One of the most dangerous politicians in the United States – that’s what CNET calls Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden. What they are talking about is Biden’s relentless attacks on internet liberty, and the threat that he thereby poses to the evolution of technology. Now that the dust has settled and we have sobered up after celebrating the Obama victory, the Biden threat has become very real. Among other things, he has backed proposals like outlawing region free DVD-players, forcing internet providers to hunt “pirates”, legalizing the entertainment industry’s use of spyware and trojans, and, not least, having the state finance the film industry’s court costs when sueing file sharing teenagers(!).
I would love to say that this gives us Swedes a competitive advantage as a nation, but the problem is that internet innovation is collaborative and spans the entire world. If one nation pours gravel in the machinery, everybody suffers. Especially if that nation is the world’s leading internet nation.
On the positive side, these repressive policies always lead to rebellion and creativity. Philip Zimmermann’s wildly successful PGP-encryption was for example created to protect private communication from a law proposed by none other that Joe Biden himself. PGP is known to have helped dissidents in oppressed nations communicate freely, but also to have put terrorist communication in stealth mode. Funny what a little oppression can lead to. My guess is that we’ll now go into innovation mode again and figure out some really sophisticated stealth file sharing technology. But really, I’d much rather see that we humans would innovate to make the world a better place than to fight oppression. It feels more constructive somehow. Innovation to avoid legislation has a treadmill ring to it.
A very intelligent person figured out that it’s hard to use laws like IPRED to attack file sharers if you can’t prove that the person responsible for the internet connection is the person responsible for, say, the shared MP3. The same intelligent person thus opened up her WIFI-base station for anyone to use. And she gave it a name: IPREDIA.
The same thing can be done by anybody as a statement against the internet repressionists, and as this spreads incredible value is created since they are in fact creating an open nation of internet connections as they go, a nation called IPREDIA.
So the effect is threefold:
1. They protect themselves from the IPRED-law.
2. They provide value for other people.
3. They spread the word.
Wow.
This is in fact a perfect recipe for the type of communication that I am so in love with. I want to hire this little genious. No resumé needed. And we’ll pay the fee to send it off to Cannes.
Im out in the sailboat reading a couple of newspapers from yesterday and the day before. A couple of different articles caught my eye. One of them is by Thomas E Patterson, media researcher at Harvard university. In the article, he talks about the future of the newspapers, or rather the production of news in general. Print media is in a crisis, more so in the US than in Sweden, but it is only a matter of time before we have the same situation here. One of his points is that quality news reporting is produced by the newspapers, and thus the newspaper crisis is really a crisis not so much for the papers but for the production of news in general and ultimately for our democracy.
Well – perhaps. But something tells me that a world of information liberty and low cost for production and distribution should tell a different story than that of LESS quality information. From a birds eye perspective it just doesn’t make sense that removing the need for expensive equipment and institutional organization should lower quality of the output. What WOULD have this effect is if the demand for such quality information is really much lower than what we have believed earlier, and that people have just read quality news because it was the only product available. If this is the case, lower quality news reporting will be the inevitable outcome. It’s just evolution. But I find that hard to believe. Sure, perhaps we’ll have a period of bad news reporting, people taking advantage of this, causing for example democracy trouble, but as long as we keep the internet free and uncensored, this pendulum will swing back. It always does. Sometimes violently. Let’s hope that this will not be the case, but I think the real danger isn’t the death of an outdated business model, but legislation threatening internet liberty, such as the the Swedish FRA- and IPRED-laws and the French HADOPI variety.
At the Esomar WM3 Conference the other day, I got a question about copyright: “But what about the rights of the artists? Do they not have the right to make money off of their work?”
My answer was that the business model needs to change in a way so that digitally replicable products are considered marketing fot the non-replicable ones.
But an even better answer is this one: Prosecuting the Pirate Bay and other open networks will not stop file sharing, but push it underground. And while the people who want to make money off of the artists spend their time and money on these trials, they DON’T spend their time innovating new business models and services. THAT will ensure that artists will have a hard time making a living.
So, yes, I think that artists should definitely be able to make a living off of their work, but the record labels, publishers, and studios are the ones NOT stepping up to the plate.
I encourage everyone to cut out and frame today’s editorial in DN. It’s one of the strangest editorials I have read in a newspaper of a democratic country, and it will probably be worth money some day. Since it was an editorial, I actually considered cancelling my subscription. But then I read this article, which is more balanced and actually shows quite clearly a couple of interesting points.
Henrik Pontén’s quote is, for example, really entertaining. Especially when he claims that this verdict will lead to “reasonable content” on the web.
We can see in this article how this is a war between conservatives and innovators. Researchers are sceptical to these controlling behaviors, while corporations making money off of the old system want to retain the status quo. I guess one can’t blaim them. Humans are inherently afraid of change.
More interestingly, Viasat’s CEO Hans Skarplöth, whom I have discussed here earlier, is in this article as well, calling the false sense of security derived from this verdict and the IPRED-law “naive”. Brand-wise we can now start to see one of the big winners, and I think that Viasat’s moral courage will be in the marketing textbooks and lectures of the future. As will the ruined brand name Metallica.
This quote makes me think of the one where Ines Uusman said (in 1996) that “the Internet is a fad that will blow over” – one of the most embarrassing quotes ever. And since Ines didn’t actually say that, Henrik is now a good candidate for the most embarrassing quote ever.
You’ve got it all backwards I believe. The big losers today are the creatives. And the innovators. And all of us who want to create a better and richer cultural future.
Anyway. Now, Henrik, that you have your sugar rush moment, why don’t you comment on this post and explain it to me?
Guilty. One year in jail and a 30 000 000 SEK fine.
We will all blush looking back at this day. Sweden has now officially shown to the world that we don’t understand the big picture of communication infrastructure and behavior. We have shown that we don’t understand the inevitable future, but only look in the rearview mirror. This verdict is not good for anyone. It’s perhaps a quick sugar fix for record industry egos, but little more. Nothing good will come out of it.
I’m blushing already, and I will probably enjoy reading these posts in a couple of years when I can re-tag them “I Told You So”.
In about an hour we will know the verdict in the Pirate Bay-trials. Let’s hope that people are being smart about this. Because a guilty verdict would not be good for anyone. Especially not for art and artists.
A guilty verdict would do little to boost sales. I believe we’ll see the opposite result. Darknets and stealth services (like Pirate Bay’s own would evolve quickly. Innovation incentives in the legal realm would be smaller. We would do little but slowing down inevitable change. From a wider perspective, it is just not intelligent.
If they are found not guilty however, it will be considered a future oriented statement. One that would benefit artists, culture, our country, and eventually the world. The music industry will have to come up with something better and more useful than Pirate Bay, and to be honest, they already have. Though Spotify would perhaps need some healthy competition. Spotify is just one small step, but it is a step in the right direction. This type of evolution is where we are going. A guilty verdict would just make us look dumb. Especially in the history books.
From the angle of the artist, nobody has put it better than Paulo Coelho: “I didn’t start writing to get rich, I started writing to get read”.
Finally it happened. Spotify released libspotify, thereby making it possible to develop third party applications to interact with the Spotify platform. I know we’ve all been talking about it since the start, and that it has been a long time ambition, but we were never quite sure if they would make the move or when. And now it’s here. It’s a big day.
Besides being a very cool display of culture to us nerds, it is also sound for other reasons. If we look at the Twitter case for example, the avalanche of third party software developed for Twitter is a big reason for Twitter’s success. Also, Spotify has clearly stated that they want to be a music platform – not a community, or a music recommendation service. And now, they don’t have to. While there have been different tweeks before, like Scrobblify, we will now see magic happening with Last FM, Facebook, Twitter, and probably a gazillion other services that I can’t even begin to imagine right now.
This is the future of music. We will laugh at The Pirate Bay trials and IPRED before long. Mark my words.
We are now starting to see the effects of the Swedish IPRED-law, which states that copyright holders can go after individuals downloading protected content. Apparently, Swedish internet traffic has now dropped by nearly half. And since when is that a good thing? I thought traffic was valuable?
I believe that you can never be quite certain when you make predictions about the future, but in this case I think that the case is quite clear, and that we can now see the evidence emerging.
But first off, I want to be very clear that I am on the side of artists and other creators of value. I have strong opinions about this subject, but they are all about realism. Not about anarchism.
What the IPRED-law is doing is to protect an outdated business model for music, motion pictures, and other content. It’s implementation will remove incentives for product- and business model development like for example Spotify.
What’s worse, however, is that it directs valuable resources to evil forces, such as terrorists and criminals. Why? Well, a lot of people care about music and film. Much more people, in fact, than are criminals and terrorists. And thus there is a broad base for recruiting creatives to help keep music, film and other content free. If we go after file sharing individuals using the IPRED-law, there will be strong incentives to develop stealth file sharing software, and a large and powerful community engaging in it. We will quickly see increasingly sofisticated software of this type appearing and being deployed. With file sharing, we’ll be back to where we started, but criminals and terrorists will have brand new fast stealth tools which they would never have had the resources to develop themselves. And even if this if perhaps an exagerrated fear (there is after all already great stealth services out there, as well as bad guys using them), it clearly shows that this law will be completely useless very soon because of people learning to use these stealth services.
And what about open wireless networks? Will they all disappear now? That will not make brands trying to utilize IPRED very popular, and will actually damage the country’s progress towards connectedness. Read on.
Because another angle is the branding angle. And here it becomes very interesting when opening todays newspaper DN (unfortunately not linkable yet). In one article you can read about how people are boycotting the film- and music industries. Here are some examples of quotes from the public cited in the article:
“I’m completely going to boycott the music- and film industry now. Earlier, I’ve spent an average of 1000kr (ca $100) per month on cinema, DVDs, concerts and CDs. That will now end. All this will be cancelled”.
Or this one from a middle age person:
“I’ve never file shared in my life, but now I have to if only to show them that they can’t scare us. Let’s fight to protect our last rights. I have just downloaded file sharing software and figured out how it works. This will be fun”.
Or this interesting one:
“Let’s demand a seal for artists entirely without association with the major labels”. Now wouldn’t that be interesting.
Like I wrote the other day, we can already see smart companies, like Viasat for example, taking advantage of this, publicly promising NEVER to have anything to do with the IPRED-law, and thereby end up in the same future oriented category as for example Spotify.
If I were a copyright holder today I would think once, twice, and three times before even thinking about using this law. It may very well cost you your brand.
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