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Tuesday, April 23, 2002
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 Tuesday, April 23, 2002
started 4/23/2002; 1:28:32 AM - last post 4/23/2002; 12:09:54 PM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, April 23, 2002 
4/23/2002; 5:28:32 AM (reads: 7085, responses: 1)
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A living latency 
| | Jack Valenti has struck back at reality with a long-winded press release. More at Politechbot, including the full text of Jack's testimony to a congressional subcommittee. A snippet: |
| | Brooding over the global reach of the American movie and its persistent success in attracting consumers of every creed, culture and country is thievery, the theft of our movies in both the analog and digital formats. |
| | Promoting legitimate alternatives to digital thievery. Keep in mind that movie producers and distributors are filled with optimism over the prospect of the Internet as another new delivery system to dispatch their movies to consumers, at a fair and reasonable price (the defining of fair and reasonable¹ to done by the consumer). And of course those very consumers are the ultimate beneficiaries of these new distribution channels, as they will enjoy more choices for accessing the movies they want in high-quality digital format. |
| | I love that "dispatch movies to consumers" business. |
| | Here's the problem, Jack. We were never just "consumers." We were customers all along, and now we're in a position to become better customers than ever, because there is more technology than ever to create more ways of making and doing business together than ever. And you're kinda calling us thieves. Like here: |
| | As I said just a few minutes ago, it is the Internet, that all-embracing technological marvel, which is putting to hazard our attempts to protect precious creative property. Viant, a Boston-based consulting firm, has estimated that some 350,000+ movies are being downloaded from the Internet every day — all of them illegal. |
| | My friend Arne just ran the math on that, and told me this outfit is claiming 10^15 bytes (a petabyte) per day. Kinda hard to believe. |
| | Then there is the mysterious magic of being able, with a simple click of a mouse, to send a full-length movie hurtling with the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) to any part of this wracked and weary old planet. It is that uncomprehending fact of digital life that disturbs the sleep of the entire U.S. film industry. |
| | Arne just told me on the phone, "If we could make the Net operate at the speed of light, maybe we could move a petabye per day of movies." |
Lawmakers crap on CARP
| | A bipartisan group of congresspeople has stood up against CARP's Webcast royalty payment scheme. Unfortunately, it confines its concers to rates, and barely addresses the reporting requirements, which impose an operational burden on every Webcaster that none are yet equipped to meet (a subject I went into yesterday). |
So why don't more up us put up PayPal buttons?
| | Steve MacLaughlin over at Saltire has been doing a good and helpful job lately of bringing respect to some overlooked market principles, especially the subject of a post this morning: You get what you pay for. He begins with the post I made earlier today (see below) about the HBO show Six Feet Under, then continues: |
| | As content providers try and charge for access online the value of what they're offering has to be there. If you truly can't get that kind of content anywhere else, then those providers have a "captivated" market. Personally, I've found myself paying for a lot more content online that I view as being high in value, and where I know the free substitutes just don't cut it. |
| | The beauty of all of this is that the market decides what's good and what's bad content. (Remember...we are the market.) The good content will rise to the top and the bad stuff will fade away. Click around to enough weblogs and you can get a general feel of what content providers are on their game, and which ones are on their death bed. |
| | The only problem I have with this is a rhetorical one: I hate the word "content" almost as much as I used to hate "solution." It derives from the conceptual metaphor business is shipping, which the Cluetrain book brought up as an issue, and which I've been harping about ever since (e.g. here, here and here). Before the Net came along, I was a writer. Now I'm a "content provider." It's not a load I enjoy bearing. |
| | We should also bear in mind that many things we like on the Web are free-to-buy, much like public radio and television. Radio Paradise and Andrew Sullivan, to name two. This allows the market to determine value and set prices without the seller locking up the goods until they're bought. It's not the only commercial approach (by a long shot), but it's an interesting one that deserves more attention. Because the choice is not betwee a Web where everything valuable is locked up and everything else is free (the premium/basic cable model). There are lots of alternatives here. |
| | An interesting item: I've heard that KCSM, the Bay Area's noncommercial jazz station, makes more from voluntary listener payments than its commercial predecessor, KJAZ, made from advertising. Some lessons there. |
Googlejacking
| | My next speaking gig is a keynote at the Strictly Business conference in Minneapolis next month. I'm bringing this up mostly because I want to raise the conference page up the results list in searches for "strictly business minneapolis" on Google. Seems like the right thing to do. My topic: "Why Linux Is Still The Best Operating System For Business." My sponsors: Linux Journal and Twin Cities Linux Users Group. |
Here goes nothing
| | "I am not alone...Literally thousands of musicians like me, who are purportedly represented by record companies and distributors in the current Napster case, are in my situation." |
| | "The record companies' representation that they are legitimate agents for their artists is false...The only payments they make are to those who have the means to force them to be accountable; to the rest, a vast majority, they pay nothing. Therefore, allowing them to collect fees in our behalf does not serve the public interest. I personally would prefer to allow my music to be freely shared, to the present situation, in which only the corporations stand to gain. Until this is changed, the record companies and publishers deserve nothing." |
Turns out I'm French after all
| | A few years back my wife and I took a ski vacation in Zermatt, Switzerland. It was my first experience with the polylingual Swiss hospitality practice of guessing a guest's language and then quickly switching to the proper language if the guess proved wrong. Without exception, they would take one look at me and say Bonjour or Bonsoir. I'd come back with Hello and they'd proceed in perfect English. |
| | One day I was skiing down one of the side streets (the streets and paths are all covered in snow there for most of the Winter) when a couple stopped to ask me directions to the train station.. They tried several tongues I didn't recognize before we discovered that the only one we had in common was German. My joke about German is that I took three years of it in high school, and gave them all back when I was done. I've since been around much of Europe, but never, oddly, in Germany. So my Deutch was rusty, to say the least. |
| | Bahnhof? Ja? Okay. Um... Gehen diese Strasse, um, entlang, und rechts bei der dritten Strasse... It was torture, but they nodded a lot and seemed to understand, aided by many hand gestures on both sides. |
| | When I was done, they thanked me. |
Six miles beyond
| | My wife and I are the opposite of TV addicts. Our DishTV plan gives us almost two hundred channels, but it's a buffet we mostly don't touch. Our viewing is purposeful, and critical. My favorites are the Research Channel, UCTV and UWTV, because they have terrific lectures by real smart people. My wife's favorite channel is OFF. |
| | But we do also pay a premium for HBO, mostly because we (actually I) have this fantasy that we're saving money on movies or something. Even though we hardly ever watch any. Hey, we're busy. |
| | But several days ago we caught a moment on Six Feet Under, and stayed for the whole show. It was real good. Better than TV, in fact. Almost as good as Opthamology Grand Rounds on the Research Channel (no kidding, that's what's on right now, and lemme tell ya, hearing real doctors talk about "displacement of corneal flaps" after RK and LASIK surgery is mighty compelling TV). |
| | So tonight we caught most of another 6FU episode. And it was pretty good, too. Kinda flat and downbeat, but good. |
| | Anyway, what I notice is how much better TV can be when either (a) the production costs round to zero (relative to bigtime commercial TV); or (b) you pay for it. |
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Ryan Irelan - Sehr gut!
4/23/2002; 4:09:54 PM (reads: 427, responses: 0)
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Ach, dein Deutsch ist doch nicht so schlecht! Du solltest Deutschland besuchen, dann wirst du dein Deutsch üben können.
Bruce Springsteen once said " 57 channels and nothin's on"
Now it's more like 749 channels and there still ain't nothin on.
Ryan
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