Category: .

Is the DMCA-based notice and takedown a disruptive innovation for web sites to license content from copyright owners?

From Wikipedia:

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
In contrast to disruptive innovation, a sustaining innovation does not create new markets or value networks but rather only evolves existing ones with better value, allowing the firms within to compete against each other’s sustaining improvements. Sustaining innovations may be either “discontinuous”[1] (i.e. “transformational” or “revolutionary”) or “continuous” (i.e. “evolutionary”).

The incumbent technology is manual negotiation between licensor and licensee, copyright owner and content distributor, media company and web site. The new one is for the web site to carry anything that crosses its path and remove anything the media company doesn’t want to be there.

This leads to lower quality content catalogs because the catalog of a DMCA-based distributor is full of holes. While a traditional distributor like HMV music stores could get copies of pretty much all the CDs that a purchaser might want, a disruptive distributor like the Gorilla vs Bear music blog lacks far more than it contains.

At the same time the web site is able to compete and win on its own terms. Using Gorilla vs Bear comes with far less friction than using Spotify.

Spotify is a sustaining innovation in that it doesn’t change the market for music recordings.

If you own real estate, you pay property tax.

Everything you say, write, sing, gesture or code that has expressive content is instantly copyrighted.

You don’t pay property tax on copyrights. If you did, your bill would go up every time you opened your mouth, from birth to death.

If copyright should be considered a natural right with the same authority and control as owning a home, shouldn’t we tax it?

Coding Horror rips PHP a new one:

The great crime of PHP is its utter banality.

The problem is that banality isn’t a crime, it’s a virtue. Banality is predictability. Predictability is ease of understanding. PHP is a good tool because it’s easy to visualize what your program is doing.

Transparency is important for a programming language. C has it, C++ doesn’t. Javascript yes, Java no. Ruby yes, Rails no. PHP yes, Perl no.

Programming is about programmer’s heads. Tools are there to assist with cognition. PHP does that well.

Personally I’m moving on to Node.js these days, because it doesn’t make sense to use different languages on the server and client. That way I can keep my head in a single language regardless of where my code runs. My goal is to increase the banality of my language. The problem isn’t that PHP is banal, it’s that PHP isn’t banal enough.

I really like Google+ Hangouts as a replacement for phone calls. There are a lot of drawbacks but overall they are much better than any alternative.

Better than Skype:

You can easily set up a video conference call. Skype makes this hard because they want to charge you, and the payment process is too slow to be worth it.

No client install needed. There’s a rumor that Skype is going to WebRTC to get a browser implementation, and that’s very nice from a web standards perspective, but Hangouts work great right now.

Not very broken. There are lots of malfeatures but no more than Skype.

Better than plain old telephone:

More reliable than over a cell phone. Voice calls over cells have a lot of problems.

Video+voice is higher bandwidth than voice alone. Video calls are richer and more effective communication.

Integrated IM is necessary for pasting in links, Wikipedia references, images, videos – things that expand the potential range of communication.

Integrated screen sharing enables showing slides/ doing presentations, which is often incredibly useful.

From Ars Technica:

For creators, especially independent ones, the DMCA takedown process is almost impossible to turn into a useful tool. But for user-generated content sites, policing uploads for copyright infringement is a hugely difficult challenge, and they are routinely accused of turning a blind eye to piracy when they can’t solve the problem themselves. One possible solution, used by sites like YouTube, is to let creators upload their work and then offer them options whenever exact copies of that work are uploaded to the site. When executed well, such systems have limited impact on fair use but can also provide modest protection for creators like Inman. But they aren’t required by law.

via Lawyer demands $20,000, so webcomic raises $100,000 from the Internet | Ars Technica.

Born April 25, 2012 at 1:10 PM. 7 lbs 13 oz, 21″.

Presenting the rebooted Official.fm:

• The site
• The announcement blog entry
• A charmingly offbeat promotional video
• Glenn Peoples at Billboard
• Techcrunch digging it

I’m proud of what we did.

I’m also sorry, because it doesn’t make sense for me to telecommute from California to Switzerland, so I have moved on. Flying from San Francisco to Geneva once a month doesn’t work, nor does building a second engineering team in SF. So that’s it. It was worth a shot.

What’s next? News coming soon.

99% of sites require your email to set up an account, even ones that allow Facebook or Twitter for logging in. So why have any password at all? For that matter why bother with Facebook or Twitter?

To log in, enter your email address. The site sends an email. Check your mail. Click on the link. On clickthrough, set a cookie. Whenever there isn’t a cookie, go through the process of sending an email and clicking on the link again.

Jon Phillips and Wolfgang Spraul are doing hardware hacking on dance music devices. They’re both westerners living in China.

One project is Milkymist:

It’s easy to create an entertaining video installation with the Milkymist One. No computer needed – everything is included in a small device that has it all. Connect a camera and a video projector, press the power button, and seconds later, everything you film becomes live psychedelic effects of color and light.

Another project is the Laoban Soundsystem:

a 6,000-watt massive soundsystem fabricated in China, designed by Matt Hope and produced by Jon Phillips.

The whole thing is so far ahead of me that I don’t know where to begin.

To begin with, a good rule of thumb for hardware development is to not do it. There be dragons. Like, you’ll have to manufacture the things you design, which means dealing with shops in the third world, which means being very far away from people who you are totally dependent on. Also there’s the issue that the factories are staffed by people who are brutally exploited. You’ll have inventory. Your latency will go through the roof.

Hang on, Jon and Wolfgang moved to China. So it’s ok, the factory is within reach, they can speak the language, etc.

Oh, wait, it’s ok, it’s open source. Whaa? Doesn’t it matter that you’re using atoms instead of bits? At the least there’s a whole new set of dynamics that apply to open source atoms. It affects inventory – you’re not actually the person doing the manufacturing, so you’re not paying for the stuff you made to sit in a warehouse. Whacky.

Our devices are open source hardware and software. In fact, we go great lengths to apply the open source principles at every level possible, and is best known for the Milkymist system-on-chip (SoC) which is among the first commercialized system-on-chip designs with free HDL source code. As a result, several Milkymist technologies have even been reused in applications unrelated to video synthesis.

Not that I have any idea what to do with this stuff except respect that it’s a whole new frontier. It’s the kind of over-my-head innovation that makes me love my chosen field. Inspiring stuff.

From the marketing brochure page at mycricket.com/muve-music:

Muve Music from Cricket is a game changer for everyone. By tightly integrating the music service into the handset and the billing plan everyone in the value chain benefits and consumers have a complete music service where the phone is the hub not the PC.

And Muve is doing very well as a business. My memory is that the subscriber numbers are in the hundreds of thousands, which puts it well ahead of Rdio or MOG.