King of the meh

Is it me or has the King of the Mountains title become a bit devalued in the Tour de France recently?
The overall race lead is always going to be the daddy obviously but I'm certain I can recall, in my youth, a period where the polka-dot jersey was considered a bigger prize than the green jersey.
Now it seems to be a bit of an add-on, a bit like the white jersey for the best young rider. It's a nice thing to have but nothing to get too excited about.
Is this just because, with Cavendish regularly featuring in the points competition, the British press have given it that much more prominence? Or have we created that bias ourselves by focussing on the Manx Missile's success?
Has there been a bit of a dearth of top-flight climbers recently that has meant the competition has been swamped by GC contenders instead?
Or is it, as I opened with, just me? Is the polka-dot jersey still as important as it ever was to everyone else?

You turn your back for one minute...

And you get a fantastic piece of copyright fuckupery like this
Norwich city has, for some unexplained reason, installed a load of painted gorilla figures around the city.
Guess which one has triggered a copyright dispute? The Ironman one? The Batman one? The Optimus Prime one perhaps?
Nope, it's the Freddie Mercury one.
Really, what a fucking ridiculous claim and what a stupid thing to do by the The Mercury Phoenix Trust - seriously, what the hell do they think they're doing?
Idiots.
Simple, simple idiots.

The Complete Manifesto

A while ago I started writing and posting a manifesto for the content industry. This spread over 15 blogs and about 10,000 words in the end. Obviously at this point a blog stops being a convenient mechanism for reading it so I've given it a bit of a polish and stuck it in a .pdf here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0z6bKK0uOagRGVxT0dfNW1ZYTQ/edit?usp=sharing

Please read, comment, critique and share as much as you like.
Thanks
Drew

Prototype (or There is a Change Coming)

There is a change coming.

A bunch of smart people, wanting to talk to each other, came up with a variety of bits of code and protocols
and tried them out.

Bits failed, bits succeed, bits got bolted together, pulled apart and stuck back together again.

An on-going prototype that is still evolving today, even though the testers make up about 50% of the planet
and the cost of the total failure of that prototype would be catastrophic.

I’m talking about the web* of course. The internet, the information super-highway**, this mesh of connections and conversations. From the actually-quite-hard-to-visualise wi-fi hotspot to the tangible words that you’re reading now; it’s still a prototype.

Because what’s coming next, the next set of prototypes, is the transition from virtual to actual. It won’t just be your phone / tablet / pc that’s connected, it’ll be your fridge, your luggage, your bicycle, your house and your 3D printer. All of these will be connected and communicating to each other. Hopefully with you in the middle of it all…

3D Printers may just be producing simple plastic parts at the moment but the price is coming down to real-
world levels, metal-matrix devices are in development and some very smart people are thinking about how
carbon structures might be “printed” at a near-molecular level.

There is another level of business and personal disruption coming, but that brings with it another iteration of
the usual challenges, and these are the biggest threat to this next level of interconnectedness.

It’s not the limitations of technology, it’s not the limitations of raw materials nor is it some hypothetical
limitation of mankind’s ability to handle the “future shock.” The biggest threat is the status quo.

The status quo of large vested interests’ control of political representatives.

The status quo of copyright and patent law being so broken that they no longer promote innovation and
creation but actively inhibit it.

The status quo of the groundless legal-action that drives a new competitor out of business, not on merit but
on the threat of an un-payable bill.

The status quo that measures value by the number of ideas locked up rather than the number shared.

This can’t continue.

From a practical perspective, it’s a war that can’t be won. The most effective mechanisms against illegal file-
sharing are not threats of disconnection, not Digital Rights Management software, not multi-million dollar law-suits or night-time raids on flamboyant businessmen in foreign countries. People, ignore, discard and work around these things. No, the most effective methods are making the product legally available at the right price, in the right format and at the right time to meet the customer demand.

For ethical reasons too, it needs to change. Every day people across the world are dying because ideas
that could have saved them are locked up in intellectual property. As the technology progresses, it will be
increasingly unethical to ship something halfway round the globe if it could be printed in your garage from
locally sourced materials. If knowledge can be shared instantly and at nearly zero cost, how do we ethically
explain the withholding of that knowledge?

Copyrights and Patents can still serve a very valuable purpose, but not in their current form. We need to
go back to the reason for their existence and start again before they lose all credibility and go the way of
Prohibition.

There is a change coming. Maybe we could try a couple of prototypes first…

* though if you removed the “wanting to talk to each other” bit and changed your perception of the word
“code” you could equally be talking about capitalism. But I’m not.

** I always think of Clive James when I hear this phrase.

A Manifesto for the Content Industry 14. Do not sue your customers.

I know this is the same as 1 but it’s so important I thought I’d say it twice.*

Well here we are at the end and you’ll be relieved to know that this final entry will be very short.

The bottom line is that, as part of the content industry, your business exists to serve your customers.

If you choose to provide a service that is worse than the competition (be that legitimate or otherwise) then you can expect to lose customers.

If you choose to provide a service that excludes certain sections of your potential customer base then you can expect to lose customers.

If you choose to provide a product that is more restricted that that offered by the competition (legitimate or otherwise) you can expect to lose customers.

And finally, if you choose to treat your customers like criminals, and make them feel like criminals when they do support you, you can expect to lose customers.

But, as I’ve hopefully explained, you don’t have to choose to do any of these things…

* With reference to Red Dwarf: “Kryten: A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One: we don't have any defensive shields. And two: we don't have any defensive shields. Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.”

Further musings on Copyright reform (3)

So, parts one and two done already yada yada yada...

The Copyright hub.
Actually some good stuff in here. Firstly they're not trying to build from scratch, they've actually done some research and are starting off with a lot of work done by the Copyright Clearance Centre in the US. Now I don't know anything about whether this is a good model or not (shout out in the comments if you have any experience of them) but re-using what's there is good project technique. Even if it's slightly ironic in this context...

Hmmm, in section 84 they mention a lot of the challenges that the hub will need to overcome to, basically, jam this new web thing into the old copyright box. Maybe it's time to look at whether the box is really the best thing for it, or even necessary at all?

They still seem to imagine individual users going for licenses for you-tube videos (not going to happen!) but they at least recognise that the hassle-and-cost factor might lead to stuff just being dropped. They also talk about making sure that the overall result is a "bigger pie" but I wonder if they've seriously looked at the pricing behaviours of the major rights holders over the last few years.

There's a section on education and information and how they plan to add this to the hub to help navigate the complex world of copyright law, but this seems to be addressing the symptoms rather than the actual problem: that copyright law is too complex and is unfit for the internet-enabled world.
Also they don't mention how they'll tackle the thorny issue of different international laws.

Section 94 has another depressing example of anecdote-based-policy making. Apparently a rights database "could have specific advantages in copyright enforcement across the internet including
• peer to peer file-sharing by individual consumers
• illegal websites and search engines with illegal websites appearing in their search results
• advertisers monetising copyright infringing material
• payment providers serving copyright infringing subscription services."
Needless to say it doesn't actually talk about HOW this might happen. That's just an industry wish-list that's been tagged on to a bit of wishful thinking.
This is followed by a paragraph that says dispute resolution is going to be critical and difficult and... ...we have no idea how to fix this.

There's a chunk on copyright and education and how difficult it is to navigate. Given the purpose of copyright is to promote learning and understanding (via the mechanism of payments to creators - important distinction that) you'd think we'd be able to come up with something simpler and more direct for schools - i.e if it's used in education it's "fair use" (to use the American term) and therefore allowable.
Overall this key chunk on copyright and education just comes up with better ways to preserve the status quo, it also suggest further use of aggregators and middlemen to simplify the process for the schools but all this will do is add an additional cost into the end price.
All a bit disappointing.

Next up, music licensing - that might take a few posts and will definitely be one for another night...

Further musing on copyright reform (2)

Following on from the first bit, I'm now into the detail of the report.
Already warning bells are ringing...
1) Still no recognition of the amateur / bedroom creator.
2) there appears to be a lot of anecdotal evidence here and very little factual research to back it up. For example: "We have heard from ITV, for example, that the adoption of the ISAN system has contributed
to increased revenue collection. Although it is impossible to be absolutely certain that the growth of collection revenues was the result of ISAN alone"
3) I have concerns about whether (in the absence of proper evidence) the differences between causation and correlation are being properly understood.
Carrying on...

The Images and metadata bit is interesting, a fair number of reasonable suggestions on unique identifiers and registries but then, when it gets to the critical bit about what to do about stripping out meta-data, it's back to a voluntary code of practice.
Sorry, but doing this deliberately is already illegal* so if, as suggested, the industry is in the habit of wide-scale meta-data stripping, what the fuck difference do they think signing up to a voluntary agreement is going to do?
It makes me wonder if the report writers have had the Treasury breathing down their necks the entire time saying "remember, there's no budget for this."
In my day job I'm what's euphemistically known as a "change professional" and I will tell you one thing for free; if you don't put budget and backbone behind something you won't change shit.
Carrying on

Finally in section 67 we begin to see the scale of creation at the moment. PPL reports that members are registrering new recordings at the rate of 10200 per week. That's half a million new recordings a year from the UK alone. But this is just the formal stuff that people register. I wonder what percentage of bedroom / amateur recordings are not registered?
To be fair, PPL appear to be doing some good stuff on databases, but I do worry a bit about the possible naivety expressed in the idea that where the UK leads other countries will follow and exactly how this will translate into good news "for the economy as a whole". As Dr Ben Goldacre would say, "the plural of anecdote is not data." 

Section 73 acknowledges the existence of content outside of the traditional industry channels. This appears to be covered in a single paragraph with a suggestion that the LCC project looks at it. Buck passed, no budget required.

Section 75, second mention of end-users. That might be you or me.

That's the data section done. The surprising thing about this is that they didn't expect this to be a problem when they started out. Who were they talking to? People have been discussing exactly this problem for years.
Oh well, it's also me done for the night. In the next thrilling installment we look at The Copyright Hub.
Join us then...



* Criminal as well as civil charges can be brought.