Month: July 2009

Blowin’ in the Wind

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.

The customer is the scarcity

Every economic era is characterised by certain abundances and by certain scarcities; these change over time; yesterday’s abundances become today’s scarcities and vice versa. When I was a young child in India, cotton was plentiful and polyester scarce. People valued the scarce thing over the abundant thing: so the rich wore Terylene shirts and the poor wore cotton. Even though the Terylene shirts were overpriced uncomfortable non-absorbent non-breathable stick-to-your-back sweat producers.

Most of the time, the abundances and scarcities are natural, caused by explicable imbalances between supply and demand. So cotton was cheap in India and expensive in the UK, while polyester was cheap in the UK and expensive in India.

Sometimes the imbalances are artificial: monopolies and cartels and market power abuse and price-fixing and market-cornering are examples of such artificial imbalances. Most of these have been seen for what they are, and consequently declared illegal in most countries.

Not all artificial scarcities have been termed illegal as yet: the most glaring example is that of “intellectual property rights”, where something is made artificially scarce using the power of the state; no other rights depend exclusively on state intervention. Strange, that.

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The digital age has given rise to more and more artificial ways of creating and assuring scarcity. Computer ports are a classic example: when all the ports were hardware ports, scarcity was easy to understand. When the ports in question were software ports, the concept of scarcity was less easy to establish.

Analogue things are usually scarcer than digital things, since the cost of digital reproduction and transmission is extremely low. As Kevin Kelly said, the internet is one great copy machine. [if you’re a fan of KK, do take a look at some of his other essays in related areas: Better Than Owning is well worth a read, for example.

Two other Kevin Kelly essays stand out in this context: People Want to Pay and Why People Pirate Stuff. I quote from the Pirate essay:

[Game developer Cliff Harris asked the online world “Why do people pirate my games? And in the answers, …] He found patterns in the replies that surprised him. Chief among them was the common feeling that his games (and games in general) were overpriced for what buyers got — even at $20. Secondly, anything that made purchasing and starting to play difficult — like copy protection, DRM, two-step online purchasing routines — anything at all standing between the impulse to play and playing in the game itself was seen as a legitimate signal to take the free route. Harris also noted that ideological reasons (rants against capitalism, intellectual property, the man, or wanting to be outlaw) were a decided minority.

Similarly, one of the key points made in the Want to Pay essay is this:

People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship. Very primitive, but real.

There are some caveats in this urge to pay.

Paying has to be super easy, idiot-proof and frictionless. There can’t be hurdles. The easier it is to pay, the more eager people are to pay.

The price has to be reasonable. That means it has to be reasonable in relation to similar stuff that is free!

The benefits of paying have to be evident and transparent. This takes creativity to produce and work to convey simply. Unless the benefits of paying are obvious, paying is made difficult.

Every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. Port vulnerabilities will be exploited, as Microsoft users have found out to their cost. DVD players will be “chipped” to overcome the insanity of region coding on DVDs (which, by the way, is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen done). Music and film and book DRM will be hacked, as Jon Lech Johansen showed elegantly.

When I was a child, “English” films (which included those of both US as well as UK origin) tended to come out a year to eighteen months after release abroad. Not surprising in an analogue world, with very high production and distribution costs and a scarcity of copies as a result. Today, when there is an artificial gap between US and Indian or Chinese release, the artificial abundance kicks in. Piracy.

Protecting artificial scarcity is an expensive proposition, and ultimately a losing proposition. More and more people will volunteer time to help correct artificial scarcity, because they see it as path pollution, the desecration of core values by profane behaviour.

People see DRM as something that is an irritant, a pollutant, a time waster. They want to pay, but not at the price of artificially imposed inconvenience. There is also a key trust issue here: similar to the issues related to identity, privacy and confidentiality, there is a pervasive belief that those who use DRM will act more and more unreasonably.

Take Amazon. I like much of what the company does and stands for. The recent incident with Amazon and 1984 may not dent the company’s reputation overall, but many people will not buy a Kindle as a result. And I am one of them. Remotely-managed deletion of electronic copies of 1984 from people’s Kindles, copies that were legitimately paid for, is a monstrous thing to do. Incidents like “1984” will spur the pushback against DRM even more.

This post is not about the 1984 incident; although we will see consequences, the incident will pass. This post is about something far more important.

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[My thanks to Bergen Moore for the photo above.]

This post is about the customer. Customers are creative people who transform scarcities and abundances in strange and beautiful ways. If two-wheelers are abundant and four-wheelers are scarce, then a way will be found to make a two-wheeler behave like a four-wheeler.

As Dan Bricklin pointed out wonderfully in his book Bricklin on Technology, we must always remember that the role of the technologist is to build tools for people to use, not to constrain them from doing things. [incidentally, Dan’s partner-in-crime during the VisiCalc days, Bob Frankston, is an excellent source of learning as well. I have had the joy of listening to him on many occasions, count both him and Dan as personal friends. If you get the chance, do read Bob on Zero Marginal Cost and on Assuring Scarcity.

People are incredibly creative. If you plan for ten uses of a tool while designing it, you can rest assured that they will find an eleventh use. Take cooking as an example. And the concept of recipes.

Recipes are tools for the transfer of cultural enjoyment. They show some classic opensource behaviours, to the extent that NEA applies. For most recipes you can say: Nobody owns them. Everyone can use them. Anyone can improve them.

I love cooking. I speak to chefs regularly in order to find out how to make what they made. Sometimes they have cookbooks, and sometimes I buy the cookbooks. Why? Because it is convenient, and I am happy to pay for that convenience, for that service. Content is a service business, as Andrew Savikas points out eloquently. Sometimes I get the book signed by the author, triggering some of Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free generatives, especially those of authenticity and embodiment and patronage.

But what happens after I get the recipe verbally, or after I buy the book? I’ll tell you what happens. I do it my way.

I change things. I experiment with the ratios and quantities in the recipe; add ingredients, drop ingredients. Change the way it’s meant to be cooked. Pass on my learning, the comments of my guests. And learn from others as they do the same thing.

Can you imagine being told that you can’t share recipes with others? That you can’t change ingredients or quantities? That you can’t enrich, augment, mutate the ideas involved? In many ways that is what DRM and IPR is designed to do, prevent us from being creative. [Pharma and IPR is a whole separate subject, yet essentially related. I will cover that in a post on some other day].

Customers want to be creative, to experiment with things, to change things, to share what they learn, to learn by sharing.

We are fast approaching an age when many analogue things will become virtual, digital, easily copied.

We can choose to invest time and effort in making digital things harder to copy: we can choose to create artificial scarcity, and lose.

Or we can choose to invest time and effort in making digital things easier to consume, to share, to enrich. And to pay for.

The customer is willing to pay. If we get the consumption model, the paying model, the sharing model, right.

The customer is the scarcity. Let’s focus on valuing that scarcity, on giving the customer what she wants when, where and how she wants it. With the right consumption and payment and sharing models.

In praise of fleshy fruit and the power of the Web



Nongu, originally uploaded by Kamala L.

I love the web.

There I was, quietly watching the golf at Turnberry, occasionally switching over to the cricket at Lord’s, seated in my favourite armchair at home.

Felt a little peckish, so I went and got myself a handful of fresh lychees. Peeled each one carefully so as not to have the juices spurt everywhere. Extracted the seed carefully. Then savoured the taste of the fruit, one by one. A heavenly fruit.

Which led me on to thinking of other exotic fruit, fleshy and juicy and oh-so-tropical. I began to recall childhood memories of eating a very unusual fruit as a young boy, the only name I could remember was the Tamil word we used at home for it: Nongu.

Now I haven’t seen a nongu for forty years. Had no idea what its “Western” name was.

Today it doesn’t matter. Google the word. [So what if the word is in Tamil?] Inspect the results, find there’s one that leads straight to Flickr. Find what I’m looking for in Flickr, notice I now have an option to “blog this”. Take one minute to configure Flickr for posting straight to my WordPress blog. And there you have it.

The fruit of the palmyra tree, resplendent and peeled and ready to eat. Something I will definitely do next time I am in Madras during the right season.

So thank you Google, Flickr, WordPress, for the tools to make this possible.

Thank you Kamala L for posting the photo on Flickr and making it possible for me to write this post.

Thank you community at large for sharing stuff on the web, making it possible for people like me to participate and share.

The Death of the Download?

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.

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

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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.

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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:

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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.

Thinking about the web with respect to good and bad news

I was born into a journalistic family in the fifties. My father was a journalist, as was his father. The family business was journalism. Financial journalism. Their models of vertical integration included owning a printing press and shares in ad agencies and restaurants. Which meant that as a child, I was pretty used to hearing (and later taking part in) discussions about various aspects of journalism. And some of it intrigued me then, and continues to intrigue me now.

Take the phrase “Bad news sells”. I’ve personally never really liked the phrase. It was brought home to me as a 13 year old when I first heard 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night by Simon and Garfunkel.  Was it really true that people prefer bad news? Why should that be? It didn’t make sense to me.

The Deadhead free-thinking folk-rock loving tie-dyed longhaired tree-hugging Sixties child in me never let that phrase settle in me. I never wanted to believe that people preferred to hear bad news.  And you know something? I still don’t want to believe it.

A few years ago, the Pew Research Center For The People and The Press published something called The News Interest Index, 1986-2007: Two Decades of American News Preferences. The entire study is worth reading. From my perspective, three key points emerged:

  • One, people appeared most interested in news about disasters, then about money, then about conflict. Political and “tabloid” news followed, while “foreign” news elicited the least interest.
  • Two, that interest in “money” was growing, it was the fastest-growing topic.
  • Three, the topic of lowest interest was that related to “foreign” news.

Sean Park, an old colleague and close friend, used to start to explain many aspects of the more esoteric workings of investment banks with the phrase “fear and greed”. And the Pew report seemed to indicate that he was bang on the money as usual.

My perspective on the role of fear in news was at least partially informed by reading two books in recent years: The Science of Fear and Scared to Death ; George Lakoff’s anchors and frames were probably also a key influence, building on the seeds planted in my brain by erstwhile colleague James Montier.

It didn’t matter what I did, I still didn’t want to believe that people preferred bad news to good; I still wanted to believe that given the choice, people would prefer to hear good news.

Very recently I came across an intriguing paper published in 1996 by Chip Heath who was then at the University of Chicago and is now at Stanford. It raised the question “Do People Prefer to Pass Along Good or Bad News? Valence and Relevance of News as Predictors of Transmission Propensity”. I quote from the summary:

…..People typically prefer to pass along central rather than extreme information (i.e. news that is less surprising rather than more surprising). However, when confronted with extreme information, the results support a preference for congruence, that is, people prefer to pass along news that is congruent with the emotional valence of the domain in question. This means that in emotionally negative domains, contrary to some theoretical predictions, people are willing to pass along bad news even when it is exaggeratedly bad. At the same time, however, people transmit exaggeratedly good news in emotionally positive domains…..

I find this whole concept of domain-specific emotional valence fascinating. I start asking myself questions like “What is the emotional valence of the web?” “What about slashdot?” “And what about Twitter?”. For many years now, I’ve taken part in many discussions about the nature of the web, and, influenced heavily by friend and mentor Doc Searls, I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea that the web is a place. A place made up of places, places that are zero distance apart.

The web has places of light and places of extreme darkness as well. I like spending time in places where people build each other up, say encouraging things to each other. I like spending time in places where people pass along tips and recommendations about people they like, books they like, music they like, food they like, restaurants they like. Positive things.

There’s an abundance of bad news out there already, in all shapes and colours and sizes. So why add to it?

I think that places like Twitter are good-news places, with a positive emotional valence. More accurately, the subset of Twitter that I inhabit, made up of the people I follow and the people who follow me, that subset is a place with a positive emotional valence. So we tend to pass on good news, not bad.

It doesn’t mean that bad news does not get passed by Twitter, or by my subset perspective. Of course there’s bad news in Twitter. But there’s also humour. And satire. And old-fashioned good-neighbourliness. And a whole lot of good news.

Twitter tells us about the miracle on the Hudson as quickly as it tells us about the crash over the Atlantic. Let’s keep it that way, let’s make sure we keep the web a place where good news is spread, not just bad. Where we help each other. Where we’re kind to each other. Where we build each other up. Maybe it’s because so many of the people I know are themselves children of the Sixties, maybe it’s why I get accused of being utopian and rose-spectacled. You know what? I don’t care.

There’s a whole world out there doing just the opposite. So let’s keep the web different.