Let me take a random list of events, some current, some not-so-current:

• Jason Fortuny and his nefarious Craigslist “experiment”
• Second Life being hacked
• Alarms about Bebo and MySpace
• Pushback against Facebook facilities
• Leaking of Google searches
• Confidential records being leaked accidentally
• “Pretexting” to hack into confidential records
• Embarrassing e-mail leaks

Lots of leaks. Lots of leaks that affect Web 2.0 companies. Lots of worried people. What is it they have in common? [No, please do not start a conspiracy theory for all this; if you feel like that, then please take your Grassy Knoll and park it in the Mare Tranquillitatis….]

Trust. Yes, again, it’s all about trust.

People are comfortable with sharing all kinds of things, via social networking sites, via Flickr, via blogs, via last.fm, via LibraryThing, whatever. They go further, they share feed lists using OPML, share sites they visit via StumbleUpon, the list goes on and on.

So what’s the big deal? Why do people get so upset with the leaks mentioned above? It’s not as simple as “people don’t mind good things coming out, they don’t like bad things coming out”. For example, “Black” credit information has been shared for much longer than “white”. So what is it?
Trust.

It appears to me that sharing of digital information takes place when four trust questions are answered correctly:

• Did the person or group tell you that the information was being collected?
• Did you agree to it being collected?
• Did they promise you not to share it with others?
• Do you have recourse if they fail to keep that promise?

The questions and answer need not be explicit, but they must, at the very least, be tacitly agreed.

This trust, even if based on tacit agreements, is very specific. It is between a person and a group. That group may be a group consisting of one person. A small community. A firm. Whatever.

Which brings me to my musing. Two questions:
If information is power, and personal information has value, then you can aggregate this information to get greater value. Can such aggregated information reach monopoly levels, become an antitrust issue? Can we start expecting antitrust rulings based on “information power share”?

This information, with all its power, gains that power at least partially as a result of a tacit agreement between the information donor and the information aggregator. How does this affect M&A? Take a hypothetical example. Say I’m comfortable with sharing purchase patterns with Company A but not with Company B. So I have an agreement with Company A but not with B. Then B tries to buy A. Do I get my information back? What happens?

If we take this to its logical conclusion, then take a look at government departments. We share information with them, allow them to collect it and store it and do various unspeakable things to it, on a tacit agreement. No unauthorised sharing. Which is why people like EFF and ACLU are so up in arms with what happens with, say, medical and psychiatric records.

I can see only one way out. But I want to see what others think.

There’s a fascinating article by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz in the latest New Scientist. Yes, of course it’s hidden behind a paywall, what did you expect? Here’s the stub.

I quote from the article:

• Locking up products with patents is an unfair and ineffective way to reward innovation.
• There is a growing sentiment that something is wrong with the system governing intellectual property.
• Recent years have seen a strengthening of IP rights…..The changes have been promoted especially by the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries, and by some in the software industry….
• …[some] patents take what was previously in the public domain and “privatise” it — what IP lawyers called the new “enclosure movement”.

And finally:

• In any system, someone has to pay for research. In the current system, those unfortunate enough to have the disease are forced to pay the price, whether they are rich or poor. And that means the very poor in the developing world are condemned to death.

I think we need something different. Whether it’s a new form of tax, a voluntary donation or a prize, or even all three, we have to stop this madness. It is unenforceable, wastes resources, gives IT a bad name because of all the unintended consequences of putting in poorly-thought-out DRM. And in some cases it is immoral.

And on to Vancouver, where Nettwerk are based. Clarence Fisher told me about this via his blog; thanks, Clarence!

Fundamentally, Terry McBride and gang at Nettwerk, having already challenged a number of traditional models in the music business, now go a step further. Put the album up for sale on MySpace. Give people the tools to play with it, remix it “their” way, do what they like with it. Encourage them to upload their remixes. And get the original band to comment on them. Co-creation.

Here’s the Wired article that covers the phenomenon. A few choice quotes:

• “The labels were never in the business of selling music,” says David Kusek, vice president of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and coauthor of The Future of Music. “They were in the business of selling plastic discs.”
• Musicians generally make very little from the sale of their records. The costs of production, marketing, and promotion are charged against sales, and even if they go multiplatinum and cover those costs, their cut of any extra revenue is usually less than 10 percent. On top of this, the labels typically retain the copyrights to the recordings, which allows them to profit from the musicians’ catalogs indefinitely.
• “The future of the business isn’t selling records,” McBride says. “It’s in selling music, in every form imaginable.” 
• ….the new model frees him and his artists from the overgrown bureaucracy of the music industry, and that means more money for everyone. He can book tours, sell ringtones, peddle songs to advertising agencies and, yes, give away free downloads without any of the complex, multiparty negotiations that once gummed up the works. “It used to take months to sell a frickin’ ringtone to Bell Canada,” McBride says. “With BNL, one phone call gets the job done.”
• “What other business splits up its key assets and sells them to separate businesses that wind up in conflict with each other?” asks Duncan Reid, a venture capitalist who now helps run UK-based Ingenious Music.

Read the article for yourself. And see why changes are necessary, and why people like Terry McBride and BNL and Nettwerk do what they do.

Have you ever had that feeling of being “sensitized” to a particular issue or concept, so much so that you find traces and images of it everywhere you look? I get that sometimes. It doesn’t last long, otherwise it could become an obsession.

Take today. There I was, laid up with the ‘flu, feeling like not doing very much. So I read and listened to music. And everywhere I looked, I saw IPR issues come streaming out.

So pardon the apparently random walk, and see for yourself what’s going on. This time I’ve broken it down to separate posts, hope that helps.
Free, but only for a while 

Let’s start with that august body, the Royal Society. They’ve done something amazing. I quote from their web site:

• Nearly three and a half centuries of scientific study and achievement is now available online in the Royal Society Journals Digital Archive following its official launch this week. This is the longest-running and arguably most influential journal archive in Science, including all the back articles of both Philosophical Transactions and Proceeding
• For the first time the Archive provides online access to all journal content, from Volume One, Issue One in March 1665 until the latest modern research published today ahead of print. And until December the archive is freely available to anyone on the internet to explore.
• Spanning nearly 350 years of continuous publishing, the archive of nearly 60,000 articles includes ground-breaking research and discovery from many renowned scientists including: Bohr, Boyle, Bragg, Cajal, Cavendish, Chandrasekhar, Crick, Dalton, Darwin, Davy, Dirac, Faraday, Fermi, Fleming, Florey, Fox Talbot, Franklin (pictured), Halley, Hawking, Heisenberg, Herschel, Hodgkin, Hooke, Huxley, Joule, Kelvin, Krebs, Liebnitz, Linnaeus, Lister, Mantell, Marconi, Maxwell, Newton, Pauling, Pavlov, Pepys, Priestley, Raman, Rutherford, Schrodinger, Turing, van Leeuwenhoek, Volta, Watt, Wren, and many, many more influential science thinkers up to the present day.
• After December 2006 subscribers to our subscription packages (S, A and B) will enjoy privileged online access to the archives. Private researchers will also be able to access individual articles for a small fee per download. To request further information please contact the Royal Society at [email protected] or view package pricing which includes ordering information.

Eh? Or as my going-slightly-deaf South African Seven Foot Tall primary school PE teacher Mr Deefholts used to say when he wasn’t sure of what he’d heard, “How much?”.

A fabulous archive. Available electronically for the first time. Free to all. But only for two months.

So what do they think people will do? Such a fabulous collection, all beautifully archived electronically, and now this. I applaud what they’re doing till the end of the year, but am at a loss to work out why they’ve done it the way they’ve done it. They have charitable status. Many of the papers are way way out of any copyright, even in this Mickey Mouse Nonsense world. Many of the papers were donated to them. The costs of creating the electronic archives have been sunk. If they were strapped for cash, then Google would have done the archiving for free. If they want donations to preserve the originals, that’s OK as well. But this neither-fish-nor-fowl situation? Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of a Con Sul Tant.

Have you ever wondered why India don’t have a team at the World Cup finals? [Here I am being obdurate and pedantic and loving it…. there is only one Open. And there is only one World Cup. There is absolutely no need to have adjectives before those words. Tautology bordering on treason).

You would imagine that a country with a population in excess of a billion may just be able to scratch up a decent soccer team. If, like me, you were born and raised in Calcutta, you would understand it even less. Because Calcutta is a soccer-crazy city. I would suspect that the brand awareness of East Bengal, Mohun Bagan (the oldest soccer club in Asia, dating back to 1889) and Mohammedan Sporting are individually greater than that of Sony, Microsoft and Apple put together, across the state of West Bengal as a whole.

I was brought up to love sport. And to go watch it. We had no television in the house. In fact, when I left India in 1980, I’d only seen a TV programme three times. And I could remember each occasion vividly. At the USIS, when man landed on the moon in 1969. Watching “I Love Lucy”, one of the first programmes to be screened, and wondering what the fuss was about. And trying to watch a cricket match at a friend’s house some years later while the adults were busy having lunch and arguing about cars and petrol. That was it.

Back to soccer. As a child I’d been told that India had actually qualified for the World Cup Finals in 1950, only to be disqualified later for refusing to put boots on. And I’d filed it under my childhood equivalent of “urban myth”. But later on I found out the truth. One, India did qualify; but only because their  qualification opponents all withdrew. Two, India did not really get disqualified later; they withdrew because FIFA insisted that no player appear barefoot, and the Indian team weren’t having that. That sounds about as believable as the USA-England scoreline that year…. :-) Read all about it in Wikipedia here.
India is currently ranked 137th in the world, and have recently announced some sort of tie-up with Brazil, across a number of fronts, including soccer. Park that to one side for a while.
While studying the nurture-versus-nature debate, I came across The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, published recently. I have not done any more than skim it, I need time. But the elevator pitch appears to be, Nurture Wins. Motivation and Perseverance and Coaching and Training Wins. Every Time. But it takes as long as it takes, usually Ten Years. If you want to see a summary of the book, which resonates with a lot of other things I believe in, you could do worse than read the latest issue of New Scientist, which reviews it here, but all too briefly, the rest is behind a paywall.

So I thought to myself. India. World Cup Finals. Ten Years. Which means qualifying for the 2018 Finals. From 137th to Top 10 in a decade, because of Nurture.

You see, ever since I read Porter’s Comparative Advantage of Nations in 1990 (an aside, try linking to that book!), I’ve always believed I understood why, say, Pakistan produced excellent squash players, why Germany had no real golfers until Langer, why Sweden had no world-class tennis players until Borg. Availability and opportunity. The willingness and motivation may be there, but there needs to be much much more. Opportunity. Availability.

That’s why the web and social software excite me so much. Opportunity. Availability.