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.

A Sunday stroll

Larry Lessig and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh have both spent a great deal of time trying to get all of us to understand one thing: that the law as it stands is completely inappropriate for today’s culture, especially today’s digital culture.

If you’re not into mashups and your music isn’t a smorgasbord of samples and you don’t think authors should plagiarise (even if you do like your Shakespeare), phrases like “digital culture” may leave you unmoved. This is understandable, but it gets harder if you have Generation M children. They won’t let you be that tolerant.

Take a look at this site, for example: When Graphic Artists Get Bored. In fact go to Glumbert every now and then, just to make sure you don’t get too staid.

Incidentally, I was thinking of putting up WTFs for terms like Generation M, The Because Effect, Cluetrain and so on. Any views?

beetle nut

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.

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

On features and bugs

I told you I enjoyed reading Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg’s recent book; I told you I was going to start reading his blog, Wordyard.

I kept my word. And I’m still enjoying it. To give you a for-instance, here’s a quote from a piece Scott wrote on MySpace and success:

Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.

Maybe we’re really going to see something different after all, as the software industry discovers co-creation and something analogous to user-generated-something-as-long-as-it’s-not-content.

Scott’s comment makes me think. Think about three things.

  1. today’s safety valves are tomorrow’s bottlenecks as we move closer to the customer. Safety is in the eye of the beholder, the customer.
  2. one man’s feature is another man’s bug. As traditional marketing and sales move out of the way, and customers are left to discover value for themselves, we are going to see a number of such unintended consequences.
  3. these two things are going to accelerate as the customer acquires the tools of production and co-creation.

I’m going to enjoy watching what happens to today’s abominations in IPR and DRM as this gathers momentum.