AUGUST 27, 2009

As a voracious consumer of internet media, I’m going to try to post, on a regular basis, the most interesting things I’ve read over the course of the week. Here goes!

• Is anyone surprised that as our lifestyles become more varied, increasingly-weirder insurance products are coming to market? Two from this week: Rapture insurance for the pets of believers, and fantasy football insurance, which covers league fees and other expenses in the event that a highly-rated player goes down to injury. I really could have used this after I drafted Tom Brady last year. (h/t to Tyler Cowen for both links)
• In times where everything looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket, it’s tough to keep perspective on just how much things have changed in the last 100 years. This chart, from Berkeley professor Brad DeLong, illustrates how radically different our day-to-day lives are from those of our great-great-grandparents. My favorite stat: 25% (!) of households had boarders or lodgers living under the same roof in 1900.
• Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey has a long thought piece on the social history of the MP3 - an investigation into how, exactly, the MP3 has changed the way we interact with music. It’s pretty dense, but worth a read. A lot of Harvey’s piece re-hashes the intellectual property debates that have been raging since the mid-90’s, but one particularly interesting bit is about the social cohesion and shared experience that music once offered. Chances are, if I whistle the chorus of “Can’t Buy Me Love”, someone in the room will be able to sing the words. But what about a song from my current favorite band? Maybe not.
• Time has a piece in this week’s edition entitled “The Real Cost of Cheap Food“. To those familiar with the sustainable food movement, there’s not too much new here, but it’s fascinating to watch new ideas bubble up from a few fringe activists, to academics, to publications geared towards intellectuals like The New York Times magazine, and finally to general-interest, establishment periodicals like Time.

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]

JULY 16, 2009

A little TechCrunch/Twitter drama is playing out this week in the blogtwitterverse.

Apparently, about a month ago, a Twitter employee’s email account was hacked, and sensitive business information about Twitter - including business plans, meeting notes, salary data, financial projections, and partner agreements - was obtained by the hacker.  There was other, more personal information in the mix - salary data, names of people who had interviewed at Twitter, etc. All of that information was sent in a zip file via email to TechCrunch, a well-known tech blog. It now appears that TechCrunch intends to publish the hacked Twitter information, minus the personally sensitive stuff.

On Tuesday, TechCrunch first posted that it would publish the documents. That post prompted over a thousand responses, many negative, and also prompted TechCrunch to post an update, responding to the responses. TechCrunch’s position is simple: it received the information, the information isn’t personally embarrassing to any individual, the information is interesting, and it is going to share it. Even though the documents were obtained through unethical means, TechCrunch sees no ethical dilemma in making it public. The documents will eventually get out, it reasons, so why not be the one to publish it?

This sentence seems to sum up TechCrunch’s position the best:“[I]t certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortious, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it’s simply news.”

Late yesterday afternoon, TechCrunch posted Twitter’s financial forecast through 2013 - clearly interesting reading for anyone who has been watching the microblogging site’s meteoric rise and wondering how it plans to make money. In the post, TechCrunch suggested that it plans to post more of the Twitter documents, and also noted that it has been in negotiations with Twitter’s lawyers over the issue of the hacked documents. (FYI - here’s Twitter’s response, posted yesterday, to TechCrunch’s first post about the documents.)

[UPDATE: This afternoon, TechCrunch posted a significant amount of very sensitive Twitter business information - pages and pages about partnerships, threats, goals, projections, celebrities, and much more.]

I get that blogs aren’t newspapers, and that they are therefore not necessarily held to the same ethical standards as traditional print journalists. And I don’t even know whether a newspaper would be ethically obligated not to publish hacked material.  In my mind, the answer to that question doesn’t ultimately matter: the point is that scoops and traffic numbers should not be the most important things to consider when facing a dilemma like this.  Sometimes, you do the right thing, just because it’s the right thing to do. And TechCrunch should have taken a pass on the documents. Would it have cost them anything to do so, other than some lost page views? Meanwhile, the potential damage to Twitter is huge.

TechCrunch likes to play on the edges - I realize that. (See its statement last year that it would no longer honor embargoes.) But it is worth it? I’d have to say no.

[Comments(4) »] [TrackBack »]

JULY 13, 2009

Via PC World comes the release of a new study by The Leading Question, a UK media strategy company, showing that illegal file-sharing among British teens has decreased by close to 33%. 26% of teenagers admitted to illegal file-sharing in the last month, down from 42% in December 2007.  Not only that, for the first time in the survey’s history, the data show that purchased music downloads outpacing illegal file-sharing.

The study’s authors suggest that the decrease in illegal activity has come partially due to the increasing popularity of legal, paid options, but also the pervasiveness of music streaming sites like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.  Streaming sites have seen enormous growth, not only because of the risks of illegal file-sharing, but also because of the increasing ubiquity of wireless data services - with devices like the iPhone, streaming is possible from anywhere, making downloaded, local copies of music more or less obsolete. Throw in the computing industry’s recent trend toward netbook computers, with their tiny hard drives, and you have a whole lot of factors creating a greater market in online streaming, making the greater prominence of these services not too surprising.

I’m encouraged by the study as a music lover. But I’d offer some words of caution to record execs who think people are finally turning away from stealing their intellectual property: the terms you’re offering to sites like Pandora are more or less killing the streaming business model. Pandora’s announcement last week that it will begin to charge heavy users of the service has, anecdotally, driven quite a few people away - even if they can afford the very small surcharge that Pandora will ask of those who listen more than 40 hours a month. I definitely listen more than 40 hours a month and can afford it, but why should I pay, when there are countless alternatives?

Pandora power users have an enormous level of interaction with the service. We generally sit and rate tracks as they play, to improve the content of our personal stations. I even have a keyboard shortcut on my laptop for doing just that,  so I don’t have to switch windows to rate songs. This should give marketers an incredibly rich data environment with which to discern our likes and dislikes. You’d think that, to simplify things a bit, if Pandora’s algorithms notice a huge number of 24 year-old guys giving good ratings to both Weezer and Mariah Carey songs, that that might be an incredibly valuable piece of data for a record executive, who could then find or create an ironic nerd-rock band with a mezzo soprano lead singer - even using the Pandora service to introduce the band directly into our headphones.

If this occurs to me, as someone well outside the music business, it has to have occurred to the pros in New York, LA and Nashville. I wonder what’s keeping it from happening. But one thing’s for sure - the costs imposed on streaming sites by the music industry will ultimately end in those sites becoming less prominent, sending people right back into piracy.

As an aside, I discovered my new favorite song, Metro by the Vincent Black Shadow, on thesixtyone, a new site that makes music streaming into a kind of video game. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, so you should probably just check it out.

(image is of the basement of Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA - my favorite record store growing up)

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]

JUNE 3, 2009

What do you get when you give a group of Lord of the Rings fans $5,000? You get The Hunt For Gollum, a LOTR sequel that premiered last month. While the story is “inspired by the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien,” the production is actually an unauthorized fan film that takes place in the same universe and follows the same storyline as the original famous films.

I first heard of the production from Boing Boing and I was interested enough to check it out. Like many fan films,  The Hunt for Gollum was available on various video sharing sites. I watched a little bit of the film and, I have to say, for only a few thousand dollars, they made it look just as good as the multi-million dollar versions!

With over 700,000 views on YouTube, it looks like the film is a success. But is it reason for Peter Jackson and the Tolkien Estate to call their lawyers? The website for the production carries a very hefty disclaimer that starts with, “‘The Hunt For Gollum’ is an unofficial non-profit film being made for private use, and is not intended for sales of any sort. No money is being made from this film, and no one was paid to make it.”

It’s clear that the film is a tribute to Tolkien’s work and to the LOTR films. The fact that it was produced and posted online without interference hopefully demonstrates that “The Tolkien Estate” understands that fan films like these are beneficial to their intellectual property, not harmful.

There are other movie franchisees that have been tolerant of fan film productions. Are you a fan of “Star Trek”? Then maybe you’ll like Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan series that picks up where the original series left off. Even though Kirk and Spock are played by lesser-known names, the series has become so popular that original cast members have made cameos.

My favorite fan film series happens to be Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager. As the younger brother of Darth, Chad manages a grocery store… and hilarity ensues. Lucasfilms has embraced the use of its IP and even encourages it. The company sponsors an annual Fan Movie Challenge where it judges fan made films inspired by the epic trilogies.

While many companies are often quick to use litigation to protect the use of their images and trademarks, these brands clearly realized that fan creations actually enhance the brand in ways beyond marketing and advertisement.  Perhaps more companies should think twice before suing for copyright infringement.

[Comments(2) »] [TrackBack »]

APRIL 23, 2009

@LivitLuvit: Miss Musing was a total fake and I was duped- ARGH. Support the REAL author of the words! http://www.velveteenmind.com @velveteenmind

Those were the words I read on my Twitter timeline yesterday. I wasn’t a reader of Miss Musing, the twenty-something blogger and grad student in New York City, though her name frequented the blogrolls of some of my favorite blogs, and her blog and Twitter account had hundreds of followers. Just look at a recent tweet she left:

@MissMusing: Home from DC. Google Reader is at 1000+ and there are 376 unread emails in my inbox.

Her popularity wasn’t contested.

So when I read that she was a fake, it prompted some research, and I discovered that a scandal had erupted in the blogosphere.

Azúcar over at The Jet Set found out that Miss Musing has been plagiarizing her friend cJane who happens to have a much more well-read blog (Technorati rank 797) than hers. Further investigation revealed that this wasn’t an isolated case of plagiarism. In fact, the majority of Miss Musing’s content was copied and pasted from other people’s blogs. Onnuh, a regular reader of The Jet Set, did some investigative work that revealed many other examplesof Musing’s blatant blog theft. She then contacted Megan, a mommy blogger who writes at Velveteen Mind, and informed her that some Velveteen posts had been plagiarized by Miss Musing. Megan was not happy. She took her frustration on to Twitter and a couple of days later Miss Musing was no more. Her blog has been taken down, and her Twitter account results in an error page. Those that knew her a little better told me that her Facebook page and other social networking profiles are gone as well. Even old blog posts about Miss Musing now include comments that reveal the ugly truth about her. The only public reaction I have seen from her is an apology she sent to cJane.

Wow, now that’s drama that you can’t get even on TNT. The reactions I’ve seen on blogs and Twitter accounts remind me of the surprise and anger that surrounded news that lonelygirl15 was a fake.

For a weird twist you have to read AshleyD’s reaction, given that she’s actually met and had dinners with Miss Musing.

Plagiarism has usually been a problem limited to high school classrooms and college campuses, and the internet has certainly made it easier for students to copy papers and essays. However I am fascinated with this particular case of blog plagiarism. It brings to light that blogs are subject to copyright protection, just like songs and movies. To learn more, Lorelle on WordPress has a great post on how to handle copyright theft from blogs.

Why did Miss Musing  plagiarize other work? Did she seek the admiration of many followers and commenters? Did she hope for a popular site that would provide ad revenue? We may never know, now that she has disappeared from the landscape. However, one thing is for certain, the face of IP is going to change as people’s opinions, thoughts, and stories become blog posts that can be easily stolen with a click of a mouse.

[Comments(10) »] [TrackBack »]

APRIL 15, 2009

If you’ve been anywhere near the blogosphere in the past few months, you’ve noticed that one of the dominant themes of conversation has been the apparent demise of “traditional media” - i.e. newspapers and, to a lesser extent, the publishing industry as a whole. The list of major dailies that have either shut their doors or moved to online-only distribution is quite startling and probably familiar territory for anyone reading this blog.  Indeed, on our social media team, it’s become kind of a predictable cliche when someone e-mails us a story about yet another newspaper folding.

The blogosphere is all about commentators, and there are a few that have buttered their intellectual bread by loudly and apocalyptically predicting the demise of the newspaper industry’s business model. Clay Shirky is my personal favorite, with Jeff Jarvis coming a close second. These folks are feted all over the web for saying out loud what everyone intrinsically knows - that there’s little future in a business model that requires consumers to pay for creative intellectual property. I can make a copy of a band’s best song in five seconds and send it to everyone I know in about a minute, without that group ever seeing a dime. I can re-post a newspaper article on this blog or my own, even challenging it or refuting it in the process, destroying not only the article’s credibility but also the protection the newspaper has over its own created content. We know this. Bottom line: people are no longer willing to pay for media or information except in very specific circumstances.

What’s disappointing, though, is that none of these thinkers seem to be considering the social ramifications at play here. Shirky, for instance, punts in his latest blog post. But if anything is clear, it’s that the development of a commercial model for news and information distribution pre-figured modern democracy, and continues to uphold it. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution, was not only a work of philosophy and political activism - it was a cash cow for its author and publishers, going through 25 printings in the first year alone. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book often credited with galvanizing the abolitionist movement and providing the spark for the Civil War, was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. I’m most familiar with American history, but every social movement of the modern era - from civil rights to feminism to gay rights (as well as other movements we might consider less savory) - has had, at its heart, one or more works of for-profit journalism or advocacy.

And that continues today. Without the profits to sustain long-term investigative reporting, do you think we would’ve seen the Abu Ghraib expose in 2004? The story on Walter Reed that surfaced in 2007? More important, would anything have been done about those gross miscarriages of justice had journalists not shined a light on them? On a local level, who covers City Council meetings? Who pesters the city comptroller about missing funds? Who writes a story on the potholes in that dilapidated neighborhood on the other side of town and ultimately gets them fixed?

This isn’t to lionize journalists or authors. There’s been a lot of shoddy work in those fields, to be quite honest. But the for-profit press serves as a vital check on the excesses and inadequacies of government, and there’s one reason that those writers, thinkers, and activists have been able to do the work they’ve done - money. I just think that the sooner we figure out a way to re-monetize creative intellectual property, the better.

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]

MARCH 3, 2009

Stanford University academics Ryan Lampe and Petra Moser have recently been intensely debating the merits of patent pools.  A patent pool is basically a form of intellectual sharing.  It’s the result of two or more companies putting their competitive agendas aside and agreeing instead to cross-license various “patent pieces” that are required to build a single technology.  While the idea makes sense, the jury is still out as to whether patent pools actually encourage or hinder innovation.

As TechDirt’s Mike Masnic explains, “Patent pools tend to come about when you have a lot of patents in and around a particular product, creating ‘patent thickets’ where a bunch of different patent holders all hold onto important pieces of the puzzle.  The worst case scenario, then, is that nothing can get done, as it’s impossible for anyone to innovate without being hit by a ridiculous number of lawsuits.”

Professor Eric Maskin from the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study offers an equally compelling insight on patents and innovation.  Maskin argues that, when discoveries are “sequential,” (each successive invention building essentially on a preceding invention), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation.  Not only does Maskin believe that society and the inventors themselves could be better off without such patent protection, but he also claims that an inventor’s prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation.

Regulators and antitrust authorities in Washington tend to favor patent pools that encourage innovation in industries where overlapping patents and excessive litigation suppress innovation, such as the biotechnology arena.  Lampe and Moser, on the other hand, would argue that patent pools are not always the best solution.  Sometimes, it seems, pool members patent less as soon as the patent pool is established and only resume patenting after the pool dissolves.  Professor Maskin may then insist that it would be better to throw out such patents if they’re clearly hindering, rather than enabling, innovation.

So, when are patent pools a good solution?  Well, last June, six WiMAX firms teamed together to create the Open Patent Alliance, a group whose goal is to jointly license WiMAX patents so they can keep royalty rates in check and make the telecommunications technology more affordable.  The companies involved in the formation of the OPA included Cisco Systems, Intel Corp., Alcatel-Lucent, Clearwire, Sprint and Samsung.

In addition, according to a recent post from PatentHawk, patent pools for the SARS vaccines and HIV/AIDS drugs have risen lately.  That’s a good thing, right?  On February 13, in a speech to Harvard Medical School, GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty announced that his company would contribute its own patents for technologies that might aid research into malaria, cholera and more than a dozen other diseases.

This type of approach is a refreshing mix of social responsibility and good business strategy.  I wonder: how many companies and industries will follow this model?

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]

FEBRUARY 18, 2009

When I woke up this morning I headed straight to my laptop so I could log onto Mafia Wars character. (A note to Facebook users: Mafia Wars is extremely addictive and I encourage you to check it out and add me to your Mafia Wars family.)

So, I logged onto my home page and I immediately noticed a post from Facebook announcing that Facebook has changed back to its original Terms of Use. For the past few weeks, the internet has been lit ablaze by Facebook making a change to its Terms of Use using language, giving the site rights to the content you put on your profile. The language made it sound like Facebook would be allowed to maintain the rights to your uploaded photos, videos, and other materials forever even if you decided to terminate your account. What?!?

Needless to say, that didn’t make a whole lot of people happy. The anger spread from blogs and Facebook groups to television shows, like The View. The message has been the same: Facebook… we… the users… will not stand for it. You have no right to keep and use my stuff without my permission.

Shel Horowitz over at Principled Profit took a close look at the language and had this to say:

Say, what? By my reading, this not only gives Facebook the right to sell our content without even telling us, let alone cutting us in on the revenues, but also could be interpreted–it’s a stretch, but lawyers exist as an industry because of these sorts of stretches–as allowing the company the right to use any content that includes a please-link-back utility that includes Facebook.

Makes Facebook sound kind of shady, doesn’t it? Well, it seems Mark Zuckerberg and company didn’t like the negative press and caved… at least for now.  Zuckerberg wrote several blog entries this week that address his take on the situation:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

I see his point that the language had to be included as an operational matter, but in doing so he’s touched on two important issues within social networking: privacy and intellectual property.  We love social networking sites like Facebook, because we can have our own profiles and a place to host our photos and videos. However, we also want to keep our right to privacy. We want to control who can see the information that we so proudly display. Essentially, we want to have our cake and eat it, too. Zuckerberg touches on this point in one of his posts:

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other.

It’s true, consumers want the best of both worlds, and they’ll fight for what they want.  And while the war isn’t over yet - the previous Facebook Terms of Use are in place until the company can revise them in a way that doesn’t make everyone mad - it seems as if consumers have won the battle, proving that consumer control is alive and well.

[Comments(5) »] [TrackBack »]

DECEMBER 18, 2008

While Christmas may be a time of giving, for some it’s also a time of receiving – as in receiving a notice that you are being served. Indeed, the Christmas season is an especially busy time for intellectual property attorneys out to protect IP claims related to trademarked holiday traditions.

For example, according to Forbes, the city of Louisville, KY was not allowed to follow through on its plans for a “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” display after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the estate of Dr. Seuss. Apparently, his estate was not too pleased with the city for trying to exploit the legendary author’s work without his consent.

While it may not be surprising for an author such as Dr. Seuss (or his estate, in this case) to want to protect his life’s work from copyright violations, other holiday-themed copyrights, however, may come as a shock.

For instance, why can’t you make a Kinko’s copy of that cute picture of your child with Santa (from the mall) to send to all of your relatives? Well, because Kinko’s is legally obligated to refuse to make copies of images to which you do not own the rights. Technically, that image – yes, the one with your child in it – belongs to the mall and/or the company who took the photo. You only have the rights to the print you bought from them.

The lesson to be learned is that, in today’s society, copyrights and trademarks are everywhere. Because of all the money that’s at stake, trademark and copyright owners do not want to see other people profit from their work, or, even worse, risk their own personal finances.

So, if you plan to produce anything on a large scale this holiday season, I would advise you to be on the lookout for possible copyright and trademark infringements. Even if your production is on a smaller scale, you should still be mindful of what you are creating. The hassle of litigation, I promise you, is never pleasant.

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]

DECEMBER 17, 2008

Have you ever left a store and suddenly found yourself singing a song that you don’t remember hearing – perhaps one that you haven’t heard in years? “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier / I got soul, but I’m not a soldier…”

What about in the morning, after you’ve hit the snooze button a dozen times and finally dragged yourself out of bed and into the shower: do you ever start humming a familiar tune, but have no idea why? “I used to rule the world / Seas would rise when I gave the word… Dum, dum, dum de dum dum dum.”

Well, chances are that The Killers’ 2005 hit song, hypothetically speaking, was actually playing in that store you were in - your conscious mind was just too busy searching for a smaller size to take notice. (Meanwhile, your subconscious mind was having a jam-session with itself!) In addition, Coldplay’s latest single was likely one of the first songs your radio/alarm clock played when it first woke you up this morning. You just weren’t quite awake enough to realize it consciously .

Remembering something without being aware that we are remembering it is a consequence of priming and implicit memory- two relatively harmless psychological phenomena. But a problem arises in the artistic world (music, film, literature) when an artist subconsciously adopts someone else’s work while believing it was actually a product of his/her own creative powers.

Earlier this year, for instance, musician Joe Satriani accused Coldplay of lifting elements of his song “If I Could Fly” for Coldplay’s hit song “Viva La Vida.” Immediately, I was inclined to believe that Coldplay’s Chris Martin (creative genius) may have subconsciously copied the beat, chords and melody of Satriani’s song. As Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk explains, it’s not uncommon for musicians to hear something and “regurgitate” it later without realizing it. Considering all of the songs we have access to in the digital music era, I would have to agree with Van Buskirk.

To complicate things further, however, it appears that videos depicting similarities between the two songs have been disappearing from YouTube, courtesy of Coldplay’s label, EMI, which claims that the videos infringe on its copyright.  (One of only a few surviving videos can be found here.) A legitimate claim on the part of EMI, or a clever attempt at a cover-up? You decide.

Either way, Van Buskirk finds it interesting that EMI is using copyright as a way to remove one version of a Coldplay song while allowing other versions to remain online.

It’s a useful reminder of the ways in which copyright law can be used for purposes other than thwarting the infringement of copyright. In this case, it’s a somewhat useful tool for downplaying plagiarism accusations directed at one of the world’s top acts.

We already know priming agents can influence cravings and the consumer decision-making process - that’s been the aim of marketing and advertising gurus for years. In an over-saturated society, however, I wonder: have priming and implicit memory lost their touch, or are their influential powers yet to be tapped?

[No Comments »] [TrackBack »]