When we see a trend that goes on for four months, there must be something to it. And that’s exactly what’s been happening to Twitter: according to Compete, it has flatlined for the last four months, showing absolutely no growth as far as uniques, visits, or rank go. And it’s not just Compete: Quantcast paints pretty much the same picture, and Twitter CEO Evan Williams has recently admitted that their traffic has stalled in the US.
Among overthinky legal types (i.e., law professors), there are many who argue that Fair Use only exists because it is occasionally difficult to make a socially-desirable use of someone else’s copyrighted material. By “difficult,” I mean “burdened by transaction costs that make the whole license-getting process a real pain in the ass.” And by “transaction costs,” I mean “lawyers.”
Example: a college professor wants to include a Wall Street Journal article in a hand-out. By making a hundred copies of the article and passing them around class, he is committing copyright infringement. However, the Fair Use Doctrine gives him a compelling defense, because we want our children to learn, etc. The market failure theory argues that, no, it’s still copyright infringement, because there’s some actual market price the professor can and should pay for licensing the article. Only thing is, the steps the professor needs to take to acquire such a license (the kaching of hiring a lawyer and the time spent negotiating the rights) make the cost of doing so like a thousand times higher than the license fee itself. For an economist, this level of inefficiency is the moral equivalent of incest. The social value of the infringement is higher than the icky waste of resources, and thus we consider such infringement to be “fair.”
Now it’s easy to see where this goes. If transaction costs drop to zero, then there’s no reason to get all outraged and shit. Enter the Internet, and rights clearinghouses, and micropayments — all things that cut down on the wasteful lawyer fees and allow a more perfect licensing market to develop. If the actual cost to a professor to acquire a license to that Wall Street Journal article is $10, with no transaction costs, and the time it takes to acquire the license is the five minutes spent clicking on a few links and the PayPal, well, then ipso facto Q.E.D. thus and therefore there’s no need to justify copyright infringement. Fair Use becomes unnecessary, economically speaking.
Ironically, much of what Google is doing to make it easier to buy shit is in fact eroding the Fair Use doctrine that they’ll likely try to hide behind when Murdoch lawyers up.
For those of you interested in boring yourself further, the seminal article on this is Wendy Gordon’s Fair Use as Market Failure, which is filled with hilarious references to Betamax tapes because it was written in 1982.
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Spiegelman (in reference to Rupert Murdoch’s attack on fair use) (via soupsoup) (via 6h057) Heh. ”Overthinky” |
In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony…and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative.for example (which is why i’m an advocate of a bit more conscious participation - the technology we’re swimming in is great but only if you understand the big picture, the advantages and the disadvantages):
Three: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.
Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return. As we move from the “web of information” to the “web of people” (aka the Social Web) the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity. This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences: MIT’s Project Gaydar can spot your sexual preference by your social ties, Facebook checks are occurring customs and every quiz you take on Facebook delivers a shocking amount of personally identifiable information to third parties. Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.
The Web has been called a “database of intentions.” The bigger that database grows, and the more deeply it is mined, the more difficult it may become to discern whether those intentions are our own or ones that have been implanted in us.
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| — | via roomthily: The informavore in its cage (via christinebeardsell) |
jgh:
Seems like it wasn’t too long ago we were striking over this technology that “was years and years” away from becoming a reality. Yea.
Click above to read on.
Big, Major FU to the Theater Owners.
I don’t know anything about this issue so please educate me. What is wrong with releasing movies straight-to-TV (an OnDemand type service, I am assuming?) Yes, it would be put theaters out of business, but is there something wrong with providing consumers more options? Getting the movies at home sounds pretty convenient to me. Not asking rhetorically, as I know I am not seeing the whole picture. Please explain. What is the argument of the theater owners?
I believe the theater owner’s arguments are roughly the same as the Michigan Newspapers who were horrified at the idea that towns would post notices online. I think the argument goes something like: We like money. And we’re scared we’re obsolete.
This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.
Simulmedia
I recently learned about a fascinating data-driven company called Simulmedia. They buy raw data from set-top box companies like Tivo and analyze it. Among many other things, they learn when a user watched what and and for how long. With a set of millions of users, they identify viewing patterns and can predict with certainty how receptive you might be to one television program given that you voluntarily watch some other one.
What’s interesting is their business model. Instead of selling the clean data back to the networks like we’d expect, they go back and ask, for example, “How many viewers would you like us to deliver to Mad Men?” Then they take the network’s own marketing assets, like a 15-second trailer, buy commercial slots on other networks, and target the viewers of specific shows who they know will be receptive to Mad Men. In turn, they get paid for the uptick they promised.
New media bounty hunters. I’m very impressed.
Smart uses of data excite me tremendously.
I’m curious what other applications the data might have besides targeting people to watch more shows so they’ll watch more ads.
In front of an audience of about 50 local social media junkies taking part in one of the station’s regular “bloginars,” new media director John Daenzer pulled back the kimono a project called The Wire. It’s an interactive timeline for news and events that allows users — journalists and citizen journalists alike — to follow and influence a story’s development in real time. It is, in fact, a way for news consumers to become news reporters; to see and participate in how the journalism sausage is made.
“We want to break down the wall that says we are the brokers of information,” Daenzer says. “I think it’s time that we as the media admit that we don’t have all the answers.”
“RapidShare in particular has become massively popular, with traffic demand pushing it into the top 20 list of most trafficked websites on the internet, Alexa reports. The site holds a reported 10 petabytes of files on its systems, which have the capability to handle up to three million users at any one time. Users with premium accounts enjoy unlimited download speeds while the downloads of freetards are throttled and restricted more generally.”
The Great And Noble War On Filesharing. Asynchronous warfare played out before your very eyes.
