I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
I once read an analysis of the costs of offering broadband in a coffee shop.
The two biggest costs are
- billing people
- tech support
When it's free, people have fewer expectations and cannot really demand tech support.
With newspapers, a lot of people don't realise just how ad funded they already are. Often they will push to get their circulation to pass some magic number to be able to command better ad revenues (for example the $12 annual magazine subscriptions I used to see for Time or Newsweek).
Of course the Evening Standard may come to dominate the Tube's litter and hence may be forced to address that.
After the Kings Cross fire in which so many died, noone wants to see a build up of flammable litter stuffed out of sight by people too lazy to carry it home. Thanks to the IRA, (and arguably, latterly, Al Qaeda) there are no rubbish bins on the London underground.
When I was doing a road warrior job (01-05) my company decided we must all have an Amex card.
(For those of you unfamiliar, this looks like a credit card but less merchants will accept it and you have to pay it off every month, rather than sustain a balance. )
The chaps in the sales team I supported hated it (as did I) because you'd buy a flight 3 weeks in advance to get a good deal then would have to pay the Amex bill before even flying and getting a ticket you could use to claim it back from the company.
Hence you were frequently carrying thousands of the company's cash flow for them.
Another mandatory thing was the Hertz Gold membership. Complementary 1st year then $50 thereafter (though the latter was not hugely publicised). All on the company Amex, mostly out of my hands. Set up by the company travel bods.
(Again the chaps hated it because Enterprise was cheaper and better customer service. Even Hertz was cheaper for same car through Orbitz than through the Gold membership via approved company travel arranger - go figure).
Anyway, I eventually left the company, and one of my final acts was to close the Amex account. All balances were settled (they actually owed me, curiously) and the card was cut up.
The next year Hertz tried to bill me $50. (Company travel chaps were supposed to have cancelled this, but hey).
When Hertz went to Amex, quoting a no longer valid card number, Amex paid up, reopened my account, and charged it to my account. As they only had my old address (Seattle) and I was in the UK now, it took me quite a while to find this out. By which point further financial penalties had accrued.
I tried to point out that when I closed the account they were no longer authorised to pay people in my name.
They said if I had a pre-existing agreement with Hertz they had to honour it. I said "who else has pre-existing agreements who might take money from me", and they said "how should we know ?", then I said "How did Hertz prove to you that they have a pre-existing agreement with me ?" and they said "they don't have to, you have to prove otherwise".
I said "how long do I have to live in fear that someone will bill be out of the blue and you'll pay them in my name, since closing the account is obviously no use". they said "forever".
We came to an agreement in the end. They did not actually have a clue where I lived (even which country) and would piss away at least the due balance trying to find me. They persuaded Hertz to stand down and cancelled the penalty charges. Or maybe I got the $50 from my old company. I forget now, it was a few years back.
My point ?
The Hertz account for our company was huge (a very big company you'd have heard of). To this day I don't think the company saved a penny over normal rental car booking, and obviously paid out $50 per year per travelling employee. But some people did get their cars a bit quicker. (But hey, we all know Hertz deliberatly make the non Gold class pickup process needlessly longer just to make you upgrade, don't they ? I mean if their computer can check in Gold in 5 seconds, what can REALLY take 15 minutes for plebs class ?)
Everyone at the coal face knew this corporate deal was idiotic.
The Amex probably stopped us getting the best rates in some hotels (even stopped us getting some hotels altogether).
But these deals are done very high up, aren't they ?
And why should Hertz care about beating Enterprise at customer service when they can lock up 10,000 new accounts on the golf course ?
In the early days the xBox was a loss leader for the games and there was a big fuss when some people figured out how to hack it and make an extremely good value linux box out of the hardware.
Just like the Virgin phone handsets in the earlier TD post, there seems to me to be a problem with the overall contract in this case.
Conmpanies should come clean and say "you don't own this hardware - you have it on permenant loan and you own a right to use it in a certain way" (a bit like most commercial software if you read the small print).
Then they can legally control what you can and can't do with it. In this case, by all means run a loss leader and force people to play by your rules to get back the revenue.
But of course they'd lose sales. Someone who pays £200+ for a piece of electronics expects to own it. On the other hand if they want to sell you hardware they should let you own it completely.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone who offers customers a loss leader on hardware should do so "at their own risk".
It does appear, however, that the law is not what is in play here but what they can actually stop you doing. So even if it is illegal to play on a modded box in your own home offline there is no way they can stop you. But on the Live service they can. And they can choose to disconnect or block people as they see fit.
In all issues of copyright (compare MS Office and an MP3 ripped from a CD) the realistic extent of the law is defined entirely by what is actually technically possible to enforce, not by morality or even necessarily common sense.
-- Sure, but why would the recipient of the file *WANT* to check it? --
This was all said in the context of whether it is right for the **AA to prosecurte a downloader. If there is a legitimate way for a downloader to find whether a download is legal or not, then whether they choose to use it or not is immaterial - it takes away their defence of not knowing. If I owned file sharing site I would point users to such a tool to get my site off the hook.
I guess the next problem is that if the tool was completely automated (as it could be) then the **AA could insist that the filesharing site used it to screen uploads, rather than simply hiding behind safe harbour and making it the punter's problem.
And by logical extension, the **AA could insist that any ISP that hosts files has a duty to see if they are indentifiable music files and if so check legality.
This would cost all internet users as the ISP's would pass costs on, but to be honest I'd rather pay for that (a once per upload application of a server algorithm) than pay for a huge overhead of watching surfers' traffic looking for infringement.
It's an interesting though experiment though. if the **AA spent the money developing such a tool and made it freely available to all and sundry, what would the implications be ?
There'd have to be logal redress for false positives (I can imagine otherwise the **AA developers adding )
if (songNotRecognised)
{
status = NOT_FREELY_DOWNLOADABLE;
}
Like any DRM, however, some smart people will get round it. They will find a way to mangle an MP3 so that it sounds almost the same but is unrecognisable by the algorithm. But a lot of illegal copying is about convenience. It is just so easy to rip a CD and post it online.
-- Are you suggesting that somebody could somehow actually tell the difference between an illegal and legal download? How would you propose that anyone do this, particularly since both controlled and freely distributable content are both just a bunch of 0's and 1's when being transmitted digitally?---
There is an iPhone app that allows your iPhone to "listen" to a tune playing on a the radio an immediately identify it (then buy it if you want to).
The "is this an illegal download" tool I alluded to would
- identify the tune (using the same database the app referred to above uses)
- interrogate the database to see if said tune is currently legally available free.
If the song has ever been legally made available free with unlimited copying rights then I would suggest that it is meaningless to later assert that a download is illegal. But I would guess that most commercial music would not be in that category and the tool would tell you that it was dodgy to expect the tune to be free.
I'm not sure that you could do this in real time as a browser add on (as you are downloading) since torrent sites get fragments from different places simultaneously, but you could certainly check the file after receiving it.
What this tool could not do so easily is tell you whether the apparently legit looking music download site with paypal payment was entitled to sell you the MP3 (Amazon) or not ("fly-by-night-cheap-mp3s.com ). But in theory the database behind the tool could tell you that too.
This is not rocket science technically if
- someone wanted to do it
- consumers wanted to use it
Specifically MS Office. Once MS have produced it is is, by TD's definition, an infinite good. However, plenty of people with a choice are prepared to pay a lot of money for it and do every year.
Noone can fault MS's business model - there are a lot more MS millionaires than OpenOffice millionaires or linux millionaires. You are free to opine MS would make more money in the long run by giving Office away but I fear you'd find it hard to convince many (including me).
I don't think anyone would argue that after MS have invested what could amount to millions in a new version of Office, that they there is some moral reason why they should give it away, not that someone who chooses to illegally pirate it has some moral defence.
Sure, in a country or market sector where noone can afford it, MS might be better of turning a blind eye to piracy rather than see OpenOffice take market share but this is a decision for MS alone to make. They invested the money up front to create value for people.
The major reason that there is not huge ubiquitous piracy of Office is not because people are respectful of any moral arguments or even of the rules of copyright. There are simply technical hurdles (aka DRM) and a well funded policing operation that finds and punishes businesses that break the clear rules.
And when software as a service becomes uniquitous, there will little or no pirated software. When Office is served from the cloud, how will OpenOffice compete ?
Who will pay for the servers that are required for OpenOfficeAsAService ?
Once again, I'd defend to the death your right to say that MS would be financially better off giving Office away, but I would not agree.
Now compare this with music. The ONLY difference is that preventing and punishing piracy is technically more challenging. The value per item is less and there is little control over the enivironment in which the product is used. But music, like software, is digital content that can be copied infinitely at almost zero marginal cost.
( Music in the cloud (aka streaming) will simply be recorded and then pirated. The old Radio DJ trick of talking over the intro won't work for a streaming service )
Now I fail to see how just because it is harder to protect music from actions the creator has not approved, that somehow changes the morality of the situation.
It may well be true that the musician / label is on a hiding to nothing now the genie is out of the bottle but that doesn't make it morally wrong for the artist to want to sell the content (noone has to by it) nor does it make it right for someone to copy it without his/her permission.
It may well be true that the industry would find a whole different business model more profitable than the RIAA/DRM approach, but that doesn't mean their current approach is morally wrong. The RIAA's main fault is their overreach and excessive behaviour, and the way they seem to get absurd backing from the legal and political establishment, resulting in ludicrous financial legal awards, but if these things were not so, they would not be per-se morally wrong. A guy/gal who uploads an album with the express intention of enabling illegal sharing should arguably be punished as if he/she had shoplifted one copy. It is well nigh impossible to meaningfully prosecure the downloaders unless tools exist for them to verify what is a legal/illegal download. (As an aside, the industry could easily create such a tool and make it widely available - why don't they ?).
Without these excesses, the RIAA would be little different from the alliance of software producers (whose acronym eludes me) that send people into sizeable companies to catch them in the act of using 200 pirated copies of Office.
Are they morally wrong ?
Someone posted earlier saying how they create software for themselves and then are happy to freely share it for others. That is all well and good but I suspect that
a) The software he refers to is not 20 man years of effort
b) Giving code away for free is not his day job
I must say, with a Sonos as my primary music system (plus a few cheap MP3 players for running/dogwalking) I would rather buy an MP3 album for £5 from Amazon than pay more than twice that for a plastic disk that I have to rip as soon as I get home. But £5 is fine, and the artists have to eat. I'd rather they made money off the music and toured to meet the fans, playing small, unprofitable venues even in towns where the turnout might not be high, rather than played a few stadiums I cannot get to to be sure they make a million from the tour.
You could tell me that DRM is not a business model but MicroSoft might disagree.
An example springs to mind. The "Build a bear" stores that have opened now in the UK allow a child to construct their own bear including putting a voicebox in. Kids in Wales asked if they could get pre-recoprded phrases in Welsh. They were told no, you can't even have English without the US accent.
I once hear some idiot from the music industry explaining that personalising music (ie water marking on a mail order CD as a non obtrusive form of tracking who might be uploading) would be too expensive. Put another way, they won't add 10c to the cost of what they sell for $15 however much it could be better for them in the long run.
This sort of cheapness is why the archetypal US conglomerate will be beaten by more nimble mindsets. We've all heard stories of how the marketing depts in US car companies keep trying to insist on worldwide car model names
(The Opel Corsa in mainland Europe is the Vauxhall Nova in UK. They almost launched in Spain with "Nova" = "doesn't go").
And of course GM would rather lobby for lower emission standards than just innovate and keep up with Toyota on the world stage. It's what you get when you have a single fairly homogenous market in your back yard that is so big you THINK that you can survive by ignoring the rest of the world altogether. Not something a Luxembourg based company would ever suffer from...
If I understand this correctly, we're not talking here about someone "copying a commercial without permission" or "passing off". Simply a claim of unfair or inaccurate advertising.
When I was at University 20 years ago an acquaintance called either the Times or the Telegraph science correspondent and told them Cambridge University Eng dept now had working superconductors at temperatures far less cold than anyone had ever achieved. After a half-hearted attempt to check the story, the journo ran it and may I recall have lost his job in the end.
Not a tabloid, and well before digital news stole the paper media's profits.
Nothing new here.
In the UK there used to be a thing called the net book agreement. This seemed to mean noone could sell a book for less than the RRP.
This means supermarkets made a huge markup on the few books tghey sold, for example, but tiny specialised bookshops could still survive qas some margin was guaranteed. In those days it was believed that if the NBA went away, small niche book shops would disappear because they'd never sell any "normal" books and the specialised books would not keep them in profit.
However, there have been a couple of developments since then.
One, Amazon etc al and the "long tail" have made it possible for a book that sells only 100 copies to just as profitable per book as one that sells a million.
Two, small niche dealers can still reach a worldwide market via Abebooks.
With these two developments, I don't think anyone could defend the NBA today.
You could maybe criticise Walmart for selling books dirt cheap as they only carry high volume books and don't care about the low volume stuff which might suffer as a result, but Amazon don't suffer from that problem. No reason why they can't sell every book cheap if they want to.
Plus Amazon can reprice everything in minutes if they want and Walmart simply can't be that responsive.
Suppose this guy legitimately represents several groups. He writes 1 form letter then sends it 3 times, each wearing a different "hat".
I do marketing for several clients. If there was a legislative issue that affected them I might write to my representative from each of them. And if I was really lazy I might re-use some of the letter.
In addition to replacing boilerplate text I'd probably reword a few paragraphs too...
But if I was 77 I woudl reserve the right to have a senior moment and forget to replace something.
I'm not saying that I believe this for a minute in this case - simply that if you, Mike, cannot think of a single scenario where the guy might be telling the truth then you have a fairly limited imagination.
I'm sure within the last few days I read you criticizing Virgin for seeking to legally prevent folk from reprogramming phones for another network.
So what happens when someone starts reprograming their "free" Palm Pre ? Or is that different ?
Also, in the UK, cellphone usage really rocketed when they introduced "pay as you go" tariffs (people hate contracts and being surprised by big bills).
Now PAYG and contracts probably hold comparable market share. You can't heavily subsidize a phone on PAYG so people see the real price of the phone.
When people can compare the price of the phone on PAYG with that on a contract they figure out how much of the plan is paying for the hardware.
The decision between PAYG and contract thus gets distorted.
C'mon Mike, you have implied that a paywall for a news scoop will never work because someone else can just repost the content and offer it for free
and YET
you claim here that the very concept of someone copying and reposting content is imaginary.
Personally I've seen my own content which I placed on Wikipedia re-served verbatim through some other ad filled site, so this automated scraping definitely goes on. Why it would not happen for news is a bit hard to fathom.
(And if you read the Wired article on Demand, you'll know that it is possible for scrapers to determine automatically what is the most profitable stuff to scrape).
2. Watermarking.
If the UK intelligence services have (say) 10 copies of an intelligence report for 10 different authorised readers, each one is subtley different in wording so that if it ever gets leaked they can see whose copy the leak came from. There are computer programs to determine when a high school essay has been plagiarised from known sources.
Similarly, any automated news scraping service can easily be proved to have got the content from the originating website. (Watermarking pictures is unnecessary). Copy and paste won't defeat this - it will take active rewording by a human and THIS would kill the scrapers' business model. The question (if you agree with the logic of taking action against offenders) is whether the scraper is reputable enough to sue or run by spammers who cover their tracks.
What I imagine the newspaper could do is ask google to suspend the adsense account of anyone who is clearly making money from plagiarised content. Not sure what Google would do, but if it was happening hundreds of times per day, the two parties would probably agree a streamlined way to handle it.
This is not ideal (like automatic takedown actions without due process) but google have the talent to automatically decide for themselves if page x is actually plagiarised from page y (or vice versa) based on content scanning and publishing dates based on their own spider visits. They could even sell this to the newspapers as a service (subscription based). They would (for paying customers) check all pages submitted by the users to see if they are currently plagiarised by any pages currently serving Adsense ads. If they (google) believed that there was infringment, they could send an automatic takedown request to the offender, and follow it up with an Adsense suspension. Or else channel the adsense funds to the content originator instead.
What if, you ask, the newspaper actually plagiarised some blogger and claimed it was the other way round ? Well, they could offer anyone a chance to have their new posts "timestamped" by google ? I dunno, if there was a need, there's a way. After all, they now offer a potential wiki sidebar on every page on the web so this would not be too hard.
Now I know that, Mike, you think that trying to fight online plagiarism is like trying to hold back the tide. It might be futile, it might not be the best business model, but that does not make plagiarism RIGHT.
The point would be that you'd maybe miss the book and ask for it back and the borrower would go and get his own.
It would also stop you behaving like an unauthrosied public library at the expense of the author.
Have to agree with the poster who says nopt all DRM is pure evil.
Demanding that everything be free just because someone somewhere can get round DRM is not a defensible position.
When DRM becomes evil is when it inconveniences the innocent (like CD's that won't play or rootkits).
Google have the size and legal power to at least resist until court order.
Many small ISP's would probably have rolled over with no court order when suits froma major bank came knocking.
I'm leaving my mail with Google where I can see they will at least hold out until forced by law.
(I think the law is what was at fault here, but Google have to follow it).
If as I understand it, Virgin (who have made a lot of money out of doing far better at giving people what they want than most of their competitors) have a business model that allows people to pay less for the handset but pay it back in the calling charges over time, then this is a good business model. But if someone then unlocks the phone and uses it on a different network that have not had to subsidise the handset, then the business model is defeated.
Is this because Virgin (seeing that some people don't want to pay so much up front for a handset) have a BAD business model ? Is it wrong to offer cheap or free hardware and get the revenue back from the service ?
Obviously this business model needs some form of protection. They probably hoped to rely on technical protection but someone got round that so they fall back on legal protection.
This is like training as a pilot with British Airways then expecting to skip off to some other airline who pays for no training but offers higher salaries, the moment you qualify. BA would (rightfully) ask for the training costs back, as the contact you signed said they would.
RSS
Twitter
Minimum scale (as Griff)
I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
Minimum scale (as Griff)
I guess Amazon aren't going to take on a 3rd party vendor who could not ship enough goods to satisfy their likely orders once publiscised globally. So in that respect certain types of minority goods will remain out of the mainstream promotion (and hence in the slow lane) due to being too small an operation.
But for the Amazon recommendation engine as it applies to digital goods, it is not a zero sume game (who ever ran out of downlod stock ?). What I mean is, if Amazon recommends an unheard of indie band and people buy and like the album, it doesn't cannibalise Amazon's Britney Spears sales. They just sell more.
But of course it is self feeding - you have to be recommended in the first place to even get started.
But we all know Amazon (for example) "seed" these engines to get things moviong. There was a story when they first started selling clothes that people were getting recommendations like "people who read this book also liked these socks". It is in Amazon's interests to widen the public's taste, even if it means artificially nudging the envelope.
So is the writer claiming that recommendation engines narrow the field as an accidental consequence of their design or as part of a ClearChannel-esque deliberate policy ?
The benefit of Amazon being the recommender (rather than a radio station) is that
- they have no preference what you buy, they can make a buck off anything
- they aren't resource limited in their own discovery of what to recommend
- they are not linked to the labels
I think a true analysis will show that more new music gets discovered with these engines than without. The 30-50 demographic with all the cash do not frequent grungy record stores or listen to seriously avant garde radio stations, (IMHO) so they have to discover stuff somehow and this is as good a route as any.
Less appealing is something like Last.fm which (though excellent) may have a narrow focus if (as I believe) it is owned by major labels.
And even less appealing (to me) are the recommendations of my facebook friends. Take DVD rentals. I have rented DVD's on the recommendation of good friends and been seriously disappointed, but far less so with automated recommendations. Not all my friends have taste ;-)
Same with broadband (as Griff)
I once read an analysis of the costs of offering broadband in a coffee shop.
The two biggest costs are
- billing people
- tech support
When it's free, people have fewer expectations and cannot really demand tech support.
With newspapers, a lot of people don't realise just how ad funded they already are. Often they will push to get their circulation to pass some magic number to be able to command better ad revenues (for example the $12 annual magazine subscriptions I used to see for Time or Newsweek).
Of course the Evening Standard may come to dominate the Tube's litter and hence may be forced to address that.
After the Kings Cross fire in which so many died, noone wants to see a build up of flammable litter stuffed out of sight by people too lazy to carry it home. Thanks to the IRA, (and arguably, latterly, Al Qaeda) there are no rubbish bins on the London underground.
I got caught by Amex / Hertz tag team (as Griff)
When I was doing a road warrior job (01-05) my company decided we must all have an Amex card.
(For those of you unfamiliar, this looks like a credit card but less merchants will accept it and you have to pay it off every month, rather than sustain a balance. )
The chaps in the sales team I supported hated it (as did I) because you'd buy a flight 3 weeks in advance to get a good deal then would have to pay the Amex bill before even flying and getting a ticket you could use to claim it back from the company.
Hence you were frequently carrying thousands of the company's cash flow for them.
Another mandatory thing was the Hertz Gold membership. Complementary 1st year then $50 thereafter (though the latter was not hugely publicised). All on the company Amex, mostly out of my hands. Set up by the company travel bods.
(Again the chaps hated it because Enterprise was cheaper and better customer service. Even Hertz was cheaper for same car through Orbitz than through the Gold membership via approved company travel arranger - go figure).
Anyway, I eventually left the company, and one of my final acts was to close the Amex account. All balances were settled (they actually owed me, curiously) and the card was cut up.
The next year Hertz tried to bill me $50. (Company travel chaps were supposed to have cancelled this, but hey).
When Hertz went to Amex, quoting a no longer valid card number, Amex paid up, reopened my account, and charged it to my account. As they only had my old address (Seattle) and I was in the UK now, it took me quite a while to find this out. By which point further financial penalties had accrued.
I tried to point out that when I closed the account they were no longer authorised to pay people in my name.
They said if I had a pre-existing agreement with Hertz they had to honour it. I said "who else has pre-existing agreements who might take money from me", and they said "how should we know ?", then I said "How did Hertz prove to you that they have a pre-existing agreement with me ?" and they said "they don't have to, you have to prove otherwise".
I said "how long do I have to live in fear that someone will bill be out of the blue and you'll pay them in my name, since closing the account is obviously no use". they said "forever".
We came to an agreement in the end. They did not actually have a clue where I lived (even which country) and would piss away at least the due balance trying to find me. They persuaded Hertz to stand down and cancelled the penalty charges. Or maybe I got the $50 from my old company. I forget now, it was a few years back.
My point ?
The Hertz account for our company was huge (a very big company you'd have heard of). To this day I don't think the company saved a penny over normal rental car booking, and obviously paid out $50 per year per travelling employee. But some people did get their cars a bit quicker. (But hey, we all know Hertz deliberatly make the non Gold class pickup process needlessly longer just to make you upgrade, don't they ? I mean if their computer can check in Gold in 5 seconds, what can REALLY take 15 minutes for plebs class ?)
Everyone at the coal face knew this corporate deal was idiotic.
The Amex probably stopped us getting the best rates in some hotels (even stopped us getting some hotels altogether).
But these deals are done very high up, aren't they ?
And why should Hertz care about beating Enterprise at customer service when they can lock up 10,000 new accounts on the golf course ?
Do I own my xBox ? (as Griff)
In the early days the xBox was a loss leader for the games and there was a big fuss when some people figured out how to hack it and make an extremely good value linux box out of the hardware.
Just like the Virgin phone handsets in the earlier TD post, there seems to me to be a problem with the overall contract in this case.
Conmpanies should come clean and say "you don't own this hardware - you have it on permenant loan and you own a right to use it in a certain way" (a bit like most commercial software if you read the small print).
Then they can legally control what you can and can't do with it. In this case, by all means run a loss leader and force people to play by your rules to get back the revenue.
But of course they'd lose sales. Someone who pays £200+ for a piece of electronics expects to own it. On the other hand if they want to sell you hardware they should let you own it completely.
I guess what I'm saying is that anyone who offers customers a loss leader on hardware should do so "at their own risk".
It does appear, however, that the law is not what is in play here but what they can actually stop you doing. So even if it is illegal to play on a modded box in your own home offline there is no way they can stop you. But on the Live service they can. And they can choose to disconnect or block people as they see fit.
In all issues of copyright (compare MS Office and an MP3 ripped from a CD) the realistic extent of the law is defined entirely by what is actually technically possible to enforce, not by morality or even necessarily common sense.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Lets consider software (as Griff)
-- Sure, but why would the recipient of the file *WANT* to check it? --
This was all said in the context of whether it is right for the **AA to prosecurte a downloader. If there is a legitimate way for a downloader to find whether a download is legal or not, then whether they choose to use it or not is immaterial - it takes away their defence of not knowing. If I owned file sharing site I would point users to such a tool to get my site off the hook.
I guess the next problem is that if the tool was completely automated (as it could be) then the **AA could insist that the filesharing site used it to screen uploads, rather than simply hiding behind safe harbour and making it the punter's problem.
And by logical extension, the **AA could insist that any ISP that hosts files has a duty to see if they are indentifiable music files and if so check legality.
This would cost all internet users as the ISP's would pass costs on, but to be honest I'd rather pay for that (a once per upload application of a server algorithm) than pay for a huge overhead of watching surfers' traffic looking for infringement.
It's an interesting though experiment though. if the **AA spent the money developing such a tool and made it freely available to all and sundry, what would the implications be ?
There'd have to be logal redress for false positives (I can imagine otherwise the **AA developers adding )
if (songNotRecognised)
{
status = NOT_FREELY_DOWNLOADABLE;
}
Like any DRM, however, some smart people will get round it. They will find a way to mangle an MP3 so that it sounds almost the same but is unrecognisable by the algorithm. But a lot of illegal copying is about convenience. It is just so easy to rip a CD and post it online.
Re: Re: Lets consider software (as Griff)
-- Are you suggesting that somebody could somehow actually tell the difference between an illegal and legal download? How would you propose that anyone do this, particularly since both controlled and freely distributable content are both just a bunch of 0's and 1's when being transmitted digitally?---
There is an iPhone app that allows your iPhone to "listen" to a tune playing on a the radio an immediately identify it (then buy it if you want to).
The "is this an illegal download" tool I alluded to would
- identify the tune (using the same database the app referred to above uses)
- interrogate the database to see if said tune is currently legally available free.
If the song has ever been legally made available free with unlimited copying rights then I would suggest that it is meaningless to later assert that a download is illegal. But I would guess that most commercial music would not be in that category and the tool would tell you that it was dodgy to expect the tune to be free.
I'm not sure that you could do this in real time as a browser add on (as you are downloading) since torrent sites get fragments from different places simultaneously, but you could certainly check the file after receiving it.
What this tool could not do so easily is tell you whether the apparently legit looking music download site with paypal payment was entitled to sell you the MP3 (Amazon) or not ("fly-by-night-cheap-mp3s.com ). But in theory the database behind the tool could tell you that too.
This is not rocket science technically if
- someone wanted to do it
- consumers wanted to use it
Lets consider software (as Griff)
Specifically MS Office. Once MS have produced it is is, by TD's definition, an infinite good. However, plenty of people with a choice are prepared to pay a lot of money for it and do every year.
Noone can fault MS's business model - there are a lot more MS millionaires than OpenOffice millionaires or linux millionaires. You are free to opine MS would make more money in the long run by giving Office away but I fear you'd find it hard to convince many (including me).
I don't think anyone would argue that after MS have invested what could amount to millions in a new version of Office, that they there is some moral reason why they should give it away, not that someone who chooses to illegally pirate it has some moral defence.
Sure, in a country or market sector where noone can afford it, MS might be better of turning a blind eye to piracy rather than see OpenOffice take market share but this is a decision for MS alone to make. They invested the money up front to create value for people.
The major reason that there is not huge ubiquitous piracy of Office is not because people are respectful of any moral arguments or even of the rules of copyright. There are simply technical hurdles (aka DRM) and a well funded policing operation that finds and punishes businesses that break the clear rules.
And when software as a service becomes uniquitous, there will little or no pirated software. When Office is served from the cloud, how will OpenOffice compete ?
Who will pay for the servers that are required for OpenOfficeAsAService ?
Once again, I'd defend to the death your right to say that MS would be financially better off giving Office away, but I would not agree.
Now compare this with music. The ONLY difference is that preventing and punishing piracy is technically more challenging. The value per item is less and there is little control over the enivironment in which the product is used. But music, like software, is digital content that can be copied infinitely at almost zero marginal cost.
( Music in the cloud (aka streaming) will simply be recorded and then pirated. The old Radio DJ trick of talking over the intro won't work for a streaming service )
Now I fail to see how just because it is harder to protect music from actions the creator has not approved, that somehow changes the morality of the situation.
It may well be true that the musician / label is on a hiding to nothing now the genie is out of the bottle but that doesn't make it morally wrong for the artist to want to sell the content (noone has to by it) nor does it make it right for someone to copy it without his/her permission.
It may well be true that the industry would find a whole different business model more profitable than the RIAA/DRM approach, but that doesn't mean their current approach is morally wrong. The RIAA's main fault is their overreach and excessive behaviour, and the way they seem to get absurd backing from the legal and political establishment, resulting in ludicrous financial legal awards, but if these things were not so, they would not be per-se morally wrong. A guy/gal who uploads an album with the express intention of enabling illegal sharing should arguably be punished as if he/she had shoplifted one copy. It is well nigh impossible to meaningfully prosecure the downloaders unless tools exist for them to verify what is a legal/illegal download. (As an aside, the industry could easily create such a tool and make it widely available - why don't they ?).
Without these excesses, the RIAA would be little different from the alliance of software producers (whose acronym eludes me) that send people into sizeable companies to catch them in the act of using 200 pirated copies of Office.
Are they morally wrong ?
Someone posted earlier saying how they create software for themselves and then are happy to freely share it for others. That is all well and good but I suspect that
a) The software he refers to is not 20 man years of effort
b) Giving code away for free is not his day job
I must say, with a Sonos as my primary music system (plus a few cheap MP3 players for running/dogwalking) I would rather buy an MP3 album for £5 from Amazon than pay more than twice that for a plastic disk that I have to rip as soon as I get home. But £5 is fine, and the artists have to eat. I'd rather they made money off the music and toured to meet the fans, playing small, unprofitable venues even in towns where the turnout might not be high, rather than played a few stadiums I cannot get to to be sure they make a million from the tour.
You could tell me that DRM is not a business model but MicroSoft might disagree.
The great American franchise operation (as Griff)
An example springs to mind. The "Build a bear" stores that have opened now in the UK allow a child to construct their own bear including putting a voicebox in. Kids in Wales asked if they could get pre-recoprded phrases in Welsh. They were told no, you can't even have English without the US accent.
I once hear some idiot from the music industry explaining that personalising music (ie water marking on a mail order CD as a non obtrusive form of tracking who might be uploading) would be too expensive. Put another way, they won't add 10c to the cost of what they sell for $15 however much it could be better for them in the long run.
This sort of cheapness is why the archetypal US conglomerate will be beaten by more nimble mindsets. We've all heard stories of how the marketing depts in US car companies keep trying to insist on worldwide car model names
(The Opel Corsa in mainland Europe is the Vauxhall Nova in UK. They almost launched in Spain with "Nova" = "doesn't go").
And of course GM would rather lobby for lower emission standards than just innovate and keep up with Toyota on the world stage. It's what you get when you have a single fairly homogenous market in your back yard that is so big you THINK that you can survive by ignoring the rest of the world altogether. Not something a Luxembourg based company would ever suffer from...
So this is not a copyright or IP battle (as Griff)
If I understand this correctly, we're not talking here about someone "copying a commercial without permission" or "passing off". Simply a claim of unfair or inaccurate advertising.
So remind me again why this is on TechDirt ?
Bottles of urine (as Griff)
--- Three decades ago, I invented filling up Coke bottles with urine.---
That's where Red Bull came from...
Same 20 years ago (as Griff)
When I was at University 20 years ago an acquaintance called either the Times or the Telegraph science correspondent and told them Cambridge University Eng dept now had working superconductors at temperatures far less cold than anyone had ever achieved. After a half-hearted attempt to check the story, the journo ran it and may I recall have lost his job in the end.
Not a tabloid, and well before digital news stole the paper media's profits.
Nothing new here.
The Net Book Agreement (as Griff)
In the UK there used to be a thing called the net book agreement. This seemed to mean noone could sell a book for less than the RRP.
This means supermarkets made a huge markup on the few books tghey sold, for example, but tiny specialised bookshops could still survive qas some margin was guaranteed. In those days it was believed that if the NBA went away, small niche book shops would disappear because they'd never sell any "normal" books and the specialised books would not keep them in profit.
However, there have been a couple of developments since then.
One, Amazon etc al and the "long tail" have made it possible for a book that sells only 100 copies to just as profitable per book as one that sells a million.
Two, small niche dealers can still reach a worldwide market via Abebooks.
With these two developments, I don't think anyone could defend the NBA today.
You could maybe criticise Walmart for selling books dirt cheap as they only carry high volume books and don't care about the low volume stuff which might suffer as a result, but Amazon don't suffer from that problem. No reason why they can't sell every book cheap if they want to.
Plus Amazon can reprice everything in minutes if they want and Walmart simply can't be that responsive.
Can't see the problem, myself.
Can't a guy represent more than 1 group ? (as Griff)
Suppose this guy legitimately represents several groups. He writes 1 form letter then sends it 3 times, each wearing a different "hat".
I do marketing for several clients. If there was a legislative issue that affected them I might write to my representative from each of them. And if I was really lazy I might re-use some of the letter.
In addition to replacing boilerplate text I'd probably reword a few paragraphs too...
But if I was 77 I woudl reserve the right to have a senior moment and forget to replace something.
I'm not saying that I believe this for a minute in this case - simply that if you, Mike, cannot think of a single scenario where the guy might be telling the truth then you have a fairly limited imagination.
Inconsistent, Mike ? (as Griff)
I'm sure within the last few days I read you criticizing Virgin for seeking to legally prevent folk from reprogramming phones for another network.
So what happens when someone starts reprograming their "free" Palm Pre ? Or is that different ?
Also, in the UK, cellphone usage really rocketed when they introduced "pay as you go" tariffs (people hate contracts and being surprised by big bills).
Now PAYG and contracts probably hold comparable market share. You can't heavily subsidize a phone on PAYG so people see the real price of the phone.
When people can compare the price of the phone on PAYG with that on a contract they figure out how much of the plan is paying for the hardware.
The decision between PAYG and contract thus gets distorted.
Arguing against yourself (as Griff)
1 Consistency
C'mon Mike, you have implied that a paywall for a news scoop will never work because someone else can just repost the content and offer it for free
and YET
you claim here that the very concept of someone copying and reposting content is imaginary.
Personally I've seen my own content which I placed on Wikipedia re-served verbatim through some other ad filled site, so this automated scraping definitely goes on. Why it would not happen for news is a bit hard to fathom.
(And if you read the Wired article on Demand, you'll know that it is possible for scrapers to determine automatically what is the most profitable stuff to scrape).
2. Watermarking.
If the UK intelligence services have (say) 10 copies of an intelligence report for 10 different authorised readers, each one is subtley different in wording so that if it ever gets leaked they can see whose copy the leak came from. There are computer programs to determine when a high school essay has been plagiarised from known sources.
Similarly, any automated news scraping service can easily be proved to have got the content from the originating website. (Watermarking pictures is unnecessary). Copy and paste won't defeat this - it will take active rewording by a human and THIS would kill the scrapers' business model. The question (if you agree with the logic of taking action against offenders) is whether the scraper is reputable enough to sue or run by spammers who cover their tracks.
What I imagine the newspaper could do is ask google to suspend the adsense account of anyone who is clearly making money from plagiarised content. Not sure what Google would do, but if it was happening hundreds of times per day, the two parties would probably agree a streamlined way to handle it.
This is not ideal (like automatic takedown actions without due process) but google have the talent to automatically decide for themselves if page x is actually plagiarised from page y (or vice versa) based on content scanning and publishing dates based on their own spider visits. They could even sell this to the newspapers as a service (subscription based). They would (for paying customers) check all pages submitted by the users to see if they are currently plagiarised by any pages currently serving Adsense ads. If they (google) believed that there was infringment, they could send an automatic takedown request to the offender, and follow it up with an Adsense suspension. Or else channel the adsense funds to the content originator instead.
What if, you ask, the newspaper actually plagiarised some blogger and claimed it was the other way round ? Well, they could offer anyone a chance to have their new posts "timestamped" by google ? I dunno, if there was a need, there's a way. After all, they now offer a potential wiki sidebar on every page on the web so this would not be too hard.
Now I know that, Mike, you think that trying to fight online plagiarism is like trying to hold back the tide. It might be futile, it might not be the best business model, but that does not make plagiarism RIGHT.
Decentralisation (as Griff)
Most of the biggest innovations recently will drive the next.
For example the "next big thing" will be talked about in facebook and on Twitter.
Re: True lending (as Griff)
* That would be a true lend.
** And the point of that would be?
The point would be that you'd maybe miss the book and ask for it back and the borrower would go and get his own.
It would also stop you behaving like an unauthrosied public library at the expense of the author.
Have to agree with the poster who says nopt all DRM is pure evil.
Demanding that everything be free just because someone somewhere can get round DRM is not a defensible position.
When DRM becomes evil is when it inconveniences the innocent (like CD's that won't play or rootkits).
Think your ISP is better ? (as Griff)
Google have the size and legal power to at least resist until court order.
Many small ISP's would probably have rolled over with no court order when suits froma major bank came knocking.
I'm leaving my mail with Google where I can see they will at least hold out until forced by law.
(I think the law is what was at fault here, but Google have to follow it).
Virgin Mobile (as Griff)
If as I understand it, Virgin (who have made a lot of money out of doing far better at giving people what they want than most of their competitors) have a business model that allows people to pay less for the handset but pay it back in the calling charges over time, then this is a good business model. But if someone then unlocks the phone and uses it on a different network that have not had to subsidise the handset, then the business model is defeated.
Is this because Virgin (seeing that some people don't want to pay so much up front for a handset) have a BAD business model ? Is it wrong to offer cheap or free hardware and get the revenue back from the service ?
Obviously this business model needs some form of protection. They probably hoped to rely on technical protection but someone got round that so they fall back on legal protection.
This is like training as a pilot with British Airways then expecting to skip off to some other airline who pays for no training but offers higher salaries, the moment you qualify. BA would (rightfully) ask for the training costs back, as the contact you signed said they would.