Month: December 2007

There are lots of ways to get on Digg — and one of the best, as many people know by now, is to mention Digg. Better still, write a cute song about it. And better even than that, be a cute girl and play the song you wrote about Digg on a guitar, with your cute friends in the background. Kina Grannis has done all of those things, and on top of that she has a great voice too. She’s in the running for a SuperBowl contest, according to her website. This one has front page written all over it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLLRsn_nr6s&rel=1&w=425&h=355]

From various sources comes the news that Mozilla is testing a prototype of a service called Weave, a kind of browser-to-cloud feature in which users can synchronize their bookmarks and other info from Firefox to a remote server somewhere — although most descriptions don’t really make it clear where these servers are located or who operates them. Will Mozilla be using Amazon’s S3, one of several cloud-computing services the online retailer has launched over the past year or so? That’s not clear.

It seems like everyone is moving in the direction of desktop-to-cloud synchronizing, or the blurring of borders between online and offline. Google has Google Gears, which lets you synchronize your Google Reader RSS feeds, and Zoho has synchronizing features for its online document-editing and spreadsheet tools (which Google will presumably be adding to its Google Docs services soon). Google has had a rudimentary bookmark-sync tool for awhile now, and Opera recently added one to its browser. Where will Mozilla’s Weave sit in this landscape of tools?

More importantly, are we going to have several competing standards for this kind of syncing, or is everyone going to agree to use open-source methods such as FOAF and OpenID and all that other semantic Web goodness? I would hope for the latter. If there’s anything worse than having to type the exact same personal info into half a dozen social networks, it’s having to replace all your bookmarks everytime you get a new machine. Synchronizing would be a huge boon — and Mozilla says it will be encrypting the data too, which is another plus.

Due to a surfeit of Christmas parties, I missed much of the Fake Steve Jobs takedown frenzy, in which the writer — otherwise known as Daniel Lyons of Forbes — claimed in a series of posts that Apple was trying to shut down his blog. I realize it’s easy for me to claim that I saw through the whole thing, since it’s all over now, but I must admit that even when I saw the headlines I had a suspicion we were being played like a prize trout.

I’m not sure I would describe Fake Steve’s trolling for sympathy as “brilliant,” as my friend Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has, but it’s obvious Lyons knew he could get a huge amount of mileage out of such a rumour in the slow-news runup to Christmas. Fake Steve has continued to try and play the game, but his latest post — in which he describes an Apple lawyer offering him $500,000 to close the blog, and refers to his lawyer as Tony Clifton — is just too hard to believe.

First of all, there’s no way he would have been offered that much, and the addition of Tony Clifton as his lawyer is the capper, since that was the name of an alter ego character that comedian Andy Kaufman used. There’s a picture of Kaufman in the post too, getting beaten up by a female wrestler (some of his favourite gags involved wrestlers, including an infamous David Letterman appearance).

I’ll give Scoble some credit — he caught on fairly quickly, and so did Engadget, which pointed out that all the talk about Apple going after Lyons personally didn’t make much sense, considering he is employed by Forbes. Other skeptics included Steven Hodson of Winextra, as well as Shel Israel and to some extent ParisLemon. But it took others awhile to get the joke, including my friend Karoli and James Robertson (at least briefly).

A desperate cry for attention on Fake Steve’s part? I wonder. For awhile now I’ve been wondering how much longer FS could continue, now that everyone is in on the joke. Can a blog based on satire continue to work once everyone knows who’s behind it? I’m not sure. But when you have to resort to lashing out at the likes of yours truly — as FS did when I wrote my Think Secret post — maybe it’s time to turn out the lights.

(this is cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

As the strike by Hollywood TV and movie writers drags on, one question that keeps popping up is whether the strike is a boon for online content. The short answer is that it’s impossible to say for sure. Will the strike be one of those turning points for online media, as the previous strike in 1988 was for reality TV and satellite programming? No one knows. But one thing is pretty clear: writers like to write, and if they can’t write for television or movies then they will write for the Web.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, several writers have signed on to create a Web-based comedy series for Worldwide Biggies, a digital studio run by former MTV Networks executive Albie Hecht, the creator of Spike TV. The writers have experience working on shows such as “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” VH1’s “Best Week Ever,” and “Saturday Night Live.” They will share in the revenue from the series, which Hecht said could be posted on a dedicated site or distributed through a portal.

The report also mentions that former News Corp. executive Ross Levinsohn has discussed funding writers who are on strike but want to do online projects, through a venture Levinsohn has called Velocity Interactive Corp., which he co-founded with former AOL head Jonathan Miller and recently merged with a venture capital firm called ComVentures.

On his investment blog, hedge-fund manager Barry Ritholtz wrote recently that the strike could be a tipping point, and that Silicon Valley VCs could see it as an opportunity to start getting into the content business. As he puts it: “The TV studios have already lost. The VCs will find a business model that works on the cheap, and begin competing with the studios, even if the strike is settled tomorrow. I suspect that Television, as we know it, is now officially over.”

Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put forward a similar theory on his blog recently, first in a post entitled Suicide by Strike and then in a follow-up post called Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s Image. In Andreessen’s view, the arrival of the Web means (as it has for the music industry) that while distribution costs have fallen virtually to zero, production costs have also fallen dramatically, and that means the number of potential competitors is theoretically limitless. Whether that increases or decreases the amount of quality content out there is another question, of course.

A recent L.A. Times piece looked at a number of writers who have been pursuing a Web strategy as a way of keeping their creative juices flowing — and also of increasing the amount of creative and financial control they have, another of Andreessen’s major themes — including Aaron Mendelsohn, co-creator of the Air Bud movies. Groups of like-minded artists have formed and are looking for venture financing, using a model not unlike the original United Artists studio in the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin and several other prominent stars.

Funny or Die, a comedy-video portal founded by SNL star Will Ferrell that now includes content from filmmaker Judd Apatow and others, recently got $15-million in funding from several venture capital groups, although a profile in Portfolio magazine pointed out that the site has yet to achieve the same amount of traffic its first hit (Ferrell’s Landlord sketch) achieved. Some skeptics, meanwhile, have argued that Web content isn’t going to replace TV content anytime soon, for a number of reasons.

After having his account suspended for what YouTube said was a history of repeated copyright violations, uber celebrity-blogger Perez Hilton has announced that he is pulling all of his videos from the site and will henceforth only be posting them to perezhilton.com. YouTube says that it is merely complying with the rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by blocking a known copyright infringer — but is its behaviour towards Perez part of its ongoing war with Viacom?

As CNET points out, many of the copyright complaints about Hilton have come from entertainment giant Viacom, and part of why the Google-owned site might be a little hyper-sensitive about copyright infringement is the ongoing $1-billion lawsuit launched by Viacom against YouTube for just that kind of thing. It’s more than a little ironic, then, that Viacom is also the parent company of VH1, the entertainment channel that owns the rights to Perez Hilton’s TV show, and would presumably be interested in the publicity that his videos might draw on YouTube.

After phone calls back and forth from lawyers, YouTube reinstated Hilton’s account, but by then he had already decided to pull his videos and stick to his own site from now on. But the big question is this: was Google beating up on Perez as a way of sending a message to Viacom about the cost of winning its war? Or maybe it was just trying to do the right thing 🙂

A number of people, including Nick Ciarelli’s lawyer and my friend Rob Hyndman, are looking at the closure of ThinkSecret a little differently than I did yesterday (in a post that got me a smackdown from no less than Fake Steve Jobs himself — thanks for crashing my blog, FS). In effect, they seem to be saying: Why all the fuss? So maybe Nick gets some cash, maybe Apple pays his legal costs, then he moves on to his Harvard studies and everyone goes home happy. Where’s the harm?

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying free speech died along with Think Secret, and I’m glad that Nick didn’t have to reveal any of his sources. That’s a win. And I think it’s great if he got some money and could move on with his life. But that doesn’t mean Apple should get a free pass for hounding him and his website for the last three years, and for being instrumental in getting him to shut Think Secret down. Maybe he was going to close it anyway, as he has suggested in interviews, but that still isn’t the point.

The point (or at least one of them) is that if Microsoft or any other large company did what Apple has done, and badgered some 18-year-old kid to the point where he decided to just take the money and run, there would be howls of protest up and down the blogosphere. But because it’s Apple, I think there’s a tendency to take the company’s side. And would Nick have decided to close his site and move on if the company hadn’t pursued him so tenaciously? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s possible that he decided fighting a $180-billion company just wasn’t worth it.

Would it be okay if Apple paid Walt Mossberg to stop writing about it? What if some other journalist was the subject of a bunch of lawsuits, and he agreed to stop writing about the company in return for cash, or in return for his legal costs being paid? Would we be celebrating that, and congratulating him for cutting a good deal? I doubt it. Maybe the only thing that differentiates bloggers and journalists is a better legal department and a corporate entity backing them up that is willing and able to fight a lawsuit.

Update:

A commenter here points to a blog post from a writer in Washington who argues that it’s a good thing that Apple hounded Think Secret into shutting down because journalists need to be kept on a short leash, and bloggers in particular “need to be chilled” — because journalism’s “moral compass needs to be un-stuck” by the occasional lawsuit. Boy, it sure is a good thing that Apple sued then, isn’t it? I guess I should be thanking Steve Jobs for keeping us “moral” then. What a load of crap.

Not content with helping to destabilize the traditional record business, Radiohead has whipped up a widget featuring some of their videos, music and news (using Clearspring’s widget-making service). I’ve embedded it below, and you can click on the menu and get your own. According to Clearspring, almost 1,500 people have downloaded it. In other Radiohead and music-industry news, if you haven’t seen it already be sure to check out the recent interview between David Byrne and Thom Yorke in Wired magazine. Definitely worth the read.

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/476195e50dfcd954/476ae5ee4da5743e

Erick Schonfeld is right about the debate that has been sparked by photographer Lane Hartwell and her decision to file a DMCA takedown notice against YouTube, in order to have a video removed that had a photo of hers in it (for less than a second), a debate that I think I helped in some small way to spark — for better or worse — with this post, which got almost 100 comments, and a more recent follow-up.

In his post at TechCrunch, Erick makes the point that this is not just about what Lane did, or whether the guys in the band Richter Scales should have been a little nicer when she asked them to remove her photo. Lane seems like a nice person — she should, after all, since she’s Canadian 🙂 But the principle of fair use continues to be tested in cases just like this, and they are just going to keep on coming.

So what if Richter Scales had to remove the photo, you might say. Big deal. And so what if they had to remove a bunch of the other photos, which the photographers involved are also pissed about, according to a recent post at PDNPulse. And so what if Lane and some of those other artists ask Richter Scales to pay them for the use of their work. So a stupid video mashup from some unknown band ceases to exist.

The problem is that the ability to blend media of all kinds — text, photos, video — is one of the most powerful things that the Internet and new media have brought us. Yes, the Richter Scales is just a goofy sendup of the Valley. But what about other videos for other purposes? The principle of fair use for artistic purposes and the purposes of commentary is being chipped away gradually, and each time a DMCA takedown is issued another chip falls.

In the comments on my post and those elsewhere, you can see supporters of Ms. Hartwell — and of the artists’ apparently inalienable right to control every speck of their creation no matter where it appears or for what purpose — slicing and dicing fair use until it barely exists at all. Richter Scales’ work wasn’t a direct parody of her photo, so it doesn’t qualify; it’s the whole photo, so it doesn’t qualify (how do you use an excerpt of a photo?); it was made for a band, who might one day sell a CD, so it doesn’t qualify.

And now, Ms. Hartwell tells CNET that she doesn’t want to say how much she has invoiced the band for, but she used a popular photo-management tool called FotoQuote, and priced it based on “usage, the market where the photograph is to be used and various other factors.” So how much does less than a single second worth of looking at a photo cost? I don’t have FotoQuote, so I don’t know. The mind boggles.

The Apple rumour site Think Secret has posted a note saying that it has reached a settlement with Apple over the lawsuit the computer company filed against it for leaking company secrets, and that it is “a positive solution for both sides.” No doubt any kind of settlement that doesn’t involve millions of dollars or jail time is a relief for Nick Ciarelli — the Harvard student who ran the site and has been hounded by Apple for several years now — but I fail to see how it’s positive for anyone.

This case is separate from another case involving bloggers and company secrets, in which Apple tried to get PowerPage, AppleInsider and Think Secret to reveal the names of the sources they got their information from. In that case, a lower court ruled that the bloggers weren’t protected by California’s “journalist shield” law, and that they would have to turn over the information — but an appeals court disagreed, saying they were entitled to the same protection as journalists.

Think Secret was sued separately for divulging trade secrets — and while the site didn’t have to turn over the names of its sources, it has still been forced to shut down. Meanwhile, Apple comes off looking like some power-crazed South American dictator, the kind who can’t stand it when the media reveal government secrets and so arrests the entire press corps. I know that keeping secrets and then revealing them to an adoring public at Macworld is a time-honoured Jobs tradition, but this is ridiculous.

As Mike Masnick notes at Techdirt, this will have a chilling effect on journalists — and I’m including publications like Think Secret and Apple Insider in that description. Apple should be ashamed of itself. My blogging friend Rex Hammock has a moving tribute to Think Secret here.

Update:

Ars Technica has a good overview of the case and those that preceded it — and according to the EFF, Nick Ciarelli is pretty happy with the settlement (which the EFF suggests Apple was in danger of losing). If he got a half-decent settlement, then I’m glad. But I still think it sends the wrong message to shut the site down.

Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has the 411 on a new feature on Facebook — everyone’s social-networking walled garden of choice, it seems. The site now allows you to create (gasp) lists of friends, and then easily send messages to one list or another (don’t worry, no one will see whether you’ve put your boss or your high-school pal on the “Mostly Ignore” list). This comes along just as Mark Cuban is wrestling with how to rank his 5,000 friends — so now he can create three lists: people more important than me (a small list, I’m sure); people as important as me (also small, I would imagine); and everyone else. Josh Catone at Read/Write Web is right though — the new feature needs privacy settings built in.

At the risk of beating an already unrecognizable horse even further into the ground, I see that there’s a new “Bubble” video from the band Richter Scales available, with the offending image of Owen Thomas — the photo that Lane Hartwell filed a DMCA takedown notice about, forcing YouTube to remove the video — replaced by one of Kara Swisher from All Things D.

So is the whole sordid affair over, finally? Not really. Although the band has added credits for all of the images, apparently that’s not enough for Ms. Hartwell. She says she wasn’t able to come to an agreement with the band because they refused to pay her for the photo, although she doesn’t say how much she was asking for. She says she was planning to use the money to pay her legal costs and then donate the rest to charity.

Contrary to what some have suggested in comments on my previous posts (here and here) I don’t wish Ms. Hartwell any ill will, and I can see how she would be irritated that people keep taking her photos. But that doesn’t change the fact that what she did was wrong, and asking for money is even wronger. So the video got a million views on YouTube — so what? A startled prairie dog got 10 times that many.

If you want to read my thoughts in more detail, please have a look at one or both of my previous posts — and read the comments too, because there are some good ones (and some not-so-good ones) in there. In a nutshell, I think Ms. Hartwell’s actions are part of a trend that is chipping away at the principles of “fair use” and creating the impression that copyright law’s sole purpose is to act as a weapon for artists and content creators to police any use of their content, anywhere, for any purpose.

A photo that has been previously published and appears for less than a second in a video satirizing (in part) the subject of that video is fair use, plain and simple. Richter Scales doesn’t owe Ms. Hartwell a penny. Would it have been better if they had asked for permission or given credit? Yes. In their post on the subject, they say they tried to contact the photographer, but she was too busy filing a DMCA takedown notice.

There’s a good analysis of the issues behind this event at Plagiarism Today, and Chilling Effects has a good overview of fair use.

So a survey by NPD shows that only a tiny fraction of people have ever heard of Web-based document management tools such as Google Docs, and an even tinier fraction have ever used them. Does this really surprise anyone? Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Watch says “RIP, Web 2.0 Office Suite” — but given the title of his blog, that’s hardly surprising either. Presumably, Joe would like us to believe that the Web is no threat to Microsoft, that Live Office will rule the world, and so forth.

Does anyone remember when no one had ever heard of Firefox? I do. It’s still a relatively small proportion of the browsers out there, but it’s growing. Anyone remember when Facebook was virtually unknown outside university campuses? I do. Obviously, Google Docs is no Facebook — but the phenomenon of Web-based document management is not a fad, and I think it’s a little early in the game to be writing obituaries for something that has only been around for a year or so.

So a majority of people have never heard of Google Docs, and are happy to use Microsoft Office for everything. So what? A majority of people still search in vain for the “any” key on their keyboard when installing software. What does that prove? Nothing. Microsoft will likely continue to dominate the office software market, just as it does the OS market — but that’s not where the action is, and not where the future is.

One of the reasons I’ve got my knickers in a twist over copyright and fair use — see my two previous posts on Lane Hartwell and her photo (and be sure to read all 100 or so comments) — is that I’ve been thinking a lot about it, in part because I was on a panel on TV Ontario the other day discussing just that issue. On the panel with me were Michael Geist, a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and strong critic of the government’s proposed copyright legislation; Rob Thompson, a correspondent for Billboard magazine; and David Basskin, legal counsel for the Canadian Music Publishers Association.

We talked about how the legislation was (or wasn’t) pulled from the order paper as a result of the work Michael did in setting up a Facebook group — which now has more than 20,000 members — in opposition to a Canadian DMCA, and we also talked about the principles of fair use, which in Canada are covered by an exemption for “fair dealing.” Our exemptions are more restrictive than under U.S. law, which could be why I’m so concerned about the issue. Please read my previous posts for more on this subject. The video of the panel is here, (click the tab that says “Copyright and Intellectual Property”) or you can click the image below.