Day: 17 June 2008

I’ve been following a perplexingly fascinating case for about a year or so; one of those cases where truth way beats fiction. Simply put, one of the biggest companies in the music business, Universal Music Group, was suing the delightfully-named Roast Beast Music Collectibles, or more specifically Troy Augusto, who trades as roastbeastmusic on eBay, for selling on promotional material.

Last week Judge James S Otero decided enough was enough, threw the case out, and cited the doctrine of first sale as the primary reason.

You can see some of the coverage here and here. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did a great job in publicising the case and fighting in Troy’s corner, here’s an excerpt of what they had to say.

I collect books, and have in my collection many review copies Not For Resale. A small number were actually sent to me, and most of the rest I bought at charity shops (I think they’re called thrifts in the US). Some were given to me by friends who had received them originally. It never occurred to me that someone could even conceive of a reason to claim that what I was doing was illegal. And it is not. Doctrine of first sale.

People have been selling and trading rarities such as promo goods for a very long time, so I tried to figure out why Universal was getting so excited about it. So I looked into it.

I should have known.

Pre-release piracy.

So let me understand this. Universal want to send pre-release promos to people. Why would they do that? So that they could get good reviews of the releases, I would guess. So they must know the people they send it to, at least professionally. But they don’t trust them. They think that the recipients of the promos are going to go into business making copies of the promos and then selling the copies on. So they need a law to protect them against that eventuality.

You know something? If I was one of those recipients of the promo, I would feel insulted and send it back. Maybe that’s what we now need to do, start a movement to get reviewers to send all promos back unheard

Pre-release promos are slow-burning examples of artificial scarcity; the scarcity is non-existent at the point of pre-release….. The promos take time to develop into valued items, time measured in multiple decades. As a result, no one has bothered to create the balancing artificial abundance. What Universal was trying to do was to create that scarcity at the point of pre-release. And they failed.

I’m a pretty gregarious kind of person; I like spending time with people, stay awake all kinds of hours, travel quite a bit (on business as well as pleasure). So I know a lot of people, and a lot of people know me.

Which means I land up with a lot of information about how to contact people: telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and the like. I store this information in all kinds of places, I guess we call them social networks now. And when I store this information, I tend not to think of it as mine. Or as the social network’s. Most of the time I am a trustee of that information.

So when you give me your private mobile phone number, you trust me with that information. I am not empowered to give it to anyone I feel like, you trust that I will use that information wisely. It isn’t my information. It’s yours.

I think a lot of people feel that way.

In the old days, there was a clear distinction between professional and personal, and address books worked that way as well. When job migration was low it made a lot of sense. Now, with security of tenure a distant memory, this is harder to figure out. Quite often people have relationships that last beyond the jobs they were in when they met for the first time.

Which makes me think. Does the average professional relationship last longer than the average professional job?  Have we worked out what the implications are?

The kernel for this post was an article I read on the plane coming over to San Francisco. The headline was amazing:

Court orders ex-employee to hand over LinkedIn contacts

You can find the whole story here. It conjured up visions of this thing called LinkedIn contacts being ceremonially handed over from one person to another.

And for a moment there I thought that the value was in the relationship and not in the contact information.

If there is no relationship then it is just data. Who cares who owns it, it is just commodity. Where there is a relationship, and where the information is scarce, it is usually held in trust and cannot be given away anyway.

All this is about contact information. When we start talking about derived and ancillary information, to do with things like relationship networks, friend wheels, social graphs and so on that’s a whole different ball game. The same is true about patterns of behaviour: buying, selling, watching, eating, reading, listening.

When it comes to contact information alone, the value is not in the data but in the relationship.