In my post below, I mention Lessig’s notion of reframing the debate around file sharing away from the idea of a ‘War on Piracy’ towards a more constructive metaphor. Well today’s front page article in the NYTimes is clearly influenced by the MPAA. Today’s headline: ‘Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios’. Obviously it is going to take some time for this discussion to happen in a constructive manner.

Look, I am very sympathetic to content creators getting their fair share. Movies cost a ton to make and market these days and clearly BitTorrent Trackers are facilitating illegal actions. That being said, just like the record companies fucked it up with Napster and suing 12 year olds, the movie studios should be working that much harder to come up with a viable solution for what consumers are demanding - more on demand availability of movies that have been recently released. That may take reframing some of their notions about theatrical release, dvd release, cable release, etc. But the physics of media (i.e. DVDs) are changing from objects to bits. Accept it.

Just because the old formula worked great doesn’t mean it needs to stay that way. Business models and revenue streams evolve and studios may have to stop relying on the golden goose of DVDs. According to this Business Week article, DVD sales account for 70% of a movies revenue and yet DVD sales fell 14.5% last year and that rate of decline seemed to accelerate in the 4th quarter. Things are changing fast and media companies need to respond with what consumers want not lawsuits and a ‘war on piracy’.

Girl Talk, Give Me a Beat

I just finished reading Larry Lessig’s latest book ‘Remix’ on copyright in the Internet era. Much like his other books on the subject, Lessig lays out the case for why copyright law is broken and ultimately harmful to the production and consumption of culture and knowledge. The Girl Talk song I’ve posted is a great example of the failings of the current system and the need for revised Fair Use doctrine and is one of the initial cases discussed in the book.

Three things that really stood out to me were:

1. We need to re-frame the discussion of copyright around a metaphor other than ‘War’ (i.e. the War on Piracy). It is constraining and ultimately more harmful than helpful. Media companies and copyright law need to be more modest in  regulation by simplifying copyright law, de-regulating amateur creativity and decriminalizing file-sharing (which to the RIAA’s credit they are finally coming around to). Ultimately this can lead to more creativity, innovation and revenue.

2. That the ‘hybrid economy’ - that is the “commercial” and “sharing” economies - can co-exist and in fact complement each other. The important thing is to create frameworks that allow this complementary benefit to arise. Examples he cites are Google, Netflix and Amazon where user actions (searches, clicks, purchases) help drive value to the community at large and the user in specific.

3. When one looks at the sharing economics there are what he calls two basic types, “thin sharing economies” and “thick sharing economies”. “Thin sharing economies” refers to more simple self motivated sharing actions - basically “people contribute to the common good as a by-product of doing what the would otherwise want to do.” “Thick sharing economies” have a broader set of motivations at work - think contributing an article to Wikipedia or working on an open source software project. Both are necessary components to a sharing economy but being able to distinguish between the two is important in constructing systems that ultimately survive.

As I mentioned in my previous post media discovery is broken and a big reason for this is existing copyright law and how the record labels have tried to litigate against these broken laws. Ultimately I believe that even before the law is fully modified, the record labels are going to realize that there is not nearly enough sharing of music going on right now online. I don’t mean file sharing, I mean music sharing. Sharing your listening stream so that others in your social graph can discover this music as well and listen to it. I think the thinking in this book points to some of the important legal and business frameworks that need to be adjusted to realize the full potential of the sharing economy. Which ultimately will generate a lot of revenue for the music industry - but maybe not the big labels. Oh well.

Just finished reading Tim O’reilly’s great post about the real-time enterprise and why MyBarackObama.com, Google and Walmart were all so successful by creating organizations infused with responsive data technology to sense, process and respond appropriately. Google and Walmart I studied pretty closely at business school - fondest memory was in a class taught by Andy Grove when Sergey dropped by in these goofy spring sneakers to talk about Google’s efforts in India and China. MyBarackObama was on clear display this year and I certainly visited the site, received emails and contributed through the system. An excellent display of a responsive and fast moving organization that could orchestrate a clear, successful, long term strategy. I’ve also seen (read:worked) for a number of internet companies that did not leverage data as well as they could have and had not architected great data responsiveness into the DNA of the company. Interesting to me is for companies that get it right to architect the sense-process-respond notion not only into the company but into each of its products. Products that can evolve and adapt over time to my tastes create truely delightful experiences and still has a long way to go.

skate - shot on red - 120 fps from opus magnum prod. on Vimeo.

I read this month’s Wired article about Oakley founder Jim Jannard’s new project to create a digital movie camera that matches the richness of analog with great interest. It sounded like a cool project and product from an eccentric billionaire with time on his hands now that he sold Oakley. Anyways, just checked out this sick video shot with the Red One and it is pretty impressive. Exciting how the tools for high quality digital production keep getting better and the prices keep going down. The second wave of digital media on the web (Media 2.0) in my mind is yet to be close to realized but these types of tools will ensure a great user experience.