Lucas Gonze blog

Apropos of changing the subject, I got an email asking would it be possible to advertise in one of your blog posts? and offering a hundred bucks if I put a particular link in a post, obviously for SEO reasons.

I feel like it would be gross to not take the money. It’s the same question as whether you pick up a penny on the floor. Maybe I don’t even want pennies, maybe the trouble to bend down is worth more than the penny. I try to always take the penny, under the theory that it’s disrespectful to people who really need a penny if I leave it there.

Years ago I took money for mentioning a company in blog posts on gonze.com. Some friends tolerated this, some must have moved on. It is weird to do to people in a personal blog, like signing on to a pyramid scheme that requires you to turn your friends into zombie suckers just like yourself, except at your profit and their expense.

I remember offering to buy a drink for the cyber celebrities Lawrence Lessig and Tim O’Reilly, who I had run into at the bar at a conference. They took it as offering to buy dinner. I guess people often do that for them because they’re celebrities. They took me up on the perceived offer and by the time I figured out what they thought I was too embarrassed to correct them, maybe because of their celebrityhood. They must have seen that offer the way I see this one.

A tip for life: when somebody writes you a check, cash it. So I put the link in, along with a little blurb about the money stuff. (That blurb is how this post started). Also I named the logo image on my site thesefolksgavemeahundredbuckstoputthishere.png. And the guy didn’t dig it.

So I moved the blurb out to this post. But the dude still didn’t dig the image name, and he didn’t like that I prefaced the link with here’s a link that will earn me a few bucks in exchange for some SEO juice. So I said forget it and gave the money back to make him go away. Easy come, easy go.

I’m sitting in a cafe and I hear that Phil Collins hit “I can hear it coming on the edge of night” or whatever the title is. That song bugs me. And it strikes me that it’s possible to selectively remove it from my existence.

Picture if you will a noise cancellation headset with a dynamic perspective on what noise is. Rather than identifying background sound as noise, it identifies a constantly changing (but well known) stream of audio signal as noise. The constantly changing audio is none other than a recording of a song which you hate.

Hated songs are identified via audio fingerprinting, like Shazam. You allow your Shazam-like live audio fingerprinting system to be on constantly, so that any time a hated song appears in your audio environment, the software recognizes it. The software activates the Imaginary Dynamic Noise Cancellation (IDNC) controller. The IDNC switches on your noise cancellation headset using the hated song previously identified as the target. Henceforth to the end of the song, that source is filtered from your reality.

*Wham*! Or more precisely, *no* Wham any more, ever, if you don’t dig them. They’d be snipped out of reality.

Between my smartphone, tablet, and laptop, it’s a problem if I have a file on local disk instead of in the cloud. The file is only accessible on FOO computer? Ridiculous.

When I was helping my brother set up a link between his digital camera and his laptop last weekend, he specifically didn’t want the photos to go to the laptop because then he would lose them as soon as he changed machine.

I’ve been backing up to Backblaze instead of a disk lately. Partly it’s that I’ve had several backup disks go bad and take down my history. Partly it’s that the files are then accessible via the cloud.

Not long ago this was spacey and futuristic. Soon it won’t be worth remarking on.

From the Viacom vs YouTube summary judgement (pdf):

The DMCA notification procedures place the burden of
policing copyright infringement—identifying the
potentially infringing material and adequately
documenting infringement—squarely on the owners of the
copyright. We decline to shift a substantial burden
from the copyright owner to the provider …

That makes sense, as the infringing works in suit may
be a small fraction of millions of works posted by others on the
service’s platform, whose provider cannot by inspection
determine whether the use has been licensed by the owner, or
whether its posting is a “fair use” of the material, or even
whether its copyright owner or licensee objects to its posting.

This is a deeply wise decision. Solomonic.

The next hurdle is a method to enable rights holders to police infringement at internet scale. They need to be able to send takedown notices fast enough (and have them take effect) for their will to be respected.

YouTube won summary judgement motion against Viacom. This means that the DMCA safe harbors for ISPs have passed judicial review. That would mean a big reduction in legal risk for internet developers whose products are able to implement notice-and-takedown. Just be very careful to get the legal details right and your startup will be on predictable footing.

But caveat emptor. This is just one bit of data in a very complex landscape.

“Filesharing music amongst UK teens down by a third” (PDF):

Overall levels of regular file-sharing music are down, particularly amongst UK teenagers:

• The overall percentage of music fans file-sharing regularly (i.e. every month) has gone down since the last national survey. In December 2007 22% regularly file- shared tracks, but in January 2009 this was down to 17%, a comparative drop of nearly a quarter.
• The biggest drop in those regularly file-sharing occurred amongst 14-18 year olds. (In December 2007 42% of 14-18s were filesharing at least once a month. In January 2009 this was down to just 26%)
  This is despite the fact that the percentage of music fans who have ever file-shared has, unsurprisingly, increased, rising from 28% in December 2007 to 31% in January 2009. The move to streaming – e.g. YouTube, MySpace and Spotify – is clear with the research showing that many teens (65%) are streaming music regularly (i.e. each month). Nearly twice as many 14-18s (31%) listen to streamed music on their computer every day compared to music fans overall (18%). More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks.

David Barrett (aka Quinthar)‘s comment on the quinthar edition blog post:

The fact that an insignificant pirate outfit like Limewire is within an order of magnitude to the revenue earned by Apple on content sales is stunning. Apple is worth $240 *billion* dollars; it earns over $40B a year in revenue. For it to only earn $150M on content sales should be proof that nobody else should even bother. As a comparison, they sold 2M iPads in 2 months. Those cost $500 each, so that’s roughly a billion dollars. In 2 months, from one product. iTunes will never, ever be significant to Apple. Indeed, I believe the only reason Apple has iTunes is to distract from the fact that Apple is the major beneficiary of piracy. Nobody can argue with a straight face that people buy $30K worth of iTunes music to fill up their ever-expanding iPods; Apple *is* the largest inducer of piracy in the world. They’re just more clever about monetizing and hiding it.

Yup! I agree. I just don’t agree that unauthorized distribution matters to the recording industry except where it reduces profit. My case is not that the Sue Em All strategy has given consumers an direct incentive to stop filesharing.

My case is that the Sue Em All strategy has lead to new products being created which stay as far away from infringement as possible, and they are successfully drawing attention from filesharing. Pandora, YouTube, Hulu are all licensed, and they’re all doing significant volume. And out of the current wave of music products, nothing interesting is coming out of vendors with significant legal exposure.

David Barret responds to my Sue Em All Solved post, in which I say that the Sue Em All campaign is *succeeding*:

Are you sure it’s working out well? All the troubles of TPB amount to
little more than a couple slight dips — from enormous piracy to
slightly less enormous piracy. TPB is still alive and well. … nothing has been remotely effective at reducing torrent pirating.

It’s precisely wrong to see downloads as the measure of success —
what matters is activity that could be monetized. Unauthorized
downloads don’t matter unless the downloader would have made a
purchase. The point is to extract as much money as possible from each
potential customer, not to extract money from people who aren’t ever
going to be customers.

Sell Donald Trump a gold-plated tour jacket. Sell box sets to
20-somethings who passionately love a particular band. Sell single
MP3 downloads to teens with no more than a single dollar to spend.

in what possible universe can you claim pirates aren’t demolishing
their foes in every field of battle they choose to fight? … The only battles the copyright forces are winning are Pyrrhic. They’re *masters* of those.

I know that people who read tech blogs think P2P is winning and don’t
understand why anybody would be in a business that assumes copyright
will continue to exist. This is a dream world.

Licensed content businesses are a big deal, techies.
YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, and on and on. And
awesome products from startups like Mog keep coming in wave after
wave.

Hulu
vs The Pirate Bay:

Or note that Limewire earned on the order of $20 million a year, while
the iTunes music store probably earns on the order of $150 million –
an order of magnitude. And it will probably cost Mark Gorton far north of a hundred million dollars to settle the lawsuit. That
investment is a huge disaster, even though he had the #1 product in an
important space!

Money reshapes the economy like icebergs reshape continents.
Slowly but inexorably, value follows investment and users follow
value. Spotify’s users are there because Spotify’s investors
subsidize them. Who is investing in the Limewire of tomorrow? And
who is investing in their competition?

Peter Van Dijck sez:

I want apps on my tv. But the UI has to be TV-UI, leanback. They should build some kind of html5 television UX standards that I could then easily build apps on. The TV UI would be quite different from the regular web UI.

The Kylo browser for televisions is a pioneer in this space. Their business is selling infrared mice that you can use as a remote. It’s a mouse that controls a pointer on the television from over on the couch.

This is a totally kamikaze user experience. But so what? They’re smack on the evolutionary cusp, figuring out how little has to change.

So are they more of a neanderthal than a homo sapiens, too close to the ancestor to live on among the descendents? How much more do they need to change, then?

Given years of smug certainty among techies that sue-em-all was a mistake, how come suing em all seems to be working out pretty well?

suing consumers didn’t work, but suing businesses did. Unlicensed companies have been forced out of business or forced to license. Those which do license come out with new products, and consumers are going where the products are.

Limewire’s software will certainly survive legal annihilation because it is open source, but it will lose the casual users who rely on the quality level that Limewire the company has been providing. Sites that host the source code will hold their noses and take it down when they get credible lawsuit threats; then even developers will miss the polish, since the source repositories will have to be hosted on private servers or in the gray market.

In the end anybody who can be upsold to a licensed music source will be. The only people who stick to filesharing will be those who are too broke to pay and don’t care about the unpleasantness of life in the gray market. People with a few bucks will surely cough them up. Sue Em All has turned out to be a method of price discrimination, leaving the black market running but limited to the poor!