Norwegian Band Told It Can't Post Its Own Music To The Pirate Bay, Even Though It Wants To

from the how-nice dept

Having recently returned from Norway, where I was impressed at the optimism and the willingness to embrace new technologies and services, it's disappointing to read the following story (found via brokep) of a Norwegian band who recently released an album on their own label and decided to put it up on The Pirate Bay themselves, as more and more indie labels are doing. Except... the band members are a part of the Norwegian music collection society TONO, who is among those fighting to have The Pirate Bay blocked in Norway. Since the band has allowed TONO to enforce its copyrights in performance situations, TONO is claiming that it can forbid members from putting their music on sites like The Pirate Bay (translation from the original Norwegian):

The management contract in TONO means that we can not allow the TONO-members post things on your own at some commercial sites.

Once again, examples of these performance rights groups working against the wishes of artists, rather than helping them out.

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Is The Kindle's Antisocial Nature Holding It Back?

from the interesting-quotes dept

We've discussed in the past how idea sharing and content sharing is "the new normal" for many people, thanks to the internet these days. The "old" view of things -- the broadcast view -- was that big professional creators of content or journalism put a stamp of approval on some content and shipped it along to a waiting audience. But, the rise of the internet has muddied this picture greatly, showing that people actually prefer to be a part of the process. They want to share content. They want to comment on it. They want to modify it. They want to link to it. They want to promote it. They want to respond to it.

Content, itself, has become part of the social process.

Now, we spend lots of time discussing how that's mucking around with business models based on the old view, but it may be causing some troubles for technology as well. In a brief message on Twitter, Mediashift author Mark Glaser, highlighted a fantastic point by Dan Pacheco about why he preferred an iPhone to a Kindle for reading content:

Most content I share starts from the iPhone. Kindle's antisocial nature is what bugs me most.

This point made me realize why I have so little interest in a Kindle. You can't do much with the content on it. It's delivered to you in that old "we're the content creators, you're the content recipient" method. You can annotate it for yourself, but it's not social at all. And these days, so many of us have learned to interact with content socially. For something like eBooks to really take off, my guess is that it will take a much more social approach, where people can do more to interact over the content that they're reading.

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Paulo Coelho: Content Creators Will Be Punished For Not Sharing Their Ideas Freely

from the welcome-to-the-new-world dept

We've written a few times about best-selling author Paulo Coelho, and his embrace of file sharing and openness -- and how it helped him sell a lot more books. Reader Esahc writes in to alert us to the text from a speech Coelho gave. The actual speech appears to be from last year, so a bit out of date, but it's still well worth reading:

He talks about the success of his own projects, from "pirating" his own books, to having the community make their own movie out of one of his books. At the same time he discusses the rise of technology and the folly of pretending you can fight the technology. It's really a great overall statement on embracing new technologies for anyone who thinks they need to rely on copyright. On top of that, it again confirms the basic premise that we've stated here time and time again: for those who work to connect with their fans directly, there are plenty of ways to do well, even without specifically relying on copyright to do so.

We are facing a new era, so either we adapt or we die. However, I did not come here to share solutions, but my own experience as an author. Of course, I make a living out of my copyrights, but at this very moment I am not concentrating on this. I have to adapt myself. Not only by connecting more directly with my readers -- something unthinkable a few years ago -- but also by developing a new language, Internet-based, that will be the language of the future: direct, simple, without being superficial. Time will tell me how to recover the money I myself am investing alone in my social communities. But I am investing in something for which every single writer in the world would be grateful: to have his texts read by a maximum of people.

The Internet has taught me this: don't be afraid of sharing your ideas. Don't be afraid of engaging others to voice their ideas. And more importantly, don't presume who is and who is not a creator -- because we all are.

And the key point he makes? In the past, heretics were punished for sharing their ideas. These days, you'll be punished if you don't share your ideas.

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Since When Is Sharing So Bad?

from the it-seems-like-a-good-thing dept

Jerry Leichter writes "We're all taught to share as kids, and sharing is a fundamental aspect of human societies. But sharing is also "anti-market" - at least as many sellers see it. I have something - a piece of music, a lawnmower - that you need. If I share with you, we both come out ahead - but if instead you buy one for yourself, the seller and manufacturer comes out ahead.

Need a Connection? Sorry, This Is MyFi is a sad tale of where our society has come to. In brief: The writer has a MiFi, a little box that connects to the cellular network and creates a small WiFi network that you can connect to. She was using here MiFi box at the San Francisco airport. Someone recognized it and asked if he could share here connection. She said "no".

Now, she was certainly under no obligation to share her connection. There are good reasons for saying "no". The connection isn't super-fast, and depending on what you and the sharer are doing, you might well notice a slowdown. There's a cap on monthly usage, beyond which you pay per byte, so if you tend to come near the limit (it's 5GB and unless you use the service to do things like download movies regularly it's hard to do) it could cost you.

Still, it would have been a *nice* thing to share - you'd think. Most (to be fair, not all) of the responses to the article are adamant that sharing is a bad idea. All the bad memes appear: "He could download child porn. He could share music. You could be blamed." The general feeling is that sharing your WiFi connection is like picking up a scary-looking hitch-hiker. I mean, what were you thinking?

Even worse, many people seem to believe *it's rude to ask*! That, I find astounding and deeply disturbing. Do we really want to live in a society where asking you to share something that may well cost you nothing to provide is *rude*?

There's plenty of work in behavioral economics that shows we classify transactions as either "social" or "economic". We apply different standards to each. The social realm is all about reciprocity and trust, while the economic realm is all about value and rules. Once things cross over into the economic realm - and a simple mention of money is often enough to cause a transition - it's extremely difficult to go back. (If you think this is all about some dreamy socialist communal life, consider what would happen on a date if - to be traditional - the guy made a point of how much the dinner cost, what he paid for the theatre tickets, etc. Think that evening would end well?)

Yes, network access is sold, not given away. Yes, someone does have to pay to build out the networks - so I have no problem paying my fair share - just as I pay for the sugar in my kitchen. But is it really wrong for my neighbor to knock on the door and ask to share some?"

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Ripped Off News? Or Spreading The News?

from the what's-the-problem-here dept

It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on. They seem to come at this viewpoint from the old line of thinking that a reporter reported on the story and that was it. The story was done. But that's not the way the news works. A news story is simply a part of the conversation. It may be a starting point in a bigger effort -- which is why it's important for so many people today to be able to spread and share the news with others. Yet, if you come at things from a viewpoint of the newspaper article being a final and definitive word, then suddenly such sharing and spreading is viewed as "theft" or being "ripped off" and the person promoting and discussing and sharing your work is suddenly a parasite.

Over the weekend, just such a situation cropped up, when Ian Shapira, a writer for the Washington Post wrote about how he felt when the blog Gawker wrote about one of his articles. At first, he was thrilled. It was validation. In fact, he called it "one of journalism's biggest coups." He should have stopped there, because he was right.

But after excitedly telling his editor about it, his editor claimed that Ian was "ripped off" by Gawker... and Ian appears to have come around to that view. But was he really? Not at all. The Gawker post links to the Washington Post three separate times. And, even worse, almost all of the article they quoted wasn't actually Shapira's writing at all, but quotes from the person he was profiling -- someone Shapira most certainly did not pay. As we recently discussed, newspaper reporters regularly get free quotes and free insight and free advice from various experts, that they get to use in their articles. And now suddenly it's "stealing" for someone else to quote the same people (with a link -- or three) back to the story? Please.

At some point, more people will come around to realizing that when others are discussing the stories you helped bring forth and linking back to you, it's time to join in the conversation -- not scream and whine about others stealing. That just makes it less likely anyone will ever write about one of your stories again.

This isn't even an issue about fair use, as some are suggesting. It's an issue about common sense. If you have a story, you'd better want it to spread, and what better way to get it to spread than to get more people talking about it wherever they want to talk about it. You can't keep all the discussion at your site, nor should you want to. Doing so only guarantees no one cares about what you have to write.

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Government-Owned Norwegian TV Station Launches BitTorrent Tracker

from the legitimate-uses... dept

As some entertainment industry folks continue to insist that BitTorrent tracker search engines have no redeeming value, we keep hearing more and more stories of content providers willingly and eagerly putting up their own torrent trackers, knowing that it's an incredibly efficient means of distributing their content. In the past, we've seen TV networks in Australia and Canada do this with individual shows, and now TorrentFreak is reporting that the government-owned Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) has set up a BitTorrent tracker for distributing a bunch of its shows, noting that: "This type of distribution is reliable, cheap and popular with our audience." Indeed. Not only that, but by running its own tracker, NRK realizes: "we will get better statistics and gather important data about how this technology works." Even better, it plans to share some of that data for others to learn from as well.

The shows will be DRM-free, and it's looking to employ a Creative Commons license on the content "to allow full freedom for our audience." Definitely nice to see someone not going down the same well-trodden road of self-defeat:

"It is important for us to start experimenting with new distribution methods. We don't want to do like the music industry. Running around thinking that people will keep driving down to a record store when they can have the content delivered with the push of a button at home."

If only some others in the entertainment industry would recognize the same thing.

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Yes, Let's Create A Real Day Of Sharing

from the and-show-musicians-how-it-works dept

Shaun alerted us to an article in the CS Monitor about a Hollywood composer, Richard Gibbs, who is sarcastically proposing an international "Day of Sharing." It's not what you might think it is. Rather than suggesting a day to show how sharing is a good thing, Gibbs is simply showing his own ignorance of the difference between scarce and infinite goods. That's because his "Day of Sharing" is a recommendation that people steal (yes, steal!) physical things. He claims that this will show people that sharing music is stealing -- but, of course, he's wrong. Making a copy of an infinite good is entirely different than taking a scarce good away from someone. Most people who think about this for more than a few minutes tend to get that -- though, obviously, some are a bit slower. The very fact that more and more musicians have learned not just how to make money but to thrive while encouraging people to share their music suggests that it's not stealing at all. It's simply a business model issue, with Mr. Gibbs being unwilling to adjust. Also, amusingly, either he or the author of the article seems to think that eMusic is a file sharing site -- complaining about it as one of the "sources of free music" apparently unaware that eMusic is a paid music site, and probably the most successful service after iTunes.

However, if he wants a "Day of Sharing," perhaps we should give it to him. On the day he's chosen as his Day of Sharing, November 29, 2009 (the day after Thanksgiving) we should all send him copies of free, public domain or Creative Commons-licensed music from musicians who actually have an open mind on this issue and who encourage sharing, knowing that, with the right business model, it actually helps them tremendously. That would be a true Day of Sharing and would perhaps show Mr. Gibbs that perhaps things aren't so bad as he thinks they are.

Update: Fantastic idea from the comments: "We should all dress like Richard Gibbs and then send him pictures showing how we stole his clothes." Brilliant.

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50 Years Of Scientific Discovery & Sharing In Antarctica May End Thanks To Patent Greed

from the patents-against-peace dept

For the past 50 years, 47 countries have been a part of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which was used to establish Antarctica as a peaceful science outpost where scientists from many nations could work together and share their discoveries. And it may now all be coming to an end. Why? Because (as Will Klein alerts us) all this discovery and sharing is going on mostly without patenting! This has greatly upset a bunch of companies who want to hoard any such discoveries and want to be able to patent "Antarctic organisms or molecules." Beyond the rather serious question of why either organisms or molecules can be patented, this is a microcosm of what's wrong with patents. Patents are supposed to be used to encourage research (promoting the progress, remember). And this treaty has done a great job promoting progress without patents. As the article notes, products already "derived from Antarctica include dietary supplements, anti-freeze proteins, anti-cancer drugs, enzymes and cosmetic creams." In other words, all of that happened mostly without patents. The only reason to break up this treaty, stop the sharing, and start allowing patents is to slow down the discovery, hoard the results and limit the progress to single companies who get a monopoly on that work.

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Carl's Jr. Apparently Unaware That People Share Discount Coupons Online

from the welcome-to-the-internet dept

I remember a decade or so ago stories of online coupon offerings where companies would use a single coupon code, and not realize that people would share it with tons of others. However, those types of promotions went away after companies started using unique codes for promotions to make sure people couldn't share them too widely. Apparently, however, the folks who work for marketing at Carl's Jr. were unaware of how news of deals spread online. They offered up a promotion at a basketball game, where certain attendees were texted a code to download a coupon for a free burger. However, all attendees were given the same code... which was quickly leaked online and Carl's Jr. was forced to cancel the promotion after a lot more people than expected started to show up with the coupon. It's hard to believe that no one involved in the promotion had any idea that this would happen.

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What A Concept: Sharing New Inventions With The World Is Good For The Inventor

from the but...-but...-where-are-the-patents?!?!? dept

If you read the angry comments we get from self-proclaimed "inventors" whenever we write about patents around here, you might get the impression from them that if you can't protect your ideas, there's simply no reason to be an inventor. It looks like Johnny Chung Lee is proving that's simply not true. Lee has made plenty of cool things, some of which have garnered plenty of attention: from his Poor Man's Steadycam to his Wii-based interactive whiteboard. But none of his inventions have garnered as much attention as his YouTube video of his headtracking virtual reality system for the Wii, which became a YouTube sensation:

The New York Times now has an article noting all of the ways that Lee has benefited from being so public in revealing all of his inventions. Rather than struggling to get known, he's well known all over the place. Plenty of companies came calling trying to hire him, leading to a job he wanted at Microsoft. And, even when he's giving his ideas away for free, he's making some money on the side. The Poor Man's Steadycam, for example, is available to purchase, and Lee has made a quarter of a million dollars from it -- even though he provides full instructions for anyone who wants to build their own. Patent lawyers may cringe, but it would seem that he's doing quite well actively giving away his ideas, rather than trying to lock them up with patent protection.

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When Ideas Are Easy And Execution Is Hard... It Makes Sense To Share Your Ideas

from the be-open,-be-good dept

We've been hitting on the theme that ideas are easy, while execution is hard for a while now -- and a friend pointed me to a worthwhile blog post by Brad Burnham, an experienced venture capitalist, now a partner with Union Square Ventures. Burnham muses that the successful entrepreneurs he's backed tended to be the ones who were the most open about their ideas, not just with him, but with everyone. What it really comes back to is this idea that ideas are easy and execution is difficult. The entrepreneur who is living and breathing the idea (and has probably already tested out a bunch of different related ideas) is likely to gain a lot more from the conversation with an outsider (even a potential competitor) than that other person is going to gain from talking to the entrepreneur. While there is an old-school mentality that you need to keep things secret, history has shown that that tends not to be the best way to grow a successful business. When you do that, you end up making all sorts of mistakes that a few conversations may have helped you avoid.

An interesting parallel to this debate is the discussion we had last year about noncompetes. What the research there has shown is that a big part of the reason for Silicon Valley's success is the fact that noncompete agreements are unenforceable in California. What happened, then, was much more job-hopping, and a much faster dispersion not just of ideas, but of problem solving and innovation across the industry. In AnnaLee Saxenian's book that kicked off this debate, she noted that Silicon Valley culture was such that many engineers here spent plenty of time discussing their biggest challenges with direct competitors, just to get better ideas -- believing that solving the big problems would work out better in the end for everyone, and that holding back ideas didn't solve anything. Amusingly, in that case, Burnham's partner at Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, took the other side: favoring noncompetes (though, I get the feeling Wilson's changing his mind as the evidence has been presented).

This also, by the way, goes completely against the theory (chiefly propagated by supporters of a stronger patent system) that without patents, the world would devolve into an innovation-free zone where trade secrecy ruled. That seems unlikely to happen, based on exactly what Burnham and others have noticed. Keeping an idea secret not only is unlikely to be effective, it can often stifle the necessary development. Thus, it will be the companies that are more open and free with their ideas that dominate the market. The key reason why, of course, goes back to what we talked about at the beginning. Ideas are certainly important, but it's execution that's the key to success -- and being more free in sharing your ideas will often help you execute better.

Burnham also asks about whether or not it's possible to "model" this openness -- and I think it is. In fact, in many ways it matches the infinite goods economic model we've been discussing, with the ideas representing the infinite goods, and the execution being the main scarcity. So, in the same way that freeing up music helps expand the opportunities for every other area of the music business, opening up your idea is likely to open up many huge new opportunities for the entrepreneur in how to execute successfully. If you really want to model it mathematically, you could probably build something based on the economic models that made Paul Romer famous (and should eventually net him a Nobel prize), but that might be overkill for what Burnham is looking for. However, if you're familiar with Romer's work, applying it to this scenario should make you see how much more powerful sharing ideas can be vs. keeping them secret. It's not just a small edge -- it can be a huge difference. I've been working on a few simpler models myself that I'm hoping to share (openly and freely!) soon enough, in the hopes that others can improve on them.

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Mainstream Press Finally Realizing That Kids Want To Share News, Not Read News

from the it-took-them-this-long? dept

In an interesting followup to our earlier post about the state of the news business, Robin writes in to point us to a NY Times article all about how a younger generation of news readers now focus on sharing the news, rather than just consuming it. Mathew Ingram highlights the key sentence in the article, from a college student: "If the news is that important, it will find me." Very few mainstream publications have grasped that concept, even if some folks have been saying the same thing for years. It's time for those in the newspaper business to stop thinking of readers as straight consumers. They're distributors, promoters, creators and analysts of the news as well. Once you recognize that, you start to change how you approach the news business. You certainly get rid of paywalls and registration walls, and you start enabling your users to do more, rather than less, with the news.

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Western Digital Decides That You Shouldn't Be Allowed To Share Any MP3

from the why-is-that-WD's-decision? dept

Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the internet (rather than on the local network). You can set up accounts for specific people, including highlighting what is available to be shared with that person. However, Western Digital has simply decided that under no circumstance can you share a variety of multimedia filetypes, such as mp3s, wmvs, aac or others. Its reasoning is that this is "due to unverifiable media license authentication," which is basically a gibberish way of saying that you might be infringing on someone's copyright. Of course, you might not be either. There are an awful lot of media files out there that are perfectly legitimate to share with others. Certainly, this sort of action makes this service useless to a musician who records tracks and makes them available to his record label using such a drive. The key question, though, is why Western Digital should bother at all. There's certainly no legal reason for Western Digital to do such a thing -- and all it does is make their drives a lot less useful for perfectly legitimate activities.

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