KnownHuman 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (53)

• On the post: Misguided Outrage At NY Times' Ethicist Over Ethics Of Downloading A Book

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 09 Apr, 2010 @ 06:50am

  Boog really cut my comment short when he quoted me for that article. He cut Mike's comment short as well.
  
  Mike's comments basically said that it's okay to download the eBook as long as you pay for the eBook when the publisher gets around to releasing one.
  
  My comment corrected the terminology (not piracy or theft, but civil copyright infringement), and then pointed out that Cohen's analogy was wrong - downloading the ebook was not akin to ripping a CD, for that to work, the user would have to scan and OCR the book himself. The difference was in the sweat-equity, the customer was paying for the new edition through time and effort (both scarce commodities).
  
  And if customers didn't like a publisher not producing an eBook, let the customer know and support another who does.
  
  Since Jason didn't link to the original article, you can find it here: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/publishing/ny_times_ethicist_approves_of_illegal_downloading_an_ebook_157343.asp

• On the post: As Expected, Labels Now Want To Use Privacy-Reducing Watermarks As 'Cloud DRM'

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 07 Apr, 2010 @ 04:20pm

  Re: Re: Not Actually Watermarking

  No, watermarks are data that is contained within the file itself, undetectable to the human ear and requiring a special piece of technology to access.
  
  This consumer-based information actually appears in the file's header, and can be accessed through any number of editing tools (including the default media players bundled into most OSes) as plain text.
  
  With regards to how this would be a clear DMCA violation, I'd like to see your logic on that. As stated in the DMCA Section 1201(a)(3):
  
  (A) to circumvent a technological measure means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;
  
  Now, this data is maintained in plaintext, so there is no descrambling nor decrypting. The question then seems to fall to the issue of whether that metadata is protected under copyright - and that answer seems to be no, as the metadata itself is examples of facts.

• On the post: As Expected, Labels Now Want To Use Privacy-Reducing Watermarks As 'Cloud DRM'

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 07 Apr, 2010 @ 01:58pm

  Not Actually Watermarking

  From what I can tell, it's not actually watermarking, just attached metadata. I don't know if it's similar to the ID3 metadata scheme or not, but it should be rather easy to alter. I've never had to do so - as I've never purchased anything from the offending retailers - but like most music geeks, I've gone through and done the corrects to my collections metadata by hand.
  
  The upside to all this is, changing the metadata - either by removing your own details for privacy reasons, or adding details to make a track compatible with a cloud-based DRM scheme - doesn't seem to be a violation of the DMCA, at least not on the surface.

• On the post: Are Publishers Putting Too Much Stock In The iPad, Or Are They Just Doing It Wrong?

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2010 @ 01:12pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  [Full disclosure - I am an independent digital strategist who works exclusively with authors and publishers. I am also a rather ardent supporter of eBooks and the potential they can bring.]
  
  With regards to an honest breakdown of costs, there's been a couple done, but the problem is that costs differ from book to book even at the same publisher. However, the generalized cost for a priced eBook at $26 is as follows:
  
  Wholesale price: $13
  Authors Royalty (*1): $3.90
  Printing/Storage/Shipping: $3.25
  Design/Typesetting/editing: $0.80
  Marketing: $1.00
  -
  Profit before overhead: $4.05
  
  Agency Model pricing structure, eBook, $12.99 list price
  
  Publisher's 70%: $9.09
  Author's Royalty (*2): $2.27~$3.25
  Digitizing/Typesetting/Editing: $.50
  Marketing: $0.78
  -
  Profit before overhead: $4.56~$5.54
  
  Source: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01ebook_g.html?ref=media
  
  Extrapolated Kindle Costs under Wholesale Model, $9.99 list (*3)
  
  Wholesale Price: $13
  Authors Royalty (*2): $2.50~3.25
  Design/Typesetting/editing: $0.50
  Marketing (*4): $0.78
  -
  Profits before Overhead: = $8.47~9.22
  
  Footnotes
  1 - Note that none of the author royalties are paid until the initial investment "earns out," that is, the author won't see any royalties until the advance from the publisher is fully recouped.
  
  2 - Author royalties, while reasonably higher in electronic format (25% in eBook compared to 15% in hardcover, ~13 in trade paperback, and ~7.5% in mass market paperback), are variable because the debate has yet to be settled on which number the percent is derived from: list or net price. Current, most publishers are paying net, which means the author receives the lower royalty while the publisher earns the higher profit.
  
  3 - The numbers that Motoko quoted for the $9.99 eBook in the source listed above are if the book is sold for $9.99 under the agency model. This set of data represents the current setup for eBooks sold on the Kindle under the wholesale system.
  
  4 - I starred this number, as I've yet to see a major push by publishers to highlight the availability of the Kindle edition in anyway other than included with print announcements. If you take this number out of, under the current system, publishers earn more profit on a Kindle sale than the list price.
  
  Granted, none of those numbers include incidental and fixed costs - office space, utilities, salaried staff, or unrecouped debt from the 70-90% of books that fail to earn out. However, this estimate also does not take into account rolling, continual, long tail profits from books that have earned out. So, there is a lot of room for fuzz with these numbers.

• On the post: Google Fined For Not Blocking Dirty Jokes

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2010 @ 04:05pm

  Orkut's Popularity in Brazil

  If memory serves me correctly, Orkut was released (in beta, of course) right around the same time as Gmail. The late spring of 2004. Both setups were moderately closed, requiring an invite, but users were given the ability to invite new users.
  
  If you remember back, that was right around the same time that MySpace was gaining in popularity amongst teens and twenty-somethings in the United States. MySpace gained enough users to be self-sustaining in America, while the closed nature of Orkut became popular with Brazilian (and Indian) users.
  
  As MySpace grew in importance in America, the number of active American users at Orkut atrophied. The more that left, the quicker the atrophy.
  
  As a user who signed up for both services right around the same time, it was an interesting transition to watch.

• On the post: School Accused Of Spying On Kids In Their Homes With Spyware That Secretly Activated Webcams

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 18 Feb, 2010 @ 02:49pm

  Re:

  There's a couple of people leaving anonymous comments on Boing Boing claiming to be from the same school or school district. The purported word on the street is that the minor defendant was smoking marijuana.
  
  http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html#comment-716396

• On the post: Will People Pay For Content Online?

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 17 Feb, 2010 @ 11:13am

  I think the chart would be better served with a third color representing the remaining people who, even in a survey, admit that they will not pay.
  
  
  I'd also like to see the questions used in the survey - after all, I have (at one point or another) paid for at least a single item from most of the categories. However, the vast majority of the times I find other means to access the content that don't involve payment.
  
  That is, the question is likely predicated to include everyone who's ever paid (even once) for a digital product in the blue, inflating the numbers further than they are in reality.

• On the post: Universal Music Gets A New CEO… Who Thinks CDs Are The Future

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 15 Feb, 2010 @ 12:27pm

  Re:

  That's how I took it to mean. As physical relics, the compact disc will be around a long while. However, the modern CEO is a fleeting animal, which cannot exist in one location for long.

• On the post: Universal Music Gets A New CEO… Who Thinks CDs Are The Future

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 15 Feb, 2010 @ 12:25pm

  Re: THIS....

  Damn right.

• On the post: Warner Music Shoots Self In Head; Says No More Free Streaming

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 10 Feb, 2010 @ 01:50pm

  Someone needs to sit WMG down and tell them to think of England.

• On the post: Yes, Three Strikes Laws Have Unintended Consequences That Even Music Industry Execs Hate

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 27 Jan, 2010 @ 07:15am

  Re: Turns out

  Don't you mean "recording industry"?

• On the post: Guy Buys $3 Billion CD-ROM

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 05 Jan, 2010 @ 09:28pm

  Re:

  That's the first thing I thought, how the hell did his bank clear the initial transaction request?

• On the post: Australia Back To Censoring The Internet… Again

  

  KnownHuman ( profile ), 15 Dec, 2009 @ 05:01pm

  Throw some math at 'em

  I coined a theory based on the bit about 100% accuracy when I read that story this morning:
  
  As a sample size grows, the probability of achieving 100% accuracy in anything falls towards zero.
  
  That is to say, it's highly improbable that Australia can achieve a filtered Internet at anywhere near 100% accuracy. However, I'm glad that they're finally going ahead with this.
  
  It is my hope that after a string of embarrassing false positives and open secrets for evading the AU filters, that Australia decides to officially remove their filters and that somehow, other nations learn from the mistakes of Oz.