6174 time for content: there’s a train crash a-coming

the omens
are not goodWhy 6174? Read this article. I love the symmetry and chaos of numbers, and have been entranced by Kaprekar’s constant ever since I heard about it, too many decades ago. You could say that for four-digit numbers, when you apply Kaprekar’s operation, all roads lead to 6174. Which is the way I feel about “content” right now; we appear to be on a major collision course, and the omens are not good.

Why do I say this?

Humour me.

I’ve finally finished watching Larry Lessig speak at 23C3, the preferred abbreviation for the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress. Here’s a link to the video. Exhilarating. If you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to watch the clip; but make time for it, he speaks for about 45 minutes, and then there’s nearly half an hour worth of questions, including a very interesting discussion with someone I’ve assumed is John Perry Barlow.

Outside InnovationSeparately, I’ve finally finished reading Patricia Seybold’s latest book, Outside Innovation. I’d considered buying it, but something held me back. Then Gordon Cook reminded me, and so I looked again. Gordon knows what makes me tick, so I listen. And when I looked again, and saw that John Seely Brown recommended it, I had to read it. I’d read a telephone directory cover to cover if it came recommended by JSB. Seriously. The power of recommendations held by people you trust….

Seybold’s book is excellent, a good and honest structured look at what companies are doing to co-create value with their customers. Real companies, real customers, real takeaways. Maybe it was the effect of having watched Larry’s talk prior to reading the book, but the word “content” kept bouncing off the page and hitting me. I don’t particularly like that word.

And then it made me think.

So there’s a bunch of people who are building fortresses around “content”, using DRM and IPR and whatever other flag of convenience they want to fly under. For the sake of argument, let’s say they are all clustered around the slogan:

Content is King

Now I abhor most of the attempts by people to implement bad DRM and legislate for bad IPR, but I am always happy to pay for value received from someone who creates something. The basis and method of payment cannot be what it has been, but fundamentally I agree with “creativity is king” so I accept, grudgingly, that “content” has some power. I still don’t like the word though.

There’s another bunch of people who are walking around with a different mantra. Maybe some of them have even read Cluetrain. One way or the other, they’re into post-Nader consumerism, and they walk around saying:

The Customer is King

Now I’ve read Cluetrain, just once or twice :-) — and even without reading it, I would have no hesitation in agreeing that “the customer is king”.

So.

We have group A marching to Content is King.

We have group B marching to Customer is King.

So far so good.

Content is King.

Customer is King.

Content is King.

Customer is King.

Look carefully, and you will notice something weird about groups A and B.

Many people belong to both groups.

God’s in His Heaven, and All’s Well with the World.

Along comes group C, and they march to the sound of a different drummer. Syncopation? Their mantra is:

Consumer-Generated Creativity is King

Or, to use the words I detest, Consumer-Generated Content is King.

train wreckCustomer Content is King

Whoops again. That’s not the tune that Content is King is played to. That’s not the tune that DRM is played to. That’s what ASCAP didn’t figure out; that’s how BMI walked in, so eloquently described by Larry.

There’s a train crash a-coming.

Whoops.

Only the customer can make content king. We must all remember that.

Be careful what you wish for

from DVDs
to cigarettesThanks to Doc, I came across Mark Pilgrim’s post on A History of DVD Copy Protection. I have always found DVD Region Coding to be laughable, almost tantamount to fraud, so I loved the article. Read it and decide for yourself.

What I particularly enjoyed was how Mark moved from DVDs to cigarettes:

On a side note, this turn of phrase reminds me of a similar one told of the Liggett Group, formerly known as Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, the company that formerly manufactured Chesterfields, which I formerly smoked, before selling the brand to Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris. In fact, the last time I smoked Chesterfields was right around the time the brand was sold to Philip Morris. At one point, I had a pack of Liggett-branded Chesterfields that bore the history-making label, “Smoking is addictive.” Then the brand was sold to Philip Morris, and suddenly Chesterfields were no longer addictive. Or if they were, their packaging no longer admitted it. ;-)

All of which is a roundabout way of quoting an article I once read about Liggett — or rather paraphrasing, since I have long since lost track of the original in the infinite sands of time and bookmarks — which stated that Liggett had managed to lose an enormous amount of money, despite the overwhelming business advantage of having an addictive product.

The analogy to copy protection, if indeed there is an analogy to be made, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I followed Mark’s advice and did his reader exercise. And what I found was instructive (at least for me).

Let us assume that both cigarettes as well as DVDs are addictive products.

Let us also assume, for the sake of argument, that Smoking Kills labels on cigarettes are broadly analogous to Copy Protection on DVDs (whether in Region Coding form, RCE form or vanilla copy protection. Analogous because both devices serve to protect.

The analogy breaks from then on. Protect whom? At least in the cigarette case I can see the consumer being protected. But in the DVD case there’s no way of understanding just how the customer is protected.

There’s also the question about the agency that requires the protection to be implemented. In one case it is a regulator of sorts, in the other it is “self-governing”.

But it doesn’t matter. It all comes back at the end, just like Mark says.

Someone with an addictive product manages somehow to achieve two aims:

  1. make no money
  2. damage the customer

You know how I think. (b) will always lead to (a). It’s just a matter of time.

Alienated by Hollywood

I’m still trying to settle into a rhythm of doing as little as possible, something I’m not quite used to. I’m getting better at it, though.

One of the things I’ve decided to do is “desk research” into a murky area. That dark and gloomy space where copyright meets “content” and chains the strangest bedfellows together.

I want to do this by researching an event I know very little about. When I was around ten years old, one of the more esoteric topics in “cocktail party” conversations in Calcutta was a particular Satyajit Ray Hollywood episode. Definitely not something a schoolboy would get deeply into, but it stuck somewhere in my head anyway.
Apparently he went to Hollywood in 1967 on a mission, to sell a particular project. He wanted to direct a film called The Alien, based on a script he’d written. By the time he got to Hollywood, he found that his script had already (a) done the rounds (b) been copyrighted by someone else and (c) already been acquired by the studio he was dealing with.

a saga of calamity
happenstance
and hard luckHe found all this hard to believe. He left Hollywood, naturally, in very high dudgeon. That particular Calcuttan’s first experience of creativity meeting copyright was, shall we say, less than good.

Here’s an extract from his wikipedia entry, touching on this subject:

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled The Alien, based on his short story Bankubabur Bandhu (‘Banku Babu’s Friend’) which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando later dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata.[27] [28] Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray’s earlier script – Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg‘s movie would not have been possible without his script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.

If he were alive today, his views on Hollywood and copyright may have been interesting to hear. Who knows, he may even have made a film about it. Opensource.

Notwithstanding his experiences of Hollywood, he may have had more positive views about the digital world we live in. The state of the Satyajit Ray film archives seems deplorable despite the best efforts of a bunch of people, a saga of calamity and happenstance and hard luck. Just stuff that I found while digging around for the Alien script story.

The World Is FlatSuch tales of person A claiming person B’s copyright, and being paid for it in good faith by person C, still continue. The most recent I can remember is that of the cover illustration for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. The publishers did their bit, found the copyright holder and paid their dues. Wrong copyright holder, apparently. So the books were recalled and new covers issued.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us. When we finally figure out who gains from all this DRM guff. It’s not the creative guys. It’s not the consumers.

An apology

I posed a cricket trivia question at the end of a recent post. My multitasking skills weren’t up to it.

The question should have read:

Which five cricketers have done the treble of 3000 runs, 100 wickets and 100 catches at Test level?

Apologies to those of you who’ve been trying to come up with impossible answers.

Incidentally, the one part of the question I remembered easily was the answer, which I had memorised… and then I had to reconstruct the question from that answer.

Talking about reconstructing questions from answers, there used to be a competition in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I think it was on the radio. I was still in Calcutta, so all this came to me secondhand or even further removed.

This is all I can remember. They gave you a list of everyday answers to trivia questions. You had to come up with the most original question befitting any one such answer.

The runner up was:

The answer was Dr Livingstone I Presume. The question was “What is your full name, Dr Presume?”

The winner:

The answer was Crick. The question was “What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?”

Does anyone know where I can find out more about this competition?

Musing lazily about identity

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Who you are is a function of:

  • what you stand for
  • what you belong to (both blood as well as thunder)
  • what you like (and what you dislike)
  • what you’ve done (and what you’d like to do)

Sure there are many other things. Ways to contact you. The size of your wallet. All kinds of things that other people use to “define” you: your age, gender, marital status, number of dependents, address.

Interestingly, these mattered when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into. [If you’re interested in hearing a worthwhile rant on this subject, try and spend some time with Professor Richard Scase, “Futurescase” as he gets called. I’ve relished the privilege.]

Today, the marketers are in trouble. Socio-economic groupings mean jack when it comes to predicting purchase propensity. Long tails weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of.

In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality.

No man is an iland.

We are going to have villages and towns and cities where the computing device is communal. Where that communal device uses opensource software and open standards and open platforms and open open open.

And we’re going to have to work out what identity means there. Not identity from a narrow financial-transaction point of view. But identity in the context of sharing information. Digital information. Letters. Photographs. Films. Music. Books. Whatever.

Communal devices. Communal devices that work when the local power grid goes down. Communal devices that don’t go obsolescent in 18 months. Communal devices that do their bit about global warming.

Communal devices.

Hey, let’s be careful out there. This is why I am so concerned about the garbage that gets one in the name of DRM and IPR. Have you really tried to use a “family” PC after Windows 95? One that three or four people use regularly, who are happy to share their files. If only they could.

An aside, still about identity. When I look at startups, one of the things that I check out very carefully is how the core team got together. Did they grow up in the same neighbourhood? Hang out in the same places? Know the same people? Go to the same university?

I’ve always felt this is important. Unless the core has some independent grounding, some reason to be together, they’re going to come apart when trouble comes their way. And every startup will hit trouble sometime in the early years.

In similar vein, I tend to check out what makes a group come together. Take America. The folk rock band, I mean, the ones who gave us Don’t Cross The River and Ventura Highway. [And Horse With No Name and Sandman, but those are not my favourites…].

Do you know how they got together? They were all sons of US GIs stationed west of London, in Ruislip, Middlesex. Their mothers were all British. They attended the same school. They broke up before they really got started, in 1969. And then came together in time to savour their success.

Just goes to show.