Fair Use News & Views

The University of Oregon is refusing to cave into the RIAA on a file sharing suit against 17 of its students. The RIAA responds indignantly to the defense mounted by Hardy Myers, Oregon’s Attorney General. It seems obvious that there is an identity issue here , forgetting for a moment about whether the current political mood does in fact support broad extension of policing powers.

Imagine a time when we no longer talk about digital media, and I believe that time is not far away. When the current DRM battle is solved, all media will be bought online. This means that not only will your your surfing habits become a matter of public record. How will we like it when the RIAA (and anyone else) can look at our library of music, films and books? Profiling abuses and the thought police loom large.

The industry MUST acknowledge the need for pseudo-anonymous identity in these matters. It cuts both ways.

AOL has written the final chapter on Netscape by pulling the plug on development.  Netscape started the boom of the commercial Internet, got crushed by Microsoft Explorer and was eventually sold to AOL.  AOl has a talent for buying worthless Internet properties.  Now we await the fate of AOL itself, which has been largely irrelevant for years.  When Jeff Bewkes takes over Time Warner on Jan. 1, it is widely expected he will put a bullet in AOL.  The only thing we can look forward to is the language they use to describe what they are doing.  I expect phrases like “advertising property,  interactive portal” and other mediaspeak.  With any luck, we may get a gem like the one that Terry Semel used two years ago at CES when he talked about how much his daughter used the “Wide Wide Web.”

Wal-Mart has quietly shut down its service for downloading movies. The announcement went unnoticed for almost a week, which certainly speaks to how popular it was. A couple of big companies like Wal-Mart and HP (who supplied the delivery infrastructure) might have been able to figure out that the product offering was DOA from the start. Let’s list the reasons:

•  
  • Operated on a single PC
  • Windows only
  • Price of $13-$20 per movie
  • High speed connection mandatory
  • Played only on Window Media Players (no iPods)
  • Do it yourself connection to a TV

Henry (”Amazon Will Go to $600″) Blodgett lists a lot of smart sounding reasons about branding, etc. to explain why this failed. Any 16-year-old kid could explain it more simply: It was just plain stupid. Any of the reasons above would have spelled trouble; together they were a perfect storm of cluelessness. A service like this is an ALTERNATIVE to buying or renting DVDs. A bad alternative will never be used.

Television networks continue to lose viewers.  Gaming, YouTube, BitTorrent and others provide viewers with alternatives.  Advertisers are looking for other outlets. The television writers are striking for their fair share of new media (pencils down!). Networks seem to think they can set it right by breaking the writers union, but how is that going to recover the audience that is already gone?  Networks think that if they simply embed the advertising into the content and distribute it freely on Hulu et al, then everything should work fine. Personally I don’t look forward to a solution that turns all media into AM radio with an ad in between every song and makes movies into the ones on network TV.  If that is the price I have to pay to keep the music industry and movies afloat, then they can just go out of business.  I am willing to pay for content without ads and so are many others.

I’d be very surprised if that is how things end up.

Here in Silicon Valley, anyone who scores more than $15 M or so automatically becomes a Venture Capitalist.  It wasn’t always this way. In the old days, people had good reasons for starting companies (remember when business plans used to be required?). After they succeeded, some retired, wrote books or generally moved on. Now, it’s all about doing it again. As an entrepreneur, I have learned that there are five distinct types of VCs:

1. The Real Deal

These are the guys who really did it and keep doing it because it is in their blood. They are people like Gene Kleiner and Andy Grove. Some are VCs and some are involved in other ways. A half hour with any of them is like a batting lesson from Ted Williams. An investment from them is basically impossible, but even a few ideas would have a huge payback. If you are lucky enough to meet someone in this catagory, nurture a relationship. It’s worth way more than their money. All of them will tell you how luck has been an important partner in their success.

2. Lucky Idiots

The category sounds perjorative, although that’s not my intention. The description was actually coined by Wired Magazine a couple of years ago. If you are looking for VC, these are the people you will spend your time with. Most of these people have been “involved” in successful ventures and you must figure out whether they have anything to offer. Some may be moving up to category #1 and some may belong in category #3. None of them will acknowledge luck as important in their success.

3. Posers

These people are the big time wasters. They know nothing, and they can do nothing. But they won’t admit it (because they don’t believe it themselves). If you meet with them, they will likely tell you very quickly what is wrong with your idea and spend more time dismissing it than actually listening to your idea. They have an infinite number of names to drop.

4. Seagulls

Probably these people are working on the edge of the VC industry, in corporate development, M&A, and the like. They have good jobs but are eager to join a startup, probably yours after you get it all working and provide a big salary. They will tell you that they are just the rock star your business needs, and are full of ideas for how to fix all your problems. Just like seagulls they’ll land on your boat, shit on everything. And, with any luck, fly away.

5. Lovers

Like the Seagulls they really want to join you. They are charming. They have industry credentials and lots of contacts. You will really like them from the moment you meet. They respect you in the morning, but they will never leave their current spouse.

At its 5th year birthday celebration, Creative Commons announced a collaboration with CloakX. The new system dubbed CC+ (Creative Commons Plus).

“CC+ will enable you to continue offering your work to the public for noncommercial use,” said Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons CEO, “ but will also give you an easy way to sell commercial licensing rights to those who want to use your work for profit.”  A Creative Commons license with CC+ will provide a link to secure commercial rights, and to services of use such as warranty, ability to use without attribution, access to performance and physical media.

This new infrastructure has symmetric  benefits for both the user and the publisher and will facilitate a collaboration system for user-generated content. We want to make a range of media and publishing applications possible so we can build a viable, user-friendly technology for exchanging media, software, etc. that is totally open and empowers the artist.   Our goal is to create a new infrastructure with symmetric  benefits for both the user and the publisher that:

1.  encourages licensed viral sharing
2. permits the artist (or copyright holder) to determine how music is shared/paid for.
3. is hardware  agnostic, so that the purchased/licensed media can be used across  platforms.

Our system is basically just as convenient as piracy, without the guilt.

Wired Magazine has in its current issue this excellent article about the state of the music industry by David Byrne. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the economics of CD vs. digital delivery. The tone about the future of the industry is very optimistic, with none of the RIAA doomsaying.