“copyright”
13 posts under this tag.
Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.
The story Sam Walton tells of how he started Walmart is one of my favorite autobiographies and business books. My old, scribbled paperback is long lost but I can now safely share the book with you digitally through the 3rd-party magic of Scribd: read it online.
It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!
 It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, we amazed ourselves. And before too long, we amazed everybody else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore.
I love the anecdote because it makes the point so well and it rings so true. The statistic surpassed even my dire expectations. And yes, major labels should have acted years ago. May we learn something from their example.
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected.
Tim Renner, a former boss of Universal Music in Germany, says the majors should have acted years ago. “Then they had the money and could have built the competence by buying concert agencies and merchandise companies,” he says. Now it may be too late.
SeeqPod (YubNub’s “seeq“) crawls the web for mp3’s and streams (and queues) them for you right along search results. “Playable search” they call it, hinting they’ll use the word in expansive, unexpected ways. It’s kind of how you can now play YouTube videos within Google results. The instant gratification level of it all is sky-high. It’s long due and as clever a copyright hack as I’ve seen (like how music websites link to YouTube videos to play music but so much better). A big, dark underweb of mp3s has always been there, it’s just never been this discoverable, this sampleable.
I learned about it, btw, through one of the classiest, most elegant, best targeted spams ever. The SeeqPod team sent me a (probably automatic) email recommending me to try searching for Rufus Wrainwright through their search engine. Since their spam was so unusually well-written and targeted (I had written about Rufus Wainwright before), I tried it. Maybe in these days were spam filters are so effective spammers will have to resource to being useful and wanted. We can dream.
Update 11/Dec/07
Project Playlist (YubNub’s “projp“) is a very similar website, though SeeqPod’s interface is much better. One interesting feature of Project Playlist is that you can search other people’s playlists too, which is a great way to find similar music. SeeqPod, on the other hand, has the interesting “discover” feature, which recommends similar music. (Via Chepe.)
Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:
“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”
and anime’s general stance towards piracy:
“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”
Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry’s biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.
Frustrated record companies have responded by trying to get their artists to spend more time promoting records and less time touring and endorsing products, says Jeanne Meyer of EMI, another big record label. “Sometimes you’ve got a tug of war going on,” she says. Yet the more labels spend on marketing pre-recorded music, the more they raise their artists’ profiles and boost their other, more lucrative, sources of income. Pre-recorded music, no longer the main cash cow, increasingly serves merely as a marketing tool for T-shirts and concert tickets. The best seats for The Police’s world tour this summer cost over $900; the group’s entire catalogue on CD costs less than $100.
The shift away from recorded music is due in part to the recognition that touring and merchandise are more lucrative. But it may also be a consequence of internet piracy, as free downloads give music fans more money to spend on other things. Jwana Godinho, the director of Música no Coração, a concert promoter in Lisbon, thinks many music lovers have a “mental budget” that they are prepared to spend on music, and have switched their spending from CDs to tickets and merchandise.
The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry’s top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.
I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)
To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodificationWP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.
Turns out you can easily break DRM-ed LIT ebooks while as far as I know your PDF ones—if tightly DRM-ed, and these days they all are—are lost for good—leaving you as a sucker who can’t even copy paste and interesting quote; heck, a sucker who can’t even lend the ebook to a friend (hurrah for technology!).
Interesting how piracy can actually be a good thing for business: yesterday I bought a digital version of Peter Watson’s 800-paged IdeasAM (to go with my paper version) only because it was available as a LIT. I then immediately broke the DRM (Microsoft Reader is a joke) and had the—again, 800-paged book—as an HTML mine to edit and tweak. This is just the encouragement I needed to start reading the book—just imagine, I can now tweak the format just like I want it (and as you may have noticed I am a format freak—I like my italics in a slightly more remarkable tone, my parenthetical text slightly subdued, my quotes highlighted), I can turn footnotes into sidenotes, I can 1-click-Answers.com every word, I can copy-paste to Evernote and Devonthink (these days I just can’t conceive of reading a book without highlighting, now it’s getting intolerable not being able to immediately save select quotes in a digital form1), I can upload to my webserver and have it always some seconds away, I can read it in my berry, I can print it, I can find-as-I-type, I can link, annotate, or rewrite, I can…
 Is an essay posted by Steve Jobs two days ago [link] proposing to do away with DRM protection in digital songs. It’s a brilliant, persuasive pamphlet and easily one of the most surprising recent turns in Intellectual Property’s (IP) unfolding evolution—and with IP soon becoming the only property that matters, we are talking about a civilization-defining process here.
Now of course Jobs’s letter is self-serving, as The Economist clearly explains, but is he right? Is a DRM-free world better? With thousands of pirated songs in my library I could hardly make for a devil’s advocate now but I still wonder. If we renounce technological solutions, how will we reward creators? Will policing and empathy be enough? (Don’t be so quick to answer, we will all be creators soon.)
A technological arms-race between pirates and anti-pirates was bound to end in senseless wastage, but that doesn’t mean new structures are not hardly needed—economical structures (based on trade) not political ones (based on force)—if IP will prove ultimately viable.
Let’s see what we can think of—the problem just got a whole more interesting.
Techguru Esther DysonWP, EDGE (who, I just learned, is Freeman DysonWP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.
It’s a beautiful copyright-infringement shooting star. Enjoy it while it lasts. (Via reddit.)
Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de MerkabastosELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.
Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?
This (anonymous) feedback on Imagery just came on Saturday.
If your searches could also generate the academic citations for the images, that would be ultracool for those of us out in education-land trying to teach kids that they do not “own ” the internet without at least giving credit. I know some blog tools do this ( David Warlick’s blog does it).
A person who teaches teachers
and sends them to cool places like this.
Some sort of auto-citation of images is a fantastic idea (as anyone who uses EverNote or Google Notebook will know firsthand) and my gratitude goes to whoever sent it to me, I’d never have thought of it myself. And yet, for a while I almost decided to willfully not implement it:
I strongly disagree with the way citations are usually handled within “education-land”: little more than curtsies one must mindlessly perform to pay respect to others’ property (and it is against such moralistic establishment that I am one of those kids who believes he owns the internet). Citation styles are taught and required simply as one more formal hoop for students to jump.
But citations can be much more than that! They allow readers to recover and rewalk the path the writer followed, and in that they perform an invaluable service to readers, but they can also be immensely profitable for writers too, starting with forcing them to walk paths in the first place (one is so loathe to do the slightest of researches when in the thrall (or duty) of writing, so very prone to simply rearrange one’s prejudices and call it even). Citations make for more rigorous reading and writing—that’s why we should encourage them (not simply because they make, arguably, good fences).
So yes, I thought I saw some of that ownership-based, rote teaching of citations (copyright-instruction) in that email—in a scared flash of exaggeration I glimpsed a DRM image-search engine—and my recoil reaction was so surprisingly strong I thought of deliberately not implementing any sort of auto-quotation. Lawrence Lessig has talked already on the power technology’s architecture has to regulate conduct and the weight of such responsibility was suddenly overwhelming.
Careful thought has shown me the error of my ways. My overreaction to such friendly (and helpful) feedback was not called for. An auto-citation feature in Domburi would be very helpful indeed and will be implemented. But it’ll be tinged with my prejudices and that means it will be open-ended.
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