Category: DRM and IPR

Four Pillars: The Power of Context

checkershadow illusionHave you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

  • The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
  • Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
  • The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

7 seconds of fame: a parable for our times

There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.

Ninja KittenThey’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.

Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in the video as well.

They were not happy. They complained to the head office of the company that did the plagiarising. And the company gracefully apologised and settled out of court. The band gave some of the proceeds to charity, and said they would spend the rest on themselves.

So far so good. What makes this a parable for our times?

The plagiarism apparently took place in Argentina, where the theme and the tune were used for a TV ad.

So how did the band find out? Fans of theirs, fans they didn’t know they had, left comments on the YouTube clip.

Wow.

Linus’s Law in operation. Given enough eyeballs……

[An aside: Their music might not be to everyone’s taste, but do take a look at their web site. Why? Here’s an extract from their “bio”

At the dawn of the new millennium a revolution was underway which would change the world for ever.

Joel and Alex Veitch from rathergood.com were men on a mission. Men wild-eyed with the crazed pursuit of their obsession. Men who loved the moon, U-Boats and Zeppelins. But above all else, men who loved kittens. Kittens.. OF ROCK!

Their mission to subjugate the world to the utopian kitteny vision of the future was well underway, but there was one ingredient missing. And that missing ingredient was…… the unstoppable, unbelievable power of rocksteady skanking ska punk pop beats.

Unbeknownst to them, at the same time four battle-hardened, bloodied and weary gaijin Warriors Of Rock staggered from Japan to the shores of Great Britain. Exactly like the Seven Samurai, but with less Samurais.

And less swords

And more musical instruments. (And also they weren’t actually Japanese like the 7 Samurai were)……

Nuff said.

Continuing the ramble in open spaces amidst walled gardens

Cory pointed me towards this article in the New York Times, headlined Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music. [An aside: The retarded hippie in me just cannot comprehend the use of the word “contemplate” in a context where “navel” and “lint” are absent…]

Where was I? Oh yes, the New York Times article. Here are a few snippets from there:

Publicly, music company executives say their systems for limiting copies are a way to fairly compensate artists and other copyright holders who contribute to the creation of music.

But privately, there are signs of a new appreciation in the industry for unrestricted copies, which could be sold as singles or through subscription services or made freely available on Internet sites that support advertising.

The EMI Group said last week that it would offer free streaming music on Baidu.com, the leading Web site and search engine in China, where 90 percent of music is pirated. EMI and Baidu also agreed to explore developing advertising-supported music download services. This summer EMI licensed its recording to Qtrax, an ad-supported music distribution service.

I think there are two things here worth observing:

One, ad-based selling of singles is not as outrageous as it sounds. Ad-based selling of anything doesn’t sound that outrageous. Just look at Google. There is something Because-Of-Rather-Than-With about it that makes the model attractive. I can get something for free or at a reduced price, if I rent my eyeballs out. [In fact that is what I expected the iPhone to do; like any other handset, I can get it free or subsidised from a lock-in provider, or I can pay the unsubsidised price. But what do I know?]
Two, look at what happened when Sabeer Bhatia launched Hotmail, or when Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis let Skype loose. The revenue lock inherent in a particular business model just went and exited stage left, followed by a bear. But the new business model made money. In a strange kind of way, maybe that’s what Because-of-Rather-Than-With is about. Making money differently.

Someone will do this. I’m not sure “content owners”, or for that matter Wall Street, really understand the power behind today’s groundswell of opinion against bad DRM and bad IPR. Those walls will crumble. I love my Macs, I love my iPods, but I will not love them forever. iTunes will have to change. I will keep buying iPods because I want to, but from now on only if I don’t have to.

A related issue. I’m sad to miss the VRM meeting I had hoped to attend: doctor’s orders… I wish the participants every success. I think that what Doc and gang are working on is absolutely crucial, and in the current context it made me wonder about something:

If marketing as we knew it doesn’t exist any more, and if trusted recommendations are the new marketing…… Every one of us has so much “advertising consumption capacity”, and it all gets converted into iBalls or something like that. We start our lives with so much iBalls each. I spend my iBalls as I feel like: buy music, watch movies, read articles,  whatever. Sometimes I run out, I can buy spare iBalls from my next door neighbour. Or sell them.

It’s just capacity trading. But as human beings in markets, having Cluetrain conversations. Today’s been a Cluetrain day for me, for a variety of reasons.

Just a thought.

Gaps in the market, in the open spaces amidst walled gardens

You may have figured out that I was born and raised in Calcutta. Lived there from 1957 to 1980. For much of that time, the roads there were less than perfect. So much so we used to joke that, when confronted with a particularly poor road, the smart way to drive was to stay in the potholes, avoiding the little bits of road that loomed up every now and then.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Which is why, when we have walled-garden approaches to digital music sales, people find a way to operate in the open spaces. Take a look at this article in today’s Wired News, where Josh Madell, one of the co-owners of Other Music, gets interviewed by Eliot Van Buskirk.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Madell: We will be selling high-quality files without DRM copy protection (our music is encoded at 320 Kbps rather than 192, the iTunes model, so the sound will be much better). All our pricing is not set yet, but we will definitely have to be a little more expensive than iTunes — probably $10.99 per album rather than $9.99. I hope we can more than make up for the price with our selection, service, knowledge, features and, of course, the quality files. As for the label deals, this business works on percentages; you split revenue with the label for sales, and typically labels make 65 to 70 percent of the retail price.

If you want to stay informed of their plans, here’s the link. In case you missed it, an earlier story about MP3s and DRM by the same author is also worth a read. Link.

And if you have no idea what kind of store Other Music is, then take a look at this video.

Tell me what you come here for, boy

Sean’s having trouble finding vendors that try to Keep the Customer Satisfied; in fact he seems to be doing better at finding Deputy Sheriffs, according to his recent post.

Deputy Sheriff said to me
Tell me what you come here for, boy.
You better get your bags and flee.
You’re in trouble boy,
And now you’re heading into more.

Sean’s example of CNBC.com and its archives policy made me wonder about something. Why would anyone do something like that? Why would anyone take something that was already made available for multiple devices and then pay to reduce the market opportunity?

Three possibilities:

  • One, incompetence. They didn’t know they were doing the restricting.
  • Two, greed. They were paid to use a walled garden.
  • Three, line-of-least-resistance. They could not find a way of implementing their DRM without restricting choice further.

Even the optimist in me thinks it is possibility 3. After all, we live in a world where people can come up with rank stupidities such as Region Coding.