Maybe the music industries issues are not all about piracy, but also a secondary confluence that we have heard of but did not really think about. The Motley Fool though comes wading into the RIAA and its minions against everyone on the planet with an interesting take on things.
Maybe it is not piracy that is the full issue much to the consternation of RIAA et Al, but another even bigger side band, independent artists, going their own way, using alternative methods to distribute music, mainly wal-mart.
With discount department stores, live event promoters, and premium coffee houses becoming the new music brokers, is it any wonder to see the majors reeling? It gets worse. Madonna, McCartney, and The Eagles proved marketable…The ability of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Live Nation to generate adequate promotional muscle for The Eagles, McCartney, and Madonna will make it that much easier for proven acts to snip the strings in the future. Source: Motley Fool
So while the industry burns down around the old model, the new model looks promising, sell at cost or for small profit on line, sell the albums at Wal Mart, Starbucks, and other venues including Amazon where you can really cut your own deal with some software and a lawyer. Use the on line sales to promote off line sales, to promote the concert gig or touring gig. All of this without signing to a label, or feeding the RIAA and its minions machine against everyone else in the whole world.
There will always be piracy, there has always been some form of piracy, the point where the sanity begins is when you embrace chaos and work out a path that leads to less chaos. While the RIAA and its minions are busy looking elsewhere, the rest of the world has moved on, and that is the good thing. In a few years or a decade, it just won’t matter.
Tags: riaa, wal-mart, motley fool, music, minion, money, business, model
Last night the Phoenix mars Lander touched down perfectly and has started transmitting pictures from its local area. While most of the pictures right now are “situational” in that they are looking to make sure that the craft has deployed properly, and that the local area is fairly dull or benign when it comes to large rocks, or things that could hurt the lander, the pictures are still pretty cool.
The mars Phoenix Lander’s pictures are right here at the gallery, of course everyone is all over this one, and our fascination with Mars just will not go away. As a possible abode of life, both Mars and Europa have a promise that life either exists or did exist at some point on both planets. Since mars is closer, it has been the easier target to get to.
Not to degenerate Venture Beat at all, but really a spat over attribution is one way to start out Monday morning, probably not the best one we could think of, but there it is all the same. Reminds me of academic honesty, there are no consequences for plagiarism on the internet, but boy do schools hammer students who do not properly attribute sources, and in some cases, to the point of bouncing students out of entire programs.
The whole story revolves around Ars Technica and Venture Beat, who both wrote about Apple IPhone penetration on the worldwide market. The striking similarity between maps and theory is there. If I was grading the paper, I would be running both of them through turitin and looking at more similarities along the way.
In a link from Paris Lemon points to Duncan Riley’s thoughts from 2007 on just how much does Ars Technica rip off story ideas? There is a certain amount of humor here though given our past encounter with someone claiming to be from Ars.
Our own issue with Ars Technica rolls around this article where they got all sorts of cranky pissed off because we quoted one of their articles. Hey who knew they didn’t like back links or attribution on their own right from another blog? Who knew we were a spam blog, really, we didn’t know that either.
Ars is Ars, they provide something and are popular, even if they hate backlinks, or do not properly attribute, in the end game, things like this happen, and while it is not right, Ars seems to be in their own universe when it comes to the blogging world. As long as they stay in their own universe things are ok and as long as they are not harassing us, that is even better.
We have seen this same issue played out all over the place, who owns the idea, who owns the content, and some ideas are just better than others. They inspire, and in reading the two articles, to me they seem very similar, again back to the school house and grading, I would be talking to both students about now.
Oh an on a closing note, we really dare Ars to come back and call us a spam blog again, because we linked to one of their articles with proper attribution.
tags: ars technica, venture beat, paris lemon, duncan riley, techwag, attribution, iphone, risk, map, spat
Jason Calcanais posted on twitter the question “Question of the day: Can you copyright your Twitter stream? Can anyone republish anyone’s twitter stream? Thoughts?” It is an interesting idea, how ephemeral is 140 words or less, and if they are pulled and reproduced like in the image below, who owns what? Does it in the longer run really matter?
One of the reasons that this is a good question, is that with passage of the Pro-IP act, the way that the DMCA has been subverted for illegal take downs (with evidently no back action on that issue), and the host of other copyright issues that seem to be touching on everything we do, someone coming along and copyrighting their twitter stream is not far fetched.
The idea of ownership, what we own, and what we don’t own, we merely rent is as complex and as convoluted now as they have ever been. America was built on piracy, the theft of intellectual property is a time honored tradition since the start of the country. China is now doing a one over on America, and building their country on the time honored tradition of IP theft. What we can’t create we steal. Been that way for a while now.
This brings us back to twitter stream and copyright. I like the question, but evidently this answer does not fit into another twitter stream, it is more pontificating on the idea. If Jason copyrights his question, which he can do, with or without merit, as well as all the answers that I screen capped above, who owns that? Does it matter?
Yes it does matter, because no one wants to be sued for doing something, while I am taking the question and running with it, at this point with blogging, and RSS feed scraping, and the host of other ways that the content off by pro and personal blog are used, the effort that I would have to go into policing the use of the stuff I write is well beyond me, and the recovery of any money would be pretty slim.
Add to that the twitter stream, and no one single person could hope to police the Internet for their own content, in or out of context. The copyright would not matter, the words will move too fast onto other sites, which would cause a logistical nightmare, huge costs, and little recovery. I know this sounds like the MPAA/RIAA copyright terrorism, but if we end up there with twitter, what a waste of time, resources, and people to hunt down 140 words or less.
If you have ever tooled around archive.org it has some of the most fascinating materials that are available to you to watch. We ran into this video featuring Guy Kawasaki from 1996 and just about fell over laughing. You can walk away from this thinking that Guy is one of the smartest kids on the block, you can also wonder why we are dealing with the same issues 12 years later.
The video covers different ways to manage the glut of information showing up on computers and other storage devices. Demonstrations include DayTimer Organizer 2.0, Em@iler, Personal Journal, and DataTimes Summarizer. Originally broadcast in 1996.
The fun times early on in the dot com boom that was a fun time, this is a great flashback to some of the wildest times ever.
Tags: guy kawasaki, computer chronicals, dot com boom, silicon valley, fun, humor
Just as a side note, the obviously brilliant but troubled Hans Reiser , developer of the Reiser file system used in near all Linux installations has been found guilty of first degree murder after one of the most bizarre trials of 2008.
The 44-year-old developer of the ReiserFS filesystem, sat quietly as a clerk for Alameda County Superior Court Judge Larry Goodman read the verdict. Reiser faces a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison. Wearing the same dark coat he’s worn for months, the defendant was immediately removed from the courtroom by one of four bailiffs watching over the courtroom. He asked out loud if he could speak with his attorney. Source: Wired Threat Level
You can watch the video of the verdict reading right here.
The Silicon Alley Outsider has done a great job putting together the SAI 25, which is a startup valuation index tied to the NASDAQ, and provides floating valuations of startups as they move up and down the popularity and valuation tree.
So far, the SAI 25 ranks the world’s 25 most valuable digital companies and 25 additional “Contenders.” As we get to know more companies, we will add them to the list. (We’ll be adding another 25 or so in a couple of weeks). Some of today’s SAI 25 will soon stagnate or tumble in value, and they will quickly be replaced with rising stars. But we’ll rank all of the companies we follow–even those outside of the SAI 25. Source: Silicon Alley Outsider
The floating valuation page is here, and is probably worth watching as your brand new shiny startup gets techcrunched, techmemed, and slashdotted along the way.
There have always been questions about how a startup is valued, along with its adoption rate. Having a moving index tied to valuation, much like Sampa’s Seattle Startup index that is tied to Alexa and Compete scores makes sense for a more national or in this case global valuation of a startup company. The uses are immediate, the list is made of folks we all know as we blog, test, and beta test some of this stuff along the way.
In other words, very cool, glad to have it, put it right next to Sampa’s startup index, and the idea of valuation, use, and adoption gets to be very apparent.
Keywords: silicon alley outsider, valuation, startup, money, sampa, seattle startup index, SAI, SAI 25, tool, toy, fun
