Category: Four pillars

More on Jobs and DRM and ostriches and sand

ostrichesI could never have predicted it. Obviously there’s a lot of buzz about what Steve said; no surprise, some people want him to run for President now.

What wasn’t obvious to me was the nature of the buzz. It isn’t about the “what” of the argument, removal of DRM. It isn’t about the “how” of the argument, the process by which we are going to see the removal of DRM.

Surprisingly, much of the debate has been about the “why”. Looking for deep philosophical reasons (or for that matter deep-pocketed business reasons) that would explain why Steve said what he did. [Reminds me of Jim Morrison and Mr Mojo Risin].

Yesterday, we had many people commenting on the Europeanness of the Big Four music-related “content owners” ….. suggesting that Steve had some ulterior motive for attacking Europe. What tosh. Suitable only for the ostriches who think that Steve’s attitude towards DRM was about music and music alone.

Now today, I’ve seen more unusual variants on the story. Mr Jobs did what he did because the “European” regulator was going to insist on it anyway; tosh again. The unadulterated variety. Only suitable for the ostriches who think that “European” regulators have some unforseen power and efficacy.

And there’s a third group who believe that Jobs can’t do it anyway, accusing him of playing to the galleries with zero downside.

I prefer not to look for hidden agendas and conspiracies and vested interests. That’s as bad as expecting people to behave rationally…..

So what do I think? I think that Jobs has worked out that implementing DRM will not scale. That the experience he’s had with Vista (yes, Vista) and with the iPhone has finally irked him beyond tolerance. That he recognises DRM for what it is, a Path Pollutant. And that he sees an opportunity to stop the pollution.

Strangely enough, Vista may prove to be a real boon in this respect. Finally showing people what a load of $%£ DRM is, how difficult it is to implement, how terrible the impact on the common man, and how futile the effort anyway.

Personally, I like what Cory said about it. Go take a look. Particularly the Disney bit.

The walls are coming down. And the gardens are getting connected again. Not channelled.

Web 2.0 and DRM

With the Steve Jobs missive yesterday, everyone’s talking about DRM. And I’ve been listening. One of the things that occurs to me is that the proponents of DRM are often the opponents of Web 2.0; it’s not clear to me whether this is due to a lack of understanding, an inbuilt animus against “openness” in general or something else. One way or the other, I feel it can’t hurt to expand our understanding of Web 2.0.

Which brings me to this fabulous video by Michael Wesch of KSU. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop whatever you’re doing and take a look. It’s only 5 minutes long and well worth it.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Towards the end of the video, Professor Wesch talks about a dozen things we need to rethink. He lists them as:

Copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family and ourselves.

And in a way that’s what this blog is about. Almost.

I don’t think we need to rethink love, family and ourselves. I don’t think we need to rethink ethics. All we need to do is to regain what we’ve lost.

But for the rest: copyright, authorship, identity, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy and commerce (inclusive of sales, marketing and all forms of “relationship management”), I could not agree more with Michael.

Thanks as usual to RageBoy for reminding me of this while I was reading the Jobs article again and again.

One More Thing….

Yesterday Steve Jobs challenged “content owners” to walk away from DRM, and signalled Apple’s desire to live and participate in a DRM-free world. Great.

A day earlier, Apple announced that they’d settled their long-running suit with the Beatles. So we’re going to see Beatle songs available for download soon. Also great.

So Steve, why not go for broke and tell us today how you’re going to give us a SIM-free contract-free iPhone, with support for third-party applications?

My thanks to Kerry for correcting my headline, pointing me to the Wikipedia link and making some other really valuable suggestions for improving this piece.

Look what they’ve done to my song, ma

[With thanks to Ms Safka, and to Malcolm for alerting me to this story via his post here.]

[An aside: Would you believe Melanie turned 60 earlier this week? Happy belated birthday.]

In a HotNews post earlier today, Steve Jobs opened up (pun intended) with his views on DRM. Well worth a read. For me, the most telling quote was this:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

I am aware that there have been attempts to develop DRM systems for CDs, as discussed here. But they were (thankfully!) catastrophic failures.

This whole DRM thing, when put in the context of what Steve says, now reminds me of something else tangentially Apple-related.
Soon after iPods came out, we had this flurry of activity from some information security professionals saying things like “iPods should be banned from trading floors”. My natural counter at the time was “OK, provided we check every person in and out of the building, look into their briefcases or whatever passed for briefcases, scan and analyse their cellphones and PDAs, and so on.”

I likened it then to being asked to shut the attic window while the front door was not just wide open but barn-sized. I would not ban the iPods unless they “shut the barn door”.

And I guess that’s the way DRM now feels in the context of music. Shutting attic windows while barn doors  flap forlornly open.
Critics of Jobs may argue that CD sales are eroding fast and being replaced by digital downloads, and that stopping the illegal reproduction of digital tracks was therefore imperative. My answer?  No cigar. Not even close.

The damage done by poorly implemented DRM is damage that is being done to all and sundry. Damage that affects everyday people carrying out everyday activities. Damage that affects business and leisure, creativity and pleasure. Damage that extends way beyond music. Legitimate software doesn’t run. Legitimate subscribers can’t get access to digital things they’ve paid for. There are too many examples for me to continue to cite them here.

It’s been no secret that the drive for DRM has come from “content owners”. Even Bill Gates, someone who doesn’t automatically conjure up images of being the Godfather of Open, said so here a couple of months ago.

Take a look at Steve’s penultimate paragraph:

If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

It’s a classic Because Effect situation. We have numerous examples of publishers saying they’ve sold more books once they opened up to Google Search or Amazon Look Inside This Book or similar; numerous examples of musicians and bands being successful selling DRM-free downloads; I could go on but won’t.

The whole concept of an e-book failed, as far as I am concerned, for three reasons:

  • The hardware was too heavy.
  • The process was too unwieldy.
  • Reading a book was no longer a pleasure.

We appear to live in very strange times. Times when people in the hardware, software, media and entertainment industries spend enormous sums of money on making their products and services more “user-friendly”, more user-centred, simpler to use, more convenient. They know all the buzzphrases, so do their consultants. And vast sums get spent.

And then what do they do? They put poorly thought out DRM all over the place. Go figure.

Folks, this is not sustainable. We need new ways of paying for creative value. So go read Terry Fisher, go watch Larry Lessig, go surf Cory Doctorow, go pore over Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, go study the opensource movement. Go write to your local DJ. Go burn a disk.
Go do something.

Because the walls are coming down. They’re coming down.

On WTF and Yogi Berra and related stuff

I knew it, someone to come up with a way of making sure that people want their posts to be Flamed!

A couple of days ago, Dave Sifry wrote about a new feature in Technorati called WTF, which stood for Where’s The Fire?

I guess it means many things to many people, but to me it seems simple and worthwhile, a natural extension to the World Live Web, as Doc tends to call it. What is it? You write an explanation for something, anything, that you feel will help others. And then you let people vote for it. Your friends and family can vote for it, helping you kick-start the process. If you succeed, then it rises towards the top of the Technorati search response for the term you seek to explain.

When you do succeed, the entry you make has a little Flame next to it.

So in a way it’s Wikipedia. Each entry is an article, an explanation of something.

In a way it’s Firefly, it’s Amazon ratings, it’s StumbleUpon, it’s Digg. Collaboratively filtered information. A community popularity index.
In a way it’s Google. Ranking information that forms a searchable base and returning results according to some algorithm.

And in a way it’s Technorati. Working primarily in and around the blogosphere.

Some people have compared WTF as purely a Digg competitor. I guess it could become that. If we let it. Personally, I am not interested in yet another way of ranking news stories per se, and that’s what Digg seemed to become. I’m completely uninterested in what Paris Hilton or Britney Spears get up to.
All this reminds me of my favourite Yogi Berra saying:

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

If I’ve read Dave correctly, it’s up to us what WTF becomes. To me it represents a golden opportunity to try and solve something, a problem that Wikipedia has not been able to solve so far.

The problem of wisdom-of-crowds versus expertise. Something I’ve written about many times before, one of my pet subjects.

If we use WTF as a means of “voting” for articles on specific subjects, and we make sure that Linus’s Law is made to hold …. there are enough eyeballs …. then maybe we could get somewhere different. The original article writer remains the creator and editor, but the comments made on the article are visible as well. Who knows, maybe the comments themselves get WTFed, with the leading 25 comments always visible.

I think we can come up with something that’s harder to game. No Googlebomb equivalent. No editorial frenzies. I’m not entirely sure why, but there is something about WTF that appeals to me. It may have to do with the fact that overt control is being passed to all of us.

[An aside. A few decades ago, the company I was working for sent me on a Public Speaking course. It was a pretty expensive one, video tapes and playbacks and all that jazz. The guy who ran it was meant to be the guy who trained Margaret Thatcher; a significant portion of the course was spent looking at real footage of Reagan and Thatcher et al; the rest was spent cringing as you watched yourself on tape and got critiqued by all and sundry.

While we covered a lot of material on things like linguistic style and projection and body language and stuff like that, we spent a great deal of time discussing the “devices” available to public speakers. While all this was interesting, what really struck me was something altogether different.

How, according to the course leader, politicians had only one objective: to say something meaningful yet catchy enough to make one of the top three headlines in the evening news. The age of soundbites.]

As I write this, I hear that Digg have stopped publishing their list of top contributors, because people were beginning to game that. There was a market forming, people were paying the guys who showed they could get a story to fly.

As long as we create bottles we will have bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are there to be gamed.

How can we avoid this? We have to make sure there are enough eyeballs.
Each WTF post is a story, part of a conversation. Each has the potential to be a Global Microbrand, as Hugh MacLeod is wont to say. Each has the ability to rise in value within the market where such conversations are held, via the WTF votes. After all, markets are conversations. [Incidentally, when are we going to see Cluetrain 2.0? ]

In the meantime, I’m going to do my best to support WTF. That’s the only way I can learn about such emergent phenomena.