More ramblings from the ivory tower

[garote]

A contractor in Iraq has written a series of essays about his experiences with the locals and with the troops. I found his observations eye-opening. He's also posted a series of pictures he took while touring Saddam's palace - including the "Flintstone Park" that he built exclusively for his two sons. Note that, even as the extravagant and feared dictator of an oil-rich country, he could still only afford cut-rate and dangerous construction.

Here's an essay about modeling, written by a model, describing the mechanics of the industry from start to finish, and some of the social aspects. It's kind of a dry read: Modeling is not the exciting profession it may appear to be. The following quote is amusing, though:

"When you consider how much advertising is blatantly heterosexually-minded in the sense you see a guy and a girl eating together, holding hands, driving somewhere . . . whatever. When you're gay and see this--not only the end product of it but the production of the ads in detail--it does present to you how important harmonious, happy, hetero relationships must be to middle America. And it's damn funny to see a guy holding a beautiful girl tight in his arms during the shoot and then to be making out with him later that same night after the club."

Some essayist with an axe to grind has written the "2005 Asshole Of The Year Awards". The list is just the usual finger-pointing and trash-talking, but one of the winners caught my eye: the Sony corporation. In 2005 they quietly began selling audio CDs that contained a devious software payload, designed to badly compromise the security of any computer trying to import the music from the CD. The scandal was huge among computer geeks.

"... this will hopefully be the scandal that makes mainstream America aware that (at least according to the corporate world,) you don't own anything."

I think this is a lot closer to the truth than even the author knows.

In a world where content is becoming completely separated from containers, a huge market force has emerged, consisting of every media company that sells containers of content: Boxes of software, CDs of music, DVDs of movies, or CDROMs of photographs and words. They are all together trying very hard to keep containers and content chained together, because it's the only way they can shore up a monetary value for their content. When their product is not fettered to a physical source, they have no good way to draw money from its exchange or duplication. The tried-and-true market process breaks down.

So now they're working to create a two-teired system: You purchase the container in order to get at the content, but your "right" to manipulate the content is now separated from your ownership of the container. Your money has also bought you permission to use that content in a very well-defined and strict set of ways, which can be revoked, and if abused, may land you in court or in jail. This process of "rights management", and all the mechanical tweaks that it involves, is a process of making technology safe for commerce, and has no counterbalance, except a legal precedent of right-to-privacy laws and property rights. These market forces will take it as far as they can possibly go - to the point where you truly don't own anything media-related. You can only lease it, and are always liable for misusing it.

Now, making technology "safe for commerce" is not unilaterally evil. There are very good reasons for protecting the security of electronic money transfers, for example. Or restricting the flow of information from a customer database. Even though they are essentially just signals over wire and bits on some hard drive -- smoke-and-mirrors -- they are hugely important from an economic standpoint. An even bigger example is the restriction of who can manufacture our physical money -- paper bills and coins. If it was legal to buy and use a printing press to churn out stacks of $100 bills, our whole economy would collapse in a couple of months. So this process of paving the way for commerce is not inherently bad, and it has happened before.

The difference here is what's at stake ... what we stand to lose. Separating containers from content, and making that content transferable over thin air, routable from any source to any destination, and infinitely copyable with no loss of quality, is a stunning, unique ability of our digital age. If market forces compel us to hamstring every electronic device we manufacture, embedding an artificial "rights management" process, the market will indeed have accomplished its goal: insuring a means to turn a profit in this new frontier. But it will be the old means to turn a profit, hammered into a new environment whose primary strengths are almost the opposite of what that old means is based on and driven by: physical scarcity. The digital network has defeated physical scarcity. That's practically what it's for. Now we are scrambling to artificially create it?

That means may be desirable by the current purveyors of containers and content, but is it desirable by anyone else? Customers? Individuals? Society as a whole?

So far the middle ground has been defined by entities acting as "gatekeepers", who facilitate the mechanics of the digital transfer itself. Their profit tends to be derived less from the specifics of the content they purvey, than from the quality of the underlying infrastructure they serve it with. For example, the iTunes music store isn't popular because it provides access to certain music, it's popular because it provides reliable, searchable, well-integrated access to that music. So there is still money to be made as a "gatekeeper" -- good and legitimate money -- even without "rights management", or in the case of iTunes, the loosest form of "rights management" you're allowed to get away with. That money is made by playing to, and enhancing, the strengths of the digital universe -- not trying to prune it back until it's no different from a local drugstore.

Comments

[lutin.livejournal.com]

the link is to the blog of an internet dude,
and not to the iraq essays.

[garote]

d'oops! Fixed it. Thanks!

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

The Asshole of the Year article mentions video games tethered to a console--iTunes already tethers music to a computer. You can't copy or move it. I don't know what the crap you're supposed to do when you upgrade your machine.

Luckily, I only bought one song from iTunes on my old computer.

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Well, you can copy or move it, but it won't play. At least, not in iTunes.

[garote]

Actually that's not true ... you can "authorize" it to play on something like 5 machines. So if you buy a song on your laptop, then copy it to your home computer, you can "authorize" it to play on that machine as well as your laptop. It will also copy on to, and play on, any iPod you sync through that computer.

If you sell your laptop, you can "de-authorize it" via a pulldown in iTunes, and then that machine will no longer play stuff you've purchased with your account.

Of course, this ONLY applies to stuff purchased through the store. mp3s you download from elsewhere, AIFF or WAV files, AAC files, or "apple lossless" files you rip from your CD collection are completely unrestricted.

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

Well, except if your previous computer is broken, and you're getting your stuff from backup or otherwise getting it off the HD without being able to access iTunes to 'authorize' your new machine.

I guess that's kind of rare.

[garote]

The only way that would be a hindrance is if you'd forgotten your login and password for the account you purchased the music through. That can be recovered by either:

1. Asking apple to mail it to you, via the iTunes store, in iTunes on your new computer
2. Taking the 'keychain' file out of your old home directory's library, and importing it into your new computer, using the 'keychain access' utility in Utilities. It will contain your iTunes account information, as well as saved logins and passwords for everything else. You can only decrypt it if you know the username/password from your old machine, of course.

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

There's a certain point at which overly-aggressive protection of one's rights begins to hurt their owner -- e.g., people aren't going to listen to or buy crippled, hard-to-use CDs, and if it becomes impossible to play them after a year or two, that music is just going to be forgotten, no matter how good it is.

While on the other hand, the exact opposite approach can lead to good things for creators. For instance, I have mp3s of a CD by something called Arovane, which I think I got off Usenet. I've had them for a while now, probably since late 2004, and finally one day I got curious and decided to do some research on the group. It turns out that Arovane is some German guy and he's produced a few other albums, which I'm contemplating buying. Would I have even _heard_ of this guy if it weren't for file sharing? No. Would I have had the opportunity to fall in love with his music to the point where I might buy every single one of his major releases in one fell swoop? Certainly not.

File sharing = free advertising for most musicians. This man's album has been sitting on my hard drive, promoting his music to me and everybody I know for a year and a half, and he hasn't done a thing to seek it. And pretty soon it will lead to a few more sales for him, if it hasn't already. I know that a lot of people agree with my notion that if something is good enough to fall in love with, you should pay money for it even if you _can_ enjoy it for free, because that will only help to ensure the production of more stuff to fall in love with.

Now maybe this only works for artists whose work has a long shelf life. I suspect this won't work at all for music that will only sell for one season, and that only if it's promoted aggressively to the least discriminating consumers. I suspect this is why the big music companies are scared shitless of file sharing, because their revenue is _based_ on selling that kind of schlock, to dopes and teenagers, year after year.

It reminds me of that interview I read with Mark Mothersbaugh, where he mentioned that he _hoped_ the big music labels would collapse as a result of file sharing, because most of the stuff they promote is just more garbage that we could really do without. It's when you look to the smaller labels that you start to hear some really interesting stuff. And remember, the situation has only been like this for about twenty years; the big guys have been on a downward spiral for a while, and the whole mp3 thing has only served to point up how crappy their base products are.

[garote]

The same thing happened to me with Pete Namlook, Ayreon, MZ412, Halo_Gen, William Orbit, and several others ... I heard the music online, then went out and bought (in some cases MANY) albums by the same artist. In fact, I went out and bought THE SAME albums by the artist, because the copy I had online was crappy mp3 form, and I wanted to rip it losslessley.

However, this brings me to the big qualifier for that: If the album had been posted losslessly to begin with, I probably wouldn't have bought it later on.

This phenomenon of free advertising does indeed exist ... but it doesn't have one hundredth of the potential for profitability that the old record labels were able to grab. The simple reason for that is the teenage crowd. (And the dopes, as you mention.) They're usually not rich, they don't tend to be collectors or completists, they don't tend to care how bad the audio quality of a pirated mp3 is, and they just love to stick it to The Man (a group in which their parents are ostensibly charter members).

Take for example the song "Right Thurr", by Mr. Hip Hop Rap artist "Chingy" I believe (and a posse of guest artists), or the song "Hotel Party" featuring Snoop Dogg, or the bizarre smash "Hey Ya!" by that band whose name I already can't fucking remember. Your typical teen will hear that song on the radio, say "I want that song", listen for the announcer to declare what it's called, and then type that into google. If they're upper-middle-class or higher, they may buy it from the iTunes store first, but usually they'll try to get it for free first. If that means going to some banner-ad clusterfuck of a PHP-based webpage, downloading six torrent files, or an eDonkey link, or forking around with Kazaa and BearShare for half an hour, then so be it. In an alarmingly short time they'll have some copy of the song, and they'll listen to it five hundred times in a row, sing and dance to it, play it for their friends, and then completely fucking forget about it a week later.

Used to be, you could suck fifteen dollars out of every teenager who wanted that song and had the money. Now, as a record label, your best bet is to watch (with dismay) as every teen on every continent gets it for free, then sell the advertising rights to some teen-oriented company, to use the song in an ad.

Hence, for a while, an instrumental cut of "Hey Ya!" became the background music for INSTANT REPLAYS during NFL GAMES.

Pretty bizarre, huh?

But my question, which I would like to put to you in particular, is this: What are writers going to do in this brave new world? And not mercenary writers, like staff editors of the local rag, but creative writers, who struggle in silence for three years crafting a 500-page masterpiece?

The future of creative writing worries me, because a book that takes three years to write can be distributed in it's entirety as a 3MB PDF, illustrations included, to a hundred million people, and the download time for that isn't taxing even on a dialup modem.

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

Again, that kind of stuff is crap that we could all do without, so it's no big loss to society if they stop making huge profits on direct sales of it. It kind of sounds like they're already finding alternative ways to get revenue out of bad songs, like leasing them to T.V. networks. That's fine.

I'm inclined not to worry too much about the writing aspect of things, for a lot of reasons, but primarily because 99% of creative writers don't make a living from their writing to begin with, and they might even _desire_ such a distribution. Sure, that situation would suck a little for Stephen King, but he's overpaid anyway, and his film rights still can't be compromised so easily.

The other thing is that a lot of books are just never going to be made available in electronic form. Contrary to predictions all around for many years, the paper book is showing no signs of disappearance. The paper book is _still_ the pre-eminent means of distributing and using a book-sized chunk of information, precisely because they're easy to use, they're pleasant to use, they're highly portable, they're cheap to produce and cheap to buy, they can be sold in huge quantities, and nobody really ever needs to use more than one or two at a time, so the idea of having 'a hundred books on your PDA!' is kind of interesting but not really a convincing argument for reading _everything_ on your PDA.

By comparison, reading on a PDA or even a laptop screen can be awkward. You can't riffle through them without waiting for the program to catch up. Your batteries die too soon. You can't get enough text on the screen. Electronic books have to be obtained online, and not everybody in the universe is always sitting in front of a computer, despite appearances from here. And then you have to know how to open them. The electronic versions are largely priced similarly to the paperbacks, so that one's choice is mostly between getting the book tomorrow, physically, in the store, or right now on the computer. For me, the text has to be pretty urgent or embarrassing before I'll opt for the electronic version. And I can't even _imagine_ what I would find too embarrassing to buy in person, in a store.

I just don't think they're going away anytime soon. It seems to me that paper books, though they are 500+ years old at this point, are still the superior technology.

[garote]

That, my friend, was exactly the perspective I was looking for. You've convinced me not to worry about it any more :D

[garote]

http://garote.livejournal.com/85384.html :D

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

Underemphasized idea in the above: people will buy things they don't really want, but only up to a point, and they will stop buying them the moment they perceive that they've been used. It only takes one negative experience with a company to convince a consumer that they're not worth dealing with. Some guy buys a CD from Sony, it won't play in his player, and the store won't take it back for a refund because it's been "opened" -- his natural reaction is "Fuck Sony, they stole $20 from me!" Unless the music is really compelling, which is unlikely, that guy's not going to come anywhere _near_ a Sony CD for a long time, maybe even a few years. It's just too much money to risk wasting.