Lots of reports today on the oral arguments for MGM vs. Grokster. Tim Armstrong has a detailed overview with lots of juicy legal analysis. This Wired article doesn’t add much, but does contain one cute anecdote:
Songwriter Lamont Dozier, who wrote the Supremes’ hit “Stop! In the Name of Love,” said he wanted to ask the Supreme Court to “stop (illegal file sharing) in the name of creativity.”
Very catchy. Where do I get the deep house remix?
The best article is a sardonic take on the proceedings by the Media Access Project’s Harold Feld. (Via Boing Boing, but then I think all of these might be. Boing Boing has Groksteritis right now.) It’s pretty long, so I’ve whittled it down to two essential quotes. On Chief Justice Rehnquist:
O.K., it’s not nice to make fun of people recovering from thyroid cancer. But it was still funny to hear the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court speak into the microphone with this Darth Vaderish wheeze and say things like “Will our decision release Grokster all over the world?” I swear, he could have thrown in a manical laugh and it would not have been out of place.
Mean and funny. I like it. And on Justice Sandra Day O’Connor:
Again, the Court was skeptical. “If our standard was so clear” asked O’connor, “why did we need to go on for 13 pages after we wrote the sentence you site?” (”Because you talk too much, Bitch” was probably the wrong answer here, so good thing I wasn’t arguing.)
Good thing? God no! I would have given my left nut pinky to hear that exchange.
There is actually considerably more substance to the piece than these quotes might imply. Feld concludes:
Bottom line on Grokster: I think the Court is likely to affirm the basic idea of _Sony_ that you can’t sue a manufacturer or distributor of a technology for copyright infringement if the technology has non-infringing uses. But I also think they will remand and allow the RIAA to pursue a claim for “active inducement” to infringe based on Grokster’s conduct.
Sounds about right to me (not that I have any qualifications whatsoever to make this judgement). The Court is not going to ban P2P. This seems clear from any number of the justices’ remarks, as recounted in these summaries. At the same time, I have very little sympathy for the Groksters, Streamcasts and Sharmans of this world. I suppose they deserve kudos for giving the music industry a much-needed kick in the groin. But let’s face it, with their user bases in the millions, all of these companies have long had the perfect platform for launching any number of innovative P2P services that would have actually contributed something substantial to the state of the art, as well as cementing the notion that there are plenty of non-infringing uses for P2P.
Instead they’ve sat on their laurels milking their dodgy business models for all they’re worth, without inventing or creating anything whatsoever. Without even trying. And you’d have to be pretty disingenuous to deny that they’re guilty of “active inducement”. P2P will live on, but these guys deserve to get their comeuppance.
Radovan took the leadership test and was pegged as a JFK type. Very flattering. So I figured I’d give it a whirl. Here’s my result:
Ummmmm…
In today’s Scripting News, Dave Winer explains why he is parting ways with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Despite his long-standing support for the EFF, Dave now feels that they have become as dogmatic and extreme as the media industry they are battling:
The issue appears to be copyright, and it appears that the EFF believes there should be no copyright. My position is that copyright changes with the development of worldwide networking, and all creative people must have some right to the work they create, or else, truly, the incentive to create will disappear.
I worship the EFF. They’re my heros. There’s so much wrong with the way that the media industry is approaching the advent of digital content distribution. Between the shockingly bad legislation already in place, the braindead proposals on the table and the potentially debilitating legal precedent of the Grokster vs. MGM case (which kicks off today before the Supreme Court), there’s a real risk that technological progress in the digital media space will be completely paralyzed for the forseeable future. Thank goodness the EFF is around to agitate against this disturbing trend.
Nonetheless, I have a lot of sympathy for Dave’s position. Too many of these admirable copyright freedom fighters are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to believe that creative types will be motivated to produce top-notch output even if copyright is eliminated and content is free. A lot of the evidence put forward to support this view is based on temporary distortions in the digital marketplace. Cory Doctorow, whose work for the EFF I greatly admire, is a case in point. He’s made his first two novels available without charge for downloading while continuing to sell a bound printed version, apparently without suffering financially. And today, he posted to Boing Boing with a link to a study that purports to show that peer-to-peer downloads haven’t hurt the music industry’s bottom line.
As I’ve argued in the past, the viability of the free-online/pay-offline business model for textual content is premised on the fact that reading electronic text is too inconvenient to tempt large numbers of readers away from print media. This is going to change, inevitably, with the arrival of high-resolution, lightweight, flexible electronic paper. As far as the music industry is concerned, it frankly beggars belief that widespread downloading of pirated music hasn’t had a deleterious impact on CD sales. From what I’ve seen, once people get hooked on the online music experience they’re relunctant to go back to CDs. I don’t mean to defend the tragically wrong-headed strategy of the RIAA, with its draconian DRM and bullying lawsuits. But we should be pushing for a more attractive legal online music alternatives, not trying to convince ourselves that P2P networks dominated by wholesale piracy are compatible with a healthy future for digital media. (That said, it would be a calamity if the Supreme Court were to rule against Grokster. You can’t ban a general-purpose technology because some people are using it for illegal activities.)
Another case in point is Chris Anderson’s attempt to marry his brilliant long tail meme with Larry Lessig’s argument that copyright restrictions on more obscure content are unnecessary because these works have little commercial value anyway. Chris ends up concluding that the two are compatible because profits from the long tail will come from repurposing older works, not selling them directly. My take on this would be different: Lessig is dead-on in his assertion that creative output would benefit from less onerous restrictions. But the lesson of the long tail really is that there is increasingly broad scope for selling content that was commercially inviable in the past. The solution is not to insist that content must be free, it’s to tailor licensing practices, business models and pricing schemes so that creative types can make money without stifling the ability of others to slice and dice the fruits of their labor in new and exciting ways.
Just as bloggers like to blog about blogging, the del.icio.us crowd has an introspective bent. My latest Scrumptious version didn’t exactly shake the foundations of the blogosphere, but as part of the del.icio.us ecosystem it’s been a minor hit on del.icio.us itself. At present count the download page has been bookmarked by 57 folks (myself included), ensuring it a comfortable spot on the popular links page for the past couple of days. Above the fold, mind you.
This has driven traffic to my site like nobody’s business, doubling my daily visitor count, and provides a sneak preview of how (dare I say it) “long tail marketing” can be applied to web content. The equivalent of a superbowl ad in the blogging world is a shout out from an A-list blogger or aggregation site like Boing Boing or (famously) Slashdot. What all of these have in common is that they depend on the judgement of a small number of people (often just one) to decide which items are worthy of mention. Del.icio.us, on the other hand, is a wholly democratic medium. The result is a sort of Meta-Slashdot: the prominence of the actual articles (weblinks in this case) is the product of what is in essence a user-driven moderation system.
We’ve seen this before in guises such as Download.com’s Most Popular and Amazon’s Top Sellers. But this is the first time I’ve seen it applied to individual webpages (as opposed to whole websites). What del.icio.us has done is to provide a much-needed metric for measuring webpage popularity, where bookmarking a page is analogous to downloading a file or purchasing a book.
Interesting enough, there’s a heated debate taking place right now on the delicious-discuss mailing list that relates directly to the service’s role as a yardstick for webpage prominence. Joshua Schachter (who created the system) is proposing a switch from the current “…and N other people” label that graces popular bookmarks towards a more abstract representation like a bargraph. His argument is that the exact count is Too Much Information and clutters up the interface unnecessarily.
This has proven to be quite controversial, with many people arguing that the precise tallies aren’t superfluous at all. I agree. On the contrary, they represent much of the system’s value. Countless totals, from Amazon’s aforementioned sales rank to Technorati links to Bloglines subscribers, are presented to the user as raw numbers. We prefer to make our often subtle judgements about relative and absolute popularity ourselves, not have them distilled into little charts. After all, the fact that Scrumptious bookmarks jumped from 57 to 59 since I started writing this may seem unimportant to you, but it’s significant to me, by golly!
A brilliant piece by Tom Coates of the BBC entitled “Social Software for Set-Top Boxes”. I love the idea of taking a technological trend that is essentially isolating (”now I have so many channels that I can sit in my apartment and veg 24/7″) and turning it into a social activity. Tom focuses on grafting social networking features onto TVs, but I would expect this kind of feature to appear initially on PCs as an adjunct to video distribution networks like BitTorrent.
Coincidentally there is also a post on the PVRblog today called “Social PVRs” discussing a research project at PARC with goals that sound very close to what Tom is proposing.
A couple of additional ideas that Tom doesn’t mention:
- Public chat rooms: The PVRblog piece refers to a blog entry by Michael Sippey in which he laments the demise of water-cooler rehashes of last night’s TV, now that everyone can watch what they want, when they want. Michael suggests the creation of “micro-communities” focused around specific episodes of popular shows. Great idea! Since I consume most of my TV on BitTorrent nowadays (the only way to get a lot of new shows here in Prague), I often feel keenly the lack of someone to chat with about the latest plot twist in Lost or funny episode of Arrested Development. This could be resolved neatly by adding episode-specific chat rooms to the interface that Tom describes.
- Matchmaking: Wouldn’t this be a great way to meet new people as well? If I’m plunking myself down on my sofa with a beer and a bag of nachos to watch last night’s Daily Show, I could register myself as available for chatting to any other lonely heart doing the same. The system could even match people up based on more extensive profile information, including the set of all shows I follow, not just the one I happen to be viewing now. And it doesn’t have to be designed to help you find your life partner, just someone (”anyone” says Michael in desperation!) to be social with while watching the tube.
CNet discusses another potential problem with Greasemonkey: malicious scripts. Add that to the potential backlash from site operators that I mentioned last week, and it’s clear that we want to be on the lookout for safer alternatives to Greasemonkey scripts. That said, existing scripts have a hidden benefit, besides their immediate utility, in that they tell us in great detail what the requirements would be for a potential replacement.
The Economist ran a biography of serial inventor Ray Kurzweil in the last installment of its Technology Quarterly. This guy has produced a slew of revolutionary advances in fields as diverse as optical character recognization and electronic keyboards, mostly centered around the idea of using pattern recognition techniques in new and innovative ways. His current fascination is with the use of technology to extend the human lifespan (potentially indefinitely), a meme which I seem to be encountering more and more often recently.
Most interesting to me was his theory about the “knee of the curve”. The idea is that when you’re near the beginning of a trend that’s based on exponential growth, you feel like growth is linear. Suddenly you reach a turning point and the curve shoots upwards. Boing Boing had a nice take on this a while back. Kurzweil’s point was that this sudden shift makes it easy to underestimate the impact of technological trends.
What struck me about this is that it’s exactly the principle that I wrote about the other day in the context of online content sales. Great minds think alike, and apparently mine does too, sometimes.
Is it me, or is there something vaguely ironic about this? I clicked on the Boing Boing feed just now in my newsreader and there are two new posts. The first is called “Amputee wannabes” and it’s about people who have a nagging desire to have one of their limbs removed. Rather a quandary, no? But then the next one is entitled “Unfortunately-named gadget: “Hand Shredder“. A rather elegant technological solution, I say.
Oh, and Boing Boing people, if you’re interested I know a shrink who gives group discounts.
I’ve finally managed to get a new version of Scrumptious online. For those of you who missed it, Scrumptious is a nifty little Firefox sidebar that makes it more convenient to add bookmarks to del.icio.us. It differs from other extensions of this type in that it shows you what other tags people have been using for a given page, which saves time and also makes tagging more consistent (at least that’s the idea). More information in my original Scrumptious post. The new version is mostly about bug fixes. Definitely upgrade if you’re using the old Scrumptious since I zapped a few nasty ones. For example, with the old version it wasn’t possible to bookmark pages that didn’t have a title.
In honor of this momentous occasion, I set up a proper Downloads page. With a bit of luck I’ll be putting up some more fun extensions up in the near future.
If you find bugs in Scrumptious, please let me know either by posting a comment here or mailing me directly. Also, if you can’t get to sleep at night because you’re so preoccupied by that one cool feature that’s missing, tell me. I’ll probably add it.
Well, reaction to my “Why AutoLink is Evil” post was a bit more heated than I expected. I’m certainly glad that I didn’t go with my original title: “AutoLink: Spawn of Satan?”
Seriously, there seems to be some kind of backlash effect going on here where anyone who criticizes tools like AutoLink and Greasemonkey, for whatever reason, is seen to be taking a totalitarian, anti-user stance. In my case nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t think that we should be up in arms because these tools are letting all those pesky users muck around with our pristine web. On the contrary, as users we should be demanding much more powerful, reliable and extensible ways of mucking with the web.
Any description of a web technology as “evil” has got to be largely tongue-in-cheek. This should be obvious so I’m not going to retreat from that characterization. But let me try to clarify what I said with an analogy.
AutoLink is like Paris Hilton: it’s only interesting when it’s being naughty. AutoLink is exciting because it re-raises all of those questions about who should have the right to modify web content, and these clearly strike a nerve in a lot of people. But the main issue with AutoLink isn’t whether it does or does not violate the sanctity of other people’s webpages, it’s that it’s so bloody useless. I can see a small amount of marginal utility in linking addresses to maps, much less so with ISBN numbers, and as far as package tracking and VIN numbers are concerned: come on, is this someone’s idea of a joke?
I think that these categories of information must have been chosen by Google because they’re easy to identify using simple pattern matching. The kinds of stuff that I often do want to look up on webpages, things like obscure vocabulary, acronyms, foreign words and company names, are much harder to pick out in this way. If Google works its statistical processing magic and comes up with something that, a large proportion of the time, selects content from a page that I might plausibly want to look up somewhere, then I’ll revise my AutoLink is Evil assessment. In the meantime, I stick by my assertion that the right way to do this is for the content author to mark up linkable stuff unambiguously using XML. In other words, we should move towards a web where, instead of having constantly to make link/no-link decisions, you can designate text as maybe-link, in which case different graphical interfaces can decide how and when to present these links and what they should point at.
Greasemonkey is like Marsellus Wallace: it’s evil, but cool. It’s evil when people start thinking that this is a good way to bring the customizable web to a large number of desktops. It’s cool because for tech-savvy users, the extreme sports enthusiasts of the internet world, it provides a quick-and-dirty way to play around with web content. The intriguing thing about Greasemonkey is that it could easily become a good guy since the technique it uses is equally applicable to XML content.
As far as the “semantic web is vaporware” argument goes, we need to remember that a lot technologies take off just about the time that people start to write them off as vacuous. This is because our expectations of how fast radical change is going to happen tend to be wildly optimistic. Add to this the fact that the powers-that-be dropped the ball in many ways when putting together the specs that were supposed to be the underpinnings of XML on the web, and it’s hardly surprising that it hasn’t happened yet.
I’m not sure whether it’s entirely normal to have an AutoLink epiphany, but I just had one. My take on the whole AutoLink-is-evil debate has until now centered on control issues. AutoLink gives a substantial amount of control to users, making it seem less like SmartTags and more like RSS. Since RSS is a Good Thing, anything that gives users more control must also be a Good Thing. Ergo, AutoLink is not evil.
Then it started to dawn on me that maybe control wasn’t the primary consideration here. As people become hooked on a more customized web experience, web developers are responding by treating HTML as a building block rather than a presentation format. We used to call this screen scraping, although the term doesn’t seem to get as much play nowadays. “There’s data in them thar HTML pages,” cry the greasemonkeys, and if they can just get at it they can repurpose it in cool and useful ways like adding helpful hyperlinks or removing ads.
There are a lot of problems with this. Fact is, HTML is a presentation format and as such is not designed for reuse. There’s no contract between the HTML author and the greasemonkey scripter. The whole point of my “Greasemonkeys and Obfuscators” post was that there is an infinite number of ways to represent the same raw data using HTML. So a minor change to a website can easily break every client-side script designed to manipulate it, intentionally or not. If you’re lucky, your popular greasemonkey script will just stop working. Much worse, it might start to behave erratically, breaking the websites it was designed to enhance.
This was all anticipated by Jon Bosak in his essay “XML, Java and the future of the Web“. And that was in March 1997, guys. Understandably for a Sun employee, Jon focused on Java as the tool for client-side manipulation. But the principles remain the same whatever language you’re using. Reliable data repurposing requires a format with a lot more formal structure than HTML. This insight led to the creation of XML, which is undeniably a Good Thing because it provides a technically elegant way to empower users to do new and exciting things with web content.
This is where the comparison between AutoLink and RSS falls down. RSS is the first killer app for XML on the web. While XML was quickly embraced as a format for data interchange (notably in B2B e-commerce), its impact on the web (which, after all, it was originally conceived for) has been relatively minimal. RSS is the preeminent example of XML being delivered by websites, and people love it. This is because RSS really is a building block, so it is far more conducive to the growth of a robust ecosystem for creating, consuming and managing it.
My conclusion: AutoLink is evil. All those greasemonkey scripts are evil. They may provide fleeting satisfaction, but anything close to widespread adoption is going to create a big mess. In one post Robert Scoble asks:
I wonder what happens if there are two conflicting GreaseMonkey scripts, for instance. How does it decide which link to use?
Exactly. Software developers encounter this problem all the time when they implement a quick-and-dirty solution instead of taking the time to get the design right. Oftentimes your hack works fine until it bumps into another hack somewhere else in the program and — poof! — the whole thing blows up.
I finally got around to reading last week’s Technology Quarterly in the Economist. There’s one particularly cute article about the imaginative uses that companies are finding for camera phones. It seems that not so many people are actually sending pictures with these, but the fact that the camera provides an additional input device for digital data (barcodes, for example) means that they can be exploited fruitfully in other ways.
From the article:
The Japanese arm of Amazon, an online retailer, offers a service that allows subscribers to carry out a cheeky price check while browsing a bookstore. Snap a picture of the bar-code on a book or CD, and a quick over-the-air look-up will tell you if Amazon’s price is lower. Japanese consumers can even use the technology to find out how fresh their fish is. Scan the bar-code on its packaging, and a text message arrives in seconds detailing when it was caught, on which boat, and even the name of the fisherman who reeled it in.
I know I always demand to know who caught my halibut before I tuck in.
4. Community-driven categorization efforts work better than centralized ones. As a little test, I searched for Suck.com in the Open Directory. It’s there, but categorized under Computers -> Internet -> Cyberspace -> Culture. That doesn’t strike me as particularly accurate, and it certainly isn’t intuitive enough to have helped me to find the site based on the criteria that I remembered. Wikipedia’s categorization is much more useful in this instance. In Yahoo’s directory I couldn’t even find a definite reference to the site (although some of its content was referenced).
I read Cory Doctorow’s transcript of the folksonomy panel at ETech and realized that I have to tell this story despite what it reveals about my dangerously obsessive personality:
So the other day I’m writing a blog entry which turned into a sprawling rant about the linking nature of the web and its implications for Google’s AutoLink. Part of my hypothesis was that there is a type of weblink called an “editorial link”, which is a clever, oblique reference that you don’t really understand until you click on it. I wanted to illustrate this idea in a self-referential manner by linking the text “good web writers” to an actual example of this technique. Through the strange associative power of the human brain, I instantly realized that the perfect choice would be a humorous late 90’s website that more or less pioneered the concept of editorial links. There was only one problem: I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name.
I did recall vaguely that the name was short, began with an S and sounded a bit lewd. Being the compulsive that I am, I spent at least an hour on the weekend battering on Google with various exercises in lateral thinking, but to no avail. Finally I gave up, only to stumble a couple of days later upon a reference to the Webby Awards for “excellence in Web design, creativity, usability and functionality.”
“Matt,” I thought. “This might be the lucky break you’ve been hoping for.” So I surfed over to their website and, sure enough, one of the 1999 nominees in the Humor category was the site I’d been racking my brains over: Suck.com. And that could only be considered a happy ending to the story, provided of course that I never, ever told anyone about it.
But then the aforementioned transcript came into the picture. As I read it, my mind kicked back into overdrive.
“Doh!” I thought. “Wikipedia has categories? If I’d known that, I might have saved myself all that hassle and heartache.”
With surprisingly few missteps and backtracking, I navigated through the category hierarchy. Technology begot networks begot computer networks begot internet begot World Wide Web begot — bingo! — websites. I scanned hungrily through the list of articles, but was crestfallen to discover that Suck.com was not among them. Then I noticed a subcategory called “comedy websites” and, sure enough, my shangri-la was among them.
With a sigh of inevitability I realized that this parable was too important to keep to myself. I suppose it holds a different profound lesson for each us, but personally I learned three things:
1. You can’t find everything on Google. Sometimes you don’t know enough about what you’re looking for to identity the right keywords, and this is where tagging can make all the difference. I suppose this isn’t really news, but it’s nice to have a concrete example to drive the point home.
2. Hierarchy is important. If Wikipedia did tagging the way del.icio.us or Flickr do, I would have searched for articles with the “website” tag and drawn a blank. It’s only because I was able to visualize the hierarchical relationships between categories that I found what I was looking for.
3. I must be a bit crazy. But then that’s not really news either.
Yesterday I was hypothesizing that client-side manipulation of web content is going to cause problems for online advertisers as increasingly advanced tools become available to strip webpages of ads. Combine this with the growing problem of click fraud, and online publishing — with its heavy dependence on ad revenues — is going to find itself in a world of pain. There’s an obvious solution to this: start charging for content directly.
The New York Times ran a fascinatingly introspective article about this the other day. Basically what they say is that publishers are scared to start charging for online content because it’s far too easy for web surfers to jump ship and find free alternatives. At the same time, as people do more and more of their reading online, all that free content is starting to cannabilize their offline revenues. The result is a variant on the Prisoner’s Dilemma: publishers would benefit greatly if everyone decided simultaneously to start charging for online content, but no one wants to be the first to do so.
All the same, the current situation (where publishers use print media sales to subsidize their web content) is not going to hold up forever. At the latest, when viable mobile devices become available for reading on the go, offline sales are going to plummet, leaving a huge dent in overall revenues. Something’s gotta give. In a game attempt to disprove the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, I crafted this graph using an advanced forecasting tool:
(Okay I admit it, it was Microsoft Paint, and I can say with some confidence that with my wonky graphical skills I could have written well over a thousand words in the time it took me to put that monstrosity together.)
The X-axis represents time and the Y-axis represents the proportion of revenues generated by online as opposed to offline content. Assuming we’re somewhere near the left of the graph, we see that growth in online content sales will rise in a more or less linear fashion for some time into the future, as current trends would suggest. Then we’ll reach a magical inflection point. Suddenly paying for online content will become routine and — whoosh! — everyone will pile on. Very quickly almost all revenues for content will be generated online. (Note that I believe this will be the case for music and movies as well as the written word.)
I suppose a lot of people see this as a nightmare scenario. I don’t. It’s just a shifting of existing spend from print media onto the web. The internet being what it is, everything should become that more efficient (so you will no longer have to buy the whole issue of Cosmo just for that one gripping article about Britney’s body odor) and, with zero marginal cost for distribution, cheaper than it is today. And no more ads (unless you want them). Sounds more like heaven to me.
