For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

The venue was a conscripted hairdressing salon that was pressed into service by the Forum as a meeting space.  We were like sardines. But the energy in the tiny room was high.

To recap: The Xchange is a Web-based marketplace where companies can collaborate and share intellectual property which can lead to new sustainability business models and innovation.  Ten organizations have already signed on. The Xchange is the first step in a journey towards more sustainable innovation, and the more companies that get on board, the faster we’ll all make progress.  More info can be found here. http://greenxchange.force.com/

In Wikinomics my co-author Anthony Williams and I argued that we’re living in a world where new approaches to collaboration enable new business models that enable companies to create better value for consumers.  We said companies need a portfolio of intellectual property – some that they own and protect, some that they licence and some that they share.  The Green Exchange is all about achieving that.

Nike began the announcement with a cool video that made it clear that sustainability is not an obligation, it’s an opportunity.  Companies can choose to be ahead of the curve or behind the times.  The goal is to create an innovation community.  No one is “giving away” their intellectual property; the exchange includes a licensing protocol.

“Nike is today committing to placing more than 400 of our patents on GX for research, demonstrating our belief that the best way to stimulate sustainable innovation is through open innovation,” said Mark Parker, Nike president and CEO. “Our hope is this will unleash new innovation to help solve current obstacles to sustainability issues.”

Example: Possible cross-industry benefits of making available Nike’s Environmentally Preferred Rubber. Used in Nike footwear the rubber contains 96 percent fewer toxins than the original formulation. By licensing the technology on GX it could be used in other company’s footwear, or it could hypothetically be used by Mountain Equipment Co-op for bicycle inner tubes. In this way Mountain Equipment Co-op could bring a greener product to market more quickly and cheaply than it could on its own.

Parker explained that initially the company’s lawyers opposed the Xchange.  They felt intellectual property was always meant to be kept under wraps and guarded.  But they’ve all come around to see the value of the Xchange, not only to the environment, but also bring competitive advantage to the company.  When Nike’s patents are put into the commons, any improvements made to the patents will be available to Nike.

Parker said universities are a great source of intellectual property. What is needed – and what the Xchange provides – is a standard protocol whereby IP can bust out from the university and be helpful more broadly to business and society.

John Wilbanks, VP for Science at Creative Commons, said “There is so much duplication of effort and wasted resources when it comes to sustainability. We need to make it easier for individuals, companies, academia, and researchers to collaborate and share best practices.”

This idea of a patent commons came up at another session.  Currently the planet has many commons like the ocean, air and space.  Much of the Web is in the commons. It’s time we added an additional area:  know-how related to sustainability.

Each presenter gets the same amount of limited time (5-7 minutes) to cover key points that include: innovation, overall market opportunity, stage of development, intellectual property (IP) position, resource requirements, environmental impact, management team, and potential ROI. After their formal remarks, judges followed by audience members, have another 5 minutes or so to ask follow-up questions.

It’s always interesting to hear over 20 presentations by company principals in such a concentrated period of time. Besides being reminded how important it is to prepare and rehearse a presentation, by listening to a range of styles from very good to universally awful, you also pick up attitudes and perceptions about themes that entrepreneurs and investors consider important and how those change over time.

One of the themes I listened closely for was the approach to IP. Historically, intellectual property – especially patents – has been one of those areas considered to be critical by investors for several reasons, particularly for businesses based on “hard science” like biotech and clean energy.

First, an IP “position” is critical because investors want to know that the company has done its “homework” and has determined at some reasonable level, in advance, that it is not building its business on the legally protected work of others. Or, if it is, investors want to know that the company has a command of the IP that it must acquire or license in order to get its product(s) to market.

Second, traditionally, IP represents a competitive barrier to entry to other companies that may be trying to bring to market similar products. The thinking is that by having one or more patents on key discoveries or innovations, the competition may be slowed down or possibly completely thwarted from proceeding.

Leading to the third reason investors have traditionally viewed IP as critical, which is that IP potentially represents a “hard asset” in which the investor tangibly has an ownership interest. Worst case, should “all else fail” (which the percentages say is likely, otherwise they wouldn’t call it “venture” capital), there is the hope that the investor can monetize any patents that are secured through their investment.

Best case, the IP is so compelling and differentiating that it enables the company to bring to market a product that enjoys higher-margin profits, due to customer demand. Or, taking it a step further, competitors may want to acquire the right to use the protected IP via licensing, joint venturing, or other arrangements.

All of this is background to say that the attitudes and perceptions about IP are changing, both on the entrepreneur and investor side. While it was still an important criterion for evaluation, more than one presenter at the CEVS said, to paraphrase, “I’m really less focused on patents or other IP protection and more focused on time to market and execution, because I don’t believe that the time and money spent on the IP strategy gains you much advantage, versus the cost.”

The main reasons given for this position, were two-fold: (1) in this globally-connected market of ideas, it’s too “cheap” – both time- and money-wise – to find ways around patents (versus the costs of securing them) enabling you and/or your competitor to continue forward with your primary plans and (2) in the spirit of the global dangers of climate change, the necessity for clean technologies demands that products innovative products and services be brought to market as fast as possible.

I could spend a whole other blog post arguing the pro and con merits of this changing position by entrepreneurs about IP, but instead I want to focus on a development where businesspeople are embracing this position and doing something potentially transformative about it through an effort called the GreenXchange.

The GreenXchange is a project of Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy. Their vision is to create an “open innovation platform” that promotes the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve the problems of sustainability. The goal is to create a “commons” among as large a group of commercial, public sector, and non-profit stakeholders as possible, leveraging ideas and techniques such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

These principles sound familiar to most of us, of course, because at this point they are recognized as the essential foundations of the open software/open source movement, where Creative Commons is recognized as a leader in providing intellectual property licensing, facilitating sharing and knowledge transfer. The GreenXchange is technically a project of Science Commons, which was launched with the goal of bringing the openness and sharing that have made Creative Commons licenses a success in the arts and cultural fields to the world of science.

The GreenXchange was first publicly discussed at the 2009 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Work is underway now, among the founding partners and technology partners that have been recruited, to begin putting in place the systems for operating the GreenXchange. The goal – from discussions with GreenXchange principals – is to use the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen as a key forum for building momentum and participation for the GreenXchange, with further announcements about GreenXchange platform availability by the Davos WEF in January 2010.

Think for a moment, about how the landscape of software is different today from what it was 20 years ago. By having the LAMP stack, as it is often called (i.e., Linux-Apache-MySQL, PHP), and all of the many other open source software products available via innovations like Creative Commons’ licenses, there is a much richer, more competitive marketplace, frequently featuring better alternatives to traditionally proprietary, closed offerings from commercial vendors.

Thinking about where we are today with software open innovation gives you a glimpse of what could be the transformative nature of the GreenXchange on the cleantech industry and other sustainability ventures in 5, 10, 20 years from now.

Appearing recently before hearings of the House of Commons industry committee, Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, urged the federal government to intervene to avoid the loss to foreign control of technology he called “a national treasure.”  RIM would like to acquire the assets.

He told Members of Parliament that allowing the sale to proceed and having Canadians lose control of Nortel’s next-generation wireless patents would be similar to Canada’s notorious decision to cancel development of the Avro Arrow aircraft in 1959.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a member of the RIM board of directors, said the government didn’t appreciate how bare-knuckle the global marketplace can be.  He likened Canadians to being well-meaning but sometimes ineffectual boy scouts.

Bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. is auctioning off its assets to pay what it can to creditors. A key component of those assets is valuable intellectual property related to the next-generation wireless standard, known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Those intellectual property assets were created by Nortel with millions of dollars of support from Canadian taxpayers through the Scientific Research Tax Credit program.

Sophisticated participants in the global wireless market who identified desirable intellectual property in Canadian hands came bidding for those assets with their chequebooks wide open. As a strategist, I absolutely would have encouraged them to do what they did. In the end, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson was the winner of the court-sponsored auction, gaining licensing rights to Nortel’s 125 LTE patents, though not ownership of the patents.

However, had crucial Swedish telecom intellectual property been up for sale instead, there would be no chance that any foreign company would have even have had a sniff at it, let alone get $300-million in financing for it (as Export Development Canada offered to Nokia Siemens Networks in its failed bid for the Nortel assets). And that’s because the Swedish economic policy leaders aren’t boy scouts.

The time is now – right now – for the Canadian government to step up to the plate and use the Investment Canada Act review provisions to demonstrate that, like the leaders of Canada’s great global companies, it has graduated from scout status to being a full partner in global competitiveness.

The sale should not proceed.

Hardly typical behavior for a pharmaceutical company. After all, pinpointing their precise genetic origins of diabetes could unlock a treasure trove of new medicines and result in a major windfall for Novartis’s shareholders. But its perfectly rational from a wikinomics point of view. In fact, researchers claim there are far more leads hidden in the genome than any one lab could possibly follow-up on alone. So by placing its data in the public domain Novartis intends to leverage the talents of a global research community to dramatically scale and speed up its early-stage R&D activities.

Now it seems GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the latest pharmaceutical company to undertake a major course-correction, this time with pledges to provide cheaper medicines in the developing world and to start a patent pool for research on neglected disease. As reported in the Guardian, GSK will:

1. Cut its prices for all drugs in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make drugs more affordable in middle- income countries such as Brazil and India.
2. Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a “patent pool”, so they can be explored by other researchers.
3. Reinvest 20% of any profits it makes in the least developed countries in hospitals, clinics and staff.
4. Invite scientists from other companies, NGOs or governments to join the hunt for tropical disease treatments at its dedicated institute at Tres Cantos, Spain.

It’s an intgriguing announcement from my point of view, not least because they have adopted startegies I wrote about in Wikinomics (see “the New Alexandrians”) and in my own work on intellectual property.

While the discounted prices for medicines will likely steal headlines, GSK’s pledge to back a patent pool is arguably more significant. While never very popular in the IP-intensive pharma industry, patent pools have been around for some time in industries such as aircraft manufacturing, radio and telecommunications. More recently, intellectual property theorists such as Carl Shapiro, Robert Merges and Josh Lerner have each suggested that the pooling intellectual property rights could help address an array of issues in industries characeterized by cumulative innovation, particularly software and biotechnology. Even the USPTO recommended patent pools as a potential solution to problems of access and excessive patenting and litigation in the biotechnology industry.

If other companies were to follow suit, a patent pool would provide a significant boost to researchers who have been working on treatments for neglected diseases such as TB, malaria, and river blindness. It could also help give new momentum to open source biology movement.

While I congratulate GSK, I do wonder what took them so long and I find myself agreeing with Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières, both of whom argued that the patent pool should be extended HIV.

The Bilski patent involved a method to determine appropriate pricing and apportioning of commodity hedging instruments—a process by which companies can mitigate price risk in volatile markets. Hedging and risk management are on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days: Don has written thoroughly about it, and “risk managers” seem to be the only people on Bay and Wall Streets who still get calls from recruiters (not ones who worked for these guys, of course). But the fundamental question, as seen by the court, was “Is this ‘machine-or-transformation’ test satisfied?”

The test is simple in premise, but as are many legal concepts, is readily abstracted into realms unknown. The decision said it clearest:

“an applicant may show that a process claim satisfies §101 either by showing that his claim is tied to a particular machine, or by showing that his claim transforms an article.”

The Bilski patents were not seen as a transformation of the underlying “article” (in this case, obligations and concepts of risk), as these articles were considered ineligible: they were not “physical objects or substances, and are not representative of physical objects or substances.” (Emphasis added) The applicants hoped that their process, which produced “useful, concrete and tangible results” would be sufficient, but when considered in isolation, that wasn’t enough. An aside

But what does it all mean, Basil? What are the implications to future innovation, especially given the shift to knowledge work, where razor-thin profit margins are often a direct product of business processes (albeit, ones with more gravitas and specificity)? For that we go to one of the dissenting judge’s opinions, Judge Newman. She (and I agree) that the redefinition of the “process” to depend on machines or tangibility (or representation thereof) is imprudent:

“…thus excludes many of the kinds of inventions that apply today’s electronic and photonic technologies, as well as other processes that handle data and information in novel ways. Such processes have long been patent eligible, and contribute to the vigor and variety of today’s Information Age. This exclusion of process inventions is contrary to statute, contrary to precedent, and a negation of the constitutional mandate. Its impact on the future, as well as on the thousands of patents already granted, is unknown.”

The other two dissenters, Rader and Mayer, speak to the desirability of a more concise resolution and the devolution of the patent landscape:

• Rader argues that stressing process-machine relationship is outdated given the current state of science and technology.
  

• Mayer’s dissent is a little more vigorous, and disagrees with business method patents wholly as they stand now
  

• The argument is one that patent law is meant to spur innovation and science, not help financiers structure business arrangements.
  

So who is right? One potential school of thought is that since most technology process innovations are tied to machines so closely, that patenting shouldn’t be slowed by this decision, and Newman has nothing to fear.

My stance is this: Hedging, computer aided or not, is still a fundamental business principle: alone, it’s unpatentable. But the idea that something non-physical needs to be tied to a machine to make it patentable is a surprising (and unwise) decision. It seems like the decision failed to speak to the future, but instead seems to gain its only ammunition on the basis of the “transformation” argument. I agree with Rader that the patent could have been just as ably defeated by arguing its scope was too broad, effectively damaging antecedent work in the area.

My Wikinomics Angle: I’m decidedly Mayer-esque in his “Six Million Dollar Man” idea that we can rebuild the system. Why? Because “we have the technology” that necessitates it (apologies, but we needed some levity. This far it’s been Churchill martini-dry). Patents aren’t meant to replace a business model or prevent others from even doing business. Ideally, they’re meant as an avenue through which innovators can be compensated for their role in science and technological evolution. Instead we’re seeing companies set up defensive minefields as a competitive strategy. Weak. In 1995, Michel Robert wrote that innovation was considered to be the business “Fountain of Youth”, as it was the cornerstone to both success (a product of competitiveness) and longevity (a product of success). Jeff Roberts at McGill University in Montreal wrote a great blog post about how IP should mean innovation, not litigation. He’s a sharp cookie, and fear not, he’s not an anarchist. He just advocates that if IP policy is careless with what he calls the “rights-rewards balance”, innovation becomes an afterthought, not the goal.

Wikinomics in law isn’t about free (little joke), and it isn’t about ignoring property rights; that rigidity was born out of the old vanguard that created walled gardens. But the only way to see over those tall-walled enclaves is a return to a founding tenet of past science:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Newton, 1676

[Aside: The whole "useful…" phrase sounds like something written by Teresa Amabile a researcher who studies creativity and innovation. The stickiest phrase I remember from one of her academic papers was criteria for judging something as creative was dependent on it being "novel and appropriate". I also felt that Jerome Bruner said it really well that true creativity would produce "a shock of recognition, following which there is no longer astonishment." Pretty neat reading for you academic folks.] Back to Post

If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles – and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me – if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.

TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:

Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.

This sounds fair enough – having a single company break the platform repeatedly would seem to be a problem. However, WL vehemently disagrees with this assessment. If you read through the emails they point the finger for whatever platform problems exist squarely at Ning (particularly highlighting when Ning implemented Dojo changes that broke many applications without bothering to inform any of their partner developers in advance). They also indicate the shutdown may be more about anti-competitive behavior (a.k.a. they’re making too much money and Ning wants it, and/or Ning is worried they’ll lose customers and revenue going forward). From their POV, this was a win-win-win relationship, and they don’t understand why Ning would do this unless there were ulterior motives.

What’s the truth? it’s hard to say without knowing EVERYTHING that’s gone on, but it’s even harder to say Ning has went about anything in the right way. If you work through the email train, there is an ongoing (if occasionally heated) dialog through to August 7th between Spencer Forman at WL and CEO Gina Bianchini of Ning, at which point she indicates the communication will be handed off to Jay for technical issues, Bob Goorah (general counsel) for the terms of service, and Jason Rosenthal for business conversations (who was starting on the 15th). The next email in the chain is this:

Dear Spencer,
I am writing to inform you that your network (widgetlaboratory.ning.com) and third party applications have been removed for violations of our Terms of Service. Please direct all correspondence regarding this matter to my attention. Thank you.
Bob Ghoorah
General Counsel
Ning, Inc.

So much for business and technical I guess – only the lawyer now, and there appears to be no interest in finding an amicable solution. WL, as noted, has posted the email correspondence on the web. Ning’s initial public response, in contrast, was this:

This morning we removed WidgetLaboratory, a third party application developer, from the Ning Platform for violating Ning’s Terms of Service. WidgetLaboratory provided independently developed applications that could be added to a social network on the Ning Platform by a Network Creator. While we try to be as transparent as possible, it’s our long standing policy not to comment on specific cases where we remove networks or third party developers from the Ning Platform so we will not be providing any additional details publicly.

You have to love that – we try to be as transparent as possible… but we’re not going to tell you anything. How transparent. Lawyer Bob continued to respond to several emails from Spencer, and helpfully reminded him of the terms of service:

Ning has the right (at its sole discretion) to delete or deactivate your account, block your email or IP address, or otherwise terminate your access to or use of the Ning Platform or any Network, or remove and discard any Code or Content within any Network, without notice and for any reason.

While legally this is very clear, one has to imagine that setting a precedent of unilaterally shutting down the most successful widget provider on the platform might not be good for encouraging other developers, or encouraging customers to pay for premium services that could/ will quickly be axed. If you read through the responses on various blog posts (including this one on the Ning developer platform), you see this come up repeatedly – and you notice that most seem to be on WL’s side.

Gina later posted a more thorough response which has some more positive responses – though it’s interesting to note many users seemed to be asking for Ning to offer them the applications that WL used to offer them, which is a very slippery slope indeed. It’s even more slippery when Gina notes that:

Our focus at this point is in assisting Network Creators in finding alternatives to features that they may have been using from WidgetLaboratory. If we could fill these holes today, we would. We will start this effort shortly.

There’s no way around it – this looks really bad. It’s bad to have a model where 3rd party players are encouraged to get involved, grow a business with valuable offerings they develop and prove, and then get shut down while the “parent” company and customers clamor over replacements for them. Not sure how that can be sugarcoated.

There’s also another wrinkle in this – if you check out the August 7th email, you’ll note that one of Ning’s other complaints is that WL sometimes asks for user names and passwords, which is also against the terms of service. WL points out that they do this as a service for paying customers, who WANT to provide it to them, so they can go in there and… diagnose and trouble shoot problems with their licensed and purchased products. That seems perfectly sensible, and again to everyone’s benefit – but apparently Ning does not agree. Even while complaining that WL code regularly breaks down and hurts the network. Curious.

So overall there are a lot of disconnects here, and as more information comes out it might clear up – but I doubt it. I think it’s fair to say at this point that if you want to learn how to deal with such “open” development platforms and partnerships, do pretty much the opposite of what Ning did. Even if they had to shut down WL, they could have went about it in a far better way. Secondly, saying that you try to be transparent, and then sharing nothing, is dumb. Finally, if it’s the innovation of 3rd party developers that is helping your company so much, you really have to think about what the long-term implications are when you unilaterally axe your top performer and then very shortly after that talk about replacing their offerings being your top priority.

The site provides member-scanned full digital copies of magazines, which can be browsed, shared, archived and even re-assembled to create aptly-named “mygazines”.  The site is hosted by Stokholm-based PRQ, “the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company“, which is also host to (and owned by two founders of) well-known bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay.

Interestingly, the site tour appears to be targeted at publishers, pitching itself as multi-faceted growth opportunity,  but most industry leaders asked aren’t exactly jumping at the “opportunity”.

Why should I upload my publication to mygazines.com?

• Our article-level search and archiving ability allows your audience to find the content they’re looking for faster
• Increase your distribution and advertising revenue by exposing your publication to more eyes
• Keep control of your publication: Mygazines will not allow for downloading or printing of your publication. Your original source file is never accessible.
• Save the trees – no paper will be used in the making of your virtual publication  

It’s absolutely free!

Wow.  A paper-saving, “distribution” and advertising revenue-increasing model that is also reader-friendly, allowing for customized content…seems like a no-brainer, right?  Well, not so fast.  Despite the site’s sugar-coating, the proclaimed “benefits” do not accrue to a publisher whose member-uploaded content becomes hosted on the third-party site. (Even if hyperlinks on advertisements are provided, the content is not tied to the original publisher.)

I must admit, I see both sides of the coin on this one.  Will this be a push towards open-content release or a short-lived copyright casualty?

In other copyright news, well-known Canadian law professor and fair copyright crusader, Michael Geist, has launched a campaign entitled c61in61seconds, where citizens are challenged to submit their reactions to Canada’s heavily-debated amendment to the Copyright Law, Bill C-61, in a YouTube video of 61 seconds or less.  The campaign has yet to gain full traction, but be sure to check it out and submit your 61 cents if you’ve got an opinion.

The injunction has ignited a debate over the ruling’s merit, which names each of the students as well as MIT in the temporary restraining order. The MBTA has taken issue with the fact that the “students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws”, while the students’ representative from the Electronics Frontier Foundation (EFF) says “the students were simply trying to share their research and planned to omit key information that would make things easier for anyone who actually wanted to hack the payment system.”

In banning the presentation, which had already been distributed to conference attendees, and managed to make its way online, (go figure – handed out at a hacker conference and quickly made its way online) many have questioned whether the ruling has actually made things “worse”, helping the Hack gain increased publicity. According to EFF representative, Jennifer Granick, the ruling also leads down a “dangerous” path whereby “If you prevent legitimate researchers from talking about their findings, it’s not going to stop people from finding vulnerabilities. It’s going to stop the good guys from talking about them and from learning from each other.”

While I’m certainly not proposing anarchy here, I can’t help but wonder – with the knowledge of savvy individuals like Anderson, Ryan and Chiesa, does it make sense to alienate them with such court injunctions? As a result, has the MBTA missed an important opportunity, suppressing potentially valuable conversation that could/would have been a natural follow-on to the presentation, helping improve the MBTA and potentially other systems?

Whether you’re a regular reader, or just pop in occasionally, it’s not always easy to keep up with our Wikinomics blog content. With this in mind, we have created the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, to try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog from the past week.

We have attempted to condense the key content to just a few paragraphs, but to understand the idea in its full context, you’ll have to visit the original post. Please also keep in mind that not all blog posts are conducive to being summarized in this way, and what follows is but a fraction of our week’s content. With that out of the way, read on!

An increasing number of artists are now signing recording deals with consumer product companies such as Nike, Red Bull and Procter & Gamble, who are acting as de facto record companies – finding, funding, promoting and in cases even distributing new music. In an effort to promote various product lines, these companies have now begun to look outside of their core businesses for a new way to get their brands out there…

While collaborating with artists for short-term promotional pieces is nothing new, a number of companies are taking their relationship with artists to the next level, and early signs point to a winning relationship for both sides involved. Dupri is very pleased with the budget provided by P&G, claiming “You can’t get this type of marketing budget. There are endorsement deals, but not like this.” Artists appear to benefit by receiving both an up-front payment as well a royalty agreement that outpaces what is offered by the big labels.

• Andrew Jones of the Tall Skinny Kiwi talks about how the Wikinomics ideas of transparency, generosity, and trust relates to the Bible and Christian ideals.
• As mentioned in the comments of last week, a relatively new website, Swirrl, has posted a review of Wikinomics.“Swirrl is like a wiki, but better.”
• The State Sunshine and Open Records blog criticizes “Show us a Better Way”, a new website sponsored by the British Government, but reconsiders the statement after hearing this site is the brainchild of the U.K.’s Minister for the Cabinet Office. The website invites users/citizens to post ideas for new government services.
• Wikinomics and how mass collaboration will fundamentally change learning was one of the topics at the recent NECC 2008 conference.
• Brendan Dunphy’s Innovation Blog debates the Wikinomics Report Card on General Motors. He argues that closed innovation is better when the current market solution is not sufficient.
• Paula Thornton of the Fast Forward Blog talks about Don Tapscott’s economic tsunami in reference to the User Revolution and the Age of Aquarius.

Derek: Dipity was started by three friends who got together and who were long time Internet professionals, one from development, one from design, and the other from a product user and consumer perspective. We were all struggling with the same problem – the tools available that tell stories and provide backgrounds around particular topics are lacking because the web is so media rich now. If you look at the way people use information or when people write stories, they use text and don’t really integrate photos or videos and images.

We thought of a better way to create an interactive experience around topics that takes advantage of the web, people in the world, and the fact that everything is connected. Dipity allows you to easily create interactive experiences around particular topics; could be people, could be places, could be subjects like Darfur, and aggregate information in one place. This creates an easy summarization of a topic that’s easy to understand and a richer experience.

A corporation too, is rather like Dennett’s sea squirt. When young and growing, it is all innovation-everywhere – strategy is an active line function, a brain, through early twists and turns towards fertile markets. Research isn’t a separate function because it is all research. As it matures, the organization may take root in a comfortable market… and eat its own brain. Strategy shrinks and becomes a backroom staff function, and R&D is first localized as a vanity function (“we have a lab with 50 star PhDs!”), and then gradually shrunk. Then one day, the market is threatened and everybody screams, “Who moved my cheese!” The capacity for active strategic steering and innovation everywhere has been lost.

How do you keep it alive in a cost-effective way? How do you prevent the animal from permanently becoming a plant? Succumbing to Luddite researcher screams for more blue-sky funding is dumb – history proves that doesn’t work. Here’s a smarter way …

Here’s my ideal 2.0 banking environment: I envision a unified single-sign-on financial management space that spans all of my financial interests so I could easily move funds—across different banks and institutions—from my checking account to my line of credit, or Visa, or RRSPs, or investments, or mortgage. Picture a Web portal that aggregates data from all of my financial accounts in a single dashboard. The “smart” interface would highlight opportunities for me to save money by using different investment vehicles or compare different promotions being offered. More than just making recommendations, the authenticated system would actually facilitate these transactions via a single click. I would also get dynamic results on how my actions are affecting my lending rate, monthly payments, and tax return in real time…

If you think this utopian vision is too far-fetched, consider solutions like Jwaala.com. The company is taking some early steps towards enabling this type of functionality at banks with products like personal money manager, budgeting and reporting tools, account aggregation, and dashboards and widgets.

A few weeks ago, the popular news aggregator site Reddit went open source. This struck me as pretty surprising, as I know that reddit is competiting with Digg, and I was under the impression that both had algorithms to determine which stories were deemed most popular that were kept secret and well guarded. Opening the source of reddit for all to see would allow anyone to instantly copy the site. Given that the site is coded in and run on languages and software that are themselves open, giving the entire world their proprietary code seems like an easy way to add competitors to the market…

My hypothesis is that the reddit team doesn’t have to worry about knockoffs stealing their lunch because it would take a few years and many, many users for the weighting variables in the clone sites to become anywhere near as refined and useful as in the original. Giving away their source code is really giving away very little. In exchange, they get all of the accolades of openness that come with bearing all to the world, and legions of users who then want to engage in making the site even better — for free of course!

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many…

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

FreeGovernment.org, launched on July 4, is one of a growing number of online, direct democracy communities that allow users to vote on bills, draft their own legislation, and engage in debate. While these communities present an opportunity to make government more accessible and responsive to citizens, they have failed to earn any influence over politicians.

To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).

On Wednesday Yahoo! made a pretty cool announcement: Today, Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. Here are my two favorite wikinomics themed quotes to entice you into reading the post:

“What’s in it for Yahoo! and partners?: Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It’s really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!.

What’s in it for users? More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers.”

Being Open: Traditionally, De Beers has been very closed in their dealings. Throughout their history, they have tried their best to control industry supply, and keep competition down. In 1994, along with GE, they were charged with price fixing on industrial diamonds. In 2006, De Beers settled numerous class action lawsuits alleging that they were keeping the price of diamonds artificially high and violating anti-trust laws. They agreed to pay out almost $300 million to anyone who bought diamonds from a jewelry store from 1994 – 2006. However, ever since Gareth Penny became CEO and the complete change in business strategy, the company has become more open and transparent. Now, 100% of their diamonds are sold through the Kimberly Process which ensures that diamonds are conflict free. For the second consecutive year, they released a massive “Report to Society”. The Report covers De Beers approach, economics, ethics, employees, communities, environment, and a range of case studies, initiatives and related web sites. However, it was reviewed by Ethical Corporation magazine as “transparent but not entirely reader friendly. You can find the 2007 report here.

Keep checking back each week, as Wikinomics bloggers keeps their eyes on the web, and their fingers on the keyboard. And as always…if something stood out and interested you, please comment!

From the article:

some of Google’s biggest advertisers are growing angry over “piggybacking,” a practice in which smaller advertisers use the trademarked words of big brands in the text of search ads to divert traffic from the sites of bigger advertisers to their own sites.

Now Rosetta Stone — the company that runs print ads about a small-town boy who must learn Italian in time to impress a model — is taking its gripe to court. But rather than going after Google, Rosetta Stone is suing Rocket Languages (and others), the company that it claims is “piggybacking” its Internet advertising on Rosetta Stone’s name.

In a complaint filed in California federal court, Rosetta Stone alleges that members of an advertising program affiliated with Rocket Languages purchase and use, without authorization, the Rosetta Stone trademark, or confusingly similar variations. Rosetta Stone also alleges that affiliates of Rocket Languages use their Web sites to post “comparison reviews” of Rosetta Stone products and competing foreign language software products, without disclosing that the sources of the reviews are paid by Rocket Languages.

Being clever with Google adwords is one thing, but piggybacking in this manner (including fake reviews and calling your competitor’s product a scam) is beyond the ethical line. Rosetta Stone pays a lot for traditional advertising (full page ads in major magazines), kiosks in airports etc. Rocket Languages, in effect, gets auxilliary benefit from these expenditures because it creates demand for the whole market. Not happy with that, they are launching sneaky attacks.

Wikinomics blog readers, what are you thoughts? Is all fair in (Adwords) love and war?

By the way, the  Wikipedia entry for the actual Rosetta Stone is quite well written.

YouTube plays the role of editor in the new program, selecting films from a pool of applicants. An interesting role for them to adopt, but one I am guessing they will abandon in due course by providing revenue sharing to all their content providers (or at least those who attain a sufficient audience).

Its interesting that this program is being rolled out with independent films and not mainstream TV and movies. I’m curious to know the reasons behind that. But what’s so crazy is that it means that its easier and cheaper (and more legal in many cases) for me to watch an independent movie from Norway (one of the films currently featured) than anything the major studios are creating. Could this be another nail in the coffin for the “established” content providers?

So what do you think? What does YouTube’s Screening Room signify in our evolving media environment?

“First, I got a bit put off by receiving the money because to me, that kind of arbitrary hand-out of alms is a ridiculous system. Then I thought, why not see it as an opportunity and earmark the money for something creative. And since the money came from piracy, I had to use it for more piracy, right?”

So he created a new album, fully funded by the tax, by using other people’s music and putting it through some old effects boxes he acquired. In turn, the end result is what some might call a pirated mash-up album, fully funded by an anti piracy tax. I’m sure not everyone would agree with his approach, but one (or at least I) have to love the mindset he took to get there:

“To me, ‘Frauds’ is a statement. There’s so much negativity in the debate. ‘File sharing means artists can’t…’, ‘File sharing means nobody will ever…’ I think it’s the opposite, I think the beautiful aspect of the digital era is that anything recorded can be remixed, tweaked and modified.”

“There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”

“Why do we need closed vehicles? We do. Some of these things harm the industry but they’re here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.”

“The original mistake we made was to take the code to our labs, change it and then release it at the last minute. The community had already gone in a different direction than [us], and no-one was pushing it other than [us]. Everybody wants to make their own version and keep it too close to their chest, but that leads to fragmentation.”

I find the second quote to be the most interesting, as it seems to succinctly capture a regularly occurring issue as companies and open source movements collide – we’re not quite ready to play by your rules, but you’re not quite ready to play by ours either. Implicit is the belief that neither set of “rules”, on their own, are correct – so the big question is what are the best rules to bring the two sides together? One quick thought is that focusing on IPR might gain a little more traction with open source developers than, say, DRM…

Such issues of timing and prediction underlie Paul Krugman’s excellent Op-Ed piece in the NY Times called “Bits, Bands, and Books”. He opens by quickly recapping the technology bubble of the late 1990s, the inevitable collapse, and then jumps to the recent oil and food shocks that have reminded us we still live in a “material world.” But it’s what he says next that is most important:

So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.

The particular part of the “future” he focuses on is a prediction credited to Esther Dyson – that the ease at which digital content can be copied and disseminated would result in “creative activity” been sold cheaply, or given away, in order to allow the creator to be paid via services and relationships. Krugman goes on to highlight a few recent stories and examples where creative product markets are heading further in this direction. Rolling Stone’s recent article “Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When CDs don’t sell” is indicative of how the music industry continues to slowly march towards alternative business models, and Amazon’s new e-Book machine (Amazon Kindle) may just be pointing to the book publishing industry having to go through a similar transition soon.

Krugman wraps up the article with the following, which is worth thinking about for a few minutes:

“Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.”

While I agree wholeheartedly, I do think some of the positives here should be reemphasized. Take, for example, the music industry – without a doubt it has been facing a lot of challenges. But if you happen to know many musicians (or take a few seconds to Google the topic), it is not hard to find out that they have generally received a very, very, very small percentage of the revenue they have generated – a buck or two per CD is not uncommon. That is the legacy business model we’re talking about here, and many authors can similarly let you know that writing books is a very hard way to make an easy living. As the cost of production and distribution for digital content trends towards zero, there’s a very real chance that the business and economic models which emerge will allow the creators of content to earn as much or more than ever before, even while prices paid by customers plummet. There are a lot of winners in that scenario… though some of the people caught in the middle aren’t going to like it.

Highlights from the Orwellian document include:

• the creation of an international, copyright enforcement body with the power to force Internet service providers to hand over customer information without a court order
• empowering boarder patrol officers to, without a warrant, search data on any laptop, iPod, or cell phone

Even if IP theft was a major crisis, which it is not, these measures would constitute a gratuitous infringement on our freedom of privacy.

But more importantly, this is a destructive approach to dealing with today’s very real challenges to the traditional intellectual property model. Rather than encouraging innovation, these proposals would merely prop-up media companies too narrow-minded to adapt to new realities, while harming their customers.

It is true that these are just proposals. But what is also alarming is that ACTA is being negotiated in secret. Further, because its a treaty, the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office can adopt it without approval from Parliament. And Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice has refused to make any comments on the leaked document. This lack of openness and transparency illustrates a deep-seeded, and largely irrational, opposition to the principles of collaboration within our political institutions. I hope that Canadians, and those in other effected countries, demand better.

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up).  How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire?  Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).

I’m not a big fan of comics, either North American or Japanese, but this strikes me as a much more enlightened relationship between media companies and fans. (Though, from what I gather, these dojinshi are pretty racy and feature characters doing things ..er.. outside of their normal realm of activities — kudos to the manga companies for being so tolerant.) It would be great if instead of slapping YouTube users with c&d’s for remixing their content, media companies just silently paid attention, then picked the best content to develop for larger use. Maybe some day!

However, this may all change. A growing number of designers are placing trademarks and patents on their designs in an attempt to keep competitors from copying their work. An anti-piracy bill, called the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, has also been proposed to curtail fashion retailers from selling rebranded versions of high end products.

This seems like a step in the wrong direction. A low priced, rebranded copy of a garment or a purse is a compliment to the designer’s ingenuity. Making styles and fashions more accessible to the average person drives the designer’s popularity. After all, not everyone can afford a Hermès bag, but seeing many similar ones on the street may entice those who have the means to buy the original. Even knockoffs, which are illegal, may help rise the popularity of a certain style. After all, who heard of Luis Vuitton before replicas of the company’s purses became mainstream. In the end, designers should stick to what has worked best for them throughout the years – new ideas and rapid innovation. The surest way of staying ahead.

Now the very notion that Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing seems patendly absurd. Let’s face it, the economics of trying to be an author have never been any good, as it has always been an extremely small proportion of writers that ever manage to really make a living. Seriously, look up the numbers – scary. There’s a few superstars, and a lot of waiters, waitresses, and part-timers – but people keep doing writing. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather stick a fork in my eye then read a full book on my laptop, as the printed version is a vastly superior form on many levels. But no matter – the Society of Authors has declared that the Internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them.

What are these radical methods? In the article Tracy Chevalier suggested four possible sources of income: government, business, rich patrons, and the public (here’s a challenge for you: try to think of another source of income that isn’t government, business or people. Pets bequeathed an inheritence from a deceased owner?). The idea she expanded on was government funding, taking the form of an “academy” of salaried writers. That sounds like a remarkably bad idea on so many levels that I can’t even count them – talk about heading in the wrong direction. Next thing you know investment bankers will be asking for the government to support them… er, never mind.

From what I’ve seen there’s never been a more exciting time to be a writer. While Chevalier complains that the “cookbook authors are really struggling”, I have to think that the bloggers behind Chocolate and Zucchini were pretty excited when their blog landed them a book deal to publish a cookbook. While she complains that short story writers are really struggling, I could point towards Anonymous Lawyer, this guy that knows what white people like, the British household rant woman, the Baghdad blogger, and many, many others who managed to establish themselves as bloggers (close to short stories, non?) and then used that noteriety to find themselves with a publishing deal. And my personal fave, I imagine the Bill Simmons doesn’t mind his journey from bartender to BostonSportsGuy (on the web) to having one of the most widely read sports columns on the web (at ESPN) complete with podcasts and other Web 2.0 stuff – or the book he published a couple of years back.

We’re talking about a truly amazing thing happening here – I just don’t see how there’s even a debate about the Internet when it comes to writing and books. If you have writing talent, the path from obscurity to success has never been easier to traverse. That doesn’t mean it’s easy – just easier. The financial rewards might not always be great, but that isn’t news to anyone that’s tried to be a professional writer the last few… centuries. There’s an extraordinary amount of competition which can make it hard to get your voice heard by the masses, but also an extremely long tail where almost everyone can find an audience, and the closest thing to a meritocracy there’s probably ever been. All the while, the published book form-factor advantage isn’t going away anytime soon – and if you can’t get past those pesky publishers you can just go to Lulu.com and publish your book by yourself. What more could writers realistically want?

Ms. Chevalier threw in that you can’t wait too long to act or the industry will just be gone – because That’s what happened to the music industry. But maybe the lesson she should really be learning from the music industry is don’t wait so long to go head hunting at Google.

“Besides Monitoring the WoW process space and keeping track of DLLs running in that space, the Warden pokes around into other processes, doing things like reading the window text in the title bar of every window and doing a scan of the code loaded for every process running on your computer (which it then compares against known cheat code).”

Some have compared the installation of Warden to Sony’s better known rootkit installation scandal for CDs. Warden is also growing in sophistication, and raising new concerns – initially it was available in up to 318 different permutations (to avoid detection), but its polymorphic code permit even higher numbers of variants which make it difficult to circumvent… which also makes it tougher to know exactly what the code is doing. Now others have responded by writing something called “Governor” which apparently “watches” the activity of Warden… things are getting complicated.

Now, I can’t fault Blizzard from wanting to prevent in-game cheating – certainly the the attacks against games like World of Warcraft are growing in sophistication, but Warden takes this technology arms race to an entirely new level. These hacks, and the attempts to curtail them are both extremely innovative – a result of the new security issues that many massively distributed systems have to contend with. Hopefully that innovation won’t be limited to just security features alone, and will also show up in future expansions to the game too.

Forbes published an interview with Rebecca Fannin today that delves into this exact topic with an acute focus on China, promoting her new book Silicon Dragon: How China is winning the tech race. In it, she argues that companies like Baidu and Alibaba foreshadow a new generation of Chinese start-ups that have moved beyond imitation and are competing based on new, home grown ideas and innovations. A few of the companies she highlights are Pingco (mobile messaging), Maxthon (browser), Oriental Wisdom (mobile financial services), and Lingtu (digital maps).

However, it is her other commentary that is the most interesting. Fannin notes that while it will take some time, China is emerging as the next Silicon Valley. Venture capital (she is the international editor of Asian Venture Capital Journal) is flowing in at an astonishing rate. She discusses the innovative nature that has always existed in China, that just happened to be buried by the Cultural Revolution and is now emerging again. And, of course, she highlights the two biggest problems China is facing on this front – lack of intellectual property protection, and corruption. Apparently when Alibaba was considering new business models, they narrowed it down to five – and eliminated four because of bribery concerns.

It’s quite an interesting interview, and while I haven’t read the book I certainly hope to soon. The link to China’s Invent-it-here syndrome is also worth a read, and if you want to really stay abreast of this topic the Chinalawblog is one of the best sources around – a truly amazing source of up-to-date information.

The very unfortunate John Sullivan was executed in for stealing intellectual property – a forged bank note worth about $1. Sure the news is about 200 years late (Sullivan’s execution occurred in 1798), but given that this occurred just two blocks from our office (where the plaque pictured below stands) I thought it’d be interesting to share.

Maybe we can make every October 11th (the date of John’s demise) intellectual property day. Any takers?

Piracy is so rampant in China, that it doesn’t make sense to waste energy, time and money fighting the inevitable. Nowadays, entire artist discographies can be downloaded on different technologies, such as torrents (let’s face it, record companies are fighting a losing battle). As described in a recent article on the BBC website, new revenue models are emerging that are less reliant on revenues generated by record sales and in many cases these models can be more lucrative than old models, with less work. Chinese artists are increasingly relying on commercial gigs to make most of their income, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship for sponsoring companies as well as artists. Where one Chinese artist used to make $2000 a month from music royalties and live shows in the UK, she made almost double that amount by singing one song at a commercial show. The company benefits by being associated with ‘cool, hip’ artists, while the artist benefits from the increased exposure and opportunities to perform for fans; especially given the difficulty scoring TV and radio time.

When did it become a good idea to force-feed an unfit business model down consumers’ throats? Especially since today’s customers are the most sophisticated customers in the history of consumerism; for all the different measures companies develop to stop the sharing and so-called ‘undesirable’ behaviour, there are armies of ‘hackers’ out there looking to crack these codes. Stop fighting it, accept your fate, and start looking for new ways to make money. Change is scary, but it isn’t always a bad thing. I think it’s time for a change.

GCBC is a insightful documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, and is directed by independent Danish directors Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. The film goes around the world, showing the changing attitudes toward art and culture in Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, the UK, and in the US. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers such as Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons, Tiamo and Anakata from The Pirate Bay, music producers, and controversial music artists such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse who, as we all know, created the Grey Album by mixing The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album.

Even MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) CEO Dan Glickman makes an appearance. He briefly comments on the MPAA’s involvement with the raid on The Pirate Bay. Glickman states that although he knows piracy will never be stopped, they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.

Amongst the most interesting segments include a trip to Russia to look at the rampant bootlegging that occurs there, the perspectives of the Nigerian film industry and the Techno Brega musical movement in Brazil, which has been using a business model for years that was originally considered to be pioneered by The Pixies, Metallica, and Phish back in 2004.

What becomes obvious progressively throughout the film is the death of the current business models used by the record industry and the lack of control which is becoming more prevalent in the current consumerist climate. The old vanguards are fighting to retain their revenue while people are endlessly re-using and recycling copyrighted material in order to create new art-forms.

I would highly recommend this light-hearted and neutral account of the current state of copyright to anyone. The link to download GCBC can be found here. Feel free to donate something to the makers of the documentary if you enjoy watching it.

A couple of items piqued my interest this week. This article describes how, for the first time, weekly album sales have fallen below 7 million and the #1 album by Alicia Keys has the second lowest sales for a top album in history. If I moved next week to Pitcairn Island, I might well be the best hockey player in town. Doesn’t mean that I have a decent wrist shot.

A more distressing article appeared in the Economist (and received wide play on the blogosphere) that discussed how free CDs do not appear to be a good enought deal. From the article:

… EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.