Posts tagged can’t
The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate – the Result is SOPA
Jan 7th
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (a third of it in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?
From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.
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The Movie Industry and Technology Progress
Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous “Customer Development” methodology detailed in his book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany.” Blank teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University and UC Berkeley and blogs at steveblank.com.
The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.
- 1920′s: The record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.
- 1940′s: Movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.
- 1950′s: Broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid.
- 1970′s: Video Cassette Recorders (VCR’s) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with “end of the world” hyperbola. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.
- 1998: The MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( DCMA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.
- 2000: Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV.
- 2006: Broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.
Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?
Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology?
Technology Innovation
The movie industry was born with a single technical standard – 35mm film, and for decades had a single way to distribute its content – movie theaters (which until 1948 the studios owned.) It was 75 years until studios had to deal with technology changing their platform and distribution channel. And when it happened (cable, VCR’s, DVD’s, DVR’s, the Internet,) it was a relentless onslaught. The studios responded by trying to shut down the new technology and/or distribution channels through legislation and the courts.
Regulation/Legislation
But why does the movie business think their solution is in Washington and legislation? History and success.
In the 1920′s individual states were beginning to censor movies and the federal government was threatening to do so as well. The studios set up their own self-censorship and rating system keeping most sex and politics off the screen for 40 years. Never again wanting to be at the losing side of a political battle they created the movie industry’s lobbying arm, MPAA.
By the 1960′s, the MPPA achieved regulatory capture (where an industry co-opts the very people who are regulating it) when they hired Jack Valenti, who ran the studios’ lobbying efforts for the next 38 years. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership.
Management of Innovation
The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners whose sell through well-established distribution channels. The incumbents tend to have short-sighted goals and often fail to recognize that more money can be made on new platforms and distribution channels.
In an industry facing constant technology shifts the exec staff and boards of the studios have lawyers, MBAs and financial managers, but no management skill in dealing with disruption. So they rely on lobbying ($110 million a year), lawsuits, campaign contributions (wonder why the President won’t be vetoing SOPA?) and Public Relations.
Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights, Video On Demand, Ultraviolet, etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios’ strategy. Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)
Piracy
One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud. But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.)
The studios don’t even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It’s all about protecting short-term profit.
SOPA
When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators, understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities. The SOPA bill (and DNS blocking) is what happens when someone with the title of anti-piracy or copyright lawyer has greater clout than your head of new technology. SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet.
History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player or now the Net. It’s prudent for courts and congress to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.
What the music and movie industry should be doing in Washington is promoting legislation to adapt copyright law to new technology- and then leading the transition to the new platforms.
The U.S. State Department has been championing the Internet Freedom initiative across the world. Secretary of State Clinton said, “…when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.”
It’s too bad the head of the MPAA – an ex Senator – made a mockery of her words when he wondered “why our online censorship can’t be like China?” We wonder, “Why can’t the film industry innovate like Silicon Valley?”
Lessons Learned
- Studios are run by financial managers who have no corporate DNA to exploit disruptive innovation
- Studio anti-piracy/copyright lawyers trump their technologists
- Studios have no concern about collateral damage as long as it optimizes their revenue
- Studios110M/year lobbying and political donations trump consumer objections
- Politicians votes will follow the money unless it will cost them an election
Movie camera by Jeremy Burgin
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Basic SEO Services You Can’t Live Without – Search Engine Journal
Dec 6th
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Big Question (Answered): “Siri Can’t Find Abortion Clinics. Purposeful Policy or Search Oversight?”
Nov 30th
EU Advocate General: You Can’t Copyright a Programming Language
Nov 29th
In an opinion which, if affirmed by judges, would have dramatic impact on the definition of software and standards – at least in Europe if not eventually worldwide – the Advocate General in a European Court of Justice case involving U.S.-based business analytics firm SAS, has argued that the language in which computer programs are written may be exempt from copyright.
At issue: If you make a programming language that works like an existing one, have you violated copyright if you use a copyrighted manual as your guide? Have you violated copyright if you produce a manual that explains your language using terms that are similar to those in the manual you used as your guide? And finally, the big one: Is a work-alike programming language a violation of copyright in and of itself? You can just imagine the Oracle executives listening intently in the gallery.
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The case in question involves SAS’s business process language, which a classical-style procedural language that financial and manufacturing institutions consider the modern-day successor to COBOL and PL/I. A London, U.K.-based company called World Programming Ltd. (WPL) built a work-alike language it calls WPS, apparently not through reverse-engineering but simply using existing SAS manuals as guides. SAS argued that this was a violation of copyright, both of the manuals and of the ABAP language itself, and besides, that WPL violated its license agreement to use SAS software.
A high court ruling in July 2010 reached only a partial conclusion: WPL probably did not violate copyright by creating the WPS language using the SAS manual, but probably did violate copyright by creating a WPS manual to teach it. The judge referred the case up the chain (as the European system permits judges to do) to the Court of Justice. There yesterday, an Advocate General (a person retained by the court to issue opinions that may guide judges in their final decisions) issued a non-binding opinion stating that a programming language should be like any other language: a means of expression that cannot, in and of itself, be claimed as intellectual property.
A statement from the Advocate General’s office in Brussels this morning reads as follows:
In the first place, with regard to the functionality of a computer program, the Advocate General defines it as the set of possibilities offered by a computer system – in other words, the service which the user expects from it.
Starting from that premise, the Advocate General considers that the functionalities of a computer program are not eligible, as such, for copyright protection. The functionalities of a computer program are in fact dictated by a specific and limited purpose. In this, they are similar to ideas. That is why there may be a number of computer programs offering the same functionalities. Thus, if it were accepted that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such, that would amount to making it possible to monopolize ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.
By contrast, the means for achieving the concrete expression of the functionalities of a program may be protected by copyright. Creativity, skill and inventiveness are expressed in the way in which the program is drawn up, in its writing. Thus, the way in which formulae and algorithms are arranged – like the style in which the computer program is written – will be likely to reflect the author’s own intellectual creation and therefore be eligible for protection.
In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion with very broad effects, in its AT&T v. Microsoft decision in favor of Microsoft: “Abstract software code is an idea without physical embodiment, and as such, it does not match [the] categorization ‘components’ amenable to ‘combination.’” That ruling indicated that the permutation of a machine plus the program used to run the machine, to do a specific set of functions, was not in and of itself subject to patent. While a function may be patentable, the way you perform that function cannot. So far, European law has coincided for the most part.
The difference in the SAS v. WPL case abroad has to do with whether the programming language constitutes the function, the expression of that function, or the means by which an expression is… expressed. These are three different things, only one of which is subject to legal protection that we know of, though perhaps two. If the judges of the Court of Justice affirm the Advocate General’s opinion, a new precedent may be set whereupon the concept of any programming language is thus, by definition, public property.
That might have a serious impact on Oracle’s case against Google, which hinges on Sun Microsystems’ acquiescence to Google’s creation of a Java work-alike virtual machine for Android. Sun’s having permitted and even publicly blessed Google’s work, were never expressed in formal, legal documents; so when Oracle acquired Sun, Oracle made the case that Google violated the patents that Oracle acquired from Sun. Granted, patents and copyrights are not to be confused with one another; patents protect a concept, while copyrights protect an expression. Still, if the expression of a concept cannot be copyrighted, it certainly is unlikely to become patented. The SAS case speaks to the problem of means of expression as worthy of legal exclusivity, and if WPL wins in London, Oracle’s case against Google may not carry much weight in Europe.
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Qwerly’s Acquisition: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Nov 1st
Social data discovery API service Qwerly has been acquired by social marketing data provider Fliptop, the companies announced late last night. Qwerly was a European startup that allowed developers to provide information like a person’s Twitter profile or email address and would then return links to their corresponding profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. In other words, it is a tool that helps you better understand the people you know, it points you to where they share their thoughts and experiences online, programmatically. (See: Qwerly Hopes to Power Rebel Alliance Against Facebook)
Fliptop, which acquired Qwerly, is a little written-about social media marketing platform that does similar things, just better, faster and with an explicit aim at marketers. Ultimately all beautiful things must bow down before the god of marketing; human communication has no meaning beyond the opportunity it provides for one person to sell something to another.
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“The motivation to build Qwerly was really the question ‘what do we need to build a decentralized social web platform?’ and what we came up with was ‘first, we need to find out how profiles are connected’, i.e. consolidating identities across profiles,” Qwerly founder Max Niederhofer told ReadWriteWeb in January. “We looked at what had happened there in terms of open protocols, like webfinger, and figured things weren’t moving fast enough.”
From data rebel for decentralization to marketing tool in under twelve months, how’s that for things moving fast enough? It’s not the player I mean to criticize, it’s the game. Startup companies have to make money and people aren’t willing to pay for a lot that we ought to (in my opinion). If you were to tell people you enabled anyone to swipe through lit-up full-screen, epoch-defining great works of art from around the world on a nearly paper-thin device, while listening to music, people would yawn. No, the internet would rather put real kittens in a USB powered blender and make virtual goods come out, pooped into an idiotic Zynga pseudo-world, now that people would pay for!
But learning where people publish their thoughts, dreams, plans and photos online? Why else would someone pay to know more about another person but for the leverage it provides to acquire that person’s money? Qwerly’s broad vision (as I’ve always been excited about it at least) of providing value to developers of all kinds of applications, which might then be useful in learning about the world, one another, the human condition, art, science, beauty and love, clearly offers too little tangible value to be supported by the market. That’s not what the internet is for, people.
Qwerly users will be allowed to continue using the company’s data as it transitions to its new home, but the long term prospects of any project that would even consider decorating the dark fall through life into our inevitable death and through the sharpened teeth of the undifferentiated marketer are not strong.
Fliptop offers Salesforce integration, though, and that’s pretty cool. Hopefully more interesting things will come out of all this. We’ll see.
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Why You Can’t Downgrade iOS
Oct 19th
If you rushed into upgrading your iThing to v5, you may be one of those that are having regrets. Your phone or tablet may be running slower, or draining its battery faster. Or there might be some apps that just don’t run at all under v5. Apple will basically say, “too bad.” Because you can’t downgrade your iOS to an earlier version – not without jailbreaking your phone or running some dubious software, and even then you might have problems.
I upgraded my iPad 2 last week when iOS 5 was released, and I thought all was well, until I came home from work that evening and my wife wanted to run her favorite app: the local St. Louis Post Dispatch newspaper. Nothing but a blank screen. An email to the newspaper went unanswered, and then later the paper’s deputy managing editor posted a note saying that its app was one of several that wasn’t compatible with v5 and to hang tight until they could fix it, with no ETA (thanks Apple for that one, since they have to approve all new apps too). So what to do, other than getting the dead trees edition?
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The answer is: wait. You can’t go home again, at least not yet. Apple only allows you to upgrade to a more recent iOS version. Upgrades happen in iTunes, and you can shift/click or option/click on the “restore” button to upload a different firmware version than the one that Apple intends, maybe. Before you do this, you need to first download this older firmware file to your computer. You can use a site such as iClarified that provides links to earlier firmware. However, if you haven’t done a local backup, and even in some cases if you have, you are out of luck with this method, because Apple doesn’t allow the downrevved firmware to be installed. You will see a message similar to the one here.
Depending on your iThing, you might be able to force the downgrade with one of the jailbreaking tools, such as Jailbreakme.com, Spirit and RecBoot. There are various posts around the Internet that help you figure out how to use these, and the goal here is to try to unlock the Apple-based limitation on which firmware rev you can load. But none of these have been updated to work with v5 or on the iPad. (Another place that you might want to try has you modifying your \etc\hosts file here, but that again didn’t work for me.)
So I am out of luck for the time being. Those of you that run enterprise iPad installations should think carefully about doing any upgrades for the time being, particularly if you have apps that you haven’t yet tested in iOS5. And it looks like we may have to start up our Post-Dispatch subscription in the meantime.
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Why Can’t Filing a Patent Be As Easy As Buying a Book?
Oct 14th
I am not a lawyer, and I don’t wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.
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My intersections with our legal system haven’t been pretty: my divorce, registering a trademark, and an appearance in court to evict my deadbeat renter. Yes, I did serve on a couple of juries. No arrests, thankfully.
What these events have in common is that none of them were things that I initially wanted to do. Including the trademark registration. You see, I was using the name Web Informant for sending out a series of email newsletters, and I have been doing so since 1995. A year or so later, a publishing firm who had (blank) Informant as their titles wanted to come out with a print version using Web Informant. I heard about their intentions and filed a trademark registration, fortunately a few weeks before their own attempt.
Now, on my application, I put the correct date of first use with the first issue of the newsletter, which was in September 1995. The other guys put their date as sometime in 1990, if memory serves me correctly, which was just false but there wasn’t much I could do about, short of spending thousands on legal bills to contest the action. The fact that the Web as we all know it didn’t really exist outside of a few places didn’t really enter into the discussion. As they say on lots of TV legal shows, let’s not confuse the issue with any facts.
Thankfully, things have a way of working out: the print publication went the way of the dodo, and my email newsletter and associated website have endured the test of time. But the whole thing left a bad taste with me for the trademark (and the associated patent) process.
Now we are changing things, so that the first to file will be given consideration for patents. This means if you are an entrepreneur, almost the moment of idea conception is when you need to engage a lawyer and get your application in. It almost seems as if the process is:
- Think up a cool idea.
- Find out if the dot com is taken and register it.
- Find a patent lawyer and send in your application.
- Start working on your product or service and build your business.
This seems wacko to me.
I realize that most of the world uses first to file as the criterion for patents, and in many parts of the world patents aren’t respected at all. But still, this is a step backwards. Yes, there are places like Legalzoom that will help you through this process online, but still it isn’t easy. Filing a patent should be like buying a book on Amazon.
Now, perhaps that is somewhat unfair: when you buy a book, you don’t have to have this dialogue with someone to lay out all your alternatives and to walk you through the purchase process and the various options for different forms that you need to fill out. But why can’t the Patent Office have some simplified process that has the forms online? It is probably impossible, but still.
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