The CJEU goes bonkers again…?

Sep 26, 16 11:33 AM

I am very much not a fan of the European Court of Justice and their whimsical way of making up laws which bear little relation to anything actually legislated.

Last week they were at it again, “banning” open wifi hotspots because they make copyright infringement too easy. The court said that if users need a password, and hotspot owners record their identity, copyright infringement will be reduced.

I am wondering if this time they accidentally got it right.

I’ve written before about the problem with safe harbour laws which protect service providers on the internet by absolving them of any liability for the users of their services.

The intention of this was understandable – why should someone be liable for something they cannot have any knowledge of – like copyright infringement, for example?

But the effect was catastrophic. It led to the absurd fandango of “notice and takedown” whereby copyright owners have to try to police the whole internet and then send notices to service providers to remove content.

The value of this, almost literal, get-out-of-jail-free card is shows in the fact that Google claims, at the time of writing, to have removed 1.79Bn URLs from search in response to these notices. This is a gigantic undertaking yet they still prefer this way of working to anything more sensible which might prevent infringing content appearing in the first place.

The problem with safe harbours for me has always been that they only do half the job. Sure, fine, fair enough, don’t make service providers liable for something they didn’t do (although in other areas of the law – nightclubs for example – service providers have exactly this liability). The liability, in copyright safe harbour regimes, is firmly with the person who did the bad thing in question.

Unfortunately, although service providers can use the law to put their hands out and say “not my fault, guv”, they are usually unable to point to the person whose fault it is – their customer, the person to whom they provided a service and who used it to do something illegal and who is liable in law for their actions. Even if they can, they will frequently make it as difficult as possible to discover.

So the safe harbour, while trying to limit a risk (which, at the time the law was written might have seemed unmanageable – although current technology makes it a simple matter), actually creates a thick shield behind which pretty well anyone can do pretty much any infringing they like, safe in the knowledge that there will, with vanishingly few exceptions, be any consequences at all. In practice the worst outcome will be that the infringing content get removed.

Copyright infringement is thus a zero cost, zero consequence activity on the internet thanks to safe harbour laws.

Many businesses have been founded to take advantage of this loophole and many fortunes have been made – just not by copyright holders who provide the raw materials.

I’ve always thought that safe harbour laws could be hugely improved if, in order to get the legal protection from liability, the service provider needs to have made at least some effort to be able to identify the person who is actually liable – the user. In return for immunity, they would have to be able to lift the anonymity of the alleged wrong-doer. Again, not unprecedented.

And, as far as wifi hotspots are concerned anyway, the CJEU seems to agree.

The court might have come up with a rather clumsy and faffy way of doing it but this is a change which, if applied more broadly to the copyright safe harbour, would go a very long way to re-balancing the internet and restoring creativity to its proper place near the top of the internet value chain.

So I find myself in the unaccustomed position of agreeing with the CJEU on one of their copyright rulings. It won’t last.

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About that photo on Facebook… we’re blaming the wrong people

Sep 21, 16 5:46 PM

Not long ago there was an eruption of anger and indignation about Facebook’s repeated censorship of Nick Ut’s upsetting and famous picture of a Phan Thi Kim Phuc running from napalm in Vietnam.

The thing that surprised me about it wasn’t what Facebook did, but that news organisations went to the trouble of inviting them to do it. The picture was published, by the publisher, on their Facebook page. It didn’t get there by accident.

The fear that Facebook’s domination of access to news is inevitable becomes a self-fufilling prophecy if news publishers keep acting against their own editorial and commercial interests.

Any editor who thinks the answer is for Facebook to hire more editors and start to do their jobs for them is surely looking in the wrong direction. Instead of asking someone else to do their job surely they should be doing it themselves.

Facebook’s domination isn’t inevitable

Much of the anguished debate about the Nick Ut picture focused on the inevitability of Facebook’s dominance over the media, their policies, the way they apply them and righteous indignation about their lack of editorial judgement in the face of a self-evidently historic and editorially important photograph.

Facebook’s policies (or, as you might call them in a rather old fashioned way, their Style Guide) are algorithmic and might not be to the taste of every editor.

They’re certainly not to my taste. That’s not unusual. Some newspapers in the UK, for instance, are perfectly happy to publish even the very most taboo of swear words, others will avoid them or use asterisks.

There is no universal rulebook of editorial standards and no actual news product is edited by a robot.

The problem with Facebook’s rules is that they apply them, after the fact, to other peoples’ editorial judgements and, in fact, to everything everyone publishes on Facebook.

There’s a simple answer to this: don’t let them.

Publish your work on a platform you control. Your web site, for example. Don’t just give in to the inevitability that Facebook will take over the world, because to do so means giving up not just your editorial control and integrity, but also your business.

But, if you have contractually and morally decided to cede control to Facebook, don’t be surprised when they behave in the way they do.

Why does Facebook do what it does?

Facebook, because of its nature, is never going to be a good editor. Whatever you might think about it, they are trying to oversee all the content posted by everyone by applying a single set of rules. The fact that everyone in the world doesn’t agree with them is not very surprising.

Even when humans are involved, for instance in censoring photos, they are driven by calculations not value judgements and they are not likely to be career journalists with decades of experience in making editorial judgements.

The rules for nakedness seem to be something like this:

Not naked: OK.
Naked: bad – remove (NB male nipples OK, female nipples not OK).
Naked child: ultra-mega-very-bad – remove. No exceptions
Naked child in important news story: still ultra-mega-very-bad – remove.
Naked child in important news story now being re-posted and protested by thousands of people: still ultra-mega-very-bad – remove.
Context: irrelevant – ignore.
Protests by non-Facebookian humans: irrelevant – ignore
Protests by human non-American Prime Ministers: irrelevant – ignore.

This is not surprising. Facebook as a machine is not intelligent, it doesn’t have emotions, experience or judgement, it cannot understand context except in the most simplistic terms. It is programmed for efficiency which means ambiguity is not an option.

That’s why even ‘intelligent’ machines are frequently moronic in their output. We are all aware of this, we all put up with it all the time. It’s also why the work of humans is so much more satisfying.

But they backed down this time…

There was loud and widespread scream from the internet about this one.

Facebook backed down. Of course they did, as soon as a sufficiently senior and sensible human Facebookian got involved. A cathartic yelp of victory has been heard and small celebrations have ensued among those grateful for a rare event worthy of celebrating.

Not worth celebrating at all is the fact that intelligent, experienced editors have allowed the Facebook machine to stand between them and their readers, censoring as it goes.

The madness of Instant Articles

This isn’t an accident. It isn’t just because of users adding links into their news feeds.

Editors and publishers have been actively participating in a Facebook product called Instant Artlcles.

Rather than linking out to the publishers’ sites, instead their content is served by Facebook within the Facebook platform.

As we have learned from this whole episode, there are downsides to this when the Facebook editorial algorithm makes moronic decisions.

There are other downsides too – Facebook’s algorithms also decide when and where to feature the content and they have allegedly been reducing its visibility in peoples newsfeeds. Only a proportion of the content submitted is widely viewable. So another layer of editorial interference is lurking.

Also, obviously, users aren’t looking at the publishers’ products. They’re looking at little slices of them, extracted and shown out of the context of everything else. Perhaps this is inevitable on the internet where sharing of stories is ubiquitous, but is it really a good thing? Should publishers actively hand over control of their users’ experience as well as putting up with its inevitable dilution. Seems odd to me.

Lastly, according to the publishers I have spoken to, there’s absolutely no commercial upside at all. They don’t make any more money. Given that they make precious little money anyway, when someone views a page, it seems odd to give up so much in return for so little.

So what are the upsides?

Well. Instant Articles load faster, especially on mobiles.

As far as I can tell, from what I have been told, that’s kind of it. Well… you stay “visible” and “relevant” and your product “responds to the changing needs of your users” and various other things which I might rudely summarise as “we’re not doing nothing”. But none of it helps the bottom line or the product.

It’s just weird that editors and publishers are colluding with this.

It’s not Facebook’s fault

Blaming Facebook for being what it is, demanding it change in to what news organisations are, does nothing other than offering a comforting distraction from the reality of how this came about. And it isn’t Facebook’s fault.

Publishers need to acknowledge that not-doing-nothing isn’t the same as having a strategy and doing things which have costs but no benefits is not a sensible way of not-doing-nothing.

Running with the herd and trying not to break away is comforting but so far it hasn’t worked out too well.

And we wonder why newspapers are in trouble…

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Blocking the blockers is a waste of a good crisis

Apr 28, 16 9:54 AM

Back when my day job involved worrying about such things, I didn’t much like the online advertising market. As a publisher, it’s quite hard to love.

Advertising works for publishers when they can charge a premium price for their ads, establish and defend a meaningful market share, turn a larger audience into higher yields and more revenue. None of these things are easy, or even possible, for most publishers in the online advertising market.

That’s why huge sites with massive audiences (by publishing standards anyway) are unable to be profitable, and it’s why cutting costs is better than investing in product.

Enter the ad-blocker

Recently, ad blocking has entered the mainstream thanks to players like Apple and Three, and everyone is up in arms. The publishing industry is crying foul, demanding that something be done, predicting dire consequences if they are cut off from their income source.

Now I’m not defending or celebrating ad-blocking. Some of it does indeed, as John Whittingdale said, seem like a protection racket.

But from the point of view of a publisher shouldn’t it be more a call-to-action than a call-to-whinge?

The truth is that the advertising income stream has never been enough to sustain them, and the situation has got worse not better over time. Ad blocking potentially accelerates but doesn’t fundamentally change the ultimate consequence of this.

So now, surely, is the time to start to focus industry thinking not on how to preserve the starvation regimen offered by online advertising, but how move past it? To tap into the much richer, much bigger, much fairer and more sustainable opportunities offered by the content itself rather than the annoying, uncontrollable and, as more and more users now know, block-able ads around the edges of it.

Can’t pay, won’t pay

Ah, I can hear the chorus of groans already.

“Consumers won’t pay” it rumbles.

“You can’t compete with free, subscriptions don’t work, paywalls go against the grain of the internet, micro-payments are impossible”.

It’s as if people actually take comfort from defeatist aphorisms, as an alternative to actually trying to change anything. It certainly makes life easier: if everybody expects the worst then it’s hard to disappoint them.

But it’s nonsense, and it’s feeble, and it leaves one the cultural and creative industries, together many times bigger than the advertising market, marooned by their own despair.

Perhaps one of the reasons people won’t pay, is because they can’t pay.

I don’t mean they can’t afford it. I mean there’s no simple way of handing over money. They literally can’t pay. That’s at least partly why they won’t.

Obviously, even if they could, they would have to want to – the challenge would be to make products good enough and to price them right.

That’s a creative challenge: know your user, make something that strongly appeals to them, charge a price they’re willing to pay without much thought. The same challenge which defines, effectively, the whole of the creative sector whether making films, music, books, newspapers, photography, games or anything else.

Can every page pay?

OK stop for a moment before you start groaning. Think about it. Don’t get defeated by the frustration of the years of trying to make micro-payments and subscriptions work. Look past that.

Imagine a world where every time your creative product or its content gets consumed you benefit. On terms which you have set. Imagine if every page could pay. What would it do to products, to revenues, to relationships with users?

When I ask content producers this question, most of them get quite excited. They see a world in which their focus becomes clearer. Pleasing their readers, viewers, listeners and players rather than the robots which deliver people to ad-serving systems. More consumption. More revenue. More investment in product leading to more popularity. What management consultants call a virtuous circle.

“Be popular” is the goal. The more popular, the more successful. Every page pays, predictably. Investing in creativity and creative products becomes rational again, innovating to better serve your audience becomes a key imperative, beating your competition drives the urgent need to keep evolving.

But what about the masters in the middle?

Of course there are lots of intermediaries on the internet, sitting in various places in between the content owners and the users. Search engines, ISPs, ad networks, mobile companies, aggregators, countless others.

Very often they’re the gatekeepers as well. To get to users you have to go through them, and on the way through they limit the rewards you can hope for.

But they’re also the people who can provide an answer to the payment conundrum. They are retailers. Many of them are already collecting money from your users for various things.

Just as newspaper publishers never tried to collect 25p individually from every person buying their papers, but instead got newsagents to do it in return for a share of the money, the solution to the payment problem might lie in getting other people to do it for you. As long as what’s good for them is also good for you, and vice versa, there are lots of reasons to work together.

Aligning incentives

The key, as the creative sector has known for centuries, is to have control over the terms under which you offer your work. The law has given creators this control ever since the advent of copyright.

Making this possible requires some new technical plumbing, to allow copyright to work as efficiently as advertising and websites themselves.

After that it’s down to the innovators, the creative companies and anyone who doesn’t want to rely on a failing ad-driven business model, to come up with a much more rapid evolution and new ways to please consumers and share rewards.

Since what we’re talking about her is supplementing ad revenues, not replacing them this doesn’t need to involve huge controversy. For the creative industries to win, the ad industry doesn’t have to lose (they’re doing that on their own anyway). New opportunity is something everyone can move towards

Never waste a good crisis

What’s needed is a spark to trigger all this movement. I think ad-blocking might be it. Something to move away from, a failing model for ad-based revenues. Projects like The Copyright Hub and the Linked Content Coalition are creating the basis for building a new value layer for the internet. This will lead to the emergence of new players who will make it easier for everyone to find new sources of revenue from users and others.

Who will these new players be?

Watch this space.

 

 

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Tis but a flesh wound

Feb 18, 16 4:51 PM

Much has been written in the last week or two about the death of newspapers. The announcement that the Independent will cease its print edition has prompted this hand-wringing and outpouring. The Independent’s hobbyist owner, Evgeny Lebedev, has offered up his own wisdom about the situation. In an interview with the Guardian he claims his rivals are “in denial” about print.

“I genuinely believe that the future is digital and that the industry is in denial…” he says, positioning himself as the pioneering leader of an otherwise moribund pack.

I chuckled when I read this, in the patronising way only a long-in-the-tooth, seen-it-all-before old dinosaur can. Evgeny is not to be ignored, and he has done some interesting and innovative things, but he could easily be accused of a certain amount of denial himself.

While print might be a rapidly declining market in both circulation and advertising terms, it remains the case that for certain newspapers print is still profitable.

Not, I agree, for everyone, and if you were the proprietor of a newspaper selling around 50,000 copies a day in a national newspaper market which manages to sell nearly 7m copies daily, carrying on would have started to seem irrational quite some time ago. Being in last place, with under 1%, isn’t exactly a glorious place to be in any market. In a declining market, less so. In a declining market with high overheads and reducing yields, less still.

So fine, Evgeny, shut down your print titles. Can’t imagine why you didn’t do it years ago (unless, of course, the reason why a mysteriously wealthy Russian former spy buys a failing British newspaper isn’t just because he’s interested in the bottom line).

But Evgeny’s digital dream is almost comical. For the Independent to have a future, digital or otherwise, it has to have an income. Ideally, unless it plans to rely on charity, it should have more income than expenditure. Which as countless newspapers have found, is a bit of a challenge in the digital domain.

It’s not like the Independent is the first to try this, but the precedents are not good. Going “digital only” is a usually prelude to going bust or carrying on in name only, trying to attract enough traffic to bring in a dribble of cash. That’s because “digital only” tends to mean, other than in niche areas, ad-funded.

Unfortunately ad-funded means a rather unreliable revenue stream, since increased traffic only converts a fraction of the increase into meaningful ad revenue. It also means a rather uncertain future because the online ad marketplace is one largely out of the control of any site which is seeking ad revenues. If you’re running to stand still, you’re doing rather well.

So success as an online newspaper is elusive. As so many have shown, it’s relatively easy to drive audiences to numbers which dwarf print circulations. What’s much harder is to convert those audiences into profitable or even meaningful revenue streams. So the usual approach is to try to cut costs, to acquire audience for the minimum possible investment, or keep spending and produce a fantastic product sustained by the hope that popularity will eventually deliver meaningful revenues. Just ask the Guardian and the Daily Mail how well that works out in practice.

Which means Evgeny’s high-minded promises to retain the services of high priced journalists and foreign bureaux are unlikely to survive the brutal reality of the digital only world for long. If he really believes that this transition, and the promised re-investment of freed-up capital, will lead to growth then he’s either talking about growing something other than profit, or he’s a fantasist.

The truth is that until the internet grows up enough to deliver meaningful, reliable revenue from online audiences, this sort of transition will continue to end in failure. Giving up print is simply giving up. For the Independent, which has struggled to commercially viable for much of its existence, it might be finally succumbing to the inevitable

It’s a very sad day because for all its failure the Independent has been a great newspaper, editorially proud and brave and with lots to admire. At least that’s what plenty of people I respect say. Personally I never read it much. Which I think probably explains the problem – I wasn’t alone.

Not enough people wanted to read the Independent. That’s why it failed. When the digital life support machine is finally turned off it will be the end of a painfully prolonged death. If Evgeny wants to invest in anything, in the meantime, he should try to make it something which might actually change the online marketplace into one where it’s possible for newspapers and other content businesses to thrive. That’s what I have been working on.

But that requires a strategic vision which extends beyond just brave and unrealistic rhetoric.

Farewell, the Independent. You were great. Rest in peace whenever you are finally allowed to.

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Permissions, babies and bathwater

Jan 12, 16 1:04 PM

A few months ago I started seeing this when I went to Google sites…

 

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Kind of funny, the privacy reminder. I’m guessing most people don’t see this because most people are logged in to Google most of the time and so have accepted their terms explicitly when they log in. But I’m not. As you can see I did a bit of investigating, and about a week later the message changed…

 

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I’m actually banned from using Google unless I accept their terms. I still don’t fancy this so it has given me an incentive to try out other search providers and – guess what – I get along fine. Great.

But it’s a bit more annoying than that because sometimes other people use Google to host things (YouTube videos, maps, documents etc) and so I’m not really using Google when I want to look at those things, Google just happens to be hosting. The price for me to watch the video, view the document, see the map is to make an agreement with Google to collect information about me. A quick look at their privacy policy confirms this is quite a long list of things they want permission to collect.

So… I can work around that if I try – “incognito” browser window (I get the “privacy reminder” message, still, but I’m not blocked), different computer, etc. But it’s annoying.

But look at this:

 

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And this

 

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Really strange. My browser can’t connect to Google sites at all. Now perhaps this was some weird technical thing – but the internet was working fine for other sites (you can see that the second one is a YouTube video embedded in a Bing search result) and I didn’t get the same error in other browsers.

So I can’t help wondering if Google’s servers are now refusing to talk to me at all. Sent my computer to Coventry. Pretending not to be there.

Whether or not that’s what happened it makes me think about the whole issue of permission, Google’s insistence that users must explcitly agree to give them data as a condition of being able to use their service brings the whole issue of “free” into clear sight.

Google isn’t free. They require quite a lot in return for being able to use their services. A quick summary from their privacy policy:

  • Information you give them such as “name, email address, telephone number or credit card to store with your account… photo”
  • Information they just gather from your machine such as device information – “hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number”
  • Usage information such as “details of how you used our service, such as your search queries; telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls; Internet protocol address; device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL; cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account”
  • Location information

And so on. Lots of stuff you have to give them before they’ll let you use their service. And they use it for a pretty broad range of things, also explained (although not, in my view, very clearly) in their privacy policy.

None of this is a criticism of Google. I think this is rather great, actually. I like that the deal is being made clear – at least to people who aren’t logged into Google, and that they can make their own choice about whether to click the “accept” button.

But it does highlight the issue. Permission matters – and not just in copyright.

It highlights another issue too which I alluded to above. It’s all very well asking me to opt in as a condition of using Google’s services, and all very well for me to decide not to and live without them if I want.

But what about when I’m NOT using Google’s services? I’m using someone else’s and it just so happens that THEY have decided to use Google to help?

Look at this email I got today from a company called Brewbot who make a cool device I will probably never own which brews beer for lazy people like me.

 

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I’m a sucker for a chance to win some swag, so I clicked the link to their survey and this is what I got…

 

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It’s a Google doc and it doesn’t work for me. It does if I use another browser, or an incognito window, but in my normal browser I get this inability to connect to Google. Whether or not this is related to the privacy policy issue I don’t know but there does seem to be a pattern here.

So Brewbot, it turns out, seem to have been unwittingly recruited as a data gatherer for Google. Before I can offer my survey results to Brewbot I have to agree to silently give Google the long list of stuff I described above.

Or, to look at it another way, companies using Google to host their surveys, documents, videos, whatever, are actually only able to offer those things to opted-in Google users. Not to everyone. As long as Google remains ubiquitous perhaps the distinction isn’t obvious, but who is aware of it?

This seems dysfunctional to me, and unfair. It seems a high price to pay, for users and for companies who are using Google’s services (and may well be paying for them) for reasons that are nothing to do with Google’s core consumer services.

At its heart it highlights the conundrum which is central to so many of the issues which copyright people – as well as the internet at large – need to sort out. This silent, unknowing, pervasive process which takes the place of permission and transparency is not, in the end, serving the broad interests of the users of the internet.

I’m unusual in not having accepted Google’s terms, which means I am also unusual in seeing these messages which make what’s going on slightly more explicit to me.

But isn’t this an interesting perspective from which to consider the question of price and value on the internet. While money often doesn’t change hands, rendering lots of internet services nominally “free”, lots of other valuable stuff is still given in return – and if it’s not, the service is withdrawn.

At the heart of it all, value is being exchanged for permission. The same thing that happens in the copyright world. It needs to be done better.

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Walls and words – the importance of language

Oct 24, 15 11:53 AM

YouTube put up a paywall. But they’re not calling it that. In various headlines culled from various search engines, YouTube Red is called “a subscription service”, an “ad-free music and video plan” and so on. Not a paywall.

I used to think about paid services (and how to make them pay) when I worked in newspapers. One thing I relentlessly hated was the word “paywall”. It was so negative and pejorative, a word which almost demanded to be used apologetically or disparagingly.

Despite this it was and is used even by the wordsmiths in the newspaper industry – and more or less universally – as a piece of jargon describing the desire to charge customers for creative products.

But not by YouTube, or those reporting their new business. Perhaps that’s a semantic issue – you can still get YouTube without paying if you’re willing to put up with ads – but it’s a telling reminder of how important language, sometimes almost subliminally, is to peoples perceptions.

It is even more telling when people talk about copyright.

Think about copyright. It’s a right which is automatically granted to everyone whenever they create something. The right confers on them a freedom to decide what happens to their work, which they can use however they want – to spread their work freely around, or to keep it private, or to use their work to form collaborations with others; and to agree to do whatever they want on whatever terms they want.

To out it another way, copyright is a freedom, granted to all creators. But that’s not how it’s talked about, even in the law. UK law talks about “the acts restricted by copyright”. Its written in terms of what you can’t do, not what you can.

That might be a legal necessity, but it sets the tone for a lot of the debate about copyright. Because copyright is a restricting thing, it must be a negative thing. It stops people doing things, so the things it stops must be some sort of loss. It restricts and so somehow must be blocking someone else’s freedom.

This isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous, because it has set the tone for debate. You can tell where the idea that copyright is just lent by society to creators (“for a limited time” as the US Constitution puts it – more negative language) comes from.

Copyright advocates are always fighting back against this presumption of negativity, always defending against these attacks rather than being able to talk of the huge and diverse cultural and economic benefits which copyright unlocks and the huge potential to do even more. But even they, in defending copyright, find themselves using the same negative language which feeds the negative attitudes they rail against. Copyright protects, it prevents, it is enforced.

We don’t talk about “till walls” in shops. We don’t talk about human rights in terms of the freedom they deny to one person in order to grant a more important freedom to someone else. And YouTube doesn’t talk about “paywalls” when they decide that their users might like to pay for a product made out of creative content.

So anyone who recognises the great, positive impact of copyright and its potential to deliver the real value of the internet in the coming third era of its evolution, should learn the lesson of positive language.

Talk about freedom, talk about reward, talk about copyright being for everyone, every creator, every person.

Talk about what copyright enables, not what it restricts.

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Ah… there I am

Oct 22, 15 1:49 PM

What’s the word for hibernating in summer? And winter? And then summer again?

That’s what the blog has been doing while I have been distracted. So I have been seeing issues and debates flying by and left them unremarked on (by me) partly because it’s busy work, this Copyright Hub thing, and partly because I have been in the rather serene position of thinking about copyright not from the point of view of a particular person or industry but – as far as I can – from the point of view of everyone.

In the process some ideas have been emerging and coming to the fore which I have become increasingly interested in writing down and articulating properly. It seems that the debate about copyright is constantly being re-opened all over the world and it always seems to start with something which claims to be first principles. The debate which ensues is often familiar and often, so my mind, misses the point.

So I am going to try to write some things down, I am going to try to do so in book form (yes, sort of the same book I said I was going to write when I left News Corp) and so I thought I might resurrect this blog so I can practice and try some thoughts out on my pitiful but loyal audience.

So when I have a thought, I’ll share it here. In the meantime there’s always this.

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Disappointing innovation – pitch 1

Jan 26, 15 7:25 PM

I have just spent a day with people talking about the future of the media. In amongst the usual presentation, panels, Q&As and watery coffee they have been hosting brief talks by interesting innovators in the media sector in Europe.

They were mostly perfectly nice ideas, plausible and well explained. But perhaps I have been hearing these ideas and pitches for too long because they felt a bit disappointing. Not only are many of them small, unambitious and in some ways an admission of defeat, but fundamentally they are little changed from the hopeless pitches I was listening to twenty years ago and more at News International.

Here, for example, is one generic pitch which has been around as long as the internet and still keeps popping up with different names…

The “Incremental Revenue” pitch (aka the “money for nothing” pitch)

This one involves saying to an existing media player with an established brand that you are going to conjure them up more money out of thin air. Better than that, it will be money that they can’t themselves get on their own. Better yet, there is no risk of damaging their existing business. What’s not to like!?

The ask

The existing media player is asked to give the start-up access to some or all of their content, plus their brand. The start-up will then cleverly combine it with other content and brands from other places and sell it (under their own brand, but heavily using the established media brand to help) to people who would never buy the core product (this will be young people / foreign people / people in niche sectors being targetted by a special product / people whose purpose is badly served by the core product / a whole new product etc)

The payback

Revenue share. Sometimes of subscription fees, more often of advertising. Usually calculated in a rather opaque way, or as a “revenue pool” which is shared between all the content providers on an arbitrary basis such as how often their content is accessed. If there is revenue then some fraction of it gets paid to their partners. Sometimes they offer a tempting non-financial morsel to appeal to operational people which gets their signature-hand twitching (being able to add to the circulation figures of print products for example, is better than gold to some circulation-focussed publications)

The promise

Nothing really. The established brand and content is zero-valued up-front, they just get a cut of revenue. Inevitably when this pitch is made revenue is approximately zero but huge sums are anticipated by year 3 and after year 5 it will have overtaken Google, Amazon and Apple combined.. Despite the confidence that these predictions are, if anything, conservative, no guarantee of revenue is available (“we’re a startup, we can’t afford to make guarantees”). The established brand is invariably used in pitches to other people (despite being zero rated financially).

The threat

If they deliver their lofty promises, they will get bigger than the brands that are contributing content and become a strategic threat.

The rational response to the pitch

“Come back when those big numbers you’re expecting start to become real” (the likely reply is “but we won’t get there without your content and brand” which leads to the obvious conversation about value)

or

“no guarantee, no deal”.

The ways the start-up might get people to sign up anyway

Either get them to irrationally over-value your offer (auditable circulation is like cocaine to some print publications) or get them to follow the crowd for fear of looking foolish or missing out. Depending who you’re talking to they might be tempted by equity.

Likelihood of the big numbers eventually being delivered

Almost zero (meaning the threat is, in reality, low as well). But some of these turn in to perfectly decent, if unexciting and minimal, revenue streams.

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The blog awakes…

Jan 20, 15 3:35 PM

Obviously, since the blog is sure not to have any followers left, the fact that it has awakened will be of little consequence to some people. In my new world my thoughts and efforts are mostly directed elsewhere. But every now and again something get me going, and it’s not really appropriate for me to rant with a Copyright Hub hat on.

I have a couple of rants bubbling away which will probably appear here shortly. When they do, please remember, they are my personal rants. Any ranting the Copyright Hub might want to do (or I want to do in its name) will appear elsewhere…

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A new world

Nov 8, 13 8:41 PM

As you may have seen elsewhere, I am going to be the new CEO of the Copyright Hub. While this was absolutely not what I had planned for myself, it’s too tempting an opportunity to pass up.

I have been of the view for years that the problem with copyright is not the law, but the way in which it is implemented in the digital era. While the problems have been obvious (it’s too hard to get things done, fundamentally), I have strongly believed that the solution is not to change the law. It has been frustrating that we have not made more progress towards changing the mechanisms of copyright to work better in an internet world.

My view on this has translated into action in a number of things, big and small. I have been involved with.

The ACAP project, which started from the simple observation that complaining about the way search engines crawled content wasn’t very constructive but helping them along by developing a means for their crawlers to talk to content web servers was, is a project aimed at making practical solutions to otherwise difficult problems.

The NLA e-clips project, as well, has been a great and enduring success based on the idea that if the (in this case newspaper) industry invests in creating great technology and services in response to changing needs, good things can happen. They did, and they continue to do so.

And the Copyright Hub is the most ambitious that I have been involved with yet. Recognising that the mechanisms of copyright need to radically change in an era when everyone is a creator and user, and that these mechanisms aren’t going to invent themselves, we are setting out to make good, practical, things happen.

Ultimately copyright needs to work in the interests of end users and creators (who increasingly overlap) if it is to work at all. The Copyright Hub sets out to improve the way it works to this end. It has huge support from right across the creative industries in the UK and beyond. I have a clear view of what I want it to do (and – just as important – what I want it NOT to do). If you want to know more about either, ask me… or just wait and I’ll tell you anyway.

In terms of this blog, which is rather randomly updated anyway, I’m going to keep randomly updating it with thoughts and ideas.

It’s probably necessary to point out that it is, and always has been, a personal blog expressing personal views and venting my frustrations, often on matters way outside the remit of the Copyright Hub. My views are not necessarily those of the Hub.

We’re going to try to make a really positive difference for everyone in the creative industries. Wish me luck!

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