The prosecution had attracted widespread condemnation from the scientific community, with one petition on behalf of the seismologists attracting over 5,000 signatures. But, shockingly, the judge in the case took only a few hours to deliver the verdict, and handed down sentences that were two years longer than those requested by the prosecutor.

At the time, that probably seemed a technical detail to most people, but it had two profound consequences. First, it began the shift from a world of analogue music recordings -- LPs and tapes -- to one that was digital. And secondly, it created the pre-condition for the rise of file sharing in the 1990s once the MP3 compression technology had been devised, and the Internet became available to general users -- especially younger ones. Services like Napster would not have been nearly so popular had there not been convenient digital files on CDs just sitting there, waiting to be ripped, uploaded and shared. And the reason it was so easy to do that was because CDs came without any copy protection mechanisms whatsoever.

So how on earth did Philips, Sony and the entire music industry make what must appear in retrospect such a huge blunder? Why did they not worry about people copying files from these new CDs? The answer is very simple: because at the time the CD was launched, there was nothing you could copy a CD to.

One year after the CD's commercial appearance, IBM launched its first version of the PC that had an internal hard disc, the IBM PC XT. Its capacity? A roomy 10 Mbytes. The CD holds around 700 Mbytes, meaning that uncompressed songs typically require around 50 Mbytes of storage each. The cost of any hard disc capable of storing even a single song was so great back in those days, that the idea of digital piracy was self-evidently absurd, since it would have been far cheaper to buy another copy of the CD than a hard disc to store it on.

But what that failed to take into account was the steady and precipitous reduction in the price per Mbyte of hard disc storage that would take place over the next few decades. Today we have reached the point where you can buy a 1 Terabyte hard disc for around $80; that means the cost to store the contents of an entire CD as MP3 files is about $0.005 -- and still dropping.

The CD therefore stands as a wonderful symbol of the music industry's inability to see the deeper, underlying trends in technology, and where they would take us. Back then, it meant that nobody was worried about the idea that people would copy digital files from CDs and share them, because they forgot that technology would make possible tomorrow the things that seemed impossible today. Now it means the copyright industries are still trying to preserve unsustainable 20th century business models instead of planning for the incredible technologies we will have in 10, 20 or even 30 years time. They only have to look at the history of the CD and digital piracy to see just how far things can go -- and how wrong our current assumptions can be.

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The first is that:

Every institution of higher education should have a policy assuring that peer-reviewed versions of all future scholarly articles by faculty members are deposited in the institution’s designated repository.

The second recommendation is that "the optimal license for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work" is CC-BY – that is, attribution. It's a bold move, since CC-BY gives users a lot of freedom that authors are sometimes reluctant to grant. Here's a good explanation of why that's a sensible position to take; it's from a blog post about the new recommendations by Peter Suber, one of the key figures in the open access movement:

The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to the scholarly uses of scholarly literature, without harming scholars. There’s no legitimate scholarly need to suppress attribution to the texts we use. And in any case, suppressing attribution would hurt authors. If they don’t get paid for their articles, at least they should get credit. Their impact and careers depend on that.

Finally, there is a recommendation on advocacy and coordination that includes the following:

The worldwide campaign for OA to research articles should work more closely with the worldwide campaigns for OA to books, theses and dissertations, research data, government data, educational resources, and source code.

We should coordinate with kindred efforts less directly concerned with access to research, such as copyright reform, orphan works, digital preservation, digitizing print literature, evidence-based policy-making, the freedom of speech, and the evolution of libraries, publishing, peer review, and social media.

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While nothing in this presentation would seem all that new and innovative to modern audiences thanks to the proliferation of the internet, personal computers and smart phones, back in 1973, this was a massive leap for home electronics. For instance, the creative use of encoded audio signals when ordering a product from a commercial is very similar to such common place codes such as UPC and QR codes today. And while home education over the internet today seems old hat, using your cable television subscription to achieve the same end goal is actually quite remarkable.

Another interesting suggestion that was only touched on but not discussed to great length was the idea of ad supported gaming. Today we see this in many forms whether it is free games that include advertising to bring in revenue for the developer, or games sponsored by or acting as an advertisement for a brand. Once video games became a large part of the home, we saw Baer's prediction come true. 

All in all, what this shows is that few ideas are completely new. Many times, someone else will have thought of it before you, or at least thought of something similar. A lesson that some companies should probably consider prior to using patent law as a way to kill competition.

By his own account, Morrison is also being driven out of business by the ominously feudal economics of 21st-century literature, "pushed into the position where I have to join the digital masses," he says, the cash advances he once received from publishers slashed so deep he is virtually working for free.

And not only them: From the heights of the literary pantheon to the lowest trenches of hackery, where contributors to digital "content farms" are paid as little as 10 cents for every 1,000 times readers click on their submissions, writers of every stature are experiencing the same pressure. Authors are losing income as sales shift to heavily discounted, royalty-poor and easily pirated ebooks. Journalists are suffering pay cuts and job losses as advertising revenue withers. Floods of amateurs willing to work for nothing are chasing freelance writers out of the trade. And all are scrambling to salvage their livelihoods as the revolutionary doctrine of "free culture" obliterates old definitions of copyright.

The economic trajectory of writing today is "a classic race to the bottom," according to Morrison, who has become a leading voice of the growing counter-revolution – writers fighting fiercely to preserve the traditional ways. "It looks like a lot of fun for the consumer. You get all this stuff for very, very cheap," he says. But the result will be the destruction of vital institutions that have supported "the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years."

Many will cheer, Morrison admits, including the more than one million new authors who have outflanked traditional gatekeepers by “publishing” their work in Amazon’s online Kindle store. “All these people I’m sure are very happy to hear they’re demolishing the publishing business by creating a multiplicity of cheap choices for the reader,” Morrison says. “I beg to differ.”

The only solution ultimately is a political one. As we grow increasingly disillusioned with quick-fix consumerism, we may want to consider an option which exists in many non-digital industries: quite simply, demanding that writers get paid a living wage for their work. Do we respect the art and craft of writing enough to make such demands? If we do not, we will have returned to the garret, only this time, the writer will not be alone in his or her cold little room, and will be writing to and for a computer screen, trying to get hits on their site that will draw the attention of the new culture lords – the service providers and the advertisers.

• Various economic figures can be used to try to predict how many medals each country will earn in 2012. The USA is expected to get somewhere between 99 and 113 medals, and China is predicted to come in second place with 67-98 medals. [url]
• The London Eye will be lit up like a mood ring during the Olympics, based on Tweets and a bit of sentimental analysis to gauge positive and negative commentary of the Games. The analysis is sponsored by an energy company, so it'll be watching for words like "Olympics", "London 2012" and the hashtag #energy2012. [url]
• Researchers from the Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK will be studying the 2012 games to look for significant changes in athletic performance. They've developed a "performance improvement index" to quantify things like: how sprinters are running faster than ever before or that javelin throwers are in a performance plateau. [url]

Yes, evil robots. Long-time reader Matt Novak points us to a blog post he wrote last month, showing off some vintage ads from a campaign by musicians against recorded music in movie theatres:

That must be a textbook symptom of technophobia. You should only be warning the public about robot tyrants if you are a) dangerously insane or b) John Connor. Of course, as we now know, synchronized sound massively expanded the film industry, which in turn created countless new opportunities for musicians—while at the same time, closely-related technology advancements were turning the recorded music industry into its own powerhouse. Today's entertainment incumbents have reined it in a little, preferring somewhat-believable lies over utterly fantastic ones, and focusing more on issues of "theft" than a supposed decline in the quality of the experience (they leave the latter up to technicians and weirdos like Prince). And yet there are still striking similarities between their message and the copy that appeared on those 1930s ads:

The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.

Note the consistent refrain—"we're not opposed to technology and innovation, except that we totally are"—and the characterization of what they do as the entirety of "art". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

(By the way, there are several other amusing ads in the original post, and I strongly recommend checking them out.)

But even against that tumultuous background, few of us would have expected that two of the most serious business publications in Europe, The Economist and Financial Times, would both go much further than simply noting the problems the treaty now faces, and declare that ACTA is pretty much dead.

Under the headline "ACTA up", The Economist says: "Protests across Europe may kill an anti-piracy treaty", and points out: "Internet activists used to be dismissed as a bunch of hairy mouse-clickers with little clout. Not any more."

The Financial Times' headline is "Latest pact on internet piracy set to be derailed", and the post makes an explicit connection with SOPA and PIPA:

A controversial international trade agreement, which campaigners fear would restrict internet freedom looks likely to be delayed or scrapped, the latest in a string of measures planned to combat online piracy to falter in the face of co-ordinated protests.

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Several of these analyses of alleged harm to the recording industry... were presented and debated during hearings on copyright... At each hearing, X presented the results of the most recent analysis done for the recording industry by his firm... [As] in his earlier testimonies, he stated that continued [copying] had grave implications for the viability of the recording industry. Noting that recording-industry releases were down by almost half since ****, and that industry employment had declined... X stated that further growth in [copying] would cause further decline in these industry indicators.

Did you guess: Alan Greenspan in the early 1980s? Bravo.

By 1986, industry stakeholders...had sponsored almost a dozen surveys and studies, usually to support or oppose passage of home-copying legislation. ... OTA noted:

In the 1985 analysis, sponsored by the RIAA, Greenspan estimated that in 1984, each instance of home taping cost the taper $1.67 per album equivalent, compared with an average retail price of $6.80. On the basis of an earlier report on home taping by the firm Audits & Surveys, Townsend & Greenspan estimated that 42 percent of all home tapings from prerecorded material and 40% of off-the-air (broadcast) tapings would have generated sales, if taping had not been possible. Then, assuming that 40 percent of home taping in 1984 was in lieu of purchases of records or recorded cassettes, the firm estimated 1984 retail losses of some $1.5 billion...

Moreover, as in his earlier testimonies, he stated that continued home taping had grave implications for the viability of the recording industry. Noting that recording-industry releases were down by almost half since 1979, and that industry employment had declined from 29,000 in the late 1970s to less than 19,000 in 1984, Greenspan stated that further growth in home taping would cause further decline in these industry indicators.

Greenspan's two earlier studies had estimated losses...amounting to $1.05 billion for 1981 and $1.4 billion in 1982. The Consumer Electronics Group of the Electronics Industries Association (EIA), the Audio Recording Rights Coalition, and the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) submitted dissenting comments and testimony disputing these estimates. ... EIA claimed that the analysis for RIAA had ignored the stimulative effects of home taping on sales of recordings, and that some home tapes (e.g. selection tapes made for portable or car tape players) are not substitutes for prerecorded products... A pattern emerges in these debates. The published recording industry arguments and economic analyses deal only with estimates of alleged harms...

[I]t's worth noting that Greenspan spent several years trying to pass stronger enforcement laws based on a scare story about a temporary dip in the market, as the cassette displaced the 8-Track and vinyl went into decline (and the US suffered a major recession). Stronger enforcement was a solution to maintaining the revenue levels associated with the LP and 8-Track. And he made this case at the beginning of the greatest boom period in the recorded music industry: the CD era. Now that the CD is dying, our present-day Greenspans are doing the same.

"If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the right balance in our protection of intellectual property rights? Are the protections sufficiently broad to encourage innovation but not so broad as to shut down follow-on innovation? Are such protections so vague that they produce uncertainties that raise risk premiums and the cost of capital? How appropriate is our current system--developed for a world in which physical assets predominated--for an economy in which value increasingly is embodied in ideas rather than tangible capital?"

As the MP3 replaced the CD, the major labels cut their distribution costs, struggled to keep digital prices at rough parity with the CD, and pocketed the difference. An artist signed with a major label still makes 15-20% on wholesale-no more than for a good deal in the CD era. Many of the indie labels and digital aggregator services, in contrast, return 50-90% of the wholesale price to the artist. It is glaringly obvious that the major labels' 80% wholesale cut isn't sustainable-nor, I will predict, is Apple's 30% retail cut. Piracy was the messenger, not the message.

Used to be running a label paid well, but it was mostly about the music, the lifestyle. Then, with the advent of MTV and the CD, suddenly Tommy Mottola was far richer than the acts. And Tommy and his ilk started hanging with other rich people in the Hamptons, they felt entitled to their wealth. Such that when Napster blew a hole in the paradigm, everybody was sacrificed but the top guy. The people running the labels are still as well paid as they were before Napster, before the recession. They're keeping up with the joneses, they're in charge, everybody's expendable but them. As for those people still working at the label...they're thrilled to have a job. Glad to be slaves on the plantation.

Now, if you ask me to bet on the likelihood that New York will successfully adapt to the advent of digital and the emergence of Amazon as a publisher, I would have to regretfully decline to bet very much. As I noted in my previous post, companies coddled by a lack of competition get flabby, and New York, which hasn't faced real competition in living memory, is now squaring off against a formidable competitor indeed. I don't think it's likely legacy publishers will be able to adapt and survive. And though I hope I'm wrong about that, my hope doesn't lead me to want to protect New York from competition, either.

Maybe I'm clarifying here more than is really necessary, but I've learned from recent experience how willing and even eager people can be to mischaracterize arguments they find threatening. So again: the fact that I'm predicting an outcome doesn't mean I'm hoping for it. I predict that one day I will be dead, but that doesn't render me particularly enamored of or eager for that outcome. Similarly, though I don't think New York's chances are good, come on, guys, I'm cheering you on. I want you to step up, not give up.

Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor's calendar is September 16, and he's looking for a 2006 paper written "about five years ago," setting the year as 2011.

And this morning, at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S.

So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.

In a recently published paper, Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting Large-scale Human Behavior Using Global News Media Tone in Time and Space, [Kalev Leetaru] shows that by feeding millions of news articles from around the world into an SGI supercomputer, you can analyze the tone of media coverage and pinpoint moments of unrest: a revolution, riots, or even when a despotic ruler will relinquish power and flee his country.

"On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter's tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own."

"My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I'd posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn't know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who'd posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn't actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn't know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.

But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I'd posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn't republish without permission."

“How many are left?” I asked.

She looked at her tablet and said: “Fifty-seven.”

“We can handle that,” I said. I walked her through the rest: Get rid of the ones without flags. Pay those a dime or less by hitting the dime button. How many now? (Only six.) We went through the six: Four copyright claims, all sub-dollar and quickly paid.

She opened the penultimate message and smiled. “Dad,” she said, “look.”

We had gone to a baseball game at the beginning of the season. They had played a song on the public address system, and she sang along without permission. They used to factor that into ticket price—they still do if you pay extra or have a season pass—but now other companies handled the followup. And here was the video from that day, one of many tens of thousands simultaneously recorded from gun scanners on the stadium roof. In the video my daughter wore a cap and a blue T-shirt. I sat beside her, my arm over her shoulder, grinning. Her voice was clear and high; the ambient roar of the audience beyond us filtered down to static."

• The DEA gets the balance between copyright enforcement and innovation wrong. The use of peer-to-peer technology should be encouraged to promote innovative applications. Focusing on efforts to suppress the use of technological advances and to protect out-of-date business models will stifle innovation in this industry.
• Providing user-friendly, hassle-free solutions to enable users to download music legally at a reasonable price, is a much more effective strategy for enforcing copyright than a heavy-handed legislative and regulatory regime.
• Decline in the sales of physical copies of recorded music cannot be attributed solely to file-sharing, but should be explained by a combination of factors such as changing patterns in music consumption, decreasing disposable household incomes for leisure products and increasing sales of digital content through online platforms.

Last Friday's Financial Times had some interesting numbers.

• Fact 1: According to analysts, the New York Times only needs to convert 1 to 10 per cent of the online visitors in order for the model to pay off.
• Fact 2: NY Times chief executive Janet Robinson has stated that they only expect about 15 per cent of visitors to encounter the paywall, since visitors can read 20 articles per month for free.
• Fact 3: Full website access and the mobile app are bundled for $15 per month. For the iPad app + web you pay $20 per month. $35 for all three.
• Fact 4: One analyst argues that the NY Times could earn $66m per year if it converted just 1 per cent of the visitors. This would mean they go from paying nothing, to paying (at least) $195 a year.

There is no way these numbers add up. Consider fact 1 and fact 2. First of all only 1 per cent might actually not be all that easy, let alone 10 per cent. Secondly, the 1 per cent is misleading, as they'll actually have to convert 1 to 10 out of every 15 visitors to encounter the paywall. So they actually have to convert 6 to 66 (!) per cent.

Next, the pricing might be too high. $15 per month is a lot for consumers who are not used to pay for news online, especially since there's no additional value as Mike commented last week. I'm not saying nobody will pay, but dragging in the 6 to 66 per cent of the visitors will be challenging, to say the least.

I cannot imagine this paywall to be successful. They can probably kiss the $40m investment in the development goodbye.

The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley's wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.

I'd like to make a bet. While there are different estimates as to how long any recession might be, the general consensus is that we should hopefully start pulling out by the end of 2009 or early 2010. So, let's pick a few of these that we can measure, and I'll bet Andrew Keen $100 (really money, Andrew) that in two years, on October 22, 2010, Wikipedia still gets more traffic than Knol, that Google is still much, much, much bigger than Mahalo (if they're even considered competitors any more), and that YouTube gets more traffic than Hulu.

If any one of those is untrue, I'll write him a check.

With better communication national boundaries will gradually cease to have their present importance. Because of racial differences a world union cannot be expected within eighty years. The best adjustment that we can hope for to this certain change would seem to be the voluntary union of neighboring nations under a centralized government of continental size.

Technological progress, with its exponential law of increase, holds the key to the future. Labor displacement will proceed even to automatic factories. The magic of remote control will be commonplace. Humanity’s most versatile servant will be the electron tube. The communication and transportation inventions will smooth out regional differences and level us in some respects to uniformity. But the heterogeneity of material culture will mean specialists and languages that only specialists can understand. The countryside will be transformed by technology and farmers will be more like city folk. There will be fewer farmers, more wooded land with wild life. Personal property in mechanical conveniences will be greatly extended. Some of these will be needed to prop up the weak who will survive.

Inevitable technological progress and abundant natural resources yield a higher standard of living. Poverty will be eliminated and hunger as a driving force of revolution will not be a danger. Inequality of income and problems of social justice will remain. Crises of life will be met by insurance.

...

The role of government is bound to grow. Technicians and special interest groups will leave only a shell of democracy. The family cannot be destroyed but will be less stable in the early years of married life, divorce being greater than now. The lives of woman will be more like those of men, spent more outside the home. The principle of expediency will be the dominating one in law and ethics.

I'm not exactly calling camera phones a fad, but I'm not exactly not calling them a fad, either. My bet is there will be a relatively small number of people who shoot lots of camphone pics--in the U.S., we have a special term for these people: "12- to 24-year-olds." A much larger group will have a camphone but never click the shutter; we call those people "adults."

I just think that, if God wanted telephones to be cameras, he wouldn't have given us separate eyes and ears.... I've found that the fun of the camera phone wears off quickly. The first few times one of these gizmos arrived at my house for review, I dutifully ran out and shot a bunch of pictures and sent them to friends. But the process was cumbersome, and the results not much better than the fuzzy pics my friend sent me. It wasn't too long before I stopped thinking of these phones as cameras.... the fact is that I just find them boring.

Barring one of those reality-warping incidents in which Superman gets exposed to the wrong kind of Kryptonite and then there's this huge flash of light and all of a sudden, there's a big statue of Don Ho where the Lincoln Memorial should be, camera phones never will be cool.

So: They take bad pictures, they're expensive to operate, they drain your batteries and in a worst-case scenario they'll cause your name to land on some sort of watch list. And yet more and more of them are manufactured every day. I'm baffled.

Look, somewhere here in the office I have a normal-looking digital wristwatch that also dispenses PEZ candy. After you've checked the time and determined that the Tokyo durable-goods market closes in just 20 minutes and thus it's time to start dumping some options from your company's pension fund, you push a little lever and a chalky cherry lozenge springs into your hand. It's stylish and fun.

I've never devoted a column to that one, either, because the PEZ watch had exactly the right sort of impact on the Industry. It's cool in a chocolate-and-peanut-butter sort of way, but it's certainly not the sort of thing that causes columnists and analysts to spend an hour leaning back in their chairs and speculating about where this technology will wind up in three years.

Which is a bloody shame, because on the whole, the PEZ watch is a much sounder investment than a camera phone. It's about as useful, for starters, plus it's a one-time $7.95 investment.

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.