With all the recent talk of breaking up big tech in the news again lately, one of the most common refrains is that the big internet companies (mainly Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple) are so big and so dominant that no upstart competitor can possibly succeed against them, in part because if they get too big, those giants will just “copy” the competitor and put them out of business. This narrative has gotten a lot of support from the story of Facebook effectively copying SnapChat a few years back. But, it’s important to note just how rare this actually is. The history of tech innovation is littered with disrupted giants which often tried, but utterly failed, to “copy” the upstart.
For many, many years, we’ve talked about this. Part of the problem is that “copying” features or or services is what we’ve referred to as cargo cult copying, where you’re really just copying the tacit, visible features, but without a deeper understanding of why people really use a tool or service. It’s why Microsoft failed in trying to just copy Intuit out of business. It’s why Facebook failed when it tried to just copy GroupOn (back when people thought GroupOn was a disruptor to Facebook’s local ads). It’s why smaller companies frequently out innovate giant, dominant incumbents. Part of it is that the incumbents don’t notice the innovation until it’s too late, but more often because they don’t really understand why an innovation is so disruptive — often because it attacks their position in a tangential way. That wasn’t the case with SnapChat and Facebook, where the competition was more direct and more core to Facebook’s business.
But the difficulty in “just copying” is driven home by a really great recent article by Josh Constine at TechCrunch, talking about how Mark Zuckerberg totally misunderstands TikTok and why it’s a threat to Facebook. TikTok, of course, is a giant in its own right (part of Chinese internet giant ByteDance, which creates its own problems). However, in recently leaked recordings of Mark Zuckerberg addressing Facebook employees’ questions, he notes that TikTok is a threat, and how they’re trying to copy its service in markets where TikTok doesn’t have a hold yet.
Are we concerned about TikTok?s growing cultural clout among teens and Gen Z, and what is our plan of attack?
MZ: So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that?s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It?s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It?s growing really quickly in India. I think it?s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it?s a very interesting phenomenon.
And the way that we kind of think about it is: it?s married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it?s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app. And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we?re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that?s a standalone app that we?re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We?re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.
We?re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there. But yeah, I think that it?s not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing. But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they?re doing, I think it is quite interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they?re spending a huge amount of money promoting it. What we?ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the space is still fairly nascent, and there?s time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It?s good.
However, as Constine points out, this shows that Zuckerberg totally misunderstands why TikTok is so successful.
TikTok isn?t about you or what you?re doing. It?s about entertaining your audience. It?s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It?s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else and acting out jokes. It?s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it?s not about originality ? the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture ? taking the audio from someone else?s clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a video you record.
That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on those apps aren?t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are. Insta and Facebook?s social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don?t encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates. And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else?s creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn?t offer much to remix.
That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph and retrain users? understanding of these apps? purpose?at the risk of distracting from their core use cases. T
This is the same exact story that we’ve told a bunch of times in the past (including a few of those links above). Even if Zuckerberg recognizes (correctly) that TikTok represents a competitive threat, the company can’t just copy its way out of that competition. Because TikTok’s entire approach and audience is different, and the core reasons why people use TikTok are fundamentally different than the reasons they use Facebook or Instagram even if they look similar on the surface. As Constine astutely notes, Facebook could easily offer the same features as TikTok, but that wouldn’t lead to usage.
Again, that would just be cargo cult copying: copying the visible parts, without being able to understand or effectively copy the real reasons why TikTok is so successful, which is the cultural, community aspects of what makes it such a big deal. This is not a unique story. It’s what happens time and time again. Cargo cult copying is easy. It’s easy to see certain features or a certain app and make a clone. But that won’t make people use it. This same issue was explored quite well by Ben Thompson in a recent Exponent podcast, in which he notes that Zuckerberg, for all his success, still doesn’t seem to fundamentally get what makes Facebook, Facebook — and this could lead to significant problems down the road.
Facebook is large and powerful — there is no doubt about that. But the idea that it can simply copy any upstart competitor and put them out of business is a premise that is not supported by history at all.
I know that tons of people are talking antitrust about the big internet companies, and Amazon is a prime target these days. So, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised last week when there was a minor freakout, starting on Twitter, when Jeff Morris Jr., who works in the internet industry, tweeted out an angry tweet about Amazon supposedly copying Allbirds’ famous shoes:
Amazon is now straight copying Allbirds.
We have reached "peak cloning" in Silicon Valley.
There are no rules anymore – if you build a product that works, Amazon or Facebook will copy it.
If you’ve somehow missed it, over the last five years or so, Allbirds merino wool shoes have become somewhat ubiquitous as the “cool shoe” to wear among various folks — including the 44th President of the United States. Admittedly, they’re nice shoes (and crazy comfortable). And, with all such things that become a fashion fad, copycats have quickly followed. Over the last few years there have been a ton of Allbirds-like shoes hitting the market. As I type this, I’m wearing shoes from Awel, that lots of people mistake for Allbirds, because they’re… pretty damn similar. But there are many, many other similar shoes out there.
Jeff’s tweet went viral, and once that happened, the tech press started to pick up on it. Business Insider wrote an article about it, as did Quartz, The Verge and Engadget, with most of them framing it as “evil” Amazon attacking poor little Allbirds. The Quartz article by Michelle Cheng is the most ridiculous of the bunch, with the following title: “Amazon?s Allbirds clone shows its relentless steamrolling of brands.” Without proof, the article suggests that Amazon is using its sales data power to step in with its own clone shoe to undermine competition.
But… that leaves out an awful lot. Including the fact that there are tons of other Allbirds clones out there, and if you search on Amazon for “Allbirds” you actually get a bunch of other clones, and not even the Amazon one. If Amazon were truly nefariously targeting Allbirds and using its powerful data to do so, wouldn’t you expect that a search for “Allbirds” on its own site would turn up their particular shoes? Nope. It turns up other ones from lots of other shoe companies, including New Balance, Under Armour, Urban Fox, Adidas, Dr. Scholl’s, Keezmz, LeMouton, and lots of others.
So, it may be a fun narrative that Amazon is “targeting” Allbirds and out to crush the shoe company by offering a similar shoe in a style that has become immensely popular from dozens of shoe companies over the last five years, but it’s difficult to see how that narrative actually makes sense. Indeed, the story doesn’t even hold together on its own. Part of the reason why Allbirds is so popular is because of the materials and the sustainable way in which the company tries to make its shoes. The Amazon clone that has everyone up in arms isn’t even all wool like Allbirds’ flagship shoe is — it’s only 56% wool (and it’s not even clear if it’s merino wool at that).
Allbirds has successfully been beating off most of the competition not because it’s the only one who can make wool shoes, but because of the overall story and framing of Allbirds itself. People are supporting the company because of the specific product it makes and the company’s own reputation. It’s not like most Allbirds customers are going to rush to buy Amazon’s shoe instead, because even if it looks similar, it doesn’t have the reputation that Allbirds has.
And, of course, all of this ignores that copying is how innovation happens. I mean, there has to be some irony in people complaining about Amazon’s supposed “monopoly power” at the very same time they’re arguing that Allbirds should have a monopoly on wool runners. For years, we’ve pointed out that copying is standard in the fashion industry, where there is limited protections from copyrights and the like — and that’s actually helped the fashion industry be more innovative, and enabled much more competition, especially from smaller firms, because many start out copying the hot fashions before being able to introduce more original brands.
Now, there might be an argument somewhere that if Amazon were deliberately using its power as a store to wipe out competitors, or to unfairly advantage its own products, that you could show “harm” from the company abusing its dominant position. But producing an inferior shoe in an incredibly popular style — one that dozens of companies are now producing shoes in — and then failing to heavily promote that shoe directly on its own site… doesn’t seem like it’s actually harming anyone. Other than, perhaps, the ability of some tech journalists to keep things in perspective.
Over the years we’ve expressed some concerns about the NonCommercial license option from Creative Commons. Even as we’re incredibly supportive of CC, the NonCommercial license often seemed to raise more questions than answers — to the point that some have argued that it actually harmed CC’s brand and resulted in significant confusion for how CC licenses work. There have even been suggestions that CC should drop the NC license option altogether.
To its immense credit, people at Creative Commons have appeared to take these concerns quite seriously over the past few years, doing quite a bit of work to try to clarify what NonCommercial means for the purpose of the license. Our specific concern is that NonCommercial could mean all different things to different people. If you’re using a NonCommercial CC-licensed image on a personal blog and you have ads on that blog (even if you don’t make much money from it) is that non commercial? If you use it in a tweet and your Twitter bio promotes your business is that non commercial?
Two years ago we wrote about Creative Commons stepping in to file an amicus brief in a case that raised some specific issues concerning a NonCommercial license. An educational non-profit, Great Minds, sued FedEx over FedEx Office shops photocopying some Great Minds works for educational entities, even though the works were licensed under CC’s BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Great Minds argued that because FedEx made money from copying, it’s “commercial” and thus in violation of the license. Creative Commons stepped into that lawsuit and explicitly stated that Great Minds interpretation was wrong.
In the FedEx case, both the district court and the 2nd Circuit appeals court rejected Great Minds’ interpretation and tossed out the lawsuit saying that the license in question did not limit FedEx from charging for copies. Great Minds also filed a nearly identical case against Office Depot in California, which also was dismissed, despite Great Minds claiming that this case is different than the FedEx one (specifically, it argued that Office Depot employees were “actively soliciting” schools to copy Great Minds’ works). The court didn’t buy it.
That case has now been appealed to the 9th Circuit (who, as we’ve noted all too frequently, mucks up copyright cases). And Creative Commons is back again asking the court if it can file an amicus brief again. This seems like the perfect situation for an amicus brief, given that Creative Commons certainly should understand its licenses the best. The proposed brief is well worth a read.
Creative Commons appreciates the valuable contributions to the
development of open educational resources made by Great Minds, along with its
use of a standard CC public license to enable broad reuse of the materials it
produces. However, its interpretation of the Creative Commons license at issue in
this lawsuit is incorrect. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
correctly determined in Great Minds? prior suit against another copy shop, FedEx
Office, the license authorizes a bona fide non-commercial user to discharge her
licensed rights by directing a third party like Office Depot to make copies at her
instruction. Creative Commons welcomes and respectfully seeks a similar holding
from this Court:
Under the Creative Commons ?NonCommercial? license
at issue, a bona fide non-commercial user may engage
contractors to exercise the non-commercial user?s own
licensed rights on behalf and at the direction of the noncommercial
user, irrespective of whether the contractor is
itself non-commercial actor.
Going into details, CC explains how Great Minds is completely misinterpreting its NC license term:
The CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license fully authorizes the conduct that Great
Minds contends on appeal is unlawful. The only licensee here is the school
district. Under the terms of the license and prevailing principles of law, a school
district may permissibly use Office Depot as a means by which the school district
exercises its own licensed rights. The license does not restrict the school district to
using only its own employees to exercise those rights; it allows the school district
to engage anyone?employees and non-employee contractors alike?to do so. To
establish a rule that denies a licensee the ability to use non-employee actors to
exercise the rights it is lawfully entitled to exercise would contravene the plain
language of the license and established precedent.
To be sure, Office Depot could not on its own initiative make copies of
Great Minds? curricular materials and sell them for a profit. In that scenario,
Office Depot would not be acting at the direction of a bona fide licensee, would
not be shielded by any bona fide licensee?s license, and thus would itself need to
rely on the terms and conditions of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0?including limiting its
conduct to non-commercial purposes when reproducing the licensed work. But
that is not what is alleged here. Instead, on the facts as pleaded, the school district
has, under its license from Great Minds, engaged Office Depot to make copies and
paid Office Depot for the service, just as it could have paid an employee to make
the same copies at an Office Depot store. In that scenario, Office Depot is not a
licensee in its own right, and its own, independent purpose is analytically
irrelevant.
Hopefully the 9th Circuit follows the lead of the 2nd and agrees that Great Minds is misreading the NC part of the license. This would go a long way towards further establishing that NC licenses aren’t so limiting.
Fifty years ago ? in September 1968 ? the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin first performed together, kicking off a Scandinavian tour billed as the New Yardbirds.
The new, better name would come later that fall, while drummer John Bonham?s death in 1980 effectively ended their decade-defining reign. But to this day, the band retains the same iconic status it held back in the 1970s: It ranks as one of the best-selling music acts of all time and continues to shape the sounds of new and emerging groups young enough to be the band members? grandchildren.
Yet, even after all this time ? when every note, riff and growl of Zeppelin?s nine-album catalog has been pored over by fans, cover artists and musicologists ? a dark paradox still lurks at the heart of its mystique. How can a band so slavishly derivative ? and sometimes downright plagiaristic ? be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential?
How, in other words, did it get to have its custard pie and eat it, too?
For anyone who quests after the holy grail of creative success, Led Zeppelin has achieved something mythical in stature: a place in the musical firmament, on its own terms, outside of the rules and without compromise.
When Led Zeppelin debuted its eponymous first album in 1969, there?s no question that it sounded new and exciting. My father, a baby boomer and dedicated Beatles fan, remembers his chagrin that year when his middle school math students threw over the Fab Four for Zeppelin, seemingly overnight. Even the stodgy New York Times, which decried the band?s ?plastic sexual superficiality,? felt compelled, in the same article, to acknowledge its ?enormously successful ? electronically intense blending? of musical styles.
Yet, from the very beginning, the band was also dogged with accusations of musical pilfering, plagiarism and copyright infringement ? often justifiably.
The band?s first album, ?Led Zeppelin,? contained several songs that drew from earlier compositions, arrangements and recordings, sometimes with attribution and often without. It included two Willie Dixon songs, and the band credited both to the influential Chicago blues composer. But it didn?t credit Anne Bredon when it covered her song ?Babe I?m Gonna Leave You.?
The hit ?Dazed and Confused,? also from that first album, was originally attributed to Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. However in 2010, songwriter Jake Holmes filed a lawsuit claiming that he?d written and recorded it in 1967. After the lawsuit was settled out of court, the song is now credited in the liner notes of re-releases as ?inspired by? Holmes.
?Dazed and Confused? by Jake Holmes.
The band?s second album, ?Led Zeppelin II,? picked up where the first left off. Following a series of lawsuits, the band agreed to list Dixon as a previously uncredited author on two of the tracks, including its first hit single, ?Whole Lotta Love.? An additional lawsuit established that blues legend Chester ?Howlin? Wolf? Burnett was a previously uncredited author on another track called ?The Lemon Song.?
Musical copyright infringement is notoriously challenging to establish in court, hence the settlements. But there?s no question the band engaged in what musicologists typically call ?borrowing.? Any blues fan, for instance, would have recognized the lyrics of Dixon?s ?You Need Love? ? as recorded by Muddy Waters ? on a first listen of ?Whole Lotta Love.?
Dipping into the commons or appropriation?
Should the band be condemned for taking other people?s songs and fusing them into its own style?
Or should this actually be a point of celebration?
The answer is a matter of perspective. In Zeppelin?s defense, the band is hardly alone in the practice. The 1960s folk music revival movement, which was central to the careers of Baez, Holmes, Bredon, Dixon and Burnett, was rooted in an ethic that typically treated musical material as a ?commons? ? a wellspring of shared culture from which all may draw, and to which all may contribute.
Most performers in the era routinely covered ?authorless? traditional and blues songs, and the movement?s shining star, Bob Dylan, used lyrical and musical pastiche as a badge of pride and display of erudition ? ?Look how many old songs I can cram into this new song!? ? rather than as a guilty, secret crutch to hold up his own compositions.
Why shouldn?t Zeppelin be able to do the same?
On the other hand, it?s hard to ignore the racial dynamics inherent in Led Zeppelin?s borrowing. Willie Dixon and Howlin? Wolf were African-Americans, members of a subjugated minority who were ? especially back then ? excluded from reaping their fair share of the enormous profits they generated for music labels, publishers and other artists.
Like their English countrymen Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, Zeppelin?s attitude toward black culture seems eerily reminiscent of Lord Elgin?s approach to the marble statues of the Parthenon and Queen Victoria?s policy on the Koh-i-Noor diamond: Take what you can and don?t ask permission; if you get caught, apologize without ceding ownership.
Led Zeppelin was also accused of lifting from white artists such as Bredon and the band Spirit, the aggrieved party in a recent lawsuit over the rights to Zeppelin?s signature song ?Stairway to Heaven.? Even in these cases, the power dynamics were iffy.
Bredon and Spirit are lesser-known composers with lower profiles and shallower pockets. Neither has benefited from the glow of Zeppelin?s glory, which has only grown over the decades despite the accusations and lawsuits leveled against them.
A matter of motives
So how did the band pull it off, when so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten or diminished? How did it find and keep the holy grail? What makes Led Zeppelin so special?
I could speculate about its cultural status as an avatar of trans-Atlantic, post-hippie self-indulgence and ?me generation? rebellion. I could wax poetic about its musical fusion of pre-Baroque and non-Western harmonies with blues rhythms and Celtic timbres. I could even accuse it, as many have over the years, of cutting a deal with the devil.
Instead, I?ll simply relate a personal anecdote from almost 20 years ago. I actually met frontman Robert Plant. I was waiting in line at a lower Manhattan bodega around 2 a.m. and suddenly realized Plant was waiting in front of me. A classic Chuck Berry song was playing on the overhead speakers. Plant turned to look at me and mused, ?I wonder what he?s up to now?? We chatted about Berry for a few moments, then paid and went our separate ways.
Brief and banal though it was, I think this little interlude ? more than the reams of music scholarship and journalism I?ve read and written ? might hold the key to solving the paradox.
Maybe Led Zeppelin is worthy because, like Sir Galahad, the knight who finally gets the holy grail, its members? hearts were pure.
During our brief exchange, it was clear Plant didn?t want to be adulated ? he didn?t need his ego stroked by a fawning fan. Furthermore, he and his bandmates were never even in it for the money. In fact, for decades, Zeppelin refused to license its songs for television commercials. In Plant?s own words, ?I only wanted to have some fun.?
Maybe the band retained its fame because it lived, loved and embodied rock and roll so absolutely and totally ? to the degree that Plant would start a conversation with a total stranger in the middle of the night just to chat about one of his heroes.
This love, this purity of focus, comes out in its music, and for this, we can forgive Led Zeppelin?s many trespasses.
The last time we checked in with the folks behind the massively popular video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the company was complaining about Epic Games “ripping off” its 100 vs. 100 player game mode for its Fortnite title. In that post, we attempted to explain why this sort of thing isn’t “ripping off” in an intellectual property sense, because the idea/expression dichotomy exists. Using someone else’s idea for creative expression is not infringement, whereas using someone else’s specific creative expression is. Simple enough.
Except the folks behind PubG, as the game is sometimes known, didn’t take to this intellectual property lesson and are now instead suggesting that the entire video game industry needs much more intellectual property protection because of all the “ripoffs” out there. This from the creator of the game, Brendan Greene.
He claims elements of his game, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PubG), have been ripped off by other titles and he wants better protection from copycats.
Newly released on the Xbox One, PubG almost singlehandedly created a new genre, the Battle Royale game.
“I want other developers to put their own spin on the genre… not just lift things from our game,” Brendan says.
It’s worth noting that PubG is indeed a unique game in many ways. By tweaking several aspects of a well-worn genre and upping the map size and player count in a battle royale format, the game has become wildly successful. So successful, in fact, that one wonders exactly what danger Greene is seeing out in the hinterlands of clone-games.
Speaking to the Radio 1 Gaming Show, Brendan says: “I want this genre of games to grow.
“For that to happen you need new and interesting spins on the game mode.
“If it’s just copycats down the line, then the genre doesn’t grow and people get bored.”
Sure, there are indeed games that look to essentially clone others, including PubG. But those games are rarely more than blips on the radar in terms of success. And if you think about it, it’s obvious why that is. If game A comes along and introduces new features and gameplay that people gobble up, and then game B tries to copy that format closely, people aren’t going to be buying game B because they already have game A. The only reason to buy the second game is if it offers something the first doesn’t, in which case it isn’t a clone at all, but a separate creative expression that may have some similar elements to the first. That’s exactly how culture, including game genres, are supposed to morph and grow, and it’s essentially Exhibit A as to why the idea/expression dichotomy is such a treasure.
Greene also has a strange idea that video games are not afforded much in the way of intellectual property protections.
Brendan explains: “There’s no intellectual property protection in games.
“In movies and music there is IP protection and you can really look after your work. In gaming that doesn’t exist yet, and it’s something that should be looked into.
Let’s put a fine point on our response to this one: …….wut? The idea that games are not afforded intellectual property protection would come as news to this writer. I must now do some deep introspection, because I’m fairly sure I’ve written hundreds of articles right in these here pages about intellectual property disputes in the video game industry. In fact, not only do IP protections for games exist, the gaming industry specifically has done more in the realm of the nefarious to protect that IP than any other industry (see all of DRM, forever, everywhere). Claiming otherwise is nearly enough for a wellness check on Greene.
Beyond that, some of Greene’s reasoning is downright bizarre.
“Look at movies, Armageddon came out then 20 other comet disaster films came soon after,” Brendan Greene explains.
Can any of our readers actually name 20 comet disaster movies that came out after Armageddon? I can’t even name two. And the reason for that is obvious: once Armageddon did it, it was played out. No reason to go see another one of those movies. His example is actually a perfect encapsulation of why this isn’t a problem. One of the only meteor disaster movies I can recall is Deep Impact, which came out before Armageddon, and indeed was the inspiration for that film, so even this one example only works at a fifth of its supposed impact, and only in reverse. It would be hard to be more wrong with an example than this.
It’s also helpful to look at the Wikipedia article that describes, in the first paragraph on the game’s development, just how much influence and borrowing Greene’s game owes to its success.
Lead designer Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 film Battle Royale.[8][9] At the time he created DayZ: Battle Royale around 2013, Irish-born Greene had been living in Brazil for a few years as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer, and played some video games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America’s Army.[10][11] The DayZ mod caught his interest, both as a realistic military simulation and its open-ended gameplay, and started playing around with a custom server, learning programming as he went along.[10] Greene found most multiplayer first-person shooters too repetitive, as maps were small and easy to memorize. He wanted to create something with more random aspects so that players would not know what to expect, creating a high degree of replayability; this was done by creating vastly larger maps that could not be easily memorized, and using random item placement across it.[12] Greene was also inspired by an online competition for DayZ called Survivor GameZ, which featured a number of Twitch.tv and YouTube streamers fighting until only a few were left; as he was not a streamer himself, Greene wanted to create a similar game mode that anyone could play.[12] His initial efforts on this mod were more inspired by The Hunger Games novels, where players would try to vie for stockpiles of weapons at a central location, but moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and also to avoid copyright issues with the novels.[9] In taking inspiration from the Battle Royale film, Greene had wanted to use safe square areas, but his inexperience in coding led him to use circular safe areas instead, which persisted to Battlegrounds.[9]
In that one paragraph alone, how many times are borrowing and influences in the game’s development and Greene’s previous work are mentioned? Way more than the number of comet disaster films that have came out immediately after Armageddon, that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, hey, BBC, how about injecting a little actual journalism into pieces like this? All of these refutations above weren’t exactly hard to tease out of a few well-phrased Google searches, after all. Maybe it’d be better not to simply parrot the claims of someone clearly out of their depths on matters of intellectual property.
Techdirt has been pointing out for a while that the cliché about Chinese companies being little more than clever copycats, unable to come up with their own ideas, ceased to be true years ago. Anyone clinging to that belief is simply deluding themselves, and is likely to have a rude awakening as Chinese high-tech companies continue to advance in global influence. China’s advances in basic research are pretty clear, but what about business innovation? That’s an area that the US has traditionally prided itself on being the world leader. However, an interesting article in the South China Morning Post — a Hong Kong-based newspaper owned by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of $400 billion — explores how it’s Chinese ideas that are now being copied:
it’s a reflection of a growing trend in which businesses across Southeast Asia look to China for inspiration for everything from e-commerce to mobile payment systems and news apps.
Once derided as a copycat of Western giants, Chinese companies have grown in stature to the point that in many areas they are now seen as the pinnacle of business innovation.
The article mentions dockless bike-sharing, which is huge in China, being copied in California by a startup called Limebike. It notes that Thailand’s central bank has introduced a standardized QR code that enables the country’s smartphone users to pay for their purchases simply by scanning their devices — a habit that is well on the way to replacing cash and credit cards in China. In Malaysia, an online second-hand car trading platform Carsome based its approach closely on a Chinese company operating in Nanjing. Other copycats of Chinese innovators include:
Orami, Thailand’s leading e-commerce business, which started out as a clone of China’s online baby product platform Mia; Offpeak, a Malaysian version of the Chinese group buying website Meituan; and BaBe, an Indonesian news app that borrowed the business idea from China’s Toutiao and has been downloaded more than 10 million times.
As the article points out, it is perhaps natural that entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia should look to China for ideas given the commonalities of culture. But that kind of creative borrowing can only occur if Chinese companies are producing enough good business ideas that are worth copying. It’s evident that they are, and it’s time that the West recognized that fact.
You may have heard the joke: the best way to do product design for Facebook is to get a job at Snapchat. We’ve all seen how, after failing to buy the company, Facebook has wasted little time in building its own versions of most of Snapchat’s key features. So… is this a problem? That’s the subject on this week’s episode, were we discuss the ins and outs of this kind of copying and what it might mean for the future of social media.
For any of the entrenched entertainment players seated comfortably in their lofty offices, quite used to counting stacks of money and calling it a profession, they likely already know this fearful mantra: the millennials are coming. Millennials, and even more so the generations younger than them, are driving changes in the entertainment industry. These younger consumers are largely responsible for the cord-cutting trend winding its way through the cable industry, not to mention being the force behind ever-expanding streaming options for everything from movies to television shows and live sports. These are the customers of the future. Customers that will outlive a public that became used to having bloated cable television packages filled with channels and content fit to be ignored.
And those customers are both great customers for streaming services and they are customers perfectly happy to get the streaming they want if legitimate methods for it aren’t available. A recent survey conducted specifically with millennials finds that more than half of them regularly use pirate streaming sites to watch movies or shows, but would prefer to use legitimate streaming sites had they been available.
This is one of the main conclusions of a new survey conducted by Launchleap. The data come from a survey among millennials between 18 and 35, and zooms in on pirate streaming preferences in this age group. The results show that more than half of the respondents, a whopping 53%, admit to having used illegal services to stream movies or TV-shows over the past month. Legal streaming services remain on top with 70%, but interest in more traditional platforms such as TV, DVDs or Blu-Ray is clearly lagging behind. The respondents don’t appear to be particularly bothered by their habit. Only 7% of the people questioned say they feel guilty when they watch a pirated movie, the remaining 93% experience no guilt.
You can disagree with the moral calculation of these young people all you like, but the numbers here are both stark and illuminating. If nothing else, this survey should signal to the entertainment industry that however many days are left of customers being willing to live in walled off gardens where content is enjoyed only in the manner approved by a cable company or movie studio, rather than being determined by consumer demand, that number of days is on a short timeline. It’s also worth noting that the respondents that said they used pirate streaming sites also paid for content via subscriptions to Netflix and the like. The issue is that there is both a content war currently, with movies and shows available only on one streaming site at a time, as well as the long-entrenched protectionism that has kept some content off of any streaming site at all. The attitude of these respondents seems pretty clear by the numbers: hey, we tried to pay for the content, but you wouldn’t let us, so we went and got it from a place that had it.
Money is still a factor in the survey, of course. After all, consumers could get most of the content they demand legitimately by subscribing to, say, three or four different streaming sites at once and switching between them. But that doesn’t change the fact that television and movie studios are going to have to contend with the reality that the public doesn’t want to, or can’t afford to, do that. The question then becomes whether these exclusive streaming deals and content protection continue to be good business, given that these younger customers are finding illegitimate ways around them anyway.
The millennials are coming. And they don’t think about entertainment content in the same complacent way the last generation has.
In addition to our usual offerings (tees, hoodies, mugs and stickers) we’ve added a bunch of additional options for Copying Is Not Theft gear, at the expense of color choices (necessitated by the design). There are tank tops, long-sleeve tees, crew neck sweaters and a second option for women’s tees. Also, in addition to our usual $23 premium men’s tees, you have the option of a cheaper Hanes tagless tee for only $20. We don’t know if this is something people prefer, and we’re not sure how big the quality difference is (the premium tees are very nice) — but if lots of people opt for the cheaper t-shirt and are satisfied with the quality, we’ll consider making this available for more shirts in the future. Vote with your wallet and by letting us know in the comments or on Twitter!
