|
Sunday, March 24, 2002
Other ears 
Third Panel, another conversation, this one between Kevin Werbach and FCC Chairman Michael Powell
| | Michael: It is very important for the government to adopt a sense of dynamism about markets. You make assumptions that things wiell be stable for along time. But we are trying to recfognize that we are in a time when we need to assume that things change, that bets are hazardous (to that effect). Shit, this guy is a fast talker. Broadband has to be perceived as a true synergy. Not an incremental telephone or video (thing). Just as tech converges, the law is converging. Statutes are written in buckets of technology. If you have a bucket of wire we call you a telephone carrier. And if you use coax, we callyou cable. And if you're an ISP, we don't know. And we don't know what to call the large AT&T... |
| | These proceedings are our effort to bring clarification of the broadband space as an entity unto itself. That it has a new ... We need not to remake accidental judgements made 6 or more years ago. ... cohereent framework that will lower risk... |
| | Kevin: What''s the framework, your vision of a conscious way of defining these things that's better than what we have now? |
| | Michael: Government tends to focus on price discipline, quality of service. Not innovation, not competition... we need to think hard about a policy framwork that's healthy for those two things. Note I don't say deregulated or unregulated. I'm talking minimum regulated. Futility. What is broadband? If you have a regulatory regime, it needs to be predictive. Rules tend to shape the palette used to paint pictures... gong through the nasty, mud-crawling effort ... guarded and vigilant... |
| | Kevin: I'd like to talk about innovation. Some of us claim that the Internet has so much innovation due to minimum regulation, while there was heavy regulation of the pipes. Yet AT&T couldn't prevent ISPs from creating business... |
| | Michael: Minimum regulation involves conscious judgements about where the market breaks down. We should be proceeding with all due hesitation. We shouldn't regulate a gainst a strawman that hasn't demonstrated itself. |
| | Kevin: Cable broadband. We can say that at some later point we can do something, meanwhile the system gets built with limitations.... |
| | Michael: That's an intuitive point... The government was somewhat vigilant on set top boxes. Were they being built in open standards or proprietary modes? We put a lot of effort into understanding what was happening with the AOL Time Warner merger Logical differences vs. Behavioral constraints... Architectures wiht heavy components... Antitrust analysis takes you up to a point. But in the american democracy we value a diversity of media viewpoints... there is no quewstion that media is more varied than ever before. Think about the average cable plant in 2001, which has 63 distinct channels... We want copiousness. It gets hard when we mean something else, value juudgements, quality, diversity... this gets very slippery... government gets into dangerous territory |
| | It's sooo hard to keep up with this, mostly because Michael's points seem highly embedded and intellectualized. His clarity isn't bad for a guy with his job, but still... Too hard to quote meaningfully. And he talks too fast for me to keep up. |
| | Michael: Unlicensed spectrum is the best thing we've ever done... (claps) |
| | I want to ask a question or two, so I have to leave the keyboard. |
| | [Later...] Okay, I just spoke from the audience. I saluted Michael's statements about "minimum regulation" and encouraged him to consider the conflicts between two conceptualizations of the Net: one that sees it as a transportation system, and another that sees it as a place, a commons that nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. It's a public space that is nonetheless not owned by government — kind of a new thing. Perhaps we need to protect the second from the first. His response was an unexpected one: There will be many private internets as well as the public one. Interesting. If so, they can't fully compete, methinks. |
Second Panel — a conversation...
| | Kevin, Dave Dornan of AT&T... |
| | Kevin gives the background. |
| | Dave: We have a 40 billion business generating 10 bnillion EBDITA. (Going down...) We had a model that charged for ease of use. AT&T is still billing 300 million in phone calls. The rest is everything else. We have scaled a buisness in which the unit chage had come down dramatically. Sprint has an op margin is going from 14% to -6%. .. We threw tens of billins at infrastructure.... Dillution of management talent... The CEO of Global Crossing said he was going to put cables in the ocean... |
| | Kevin: This was *delusion* of managment talent... (laughter) |
| | Dave: If you look at other captital intensive industries, you're looking at 40-year assets. Here we're looking at assets that will die before they're deployed because there are no customers to go with them. |
| | Kevin: Are you big enough? |
| | Dave: We and Worldcom are big enough now that... while we were watching the Web 3 years ago and conviced that VoIP, pulling our hair out figureing out how that would work. Meanwhile wireless ate 20% of the longwire business. In multi-dwelling units in Detroit, 25% of the inhabitants don't have a wired phone. They can't find a value proposition for a wired ophone. How far will it go? |
| | Kevin: So you spun off AT&T wireless. How do you navigate that trap? Aso VoIP, which is still coming? |
| | Dave: We wanted to spin off Wireless. It kept us from going as fast as we wanted to go. Rather than fall into a trap, where we had too much debt, where the balance sheet would determine success or failure. Now the market has changed enough that our ... Some form of sustainable competition among well capitalized companies to sustain a competitive environment (is what we need). How can the FCC and Congress to help that out? It's very difficult. |
| | Dave: Infrastrucutre. The bells are saying don't let ... I was at Pac Bell when we built the infrastructure... The Bells are using the mantra that old wires, old users, copper, digital loop systems, lots of fiber in the loop... We think it's fundamental that ...I can't follow this. Sorry. |
| | Enough: Dan just asked me if I'd heard anything from Dave Dornan that's worth quoting. Um: no. Dave looks and sounds like a good guy, but he talks telcojive, and my ears are glazing over. So I'm gonna drop this one and go back and copyedit what I wrote below. That was a very interesting panel. Only recorded about 20 minutes of it, unforutnately. |
Sides: First Panel
| | Note: The full-value, typo-free, copy-edited summary of this panel should be on the Linux Journal site tomorrow (background: see the last item I wrote there). I'm just taking public notes here. Quotes are close as I can make them. I'm a fast typist, but like everybody my short-term memory is for meaning at best and verbatim at worst. Prejudices and wishful typing apply. Therefore: imagine and apply all disclaimers. Also compare and contrast. Dan is blogging live too (not sure about a link... no time to look right now). Michael at Sippey.com is on my right taking notes he'll put up later. So is Rafe, who's right in front of me (as I discovered when he just emailed me). I am sure there are many others Nearly everybody here, it seems, has a laptop, and is listening with their fingers. I'm imagining a nation of court stenographers... (I just did a count.. it's about a third.) |
| | Panelists: Kevin, Esther, Maria Cantwell, Les Vidasz, Hillary Rosen, Mitch Kapor. Maria's mike doesn't work. Esther: This is how we control what people say. (Good laugh line.) |
| | Maria: (Hottest issue is Hollings dropping his latest Act, which says 'government should decide'.) We should think about rights. Civil. Human. Speech. Even guns....Now we're talking about control. (Very different.) The tech and the content industries are coming to Washington and doing battle. |
| | Esther: We need to think about the rights of citizens, and not just consumers. |
| | Maria: Better to think about the privacy rights we want to guarantee. Rather than become too prescriptive. |
| | Esther: How broadly to others share your point of view in Congress? |
| | Maria: The Internet interest are not as organized. It needs ot be more actigve. Pat Leahy, Orrin Hatch are early adopters. But many others are not even PC users. |
| | Esther: The issue isn't, "Do they understnand PCs?" It's "Do they understand rights? |
| | Maria: At least we got a bill on rights (missed it) passed. Lots of claps. |
| | Mitch: My new project is flying under the radar. But we're trying to get users rights greater than one... It was naive to assume the Net would stay open. Nothing ever does. Thing have not been going well in that very large corporate interests, protecting business bodels, leveraging lobbying to pass legislation that is harmful and stupid. Meaning DMCA and Hollings bill. |
| | Hillary: The DMCA was a limitation on liability for users. IN the pure copyrioht model, all uses would have been liable. To say that it instituted new protections is simply wrong. This discussion for the music industry is kind of old fashioined. We're into how do we balance a great user experienc, and one that has evoolved, and matching business models in a useful way. The Hollings bill is a kindn of a setback. It threatens what people on both sides ahve been trying to achieve. What has happend is a recognition that people who make entertainment fell like their proudcts and technologies drive technologies products, and there hasnt; been enough recognitohn of the role here, the relationship between the gas and the car, the bike and the .... People in the industry are not looking fo r the lock and key scenarios that the Hollings discussions raise. |
| | Les: There are a couple of CDs here. Some can't play on a PC. This says "this requires a superdrive..." It should carry a warning that it won't play on your PC. When the record industry talks about peaceful coexistence it wants nothing of the sort. Our business has created hundreds of million s of consumers out there and your industry ... Don't lthink we're on the same page. |
| | Hillary: Superaudio CD was invented by Sony for superaudio customers. Audiophiles. Thge Charley Pride CD is a different kind of example, and a better one. But the fact that there have been two, including Universal, is exactly the point. It's not good technology yuet. It doesn't have a consumer value proposiotin. And until record companies offer something that has a good value propositoin, it won't sell. We want to sell records people want to play. We need to ask why consumers are going to want this... Assuming a market test is the position of the whole industry isn't fair. |
| | Kevin: Your strategy is sue first and ask questions later... |
| | Hillary: What I do and what the RIAA do are enforcement tools. But there are a lot of complications. You clearly have to look at enforcement and stragegy as different issues. The record industry is not given credit ... |
| | Maria: The content industry is now Disney and Fox coming to Congress and saying "you choose... you come up with a solution." These guys think this is "open source." |
| | Mitch: I don't think these guys want the Hollings legislation to pass. I think they want to cut a deal. In classic fashion, they raise a big threat. A friendly committee and a legislator with a reputation to say outrageous things. To force the players to come to the table to cut a deal that would, in my opinion, screw consumers. It is the protection of buisiness modeels that is driving things. Lost in that agenda is what consumers (and other players) can actually do. EFF, in spite of many good things it has done, has not been successful at this. It hasw been successful at fighting in courts, but not at political influence. |
| | Esther: Les, what was this thing you just signed with AOL and why? This love letter? |
| | Les: (To Maria) I wish yuou were at the same meeting I was. One of the statments made there was that we were not willing or able to work with the industry. But Industries are not monolithic. The record industry, the movie industry, the car industry... (to Esther) That was just a statement by two companies that happened to be working on problems together. The difference between one faction and another was in what they were willing to say. One was willing to sacrifice major privacy and consumer expectaiton issues... That was what one group said: that they were willing to work on DRM. A DRM solution w9ill not work alone. YUou can't have a situatiojn where the only choice is free from the Net or $15. |
| | Hillary: The peoplle who sustain seats at the table end up being more controlling. |
| | Maria: Right now we're leveling the playing field, but just between business interests. |
| | Hillary: Thnat's your job. |
| | Maria: The day that we have no campaign finance reform, or some other system, maybe we'll habve that. ... They are somewhat missing. As the net gets more controlled, the questino is how do we foster (that participation) |
| | Esther: I'm trying to get the publc interests in ICANN deliberations. Your're try9jng to get it into EFF. How do you do that? |
| | Mitch: I would urge people to talk to Cory , who is here, pick up the literature, and sign on. We he to keep trying whatever creative efforts we could come up with./ It's a very daunting probglem. Solving it will require recognizing how difficult it is. People are having their cvitizzenship taken away and replaced by consumership. |
| | Hillary: Americans in particular have had the most diverse array of entertainment, of books, of literature, of movies, at the lowest cprices in the world. they system has not failed them. it has produced a lot of diversity, a lot of... |
| | Maria: There are lots of other legislation that matters. The patriot act ... |
| | Shit, my battery is low... |
| | Mitch: We've just begun to see the impact ofall this techological change. Almost everythign today is guaranteed not to work. Huge rearrangements in the economics involved among the parties of the record industries. It's just a matter of time before that happens (specifically with the record industry.. missed the particulcars). Ijn my lifetime I'll be able to hodin my yhand storage media that will hold evbery record and movie ever made. Egvery book. That's going to change things. |
| | Esther: And every email yhou've ever written, and every move your car has ever made, will also be on a disk. .. How can we give control of that to users? Maybe there ccan be a role for government in that... |
| | Maria: Whnen I tell people they can find the nearest Starbucks that's open at 2am, they like it. When I tell them a record of how they got to Starbucks at 2am, the response is different. |
| | Hillary: This industry is not much different about intellectual property than any other industry. |
| | Les: If we talk about winners and losers, and the government chooses the entertainment industry over the info tech industry,... one is many times the size of the other... one is like a pimple on the side of ..;. (laughter) |
| | Mitch: If we wind up on a very restrictive regime on what indivfiduals can do, there will be an enormous opportunity loss in terms of lost economic mobility, creativity... we already have this in our own industry. there is a huge amount of lost opportunity because innovation has slowed because in many sectors there is no longer investment. We have a situation where potential government indtervention has jnot proven successful. The problem is (what we can do for) people on the outside. This industry was largely the creation of peoplle on the outside, who did not have stakes (in the status quo). i am concerned about what peole can do when "yhou can't" is burned into hardware. (Claps, which I started...heh.) |
| | Hillary: you sound like the christian coalition taling about what happens when abortion is legal: "there will be murder everyuwhere!" (All we're saying is).. come up with standards. Nowhere's near the dramatic notion you're raising. |
| | Les: At that level of absdtraction it sounds really good. But after six years I see a 'my way or the highway'. It takes two to agree. |
| | Esther: SDMI showed that... |
| | Bill Kulik: Would you recall for us when the IT industry tried to do that (copy protection) to its own consumers. |
| | Mitch: In my hall of fame of mistakes... The consumer objected so vociferously that ... Actually at this point I don't believe anybody pushing copy protection really believes that it is going to be effective in a straigntforward way. I think the reason that people push them is a tactic in a chess game. It is not a problem in and of itself. It's part of a larger picture where people are trying to keep power as a sole objective. |
| | Albhy Galutin: In SDMI, no PC software companies agreed to comply.... tThe reason we are so proactive in asking the IT industry to cooperate ... In a world where people can create works of art, now protectedc by inconvenience. There have been ways to supporty creativeity in the arts. The medicis. BBC taxes. We like choices where the capitalist system (does the job). No solution servers the IT industry (we in the entertaiment industry have discoverd) because they benefit from frfee created goods. I want to incentivize the IT industry to create tech that serves creative works (something like that). |
| | Hillary: SMDI was a way to create user friendly models for music if we have interoperabiolity and security. People forget interoperability. But the onlything that was open was MP3. Everythning else was proprietary. Clearly waiting for the ideal security solutions or incentives is a waste. You have to serve the customer. And change your business models. But clearly they haven't learned that yet. We found that as soon as ubiquity takes over, it is very difficult to find (an answer). It happened with music. Now it's happening with DVDs. |
| | Maria: It's when industries can't decide that government's interest is piqued. |
| | Mitch: It's a bad chice when yhour only choice is an illegal one. If yhou would like to have your research deparment suffer incursions... An unfortunate side effect of the DMCA... (We need IP laws that incentivize people to continue research...) |
| | Les: We hve been working on this issue for over 6 years. There is security tech on the table. Nobody has introduced content yet. If anyubody has anthing they want to volunteer... We cannot have a business based on illicit content only. When you have 100MB into the home... We need a business model based on the rule of law. But it doesn't start with DRM. It starts with a business model. |
| | Kevin: You have a business model to propose? |
| | Les: Subscriptions (others)... (later, after question) God help us if our problems are solved by the government. |
| | Albhy: DRMs are very good at protecting... What is the appropriate behavior? These are difficult questions that technology cannot solve on its own. |
| | Cory: This room is filled with people who thinkn they can manage their own rights perfectly well and don't want anybody else to do it for them. ... negotiate a standard at lawyerpoint.... go to congress and hold this up at standard... |
| | Hillary: I just said I agree with Maria that the Hollings bill won't pass. Congress is perfectly capable of considering the consumer. They can make a policy choice. It's just a choice. |
| | Maria: Given the open architecture of the Net... what happens is that Congress is choosing in themiddle of this playout of the Net. We need to sit back and think about what rights we are trying to protect. Not just winners and losers. |
| | Les: If somebody told me two years ago that something like this bill can even be proposed... You haben't seen a recession yet like what would happen if somethingn like this act is passed. |
| | Audience member: What rights, excactly? |
| | Maria: The right to have the content of your computer protected. We're getting the debate wrong. We risk closing off options. We need to sit back... |
| | Stephen Sprague: We have all the case examples in front of us. What we really want as users is control over our security in the broadest sense. We want to control our identity when we log in, when we go to our bank... failed to make the PC a good service delivery device. A set-top box can do that, but we don't have control of that. AT&T does. Thje consumer needs control over what they want to use and don't want to use. The PC industry needs to create the technology that (allows that). |
| | Mitch: Why is your baseline every PC? Why is that a good thing>? |
| | Stephen: The industry is based on a cserver-0centric model. Not a consuimer model. |
| | Les: You have a huge number of users and access points. I feel pretty good about what we've done. We have not solved the problem of maintaining the business model of the last generation. |
| | Hillary: We;re not talking about a better mousetrap. Thjere is no quesiton in my mond that we haent' seen the business model that serves the consumer. Also that the best, most attractive new system can't compete with (free download, I think). There is clearly a movement among many in gov't for authentication for national security reasons. Not to protyect (business or consumers). |
| | Keith: I'm a consumer who objects to anybody protecting my interests. How do you defend yourself against the argument that what you're really protecting is a cartel from a different era in the midst of modern technology... What your're jnot doing isw going with the jmarket. Your;';re going with a market that has existedc since the 19th century. |
| | Hillary: Waht we wnt you to do is use your music any way you like. The record industry thas afforded consumers the3 opportunity to do whatever they want, in spite of far more restrictive loaws. Anbd it doesn't get the credit. When we look now at what's happened, which has nothing to do with converting your record collectiojn to your iPod. It has to do with sending yhour recrod collection to million s of strangers. When we thoughtfully implement technolo9gy, we need to find a balance. There are red herrings that need to be thrown out that have nothing to do with what we've been doing in the marketplace. |
| | Mitch: I',m a huge stockholder in Real Networks, but (that company restricts rights, I think he's saying). There isn't a good way to permit tradfitional uses without the loss of the business model. Bu't that would be a more fair thing to say than than the music industry has done X or Y. |
| | Hillary: It's true that the business models going forward are not good ones. But the history does not warrant the level of vituperation... |
| | Les: How are hyou going to repurpose your content for the Internet? |
| | Elliot Noss: I';m a consumer who has spent zero dollars on music in the last five years. If you could (produce the right business modfel) I would gladly pay $20 per X for the rest of my life... (Could it be that) record sales are down becaus music is bad? |
| | Mitch: The rights to do (anything) is such a horrible tangle... |
| | Audience guy: (To Maria) Force disclosure of (financial information). |
| | Mitch: Would that apply to software makers too? (laughter) |
| | Audience guy: (There are two cliques here. The cool guys who are popular and hang out smoking cigarettes on the front steps, and the AV/tech club guys. How can they get along?) |
| | Another audience guy: The consumer cannot compete with the distributor. We need to find a mechanism for the first artist to get paid for the first copy (at least). The fract that nobody is discussing copypright law is striking to me. |
| | Les: Intel's sales were up 20% last year. Was it because the music industry made bad music? This whole debate is about speed. How fast do we get to the next business model? The Net will be the major distro channel. If they entertainment industry embraces this, it will accellerate. It's happened in every other case. |
| | Hillary: Sales are down. I never made the claim that it was about piracy. That was what (some surveys) told us. Get a lawyer, discovery, that's easy. DVD pricing is coming down. CDs are still the primary market. DVDs are terttiary. If we were baseball, we could have antitrust protection and come up with something (half joking). Here the consumer wants Bruce Springsteen to act the same way as the symphony. Business models have changed much slower than they should have... Can we all get along? |
| | Maria: Transparency is a bit term in Washington these days, since Enron. It will be much easier to talk when we get money out of politics. We need to get to Internet voting. Get money out of politics. Get closr to the people. (She has my vote.) |
| | Esther: I'll close as someone who has tried internet voting... In theory congress represents the peoplle vs. the moneyed interests. We need a congress that understands the peole better. The point of having a legislature is to have intelligent people to discuss both sides of an issue... we need a discussion, not just people voting their self interests. |
| | Maria: People are going to replace absentee voting (now big) with voting on the Internet. ... |
| | Esther: Call it internet voting educaiton, then... |
Blasts from the past
| | The conference is about to start, and they're running retrospective slides on the last 25 years. Right now: the Release 1.0 on e-commerce from 1995, with Jerry Michalski's byline. |
| | Esther, in her intro: As business people you may want one particular thing, but you also want your kids to live in a world that you'd like to live in. She's talking context and contradiction: this is equally a technology and a business conference. |
| | Kevin: Are we going back to the frontier, or to something else? (The theme of the conference is "Back to the Frontier.") |
So more kittens will live
| | Here's how thick the wi-fi is here: I'm posting this from a stall in the men's room. There are two other stalls here. I hear keyboards tapping in both of them (I think... hard to tell). |
| | How much you wanna bet that this gets quoted more than anything I'm writing today that's actually meaningful? |
| | [Later...] Rafe Needleman just told me, "You're full of shit." |
Overheard...
| | - "I think wireless should be like the light in front of your house. It should be a public thing."
- "Very little of the internet is intrinsic."
- "The corporate user is not going to drive change. They're scared of the Internet."
- "Imagine if radio came before telephony. People would be saying 'Who wants to talk personally? Broadcasting is everything. We need to protect the right to that.'"
|
| | Chris Anderson (of Wired): "It's hard to push revolution through the Net." |
| | Me (never mind the context): "There is no free lunch. Except for maggots." |
| | - "The Internet is broken."
- "Everything is broken. Our bodies are broken. They're terminal."
- "Maggots aren't broken."
|
Stay hungry
| | Cory just introduced our little schmooze circle to SpamRadio, which he describes as "a text-to-speech engine reading spam over automatically generated techno music." It's MP3. Listen here. |
| | So Cory is looking at this digging how I'm using the Radio Userland outliner to drive my blog, and wondering if it can do the same for Blogger. I think so, but not sure. (I'm sure the answer will come, though... heh.) |
Ready to march yet? Maybe this will help.
| | Wanna get really pissed off? Just read the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act's opener: |
| | To regulate interstate commerce in certain devices by providing for private sector development of technological protection measures to be implemented and enforced by Federal regulations to protect digital content and promote broadband as well as the transition to digital television, and for other purposes. |
| | Dig it: This fucker's purpose is to pave the Net for television. |
| | I just noticed that the co-authors include Diane Feinstein, one of my own senators. Others are Stevens, Inouye, Breaux, Nelson, and (of course) Hollings. (Hmm... Wonder how much Disney gave each of them?) Crypthome calls them "broadbandits." |
| | Let's call them "history." |
Equal time
| | Robert Grosshandler (of iGive) just showed up. He's on a Win2000 laptop. "Windows 2000 is a great piece of software," he just said. |
Found in Space
From the Extreme Unintended Consequences Dept.
| | "The US produced extreme Islamic textbooks for Afghan students to stir furor during the Afghan/Russian war," New World Disorder says. I heard yesterday that literacy for Islamic women is under 5%, owing to the complete absence of formal education under the Taliban regime. |
Blog hockey in meet space
| | The only stake I can possibly imagine for these pornographic middlemen of the soul is the one the Internet has locked, loaded, and aimed at the drywell of their hearts. Will someone in this crowded theater please say, "Fire"? |
An oldie but relevant goodie
An industry on the Fritz
| | Simply put, Disney is interested in maintaining the powerlessness of The Consumer. Michael Eisner and his congressional puppets want to dismantle the Net for one single reason: it's a platform for markets where demand has just as much power as supply. |
| | The offenses against the public interest have been piling up, one after the other, but we've been acting like the proverbial frog that just sits there in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil. The frog gets cooked because it doesn't realize what's happening until too late. |
| | In my piece I request questions from readers for today's panels, which include the RIAA's Hillary Rosen and the FCC's Michael Powell. So: read it and write me. |
| | Also Jamie Zawinski on Webcasting Legally. Good stuff. He knows his shit and lays it out in great detail, including the prohitively complex stuff a Webcaster will need to to to "stay legal." Then this. |
| | If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well... you're fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the ``compulsory license'' territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them. |
| | What's going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet, and are trying to prevent any kind of progress that might require them to evolve and change their business models to keep up with the times. They are pretty much trying to legislate the internet out of the way, and force things to continue to be done as if early-20th-century technology was still all we have to work with. |
| | And after all is said and done, what happens to your fees? The media conglomerates take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever management company owns N'Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles' catalog.) All other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing. |
| | Context: Jamie is one of Netscape's original programmers (he named Mozilla, among other things) and both owns and runs the DNA Lounge in San Francisco. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
