Posts from — December 2007

I’m too young to have figured out this allusion. John Gruber at daringfireball tipped me to this nugget. First, to quote FSJ:

The guy who talked to my lawyer on the phone last night got on a red-eye to the East Coast and I went to see him this morning in a suite at the Four Seasons, even though my lawyer, Tony Clifton, who lives in New York, could not attend and had told me not to agree to anything but just to listen and hear the guy out and report back to him.

Then to quote wikipedia:

Tony Clifton is a fictional character created and often played by comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s. Kaufman saw Clifton as the antithesis of the sweet, gentle “Foreign Man” character he was best known for (which was later adapted into Latka, Kaufman’s character on Taxi). Clifton was a staggeringly untalented lounge singer with a nasal, deliberately annoying singing voice. Clifton epitomized the washed-up showbiz casualty, a “star” too lazy to even bother to remember the lyrics to his songs. Clifton would often attempt to improvise comical lyrics that were intentionally unfunny before giving up entirely without seeming to care. Clifton also tended to randomly insult patrons, passing off the abuse as the “comedy” portion of his act. Many people misunderstood Kaufman’s intent, focusing on the character’s foul language and prima donna antics while failing to appreciate the fact that Clifton was meant to be the comic antithesis of the typical lounge singer, a bland, genial entertainer designed to add a touch of class to a hotel and make guests feel welcome.

FSJ is good. Real good.

Enderle:
Snark Attack - my take on this amazing bad piece of writing. So bad, it’s good.
MacDailyNews - Enderle: Is Apple Rotting From The Inside Out?

I like bad copy and bad journalism, even bad acting on occasion. When Apple-hating journalists write bad articles, they get savaged often to great comical effect. Today, one of the more notorious Apple haters - Rob Enderle - wrote a post title Is Apple Rotting From The Inside Out?

The beautiful thing about Enderle’s post is that he’s illiterate. He thought that Apple threatened Fake Steve Jobs, when FSJ was actually writing his usual, brilliant satire. Quote:

I started this week thinking about Apple killing off Think Secret and actually threatening the income and family – during the Christmas season, mind you – of the highly visible Forbes reporter who pens the very popular Fake Steve Jobs blog.

And a second quote:

With this success firmly in hand, Apple next went after Dan Lyons, who is one of the top journalists at Forbes. First it offered him money. When he disclosed this bribe, it threatened his income and his family. The evidence it had was so incredibly lame that if it weren’t for the fact that this kind of thing in my world is deadly serious, it would be funny.

But it was funny. Enderle’s post makes it funnier still. Parody that keeps on giving.

I will update this post with links to all the inevitably savagery directed toward Mr. Enderle. Expect beautiful retorts. Of course, he’s probably just link baiting. Who cares? Have fun.

Links
MacDailyNews - Enderle: Is Apple Rotting From The Inside Out?

Rob Enderle is busy explaining himself on the MacDailyNews comment thread, so make sure to read the running commentary. It’s a complete train wreck.

12/28 10PM
Rob Enderle: Falling for the Dan Lyons Apple Hoax
MacDailyNew’s coverage

12/28 10:05PM
Rob Enderle now flags my posts as spam. To late to fight. I guess he thinks saying sorry is enough.

12/29 11AM
FSJ’s retort, kinda. Sabotage!

12/30 8PM
Darning Fireball’s take: Gina Keating, Ace Reporter

Many articles on Warner Music’s announcement that it will sell non-DRM’ed music on Amazon. My favorite post was written by Cory Doctorow on boingoing. A quote:

Of course, the labels — Warner included — already shamelessly steal from their artists in the realm of digital downloads, through a crooked accounting process. Here’s how it works: artists are generally entitled to a seven percent royalty on “sales,” but are contractually guaranteed a fifty percent royalty on “licensing.” When the labels “sell” you a song online, they actually claim that they’re only giving you a license to the music (and that’s why they can attach all kinds of unreasonable conditions to the transaction — see next paragraph for more). If you’re only getting a license — rather than making a purchase — then 49.5 cents from ever $0.99 track should go straight to the artist. Instead, they get a measly seven cents.

I argue that distributors of music get too large of the share of the pie. Cory’s quote explains that in ugly detail.

I also like Cory’s approach to this topic. When the labels do something good for the consumer, he reminds us of their abuse of the artists. And if the labels did something good for the artists, he would remind us of their abuse of consumer. Of course, I cannot recall the labels doing something good for the artists. Not recently.

Also, I noticed how easy it is to drop the ‘i’ when typing ‘boingboing’. Funny that.

The writers’ strike could be as destructive to TV viewership as the Baseball strike was to it’s fan base. One perspective from YouLicense blog:

A top industry consultant divulged an interesting theory to me. The WGA’s last big strike took place in 1988. It revolved around residuals for hour-long shows along with reduced pay for reruns. Due to the five month strike, the big studios had to push the fall season to the winter. Leading soap operas had to employ low budget writers who had reduced the shows’ quality. It is said that 10% of the TV viewers stopped watching television forever!

To feed fearmongering, YouLicense speculates that this strike could shrink the audience 28%. Bad is bad.

Baseball needed steroids, the homerun record, interleague play, expanded playoffs, and a commissioner to organize the rebuilding effort. Perhaps writers can write better stories that they have in the past, or producers can produce higher quality content. Is that likely? In the face of low cost, non-written reality TV?

Maybe instead, Network TV, once distributing original content, will resume treating fans as either inconvenient or lawless. Perhaps Network TV hunkers down, and demands 1) watch the show on TV as scheduled, or 2) watch on the web on a DRMed and locked-down browser window, or 3) wait until the DVD is officially released a year after the end of the season and be prepared to pay higher prices.

Time-shift? We hate it. Skip commercials? We sue. Torrents? We prosecute.

There might be better models than selling a $1.99 version of each show the morning after it was broadcast. That model would have to provide shows that cost less and are easier to buy / watch.

Links to earlier comments on the Writers’ strike:
Strike That
Connecting A Dot
Fear (of) The Man

More from the YouLicense blog post:

The future of music 2.0
So what has this got to do with music licensing and YouLicense? Apparently a lot.
Music licensors have also been affected by this strike and are suffering considerable business loss. If there are no shows on TV, there are no 30K$ TV placements. But it’s the current strengthening of online television that will bring many new opportunities for musicians and personnel working in the music licensing arena. As Gerd Leonard, Music guru, so eloquently put in a previous post:
“10s of 1000s of new TV, online video, and gaming channels will be born in the next 2-3 years – and all of them will need music to go with the visuals. Millions of songs will be synched to video – this market will positively explode.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Hugh MacLeod’s blog, gapingvoid, had an great post on Hollywood and the writer’s strike. One quote in particular:

4. In the end, this strike is not about DVD and digital royalties. Ultimately, this strike is about the massive and traumatic erosion of privileges afforded the middle-ranking factory workers. But of course, there’s not a damn thing they or their bosses can do to bring those privileges back. The landscape of media is moving away from large studios, to college dorms, downtown lofts, and suburban garages. Like Madison Avenue, Hollywood won’t disappear. But also like Madison Avenue, it’ll never command the cultural vanguard like it once did.

Another set of privileges that erodes are those do to the distributors of content. Distribution used to be hard and expensive. The internet has made it much cheaper and much faster. Bits can fly after all.

Content producers get a small percentage of the revenues generated by direct sale or ad-supported sale of content. Writers get nothing from digital sales. As distribution get much easier, and since branded distribution of content is, at this moment, an oxymoron, competition will shrink the economics for intermediaries. Those working for distributors should fear.

The writers’ strike is about the reallocation of revenues away from distributors towards content creators. It’s about establishing those economics in the digital market. It’s a fight over new territory. It’s the 49ers all over again. There be gold in the hills. There be dragons too.

Thanks to Scoble’s shared RSS feed for the feed to the article.

Robert Scoble put up a post titled Best New Blogger… His quote is simple:

The dude just rocks with his analysis of social media and Web 2.0 stuff.

The blogger is Andrew Chen. His site is Futuristic Play. The focus of his blog is ‘user acquisition.’ For content creators who develop an active web-presence, this material is worth review. How-to stuff, like the Seth Godin links below.

Of course, I have my own opinions on how to use Web 2.0 tools. They are only tools after all.

One thing to notice: Andrew Chen has a link to his Amazon.com wish list on his About page. That is his means for suggesting and receiving donations.

Seth Godin wrote yet another pithy, insightful blog post. This time about marketing on the internet. His insight:

I think there are two strategies that are shaping up online.

The first: burn your permission. Every time you have something to sell, either buy enough ads on popular sites to achieve frequency, or just burn out your core base by repeating your message over and over again. At least you’ll make enough money to be able to rebuild your audience later.

The second: go easy on the frequency and embrace your audience. Give them what they want (interesting, new stuff) instead of what you need (frequency). Play for the long run.

You chose plan-b, right? Now that you have the marketing stuff down pat, what next?

If you provide content frequently, and embrace the audience, interacting in fresh, enlivened ways, then you can and should express how a relationship works. Tell them what you think is fair, and give them the means to honor a shared sense of fairness.

A donate button, or $20 tee shirt, or better, some form of exclusive content. Something simple and impulsive mixed in with more traditional offers of content in classic form, sold only after several clicks and perhaps a journey to another site.

I know the instinctive retort is, “well, they can just go buy my book, or my CD.” Maybe they will. Still, make contributing as easy as possible because some of them will. Leaving your audience uneasy with a vague sense of obligation really isn’t easy, or fair.

Seth, please stop bogarting all the insightful, smart ideas. Thanks.

Earlier post inspired by Seth: Promote, Well Defined

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, writes about the confluence of the writers’ strike, the internet, the future of digital entertainment. Leave it to a veteran reporter to write something sensible, and encapsulating. Quote:

As is clear from the current writers’ strike, which is destabilizing Hollywood further, the heart of the issue in the battle here centers around the best way to make a success out of digital entertainment, both in terms of audiences and monetization.

So far, there has been very little true success to point to in the monetization arena, as neither user-generated nor professional content really makes the kind of dollars Hollywood moguls are used to.

The problem, of course, is that the way the industry has done business is seriously flawed for the new medium–it’s high cost, process-intensive and slow-moving, as well as full of gate-keeping mechanisms that funnel talent rather than expand it.

In the risk-to-reward ratio, Hollywood still wants much too much reward for very little risk.

The developing clash between Hollywood and the internet will make the clash between music labels and the internet look like midget wrestling. Hollywood content cost so much more to produce than a typical CD. I want to build on some of Kara Swisher’s matter-of-fact scene setting.

The victims of Hollywood-copyright infringement are large, mogulish companies, not individual artists. The inability to identify with the ultimate victim makes it harder to orient a moral compass. Donate buttons never work in this environment.

Writers have the power to strike. Their means of seeking resolution is classic, old-time labor law. OK, so nothing is disrupted in that market place.

Hollywood sells and rents DVDs. Since it offers content at explicit prices, Hollywood should have means to deny access to content if not paid. That point is shrill in a digital world, but pricing of individual DVDs is the means to limit or incent copyright violation.

Network content is much messier. Much closer to music than to movies. Especially since Networks do not routinely offer to sell their content in a manner to limit the incentive to violate copyright. By doing so, networks impeach the notion of honor-bound reciprocity - “if you like, you should pay.”

Consumers substitute Cheap for Expensive. Easy for Difficult. Honorable behavior for morally ambiguous. The torrenting or YouTubing of network content is a) cheap, b) easy, and c) morally ambiguous. This combination beats either the networks desired outcome a) unavailable immediately after broadcast, or their generic offering b) expensive, and difficult to watch.

All of this writing ignores the essential fact that intermediaries get too much of the pie. Effective competition will challenge the status-quo. The internet facilitates distribution. Competition wants to be free. Content, not so much.

Other posts on the writers’ strike:
Connecting A Dot
Strike That

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Larry Lessig, founder of Centre for Internet and Society and chair of the Creative Commons project, makes a passionate presentation at TED that discusses more free and less free. In other words, the heart of the issue of copyright and the internet. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I strongly recommend watching the video.

I cribbed some notes from the presentation. I feel confident that in this case, cribbing is OK.

First, to the business of copyright, Larry argues that we need two types of change: 1) a collection of artists who make their work more freely available and 2) a collection of businesses that thrive in this ecology of freer (freeer?) content. These two changes allow “more free” to compete with “less free.” Competition, to his thinking and mine, is undeniably good.

Less free is the current system of copyright. One example of more free is Creative Commons. The system that maximizes artist income and consumer benefit is the best one.

He calls for business to enable the more-free ecology. For artists who wonder how they get paid, this concept is frighteningly vague. For others, this notion of ‘business enabling more-free’ is either without meaning or holds ill-formed aspirations. He is an idealist. So hard gaps in a plan can be simply filled with wishing.

Second, and to quote him, “much more important,” he discusses the morality of “less free.” Quoting:

We made mixed tapes, [our kids] remix music. We watched TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different. And as we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize that you can’t kill the instinct the technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them “pirates.” And is that good?

We live in this weird time. This kind of age of prohibitions where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing that they live it against the law.

That realization is extraordinarily corrosive. Extraordinarily corrupting.

The presentation of this impassioned argument starts at 17:30.

Copyright and the internet, boy what a topic. This week’s must read installment is by Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch. Money quote:

What we have here is a major disconnect between the norms of the offline world and the emerging norms of the Internet. Both the law and industry standards are trailing what is a major transformation in how people use other people’s words, music, and images in the Web’s culture of participation. Putting your photos up on Flickr (which Lane Hartwell did) and then acting surprised when someone uses them is like leaving your car in downtown Newark with the keys inside and acting surprised when it is, um, appropriated. The law may (or may not) be on Hartwell’s side (see below), but that is not the point. The law is outdated.

Techcrunch goes on to argue that in the modern internet, the link is the currency, and is adequate compensation. Techcrunch pedals influence, and from that point of view, linking and the associated influence is a form of currency.

Much further down, Erick writes my favorite and much used line:

There needs to be some reciprocity.

Indeed. What does reciprocity look like? Links don’t buy food. Techcrunch wants links; Lane Hartwell does not. Ironic, Techcrunch did not even compensate Lane Hartwell with a link.

I can’t imagine how a donate button combined with a sense of fair play would solve the Bubble video manner. I’m a big fan of the donate button, and a firm request that patrons use it.

Food for thought. Maybe better said: link for food.

The currency of exchange is currency. Copyright law might be outdated, but currency is not.