2009 Is Record Year For UK Singles Sales
Innovation boosts record label income as licensing and rights deals generate £195m in 2008
New business models boost income for British record labels: licensing and multiple rights deals net £122m in 2007
New BPI Stats show strength of digital music

Just some of the headlines from a group of people not known for their progressive thinking when it comes to music and downloads and filesharing.

But let’s not look at the headlines. Let’s look at the facts:

2009 has already become the biggest ever year for UK singles with more than 117m sold to date, recorded music body the BPI today announced.

“Sales of single tracks in 2009 have now surpassed the previous all-time record of 115.1m, set in 2008. The total of 117m has been reached with 10 weeks of trading, including the vital Christmas period, still to run in 2009.

“That singles have hit these heights while there are still more than a billion illegal downloads every year in the UK is testimony to the quality of releases this year and the vibrancy of the UK download market.  Consumers are responding to the value and innovation offered by the legal services and these new figures show how the market could explode if Government acts to tackle illegal peer-to-peer filesharing.”

“The UK Top 40 is now almost entirely comprised of digital singles. During this year, 98.6% of all singles have been retailed in digital formats.   More than 389.2m single track downloads have now been sold in the UK since the launch of the first mainstream online stores in 2004.

All from that well-known friend of illegal downloaders and filesharers, BPI. I have to consider the statements to be largely factual since they have no incentive to report these particular numbers falsely.

It’s not just about digital sales either. The Beatles are reported to have sold 2.25 million albums in two weeks recently. Again, data with some backing.

I like numbers. But not when they’re Numbers of Mass Distraction (NMD). Not when 136 people can become 7 million people.

Why should I care what numbers are bandied about in the press? Why should I care when someone says “Only 1 in 20 downloads in the UK is legal” or words to that effect?

Well, maybe the excerpt from Wikipedia on WMD will give you some idea why:

When “tentative” numbers get repeated often enough, even if they get corrected later, people tend to remember the original “tentatives”. That’s what the research shows. And by the way, when I refer to numbers or research, I try and refer to the source openly and transparently.

The ITU projects the total number of broadband connections in the UK to be 18.4m by the end of this year. Let’s take that number for a start.

BPI then says that there are already a minimum of 117m legal downloads this year, with 20% of the year to go. Without even going for seasonal adjustment to allow for Christmas, let’s take a worst-case legal download total for 2009 to be 150m or thereabouts.

If we then take the Mandelson pronouncement that only one in 20 downloads is legal, that would assume that 2009 will see 3 billion downloads in the UK. There’s been a similar pronouncement that we have 7 million illegal downloaders in the UK, which was the previous NMD or Number of Mass Distraction.

So let’s try and see whether these numbers look sane, smell right. 3 billion downloads represents 163 downloads per broadband connection per year, or one illegal download every two and a quarter days. Do you know anyone who buys a single every other day? Would you believe it if you were told there were people who did that?

Hang on a second. Why should I use the 18.4 million ITU overall broadband lines in the UK number? What happens if I use the 7 million NMD number? Now I have to believe that there are seven million people in the UK who download 429 singles each illegally every year, or 1.17 every day.

The 117m figure is solid. There is money to show for it. Till receipts.

The 18.4 million is solid. There is money to show for it. Telco billing records.

The 3 billion figure is an estimate based on digits (of the finger kind) whirling through the atmosphere.

The 7 million figure is an estimate based on conversations with 136 people.

If the 7 million figure is correct, then it means that nearly two in five people with broadband in the UK are illegal downloaders. People in the UK reading this post will know other people in the UK with broadband connections. Does this seem reasonable?

If the 7 million figure is wrong, do you think it is wrong on the low side or the high side? Imagine what that does to the daily illegal downloads that 40% of your friends now have to achieve as a NMD target.

I tend to think that maybe, just maybe, the 7 million number is a tad on the high side.

So now let’s move to the other number, 3 billion. If we assume 61.4m people in the UK (Source: National Statistics Online) then we’re talking about one illegal download every week or so for every single person in this country. Does that feel reasonable to you?

Let’s say the number of illegal downloads is not 20 times the number of legal downloads. Would you think the right number is higher or lower?

I tend to think that maybe, just maybe, the 20 times number is a tad on the high side.

Numbers can be so distracting. But let me not paint a gloomy picture. Taking the statements of the BPI alone and the events of the past year or so:

• There is evidence that the number of legal downloads sold is sharply on the increase.
• There is evidence that new business models are emerging, from iTunes through to OneBox, from last.fm through to spotify and we7.
• There is evidence that people in the UK care about their digital futures.

My thanks to Robert Crumb for not copyrighting this image in 1968.

I have the privilege of spending time with many startups, in a variety of guises: as incubator, as advisor, as investor, as chairman, as well-wisher, friend and supporter. The startups differ widely and wildly: they range in size from a handful of people to hundreds;  they have annual burn rates in the thousands and in the millions; they have different strategies and different ways of executing them; the motives that drive them are different, the things that keep them awake at night differ as well. They make different types of products and services, for different markets, with different social and economic aims and consequences.

But they share one thing: They keep asking themselves the same set of questions:  “What does the customer want? What will she do with our product or service, how will it be used? Why will she come to us for it? And what will she pay for it?”

This isn’t rocket science; it isn’t even illuminated startup management. It’s Customer 101. So we speak a lot about customer choice, and, much of the time, we do something about it.

When it comes to culture, however, we seem to forget. Which is strange, because the changes that are taking place are at their most severe in the cultural arena. Changes that are taking place to reverse the developments of the last fifty, maybe even hundred years in a number of key aspects of culture.

• These changes are simple yet far-reaching:
• Consumption to Participation: The television and broadcast ages brought the ability for people to consume events globally, but it took the tools of today to let them participate globally. Obama’s campaign is a classic example. There were people all over the US, even in the “red” states, who contributed to his campaign, who participated in the discussions. Yes, there were people in Europe who tried to donate money into Obama’s campaign and failed for good legal reasons; but they could still engage.
• One Place to Many Places: You couldn’t be part of an orchestra unless you went to where the orchestra was. Now the Mountain comes to many Mahomets, the orchestra comes to you, there are many examples of distributed music ensembles.
• One Time to Any Time: Gone are the days when Super Bowl Monday was a nightmare for young men in Europe, who had to stay up into the early hours of Monday if they wanted to make an “evening” of it. Now they can still do that, but they don’t have to. They can hold their party on Monday night if they want. Not everything is streamed live, or needs to be. YouTube passed a billion hits a day and doesn’t stream anything live.
• Hit Culture to Long Tail: When costs of warehousing and distribution were a significant proportion of overall cost, it made sense to reduce the number of items in inventory. As that changed the size of “inventory” available changed dramatically. So for example I buy many books from Amazon or Abebooks that aren’t in their top 10,000 sellers. Many of these books would be impossible to get via a traditional bookshop. The same goes for music and video. It doesn’t matter how many studies I see that seek to pooh-pooh Chris Anderson’s thesis, I look to what I do and what I can do. What I can do is a lot more than what I could do, because my transaction costs for “long-tail” items have reduced sharply.
• Using to Making: The proliferation and ubiquitous availability of tools that are themselves participatory by nature has changed the basis of participation. Think of the number of video cameras you saw in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and now. Just look at the photographs, videos and notes that make it on to Facebook. Soon, Facebook will be a country whose population exceeds that of every country bar India and China. A country where everyone has feedback loops to the mother ship. Say what you like about the Borg, but don’t underestimate it. A critical change is taking place there. A country with more photo uploads than Flickr, more games players than World of Warcraft, more people than most of Europe or America. And global in reach. The stuff that gets uploaded to Facebook is not “copies of originals” but often mutations. Think of the number of video cameras you saw in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and now. More on this later.
• Scarce to Abundant: One of the most fundamental changes is that of the internet as a copy and remix machine, making artificial scarcity something very difficult, something almost impossible. The very concept of artificial scarcity is relatively new, born of the consumption mindset driven by mass marketing. Things analog were, or at least could be, scarce. [If they weren't scarce then you could hoard them or cartelise in order to make them seem scarce]. Things digital are fundamentally infinite in abundance, since the cost of reproduction and transmission is trivial.
• Forced to Voluntary: Payment for cultural services has always changed from age to age; sometimes it’s been about patronage; sometimes it’s been about passing the hat around; sometimes it’s been about levies and fees, as with library schemes and radio broadcasting. The fixed purchase scheme is relatively recent in comparison and is in the process of being rendered obsolete. People will now pay what they are willing to pay, even for ostensibly free things.

I could go on, but won’t. The point is simple. We’re moving from an analog world to a digital world. That means that many things change. The most important change is that in a world of abundance, the buyer sets the price. The customer is in control.

The story is one of empowerment and inclusion, of enfranchisement. And one of the key shifts that is taking place is in the almost-random repurposing of things past. For example, take the concept of “literal videos“, as exemplified by Dustin McLean. What a lovely idea. Take an old video, keep to the original pictures and backing music, rewrite the lyrics to reflect what’s actually happening on the video rather than in the song. My particular favourite is the literal video version of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. My thanks to Dave Morin, who pointed it out to me via Facebook.

I keep trying to tell people that while the internet may have been discovered or even invented by Al Gore, it was definitely not invented exclusively as a new distribution model for Hollywood or its musical cater-cousin. Who could have predicted that someone would do this to Carl Sagan and to Stephen Hawking.

People are creating value from things long forgotten, long abandoned, long deemed worthless.

There is an eBaying of content going on, as people repurpose stuff they find in the digital garage and attic that is the Web.

Some people will become the new scavengers, looking through the detritus of the web for things to reuse and remix. Some will build the places where they look, the tools they look with: the Bit Torrents and Pirate Bays of this world. Some will do the remixing, as in the Dustin McLeans. Some will buy, but not all: there is already a plethora of data points about freemium models and conversion rates.

If we allow this to happen, then new revenue streams will begin to emerge, new business models will come about.

If we allow this to happen, then we can participate in these new revenue streams and models.

If we try to prevent it from happening, we will fail. And therefore not participate in the new revenue streams and models.

The customer now has choice.

And we have a choice. To be on the customer’s side. Or not.

I know my readership is “old” but most of you are not as old as I am. So that means you’re more than likely to have heard about the Kanye West/Taylor Swift incident a few days ago. I heard about it, found it at least mildly distasteful, despite Kanye’s apology; I was therefore glad to hear about Beyonce’s touch of class later.

But that’s not the point of this post. Why would I write about two people I don’t listen to, on a programme I don’t watch, and whose lives I have no interest in? Simple. I write because of this video:

Chris Messina tweeted and alerted me to this, a mash-up between Kanye West and Taylor Swift.

Stop there, just for a second. Shut your eyes and imagine. Imagine what will happen if the video goes viral. So-called rights holders crawling out of their shells and demanding recompense, when none is called for in a sensible copyright regime. Am I being sensationalist? I don’t think so. Just take a look at this article, brought to my attention by friend and colleague Kevin Marks.

Experiencing things by watching and hearing and reading. Learning from those experiences. Borrowing from the experiences you have. Letting your imagination run rampant and riotous. Using that imagination to praise, to teach, to lampoon, to savour alone, to share with all.

We have to allow the Matt Kammerers of this world to do their thing. Sampling from here and there in order to make a new thing. A new thing. Copyright law used to be reasonable for centuries, despite attempts to mutate it at critical stages: the inventions of the press, the radio, the copier, the tape, even the CD. Since the dawn of the digital age, attempts to enshrine stupidity in law have increased. Much of what passed for creativity and comment and parody and satire may not be possible in the future if the law is allowed to become more of an ass.

The current battles are really not about downloading or filesharing or mashing up. There is far too much evidence that the downloaders, filesharers and mashup makers are themselves the ones behind the massive growth in digital sales.

The battles have been about control. Control that allows owners of obsolete marketing and distribution systems to exert power on a new generation, because they can. Because we let them exert that power throughly poorly thought out law.

The battles are about control. Control that is alien to the very basis of the internet. Centralised and monolithic, able to criminalise a cohort in the twinkling of a cataracted eye.

The battles will be about control. Control of an entire generation and their right to their culture.

Guess what? Not much stands in the way. Except you and me.

A few weeks ago, Peter Mandelson announced his intention to push forward on stringent measures to deal with “illegal” filesharing and downloading. The measures went much further than what had been envisaged in the Digital Britain report, with responsibility for the decisions and implementation passing from Ofcom to Mandelson.

[Disclosure: I work for BT; we operate an ISP; our position on this subject has been made clear by CEO Ian Livingston here and by other senior executives here. As clearly stated in the disclaimer at the top of this blog, these are my personal views and not necessarily those of my employer.]

It now appears that “internet suspension of illegal downloaders could become law”. Before that happens, I thought it would be worth while to share some of my thoughts about this.

1. Neither filesharing nor downloading is illegal per se.

The word “illegal” regularly precedes the word “download”, to such an extent that people are used to seeing the two words together; as a result there is a risk that people perceive all downloads to be illegal. George Lakoff pointed out something very similar when analysing Katrina, showing how “citizens” became “refugees”. Earlier, there were attempts to equate “Muslims” with “terrorists”. It is important that we frame this debate correctly.

Let me put this in context. Have you ever bought a CD and transferred tracks from that CD to anything else: your iTunes software, an iPod, a smart phone, an MP3 player, even another CD? If you live in the UK, then you have broken the law. What you have done is “illegal”.

So it’s important to bear in mind that not everyone who downloads something is doing something “illegal”, there are legal downloads as well. And sometimes something appears illegal because the law is out of date, even though in practice it is not illegal.

2. Downloaders do pay for their downloads.

Last year’s best-selling MP3 album on Amazon was Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV. Not particularly remarkable, until you realise that the same album was available for free download as well.

Radiohead proved something similar with In Rainbows. Just because people download music, don’t assume that they’re trying to rip artists off. Most downloaders support their artists.

3. Downloading is good business for the music industry.

It’s not just the Amazon MP3 album chart that shows what’s happening. Digital music album sales are growing 32% year on year, while CD album sales are down 14.5%, when you compare 2008 with 2007.

If you have the time, go visit the Internet Archive. Take a look at what the Grateful Dead have been doing there. 3093 audience recordings available for free download. 3823 stream-only recordings available as well. Free. You see, the Grateful Dead have figured out what’s abundant and what’s scarce in their business. Digital things are abundant. Physical things are scarce. So I can record their concerts, trade the “bootlegs”, download away to my heart’s content. But they get my money for the concerts and the merchandise. As well as the CDs and DVDs that are “official”. [I now have 54 Jerry Garcia ties!].

Music is about performance, not just studio. We’ve been in a time warp where people have forgotten that and gotten hung up about other ways of making money. Like getting suckers like me to pay repeatedly for the same content across different formats. The new generations aren’t into buying physical copies, other than collectible vinyl.

4. Claims about illegal downloads can be misleading.

Yesterday, Lady Gaga was announced as the Queen of Downloads. What intrigued me was the others on the Top 10 list. Kings of Leon. La Roux. Leona Lewis. Alexandra Burke. Snow Patrol. Nickelback. Not the kind of stuff I listen to. The kind of stuff my youngest child listens to.

What struck me was this: young people seem to do the downloading, old people seem to do the anti-download complaining. I’ve seen claims that in the UK alone, £1.2bn is lost to illegal downloads. And I think there’s a fallacy there. It’s a bit like Rolex claiming lost revenues because people are buying rip-off Rolexes for $25. Does Rolex really think that someone who pays $25 for a “Rolex” is actually a potential customer for a $25,000 watch? I saw similar claims made for software purchases in India. So let’s put this in context. Does anyone really think that someone, anyone, downloads Cliff Richard illegally? Puh-leese.

5. There are many potential flaws in the suggested way forward.

What Mandelson seems to be asking for may be technically infeasible, to the extent that, as John Perry Barlow put it, the internet tends to route around obstacles. Howard Rheingold also makes the point that customers tend to get what they want; this is a customer-driven proposition. The Pew Internet and American Life Project published a fascinating report recently, headlined The State of Music Online: Ten Years After Napster. It’s well worth a read. One of the points made there is that customers now expect five kinds of freedoms:

• Cost (zero or approaching zero)
• Portability (to any device)
• Mobility (wireless access to music)
• Choice (access to any song ever recorded)
• Remixability (ability to remix and mash up the music)

We can prevent some of these freedoms with artificial scarcities, like putting region coding on DVDs. But the market works around such things, every artificial scarcity is met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance. And there are more of “them”.

Even if a piecemeal technical solution were to be implemented, the likelihood is that it will be exorbitant in cost. There is also the consideration that the solutions put forward may breach basic human rights. When we look at what’s happened in France, Australia, New Zealand, there is definite evidence that any such move would be grossly unpopular. On top of all this, even the RIAA appears to have concluded that prosecuting the downloader is not worth while, and that DRM has had its day.

Technically complex, unlikely to succeed. Expensive. Potentially illegal. Unpopular. The list grows and grows. And of course there is the matter of asking ISPs to criminalise their customers in order to protect third-party rights, why would any ISP want to do that?

6. Do we really want to alienate a whole generation? Are there good reasons to?

The point is actually something else. It’s about culture. It’s about the way the millenials think and act. They have rediscovered something we’ve gone and forgotten, the sheer pleasure of getting under the hood of things. Making things. Making new things out of old things. Changing things.

This process of make, remake, change is part of the way they express themselves. Part of the way they think. Part of the way they create. Part of the way they protest.

Marcel Duchamp remixed the Mona Lisa. Ogden Nash remixed Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. Lampoon and Satire are culturally significant as well, no less creative than other forms of expression. If you haven’t done so already, go read Cory Doctorow’s Makers and Larry Lessig’s Remix. They will help you understand more of what is happening.

There have always been generation gaps. There have always been pushbacks against every new reproduction technology: the book, the printing press, the copier, the tape recorder, the CD. And now the internet, the world’s biggest copy machine.

Whatever you may have been told, the internet was not actually created to become a new distribution mechanism for failing entertainment industries. There is considerable pressure on the industry to change, to innovate. New business models are emerging, based on patronage, on subscription, on advertisements.

We have to allow the innovation to continue. Today, even the worst enemies of downloaders would accept that somewhere between 13% and 16% of all downloads are legal and paid for, whatever those terms now mean. There are 6 billion people out there, all getting connected to the commons that is the internet. The industry should learn from Grateful Dead and Prince and Nine Inch Nails, focus on growing the size of the pie to make sure that 13-16% represents a very big number. Because that is possible, even likely.

There are other considerations. Andrew Savikas, writing in O’Reilly TOC, puts forward an interesting argument for Content as a Service. Companies like LendAround are beginning to pick up new trends, trends that are moving away from an ownership culture to a sharing culture. Gift-based cultures and economies have been around for some time now. Millenia.

Most people are law-abiding. Most people want to make sure that artists are rewarded. Sometimes laws are out of date and need changing. Sometimes business models are out of date and need changing.

In the internet we have something precious and valuable. In the millenial generation we have something precious and valuable. It is time to keep our heads and do the right thing, foster innovation, encourage cultural expression and adaptation. And avoid seeking to alienate an entire generation…. in order to try and implement a failed proposition.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a thing about ragu, as described here, here, here, here and most recently here.

One of the great things about dishes like ragu with pasta is that there’s so much scope for experimentation.

You can vary the pasta in use: the traditional spaghetti, the more recent penne, the gramigna that the people in Bologna swear by, the paccheri that the Neapolitans used to smuggle garlic, any of thousands of varieties of pasta.

In fact you don’t even have to use pasta.

You can vary the meat. Some swear by pork, some by lamb, some by beef. Some mix pork and lamb. In Sorrento I was served buffalo. Those in the know in Bologna said that the best thing to do is to use salsiccia, a local sausage. But you know what? Even they would say it’s up to you.

Up to you. That’s the beauty of cooking. Someone makes a recipe up. Someone else uses a recipe that’s been in her family for generations. Someone else uses a cookery book. Or even the Web (I’m a regular user of epicurious).

You can use a recipe, but you don’t have to follow it.

It used to be said that human beings go through three stages of development: dependence (as in parent-child); independence (as in adolescent); then interdependence (as in grown-up). These stages are also visible in organisations as they develop: how business units have a dependent relationship on the centre, then flex their muscles as they grow, finally coming to a mutually respectful and valuable relationship over time.

So it is with cooking. I remember a time when the only way I could cook was to follow a recipe parrot-fashion. Then came a time when I wanted to do my own thing, experiment with abandon. Now I read recipes and change them as I want or need: sometimes I have to vary ingredients because one of the guests has a medical condition, known allergic reaction or low tolerance for some critical component of a dish.

What’s all this got to do with Cory Doctorow? Simple. This post is a review of his latest book, Makers, which you can read “serially” for free over here at Tor, or pre-order here.

I’ve been fascinated by the concept of open multisided markets for many years now. How innovation flourishes, how business flourishes, how people flourish and how society as a whole gains from using open models for business. [If you want to learn more about open multisided markets, try reading Paying With Plastic or Invisible Engines, two excellent books on the subject; David Evans and Richard Schmalensee know their stuff and tell it well.]

Cory has done once again what he does so well: he has created a world where we can learn about the rich possibilities ahead of us in terms of cultural development, yet one which is fraught with risks because of the incredibly stupid things we can do. If we let ourselves.

I don’t want to spoil the book, so I’m going to say nothing whatsoever about the plot. What I am going to say is this:

Our world is full of franchise-based models, where people make money by doing something formulaic and controlling input ingredients, manufacturing process and output quality. In itself there is nothing wrong with a franchise model.

But you know something? I can make myself a hamburger or pizza any way I want. I don’t have to go to a particular franchise operator, or buy their ingredients, or use their recipes, or work their processes. I can if I want to. I don’t have to.

Imagine a world where someone managed somehow to patent the burger or the pizza, where it was no longer possible to make your own. You had to use someone else’s systems, their processes, their ingredients.

In a physical world this is hard to imagine, or, for that matter, to implement and police.

In a digital world it is a different matter altogether. We can police it. We can implement systems that force people to use particular systems, particular processes, particular ingredients. We can create artificial monopolies. And suffer the consequences.

I have always maintained that every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance; that’s why region coding on a DVD is an abject failure, why the music industry moved away from DRM, why we have to find new and pragmatic models for making sure creators and distributors of “content” are appropriately rewarded. [I've been visibly influenced by much that Cory has written in this respect; I'd also recommend the works of people like Larry Lessig, Terry Fisher, Jonathan Zittrain, the Berkman Center in general (with the mercurial Charlie Nesson). Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and the people at First Monday are also well worth a visit.]

There are many reasons to avoid creating new monopolies, not all of them pinko tree-hugger in origin. We are learning every day about the value of diversity in genes (I was lucky enough to hear Cary Fowler speak on the subject recently: if you’re interested, take a look at The Threatened Gene, even though it was written nearly two decades ago.)

Gene diversity gives us options for the future, options for conditions and scenarios we haven’t faced, don’t face but could face in the future. What is true for plants is in its own way true for cultures, for the way we think and act, for what we believe.

And there’s something far more important at stake here, how we as human beings learn and develop and create and experience things. What Pat Kane builds out so majestically for in The Play Ethic. What Dan Bricklin expounds so masterfully in his essays on tools in Bricklin on Technology.

As a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory knows a thing or two about the world we’re entering. The wonderful possibilities ahead of us. The potential for awful waste. The social, economic and political consequences of getting it right. Or wrong.

Makers is a book about that future. A book that brings together open multisided platforms, opensource and democratised innovation, distributed “edge-based” production, customer-driven demand creation, customer-participated supply.

Makers is a book that brings that future into shape in front of us, allows us to visualise the models that would make it work. Or break it. The implications for patents, for intellectual property rights in general. The role of money and credit and payments and micropayments. The rule of law; and where the law could be an ass.

Makers is a book which lets us get into the heads of the born digital, the grown up digital, the way they think about things. What their values are. Why we should take a leaf out of Larry Lessig’s Remix and make sure we don’t criminalise a whole generation by our lack of understanding.

Go ahead and read the book. Electronically. Or physically.

Go ahead and pay for it. Or not, as the case may be.

It’s your future. And mine. And ours. And those of our children. And a rattling good read as well.

I’m sure most of you have read quite enough about the Amazon “1984″ incident; it received somewhat less coverage than the Techcrunch Twitter incident, which itself is saying something. I’m not going to comment directly on the merits and demerits of either incident here and now; they deserve considered responses and in the right context, not while emotions are high and views are unduly polarised.

Nevertheless, there are a few points I’d like to make.

One, we should use this opportunity to look at the idiocy of current copyright law. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about 1984′s copyright status:

Nineteen Eighty-Four will not enter the public domain in the United States until 2044 and in the European Union until 2020, although it is public domain in countries such as Canada, Russia, and Australia.

So let’s get this right. A book published sixty years ago, by an author who died the next year, may continue to be in copyright in some countries for another 35 years.

Publishing today is a global business, and the costs of reproduction and transmission are extremely low. Having regionally disparate copyright law is bad enough, trying to impose or police that law borders on insanity. So what happens if I buy a “post-copyright” copy of 1984 from a bookshop in Canada, and then cross over to the US to read it?

In a digital world, the very concept of copyright needs to be rethought. [And I am glad that many people, such as those at the Berkman Center, are doing just that.] What is happening now is as indefensible as region coding on a DVD, the desperate attempts of a historical monopoly to try and retain its rents.

A second point is best articulated via the example of Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. For sure he wrote it. For sure he was influenced by a negro spiritual called No More Auction Block, Dylan himself has admitted to that.

No More Auction Block is cited in literature as far back as 1873.

And No More Auction Block is shown as being under copyright to Special Rider Music in 1991.

What’s wrong with this picture?

In a digital world, we really need to revisit everything to do with IPR, inclusive of DRM and copyright and patents.

I woke up this morning with blepharitis in both eyes. Not sure how it happened, but there you are. A considerable inconvenience, having to reschedule everything, go to the eye hospital, queue up, get seen and diagnosed, pick up the prescription, get the medications from the pharmacy, then go home. Start applying the stuff.

You could say that I was a bear with a sore pair of eyes. I spent most of the day in bed with my eyes shut, willing the infection and inflammation to go away. [Which has begun to happen, thank God.]

Anyway, there I was with my eyes wide shut and nowhere to go and nothing I could usefully do; I had the opportunity to do something I rarely get time for, but which I enjoy greatly. I just let my mind wander.

It wasn’t long before I settled on a subject close to my heart, the whole issue of “content” and its associated awfulnesses, “audiences” and “digital rights”. That was probably triggered by a number of serendipitous events:

Firstly, I received my limited edition book and CD-R of Dark Night of the Soul (or DNOTS, as it gets called), the latest work by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse.

My copy came all shrinkwrapped, with a sticker on top. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw what the sticker said:

I heard about it. I paid for it. Yes, I paid a premium price for the book and the blank CD, the same way I paid for Arctic Monkeys (who started experimenting with the marketing process) or Radiohead (who tried to change how prices are discovered) or Prince (who really understood the Because Effect; he knew that digital copies of his music were essentially infinite, and that he personally represented the most valuable scarcity). [I've always felt that the only way I'm going to learn about how value is forming and morphing is by taking part in the process]. It didn’t take a degree in rocket science to figure out that digital downloads of DNOTS were going to be abundant, and that the physical book was likely to be scarce.

As Doc Searls taught me many years ago, Because Effects are all about abundances and scarcities; you make money with scarcity. You make money because of abundance. I’ve written about this repeatedly over the years; if you’re interested, take a look at this or this or this. And while you’re at it, you should probably re-read Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free, which I refer to here.

Secondly, while in ruminative mood yesterday, I read the Guardian article referred to above. Headlined Collapse in illegal sharing and boom in streaming brings music to executives’ ears, the article is well worth reading. [Don't worry about the gratuitous use of the word "illegal" before the word "download", that's just a generation thing. Like saying "social" before "media".]. The key takeaway from the article is that teenagers are beginning to move away from downloads and towards streaming.

Thirdly, no story is complete nowadays without a Twitter angle. As I said earlier, I spent much of the day with my eyes closed thinking about things. It takes a lot of effort to do very little, so I was hungry by the late afternoon. Waiting for an early dinner, I checked Twitter out and came across Tim O’Reilly’s RT of an excellent post by Andrew Savikas:

This is a very important post. Andrew Savikas, you have made my day.

People don’t buy LPs or tapes or CDs or even downloads in order to own anything. What they want to do is to listen to music. The business of the musician is to make that music, in ways that only musicians can.

Some people seem to have forgotten that.

As Andrew says:

Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they’re not paying for the goods they’re paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download.

Many people, from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh through to Larry Lessig and Terry Fisher, keep drumming this point home in their different ways. This is not about content. It’s about culture. The food and cooking pot analogies are very important. Again, Andrew Savikas makes that point very well in his post.

Read Andrew Savikas’ post. Then go and read Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free. Then come back and read Andrew Savikas’ post again. All this is a simple variant of Peter Drucker’s “People make shoes, not money”.

We should concentrate on giving customers what they want to pay for, rather than trying to force them to pay for what they don’t want to pay for. Artificial scarcities lead to artificial abundances.

An aside: For some time now, I’ve been researching and writing a book on information as seen from the perspective of food, unsurprisingly called Feed Me. Watch this space.

There’s a child in me somewhere, a child I encourage the existence of. And that child began giggling when the thought occurred to me:

What if the troglodytes finally began to realise that customers were scarce and digital music was abundant? What if they finally began to realise that downloads were an excellent way to advertise scarce things like concerts and physical memorabilia, as Prince figured out?

And what if the customers have given up and moved on, from the download to the stream?

It was never about owning content. It was always about listening to music.

It was never about product. It was always about service.

The customer is the scarcity. We would do well to remember that. And to keep remembering that.

A few decades ago, I read a book called AI: The Tumultous History of The Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier. In it, the late and brilliant Donald Michie is quoted as saying something like this:

AI is about making machines more fathomable and more under the control of human beings, not less. Conventional technology has indeed been making our environment more complex and more incomprehensible, and if it continues as it is doing now the only conceivable outcome is disaster.

More recently, when I wrote about complex adaptive systems, a colleague of mine, Reza Mohsin, pointed me towards another Michie quote:

If a machine becomes very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it has a mind of its own or not. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.

Last month’s tragedy involving the Air France flight over the Atlantic really brought this into stark relief, as I began to understand the implications of what may have happened. I quote from a Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago:

A theory is that ice from the storm built up unusually quickly on the tubes and could have led to the malfunction whether or not the heat was working properly. If the tubes iced up, the pilots could have quickly seen sharp and rapid drops in their airspeed indicators, according to industry officials.

According to people familiar with the details, an international team of crash investigators as well as safety experts at Airbus are focused on a theory that malfunctioning airspeed indicators touched off a series of events that apparently made some flight controls, onboard computers and electrical systems go haywire.

The potentially faulty readings could have prompted the crew of the Air France flight to mistakenly boost thrust from the plane’s engines and increase speed as they went through possibly extreme turbulence, according to people familiar with investigators’ thinking. As a result, the pilots may inadvertently have subjected the plane to increased structural stress.

I stress that investigations are continuing, that the comments above are nothing more than theories at this stage.

Thankfully, not all events arising from the behaviour of complex adaptive systems are as tragic as the Air France crash. Some of them are downright comic. Take the accidental ‘takedown’ of YouTube by Pakistan early last year, where much of the world’s YouTube traffic was directed towards a page from the Pakistani ISP saying that YouTube access had been blocked; or the Skype meltdown in August 2007, where a large number of Skype supernodes were rebooted, after downloading Vista patches, at a time of very high activity. Others range from the Northeast Blackout to more recent gmail outages.

I spent some time yesterday evening with Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd and @defrag_ami, after the end of reboot11. The evening’s valedictory keynote had been given by Bruce Sterling, and I’d found it somewhat darker and more cynical than I would have preferred. Stowe felt that I should have seen it in a more satirical light, and he’s right. He reminded me that he himself taken a similar tack the previous year at reboot10, suggesting to the Utopians in the crowd that not all problems have solutions.

[Incidentally, I will always remember the Bruce Sterling talk as the one where he introduced the comic device of "my dead grandfather", exhorting us not to concentrate solely on climate change ideas where our efforts will always be beaten by the relative performance of our dead ancestors.]

Understanding when and why a problem becomes intractable is an art not a science, something that two close friends (and erstwhile colleagues) Malcolm Dick and Sean Park have managed to teach me over the years. Neil Gershenfeld, alluded to something similar in his book When Things Start to Think. While discussing the work of Ed Lorenz, Neil says:

The modern study of chaos arguably grew out of Ed Lorenz’s striking discovery at MIT in the 1960s of equations that have solutions that appear to be random. He was using the newly available computers with graphical displays to study the weather. The equations that govern it are much too complex to be solved exactly, so he had the computer find an approximate solution to a simplified model of the motion of the atmosphere. When he plotted the results he thought he had made a mistake, because the graphs looked like random scribbling. He didn’t believe that his equations could be responsible for such disorder. But, hard as he tried, he couldn’t make the results go away. He eventually concluded that the solution was correct; the problem was with his expectations. He had found that apparently innocuous equations can contain solutions of unimaginable complexity. This raised the striking possibility that weather forecasts are so bad because it’s fundamentally not possible to predict the weather, rather than because the forecasters are not clever enough.

Which brings me to the kernel for this post. Tunguska. For those of you who’ve never heard the word, the Tunguska event is something that happened over a hundred years ago, in a part of the Tunguska river region in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, Russia. There was a massive explosion, a large swathe of forest was destroyed, trees were reduced to matchsticks.

Recent research suggests that “clouds that form at the poles after shuttle launches are due to the turbulent transport of water from shuttle exhaust”. The ‘two-dimensional turbulence” model put forward by Michael Kelley and his team at Cornell is fascinating, insofar as it suggests a plausible reason for the Tunguska event.

I’d already been intrigued by the connection between aviation and clouds. I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Doc Searls, who has taken pains to try and educate me on the relationships between some of the cloud formations I see today and the contrails of aircraft.

So I did some personal research. Nothing significant, just a little digging around, mainly through Wikipedia. In the Tunguska event article, there’s alist of ten other events in the last 100 years where the symptoms suggested significant meteorite airburst. Of the ten, two had an explosive yield in excess of 10 kilotons.

We had the “Eastern Mediterranean Event” on June 5, 2002, and the Lugo, Northern Italy event on January 19, 1993. So I tried to correlate this with any significant space activity. And this is what I found. STS-111 was launched on June 5, 2002, with a UTS time remarkably close, and on the right side of, the eastern Med event. Earlier, STS-54 splashed down on January 19, 1993, again remarkably close to, and on the right side of, the Lugo incident.

Intriguing. Not conclusive, but intriguing nevertheless.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more complex, as we represent physical things as virtual abstracts, then use software to operate and manipulate the virtual models.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more connected, as devices and sensors proliferate while being reduced to nothing more than nodes on a network.

We live in a world where people are happy making snap decisions on limited and superficial information, where conclusions are drawn and propagated on the flimsiest of bases.

We need to be careful. Careful to make sure we do our root cause analysis correctly. Careful to ensure we have the right feedback loops in place for learning, so that recurrence is properly and sustainably prevented.

For all this we need patience and tolerance like we’ve never had before, and an avoidance of judgmental behaviour.

Maybe the continuing advance of complex adaptive systems means that we need to increase our understanding of the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

[While reading the wikipedia article on the prayer, I could not help but enjoy the reference to a Mother Goose rhyme with similar sentiments:

For every ailment under the sun

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.