I suppose it was only a matter of time before something like this came along and I have been anxiously waiting to see how this one pans out. Launched in July, on seemingly razor-thin legal ice, it appears that beta site mygazines is still alive and kicking (not to mention enjoying the spotlight gained from a widespread AP news release).
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
Late last week, newly-famed MIT students Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa were court-ordered to cancel their Sunday presentation entitled “Anatomy of a Subway Hack” at DEF CON , the world’s largest hacker conference. The banned presentation highlighted security weaknesses in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s fare system that would potentially allow enterprising individuals with the appropriate technology and process (as intricately outlined in the presentation) to add monetary value to their existing CharlieCard or CharlieTicket to receive free transportation.
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.”
Scrabulous has, of course, been removed from Facebook. It seems that Hasbro had some problem with EXACTLY copying Scrabble. Couldn’t they make the J worth 7 instead or something?
Anyway, since it was such a big hit (one of the most popular Facebook applications), its removal caused a fair amount of angst. See here, here, and here for the standard protest groups.
Well, it’s back! Wordscraper provides the Scrabulous experience…and it’s no longer an exact duplicate of Scrabble. There are some key differences…for example, the tiles are no longer square, they are round(ish).
Somehow, I think Hasbro might still find some similarities. Reminds me of a classic scene from a 80s movie where the proprietor of McDowell’s restaurant describes the differences between his establishment and the Golden Arches.
Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
In the spirit of a blatent pandering for comments healthy competition, the first person to identify the movie and tell which two future Academy Award winners appeared in cameos wins an audio version of Wikinomics narrated by the fabulous Alan Sklar.
A darling of the Wikinomics blog (1,2,3), Radiohead has impressed before, and with their latest video for House of Cards, they do so again. Maintaining their promise not to make any conventional music videos for their anything but conventionally released In Rainbows, the band’s latest video was made using Geometric Informatics and LIDAR (think radar, but with light) technology normally reserved for geographic mapping and catching speeding cars, among other things.
Interesting story in the Wall St. Journal about language training company Rosetta Stone suing a competitor who has bought Google Ad words that encourage users to visit sites such as “Don’t Buy Rosetta Software,” and “Rosetta Spanish a Scam?”
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.
Tech companies have long suffered from patent trolls: companies that bulk-buy cheap, unused patents from bankrupt companies, wait until someone becomes successful at doing something similar, and then launch a frivolous infringement suit that gets settled out of court. Well now the big tech companies are teaming up to fight back. Verizon, Google, Cisco, HP, Ericsson, and others have formed Allied Security Trust (AST): a venture that will buy-up patents that members might be interested in using down-the-road.
Last week, YouTube introduced Screening Room: a program that broadcasts independent films on YouTube and gives their creators a majority share of the ad revenue generated. This is a fantastic idea, and one that I believe will be central to the 21st century business model for media. I am anxious to see what the Wikinomics community has to say about this, but let me share a few of my observations.
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?
How Does America’s PASTime Fare in the World of Wikinomics?
Hello Wikinomics blog readers! I’m a new summer student with the Wikinomics team. I have decided to do things a little differently and profile a different business each week and grade them through the Wikinomics Report Card™. I will try to focus mainly on older businesses and organizations and analyze how they are utilizing the wikinomics principles such as being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Background: Major League Baseball (MLB) was originally founded in 1876 and the current structure of the American League and National League has existed since 1903. Baseball is a game ingrained in American culture, and is frequently referred to as America’s pastime. Although attendance has grown steadily since the league’s inception (ignoring strikes and lockouts), the game is slowly fading away from the public consciousness.
Here’s an interesting little story from TorrentFreak - when Mr. Suitcase published an album last year, he started receiving payments from Stim (the Swedish Performing Rights Society), which is funded via a tax on all recordable media in Sweden. This is often referred to as the “Pirate Tax”, as it is designed to compensate artists for having their creative output “stolen” in various ways. To quote Mr. Suitcase on how he responded:
“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.”
Few issues can stir the Net Generation more than the seemingly unexciting subject of copyright law. Last Thursday the Government of Canada introduced a new copyright bill that will potentially severely restrict the use of digital content. The blogosphere was alight as were the comment sections of the news stories that reported on the bill. Most remarkably, the Facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada”, which has become a platform for protest, gained over 20000 new members in the three days since the bill was introduced.
The interesting part is that the bill has spurred young people to turn to more traditional means of political activism. One young person wrote “Besides voting, I’ve never taken action politically, but I’ve now got a face-to-face meeting set up with Guy Lauzon, our MP for on the 24th. He’ll know first-hand that this bill, if passed, will cause him to lose votes.” The website “Copyright for Canadians” allows people to automatically email their local Member of Parliament with their concerns – 6500 have already done so. Some think that the issue has the potential to bring down the government.
The political activism in opposition to the bill is proof that the Net Generation is not as apathetic as certain critics seem to believe. The key is that this issue is at the core of the Net Generation’s lifestyle. Most realize that if the harsher aspects of the copyright bill were to be implemented any young person with an iPod or MP3s on their computer would become a criminal overnight. It seems that every generation enters the political stage for the first time by adopting an issue important to it. For instance, the Baby Boomers opposed the war in Vietnam during the time of the draft. Although digital rights are not nearly as significant as a war, it will be interesting to see if the issue will become the first that the Net Generation adopts as its own.
Mashable has a post up on a new, crowdsourced film project: Lost Zombies. The idea is that people from all over the world will make their own zombie home videos, and send them in, the best clips will be compiled into a feature length doc/mockumentary.
Lost Zombies hopes to compile all the proof of zombie existence that people submit from around the world, create a feature length documentary film, and ultimately “…educate the world’s population of the reality of zombies and the potential, if not imminent, zombie apocalypse.”
Here’s the introduction/trailer, watch out, there’s blood and foul language:
This looks like it could be entertaining, and it bridges the gap between the user generated media and Hollywood’s go at doing the same that I wrote about earlier.
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!
A very interesting project garnering massive attention online is brandtags.net, set up by Noah Brier. The site features countless images of brand trademarks and asks users to input the first word or sentence that comes to mind upon viewing each logo. Answers are then compiled to create tag clouds reflecting the magnitude of each response.
With over 600,000 responses in 12 days, the site’s success has come as a huge surprise to Brier and it is a great example of mass collaboration to leverage collective “intelligence”. The project presents a great opportunity for progressive organizations to receive unfiltered feedback (and in many cases, reality checks). Check out the site yourself to see how your perceptions compare with the masses’.
It can be argued that fashion is one of the most innovative industries in the world. New styles come out four times a year and stores such as Zara and Forever 21 can design, produce and distribute a new garment in as little as 15 days. However, unlike many other creative industries, fashion designers have had very little intellectual property protection. Although this may be disputed by our friends in the music industry, it seems that the lack of IP protection may have actually increased the pace of innovation as opposed to ruining the industry altogether.
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.
How much of a premium would you pay for unlimited legal music downloads?
Alright, so the title is an obvious exaggeration, but it raises an interesting question - How much would you pay for an iPod or iPhone with unlimited access to the entire iTunes catalogue? That seems to be one of the questions being kicked around by our Cupertino, CA friends these days. In an effort to beat (or at least match) Nokia’s launch of their “comes with music” line of mobile devices, Apple appears to be in negotiations to deliver a line of premium iPod and/or iPhones that would be bundled with unlimited access to all available iTunes music.
Although there are many things China can learn from its North American counterpart in this new world economy, there’s at least one thing North Americans can learn from the Chinese.
China has developed a reputation for bootleg products (CD’s, DVDs, software etc.). So here’s a crazy thought, instead of refusing to change and opting to take measures such as suing their customers, or coming up with crazy DRM policies…. the Chinese music industry is – adapting. Albeit, not by choice, Chinese record companies have given up trying to fight piracy like their European and American counterparts and instead, are looking at different business models.
I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across this movie on the internet. A little behind the ball on this one, Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary originally created for the Danish National Broadcasting Television network that was eventually released for free on the internet in 2007. It first appeared on The Pirate Bay and then was officially released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
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.
Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Remember the good ol’ days? I sure do, and so does my “favourite” organization – the MPAA, for they seem to still be living in this fabled period of time…
This post was inspired by the coincidence of two pieces of related news that really got my attention yesterday – the admission of a very significant error by the MPAA and a blog post that I read, highlighting the potential for an increasingly affected Net Generation to exert their influence in the next Canadian federal election.
In a report released Tuesday, the MPAA revealed that a major statistic from its groundbreaking 2005 study proclaiming that college students were stealing nearly half of their industry’s revenue was wrong – nearly 300% wrong. The original report claimed that 44% of the motion picture industry’s domestic revenue losses were a result of illegal downloading over campuses’ high speed networks. While skeptics knew that 44% seemed quite high, students were an easy target, and the study was used to encourage (and almost legally mandate) that colleges across the US beef up their anti-piracy efforts. Yesterday’s release proves that the skeptics were right and that such gaping losses were NOT caused by student downloads (but rather by a stone-aged business model – sorry, I couldn’t resist interjecting my two cents) and that the true figure is actually closer to 15%, with “human error” to blame for the discrepancy.
While the MPAA data are based on US figures, the issue of campus downloading and piracy is also hotly-contested in Canada, and it has the potential to significantly influence the next federal election, as Michael Geist points out in his recent post. Geist highlights what he calls the Copyright MPs (Members of Parliament) – MPs who won their last election by a margin of less than 10% and whose riding is home to a university. The table below illustrates the ten closest such MPs:
Amid the hype of product launches and keynote addresses at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, AT&T confirmed yesterday that it is actively seeking the tools to filter Internet traffic at the network level, in an effort to manage online piracy of copyrighted material.This confirms month-old speculation of the telecom giant’s efforts to manage subscribers’ web usage and it is the latest threat to net neutrality.
Following in the familiar footsteps of competitor Comcast, AT&T cited an “overwhelming” and “unacceptable” volume of peer-to-peer online traffic sharing copyrighted materials as the impetus for action. Senior vice president, external & legal affairs, Jeff Cicconi revealed that AT&T is “very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this.”Partnering with firms such as Vobile, creator of VideoDNA, would allow Internet Service Providers to eliminate copyrighted material traffic, thereby eliminating what some estimates peg at up to 40% of traffic, freeing up bandwidth and nearly doubling capacity (and potential paying subscribers) without additional bandwidth investment.
While legal experts have chimed in on the (il)legality of the telecoms’ move towards filtering web traffic, implementation by AT&T could be the first step in a trend that would see net neutrality become an idealistic reverie as other ISPs follow suit.Cicconi acknowledges that whatever actions are taken “must pass muster with consumers” and in a perfect world consumers would maintain the power to choose an ISP that fit their needs (and values).In reality, this power would only hold true as long as ISPs without filtering exist, but unless (or hopefully until) such filtering is deemed beyond the legal rights of ISPs, subscribers are likely to face an impending clampdown on their Internet freedom - Stay tuned.
(For those avid blog readers, this move would make ISPs the new emperor Palpatine on the Brendan Peat hierarchy for piracy.)
Is there a hierarchy for piracy for those in the Net Generation? A visit to torrentspy, the pirate bay or any other torrent search site and you will find a plethora of hacked, cracked and pirated software. This generation has grown up in a digital world that has seen the creation of Napster, experienced the RIAA suing children and the use of invasive DRM technologies (which oddly enough only hampers those who actually legally obtain their media).
Technology and old business models have collided and by most accounts the media giants have responded poorly. In many cases still refusing to accept that the world is changing and business models needs to change and adapt along with it. Does this mean we should ignore copyright and condone piracy, no, but it doesn’t mean that we should continue down the path we have been on either.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
