure? The ones on the page I show above (not all the porn spam trickery I got, but the first batch) are Toyota and Gartner?

I deleted all my Slide apps after my last blog post, a month ago, and since heard from maybe 20 people in person that after reading my post, they'd done the same. But I guess we don't count, since we only have a few people concerned.

I hope the folks who attended the session yesterday at Wharton have a better idea as to why I find this upsetting, and upon hearing that more "experiments" with Facebook apps are happening, why I might get worried and distrust the process, the results and the motivations behind them.

Note: I am aware that Facebook did recently force apps makers to default turn "off" the checked names in forward (as far as I can tell from my own analysis of Facebook and via other blogs explanations). But I have yet to receive replies to my original support notes to these companies, and feel confused about an unspoken, barely there response. It's as though after barely changing one thing aspect of a feature, in order to mitigate the problem, they want to sweep it all under the rug. But I don't feel confident that these companies either care about the spam problem, the porn problem or the social abuse problems they are allowing.

For now, the answer for me is to use Facebook minimally and Slide not at all. Interestingly, at recent social gatherings I've mentioned these issues. At almost every one, people have said they are getting off Facebook and not going back, for precisely the reasons I mention above.

I guess that's the only way to make an impression on Facebook and Slide. Shut down your own use.

Be Like Me Remix Parody

Britney Spears remix parody on her life and that of her little (recently pregnant) sister. Not to mention the spot-on parody of pop culture as it currently stands in Hollywood today.

V. v. funny. By Leeni (click on that link and play "be like me" under her music player to hear it or download it.

James Cicconi of AT&T On Net Netrality

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T was at Esme Vos' Muniwireless conference yesterday, spewing what I would kindly call the greatest of spin, and unkindly as BS.

Net Neutrality is not about people telling network providers what to charge for tiered service. That's bull. Net Neutrality says that video packets, no matter where they come from, will get through at the same rates. Same with text or photos or VOIP or anything else. The network can't under Net Neutrality distinguish and discriminate because it doesn't like where something came from or the place the packet came from didn't pay the telco's any money to prioritize the packet.

To quote muniwireless (emphasis is mine):

It's Day 2 of the Muniwireless Silicon Valley Conference and they have an executive from AT&T talking about municipal wireless networks.

AT&T has not changed its tune. It is still against cities using public funds to compete with private enterprise and believes that communications should be left up to private firms like AT&T.

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T claims that there is no duopoly and there is enough competition in the market for telecommunications services, so cities should stay out.

What is AT&T's position on net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a challenge for all companies. You spend billions to deploy your assets and net neutrality means someone telling you what you can do with your assets - what you can charge, tiers of service, etc.

"All bits should be treated equal" is a problem for network engineers because one bit is porn another bit is heart surgery, another is email, yet another is voice, another is spam. That everything should be moved equally end to end is ludicrous. It's a more costly way to do things. It's not efficient, according to AT&T.

AT&T cannot build and maintain assets quickly enough to meet the demand. They are spending $19 billion this year. Some of the demand is driven by video. What happens when people start delivering high definition film? They can't build networks fast enough! What's the answer? Effective traffic management.

The antitrust laws can deal with the problems of net neutrality (side note: unfortunately these are not being enforced today). Why should AT&T want to degrade traffic? They will go to someone else (side note again: in a duopoly, you've got Comcast which has been blocking Bittorent traffic).

I don't know about you but where I live and work, we have two choices: AT&T for dsl or Comcast for cable internet access. They are both Mid-band services, and not great but better than dialup. And we pay exorbitantly for them compared to other countries.

So of course they want to take their AT&T/Comcast duopoly and spin Net Neutrality as being all about people interfering with their pricing models for tiered service when it's really all about prioritizing packets. They want to divert attention from the reality which is that they want to put their videos through first, their media, their VOIP or media/VOIP from people who've paid them off. Instead of letting users have what they want. The telco's want to own the pipes and the content.

It's wrong and we can't let the telcos win on this.

Legacy Media Gloats About Fake Steve Jobs Outing

There's been a lot of gloating over the outing of the author of the blog, Fake Steve Jobs (see article below this link for gloating), which has been written by Dan Lyons, a Senior Editor of Forbes and where Brad Stone of the New York Times broke the story yesterday.

The interesting thing to me is that legacy media in NYC thinks that they are so clever for finding Lyons, or at least Lyons and his friends think this, when lots of bloggers on the west coast have spent months speculating and looking for FSJ. They even have pointed out how geeky the new media people are because they were doing things like checking the headers of email from FSJ, which appeared to point to a Boston location but that was all they got.

Brad Stone figured it out because he looked through Manhattan back channels to find a book agent was shopping a book proposal from FSJ (a few months ago, the book is due in October), and because the agent was telling publishers that the writer was a "the anonymous author was a published novelist and writer for a major business magazine," he could compare the FSJ writings with Lyons blog and figured it out.

Well, the point is that if you are part of legacy media, and more specifically, are in Manhattan, you probably have access through your network to other media entities in Manhattan. (Note that Brad Stone doesn't live in Manhattan, but as a member of the Times, I'd consider that very strong "local" access.) Of course if you get a clue through people you know that tell you about the FJS publishing package and mysterious writer status, you figure it out this way. No bloggers out in the hinterlands have that sort of access to be able to put this together.

It reveals both positives and negatives about legacy media, that bloggers have know for a long time and that legacy media has tried to sweep under the rug now and then. Bloggers over the past few years have pulled back the curtain on legacy media, and legacy media is now better for those conversations. But it's hard to break any story like this without both online and off-line access. You need both, and so it's not so much that Brad Stone of the NYTimes did the breaking, but rather Brad Stone, person with access Manhattanite and local connections to the publishing industry who broke the story. Could have been anyone with friends in publishing who figured it out.

But to say that it's "ironic" that a legacy media journalist was the FSJ and legacy media broke it may be true, but it's gloating at the same time. And it's that gloating attitude that got legacy media into trouble in the first place, and made the public so angry with them, after things like Jason Blair and Stephen Glass. So it may be a small victory, but often what legacy media doesn't understand is that there isn't a battle. Many conferences over the past few years have devolved into an either or battle where public demonstrations of these attitudes come out. But both sides need each other and if one went away, the other would be in deep trouble, at this point.

Bloggers drive a lot of traffic back to legacy media, as they discuss news print stories, and journalists get a lot of stories out of blogs (I first noticed this five or six years ago when my intellectual property stories started to get lifted a couple days after I published them.. by.. the New York Times. They added to them, but they took the arguments, the phrases, and never said a word about where it came from. I noticed this same thing with other IP bloggers like Law Meme and Copyfight as well.) News reporters report and bloggers opine. Bloggers opine and poke and reporters go looking for more.

We also need reporters who have access, not so much of the example above, but with access to important things, in order to get good information out. This is critical for the democracy and the reason reporters are given special dispensation in the Constitution. But reporters also need not abuse that power through gloating or arrogance.

This isn't about getting over on new media by the legacy guys. Many legacy guys have become new media guys.. Lyons and Stone each have blogs and write on the daily. The much more interesting story is how legacy media is using new media tools, changing their habits (like writing anonymous parody blogs !!!) and how everyone is interacting on and off-line to get better knowledge as well as entertainment. I have to admit, I have loved reading FSJ the past year. It's been totally entertaining.

Check this out: Fake Brad has come on the scene. Maybe a little less than FSJ-clever, but it is amusing. And ironically, it's amusing partly because it makes fun of legacy media arrogance. And as Geek.com notes, FSJ and FB may be the start of a whole new genre.

Harry Potter on The Pirate Bay, Pls C&D Me!!

So, I just realized I probably know Mark S. Seidenfeld, mentioned on Techcrunch today. I believe I worked with him at my first job out of college and would love to catch up with him. I tried looking him up on the Scholastic site but they don't list General Counsel or make it easy to reach people.

So, here's the deal, if I link to Techcrunch on their C&D story, who linked to Torrent Freak, I'll be linking to the linkers who linked to the linkers who pirated something. Harry Potter, in this case.

This reminds me of when I was C&D'd by Diebold for linking to the linkers who linked to the linkers... blah blah which produced a C&D from them. It was all totally bogus and just a form of shutting down speech, but as I said, I'd love to get an email from Mark because I'd like to be in touch.

Whatever works. Mark, my email is mary at hodder dot org. Ttyl.

Getting Real

Bob Lefsetz explains why the music industry is even worse off than I thought, pushing them deeper into the hole they've been digging for years. They are so far removed from what is real and passionate in the art of music and in how people connect to the artists that this must seem perfectly reasonable to them, from a business point of view.

This summer in the east hamptons there will be a 5 concert series, costing $15,000 per ticket which buys entry into all five shows, with Prince, Billy Joel, James Taylor, Tom Petty and Dave Matthews.

He aptly compares this concert series to Mitzvahpalooza where Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks spent $10 million dollars in 2005 on his daughter's bat mitzvah, and hired Don Henley, 50 Cent and Aerosmith among others to play two floors of the Rainbow room in NYC for the event.

Bob's right, it's disgusting for the fans, not to mention the idea of the artform, as well as commentary on the state of our society, which has gotten so gluttonous and cynical that even to people who can't afford it, which is most of us, this kind of thing seems reasonable and in no way a slap on the soul of music as an artform.

Dylan Does Seuss

The Napster Nation at work.

Dylan Hears a Who:

The Future of Video

I'm moderating a session today at 10am on the Future of Video at the Web 2.0 Conference:

Future of Video: We Just Wanna Watch, Or Do We?
Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble
Josh Felser, CEO, Grouper Networks
Mike Folgner, Jumpcut/Yahoo
Tod M. Sacerdoti, Founder and CEO, BrightRoll

YouTube has done a terrific job of leading the way for video 1.0 online, where watching is everything. But as people get more comfortable with watching video online, the old broadcast relationship they had to content changes, and they start to want more. What do users need for video 2.0 where watching is just a part of the story, where remixing and online editing, arranging, playlisting, searching, and most importantly, discovery through other sources are expected by users? What are the barriers and what is being done now to make regular users into power users, and give everyone more control and access than just watching in an on-demand style?

Come join us if you are at the conference. Should be a great discussion!

Update: Here is a Wired blog post on the session.

Busy Busy

The last month or so I've been on more planes and traveled more miles than I want too, especially with the current liquid policy we started two months ago. You can probably tell I haven't been blogging much, and it's mainly because I have been offline at meetings or when I'm online, there is so much to do, I have hardly been able to think about blogging, much less do it. But there has been a lot going on, and I have a couple of posts that I will put up shortly.

Thanks for your patience.

Thought Fashion: Are You In or Out?

It's true. I peeked.

Yes, I downloaded the AOL files. And I peeked. Why? Because I wanted to write this blog post and I wanted to see for myself what sort of gestures people were making as they searched for porn or socks or how to bury their pet birds or wives they'd just killed. I also needed to see the form the data was in. And I'm a voyeur just like everyone else in and around this story, and I wanted to rubberneck my way into other's private intellectual spaces.

But it's not right. The part where I and every news outlet, blogger, reader and looky-loo has been engaging in, judging people by their searches, making assumptions and behaving as if we ourselves have never made any searches or expressed any thoughts that would not look funny to someone else.

It's also not right because the data is personally identifying. Reporters have been tracking down people based upon their searches. It's not that hard, if you yourself are a good searcher.

What was it Bob Blakely said? About how "dragging all human behavior into the public is literally totalitarian." He is the chief security and privacy scientist for IBM's Tivoli Systems. "If you erode privacy, you erode liberty, because people don't tolerate things going on in front of them that they don't approve of." I was struck by how succinctly he answered the question that is always asked of people who object to the government or some other large and powerful entity as compared with you: What do you have to hide? If you're not doing anything wrong?

Every article on AOL's mess up that says something like AOL's Disturbing Glimpse Into Users' Lives is buying into this whether they know it or not. Thank you CNet for reaffirming our intolerance.

Let's get clear on the definition of "aggregated" data. For us geeks, we use this term often, as we reassure those whose data we work with that aggregation means we are removing anything personally identifying, and placing it with other user's data, so that it's just a pile of anonymized data that could never be distinguished by the person. An example might be the aggregation of all the searches on "dog," where who did them is removed but we know that 38 people searched on that term during a particular hour and day.

But users don't think that way. They hear the word, aggregated, and they think the data handlers are aggregating everything the system may know about just them, specifically and personally, and lumping it all together. Talk about miscommunication. And it terrifies the non-geeks.

What we really should be saying is that the data is "anonymized" and therefore you are safe. AOL's data was not safe because it was not anonymized, and for users, it was their definition of aggregated.

The AOL data which lumped each user's searches together with a user ID over three months, making profiling and finding them easy, meant that AOL provided enough data in some cases to indicate a lot about who the data related to very specifically. Leading to judgments by the rest of us. About the people who do or think things on the edges of society.

And why is this wrong? Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas.

So, well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, what *do* you have to hide? Well, everyone has something they do or think about that would be an edge thought or that in one context would be in the middle, but in another, must be defended as it resides on the edge. And that would be disapproved by someone. Something the rest of society might not tolerate.

Intolerance leads to the totalitarian. We, the human race, have been intolerant since the beginning of time. What we are intolerant of is a moving target depending on the fashion of the day. In the 30's in some places it was fashionable to be intolerant of Jews and gays. In the 40's it was Germans and the Japanese, and in the 50's communists and socialists. In the 60's it was civil rights proponents and hippies and in the 70's liberals. In the 80's we were back to communists, and in the 90's it was Hispanics (remember all the state propositions outlawing them from medical care?). And what is it today? Islam? Are thoughts you think today and the cultural references associated with them that are in the middle going to fall to the edges in the next decade?

We have used the fear of all these intolerable people and their thoughts as excuses to hunt for more proof of their intolerableness by surveilling everyone in society and searching through all the detritus of our lives. With digital data more available, we think we can find the proof we need in these edge thoughts. And then we will persecute the people having them. And what better way to do it now that the internet, ISPs and heavily used search systems can provide one or another level of very personal, thought data. Search terms, or a database of intentions as John Battelle has talked about so much, are one slice of your data that tell a lot about you. And if we can get it in a neat little file, machine readable and searchable and quantifiable, then well, why not?

If you believe that sacrificing freedom to keep freedom is the way to go, then you probably don't see any problem with demonizing people who have thoughts you don't like. Especially if those thoughts are in the form of passing gestures such as search terms plugged into a browser.

But until we decide (or default) into a Minority Report society (and change our constitution), we are not yet convicting people for thinking things. Everyone has had the thought that they'd like to kill someone once or twice in their lives. But people, the vast vast majority, don't do it. The idea that we demonize someone for searching on this, which is a gesture I would put into the fleeting thought category for almost everyone, is taking an edge thought, which we all have from time to time, and putting it firmly under the scrutiny of the middle. I believe we really only want to find people who make serious plans to hurt others, or actually carry it out. That is what our law it based on, and the premise of our society. But to track everyone, their searches, their every digital gesture, and expose it in one or another ways is going to be troublesome. And it begs a question I've asked before: is your digital identity your personal intellectual property? Is your Google identity yours or someone else's? And by extension, is your clickstream a personal expression (carefully chosen and shaped by you)? In other words, can you copyright your clickstream and exert ownership?

There are at least two choices. One of them is to do what we are doing now: have ISPs and search services collect this data, and when asked by the government, have it turned over. But that means the data is still in many ways secret. Of course the companies don't want the data getting out because it is proprietary. And neither does the government, because they don't want anyone to know quite how much is out there about you, in case you are trying to cover your tracks or you want to defend yourself. But having all the data, the government has the upper hand. And secrets are powerful. How do you show, if you are being accused of something based upon your searches, that everyone else searches on those same things too? That it's actually a social norm? If you can only ask for your own searches to defend a case against you, and not everyone else's, in order to compare yourself to it, you won't be able to argue social norms which judges rely heavily on when making decisions.

But there is another choice. And that brings up the Attention Trust premise (I'm a Board Member) which is that people own a copy of their own data, no matter where they do things: Amazon.com purchases, Google searches, or AOL clickstreams, or anywhere else you might land in a browser on your computer. As a co-owner of your data, you can take it anywhere and do what you wish. There could be many business models built upon this data controlled and shared by users. Google takes all the data they collect and plugs it into AdSense. If lots of users took their own data and made it available voluntarily, a new and more 'open source' style AdSense could be created.

But much more importantly, something like Steve Gillmor's Gesture Bank, where users opt-in their clickstream information, in an anonymous form, exists to open up this kind of data. The Bank will make the aggregation of anonymized data available to anyone for any purpose. While this may lead to businesses working from this pool of searches and clicks, it also means that a growing pool of data is there to show the edge thoughts and potentially unpopular ideas people may exhibit. The pool can be used to defend against totalitarian efforts to single out in secret those who are out of fashion politically. Which may turn out to be you. Or someone who uses your computer.

That I think is far more important than an open source AdSense, though a business built upon this data would likely justify and make a better case for us to have a Gesture Bank of ideas and thoughts that support political freedom.

Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor already offer Root. net users the opportunity to put their data into the Gesture Bank if they wish, though any person can contribute to this anonymous pool of user data. And for that matter, attention streams can be sent to multiple services.

And, at the October 4 Attention Conference, Steve and Seth will announce Attention Soft. Stay tuned.

Core Values at Bloggercon

Mike Arrington is doing the next Core Values session at Bloggercon IV. I want to wish him well, and note the information from the Core Values session at Bloggercon III that I led, because I think that session was extraordinarily productive.

In fact afterward, many people kindly said that they felt it was most useful and interesting, because they left with something tangible (the list) and they really liked that rather than me telling them what the values are I see online, or that I feel are important myself, I just asked questions, and let them come to the conclusions about the values they share and the controls they felt should exist to support those values. They appreciated the light touch guiding them to find and develop their own conclusions.

Here the list the group of 80 made during the session, of what they feel are core values for the blogosphere:

Things we value:
Democracy
Non-exclusivity
Attribution
Transparency – disclosure
Innovation
Personalization
Accessibility
Honesty
Creativity
Knowing who people are
Editorial Independence
Connectedness
Anonymity

Things we devalue:
Power law economics
Lack of Attribution
Anonymity
Wuffie-hoarding
Links for money

Good luck Mike! I'm sure you'll take us to the next level. I hope the last sessions list is useful as a starting point.

Where are we? Rise of the Videonet

At my session today at Supernova, with JD Lasica (Ourmedia) as our moderator, and Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), and Robert Levitan (Pando), I mentioned some stats and ideas, and I said I would blog those items. The are below.

The first two sets of stats focus on video hosting sites (places where users can upload video) and their use, as far as uploads and user visits or traffic. The third set of data reflects trends in the types of video we see users making and posting online, with an example or two of that kind of video.

1. Users per day/Uploads per day on a few sites we have seen info about:

ClipShack : 2200 users per day. (source: AdBright).

Google Video: 12.5 million users in month of April. (source: Washington Post).

Grouper: 8 million users per month (source:
PR News but on Alexa, that traffic appears to be a one time spike, where their traffic seems to hover around 3 million users per month) and 500,000 registered users (source: Alexa).

Ourmedia: 28,000 users per day (source: AdBright).

Vidiac: Streaming 2 million videos per day and 3 million users per month (source:
Silicon Beat Comment by Adam Beat)

Vimeo: 20 thousand users per day (source: USA Today, 11/21/05) and 50,000 registered users (source: Vimeo's about pages)

YouTube: 50,000 uploads per day, serving 50 million videos per day, with 6 million users per day (source: You Tube Fact Sheet).

2. There is a list ranking the top ten video sites by market share or traffic, published by Hitwise), May 24, 2006. (Several of the traffic stats found in articles, press releases, advertising, etc., also credited Hitwise for the numbers):

1. YouTube 42.94%
2. MySpace Videos 24.22%
3. Yahoo! Video Search 9.58%
4. MSN Video Search 9.21%
5. Google Video Search 6.48%
6. AOL Video 4.28%
7. iFilm 2.28%
8. Grouper 0.69%
9. Daily Motion 0.22%
10. vSocial 0.09%

3. At Dabble, we are seeing different video genres coming up over and over. Users, as opposed to top down TV video producers, seem to work in areas that are accessible and interesting to them. They are not just copying mainstream production styles. The list below is in no particular order as far as prevalence or audience viewing. We just see them a lot:

1. Mini tv show-style -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2. Videobloggers: telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson
3. Genre guys: snowboarding or car videos
4. Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video.
5. Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters
6. Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin tag: lipsync
7. How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach: French Pod Class
8. Remixs and mashups: The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future.
9. Interviews like those at GETV.
10. Parodies like the 8up commercial.
11. AMV or anime music videos: Loveless
12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

Attention or Eyeballs.. Attention or Intention.. Attention or Identity

"The eyes are the window to the soul." - Unknown
"If the eye is a window to the soul, then, the heart is the doorway to love." - Unknown.
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

What's the difference between the static web and the live web?
Participation.

What's the difference between consumers and users/amateurs?
Participation.

What's the difference between attention and eyeballs?
Participation.

What is attention? Lot's of people have discussed it, including Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein, all of the Attention Trust. I'm on the board too, but my interest in joining it was a little different, though I believe in the core idea just as they do. To quote Seth's blog: "Attention is the substance of focus." The idea for the Attention Trust is that "users own a copy of their data" or attention stream or intention stream or whatever you want to call it. I'm going to leave the intention debate to others because while I agree with John Battelle, that these kinds of recordings can form a sort of 'database of intention' it's not my interest in this post to pick that apart.

Caterina Fake also blogged about this idea of users owning their data.

Etech's theme this past week was attention, though I don't think anyone there except maybe Michael Goldhaber really got anywhere near the idea that the difference between the eyeballs of old (10 years ago) and the attention question is really about participation, at least as far as users collecting it on themselves and reusing it, or sharing it as they desire. Not to mention the digital social gestures that people can now make, and collect, through participatory media online that go much further than the simple mouse over or clicks that were all that could be collected before. Now the aggregate of both, clicks and gestures that are much more participatory in nature are richer and much more meaningful, and quite a bit different than "eyeballs".

And what is participation? As far as the AT, it's about user control and choice, and an absolute right to participate. Or not.

Surprisingly enough, since last August, when the AT was formed and announced, it's been just so easily accepted by anyone asked, from the top to the bottom of those "database of intention" makers, that you should own a copy of your data. They own one copy of course, but we really thought it would be much harder to gain acceptance of this ideal. And yet, here we are. Pretty much everyone has said, "...er, yes, users own a copy of their data." The hard part is, how, how much, when, in what way, will all these companies share a user's data with the users.

So the reason I joined the AT board was because I feel strongly that users should own a copy of their data. But I also feel strongly that users should be able to keep that data private, have complete control over their copy, and shared control over other copies depending on circumstances, and those users have the absolute, unequivocal right not to participate in the attention economy, at least as far as sharing their own data goes, if they are asked to by some vendor or company or other entity. No question.

If Visa wakes up one day and decides to tell me I must give them my attention stream or kiss my credit card good bye, well.. the AT would need to step into the middle of that one pronto. I cannot abide by that sort of coercion, and so, my real interest in the AT is making sure that it's as much an advocacy organization for user's privacy and security from coercion, as it is for making a place for people to come to learn about how to own and user their own data and possibly interact with entities that might trade them for it, or share the rewards of turning over leads for marketing.

Omidyar, the foundation established by Pierre Omidyar to fund both for profit and non-profit ideas, has given the Attention Trust its support to explore this idea of having a non-profit, independent group supporting user's rights.

I'm also going to work with EFF (and hopefully EPIC and Markel) to make sure the AT work and the recorder tools are the most user-friendly and affirmative of user-control, privacy and security as possible. I would also appreciate any help from people in covering this as well, so if you have thoughts, please send them to me in email to mary at hodder dot org .... or comment below.

Tonight there is a talk on attention, at SD Forum if you want to come check out some attention ideas. I encourage you to attend if you are interested and in the area.

Notes from James Surowiecki's Talk at Intelligent Television

Intelligent Television conference info here.

1. Openness bridges all of these mechanisms: open source, p2p, shared work.
2. Intelligence is distributed rather than centralized: the knowledge is spread out in many locations
3. Bottom up works better than command and control mechanisms
-- people are better at understanding their own needs than the top
4. We are better off casting wide rather than narrow
-- don't know where the info is much of the time
5. Open access to creativity, knowledge -- benefits are greater the more people are involved
-- when people learn more, we learn more.. it's anti-rivalrous
6. Be very hesitant to filter who belongs to community
-- don't keep people out
7. People act better the more info they have

8. The internet allows us to become technically able to do so much more
-- distributed info and aggregation are so much more powerful
-- possibilities are immense

9. Different ways to tap into open systems
--obviously people using open systems to make money
-- Innocentive.. people go to register as a 'solver' where 10. You then get access to a problem set
----- if you solve a problem, you get a prize, but he company owns your solution

11. Systems that allow people to give ideas and innovation a piece at a time are interesting, because lots of people contribute. Prediction markets and prices work this way.

12. Can profit from an open content system.. leave everything open and free and then make money from talking about this stuff..

13. People find pleasure from the value of competition
-- from contributing to the growth of the pool of knowledge

14. Many of these systems are inefficient, because in a strict sense, they are redundant..
but the point is that even though this is the case, if we expand our ideas of efficiency, it's tremendously efficient.

15. What are the challenges to these systems?

Internal
-- problem with model in that a network or self organized model, it's difficult for individuals to contribute due to echo chamber effects...army ants .. work in ways where they do just what the ant is doing ahead of them.. if they start walking in a circle.. they actually die.. worry that if humans imitate others.. we will degrade because nothing new happens.. group loses collective intelligence.. drawing knowledge from just a few
-- challenge is to keep the ties in the networks loose.. and open and flowing

External
-- profound counter to our most deep seated ideas around authority, knowledge and expertise -- people have a fundamental desire to pick "the expert"
-- traditional need to develop a product, and then show it after it's out.. instead of working with people all along..
-- traditional needs to develop IP are challenged

16. Arthur Miller in the Harvard Law Review just wrote an article saying that what we need now is 'common law' for ideas.

17. Tom Bergeron -- host of dancing with the stars on why people like this.. because it is about
"wholeheartedly uniting our skills is the basis for all human interaction"

18. Collective systems may work better when there is an answer people think they can find, verses when a lead user or expert may be better at finding the right thing.

19.. Our imagining of the 'genius' is the failure to see that works of art are actually based on others ideas ... works of art always borrow from other works of art.

Mash Up Camp Progress

So, Mashup Camp is moving along. To recap...

Dec 15, David Berlind said the idea in a meeting we were in, and later Doc Searls and I agreed to help.

Dec 22 David wrote about it on his blog, announcing it. Lot's of folks blogged about it and very very interested.

Jan 9 The domain was purchased and website set up with lots of help from Ross Mayfield.

Jan 13 After much discussion and coordination with very helpful people like Ross Mayfield and Lauren Gellman, of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, I managed to get the Computer History Museum (thanks to Peter Hirshberg too!). To date, without a venue or time, we had 245 people out of 250 spots signed up.

On Jan 16, we "sold out" and started a wait list.

I think this is the fastest organized event I've seen, with this breadth of people and concerns. There is a fantastic group of people, including all the mashup developers and folks from big API provider companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, etc.

Now David and Doug are working on getting lunches and the evening event paid for, the site details and costs worked out (big thanks to the Museum for donating the site at a non profit rate, since this is a community event and costs $0 to attend -- consider joining the Museum here). Others are helping to get some hotels lined up for out of towners, and people are thinking about sessions they might lead and dinners.

Doc Searls on Corpuscles and Hearts, Among Other Things

Doc, as interviewed by Irina Slutsky at GETV.

"The Granddaddy of us all...." It's funny. Check it out. It was done right after his talk at Syndicate.

Intelliseek: Using the Outdated Terminology... It's Users, Not Consumers

Updated: I've added this post on using the term, 'Amateur' to describe those who 'lovingly create media' instead of professional. Check it out as well. And it was Kevin Marks idea.

Yesterday, Pete Blackshaw and Intelliseek put out this press release:

Consumer-Generated Media Exceeds Traditional Advertising for Influencing Consumer Behavior, Finds Intelliseek Study

Where they said, "Consumers 50% more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth behavior than radio/TV ads, says 2005 Intelliseek research of consumer behavior."

That's all very nice, and something we've all been seeing online, and participating in for years. But consumers?

No.

We are not creating our own media, writing blogs (Intelliseek owns Blogpulse, a blog search product), in some cases creating our own products, as 'consumers.' We are *users* with a proactive capital U.

Users are people who go out, find stuff they like, publish, remix and create a new. They are smart, they are proactive. They don't take being marketed to, but would rather either discover or get more real information from people they trust. Users have been operating digitally since the advent of the internet.

Consumers are those whose mouths are wide open, pointed toward the sky, so they can't see what's going on, like baby birds, helpless and clueless and waiting to be marketed to, while information or products are spoon-fed to them by marketers. Consumers are so 1980's.

It's Users. Get your ticket now on the cluetrain. If you keep talking about consumers, the users will pass you by as they take control of their own media, product interests and activities.

Symposium on Social Architecture

Update: I changed the name of the post to reflect the actual title of the event and Stowe's comments below.

Next month (in three weeks actually) the Symposium on Social Architecture will take place at Harvard. Stowe Boyd and David Weinberger have been working hard on this event, which is intended to be a fairly high level discussion about social spaces online. Terrific folks are coming, and the program includes Kevin Marks and me talking about Engines of Meaning: How Will We Scale Our Understanding:

"Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning." – Bruce Sterling

How will we keep up with the "dark, expanding ocean of data we spew"? Algorithms? Social filters? Faster memex-like gadgets? Do we need open algorithms in future search, so that each person can tweak their own preferences? Will we become dependent on social networks to filter the world for us, and if so, are the current representations of social relations too coarse? Will we be spending more and more time creating explicit metadata, like tags, in order to help channel the "expanding ocean"? What does it mean to be smart, today?

Kevin and I are planning to work from an brief framing of the issues with a short outline for a led discussion. If you have any ideas, please comment below. Would love to hear your ideas.

Also, if you are interested in attending, there is a registration form here.

symposium+on+social+architecture

Offline for 24 hours: Enjoying my Birthday

Today I got a call from a friend wishing me a happy birthday (was yesterday). He exclaimed: you were offline for 24 hours! Yes, it's true. I took a day off. Another friend flew me to Sierraville hotsprings (from Palo Alto) for a soak in the pools. Then we came back to the bay area for dinner. The amazing part is it's only one hour, twenty minutes to fly, but 4.5 hours to drive. And way more fun to fly too. Very beautiful. And a very nice present!

When I got back, some other friends left me voicemail: we would sing you happy birthday, but we would be in violation of copyright as Cingular will record it and plays it back to you later. So, we are just going to wish you happy birthday. Lovely. Wouldn't want to violate copyright!

And I just found out David Johnson's birthday was yesterday too. So happy birthday David!

Web 2.0

Complete fucking insanity. It's like a disco in the 70's. With the smell. Without the smoke. Without the bad music. Except I did like some of the music....

(Did i mention, this was posted during the cocktail party? 800 people into space for 300. Oy.)

Web 2 Point 1 dot Org

The other conference:

New Canadian Copyright Law Book is Under CC Licensing, Royalties Go to CC

Professor Michael Geist writes about In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law (all chapters available for download):

Of possible interest - with the Canadian government nearing hearings on proposed copyright reform, 19 Canadian copyright professors today launched a new book examining the bill and copyright law in Canada from a public interest perspective. I served as editor with the contributing professors representing ten universities from across Canada. In a first for major legal title in Canada, the book is being published under a Creative Commons license with all royalties going back to CC.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one includes three essays that provide context for Canadian copyright law. Part two features 11 essays on the current legislative proposal with several pieces on TPMs, education and copyright, and ISP issues. Part three looks ahead with pieces on copyright term, user rights, fair dealing, extended licensing, and crown copyright.

Nice!

What's going on?

The deal. I've been working like crazy. My calendar is bloated full of interesting events and people I want to see because they ARE wonderful and interesting. But then I was off the grid for a bit while at a workshop this weekend that was mindblowing. And it will help me so much in my on-the-grid work.

Om Malik blogged something about Treo's and a lawsuit again Palm, and now a gazillion people are leaving amazing comments about their Treo experiences (good, bad and ugly) on my old blog post about the cynical approach Palm had on developing the 650.

Scott Beale of Laughingsquid.com sent me a fabulous present in the mail today of beautiful stickers for my laptop. Thanks Scott. You so rock!

I was sorry to miss Webzine due to my workshop, but I did get the stickers, and now I may need a new laptop cause the old one is getting so full. There's a marketing campaign for Apple: Buy a new powerbook for your latest stickers... because well, let's face it, your old laptop just can't hold any more of them.

Is there Moore's law for stickers? This is bad, but good.

Also, been reading Ray Kurzweil's book, The Singularity. Really great.

Participatory Media discussion group tonight with Howard Rheingold and Xiao Chang. That should be great.

Oh, and a very close friend, whom I've known all my life, died yesterday around 1pm. That's the ugly part. That's really hard.

So, my blogging has suffered. Sorry. And there is so much I want to blog! Drat.

All things mechanical..

...seemed to fail or their failures became apparent yesterday.

I got a beep on my phone indicating voice mail, but there was no ring. So I got into VM and found there were 50 messages from the past two weeks. Took me 20 minutes to listen to them. Thank you Cingular.

And if you called me in the past two weeks, I'm sorry, the calls were apprently not all ringing through and for those who left messages, neither were they getting to me quickly. And now they magically are again. Thank goodness for small favors. I guess it's a favor when you pay for service and you actually get it?

And the DSL, from SBC Global.. spotty to non-existant for most of the day yesterday.

And my car, at the shop for a regular checkup.. they replaced some sort of dual oxygen censor.. and now it appears one of the new censors was bad. So I have to go in again. But the 'check engine' light that came on yesterday while on the bridge was not fun.

Lastly, Firefox and moveable type 3.2 are not cooperating. Third time this has come up with the new version.. I otherwise love the new 3.2, it's organized, easy, and thank god they made it possible for me to customize the new entry windows.. so that it can exist at a reasonable size. But they have no info yet on keywords (what are they, how do they work, are they like categories, can i display them.. so i'm not using them til i can figure out the value). Hopefully, after three attempts, I'm still hoping to get this and my other post on Andrew Rasiej up there.. after all.. the election is tomorrow!

By the end of this day, I wished I'd stayed in bed.

Lisa Rein's Songs from the Commons

songs from the commons
on MondoGlobo.net

All songs have one or another Creative Commons licensing, and sez Lisa:

The purpose of this show is two-fold.

On the one hand, I am featuring CC licensed music from the various libraries of it online. Explaining more to artists about how CC-licenses work, and demonstrating that more and more artists of increasingly professional quality are becoming involved in the Commons Revolution.

On the other hand, this show will provide a step by step basic understanding of Copyright Law and how the big cases affect the public, so they can understand better when new cases are decided by the Supreme Court in the years to come.

So basically, if you want to spend five minutes a week learning about Copyright Law, in an attempt to begin to understand what the hell is going on with these landmark cases and how the average person is ultimately affected, while listening to cool music in-between, then you’ll like this show.

This week's focus: The Copyright Bargain {{{MP3}}}

It's hard to move forward in discussing the current copyright situation without first learning a bit of background about the original intentions of the Founding Fathers when they created Copyright and added it to the Constitution. This show will discuss this briefly, and then, in contrast explain the current state of Copyright today.

Great cause and the music is awesome! I especially like Human Nature.

For the love of wifi and 110

So, I'm in Palo Alto all day for meetings and in between, trying to get on wifi to work.

Started out in Palo Alto at a cafe that has disconnected all its power outlets so people can't plug in (Torrefazzione on University -- bah to you guys). After a while, due to power needs, I had to move. Eventually ended up at a Starbucks, where I helped some people make a shared network so that they could all get on with one account (they were all buying food.. so why not, plus I really hate Starbucks, and they self-identified as 'rookies' for wifi.. so I felt like they could really use the help....) You know, I bought things at all of these places.. so I think the deal should be that if you buy, you get on and can get power.

I'd rather have wifi than food, but I'll buy food to get the wifi.

Live Vlogging Supernova

... and here are the results. I made this on the fly.. the past two days, and showed it during the last session at Supernova 2005, yesterday. It was a bit of an adventure making it and trying to show it all in a few hours.

Not perfect, but that's blogging, or vlogging.

(4 min 18 sec, made with my Canon SD300 and iMovie)

So I know people live blog conferences, and they live cast or webcast or stream video.. but are there any other live vlog posts? I'd love to hear about them?

Supernova was interesting.. everything from distributed systems to VOIP to tech com policy to socio-technical observations to a naval military project (presented by Commander Greg Glaros but JC Hertz who was on another panel is also on the project) to media, privacy and identity. The video is just a little snippet of the conference.. but doesn't cover it all. Video sort of requires that you make a little story.. so last minute.. I put together a quick story. Which means you don't necessarily get it all in.. certainly not in 4 minutes.

Supernova2005

The Gender Guessing Game

Sign up to play here, and the game is happening on AIM between noon and 3pm, PST today (3-6pm EST). They still need participants.. and it's an academic study.. and so far, it looks like they are doing all the right things with human subjects, etc.

Ann Livermore at HP.. On DRM

You know, I'm loving this thing Esther is doing, with PC Forum. We're watching lots of very cool women, accomplished, well spoken, powerful, talking about their areas of expertise. And their not here because they are women, they are here because they are brainy, cool and very insightful... the Open Source panel is *only* women, because those are the relevant people needed to talk about these issues.

But Ann Livermore from HP was up earlier .. talking about DRM .. and it was a scary thing. She talked about the hardware makers responsibility to make DRM based products to protect content makers, but then said there is an "... obligation that sits on individuals as well, technology companies can't do all of it..." in terms of respecting copyright. She says HP is an "... advanced and active proponent of DRM for Hollywood..." but admits "... it's the value chain that is going to be disintermediated." Which is code for the old networks of content makers and distributors.

Thank goodness. I'm really at the point where that old value chain is so clueless and obtuse, that I think they deserve what they get for not figuring out how to work with the web, and sharing and remixing of content, and instead fighting it so stupidly when it's been so obvious for so long that this was a folly. But HP isn't helping by allowing for temporary delay of this with DRM that will ultimately be cracked, or moved around, by the network.

The internet is a delicate ecosystem, and while DRM won't kill it, it will create a situation where most users of HP and other DRM based products won't even know they've been left out of socializing with technology and routed around by the network. The network will move on, but it's one of the many things that will keep some folks and some parts of it back.

eTech... (if it's Tuesday, it must be eTech, no?)

So I left SXSW for eTech Monday afternoon.. and it's been fun here in San Diego.. seeing lots of great folks. But it's also high contrast: at SXSW, there were about 50% women, both onstage and off, compared to eTech, where one documentarian told me he was working hard to take photos of women. 9% of the speakers are women and in the audience, I see about one woman every four rows or so. It's a very male event here.. which I don't mind.. it's fine.. but defintely has a different flavor than conferences that are balanced and interested in having both men's and women's points of views mixed together (is this the west coast geeky equivalent of Poptech?). It's also not nearly the great-party-with-great-entertainment atmosphere that SXSW is.. but then they get that whole, filmaker/musician group that is just all about entertainment. The average age is about 10 years older here to. But it's much more serious, and the content is more techy, geeky, and in someways intellectually deeper than SXSW. It is a great place though to socialize and talk with very interesting people who play around with fun technologies, and I'm really enjoying that!

Manuel Kiessling and Greg Elin are very excited about the attention stream that's online, but also in the lobby on a large plasma screen. There is also an inroomchat.

Really interesting talks here by Cory Doctorow, Stewart Butterfield, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Wendy Seltzer and Jason Schultz, and many more. I'm videoing a bunch of them for Lisa Rein, who should have them up in a week or two -- it's a lot of work digitizing all this footage and putting it up so thanks Lisa for doing that will all the footage I'm shooting!

Since I'm videoing.. and that takes a lot of focus and logistical deftness, I'm listening and not really taking notes. I'd say David Weinberger's site is the place to be for an interesting take on things here.

Oh, and I heard last night and this morning from three people (yes three) that David's Tag BOF (which I stupidly missed last night) was the best thing they'd attended yesterday. Apparently it was an amazing discussion.

Tags: etech attentionstream davidweinberger

Yahoo 10

Noting the fab fab fab Yahoo 10 site (screenshot below, but I really recommend playing with the actual site).

More Interesting Stuff This Week

Still catching up. Got no sleep Friday night, and ended up with a bad cold. In bed working.. but hopefully I'll make my meeting this afternoon. Oh and did I mention, a snow storm is rolling into NYC .. supposed to be slow moving, and so the airlines are reporting on their websites that flights may not go as planned today or tomorrow. Yeah. Did this delay thing out of here last month and now it appears I'm doing it all again. So it's snowing out the window.. lovely .. it reminded me of more things I'd meant to blog the last few days:

A podcast on the napsterization of TV (12.47 mb mp3, from Webtalk radio). One interesting point is that when the Supernova site was shut down a few months ago, it was over the distribution of movies and music, but the prosecutors didn't touch the TV aspects because of the perception that TV is free anyway and they didn't want to get into that argument. It was just easier to deal with the obvious movie and music copy-written content being distributed. They go off into podcasting about 20 minutes in.. or so.. so the title is a bit of a misnomer for the last 2/3.

Also, Adam Penenberg wrote last Thursday about the lack of attention the Wall Street Journal gets online.. because nobody can link to them. Adam and I talked about this a few months ago.. when I was at Technorati and he interviewed me for an article in August about the service. I mentioned that while the NY Times has tons of links, and is one of the most "authoritative" sources online, the WSJ is non-existent.. as far as linking and discussion attention go from bloggers, because they are a walled garden. I've blogged about it for a long time.

Adam takes an interesting view.. not about linking, though he does quote JD about the WSJ's lack of linkability, but rather the effects of this. Adam says that people are not finding the WSJ in google searches, or hearing it talked about, and so the WSJ is in danger of becoming irrelevant. And this may not be very reversible, if things continue as they are, because the WSJ.com biz model is based on the walled garden/paid subscription model. Their competitors like Forbes are free online, sans registration even, and therefore, it's allowed Forbes to get pretty entrenched as the source for online business news.

Oh My.. Where to Begin

So many things have been going on the past 10 days.. that I wanted to blog.. but for various reasons, lack of time, or being at a loss about what to share, among others, I've had posts in draft that didn't make it to the blog. So now, I'm sitting here watching the Oscars for the first time in years, I figured I should catch up. The guilt has been killing me. So.. I'll finish and post them.

"When Does Open Source Happen?"

From Steve Weber earlier today in Howard Rheingold's class: ".. when there is a disconnect between the activity in day to day businesss and this extraordinary promise of what can be...".

He also talked about how open source doesn't act like the traditional commons problem.. because there isn't a battle between open and closed systems, but rather a co-evolution. He said he doesn't yet know where the boundary is between open and closed systems, and that getting that allocation right will be hard.

Today was ripe with interesting talk, starting with Kaliya Hamlin and Sylvia Paull first thing, then onto lunch with Esme Vos, Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park. After that.. Weber on open source and pharma-biz... his latest book.. post The Success of Open Source, is apparently on this combination of drug company economics and open source models of production.. so he appeared to be trying on some of the concepts he's extended to think about drug production and arguing them before the class.

After that.. there was dinner for Greg Gershman of Blogdigger. Russell Beattie, Niall Kennedy, Susan Mernit, Esme and Kaliya, among others. Very nice time. Asked Greg about the search results, and he said they cover 250k RSS feeds, and the results for key words produce all instances of the word used in blog posts they are indexing. They too have search feeds, and so I've added all the feeds I search in duplicate to see how they compare to the rest of the search feeds and services I use.

This Morning At The Toll Plaza

Unrelated to anything napsterization, this morning i saw Marc Canter in the toll lane next to me and decided to snap:

Happy Napsterization and Creative Commons

So Eddan Katz and I talked about and agreed to make Napsterization at the first Creative Commons event, a little over two years ago. For a year, it sat partly moving, and a year ago at the second one, I decided it was time to make it happen all the way. So going tonight to the third event (and second anniversary of Creative Commons) is a reminder that Napsterization is about that old too.

World's Smallest P2P Code.

Alex Halderman and Ed Felten have done it again. They have their fingers in lots of cool pies.... They've made the code available for download, or cut and paste to iron it onto your favorite old T-Shirt. Tasty.

Enjoy:

# tinyp2p.py 1.0 (documentation at http://freedom-to-tinker.com/tinyp2p.html) import sys, os, SimpleXMLRPCServer, xmlrpclib, re, hmac # (C) 2004, E.W. Felten ar,pw,res = (sys.argv,lambda u:hmac.new(sys.argv[1],u).hexdigest(),re.search) pxy,xs = (xmlrpclib.ServerProxy,SimpleXMLRPCServer.SimpleXMLRPCServer) def ls(p=""):return filter(lambda n:(p=="")or res(p,n),os.listdir(os.getcwd())) if ar[2]!="client": # license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0 myU,prs,srv = ("http://"+ar[3]+":"+ar[4], ar[5:],lambda x:x.serve_forever()) def pr(x=[]): return ([(y in prs) or prs.append(y) for y in x] or 1) and prs def c(n): return ((lambda f: (f.read(), f.close()))(file(n)))[0] f=lambda p,n,a:(p==pw(myU))and(((n==0)and pr(a))or((n==1)and [ls(a)])or c(a)) def aug(u): return ((u==myU) and pr()) or pr(pxy(u).f(pw(u),0,pr([myU]))) pr() and [aug(s) for s in aug(pr()[0])] (lambda sv:sv.register_function(f,"f") or srv(sv))(xs((ar[3],int(ar[4])))) for url in pxy(ar[3]).f(pw(ar[3]),0,[]): for fn in filter(lambda n:not n in ls(), (pxy(url).f(pw(url),1,ar[4]))[0]): (lambda fi:fi.write(pxy(url).f(pw(url),2,fn)) or fi.close())(file(fn,"wc"))

Napsterizzazione: la musica era solo il principio

Yes. You are learning Italian. Napsterizzizione. Of course!

He says...

"E Wired ha una storia che parla della vita online - una tendenza, non più un'anomalia - di Mary Odder, colei la quale ha messo online Napsterization, e di migliaia, milioni come lei."

I'm completely taken with his accent. I don't even care that my name has been changed. Adorable.

Down in the extended entry is a translation provided by Babelfish. However, the end of his post talking about digital revolution is too good to miss:

Now it happens, and it is like a underground earthquake, dug from a carsico river. And the crazy thing is that the premonitory ones, those that in the years had elaborated the first theories and the first systems, now are those that come burn to you from the flame of the innovationes. But thoughts you...

Yes. I'm feeling the burning flame of innovation right now.

2.12.04
Napsterizzazione: music was alone the principle
YOU CAN READ here: Napsterization tells, between the other things, in English and with slow step, as the world is changing to thanks to Napster (that old one, the version does not trade them today). And Wired has a history that speaks about the life online - a tendency, not more an anomaly - than Mary Odder, the one who which has put online Napsterization, and of migliaia, million like she.

We try to also be reflected: how much time to the day, how many resources, how much communication and how many contacts at a distance pass for channels, virtual (telephone, email, web, rss), regarding ten years ago? In order to cite William Gibson, the future has arrived but in scattered order. Also because the time that noialtri (just European, Italian we in head) pass of forehead to the television we are less and less, it comes replaced from the use of the computer and Internet and - above all in the field of the games online who are ways to communicate with the other persons, there are innovation to the horizon. Something is changing, insomma... (also the reading of newspapers and periodicals cove).

Sapete what? Me memory when three or four years ago these things were said (will change, decrease, change, thanks to the wide band, thanks to the truly multimediali and friendly computers, etc. etc) and all to try the change in the numbers and then to get angry because to the age it did not succeed nothing.

Now it happens, and it is like a underground earthquake, dug from a carsico river. And the crazy thing is that the premonitory ones, those that in the years had elaborated the first theories and the first systems, now are those that come burn to you from the flame of the innovationes. But thoughts you...

//posted by Antonio @ 2.12.04

Comments:
The sense of the last period escapes me. In that sense the first teorizzatori "are those that come burns to you from the flame of the innovationes"? What you mean to say? That nobody recognizes they the merits? Or viceversa? Or other anchor? In any case I find normal the fact that the changes in the system of the communications are slowest. Of other song when us they have never been revolutions that have changed the situation from a day to the other? He cites some to me in the system of the communications. Also the TV, that it has been one of fastest in the imporsi to a multitude of customers, has put us however half century approximately for sedimentarsi in the daily habit to the consumption. Or mistake?
# posted by Smeerch : 2.12.04

In this period job with the boys of the Civic Net of Milan. Been born ten years ago. A technological miracle, based on a platform (FirstClass) particular, in a position to making things that still other software does not make. But then they are escapes a series of other instruments (software for the community virtual like Cms, or modality of use like the blog same) that they radically change to the approach and the use. And they but are not change to you radically therefore.

Approximately "old" the things, creed, the early adopters, the premonitory ones, often and gladly remains attacks you to their way of use, consolidated in the time, that valid but it was used mostly from the "pioneers". When the thing is made mainstream, the new models come used from the crowds (ok, do not give the crowds, give a little people ---) and the premonitory ones become a po' obsolete. I wanted to only say this, thinking also next to the fact that the New Economy, that blaze that for three years or down of lì has excited a lot the minds, proposed the revolution "between ten minuteren". There are intentional a little years, but ' it is blessed revolution seems that it is arriving, even if in scattered order.
# posted by Antonio : 2.12.04

HiFi: Networking at 41,000 Feet

Brian Sugar, of the famous PopSugar, was just on a plane and networked together his wife's, his company CTO's and his computers on an airplane... he listed it on his 'blink' -- his link blog. Except it's more of a little story.

They shared music and files... I can't wait to take jetblue and see who's on the plane and send them content... It's 'hifi wan'... I'm going to load up my laptop with content, to become a central server for everyone and share it all on the plane.

It's like being Yahoo in 1994 -- I could make 8 webpages and BE the internet on the plane! I could spoof the airline's site, no one would know it was me!!!

"...the uncontrolled desires of people can be a very unpleasant thing" - Ed Castronova

This was said in relation to online community systems and games. I was at this conference at NY Law School a week ago last Friday and Saturday... The State of Play. Heard a great panel called Intellectual Property/Digial Property, with David Johnson (New York Law School) moderating with Yochai Benkler (Yale Law School), Edward Castronova (Indiana University, Bloomington), Cory Ondrejka (Vice President of Product Development, Linden Lab, creators of Second Life) and David Post (Temple University Law School).

Yochai Benker talked about "second generation creativity" where users make one thing and then others modify... also talking about the logic behind why creative commons did not allow people to prohibit attribution...

I listened a lot and didn't take very good notes... because it was the first time I'd been online and been able to really do stuff in about four days, uninterupted.

Cool folks were there either speaking, posting papers or just taking in the ideas: Ernie Miller, James Grimmelman, Eddan Katz, Jack Balkin, Susan Crawford... lots of gamers, lawyers, some engineers. The conference wasn't just about gaming, but also about the future of online expression in other media, and the ways to control behavior with law, social norms, technical controls, or system architectures.

Call for Entries: Samping Contest from Three Notes and Runnin'

The first remix is already up at Three Notes and Runnin'.

What's the contest? Make something good by sampling the music and they'll post it to their site. Here are the details:

SEPTEMBER 15, 2004: Michael Bell-Smith and Downhill Battle are seeking submissions for 3 Notes and Runnin', an online music compilation commemorating and protesting The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Case No. 01-00412 (pdf).

In the case, the court found that NWA violated copyright law when they sampled 3 notes of a guitar riff from Funkadelic's "Get off Your Ass and Jam" for their song "100 Miles and Runnin'". The ruling reversed a district court finding that because "no reasonable juror, even one familiar with the works of George Clinton, would recognize the source of the sample without having been told of its source", sampling clearance should not be required.

Hear the guitar riff in question from Funkadelic's "Get off Your Ass and Jam"

Hear a sample of the NWA song, "100 Miles and Runnin'", which contains the sample. (hint: the sample comes in after the line "when in a black and white the capacity is two", and is looped for 16 bars).

In doing so, the court broke from decades of established sample practice by ruling that all samples, regardless of how heavily manipulated or unrecognizable they may be, are subject either to "clearance" (obtaining permission for use of the sample, usually in exchange for money), or litigation. In an instant, this act made the majority of sample based music illegal. For more, read Why Sample Rights Matter.

To protest this decision, we are creating a forum for sample-based musicians and artists to share their own 30 second songs which have been created using only the sample in question. By doing so, we hope to showcase the potential and diversity of sample based music and sound art, and to call into question the relationship between a sample and its use. All entries will be posted on this site as they are received.

Rules for Submission

1. Your song must be thirty seconds in length.

2. Your song must use only the designated two seconds of the intro to Funkadelic's "Get off Your Ass and Jam" as source material. You can slice it, layer it, loop it, stretch it, filter it, smack it up, flip it, and rub it down, but you can't bring any other sounds into the mix.

Download the sample: 1.5 second 44.1 khz 16 bit Aiff 200k

3. All Entries should be encoded as mp3s and emailed, along with artist name, email or URL, and a brief description / statement to mike@burncopy.com. All entries that adhere to the format of the call will be posted to the website.

Participants are encouraged to process the sound in creative, unconventional and excessive manners, stretching the relationship between the finished result and the source material.

Courtesy of Jason Schultz.

The Hughtrain Manifesto

Check out his blog. And his latest:

Great stuff.

Two Birds With One Stone

Check out this Leander Kahney/Wired piece: Pocket PCs Masquerade as IPods. Apparently, there are pPods running around with iPod-like interfaces (made by Starbrite) that cost $20. Remember boys and girls, imitation/innovation is not the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to intellectual property.

Here's where the two birds come in, first, bird no1:

Naturally, the pPod's interface is also just like the iPod's. Songs are arranged by a series of nested menus, which can be browsed by artist, album, genre, etc.

"It works exactly the same way, except it's software and it costs $20," said a spokesman for the company, who wished to remain anonymous. (emphasis mine)

So later in the article, they discuss patents, but what is described above sounds like an interface idea, and so while the pPod may be infringing on a patent, just the idea of nested menus isn't probably patentable or copyrightable at this point, though it might be trademarked, though I would have to see both of them to see what they are talking about, how the interaction and design are. Not sure. However, the expression of the menu could be copyrighted. Not sure there either. Anyway, considering that iPods go for hundreds depending on physical and storage sizes, there is a absurdly big difference in price, which is a serious market issue here as well for Apple, regardless of how the p's and i's work out their IP issues.

But bird no2 here, for napsterization, is the use of anonymous sources, as we've previously discussed. What's with the "anonymous spokesperson" for company? Wired obviously didn't get the memo, or the other memo. Guys, anonymous sources should only be used for the spokespersons of international spy organizations and terrorists. Otherwise, you lose all cred and your readers think you, this anon-guy and his company are "absurdly tragic", in the words of my colleague, PT.

Two birds, innovation/copyright and anon sources, all in one article, for your brain teasing pleasure. What more could you want? Thanks, Wired.

Grey Tuesday is Today

The album is great. Download it here and check it out. Free the grey album! I think if you have or buy both albums already, black and white, you should be able to hear the grey. Grey Tuesday is in support of the Grey Album. Also look at EMI's C&D on Grey Tuesday.

(ps, I had wanted to host it but having just changed hosters, have not figured out how to get it up there on the new stuff, but if I do, I'll update....)

Update: as noted in the comments the link to the Grey Album was shut down Tuesday night.

Yeah!

Just changing hosting services, and as of tonight, I'm blogging again. Yeah! Took a couple of days to switch everything over and get it right, but thanks to the incredible Scot Hacker, we're in biz.

So last week at the blogger dinner, one of the bloggers whom I had not met before (and I can't remember exactly who said it so I won't try to guess) told me he was surprised I was so young. He though, reading bIPlog and then Napsterization, and considering my name (which he thought sounded very old fashioned), that I must be someone in her 50's. Well, I'm sure you can image I was surprised.

Anyway, I also had a conversation early this morning with Doc Searls, who accidentally called me on cell around 6:30. He didn't realize it at first, as he was wandering around his construction site/house remodel (disaster - please wish him good thoughts for a speedy fix to the chaos), and somehow I won the speed-dial roulette. Great conversation involving Walt Whitman, blogging, the industrial revolutions, trade offs, privacy and disruptive technology. Suffice it to say that Doc pointed out that the bigger fear, beyond the government or companies (who are incompetent for now - though that isn't great long-term privacy protection), when we reveal anything about ourselves on the internet, is from each other. He's right. Great thoughts to wake up to before coffee.

I've been thinking about that all day, in the context of the remark last week about how my name and blog makes me seem, and how in the past I've been reluctant to post photos of myself online. Generally, I just didn't want to go that far on my site, though it's been done in other places. It's true, that in that case, my fear is about people who might misuse it. The wisdom that Doc points out is that we are in the end the ones who can really hurt us the most. We have, day-to-day, the greatest ability to accept this always-on, online existence with persistent information and point's of view, especially on blogs, not to mention personal information, and use it respectfully and judiciously.

Press - Blog Feedback Loop, or The Napsterization of The Non-Fiction Media

Last night at dinner after the end of eTech, Robert Scoble (of Scobleizer, and a Microsoft employee) told me about his interaction this week with Reuters. Apparently, Reuters did an article about Joe Trippi's O'Reilly's Digital Democracy Teach-In talk Monday (which was very different in effect for those who heard Trippi than the way it was framed by Reuters). I also heard that the back channel IRC talk from the audience listening to Trippi were very critical of him. Robert reacted to that article with this:

... TechDirt compared the coverage from bloggers to that of Reuters. They underlined the "spin" that Reuters gave the story. I agree with TechDirt. The spin doesn't match the speech. Journalists need to report what was said at speeches and put it all in context. This was like listening to a two-hour speech and then ignoring almost all of it so you can write the story you want to write in the first place. Why go to the conference then?

Robert said that Eric Auchard from Reuters came up to him yesterday during eTech to explain why he (Auchard) had written the story the way he did. Robert was surprised, and notes it:

Turns out it was Eric Auchard from Reuters. Now, look back at my blog on Monday. I took a swing at Reuters for how they reported Joe Trippi's keynote here at the O'Reilly conferences. The guy who wrote that story was now speaking with me. We had a nice conversation. He said that he had read and considered what I had to write and appreciated that. Then he explained his point of view. While discussing news judgment and other factors I found myself thinking just how unlikely this exchange would have happened five years ago.

Because of the relationships I've built in the industry he was talking to me as a peer. Think about that. Reuters was explaining how it worked to me. And whether or not I was right or wrong really doesn't matter. The fact that a common citizen like me could be heard by a journalist who is at the top of his profession (you don't get a job at Reuters by being a hack or unprofessional) is simply amazing to me.

Now, is Eric changed by weblogging? Absolutely! But I'm changed by Eric too. First of all, I was able to get Eric's point of view and, to tell you the truth, it is a compelling point (that his job is to report the news and that he picked out the most interesting things for his readers). Second of all, I now have a relationship with Eric. Who do you think I'm likely to call if I have a technology story that I think Reuters would be interested in?

I think this is rather amazing. I missed the Monday sessions. But I'm happy that to see that the whole day is available here. And I really am very interested in this discussion between a blogger and reporter discussing the why and how of stories in the traditional press. It's a very interesting phoenamon.

Check out Jay Rosen's The Tripping Point for more perspective on the Trippi talk at eTech and the Dean Campaign.

And for a different take on the traditional vs. non-traditional, here's Dan Okrent's semi-blog (he's the New York Times' public editor or ombudsman) and Steve Outing's interview with Len Apcar at NYTDigital.

Ken Auletta on Objectivity vs. Fairness, and the Defensiveness of the Press

...at UCB JSchool 9am this morning in the Library. (Back after a long day, but I wanted to note these notes.) Ken Auletta is a lovely man. Sat next to him, and noted that with the pouring rain outside, he had the most beautiful pair of brown suede shoes, perfect and untouched.

A few points (all -'s are KA):

Credibility

-News outlets will lose their brand if they lose their credibility. Ex: When Gannet says to their journalists, if you view a press conf online instead of attending, you can do two articles a day instead of one, and that's more productive, journalists have to figure out how to respond to these business interests to maintain their credibility, to maintain the brand, to maintain the value.

-It's bad when Gilligan says "I got it essentially right."

-Can't turn back the clock on narrow casting, and in fact transparency is key for journalism. Declare your ideology (news outlets), though journalists shouldn't have one. Not worried so much about bloggers so much as the European model, or the 19th century American model, where papers essentially worked for the parties. Though the new liberal radio has declared itself, rather not have that.

-Tech is not a tool of governments, in fact it can often be the tool that opens up or reveals.... Finds it thrilling that people like Bill Gates at MS are terrified of technologies like Linux, which Gates believes could ruin his biz model overnight.

-Bush views journalists and the press as a special interest, and Bush knows the press is unpopular. There have only been 9 press conferences this term. Bush, et al charge that the press is too often interested in the gotcha story, headlines, and there is merit to this argument, and so they can get away with this Left argument. But the real bias is not Left or Right, but rather an economic bias, where everything is ratings driven.

-The government has a role in helping police media. Murdock/Eisner/Sumner Redstone are terrified that India or China or the Govt of France will keep them out, or force certain kinds of public content.

Objectivity vs. Fairness

-(from Paul Grabowicz) Objectivity? What about this, is it part of the role for journalists? Or does it instead make for something where the journalists stand above everything?

KA:
-Objective is the wrong word. Rather, it's fairness. Objectivity is a false God. Instead we should strive for fairness and transparency.

-The press is too intrusive, but if you stick with fairness, as well as humility -- ask questions instead of providing answers -- there is good journalism. It's the vanity of journalists today, that go on talk shows and never say "I don't know" and then ask a question; instead they always have answers and people find that arrogant.

Transparency, Defensiveness and Humility

-Thinks it would be really great if Dan Okrent (Ombudsman at the NY Times) and Bill Keller should sit down every week and blog together.

Q (from me): is there a way to have conversation with your readers and still maintain journalistic integrity?

KA: that's the question! (but no one, including Clay Felker or Orville Schell provided an answer, though they looked around searching for something.) But he doesn't have time to do tons of email...

OS: there is no way Tom Brokaw can respond to 10k email.

-Is there a way to get away from arrogance? Hard. Yesterday, KA on CSPAN, and he said that, regarding media consolidation and the FCC, last June, the NRA, a right wing group, had joined with liberals in the fight. A caller said that KA was stereotyping about the NRA, and KA's first response was to get defensive, but then KA realized the guy was right. It's human nature to be defensive, but journalists need to start being transparent and allowing criticism.

Q: how come the NYTimes doesn't credit other outlets?

KA: that was yesterday's column by Okrent. Not a mistake by the Times, but rather not giving credit to other sources. And that's new.

I pointed out that Jeff Jarvis said that yesterday's column was the Okrent's first blog post, because it contained a link.

He mentioned his favorite inventions, including the Sony Digital Recorder because it makes his job so much easier, and he seemed delighted with the actual process of moving an interview from DR, via a memory stick to his computer. Nice talk. I hope the shoes made it through the storm on his way to the next event.

Suggestion for Conversations Between Those Formerly Known as Your Audience and Journalists

So while Ken Auletta and Orville Schell suggested it would be great and yet difficult for journalists (the example was Tom Brokaw) to truly converse with their audiences, I wonder if it might be possible to blog these conversations. Tom Brokaw could do a blog, not turn on comments, but rather link to constructive conversation on other blogs, as could other bloggers link to him. Inherent in blogging is a sense that, "this is my house" and so quality and reputation are up to each blogger, while other bloggers link to those that are useful or conversant in some way. It seems to me this conversation, which goes on every day in the blogsphere, transparently and in front of any viewer who wants to see it, might answer this question, while keeping Tom Brokow from having to answer thousands of email, comments or whatever.

Below is a recent CBS Marketwatch article on Auletta.

New Yorker's Auletta is in his prime
Commentary: He is the best at reporting on the media biz

By Jon Friedman, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Jan. 30, 2004


NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- When I think of the qualities that separate the best journalists from the pack, curiosity and courage invariably top the list.

By my standards, the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, the premier chronicler of the media business, is in his prime. Auletta, 61, is the author of the critically praised "Backstory," a new collection of his articles about the media industry and his ninth book in all.

In every chapter - ranging from "The Howell Doctrine" and "New York's Tabloid Wars" to "Fox News: We Report, We Decide" - what comes across is Auletta's boundless desire to understand how the world works.

"He loves the process of discovery," says his wife Amanda Urban, who knows a few things about successful authors. She runs the book department at International Creative Management.

And as I discovered, no detail is too small for Auletta to ponder. When we met on Jan. 16 at the New Yorker offices, he saw my notepad and asked in his characteristically quiet but forceful way: "Why aren't you using a tape-recorder?"

Even seasoned journalists sometimes shrink from asking tough questions of powerful people. But Auletta isn't reluctant to put CEOs on the spot. In November 2002, I watched him sit on a stage at New York University and interview Dick Parsons, the chief executive officer of Time Warner (still known as AOL Time Warner at the time) (TWX: news, chart, profile), the biggest media company in the world.

It was an opportune time. The company's stock had been falling steadily because of the calamities at its America Online unit (the shares have gained 29 percent in the past year). The financial beating that longtime Time Warner employees' 401 (k) programs had been taking was regarded as something of a scandal inside the House That Luce Built.

Auletta courteously but doggedly pressed an uncomfortable Parsons to talk about the grim effect of the stock plunge. Finally, Parsons said he would advise his employees to "get over it." As blunt as the comment sounded, it was even more astonishing because of Parsons' reputation for being a good-humored CEO as well as a shrewd corporate politician.

Auletta said Parsons' answer surprised him "because he's such a skilled diplomat."

It was vintage Auletta. He is the rare journalist who can persuade subjects and sources to tell him interesting nuggets without resorting to what he regards as the bane of the media, the tabloid practice of "gotcha" journalism.

"In addition to being really good at listening, he has a kind of sympathetic manner that lures people into saying things they probably wish they hadn't," said Nora Ephron, the film director of such hits as "You've Got Mail," who worked with Auletta at New York magazine in the 1970s.

Work, work, work

So, what, then, is Auletta's secret?

"There's no secret," says David Remnick, the ever-astute editor of the New Yorker. "He works and he works and he works and he works."

Indeed, Auletta, a native of Brooklyn, has ferocious work habits. When he labors on a New Yorker piece, he creates an index that would impress a doctoral candidate, complete with stick 'em pads as well as alphabetized and numbered sets of notes. By the time he is finished researching a book, his research file may be 180-pages long - single-spaced! For a New Yorker piece: 50 pages.

"My wife tells me I'm anal," Auletta lamented with a weary grin, "and she is right."

For a profile of Time Warner in 2001, Auletta said, he turned in 35,000 words, which his editor trimmed to a tidy 13,000 words. No wonder when I asked Auletta what he hoped to improve on in his craft, he said he wanted to do a better job of writing descriptions of people and scenes -- and that he wished he could hand in shorter stories to his editors -- "maybe 25,000 words," he shrugged.

Urban suspects her husband -- who moved seamlessly from a career in politics to one in journalism -- may eventually ease into teaching as his next Everest.

For now, Auletta's lessons can be found in his work. He follows a few wise courses of action in interviews. He says he keeps his mouth shut and lets the subject do most of the talking, opens conversations gently by asking about the person's childhood, doesn't make deals with sources, laughs at their jokes and definitely doesn't suggest he will write an overly flattering "puff piece."

"I tell them that if I do my job properly, I can promise that there will be things that you won't like," he said. "As a journalist, your first obligation is to the reader."

Auletta has served as an inspiration for his fellow journalists, such as Timothy Noah, who writes Slate's excellent "Chatterbox" column.

Speaking about Auletta's fascinating book, "Greed and Glory on Wall Street," Noah said: "I have never gotten over what a special piece of journalism it was."

Lessons in humility

Instead of "Backstory," Auletta could easily have titled his new book, "Lessons in Humility."

Auletta respects humility, perhaps above all, in his subjects and fellow journalists. Likewise, when a CEO is haughty or shows signs of hubris, Auletta will show his disapproval.

That was evident when Auletta wrote, perhaps, his finest -- and most important -- piece of the past few years, a profile of Howell Raines. When Auletta encountered him in 2002, Raines was riding high as the top editor of the New York Times.

Raines had crafted the Times' strategy on Sept. 11, 2001 to "flood the zone" and cover the terrorist attack from every conceivable human, business and political angle. The Times won Pulitzer Prize recognition.

But Auletta showed in his subsequent profile, "The Howell Doctrine," that Raines was a flawed leader. He was sure of himself and didn't seem to communicate well with his staff. "His virtues became his vices," Auletta said.

Auletta's article proved to be remarkably prescient. In a stunning fall from grace, Raines resigned from the Times last year in the wake of the scandal involving Jayson Blair, the reporter who fabricated facts in many cases.

While it's hard to find fault with Auletta, I had begun to believe some years ago that he was too easy at times on his subjects -- particularly in a 1997 piece on Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who is now the mayor of New York.

When I raised this point with Auletta, he frowned ever so slightly and said, "Maybe you're right."

Auletta's stories have also angered subjects.

"Bill Gates still doesn't talk to me," he said, referring to the Microsoft (MSFT: news, chart, profile) leader. Auletta criticized Gates' inflexible stance during the software giant's infamous antitrust battles with the U.S. government.

Auletta deftly peeled away -- like an onion -- what he viewed as personality shortcomings of Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, an accomplished moviemaker.

"Harvey hated that piece," Auletta said evenly. "I'd have been disappointed if he had liked it."

It wouldn't surprise me if Auletta writes soon about the nation's newsmagazines, which intrigue him.

"The newsweeklies have a problem -- the mail," he said. "How do they stay relevant? I don't understand the future of the newsweeklies. You often don't get until Wednesday and you can read them online."

Generally, Auletta is skeptical about the media's future. He frets about the global corporations, which systematically cut the quality in their holdings to squeeze higher profits. He worries that it will be harder for his peers to do their essential work.

"As journalists, we're truth-seekers," he said. "We follow the truth."

What's Going On

Well. A lot. Okay, here's the deal. BIPlog is moving from the Journalism School servers to the Boalt.org servers. Why? Well, I'm the only poster from the original class (you remember the one: the one that was going to be the Altamont of blogging) and I'd like more posters, because I want to focus more on Napsterization. Also, the blog can live on as more Law and other students join Boalt.org (the student organization at Boalt Law School) to keep it sustainable and alive. So the last two weeks we've been working on the stuff to get that done (some technical, with a huge thanks to Scot Hacker, and some procedural) and will let everyone know when to change the RSS and linking information, though old original links will continue to work, because I hate broken links to posts and so will not do this to those who've linked to bIPlog.

Secondly, I've had the most stressful week of my grad school era this past week, which thankfully has ended, as well as, in my voluminous spare time, a friend's wedding the past two days. Why two days? Well, in a past life, I used to do flowers for events to earn spare dollars as an undergrad. Now, occasionally I do them for friends as a gift for the wedding. Involves a 4am trip to the flower market, some advance planning, and then two solid days of work. My body aches everywhere. I think I'm going into retirement on this one. Though it is fun to spend $1500 on wholesale flowers and do a really high end job (retail, that would cost ten grand). But at this point, my time is more valuable than it used to be, and I just can't do this too often. Did one last summer, and while it's such a great gift, and sumptuous and beautiful to get to work with such great media, it's too much. So, I have one more bar mitzvah, and then I'm out of the biz. At least for a few years. Hopefully.

It was this week with school and the wedding that really put me behind in my technical work, blogging, school, etc. However, once bIPlog is transferred and one other project is over, I resolve to get back to my regular schedule. Please forgive me the interruptions, but I actually have quite a bit I've been wanting to do here. Stay tuned.

Napsterization: What it's meant to do

Scott Woolley/Forbes talks about the possible Napsterization of Hollywood in The Big Squeeze (reg req) with digital media. The article relates the tale of Jordan Greenhall who took the codex technology with him after leaving MP3.com, just before it was bought up by Vivendi, who is now gambling that he can beat Microsoft to the digital media punch.

Greenhall's big idea was this: Ever greater degrees of compression would soon upend other, even bigger, industries. He seized on a medium that remained hobbled from unwieldy digital files--video. An hour of Survivor (the reality show on CBS) takes up 300 times as much room as an MP3 version of Survivor, the hit song by Destiny's Child.

True enough, and this is why the Broadcast Flag has been discussed as unnecessary for some time because most people don't want to wait forever to download a movie (the real threats to movie piracy include Hollywood leaks and street distribution of videoed movies). But then the article suggests that with the codex technology to compress and decompress rich media:

Users would be able to stream movies and TV shows over high-speed Internet lines with no lag time. That could lead to either massive piracy--the Napsterization of Hollywood--or, with the right copy protection, supplant DVDs as Hollywood's richest revenue stream. Better video codecs also open the door to portable video players, much the way MP3 led to iPods and the like.

So DRM is the answer or it's the Napsterization of Hollywood. But is it possible that there is an alternative to these two choices? How about low res/highly compressed video for viewing on small portable screens is offered to entice customers to view large commercial screened movies? It seems to me that it's not an either or situation. Maybe, codex enabled work is a plus, given the right positioning and business model. There is no DRM system that hasn't been broken, and often it's customers who are frustrated with its limitations because they don't know how to make it coincide with the reasonable fair use expectations they have, or even play the media at all, while hackers break it and the business model it supports. Why not develop a business model that doesn't need DRM, and works with your audience as they promote and share your work? And one that takes into account that people still love going to the movies in a moviehouse, watching on a big screen? Offer something cheap, much like rentals now, but without the requirement to get physical media through the mail or in a store, that people could download in low res, but good enough to play on their TVs at home, that is just better and easier and more reliable than those on illegal file sharing networks, and make it ubiquitous, easy.

Update: Kevin Marks explains why compressed media is not such a good idea, because with storage subject to Moore's Law, it is irrelevant and causes a bottleneck for the CPU accessing the compressed media, but more importantly, the quality for compressed media is compromised by the process where the compression removes redundancy. This process leads to a situation where with no redundancy, there is no way for the system to compensate when an error occurs, so errors become visible and intrusive, and may destroy the rest of the file following the error. Therefore, compression will not lead to high quality or archival quality media.

Napsterization of TV and Movies From Internet Piracy?

Holland & Knight, a law firm with worldwide presence, has in their latest newsletter an article on FCC Issues Broadcast Flag Order to Protect Digital Content (by Kristen E. Fligel) about how because of fears of napsterization, the MPAA has pushed the FCC to issue the Broadcast Flag order - meant to combat internet piracy. She notes:

The MPAA reports that as a result of piracy, the U.S. motion picture industry loses more than $3 billion each year in potential worldwide revenue, not including Internet piracy losses. According to the MPAA, "It is safe to assume Internet losses cause untold additional damages to the industry."[1]

This isn't quite right. It is very important to note that the $3 billion per year piracy figure is actually that piracy that occurs outside of internet piracy (people selling homemade DVDs and VHS tapes on the street, for example, with movie content videoed from a movie theater). Internet piracy is actually estimated by Informa Media (a Media Industry research company) at about $92 million per year as of last year, because so few people will hang out waiting for 24-36 hours to download a movie over their thus-clogged high-speed internet connection.

the "...Study, from U.K-based Informa Media, concludes that, Hollywood and other film copyright owners have far more to gain through legal streaming, online subscription, e-tailing of discs and other legit downloads than they stand to lose.... But the sector's main advantage so far is speed and infrastructure (or lack thereof). Online film piracy will only reach the problem level that the music industry is suffering when most homes have super high-speed fiber optic connections, and that's not likely to be pervasive before 2020".

Holland & Knight/Fligel may believe they are writing in an objective manner, but leaving out this information slants the story in favor of the MPAA's assertion that the Broadcast Flag was necessary in the first place, when in fact the real piracy problem is unrelated to internet downloading of movie/TV content. In fact, the MPAA's own representatives have asserted that the BF has a lot of problems.

And as far as foreign piracy, Fritz Attaway has "admitted that there were currently no recorded losses from piracy of broadcast shows." He also admitted "the broadcast flag would still be completely and utterly useless at addressing the problem. The thing leaks like a sieve." Attaway goes on to admit that existing consumer electronics and the analog airways will keep the BF from being effective.

The H&N newsletter does mention the many issues still outstanding, including the analog hole, the fair use problems for users trying to do normal things like time shifting TV shows, the analog to digital and digital to analog problem, whether existing equipment will continue to work after July, 2005 when the BF goes into effect, whether the FCC has jurisdiction to order the BF, whether the BF will motivate competition, distribution and facilitate the digital transition, but the article offers no solutions.

Napsterization of TV and Movies From Internet Piracy?

Holland & Knight, a law firm with worldwide presence, has in their latest newsletter an article on FCC Issues Broadcast Flag Order to Protect Digital Content (by Kristen E. Fligel) about how because of fears of napsterization, the MPAA has pushed the FCC to issue the Broadcast Flag order - meant to combat internet piracy. She notes:

The MPAA reports that as a result of piracy, the U.S. motion picture industry loses more than $3 billion each year in potential worldwide revenue, not including Internet piracy losses. According to the MPAA, "It is safe to assume Internet losses cause untold additional damages to the industry."[1]

This isn't quite right. It is very important to note that the $3 billion per year piracy figure is actually that piracy that occurs outside of internet piracy (people selling homemade DVDs and VHS tapes on the street, for example, with movie content videoed from a movie theater). Internet piracy is actually estimated by Informa Media (a Media Industry research company) at about $92 million per year as of last year, because so few people will hang out waiting for 24-36 hours to download a movie over their thus-clogged high-speed internet connection.

the "...Study, from U.K-based Informa Media, concludes that, Hollywood and other film copyright owners have far more to gain through legal streaming, online subscription, e-tailing of discs and other legit downloads than they stand to lose.... But the sector's main advantage so far is speed and infrastructure (or lack thereof). Online film piracy will only reach the problem level that the music industry is suffering when most homes have super high-speed fiber optic connections, and that's not likely to be pervasive before 2020".

Holland & Knight/Fligel may believe they are writing in an objective manner, but leaving out this information slants the story in favor of the MPAA's assertion that the Broadcast Flag was necessary in the first place, when in fact the real piracy problem is unrelated to internet downloading of movie/TV content. In fact, the MPAA's own representatives have asserted that the BF has a lot of problems.

And as far as foreign piracy, Fritz Attaway has "admitted that there were currently no recorded losses from piracy of broadcast shows." He also admitted "the broadcast flag would still be completely and utterly useless at addressing the problem. The thing leaks like a sieve." Attaway goes on to admit that existing consumer electronics and the analog airways will keep the BF from being effective.

The H&N newsletter does mention the many issues still outstanding, including the analog hole, the fair use problems for users trying to do normal things like time shifting TV shows, the analog to digital and digital to analog problem, whether existing equipment will continue to work after July, 2005 when the BF goes into effect, whether the FCC has jurisdiction to order the BF, whether the BF will motivate competition, distribution and facilitate the digital transition, but the article offers no solutions.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Napster Runs For President in 'O4

...http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/arts/21RICH.html?ex=1387342800&en=035abc452122c4ec&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND">by Frank Rich.

...Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

...

Should Dr. Dean actually end up running against President Bush next year, an utterly asymmetrical battle will be joined. The Bush-Cheney machine is a centralized hierarchy reflecting its pre-digital C.E.O. ethos (and the political training of Karl Rove); it is accustomed to broadcasting to voters from on high rather than drawing most of its grass-roots power from what bubbles up from insurgents below.

For all sorts of real-world reasons, stretching from Baghdad to Wall Street, Mr. Bush could squish Dr. Dean like a bug next November. But just as anything can happen in politics, anything can happen on the Internet. The music industry thought tough talk, hard-knuckle litigation and lobbying Congress could stop the forces unleashed by Shawn Fanning, the teenager behind Napster. Today the record business is in meltdown, and more Americans use file-sharing software than voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election. The luckiest thing that could happen to the Dean campaign is that its opponents remain oblivious to recent digital history and keep focusing on analog analogies to McGovern and Goldwater instead.

Homemade DVD vs. Official Release

This story of a budding new form of fan commentary (by Emily Nussbaum/NYTimes) hints at something people would love to see: what other's care about, what it means to them, and why it affects them so deeply. Firefly, a Fox show that had a loyal following, but was often shown out of order (apparently Fox confused the audience by showing episodes 2-3, 6; 7-8, 4-5, 9; 10, 14, 1; with 11-13 still unaired) and then axed it, has been traded around on the fansites. Though it has also just been released officially as a collectible DVD (12/9/03) with three episodes never shown, extra footage, interviews, all the stuff people buy DVDs for besides the content.

But a fan, Philip Gaines, a grad student at UW in digital media, made his own fan-documentary, a two DVD-set (catch this sample) with excerpts of the show (small, fair use length), and his commentary, but offered not for sale, just feedback. It's not the slickest most sophisticated commentary, though the media clips are well done, but it's pretty interesting to see what he likes, what matters to him, "...the exquisite part about Firefly is in the bits of hope that trickle down in these character's lives."

(From the /. discussion here): (7548922)

Now, as for 'fan-documentaries', I haven't seen this yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a good documentary. Who better to write about a show than one of the people who loved it?

Roger Ebert is quoted from his old Yahoo column that he'd like to see a track on a DVD where someone who hates the movie rips it apart. But the creator of Firefly, Joss Whedon thinks if he did his own negative commentary for another project where he didn't like the final results, it might spark a lawsuit by the owners of that work, and I think it would take creators with a lot of confidence to release something critical on their own DVD.

Oh, and one more thing, the NYTimes has started linking outside its own site to all sorts of idiosyncratic spots, and this article is full of them! Very cool.

Homemade DVD vs. Official Release

This story of a budding new form of fan commentary (by Emily Nussbaum/NYTimes) hints at something people would love to see: what other's care about, what it means to them, and why it affects them so deeply. Firefly, a Fox show that had a loyal following, but was often shown out of order (apparently Fox confused the audience by showing episodes 2-3, 6; 7-8, 4-5, 9; 10, 14, 1; with 11-13 still unaired) and then axed it, has been traded around on the fansites. Though it has also just been released officially as a collectible DVD (12/9/03) with three episodes never shown, extra footage, interviews, all the stuff people buy DVDs for besides the content.

But a fan, Philip Gaines, a grad student at UW in digital media, made his own fan-documentary, a two DVD-set (catch this sample) with excerpts of the show (small, fair use length), and his commentary, but offered not for sale, just feedback. It's not the slickest most sophisticated commentary, though the media clips are well done, but it's pretty interesting to see what he likes, what matters to him, "...the exquisite part about Firefly is in the bits of hope that trickle down in these character's lives."

(From the /. discussion here): (7548922)

Now, as for 'fan-documentaries', I haven't seen this yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a good documentary. Who better to write about a show than one of the people who loved it?

Roger Ebert is quoted from his old Yahoo column that he'd like to see a track on a DVD where someone who hates the movie rips it apart. But the creator of Firefly, Joss Whedon thinks if he did his own negative commentary for another project where he didn't like the final results, it might spark a lawsuit by the owners of that work, and I think it would take creators with a lot of confidence to release something critical on their own DVD.

Oh, and one more thing, the NYTimes has started linking outside its own site to all sorts of idiosyncratic spots, and this article is full of them! Very cool.

Homemade DVD vs. Official Release

This story of a budding new form of fan commentary (by Emily Nussbaum/NYTimes) hints at something people would love to see: what other's care about, what it means to them, and why it affects them so deeply. Firefly, a Fox show that had a loyal following, but was often shown out of order (apparently Fox confused the audience by showing episodes 2-3, 6; 7-8, 4-5, 9; 10, 14, 1; with 11-13 still unaired) and then axed it, has been traded around on the fansites. Though it has also just been released officially as a collectible DVD (12/9/03) with three episodes never shown, extra footage, interviews, all the stuff people buy DVDs for besides the content.

But a fan, Philip Gaines, a grad student at UW in digital media, made his own fan-documentary, a two DVD-set (catch this sample) with excerpts of the show (small, fair use length), and his commentary, but offered not for sale, just feedback. It's not the slickest most sophisticated commentary, though the media clips are well done, but it's pretty interesting to see what he likes, what matters to him, "...the exquisite part about Firefly is in the bits of hope that trickle down in these character's lives."

(From the /. discussion here): (7548922)

Now, as for 'fan-documentaries', I haven't seen this yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a good documentary. Who better to write about a show than one of the people who loved it?

Roger Ebert is quoted from his old Yahoo column that he'd like to see a track on a DVD where someone who hates the movie rips it apart. But the creator of Firefly, Joss Whedon thinks if he did his own negative commentary for another project where he didn't like the final results, it might spark a lawsuit by the owners of that work, and I think it would take creators with a lot of confidence to release something critical on their own DVD.

Oh, and one more thing, the NYTimes has started linking outside its own site to all sorts of idiosyncratic spots, and this article is full of them! Very cool.

Legal MP3 Blog

Check out LegalMP3Downloads. It's a blog devoted to posting legal mp3 download info. They've aggregated links to a blogload of artists and music, but they are very anti-piracy (see the latest post, an open letter to DVD-Jon). However, the great majority of posts and links go directly to music, and if you want legal mp3 content, they probably link to it.

Nice job on getting so much content together and organizing it (scroll down to see a nav system on the right side).

Legal MP3 Blog

Check out LegalMP3Downloads. It's a blog devoted to posting legal mp3 download info. They've aggregated links to a blogload of artists and music, but they are very anti-piracy (see the latest post, an open letter to DVD-Jon). However, the great majority of posts and links go directly to music, and if you want legal mp3 content, they probably link to it.

Nice job on getting so much content together and organizing it (scroll down to see a nav system on the right side).

Legal MP3 Blog

Check out LegalMP3Downloads. It's a blog devoted to posting legal mp3 download info. They've aggregated links to a blogload of artists and music, but they are very anti-piracy (see the latest post, an open letter to DVD-Jon). However, the great majority of posts and links go directly to music, and if you want legal mp3 content, they probably link to it.

Nice job on getting so much content together and organizing it (scroll down to see a nav system on the right side).

Welcome

The weblog is just getting going officially (though we've had posts in draft for a while, but didn't publish them), and I do appreciate the nods from a couple of folks today. However, still fixing one or two technical glitches here: the RSS is still not working, and neither are categories. Sorry. Will try to rectify that pronto.

Thanks again.

Welcome

The weblog is just getting going officially (though we've had posts in draft for a while, but didn't publish them), and I do appreciate the nods from a couple of folks today. However, still fixing one or two technical glitches here: the RSS is still not working, and neither are categories. Sorry. Will try to rectify that pronto.

Thanks again.

Welcome

The weblog is just getting going officially (though we've had posts in draft for a while, but didn't publish them), and I do appreciate the nods from a couple of folks today. However, still fixing one or two technical glitches here: the RSS is still not working, and neither are categories. Sorry. Will try to rectify that pronto.

Thanks again.

Mediapost On Music, Gets It Wrong In Multiple Ways

Yesterday I got an email from Mediapost with this article: The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans By Cory Treffiletti. I read it, and was interested in seeing the SFGate article (the backup) and in replying to the author.

Here is the reply I tried to post through their email reply box at the bottom of the email column, which didn't work in getting this response into their forum even after multiple tries, here:

Hi, You are a site, and email notification service, devoted to online media, and yet I cannot email the writer of this article (in case you are worried about posting email addresses, there's code to scramble online email addresses to keep spambots from getting them... and there's spam assassins to catch the rest of the spam) and you've emailed me an article without links, so that I cannot directly read the article at SFGate myself or connect your words to that exact link, if I want to blog it or somehow continue the conversation online.

I suggest that you open up your network to the whole internet, so that information is free and flowing, and your conversants can connect with and to you easily. Thanks,

The article itself is on the ASCAP lawsuits filed against an SF tavern owner (Skip's Tavern, on Cortland Avenue, Bernal Heights), who hired bands to play there, and ONLY bands who play original music where they did not have to pay the licensing fees. ASCAP sued, not once but twice, but because they hired a private investigator, who says the bands played covers, though the bands deny it, and specifically have said that they don't even like the cover music ASCAP claims they played. The Mediapost article gets this whole thing completely wrong, and by not linking to the article, makes it hard for readers to get back to the SFGate article, which is the source, to figure this out.

In fact, the real controversy is that the Skip's Tavern doesn't want to keep fighting with ASCAP to have original music playing bands play on their stage, even though ASCAP has no business here, because the music is ORIGINAL, not covers. And the other controversy here is that Mediapost got it wrong, and wouldn't link to the article that sets the record straight.

Treffiletti/Mediapost also assert that the reason the music industry is losing money is that the quality of music has declined, and live performances are good marketing toward this end. The second part is true, but the first is questionable: I'd say there are five or six factors that have all in part caused the decline of the music biz: instead of releasing 38.9k separate titles (like in 2000) the RIAA now releases around 27k per year so there is simply less product (see George Ziemann, owner of Azoz and MacWizards Music, who has analyzed RIAA statistics on music sales), people are done replacing old records with CD's so the intense buying for that reason in the 90's has dropped off, the recession the past three years, piracy on things like KaZaa, general hatred of the RIAA, and the expense until recently of CD's at around $18.99 meant people would by less. These are in addition to the lowered quality of music.

Treffiletti/Mediapost are playing like old media, where they assert things, and then make it hard, or technically impossible, to comment as my multiple attempts to use their comment/forum system show, as well as giving no author email, so that my email reply attempt to the original email, which was never responded to and since it was sent from Mediapost's general email address, probably went to spam hell.

Nice conversing with you, guys! How 'bout some new media conversing, where the audience has both eyes and ears, as well as a mouth.

In a related note, see this BuzzMachine post on comments useage in blogs. He, and Fred Wilson, are all for the conversation that is open, and involves the writer, and the audience and lets the links from one writer to the next happen to create the conversation.

THE EMAIL EXCERPT:

Wednesday, December 10, 2003
The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans
By Cory Treffiletti
This is indeed MediaPost's Online Spin, but since I sometimes use this space to critique the music industry (positively and negatively), I wanted to make you all aware of something that recently made the pursuit of illegal downloads look like pre-school behavior.

Have you ever patronized a bar to see a local band consisting of your friends and colleagues? How many times have you sat and listened to a relative unknown sing covers of your favorite songs, with a sprinkling of some originals? Well, it looks like those days may be on the way out if the record industry has their say.

Over the last three years we have all heard repeatedly about the steps the music industry has taken to curb illegal music downloads, but it seems their greed knows no boundaries. In a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, a tavern owner was forced to stop featuring live music due to lawsuits filed by ASCAP. The lawsuits held the tavern owner responsible for unauthorized covers of ASCAP copyrighted music by local musicians who were playing in the bar. These bands obviously played the music in homage to their favorite artists, and to showcase their own musical talents, but "spies" from record companies and ASCAP were placed in the crowd and subsequently filed two lawsuits against the owner of the tavern in less than a year. Rather than dealing with these lawsuits, the bar was forced to retire the live music in favor of a jukebox or silence....

...

What are your thoughts?

To respond now, enter your comments below and click 'Post Reply.'

>>>And then there was a "box" to post my reply, which I tried three times, and it never appeared here: "see what others are saying."

Mediapost On Music, Gets It Wrong In Multiple Ways

Yesterday I got an email from Mediapost with this article: The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans By Cory Treffiletti. I read it, and was interested in seeing the SFGate article (the backup) and in replying to the author.

Here is the reply I tried to post through their email reply box at the bottom of the email column, which didn't work in getting this response into their forum even after multiple tries, here:

Hi, You are a site, and email notification service, devoted to online media, and yet I cannot email the writer of this article (in case you are worried about posting email addresses, there's code to scramble online email addresses to keep spambots from getting them... and there's spam assassins to catch the rest of the spam) and you've emailed me an article without links, so that I cannot directly read the article at SFGate myself or connect your words to that exact link, if I want to blog it or somehow continue the conversation online.

I suggest that you open up your network to the whole internet, so that information is free and flowing, and your conversants can connect with and to you easily. Thanks,

The article itself is on the ASCAP lawsuits filed against an SF tavern owner (Skip's Tavern, on Cortland Avenue, Bernal Heights), who hired bands to play there, and ONLY bands who play original music where they did not have to pay the licensing fees. ASCAP sued, not once but twice, but because they hired a private investigator, who says the bands played covers, though the bands deny it, and specifically have said that they don't even like the cover music ASCAP claims they played. The Mediapost article gets this whole thing completely wrong, and by not linking to the article, makes it hard for readers to get back to the SFGate article, which is the source, to figure this out.

In fact, the real controversy is that the Skip's Tavern doesn't want to keep fighting with ASCAP to have original music playing bands play on their stage, even though ASCAP has no business here, because the music is ORIGINAL, not covers. And the other controversy here is that Mediapost got it wrong, and wouldn't link to the article that sets the record straight.

Treffiletti/Mediapost also assert that the reason the music industry is losing money is that the quality of music has declined, and live performances are good marketing toward this end. The second part is true, but the first is questionable: I'd say there are five or six factors that have all in part caused the decline of the music biz: instead of releasing 38.9k separate titles (like in 2000) the RIAA now releases around 27k per year so there is simply less product (see George Ziemann, owner of Azoz and MacWizards Music, who has analyzed RIAA statistics on music sales), people are done replacing old records with CD's so the intense buying for that reason in the 90's has dropped off, the recession the past three years, piracy on things like KaZaa, general hatred of the RIAA, and the expense until recently of CD's at around $18.99 meant people would by less. These are in addition to the lowered quality of music.

Treffiletti/Mediapost are playing like old media, where they assert things, and then make it hard, or technically impossible, to comment as my multiple attempts to use their comment/forum system show, as well as giving no author email, so that my email reply attempt to the original email, which was never responded to and since it was sent from Mediapost's general email address, probably went to spam hell.

Nice conversing with you, guys! How 'bout some new media conversing, where the audience has both eyes and ears, as well as a mouth.

In a related note, see this BuzzMachine post on comments useage in blogs. He, and Fred Wilson, are all for the conversation that is open, and involves the writer, and the audience and lets the links from one writer to the next happen to create the conversation.

THE EMAIL EXCERPT:

Wednesday, December 10, 2003
The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans
By Cory Treffiletti
This is indeed MediaPost's Online Spin, but since I sometimes use this space to critique the music industry (positively and negatively), I wanted to make you all aware of something that recently made the pursuit of illegal downloads look like pre-school behavior.

Have you ever patronized a bar to see a local band consisting of your friends and colleagues? How many times have you sat and listened to a relative unknown sing covers of your favorite songs, with a sprinkling of some originals? Well, it looks like those days may be on the way out if the record industry has their say.

Over the last three years we have all heard repeatedly about the steps the music industry has taken to curb illegal music downloads, but it seems their greed knows no boundaries. In a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, a tavern owner was forced to stop featuring live music due to lawsuits filed by ASCAP. The lawsuits held the tavern owner responsible for unauthorized covers of ASCAP copyrighted music by local musicians who were playing in the bar. These bands obviously played the music in homage to their favorite artists, and to showcase their own musical talents, but "spies" from record companies and ASCAP were placed in the crowd and subsequently filed two lawsuits against the owner of the tavern in less than a year. Rather than dealing with these lawsuits, the bar was forced to retire the live music in favor of a jukebox or silence....

...

What are your thoughts?

To respond now, enter your comments below and click 'Post Reply.'

>>>And then there was a "box" to post my reply, which I tried three times, and it never appeared here: "see what others are saying."

Mediapost On Music, Gets It Wrong In Multiple Ways

Yesterday I got an email from Mediapost with this article: The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans By Cory Treffiletti. I read it, and was interested in seeing the SFGate article (the backup) and in replying to the author.

Here is the reply I tried to post through their email reply box at the bottom of the email column, which didn't work in getting this response into their forum even after multiple tries, here:

Hi, You are a site, and email notification service, devoted to online media, and yet I cannot email the writer of this article (in case you are worried about posting email addresses, there's code to scramble online email addresses to keep spambots from getting them... and there's spam assassins to catch the rest of the spam) and you've emailed me an article without links, so that I cannot directly read the article at SFGate myself or connect your words to that exact link, if I want to blog it or somehow continue the conversation online.

I suggest that you open up your network to the whole internet, so that information is free and flowing, and your conversants can connect with and to you easily. Thanks,

The article itself is on the ASCAP lawsuits filed against an SF tavern owner (Skip's Tavern, on Cortland Avenue, Bernal Heights), who hired bands to play there, and ONLY bands who play original music where they did not have to pay the licensing fees. ASCAP sued, not once but twice, but because they hired a private investigator, who says the bands played covers, though the bands deny it, and specifically have said that they don't even like the cover music ASCAP claims they played. The Mediapost article gets this whole thing completely wrong, and by not linking to the article, makes it hard for readers to get back to the SFGate article, which is the source, to figure this out.

In fact, the real controversy is that the Skip's Tavern doesn't want to keep fighting with ASCAP to have original music playing bands play on their stage, even though ASCAP has no business here, because the music is ORIGINAL, not covers. And the other controversy here is that Mediapost got it wrong, and wouldn't link to the article that sets the record straight.

Treffiletti/Mediapost also assert that the reason the music industry is losing money is that the quality of music has declined, and live performances are good marketing toward this end. The second part is true, but the first is questionable: I'd say there are five or six factors that have all in part caused the decline of the music biz: instead of releasing 38.9k separate titles (like in 2000) the RIAA now releases around 27k per year so there is simply less product (see George Ziemann, owner of Azoz and MacWizards Music, who has analyzed RIAA statistics on music sales), people are done replacing old records with CD's so the intense buying for that reason in the 90's has dropped off, the recession the past three years, piracy on things like KaZaa, general hatred of the RIAA, and the expense until recently of CD's at around $18.99 meant people would by less. These are in addition to the lowered quality of music.

Treffiletti/Mediapost are playing like old media, where they assert things, and then make it hard, or technically impossible, to comment as my multiple attempts to use their comment/forum system show, as well as giving no author email, so that my email reply attempt to the original email, which was never responded to and since it was sent from Mediapost's general email address, probably went to spam hell.

Nice conversing with you, guys! How 'bout some new media conversing, where the audience has both eyes and ears, as well as a mouth.

In a related note, see this BuzzMachine post on comments useage in blogs. He, and Fred Wilson, are all for the conversation that is open, and involves the writer, and the audience and lets the links from one writer to the next happen to create the conversation.

THE EMAIL EXCERPT:

Wednesday, December 10, 2003
The Record Industry Continues To Crush the Life Out Of the Fans
By Cory Treffiletti
This is indeed MediaPost's Online Spin, but since I sometimes use this space to critique the music industry (positively and negatively), I wanted to make you all aware of something that recently made the pursuit of illegal downloads look like pre-school behavior.

Have you ever patronized a bar to see a local band consisting of your friends and colleagues? How many times have you sat and listened to a relative unknown sing covers of your favorite songs, with a sprinkling of some originals? Well, it looks like those days may be on the way out if the record industry has their say.

Over the last three years we have all heard repeatedly about the steps the music industry has taken to curb illegal music downloads, but it seems their greed knows no boundaries. In a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, a tavern owner was forced to stop featuring live music due to lawsuits filed by ASCAP. The lawsuits held the tavern owner responsible for unauthorized covers of ASCAP copyrighted music by local musicians who were playing in the bar. These bands obviously played the music in homage to their favorite artists, and to showcase their own musical talents, but "spies" from record companies and ASCAP were placed in the crowd and subsequently filed two lawsuits against the owner of the tavern in less than a year. Rather than dealing with these lawsuits, the bar was forced to retire the live music in favor of a jukebox or silence....

...

What are your thoughts?

To respond now, enter your comments below and click 'Post Reply.'

>>>And then there was a "box" to post my reply, which I tried three times, and it never appeared here: "see what others are saying."

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism:

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism:

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism:

Pew Asks...

In the

...

Are you an artist -- musician, writer, painter, or other type of artist? We would like to know how you use the Internet and your views on copyright issues. Specifically, what's your opinion about file-sharing programs and their impact on the artistic community?

Via Frank.

Pew Asks...

In the

...

Are you an artist -- musician, writer, painter, or other type of artist? We would like to know how you use the Internet and your views on copyright issues. Specifically, what's your opinion about file-sharing programs and their impact on the artistic community?

Via Frank.

Pew Asks...

In the

...

Are you an artist -- musician, writer, painter, or other type of artist? We would like to know how you use the Internet and your views on copyright issues. Specifically, what's your opinion about file-sharing programs and their impact on the artistic community?

Via Frank.

Historical Copyright Has Clues for Digital Copyright

Chris Barton at the New Zealand Herald: Copyleft may become the new copyright

Imagine a world without copyright - where there is no legislated right to prevent copying. A recipe for anarchy? Maybe, but that's how it was in the early 18th century and before.

The British Statute of Anne in 1710 was the first copyright act. On the face of it, the legislation was to protect the rights of authors, but in reality it was a deal to protect printers.

...We're in the midst of a technological revolution that's really upset the apple cart. The printing press is a fine piece of copying technology. But it has been well and truly usurped by the far superior copying (and distribution) technology of the internet and personal computers.

In other words, he's saying the printing press has been napsterized by the internet and personal computers. And that old, freer media model may be what's needed to deal with it.

Historical Copyright Has Clues for Digital Copyright

Chris Barton at the New Zealand Herald: Copyleft may become the new copyright

Imagine a world without copyright - where there is no legislated right to prevent copying. A recipe for anarchy? Maybe, but that's how it was in the early 18th century and before.

The British Statute of Anne in 1710 was the first copyright act. On the face of it, the legislation was to protect the rights of authors, but in reality it was a deal to protect printers.

...We're in the midst of a technological revolution that's really upset the apple cart. The printing press is a fine piece of copying technology. But it has been well and truly usurped by the far superior copying (and distribution) technology of the internet and personal computers.

In other words, he's saying the printing press has been napsterized by the internet and personal computers. And that old, freer media model may be what's needed to deal with it.

Historical Copyright Has Clues for Digital Copyright

Chris Barton at the New Zealand Herald: Copyleft may become the new copyright

Imagine a world without copyright - where there is no legislated right to prevent copying. A recipe for anarchy? Maybe, but that's how it was in the early 18th century and before.

The British Statute of Anne in 1710 was the first copyright act. On the face of it, the legislation was to protect the rights of authors, but in reality it was a deal to protect printers.

...We're in the midst of a technological revolution that's really upset the apple cart. The printing press is a fine piece of copying technology. But it has been well and truly usurped by the far superior copying (and distribution) technology of the internet and personal computers.

In other words, he's saying the printing press has been napsterized by the internet and personal computers. And that old, freer media model may be what's needed to deal with it.

What Will Consumers Pay for Digital Downloads for Albums Verses CDs

Consumers Expect Substantial Savings On Digitally Distributed Albums from © Ipsos.

Sweet spot for CD's? $11.99. Sweet spot for an album's worth of digital downloads? $7.99. Gett'em while they last.

What Will Consumers Pay for Digital Downloads for Albums Verses CDs

Consumers Expect Substantial Savings On Digitally Distributed Albums from © Ipsos.

Sweet spot for CD's? $11.99. Sweet spot for an album's worth of digital downloads? $7.99. Gett'em while they last.

What Will Consumers Pay for Digital Downloads for Albums Verses CDs

Consumers Expect Substantial Savings On Digitally Distributed Albums from © Ipsos.

Sweet spot for CD's? $11.99. Sweet spot for an album's worth of digital downloads? $7.99. Gett'em while they last.

Broadcast Flag Threat Models - Are They Realistic?

Ed Felten has this on the Broadcast Flag:

The Broadcast Flag, and Threat Model Confusion

The FCC has mandated "broadcast flag" technology, which will limit technical options for the designers of digital TV tuners and related products. This is intended to reduce online redistribution of digital TV content, but it is likely to have little or no actual effect on the availability of infringing content on the Net.

The FCC is committing the classic mistake of not having a clear threat model. As I explained in more detail in a previous post, a "threat model" is a clearly defined explanation of what a security system is trying to prevent, and of the capabilities and motives of the people who are trying to defeat it. For a system like the broadcast flag, there are two threat models to choose from. Either you are trying to keep the average consumer from giving content to his friends and neighbors (the "casual copying" threat model), or you are trying to keep the content off of Internet distributions systems like KaZaa (the "Napsterization" threat model). You choose a threat model, and then you design a technology that prevents the threat you have chosen.

Felten's analysis is really useful, and reminds that technically, the BF is full of holes and will more likely frustrate users trying to watch shows tagged with the BF, as they attempt to use media in ways we do now with VCRs. It won't, most likely, keep shows off the internet. If the Pew reports are correct, as well as Consumer's Union predictions, we are 20 years away from having a large section of the US population that will have enough home use of broadband to be able to download such large files (2 - 4 gb verses a music mp3 which is typically 2-5k). Therefore, the napsterization of the music business is not so comparable to the napsterization of the movie business, which hasn't yet happened.

Broadcast Flag Threat Models - Are They Realistic?

Ed Felten has this on the Broadcast Flag:

The Broadcast Flag, and Threat Model Confusion

The FCC has mandated "broadcast flag" technology, which will limit technical options for the designers of digital TV tuners and related products. This is intended to reduce online redistribution of digital TV content, but it is likely to have little or no actual effect on the availability of infringing content on the Net.

The FCC is committing the classic mistake of not having a clear threat model. As I explained in more detail in a previous post, a "threat model" is a clearly defined explanation of what a security system is trying to prevent, and of the capabilities and motives of the people who are trying to defeat it. For a system like the broadcast flag, there are two threat models to choose from. Either you are trying to keep the average consumer from giving content to his friends and neighbors (the "casual copying" threat model), or you are trying to keep the content off of Internet distributions systems like KaZaa (the "Napsterization" threat model). You choose a threat model, and then you design a technology that prevents the threat you have chosen.

Felten's analysis is really useful, and reminds that technically, the BF is full of holes and will more likely frustrate users trying to watch shows tagged with the BF, as they attempt to use media in ways we do now with VCRs. It won't, most likely, keep shows off the internet. If the Pew reports are correct, as well as Consumer's Union predictions, we are 20 years away from having a large section of the US population that will have enough home use of broadband to be able to download such large files (2 - 4 gb verses a music mp3 which is typically 2-5k). Therefore, the napsterization of the music business is not so comparable to the napsterization of the movie business, which hasn't yet happened.

Broadcast Flag Threat Models - Are They Realistic?

Ed Felten has this on the Broadcast Flag:

The Broadcast Flag, and Threat Model Confusion

The FCC has mandated "broadcast flag" technology, which will limit technical options for the designers of digital TV tuners and related products. This is intended to reduce online redistribution of digital TV content, but it is likely to have little or no actual effect on the availability of infringing content on the Net.

The FCC is committing the classic mistake of not having a clear threat model. As I explained in more detail in a previous post, a "threat model" is a clearly defined explanation of what a security system is trying to prevent, and of the capabilities and motives of the people who are trying to defeat it. For a system like the broadcast flag, there are two threat models to choose from. Either you are trying to keep the average consumer from giving content to his friends and neighbors (the "casual copying" threat model), or you are trying to keep the content off of Internet distributions systems like KaZaa (the "Napsterization" threat model). You choose a threat model, and then you design a technology that prevents the threat you have chosen.

Felten's analysis is really useful, and reminds that technically, the BF is full of holes and will more likely frustrate users trying to watch shows tagged with the BF, as they attempt to use media in ways we do now with VCRs. It won't, most likely, keep shows off the internet. If the Pew reports are correct, as well as Consumer's Union predictions, we are 20 years away from having a large section of the US population that will have enough home use of broadband to be able to download such large files (2 - 4 gb verses a music mp3 which is typically 2-5k). Therefore, the napsterization of the music business is not so comparable to the napsterization of the movie business, which hasn't yet happened.

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Napsterization Over A Hundred Years

Via Ross Mayfield (cache here), here are some of Cory Doctrow's examples of napsterization:

1908 sheet music, Marconi, 50's TV, Disney theme park, 70s and 80s VCR (the Boston strangler), 95 DCMA, today digitial TV and Broadcast flag.

Napsterization Over A Hundred Years

Via Ross Mayfield (cache here), here are some of Cory Doctrow's examples of napsterization:

1908 sheet music, Marconi, 50's TV, Disney theme park, 70s and 80s VCR (the Boston strangler), 95 DCMA, today digitial TV and Broadcast flag.

Napsterization Over A Hundred Years

Via Ross Mayfield (cache here), here are some of Cory Doctrow's examples of napsterization:

1908 sheet music, Marconi, 50's TV, Disney theme park, 70s and 80s VCR (the Boston strangler), 95 DCMA, today digitial TV and Broadcast flag.

The Copyright Wars Heat Up

With this: KaZaa is suing the RIAA. Apparently the countersuit is meant to assert that they have “obscenely” abused their copyright powers.

And this from the Economist:

...Certainly, the content industries are likely to experience the most upheaval. They may be able to retard the growth of copying on the internet for a time, but they cannot hold back the advance of technology altogether. This will undermine their existing business models, based as they are on print, analogue broadcasting and the sale of physical products such as compact discs. Even if the “total copyright protection” scenario sketched above prevails, content providers will have to reinvent themselves."

What can you say. Spot on.

The Copyright Wars Heat Up

With this: KaZaa is suing the RIAA. Apparently the countersuit is meant to assert that they have “obscenely” abused their copyright powers.

And this from the Economist:

...Certainly, the content industries are likely to experience the most upheaval. They may be able to retard the growth of copying on the internet for a time, but they cannot hold back the advance of technology altogether. This will undermine their existing business models, based as they are on print, analogue broadcasting and the sale of physical products such as compact discs. Even if the “total copyright protection” scenario sketched above prevails, content providers will have to reinvent themselves."

What can you say. Spot on.

The Copyright Wars Heat Up

With this: KaZaa is suing the RIAA. Apparently the countersuit is meant to assert that they have “obscenely” abused their copyright powers.

And this from the Economist:

...Certainly, the content industries are likely to experience the most upheaval. They may be able to retard the growth of copying on the internet for a time, but they cannot hold back the advance of technology altogether. This will undermine their existing business models, based as they are on print, analogue broadcasting and the sale of physical products such as compact discs. Even if the “total copyright protection” scenario sketched above prevails, content providers will have to reinvent themselves."

What can you say. Spot on.

25 Lessons in HYPNOTISM

by Ethan Persoff / Horse Music: Music made from other music. 13 Tracks, recorded March through September 2002, posted online January 2003. I just love internet distribution; it's the access we get to so many things that would have been so difficult to find, the access to so many customers that can now be reached, the material that would have been impossible to make money on when it had to all be recorded on physical media in order to be distributed.

1st track, introduced by Loren Greene. Very nice. Freebasing the internet never felt so good.

25 Lessons in HYPNOTISM

by Ethan Persoff / Horse Music: Music made from other music. 13 Tracks, recorded March through September 2002, posted online January 2003. I just love internet distribution; it's the access we get to so many things that would have been so difficult to find, the access to so many customers that can now be reached, the material that would have been impossible to make money on when it had to all be recorded on physical media in order to be distributed.

1st track, introduced by Loren Greene. Very nice. Freebasing the internet never felt so good.

25 Lessons in HYPNOTISM

by Ethan Persoff / Horse Music: Music made from other music. 13 Tracks, recorded March through September 2002, posted online January 2003. I just love internet distribution; it's the access we get to so many things that would have been so difficult to find, the access to so many customers that can now be reached, the material that would have been impossible to make money on when it had to all be recorded on physical media in order to be distributed.

1st track, introduced by Loren Greene. Very nice. Freebasing the internet never felt so good.

BubbRubb Mixes Audio and Video

Cool stuff. Check it out.

BubbRubb Mixes Audio and Video

Cool stuff. Check it out.

BubbRubb Mixes Audio and Video

Cool stuff. Check it out.

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Rage Against the Machine Say Yes to Downloading

Looks like somebody's in conflict with somebody else over what it means to get napsterized....

Rage Against the Machine has posted an exclusive collection of free audio downloads and video streams on its official website as a gesture of goodwill toward fans who were recently banned from Napster for downloading tracks from the group's new album, "Renegades" (Epic/Sony). The ban was enacted by the group's management and record label without RATM's consent, according to a statement from guitarist Tom Morello.

Your classic artist verses industry tiff. If only the industry could see that loss leaders work for Safeway, and might for the music biz also. Oh well.

Rage Against the Machine Say Yes to Downloading

Looks like somebody's in conflict with somebody else over what it means to get napsterized....

Rage Against the Machine has posted an exclusive collection of free audio downloads and video streams on its official website as a gesture of goodwill toward fans who were recently banned from Napster for downloading tracks from the group's new album, "Renegades" (Epic/Sony). The ban was enacted by the group's management and record label without RATM's consent, according to a statement from guitarist Tom Morello.

Your classic artist verses industry tiff. If only the industry could see that loss leaders work for Safeway, and might for the music biz also. Oh well.

Rage Against the Machine Say Yes to Downloading

Looks like somebody's in conflict with somebody else over what it means to get napsterized....

Rage Against the Machine has posted an exclusive collection of free audio downloads and video streams on its official website as a gesture of goodwill toward fans who were recently banned from Napster for downloading tracks from the group's new album, "Renegades" (Epic/Sony). The ban was enacted by the group's management and record label without RATM's consent, according to a statement from guitarist Tom Morello.

Your classic artist verses industry tiff. If only the industry could see that loss leaders work for Safeway, and might for the music biz also. Oh well.

Matt Johnson of The The on The Boss and How He Ain't Gonna Take It No Mo

The The Verses The Corporate Monster:

After much deliberation I have decided to offer track by track, week by week free downloads of my latest album 'NakedSelf' from my official website: www.thethe.com.

This decision has not been taken lightly and below I explain the reasons why. As the tensions between artist and merchant are rising very fast I also want to stress the positive in this statement as I think this is an exhilarating time to be involved in music.

See this movie of an interview with Matt Johnson: .

And here's a link to listen to their singles:

Matt Johnson of The The on The Boss and How He Ain't Gonna Take It No Mo

The The Verses The Corporate Monster:

After much deliberation I have decided to offer track by track, week by week free downloads of my latest album 'NakedSelf' from my official website: www.thethe.com.

This decision has not been taken lightly and below I explain the reasons why. As the tensions between artist and merchant are rising very fast I also want to stress the positive in this statement as I think this is an exhilarating time to be involved in music.

See this movie of an interview with Matt Johnson: .

And here's a link to listen to their singles:

Matt Johnson of The The on The Boss and How He Ain't Gonna Take It No Mo

The The Verses The Corporate Monster:

After much deliberation I have decided to offer track by track, week by week free downloads of my latest album 'NakedSelf' from my official website: www.thethe.com.

This decision has not been taken lightly and below I explain the reasons why. As the tensions between artist and merchant are rising very fast I also want to stress the positive in this statement as I think this is an exhilarating time to be involved in music.

See this movie of an interview with Matt Johnson: .

And here's a link to listen to their singles:

Napster Movie Planned

Oh my gosh, and guess who's going to star! The Shaunster himself. Well, actually the spokesperson just said that he was not ruled out as playing himself. But really, don't you think that's just too much napsterization for all concerned? I mean, we can take the complete disruption of the music industry, cause it was a mess anyway, and really it was time for some change in that biz model, but I'm not sure we need to watch a movie about the making of the code by Mr. Fanning, et al. And do we need to put trained actors out of work? Maybe we could just download the trailer....

Napster Movie Planned

Oh my gosh, and guess who's going to star! The Shaunster himself. Well, actually the spokesperson just said that he was not ruled out as playing himself. But really, don't you think that's just too much napsterization for all concerned? I mean, we can take the complete disruption of the music industry, cause it was a mess anyway, and really it was time for some change in that biz model, but I'm not sure we need to watch a movie about the making of the code by Mr. Fanning, et al. And do we need to put trained actors out of work? Maybe we could just download the trailer....

Napster Movie Planned

Oh my gosh, and guess who's going to star! The Shaunster himself. Well, actually the spokesperson just said that he was not ruled out as playing himself. But really, don't you think that's just too much napsterization for all concerned? I mean, we can take the complete disruption of the music industry, cause it was a mess anyway, and really it was time for some change in that biz model, but I'm not sure we need to watch a movie about the making of the code by Mr. Fanning, et al. And do we need to put trained actors out of work? Maybe we could just download the trailer....

OD2 Opens the Gates to Music

On Demand Distribution, Peter Gabriel's two year old venture, recently did a did a one day/500 free download promotion for people from Ireland/England. Testing the waters on digital distribution, I see.

OD2 Opens the Gates to Music

On Demand Distribution, Peter Gabriel's two year old venture, recently did a did a one day/500 free download promotion for people from Ireland/England. Testing the waters on digital distribution, I see.

OD2 Opens the Gates to Music

On Demand Distribution, Peter Gabriel's two year old venture, recently did a did a one day/500 free download promotion for people from Ireland/England. Testing the waters on digital distribution, I see.