June 2011
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Month June 2011

Entries 5 Total

De-googlifying

Jun 30, 11 12:19 PM

This is amusing. Nothing to do with copyright, just amusing. I have had a Gmail account for a long time, and have recently decided to start moving away from it. This is easier said than done, but I have reached the point where most of the mail it gets is from friends. So I put an “out of office” on it to inform people that I would be phasing out the address and asking them to put the new one in their address books. The out of office was entitled “de-googlifying” and contained the phrase “de-googling” a couple of times. I then tested it from my new account, and another email account I have. Neither got the out-of-office, even though it showed up in the gmail sent-items I waited about an hour and then tried changing the wording. “De-googlifying” became “de-g**glifying”, “de-googling” became “de-g**gling”. And the replies turned up instantly. Could it be Google operates a sort of swearbot which censors out-of-office messages about moving away from their services? That Google treats its own name as a swearword? Surely not… Hilarious. Doubtless innocently technical. But a bit sinister.

UPDATE: OK so they all turned up in the end. A long while later. But the one with asterisks is still quicker.

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Throwing in the towel

Jun 30, 11 12:14 PM

The Guardian has received much coverage this week for it’s new strategy, to go “digital first” and cut its costs massively.

There’s no doubt that the Guardian has an enormous amount of cost they can cut before it shows, and perhaps their CEO’s grim warnings about the fatal consequences if they don’t is as much a way of side-stepping the inevitable howls of anguish from unions and staff as it is the true reason for making what others might look on as sensible adjustments.

But the “digital first” thing is a bit more worrying, to me anyway. The logic is really hard to understand.

On the one hand, they have a determined policy of keeping their digital product free, because doing otherwise “closes down digital opportunities”.

On the other hand it doesn’t seem at all clear what these opportunities are. They have recently made a big move to set up an office in the USA, where much of their audience lives, in the hope that they can make that audience more profitable.

It seems to me like the triumph of hope over experience. You could sum up the whole digital business strategy of virtually every newspaper on the web as having been “build audience now, make money later”.

Even as the audiences have grown like topsy, the money has lingered far behind. The early, optimistic belief that digital would provide a thick layer of icing on the print cake gave way to hopeful speculation that while the digital audience might not be worth much, nor would it damage print – so it was a form of viral marketing.

The more current realisation that print is dying (and the Guardian is explicitly planning for, even accelerating, this change) has been greeted by most, privately at least, with an increasingly panicky desperation to find a model that works or – for many – find a new job before their business impodes.

The curious thing about the Guardian’s position is that while they’re bravely facing up to the realities of their perilous position (Andrew Miller says they have £200m left in their trust fund – which for a company which has lost considerably more than that in the last few years and still loses over £30m per year isn’t much of a safety net) they still seem to just have blind hope that the web will somehow come good in time to save them.

Perhaps it will, and if they deliver their goal to make £91m from digital in five years then I guess they stand a fighting chance (although that’s still only half their current turnover, and they don’t say how much of it comes from services like dating, separate from the actual newspaper).

But there have been countless digital newspaper business plans with that sort of number in them, usually justifying some large capital investment in digital (The Guardian is going to invest £25m this year), and they have mostly proven to be complete fantasies. A new guru presents an even more fantastical plan the year after, but rarely if ever are the enormous returns actually delivered.

In other words, seen from the outside the Guardian seems to be trying to reconcile two inherently conflicting points of view into something they can present as a rational strategy.

On the one hand, they have a strong belief that by growing their online audience they can grow their influence and stature and become a sort of world newspaper. Released from the constraints of print they have the freedom to find their audience all over the world and they don’t want to put barriers in the way of that.

On the other hand they need to make more money, or at least lose less.

So they’re dramatically cutting costs to address the urgent need to improve the bottom line.

They’re making an optimistic five year plan safe in the knowledge that it will be a long time before anyone will know if it can be delivered (and plenty of time to change it before the deadline anyway).

And they’re hoping it will all come good in the meantime.

I hope that’s not it, and that the Guardian has some amazing secret masterplan up it’s sleeve.

But it’s basically the approach adopted by most newspapers for most of the history of the internet, and so far it has an unbroken record of failure.

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Big idea, big support

Jun 19, 11 5:05 PM

The European Commission is sometimes a confusing, strange beast. I have been to meetings and conferences organised by them countless times and have always come away not sure I knew quite what was going on.

Recently they have been been looking for Big Ideas to help formulate their digital policy and agenda. This is part of an, in my view laudable, effort to involve a wide group of stakeholders in policy development and let them help set the agenda.

One such big idea, which I have been slightly involved with, was submitted by the European Publishers Council and has made it through a selection process whittling down about 100 ideas submitted to just seven which were then discussed at the Digital Agenda Assembly at the end of last week. I was part of the panel presenting the idea at the start of the day.

Their big idea is to ensure the various standards and systems for managing copyright are interoperable, so that finding information about pieces of content and obtaining licences is easier. Boring though it sounds, this is an essential piece of plumbing (one person referred to it as “killer plumbing”) which will enable many great things to happen.

As you can see from the agenda for that session, a pretty wide group of organisations and stakeholders were represented in the discussion, from Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft through consumer organisations, artists organisations and collecting societies to the European Parliament, as well as others who contributed from the floor.

The whole thing will be written up and responded to by the Commission in due course I’m sure. My impressions were that the idea was a big hit and will probably lead to some action on the part, mainly, of the stakeholders and hopefully with the support of the Commission to get everyone together.

I’ll post further reflections too, but for the moment my strongest impression from the day was this.

Every panellist, when asked whether they support the idea of creating a “Creative Content Access Alliance” to move the idea forward, said yes.

With the exception of Google, who said they were already supporting the Global Repertoire Database (a music industry initiative which would be an important part of the Killer Plumbing) and, er, weren’t sure if they could support an alliance.

Now, everyone was put on the spot by the question, and I suppose everyone will have the opportunity to further reflect as the process develops, but it was an interesting anomaly that only one organisation demurred from offering their support. What, I wonder, would Google have to be concerned about?

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Apple’s Newsstand – the oldest new idea yet

Jun 7, 11 7:39 PM

Apple have announced their Newsstand. It’s a sort of container for newspaper and magazine apps. They’re arranged in a shelf format, a bit like shops. When a new issue comes out you can pay for it (or you might have a subscription).

This is hardly rocket science but in the topsy-turvy digital world it’s a huge innovation. People are pondering at length what it can all mean, who will win and who will lose.

In fact it’s self-evidently not particularly innovative – existing services like Zinio and, er, Newsstand do the same thing.

The real significance is that it brings a large chunk of Apple’s 225m credit-card wielding customers within the reach of publishers everywhere.

In other words, paying for content is becoming less strange and more ubiquitous.

Many anxious views will be expressed about Apple’s terms of trade, their percentage take and their non-sharing of data but to me that’s beside the point.

To have a market worth fighting over we have to have a market. Expanding the world of paid content is a good thing and we can argue over the money when there’s a bit more of it at stake.

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How long should a good thing last?

Jun 4, 11 3:35 PM

The term of copyright is a controversial and much argued issue. How can we minimise any negative consequences without robbing anybody of their property?

Copyright lasts a pretty long time. If I live to 75, the copyright in this article will finally expire some time in 2114. After that it will be in the public domain, out of copyright. Anyone will be able to use and my successors – probably my great-granchildren –  will no longer have control over it. But until then you’ll need my, or their, permission to do anything with it.

Of course the chances that anyone will have even a remote passing interest in this article in even a few years are pretty remote. It won’t take a century for this article to be forgotten, an irrelevant piece of ephemera. Despite that, the law as it stands hands the same protection to everything, from the emails you send and receive every day to the great works of William Boyd, The Walt Disney Company and your brother-in-law.

Good arguments against long copyrights

This gives rise to many, and sometimes quite emotive. arguments. People rail against the length of the protection, claiming corporate interests are trying to monopolise and protect their greatest assets. Disney, frequently, is blamed for copyright term extensions which coincide with the looming expiry of rights in early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Opponents of the long term of copyright have many eloquent and outspoken supporters.

Another common complaint is that most of the content protected by this long copyright term doesn’t want to be. Despite being effectively abandoned by its authors, who have long since stopped caring about their work of decades before, nobody can use it without their permission which – if they can’t be found – can’t be given. So huge amounts of work – so-called “orphan” work – is caught in a sort of copyright limbo, effectively held in stasis while the copyright clock slowly ticks down to its eventual transition to the public domain.

Economists talk about economic incentives, and say nobody creates anything with a mind to a hundred years or more of payback to justify their efforts, and copyright term should only be as long as needed to create the incentive to create something in the first place. So a few years is more than enough.

Copyright term means you only temporarily own your own work

All of these arguments step around one key point: copyright is property. It belongs to someone. And the law forces them to give up ownership of it at some stage, whether they like it or not.

When you stand back and think about it, that’s kind of strange. It doesn’t happen with many other kinds of property which, generally, you own indefinitely. Why should copyright ever be given up at all? It’s not as if it’s a shared, natural resource or something. it’s yours – you made it. Without you it wouldn’t exist. So why shouldn’t it stay yours?

Why shouldn’t my work stay mine?

One answer to this question is a cultural, or moral one. Copyright should pass to society, to the public domain, for the public good. We should all have access to knowledge, and copyright should only exist as an incentive to create things in the first place. Once your investment in creating it has had a good chance to be re-couped with profit, copyright should end. That way the greater interests of society are served.

Another, the subject of much anguished hand-wringing in the USA, is because the US Constitution (sometimes treated, to cynical British eyes anyway, with a little too much quasi-religious reverence) says that copyright should be for a “limited time”. Speculating about what the founding fathers meant by this is a peculiarly american way of tying yourself in knots.

What does it mean in the real world?

My instinct is to think about the realities. Where, in real terms, can the negative impact of copyright terms be seen? Can we, on the other hand, see any positive impacts?

As I have said before, one of the great balancing acts performed by copyright is to limit appropriation of something (copying) without limiting inspiration. The truth is that almost all creative work can trace its inspiration back to something someone has done before. Because copyright encourages access to knowledge, and doesn’t limit what can be done with that knowledge, it drives creation of vast amounts of new work all the time. Which I think is a good thing. The economic incentives are strongly to create new things rather than re-cycle old things.

I suppose this does mean that some old things get lost along the way, effectively impossible to re-commercialise without risk because the copyright owner can’t be found (although, as an aside, the risks are often quite small and manageable). But I’m not sure that is the terrible tragedy it is often portrayed as. There are lots of arguments, many of them theoretical, about the negative impacts, but even where they’re real I think the best solution is for the law, and technology, to incentivise commercial solutions than to reduce copyright term and simply appropriate the value from those who created it.

A bad moment for change

We should also think about the moment we’re currently in. One of the main reasons why works become orphans is because it stops being commercially viable to exploit them. In the physical world of content there are always costs involved in keeping something available, even if you don’t sell any. In the digital world that’s not true – once something is digitised it can sit in a server waiting for a buyer at virtually no cost at all.

That means that many of the things currently unavailable or considered “orphan” could be brought back into commercial availability by the people who own the rights. What was previously lost can be rediscovered and brought back into circulation. We’re already seeing this happening with e-books – there are plenty in the Kindle store for £1 or less. And with digitisation of printed books possible for about $50, the investment is low enough to encourage huge amounts of books to be brought back into print. In other words the commercial incentives are just beginning to be enabled by technology, now would be a bad time for the law to intervene.

Ultimately, creators choose copyright

There are good arguments on all sides of the copyright term discussion. You can equally well argue for a perpetual copyright term (as Mark Helprin, with some contortions to avoid arguing against the “limited time” decree of the US Constitution, does) as an incredibly limited one.

In truth most of these arguments are a thought experiment, an exercise of imagining how much better the world would be if only it was the way you want it.

Personally I’m inclined to the view that copyright term is fine, too long for some purposes, too short for others but in the end if you have to have one rule to apply to all material, longer is better. We should be looking to address any perceived unwelcome side-effects using technology and commercial solutions.

The truth is that the law shouldn’t need to decide. Creators can choose to put their work wholly or partly in the public domain any time they choose. Projects like Creative Commons exist to make it easy. The law as it is gives creators the chance to make their own choice about how much they want to take advantage of their copyrights.

The reality is that most of them choose not to give up their rights. Which to me means that the argument for forcing them to do so by reducing copyright term needs to be overwhelming.

In my view that argument has not yet been made.

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