The Complex Joys Of Music In The Age Of Digital Abundance

A recent issue of The New Yorker had a fine essay by Mike Spies about the joys of discovering and listening to music. But its overall tone is rather melancholic: 

On Techdirt.

30 Years Of The CD, Of Digital Piracy, And Of Music Industry Cluelessness

A post on The Next Web reminds us that the CD is thirty years old this month. As the history there explains, work began back in the 1970s at both Philips and Sony on an optical recording medium for music, which culminated in a joint standard launched in 1982. The key attribute of the compact disc was not so much its small size -- although that was the most obvious difference from earlier vinyl -- but that fact that it stored music in a digital, rather than analog format. 

On Techdirt.

Piracy/Counterfeit Bait and Switch

As I've noted before, one of the tricks used in the current ACTA negotiations is to blur the lines between counterfeiting and piracy, and to switch between the two whenever it suits the argument. So it's no surprise that a conference bringing together many intellectual monopoly maximalists, the grandly-titled "Global Congress Combating Counterfeiting and Piracy", used the same trick.

The emphasis is very much on the frightening "big numbers" of counterfeiting:

the problem of counterfeiting is growing, which is illustrated by a report on challenges facing the world in 2011, which was recently published by Robert Greenhill from the World Economic Forum. The report says that the illegal economy, corruption, and organized crime all work together to the detriment of society. It estimates the total value of counterfeits in the world to be $360 billion, including $200 billion in counterfeit medicines and $50 billion in counterfeit cigarettes. There is also $60 billion worth of pirated videos. This lessens the economic competitiveness of many countries.

Even if we accept what are probably inflated numbers, the last sentence is simply wrong. Countries where counterfeits are widely sold may damage themselves in the long term through fake medicines, but in the short term they keep more money in the local economy, which is likely to boost their competitiveness since it allows for greater economies of scale there.

Similarly, a speaker from Interpol talked about:

two specific operations taken in the past year to combat piracy and counterfeiting. Operation Jupiter 5 in South America involved 13 countries and led to over 7000 arrests and the seizure of over $200 million worth of counterfeit goods.

Meanwhile:

Gerhard Bauer, President of the International Trademark Association (ITA) noted that the size of the counterfeiting phenomena is so vast that it is hard to grasp, and that it leads to the ruination of many legitimate businesses. The ITA participated in a summit yesterday to discuss how different organizations can work together to build awareness of the program and to build support for ACTA.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with Internet piracy, and yet, as the mention of ACTA reminds us, it is precisely in this field that intellectual monopolists have been most active - and disproportionate in their demands.

The crucial role of ACTA was admitted during the conference:

ACTA is very important because it is more ambitious than any other previous agreement, including unique provisions on seizure and destruction of infringing goods; more criminal prosecutions; more possibilities for enforcement at the border. Especially significant, ACTA is the first treaty that specifically deals with the internet. He noted civil society concerns with ACTA, which he called “legitimate,” but which “must be allayed.” ACTA is compatible with the Doha Declaration, won’t interfere with trade of generic drugs, contains and contains no measures for intrusive searches of passengers. Civil society must be convinced of this.

Again, there is the confusion between counterfeiting - "seizure and destruction of infringing goods...enforcement at the border" - and the digital world, whose goods cannot be seized or destroyed, and for which borders are largely nominal.

Significantly, as the speaker seeks to address "civil society concerns with ACTA", he does not mention the fact that ISPs will be forced to become agents of intellectual monopolists, or the knock-on loss of privacy that will result, or the chilling effect this will have on free speech. That's because he has no answer to these very serious criticisms of ACTA, which has been pushed through largely by exploiting the deliberate confusion between counterfeiting, with its undoubted analogue risks, and digital piracy, which has none.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Sharing: Crossing the Digital-Analogue Divide

I've been writing about all kinds of openness and sharing on this blog nearly five years now. Before that, I had been covering free software for a further ten years. Although I touch on open hardware examples here, this has all largely been about *digital* sharing.

A key concern of mine has been how this will translate into the "real", aka analogue world. For digital sharing is relatively easy, and it's possible that without such low barriers to sharing, the kinds of behaviours that are becoming common online might not translate into the offline realm.

But it seems like my fears were misplaced:

The results of Latitude Research and Shareable Magazine's The New Sharing Economy study released today indicate that online sharing does indeed seem to encourage people to share offline resources such as cars and bikes, largely because they are learning to trust each other online. And they're not just sharing to save money - an equal number of people say they share to make the world a better place.

More specifically:

* Sharing online content is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline too. 78% of participants felt that experiences they've had interacting with people online have made them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers. In fact, every study participant who shared content online also shared various things offline. Sharing entrepreneurs are already taking advantage of this by seeding their services in contextually relevant online communities. For instance, online kids clothing exchange thredUP build relationships with prominent mommy bloggers to speed their launch.

* 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase in the next 5 years. While fast growing, this new sector has lots of unmet demand. More than half of all participants either shared vehicles casually or expressed interest in doing so. Similarly, 62% of participants either share household items casually or expressed interest in doing so. There's also high interest in sharing of physical spaces for travel, storage, and work - even with complete strangers.

If confirmed by other research, this is really important. It says that global projects like free software and Wikipedia are not just isolated, geeky instances of collaboration, sharing and altruism: they feed into large-scale, personal and local activities that are inspired by them and their digital cousins (remember social networking is one of these).

I'm obviously not surprised, since I have been working on that assumption. I also have a rough sketch of a theory why this digital sharing might spill over into the analogue world.

As those of us deeply immersed in the cultures of openness and sharing know, engaging in these activities is almost literally effortless: it takes probably a few seconds to share a link, a thought or a picture. It might take a few minutes for a blog post, and a few hours for Wikipedia article, but the barriers are still low.

And the rewards are high. Even simple "thank yous" from complete strangers (on Twitter or identi.ca, say) are immensely gratifying. Indeed, I'd be willing to bet that there are some serious hormonal consequences of getting this kind of feedback. For they are sufficiently pleasant that you tend to carry on sharing, and probably more intensely, in part to get that special buzz they engender.

At this point, your brain is positively wired for the benefits of sharing. In which case, you are maybe more willing to overcome the necessarily greater obstacles to sharing in the analogue world. Perhaps the benefits of sharing there are even greater; but even if they are only the same as for the digital realm, they are probably enough for us sharing addicts to carry on. (I'm sure there's a PhD or two in all this stuff.)

Whether or not that is a correct analysis of what's happening at the deepest level within us, this latest research is really good news for sharing, and for humanity's future, which surely will depend on us learning how to share everything - not least the planet and its resources - better. In fact, it was such good news, I felt I really had to share it with you...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Why Free Software is a Matter of Life and Death

As regular readers of this blog will know, free software has an importance that extends way beyond the world of software. But for most people, it's hard to understand why software freedom is really that important. So this new report “Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices” from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) provides a handy opportunity to get the message across:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Cameron as Future Avatar of Film Industry

For some months now, I've been touting "Avatar" as a good example of how the film industry should be concentrating on enhancing the experience of watching films *in the cinema* - something that no copied DVD can reproduce - thus making unauthorised copies pretty much into marketing devices that encourage people to go to the cinema for the full experience.

It seems that one person who gets this is James Cameron himself:

He said the music industry made a critical mistake by trying to stop piracy instead of innovating to give consumers new experiences that the industry could use to generate more money.

"The music industry saw it coming, they tried to stop it, and they got rolled over," he said. "Then they started suing everybody. And now it is what it is."

Instead, Cameron said he has tried to innovate to give movie goers a reason to go to theater. And in creating a rich, "reinvigorated cinema experience," Cameron said he discovered that people are willing to pay money to experience the same content in different ways. Not only are they willing to pay $10 or more to see Avatar on the big screen in 3D, but they also will pay to own the DVD and to take it with them on their phone or portable device.

"People are discriminating about the experience," he said. "They want to own it, have it on a iPhone when they want it, and they want the social experience of going to the cinema. These are really different experiences. And I think they can all co-exist in the same eco-system."

Cameron said the fact that people are still going to the theater to see Avatar now nearly four months after it was released supports his conclusion. He said he has had several discussions with the movie studio trying to figure out when to release the DVD of the movie. Typically DVD's are released after the film has left movie theaters. But he said since people are still going to see the movie in the theater, they decided to release the DVD next month with the movie still playing in some cinemas. The movie will also be available soon on iTunes.

What a perfect summary of what can be done, and what should be done. Let's hope Cameron is the future of cinema - at least in this respect.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

James Murdoch is Confused

Two quotations from James Murdoch's speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival:

So talking about a coming digital future, or a digital transformation, is to ignore the evidence that it has already happened. Why do I think we are getting this wrong? Why do I believe we need to change direction as a matter of urgency? It’s quite simple. Because we have analogue attitudes in a digital age.

GoGot that? "Analogue attitudes in a digital age." Now try this:

We don’t even have the basics in place to protect creative work. Whether it’s shoplifting at HMV or pirating the same movie online, theft is theft.

Er, what was that about analogue attitudes in a digital age, James....?

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Analogue Steganography

Steganography is about hiding stuff in such as way that it isn't even apparent stuff is hidden. For example, you might change predetermined pixels in a digital image so as to encode a hidden message, but not in such a way as to be obvious to anyone looking at said pic.

That's clever, but this is even more clever: a USB drive that doesn't look like a USB drive.

* 2GB flash drive cleverly disguised as a frayed and broken USB cable
* Easily transfer and store files, photos and music
* USB 2.0 with 1.1 backwards compatibility
* Mac, Windows and Linux compatible, of course

(Via Bruce Schneier.)

Expensive Oil and the Analogue World

Fascinating stuff:

We usually think about technological improvements in productivity as benefiting the highly skilled and educated, and disenfranchising the poorly skilled and uneducated, but what I find most interesting about globalization in an era of $127 dollar-a-barrel oil is that blue-collar workers who make physical things in the West will stand to benefit, newly protected from foreign competition by energy tariffs, while white-collar workers who live off their wits will still feel the immense pressure of competing with everyone else in the world.

Not-So-Rough Trade

As I and a few other enlightened individuals have been banging on about for some time, allowing digital files to be copied is not the end of business - just of business as usual. Essentially, people selling physical things - like books or CDs - need to recognise the differences from digital ones, and build on them positively.

Here's a good example:

At a time when CD price wars and music downloads are putting entire High Street chains at risk, independent retailers Rough Trade are opening what they say is the country's biggest music-only specialist store.

...

Despite the company's niche reputation, he feels it can fulfil what he sees as the "enormous demand" for a shop that offers expertise and can recommend music with authority - and he doesn't think downloads are killing the CD.

"With this store, we feel there's a dormant music shopper out there who's not buying music from the High Street simply because they don't like High Street retailers, not because they've gone off physical formats," he says.

"If anything, the people I talk to appreciate vinyl and CDs more than ever in this digital age. It's just that they've gone off the way it's sold.

Exactly. Shops are about the experience of shopping, not just of buying. Similarly, CDs and other analogue obejcts are about the experience of having and holding such objects, not just what they contain. As the new Rough Trade shop shows, some people are beginning to get this. (Via TechDirt.)

Time to Face the Music

I've been rabbiting on about this for some time; now The Economist is saying it too, so it must be true:

Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

...

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry's top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

Blizzards and Beauty: An Ode to Open Access

Peter Suber has long been recognised as the official chronicler of the open access movement; now, with the publication of this paean, it seems he's become its bard as well:

I've heard physicists refer to the prospect of room-temperature superconductivity as a "gift of nature". Unfortunately, it's not quite within reach. But the non-rivalrous property of digital information is a gift of nature that we've already grasped and put to work. We only have to stand back a moment to appreciate it. To our ancestors, the prospect of recording knowledge in precise language, symbols, sounds, or images without reducing the record to a rivalrous object would have been magical or miraculous. But we do it every day now and it's losing its magic.

The danger is not that we already take it for granted but that might stop short and fail to take full advantage of it. The point is not to marvel at its potential but to seize the opportunities it creates. It can transform knowledge-sharing if we let it.

We take advantage of this gift when we post information online and permit free access and unrestricted use for every user with an internet connection. But if we charge for access, enforce exclusion, create artificial scarcity, or prohibit essential uses, then we treat the non-rivalrous digital file like a rivalrous physical object, dismiss the opportunity, and spurn the gift.

More, Peter, more.

The Commons: When Digital Meets Analogue

Given the convergence of thinking about the digital and analogue commons that is taking place, the news that EarthTrends is releasing its online collection of information regarding environmental, social, and economic trends under a Creative Commons licence is welcome.