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.

Eniac Programmers Documentary at Computer History Museum

Check out the notice below about the documentary showing on October 22, 2008 about the Eniac Programmers. Should be a fantastic night!

The Computer History Museum Presents
An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik - 1945 ENIAC Programming Pioneer
7:00pm
Computer History Museum | Hahn Auditorium
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94043
Wine provided by The Mountain Winery
To register: click here or call (650) 810-1005.

We hope to see you at this celebration of pioneering women in computing -- an event 60 years in the making!

Kathy Kleiman, Historian & Executive Producer, ENIAC Programmers Project
eniacprogrammers.org

About ENIAC Pioneer Jean Bartik. Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system in 1945. She later assisted in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers.

Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). In 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the Army's Ballistics Research Lab's call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the new guns developed for the WWII effort - she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories by hand (differential calculus equations) - Her title: "Computer."

Later in 1945, the Army circulated a call for "computers" for a new job with a secret machine. Bartik jumped at the chance and was hired as one of the original six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-electronic, programmable computer. She joined Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence in this unknown journey.

With ENIAC's 40 panels still under construction, and its 18,000 vacuum tube technology uncertain, the engineers had no time for programming manuals or classes. Bartik and the other women taught themselves ENIAC's operation from its logical and electrical block diagrams, and then figured out how to program it. They created their own flow charts, programming sheets, wrote the program and placed it on the ENIAC using a challenging physical interface, which had hundreds of wires and 3,000 switches. It was an unforgettable, wonderful experience.

On February 15, 1946, the Army revealed the existence of ENIAC to the public. In a special ceremony, the Army introduced ENIAC and its hardware inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The presentation featured its trajectory ballistics program, operating at a speed thousands of time faster than any prior calculations. The ENIAC women's program worked perfectly - and conveyed the immense calculating power of ENIAC and its ability to tackle the millennium problems that had previously taken a man 100 years to do. It calculated the trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to trace it. But, it took ENIAC only 20 seconds to calculate it - faster than a speeding bullet! Indeed!

The Army never introduced the ENIAC women.

No one gave them any credit or discussed their critical part in the event that day. Their faces, but not their names, became part of the beautiful press pictures of the ENIAC. For forty years, their roles and their pioneering work were forgotten and their story lost to history. The ENIAC Women's story was discovered by Kathy Kleiman in 1985. Bartik will discuss what it means to be overlooked, despite unique and pioneering work, and what it means to be discovered again.

In conversation with Linda O'Bryon, Bartik will also discuss:

* Leading the programming team to convert ENIAC to one of the first stored-program machines (and working with Dr. John von Neumann on ENIAC's first instruction set)
* Working in "Technical Camelot" at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, as programmer of BINAC and logic designer of UNIVAC
* Sexism and stereotypes at Remington Rand and her first-hand experience with the abuse of women and the misuse of technology
* Friends and pioneers computing history should not forget, including tributes to Betty Holberton, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, the other ENIAC programmers, Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert
* Some pieces of advice to live by.

About the ENIAC Programmers Project. Founded in 1997, the ENIAC Programmers Project is dedicated to recording, preserving and sharing the stories of women computer pioneers. Its founder, Kathy Kleiman, discovered the ENIAC Programmers as a passing reference in an computing pioneer's autobiography, sought them out, researched and recorded their oral histories. Her nomination of Jean Bartik for the Computer History Museum's 2008 Fellow Award led to this special recognition -- after 60 years!

The Computer History Museum's VIP reception honors Jean Bartik and recognizes the ENIAC Programmers Project's long quest to make a feature-length documentary about the women of ENIAC, WWII Rosie the Riveters who invented many of the concepts of modern programming!

To learn more about this inspiring story and opportunities for documentary support and sponsorship, please go to www.eniacprogrammers.org or contact Kathy Kleiman at Kathy@eniacprogrammers.org.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The ENIAC Programmers Project
Honoring Computer Pioneers and Preserving Their Stories
Feature-length documentary "Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers" now in development & fundraising.
www.eniacprogrammers.org

The FAA TRACON Information Experience Live

Earlier today I had the delightful experience of touring the FAA's Northern California TRACON facility.

Basically, TRACON, which stands for terminal radar approach control, is the air traffic control center which, in this case, handles Northern California. TRACON handles traffic outside of each local control tower a plane might ultimately deal with as it lands. There are TRACONs all over the US for other regions. We weren't allowed to bring in cameras so I'll instead show you a news photo from SF gate that was representative of what we saw up on the wall of the facility. You get the idea there of what they are seeing on some of their screens.

Chronicle photo by Mark Costantini

This photo only shows traffic into SF, because it's a visualization from SFO traffic control, but just imagine more planes going into San Jose, Sacramento, and other smaller airports like Modesto. Also, these screens are synced between TRACON and the air traffic controllers who are local. And if anything happened to one TRACON, others would instantly fill in, as the system works somewhat like the internet in that sense.

TRACON is housed in a big, windowless building, extremely modern and cool with an air of serious importance about it (I always find that at say, buildings in Washington DC, and I kind of like it even if they do take whatever it is they do a bit too seriously sometimes). Our tour guide, a woman who is a trainer for other air traffic controllers, at one point said, "You have 10 seconds or so to make contract with a plane and move on. If you screw up, there are hundreds of lives on the line." That's pretty serious.

TRACON's building is basically an octopus design, where each leg has 20 or so terminals with about 10 people in each, manning a particular physical area (like planes coming into Sacramento) in order to follow planes as they enter the region first. All commercial flights must fly IFR -- Instrument Flight Rules -- which means they have to be in contact with TRACON, in case they can't see or there is bad weather, or there is simply a pile up of planes that need to be moderated into an airport. Planes that fly VFR -- Visual Flight Rules -- don't have to contact TRACON, but some do anyway for a variety of reasons. TRACON has longer range radar than the local air controllers, but the longer range radar updates more slowly. So that is the trade-off between regional (TRACON) and local control.

Once TRACON has the plane logged, they make a little block of data on their screens (a different type of screen than the one shown above) that shows the flight number, its altitude, and other information that will help them keep planes apart, on track and moderated as they reach the range of the local control towers who then take over moderating the planes.

In the cycle of life for a controller (who has to quit at age 56 and can not be considered after age 31 to start training), they typically have military training or attend a special school after college, and then are trained at the local site. Our host said that for the first few years (maybe up to 10) controllers are pretty tense on the job, but after 10 years they relax some. She said the most dangerous situations come when people are relaxed, and less is going on around them, rather than more. That's when mistakes are made.

Another thing our host said was that they have to keep the chit chat down, because if there is an accident, they don't want to have some controller chatting away on the transcript, just before it happens. They are pretty businesslike when talking to pilots. She talked pretty fast, she said, due to the edgy situation needed to quickly regulate the flow and placement of all the different planes they are watching, and that's how she trains people. I know from riding in a friend's plane frequently where I can listen to lots of this talk, that they are pretty succinct, and yet both pilots and controllers have a kind of cultural humor that is pretty funny, in those few words they exchange, and this allows some kind of personality to come through often. If you want to check out what happens, here are some example live sound feeds from a bunch of different air control areas.

So.. what were the information systems like? Well, I thought they were fascinating. The premise in building, training for and using them is very different than say, the web based systems I typically work on in my day to day life. In fact in many ways, they had the exact opposite goals and metaphors I use to build systems and interfaces. First, they train their people between 6 months and 5 years on these system -- but our guide said 2-5 years is typical.

Think about that. Training your user for 2 years. What would that mean to interface architecture and design? You could certainly do a lot different with it than what we do now on the web.

Their top menu, interestingly, is literally a series of very-1993 buttons, big squares, in rows, maybe 8 across and 12 down, though all those gorgeous 22 inch screens are touch screens. Each controller has two of them, not horizontally placed, but vertically, in the workspace. Some of those buttons go to pages that help track planes, but I did note one, placed furthest away from the user's sitting position, for that day's cafe menu. It appeared that all possible items were options at the top level. Nothing appeared to be pushed back to a lower level or made less important or secondary in the interface other than two items described below.

When you go into the main menu items, there is little to cue you back, and in fact many of the screens were missing back buttons. Some had them and some didn't. But with that much training before you can even get into a real working station, it doesn't seem to really matter. You know the system inside and out, as well as how and what to do with it and all the planes you have to manage (typically 10 - 20 at one time).

A lot of information is stored in the user's head, and as new plane info comes up, only the abbreviation or shorthand block code describing the plane is on the screen along with various map-based data to place the plane. This means that instead of giving lots of data on one plane on the screen, the data is offloaded to the user and the screen just has the shorthand.

That shorthand for a plane is shown in the middle screen (below the menu in the top screen), which has the map with blocks of data representing planes. Their systems look much like map systems we use online in a way but with way cooler visualizations because they have radar and more info about airspace restrictions and well.. I don't know any web service that has radar. Imagine "Google Radar" overlaid on Google maps? That would be a cool product launch.

So in other words, what the information systems metaphor seemed to be was the exact opposite of what we do in web systems: TRACON systems are built with high mental overhead -- you have to know a lot to use and understand both sets of systems before you start to navigate because nothing in those buttons really helps you know what is below, other than the word on top. During actual use, when you enter and track planes, you get that overhead in the years of training you do before you can operate the system in play. The information systems below those button also have little style that would take any one piece of information and make it more important than any other on the same screen. Information is chunked or grouped a little on those secondary pages, but that's it. So there is no expectation that anything is pushed back or pushed forward, other than the menu, where each little button represents a page/function, and each page has the function represented.

Instead of the software deciding what is most important at the moment of use, and emphasizing it in some formated way, the user just has all of it equally represented and therefore has to decide what's necessary or relevant. In some cases, there was a mini system below a secondary page via a link, to find backup documentation on a plane (if the controller asked the plane to do something, and the plane wasn't built for it, they could check the specs on the plane) or on a small airport (to get backup data on landing strips and landing directions). But these seemed to be relatively rare use cases that allowed the backup information to be lower down to a third level.

Our other tour guide, a man who'd checked us in, did an introduction presentation in power point to explain the basics, and then finished up at the end. He told a couple of stories like what happened on 9/11. He said they grounded every plane everywhere coming and going anywhere in the country. It was eerie, because all their screens (which we were seeing, depending on scope, with somewhere between 20 and thousands of planes) were almost completely empty. Black. With little white map lines showing various air, altitude or other restrictions and weather. They spent three days watching military jets fly around, and that was it. Nothing else.

My take on this sort of system was that it could stand visual and architectural improvement, but that without a lot of study and planning, it would be dangerous to change it. And, the users are so adept at the system they have now, and have so much responsibility and pressure to perform quickly, that changes would likely be unwelcome. Extensive study of user behavior and needs would have to happen, and then extensive testing would have to follow before anything could be put into practice. I can see why they maintain the same system (it's not from 1993 though.. it's much more recent), and just update it with new air space data and plane info, and don't do much to mess with a working system.

But it was still fascinating to see the TRACON information and understand the motivations for its construction and use. And comparing that to what we do building web systems? The best!

Putting Order to the Chaos of CES, Not to Mention Making New Media Proud

at the Bloghaus. By Podtech.

John and Linda Furrier and Maryam Scoble rock for putting it all together.

Wow. Made the chaotic CES scene fun and cool. And the video uploading.. 80 mbs up and down. It rocked!

An example of their work, vlogging the CES 2007 Keynote: Ed Zander, CEO Motorola:

Bloghaus is the best!

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.

The Best Blog Post goes to....

Sorry.. that was left over from the Vloggies.

Guy Kawasaki says this is one of the best blog posts, and as a truffle and wine lover, and someone who loves fun media, well, I say WOW! too.

Look now, look now!

The Amateur Gourmet: Chutzpah, Truffles & Alain Ducasse.

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.

I'm going to Vloggercon today!

Hope to see you there, though you should know they are sold out!

It should be a great event. I'm speaking tomorrow on the Mashups and Remixing for Vloggers Dave Toole, Josh Leo. JD Lasica, David Dudas and Jan McLaughlin.

But we talked yesterday about making it an audience discussion, which I think is much better than a panel.

Josh Leo's We Are The Media, three times in one week!

I also suggested we play Josh Leo's video from the first Vloggercon because I think it's a great representation of user generated content, mashups, and for many other reasons, it's representative of the interesting and entertaining things going on online. In fact, I played it at the Culture, Commerce and Public Media conference during my session last Monday on User Generated Content with Kenyatta Cheese, Sam Klein, Dave Marvet. I also played the first two minutes of Kent Bye's Overview of his Echo Chamber Project, as an example of news and commentary video made by users, The Guinea Pig Dreaming video, and the Bush Blair Endless Love remix. I wanted to show the audience there (typically from archives of TV, PBS or other libraries of video projects) that users were doing an interesting variety of things.

That last one got a really big laugh.

I also played Josh's We Are the Media Video again yesterday at The Hyperlinked Society conference at UPenn and the Annenberg School of Communication. The point is, digital videos are a series of edits, and each edit, with an in and out point as hypertext, is like a video map, of links. Since it was a conference on links, I wanted to show a couple examples of linking that working in ways other than what everyone there was talking about.

I also showed some Attention Trust data, with a visualization of links a user might use to see where he goes day to day.

Anyway, if we play Josh's WATM video again tomorrow, that will be three times in a week. It's that great. You should check it out.

Microformats and Media

Last night I attended a sort of meet up for people Tara Hunt had invited me to, to talk about microformats and media. She had wanted to start with photos, I think because of Riya, but it became clear after talking a bit that similar elements apply to rich media whether the piece being discussed was a photo or a video or an audio piece. The group started out mostly on computers trying to do a group chat, but I didn't have a computer, so I tried typing notes on Josh Kinberg's computer, but the software wasn't recording everyone's comments and it wasn't all that constructive.

I pulled out my notebook (I hadn't brought my laptop) and started writing a short list of elements that are common across all media types, in terms of what elements users publish over and over either on services like Flickr (and other photo sites) or Blip.tv (or other video sites) or audio sites like iTunes. At this point, everyone put away their laptops (funny how the paper can trump the computer once in a while, and while I don't really do paper, except for my notebook, it works for me at times like this). We centered around the notebook and the common document we were discussing, which consisted of a growing list of my notes:

If you want to know who attended, there are photos on Flickr. But the interesting part for me was realizing what we could make with this microformat, for users to publish with, for the publishing tools like Structured Blogging, which takes microformats and makes them into something bloggers can publish through plugins or through other tools that will be built later.

Microformats, as Tantek explained, need to have a page on the MF wiki that shows use cases that cover 80% of what users do now (as a rule of thumb) though arguments can be made for less, if they are really useful (like tags which are much lower across all users). On the Microformats list, the way Tantek and Ryan run it, it's been hard to tell what they meant by examples. When they would make these requests for examples, and I would then look at what people post for the examples, it didn't make any sense to me. But after talking, I think I understand what they want.

It's like the difference between taxonomy and folksonomy. Microformats come out of bottom up user generated use cases. Where as media metadata formats like SMIL and MPEG come out of top down committees. Not that they are bad, we are using those top down formats too in my other work. But as with taxonomy and folksonomy, so with microformats and top down metadata. They both have value and they each come from very different use cases and points of view.

We agreed that the Media metadata page had examples, and yet, it was overgrown, needed pruning, focused on metadata from the top down, instead of examples of what users do now. So last night Tantek explained what they meant by examples specifically. For example, we need to literally cut and paste a blog post from a user that can be used as an 80% use case, to show something as an example. Fair enough. So now, we need to add these examples in a constructive way, in order to argue the media format elements and microformat need for media publishing. We can think about a short list of elements that users use most of the time, when putting some media online, whether it's a photo at a service, or on their own blogs, or a video or audio piece.

Those elements (from my notes last night) are in the first list, becuase they reflect what I see online, though I will go find stats and use cases to back these up, or argue that the 20% useage of something enriches the whole community and so how far that argument goes -- tags are an example of that.

Base elements:
* Title
* Html URL
* Media URL
* Tags
* Description or quotes (subsets of the object: a video quote and tags/description associated with it, a region annotation note for a photo, or the quote of a podcast and tags/description -- the detail for these subsets exists in the 'more info' section below)
* Creator
* License (defaults to copyright, if none exists, but it's there, by US law, and many other areas of the world)

and for audio and visual:
* Duration

Other info:
(This is not the same for all types of media, and is published by users in very limited ways in practice, or is captured from the device or service or in some way, invisible to the user, and therefore often depends on a service to pick it up.)

The second piece is figuring out the elements and schema that lie around those 80% use cases.

I don't think this is so hard now, despite how chaotic and crazy media metadata can be, where some of that is reflected on the media metadata page. Though that page is a very good attempt to organize the chaos. But I now have a picture of how to make this happen in my mind, that is simple, and gets us to a place where we reflect what users do in practice, bottom up. So, based on my notes last night, I'm going to try to fulfill Tantek's requirements, and see how far I get with it. Will update here with pages as they happen.

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

Every transition known to man

...can be seen here. It's the full catalog for video transitions. There's nothing like thoroughness to impress the viewer.

Bar Camp Vid

Check it out (35mbs). Well done!

oh, and my laptop cover has a cameo:

The 5-8 Year Problem: Asking the Ocean To Turn Back Won't Work With Digital Media Tides

In 5-8 years, I think the Grokster problem will be solved by a combination of: 1. business model changes by legacy media; 2. changes in demographics because the fact is there will be a critical mass of users who have grown up with digital models in the heads (who are now young enough not to be of voting age but soon will be); and 3. where enough activity online is about people sharing and trading their own stuff (user generated media). It will be little media makers, supplying their own demands, who will solve this legal problem, first. Legacy media will follow behind them. All those legacy media companies, in order to continue to be as relevant to the masses as they have been in the recent past will have to come to the party and play in order to keep their stuff in front of our eyes. That is, the digital media party online, where they find that in order to participate, they have to give up some control of their copyrighted works, and rethink their models to include things like giving away some media in order to make money in some other place.

Laws are supposed to reflect social norms, attempt to create some fair play between different interests, and reflect our values. As the population changes, the social norms will change, as more of us have frameworks in our heads that include digital online realities, reducing the percentage of the population that thinks the internet is about static web pages and email.

Monday night, all the backchannels were alight with people who work on stuff online, talking about what to do, what they might have to change in their services. We all have to change things a bit to make sure we don't get into trouble the way Grokster did. Even if we are only building for users who make their own stuff and share it, and there is no legacy media at all to be used in our sites. It's still a worry and everyone is having to think about how these services are constructed and used.

Chatting with Jason Schultz and Joe Hall yesterday at Where 2.0, we noted that vlogging is a gateway drug to all sorts of things, including technically, infringement.. and the Grokster loss won't stop it. People are creative, and they want to remix and reuse, and they will. But if they remix each other's stuff, for non-commercial uses, even if it is technically under copyright, they'll learn soon enough that analog copyright as we've known it the past 100 years isn't going to work in the digital age.

Joe Gratz notes this:

One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses.

So there is the Seuter question: how much do you have to have going on, to have a problem? Well. If Microsoft wants to kill you, they can win even if they lose. In other words, they can sue you, and shut you down, even if they are wrong.

Tom Abate made the analogy to King Canute, a Dane who invaded England for a year in 1013 or so, who ordered the ocean to turn back, which of course, it didn't. The RIAA, MPAA, the Supreme Court, aren't going to change the digital media tide. People are using digital media in certain ways and it's only a matter of time before there is a critical mass that will simply change the social norms, and the law and business models will follow.

Robert Cringly predicted the further granular division of Grokster services in his column today:

What will happen, of course, is that Web 2.0 will turn the next Grokster into several separate organizations offering different services that use a common API syntax to create a Grokster equivalent. Each of these parts will look more like the phone company and less like Grokster until the Supreme Court won't recognize them as the accessories they happen to be.

Welcome to The Vlogosphere

It is different here. I'm dipping in my toe, have been since December.. and really, I've only made one vlog post myself. I learn both from watching others and doing this myself. The read/write nature of video is very very different than text or the genre of blogging.

What's interesting to me is how I'm now discovering the vlogosphere as I once did with the blogosphere about four years ago.. back when there were maybe 100k blogs... I had no idea what I was looking at because it was all mysterious then: the format, the linking, blogrolls, and the people, online trust and references. There were nuggets of magic, people who came through asynchronously to share and converse both information and points of view that were personal, passionate, deeply held and often far more expert and full of breadth than legacy media. I was taken, I knew there was something there.. but I couldn't figure it out until I started blogging at bIPlog and realized the linking was creating many trails of conversation; it was writers following those links, extending the conversation still further, that was making something totally new and exciting and relevant. Yes there were and are diarists, essayists, as well as others who put out bad information, and so I'm speaking here of those who blog about topics in a conversational way only. A blog is a tool as we've said a million times.. so let's not go back to that old skirmish. The point is, there are some kinds of blogs that create a conversation in blogging, through discussion and links and comments and still more posts, that are compelling, and give free speech a big push over the old analog world. Fast forward through four years of arguing the stupidity of blogging verses journalism because we don't need to go through that again either. We know they are complimentary and different, and need each other to survive.

But now.. vlogging as a low-transaction cost production medium, with reasonable bandwidth and storage costs, and vloggers with time and interest are creating a new kind of story telling that is very different than the text blog entries I can search, skim and remix aggregated by various services like Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub and Blogpulse. Vlog-posts are little movies, or a post wrapped around a little movie. One cannot link from within a movie, but one can reference, remix, explore. I know at last count there was a directory of vloggers that listed about 200 of them. So it's small now, but considering the power of video and the time it takes to make vlog-posts.. it's a pretty good start. I also thing there are probably many more folks online making video.. that aren't included there.

The ways we determine conversation in vlogs will be more along the lines of visual and aural references. Even if we had a transcript to search them, we would not get context or what is shown visually or in the sound beyond the words, nor would we get the references from one piece to the next, as we can now mouse over a text blog's links to see intended references. Vlog references must be viewed in order to see them. So conversation in media, just like in the analog world, for now, will not be tracked by counting hypertext links or key words. It will be different, and I wonder how we will show those vlog-posts conversing or remixing media in meaningful ways.

As I discover vloggers, get to know their work, see what they are thinking about as they explore and forge ahead with their vlogging work, I find myself presented with similar sensations of discovery and mystery as I did when I first was discovering blogs. And yet, because it is a video medium, the experience is different, I'm making the references between their pieces and the referenced subjects in my mind, I'm taken into a story that is not skimmable but rather gives me sound and visual narrative as a complete picture, where I see clips that may quote from others, but are no different in presentations from any of the other clips that may not be quoted. This kind of recognition was something I did in my early days of blog reading, making connections. But it was easy for all those aggregation services to make the connections for me, as they counted up links and made searchable key words in the texts. But who will be the Technorati or Pubsub of vlogging? What will we do with this medium to transform it from an industrial art that cannot be recognized computationally except by humans?

It's a whole other kind of media literacy, of understanding digital sharing of borrowed work, of seeing what remix and re-expression is about. This is true both for us, as viewers and makers of video, and for the computers we want to aid us in searching and discovering video and video conversation.

I also wonder, will broadcast and narrative legacy video producers claim that vloggers aren't 'real' in the same ways journalists have about bloggers? Or will we have learned enough to get past that to the much more interesting question of where the relationships between the top down and bottom up content with lie and how they might get on .. whether and when it will be complementary or contradictory?

Octopus Remix

This video from dtlq is a beautiful play on tagging, vlogging, storytelling.. pivoting flickr for material, making something and remaking it, and then remaking it, and telling it again. Just a minute or so but worth watching a couple of times.

Lovely repetition and remix.

Bittorrent files mixed with spyware

Why? Because it's legal. And they feel like it. And they have nothing better to do but to screw around with users that don't know the difference.

Here is the article. They say they are fully disclosing at the point a download completes, and the user is presented with nail.exe for installation. But my guess is, most users want to see what they've believe they've downloaded and think they are agreeing to that, not a spyware install. MMG says it's all totally legal. But I'm also wondering, did they host the file the user really wanted, and then send their spyware along with it, or did they just slip it into bittorrent streams as they found them going across the network, or did they find sites with desirable content and seed their spyware files in with the others?

Someone hacked their site today:

But you can contact them here if you want to complain about their practices:
Marketing Metrix Group
info@marketingmetrixgroup.com
Suite 34
1344 Pheasant Lane
Victoria BC Canada
V9B-5R4
Phone: 250-217-1264

Voetry

Josh Leo does it again: Rain. I have watched this several times. Reminds me of American Beauty with the plastic bag. Except it is it's own story and meaning; it's very beautiful and I can help rewatching it, probably 10 times, since Tuesday.

Greg Elin called Rain 'voetry' after I sent him the link. I think we both really love this video. The best 2 minutes you can spend on the internet right now.

Update: Greg linked to Store Wars.. about organic farming, staring "young cuke" and "darth tator" battling over the "death melon." And "Yogart" who says "stretch out your peelings...". Very cute.

These are real people communicating with each other -- Josh Leo

Watch the vlog post here: The Josh Leo Rant #1. It so rocks out. "Vloggywood." Sorry. Laughing.

I've watched it 5 times in the past few minutes. Wo.

Okay. Back to work.

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.

Superbowl, Tivo, Commercials

This probably is not what Tivo or the Superbowl had in mind. But hey, it's all about user control, right?

So I'm going to a friend's superbowl party today.. first a hike, during the game... then we return, fast forward to the commericals, and have a little food and drink while watching them. Can't wait.

Plus, it's been so sunny and warm here the past couple of weeks.. it should be a great hike in the Los Altos hills.

Vloggercon

I'm in NYC at Vloggercon... some cool folks are here:

Eli Chapman talked early about group video blogging.. and right now were discussing video communities.. and how much people might want to view video on their TV screens.

Marc Canter is here, Scott Rafer, Sean Gilligan, Andrew Baron, Josh Kinberg, Josh Kinberg, Peter Hirshberg, Greg Elin, and of course, Micah Sifry below left ... who appears magically and delightfully at every conference!

1001 - Exposing Your Flickr Contact's Photos

With just a small box, sheer, discreet, a thumbnail in the middle... people you have as contacts upload photos into Flickr and as they do, you see them in the little box, which I keep in the lower right of my desktop. I first tried this little app three weeks ago, sent to me by DavidX.

At first, I thought, oh, another thing to pay attention to.. and clutter my desktop. But I'm so loving this. People are out.. doing things... taking snapshots and I see them, a few here, a few there... it changes the way I see my contacts... I know who is more active on Flickr without going to the site, what they want to save or share, what they are seeing, where they are (Esther was in Russia yesterday for example, or last week, David was on the bus in SF, and Jerry was visiting his mother in Washington, and so when the photos appear on Flickr, they also end up as the top photo in a little 1001 stack I can scroll back through). I feel much more connected to them in a way I didn't so much before.. because it's immediate, because I feel that I'm seeing what they are seeing closer to the time when they took the photos. Before I would just go to Flickr when I thought about it, and it would take time to click around, and so I realize now in comparison that it felt somewhat disconnected from their experience.

Only thing, it's just for the Mac, and so far, the 1001 beta is only good through November 30th. Bad. Very bad. I'm hooked and I want this always.

Moblog of the China Digital Future Conf

.

Lots of cute little dogs and conference food and many of the bloggers.

18 Months of Phone Cam Photos

Done with iView. Cool. Link via Jenny Levine.

Digital Media Summit Day 2

More on the Digital Media Summit at McGraw-Hill. Day 2 is much more digitally focused, not on digital content or media, but on connectivity, specifically broadband, and the media, business and social effects of this always-on connectivity where people interact so differently than they did with dial-up. Still though, a lot of talk about consumers, instead of those they formerly knew as their audience, who are now expecting and demanding and wanting to talk back and truly interact, mess with media. However, there was some concession that the always-on customer they sell to may want more interaction than what they currently get now.

The first panel: Broadband, Content & Commerce, the Internet and the Digital Consumer (digital consumer seems like a misnomer, because by definition, if they are truly digital they are not just consuming in the sense big media understands their customers). They threw out a few stats: there are 22 million broadband households (no definition of this, but I assume that the vast majority of these BB people are actually midband, so between 128 and 384 mbs down -- which means they aren't going to be downloading movies anytime soon) and by 2008 with 40% growth, this number is expected to be 62 million. BB people are 5x more likely to buy something online than dial up people.

"Always on is always used"

The panelists saw this as the key to understanding people who are on BB. They realized that this was the key to creating a wired household, where people just blend connectivity and networking in the house into their daily lives. There is some holding back of ecommerce because of lack of payment standards, but stores are replaced at the margin by online shopping (giving the example of empty retail space around Manhattan as the evidence of this -- but I would argue that the recession and 9/11 have much more to do with this...), and Amazon sees 20-30% a year growth, which is amazing. Also noted was that the conversion rate on free trials for subscriptions online is around 17%, though I'm not sure what is offered, price or how to evaluate this figure.

Cable internet service was discussed, with the Comcast guy saying they are in 23 million homes, which is the largest of these providers. They are thinking about VoIP, video conferencing, and other ways to connect people to communicate personally. Segmenting customers, partnering (The WDCPost is doing lots of partnerships, as is Real, and PaymentOne.) The Comcast guy was kind of pissy, but admitted that in 10 years, everything will come over the internet, and regular cable for TV will no longer be needed (ie, you will have one cable service for all of it, and maybe save some money? except for that monopoly thing they've got goin'). The most interesting questions were how to balance the integrity of content (particularly directed at Reuters and WDCPost/Newsweek) and so they acknowledged that they have to maintain high journalistic standards for online news, whether is edited and filtered by the Post, or more of a raw flow as Reuters does.

Embracing the Connected Consumer had Jeff Cove of Matsushita reflecting on a study on how consumers want to get media at home that said the key issues are people said they wanted as absolute musts:
1. ease of use and interoperability
2. access, downloading and time shifting capabilities as well as getting some access to physical media, even if it's making their own
3. confidence that technology will last, technology standards, trust and upgradeable stuff
4. no crashing (having your home entertainment system crash is a loser...)
5. failsafe: if one part stops working, the rest keeps going (ie, TV and VCR, where if one stops the other doesn't -- they are not dependent for operating)

Next generation content convergence was mostly just demoing examples of interactive or multimedia by the panelists, but there was a very good point made by the eScholastic woman, who said that the kids on their site expect total choice, total access, no intellectual property barriers, and no architectural barriers. They want to make it work for them, when they want, how they want, where and with whomever they choose. Also, it was acknowledged that multimedia content that is designed specifically for the web is accessed much more by their audiences than video, which people hardly touch.

I chatted with Craig Calder of NYT Digital, who told me that their archives generate around $1 million a year in revenue, but it's declining. He said mostly what's accessed is less than 90 days old, but the revenue is still revenue.

I missed the last panel as I had to take off for San Diego and the second half of the eTech conference. But the Media Summit was interesting, and I chatted with a lot of people there who have no idea about digital media and information in the way I understand it, and so we shared perspectives. Really interesting in getting a more specific sense of where they are and what they care about.

Saturday Night Rewritten

Attended this show earlier tonight by the Above Kleptomania Family at the Sage Theater in NY. The premise: watch Saturday Night Live, and then do an analog remix/riff with a 6 hour rewrite, and some rehearsal, spoof it with about 14 actors, plus a different band each week (we had the Billionaire Boys Club, who had a little mic trouble – you have to turn the mic on, guys – which added to the fun; decent band too) on the Sunday night after the SNL show. It was good tiny off off-bway theater.

Many good skits, but a fav included "Sara Shaffer" describing her new "book": Movies And Albums That When Played Together Will Totally Blow Your Mind.

Chapters include: How to correctly sync The Color Purple and Hall and Oates, The Pointer Sisters and episode #37 of Saved By the Bell (the one where Jack confronts Jesse about her speed problem), and Boys on the Side with Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash.

We caught part of the SNL show last night after dinner in Soho at Peasant (you know, food in NY is just so damned cheap -- okay, inexpensive. Everywhere we go, we are shocked, after a lot of good wine and food, how reasonable it all is -- it would have been double that in SF. Previous night at Bond Street, had the best Sushi, better than Nobu, we agreed, with Sakitinis - vodka and dry saki that were great - great beautiful delicious creative sushi, and it was half what we were expecting. I can't figure it out but it's nice to hang here and pay so much less than Bay Area prices. Even the Union Square farmer's market is about half the price of organic in SF/Berkeley. Though I also have to mention that we walked past this Rice Pudding shop - similar in concept to an ice cream shop - very high tech/Italian style too - but totally weird. I tasted three, ranging from awful to good, but frankly, and maybe I shouldn't have said this to the woman, "I'm sorry, but I just can't eat this." I'm an adventurous eater, but this was just not good.)

I asked the Above Klepto Family if they had to get permission from SNL, and they said things were cool, and so far no worries (I interpret this to mean that no, they haven’t asked) and that if the show is successful (been going 4 months), they may have to be more formal. However, imagine doing this digitally. Could you get the parts of the SNL show recorded to remix once the broadcast flag is in place (as rewritten, it was acted out live, though they did use original recordings, and totally take the opening of SNL and then shoot their actors in a similar opening montage, and play it on a large TV onstage)?

Does Your Porn Come From Sex Slaves?

Peter Landesman/NYTimes in The Girls Next Door has a very scary story about the sex trade industry, which most of us probably think of as something people who trick do by choice. Not the reality according to this article, which gave me the willies reading, and then listening to Landesman interviewed on NPR.

But the part I care about in the context of this post is the part where women who are kidnapped and raped into submission, are then put into porn, and sold across space and time, to porn consumers, via digital media online. It's horrifying.

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist's patient or the obedient daughter.

[...]

Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus / through which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals.

I have no problem with consuming porn, adult porn, if that's what you like. But when you do get it, please ask yourself if what you are watching comes from sex slaves, men or women, cause frankly, that's not very sexy. And then demand that those who blog about or sell porn certify that it is made by consenting adults. Fleshbot should be on the front lines, demanding some kind of certification, some proof, something to reduce the market for sex slave porn, cause I'll bet you some of their images are of these slaves. It's hard to know for sure, but it's time to start asking.

Ceding Control of the Controls

Rick Porter/Zap2it: Fox Looking to Change the Business of TV.

NBC chief Jeff Zucker said he wasn't ready to declare the traditional fall TV season dead. His counterpart at FOX, Gail Berman, has fewer qualms about it.

Going to a year round schedule with "scripted" and "unscripted" programming reflects the audience's desire for content untethered to time or place, where they have full control over those qualities. The competition of so many forms of media, like DVD's and personal video recorded programming as well as interactive things like games, the internet, mixing your own CDs, is so great, and digital media gives so much control over experience, that I don't see how broadcast TV can not be undermined, because their business model is all about ads, and that is based on TV's control of time, place and content, at least for now.

Why did they follow a "fall schedule"? Was it to follow a school calendar? To have an official kick off season to sell to advertisers, control the pipes to distribute just a few new shows? Control the battlefield of competition between a few networks, scrimmaging in a common time and place? For Nielsen? For the benefit of those working on the shows so they could take vacations in the summer, or work on movies and other projects? All this recedes when the control is gone, and it's already gone. Yes, a few people still watch in the old style, 8pm on Thursdays, in their living rooms, but that audience is dwindling, and people think about content as being something they control, master, click through. It's no longer mom, apple pie, and the Brady Bunch reruns at 2:30pm when the kids get home from school. It's anything you want, anytime, and in many ways, anywhere.

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.

A La Carte TV

Dan Gillmor's column on the future of TV. In Hongkong, NowBroadbandTV (and PCCW) is offering each channel separately, using broadband distribution, for pushing TV to their customers.

Unlike the United States, where DSL customers are limited to speeds well below a megabit per second, the vast majority of Hong Kong's DSL subscribers have connections at 6 megabits per second.... Channels range in price from about $1.30 to $5 a month, and higher in a couple of cases. PCCW and its content providers share the revenues in a formula that isn't disclosed.

However, there is no recording allowed:

But for all the possibilities, PCCW's service is burdened by some of the most stringent control-freakery I've seen in the TV world. If you want to tape one of the TV programs to watch later, forget it. You can't. Period.

I wonder if they asked the customers about this, or just did it. Apparently, they are fairly paraniod about copying, and the programming providers refused to offer content unless recording was turned off.

PCCW's lockdown prompted a letter of complaint to the editor of the South China Morning Post. The correspondent wrote: "Recording is essential to many viewers as it is generally difficult for busy Hong Kong citizens to watch TV according to broadcast schedules."

And the ending:

I'm afraid the "big guys" in both entertainment and traditional media may end up restricting themselves out of the business, if they're not careful. I really think the day of the blockbuster novel, the movie "everybody wants to see," and a few limited voices reading/producing the news, is drawing to a close. The next few years is going to be really interesting, as major corporations come to grips with customers who want variety and instant availablity of their preferred items, with minimum unobtrusive advertising.

Right on.

A La Carte TV

Dan Gillmor's column on the future of TV. In Hongkong, NowBroadbandTV (and PCCW) is offering each channel separately, using broadband distribution, for pushing TV to their customers.

Unlike the United States, where DSL customers are limited to speeds well below a megabit per second, the vast majority of Hong Kong's DSL subscribers have connections at 6 megabits per second.... Channels range in price from about $1.30 to $5 a month, and higher in a couple of cases. PCCW and its content providers share the revenues in a formula that isn't disclosed.

However, there is no recording allowed:

But for all the possibilities, PCCW's service is burdened by some of the most stringent control-freakery I've seen in the TV world. If you want to tape one of the TV programs to watch later, forget it. You can't. Period.

I wonder if they asked the customers about this, or just did it. Apparently, they are fairly paraniod about copying, and the programming providers refused to offer content unless recording was turned off.

PCCW's lockdown prompted a letter of complaint to the editor of the South China Morning Post. The correspondent wrote: "Recording is essential to many viewers as it is generally difficult for busy Hong Kong citizens to watch TV according to broadcast schedules."

And the ending:

I'm afraid the "big guys" in both entertainment and traditional media may end up restricting themselves out of the business, if they're not careful. I really think the day of the blockbuster novel, the movie "everybody wants to see," and a few limited voices reading/producing the news, is drawing to a close. The next few years is going to be really interesting, as major corporations come to grips with customers who want variety and instant availablity of their preferred items, with minimum unobtrusive advertising.

Right on.

A La Carte TV

Dan Gillmor's column on the future of TV. In Hongkong, NowBroadbandTV (and PCCW) is offering each channel separately, using broadband distribution, for pushing TV to their customers.

Unlike the United States, where DSL customers are limited to speeds well below a megabit per second, the vast majority of Hong Kong's DSL subscribers have connections at 6 megabits per second.... Channels range in price from about $1.30 to $5 a month, and higher in a couple of cases. PCCW and its content providers share the revenues in a formula that isn't disclosed.

However, there is no recording allowed:

But for all the possibilities, PCCW's service is burdened by some of the most stringent control-freakery I've seen in the TV world. If you want to tape one of the TV programs to watch later, forget it. You can't. Period.

I wonder if they asked the customers about this, or just did it. Apparently, they are fairly paraniod about copying, and the programming providers refused to offer content unless recording was turned off.

PCCW's lockdown prompted a letter of complaint to the editor of the South China Morning Post. The correspondent wrote: "Recording is essential to many viewers as it is generally difficult for busy Hong Kong citizens to watch TV according to broadcast schedules."

And the ending:

I'm afraid the "big guys" in both entertainment and traditional media may end up restricting themselves out of the business, if they're not careful. I really think the day of the blockbuster novel, the movie "everybody wants to see," and a few limited voices reading/producing the news, is drawing to a close. The next few years is going to be really interesting, as major corporations come to grips with customers who want variety and instant availablity of their preferred items, with minimum unobtrusive advertising.

Right on.

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?