Why We Filed An Amicus Brief In Garcia v. Google: Blaming 3rd Parties Has Serious Impact On Free Speech

from the not-just-about-copyright dept

Monday was the deadline for amici briefs over whether or not the 9th Circuit should rehear, en banc, the Garcia v. Google debacle, in which Alex Kozinski made a bunch of highly questionable decisions in ruling that actress Cindy Lee Garcia deserves a copyright in her 5-second performance shown in the controversial 13-minute "trailer" known as Innocence of Muslims. The 9th Circuit made it clear that it would welcome briefs from anyone who wanted to file them, and a bunch of organizations and companies have been lining up to do so. You can see the full list of briefs here, though at the time I write this, it's still being updated. If I get the chance I'll try to review some of the other briefs soon. However, I wanted to write about one such brief first: ours.

After some consideration, we teamed up with the Organization for Transformative Works to file our own brief concerning "intermediary liability." While the 9th Circuit noted it would accept briefs from all interested parties, it also said those briefs had to be shorter than 2,500 words, which is not a lot of space to make complex legal arguments. We fully expected many others to focus in on all of the (many, many) troubling copyright aspects in Kozinski's ruling, but wanted to raise a separate (and, in some ways, larger) issue that was almost entirely ignored by the ruling: that third parties should not be blamed for the actions of their users -- and that Judge Kozinski's broad injunction did just that.

Lawyer Cathy Gellis wrote up an amicus brief on our behalf, highlighting Congress's clear intent in both Sections 230 of the CDA and 512 of the DMCA in providing safe harbors from liability for third parties, in order to encourage them to support free and open dialogue and discourse online, without fear of legal repercussions. As our brief argues, while many have ignored Section 230 (which excludes intellectual property), it should be quite clear that Garcia's case was really nothing more than an attempt to misuse copyright law in order to get around Section 230 and to hold a third party liable. Furthermore, as we've noted in the past, Judge Kozinski's injunction appears to go well beyond what the law says is appropriate in responding to copyright claims.

There is a reason why Congress was so intent on providing safe harbors, recognizing the incentives for broad censorship when you blame service providers for the actions of their users. Judge Kozinski appears to have ignored nearly all of Congress' intent in his ruling, and we're hopeful that (among the many other reasons why his ruling should be reviewed), the rest of the 9th Circuit will recognize that the original ruling has serious First Amendment implications, beyond just the basic copyright questions.

Filed Under: amicus brief, cda, cindy garcia, cindy lee garcia, copyright, dmca, free speech, innocence of muslims, intermediary liability, safe harbors, section 230, third party liability
Companies: floor64, google, organization for transformative works, youtube

86 Companies And Groups Ask Congress To Put An End To Abusive NSA Spying

from the enough-is-enough dept

A group of nearly 100 civil liberties, public interest groups and internet companies have asked Congress to put an end to the abusive NSA surveillance that we've been writing about over the past week (full disclosure: our company, Floor64, is a part of the coalition, along with the EFF, ACLU, reddit, Mozilla, the American Library Assocation, the Internet Archive and many, many more). Along with this effort, a new website has been launched, called Stop Watching Us, which is collecting more signatures for the letter, while also asking for some specific reforms from Congress.

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

The full text of the letter is below.

Filed Under: congress, letter, nsa, nsa surveillance, patriot act
Companies: aclu, american library association, eff, floor64, mozilla, reddit

Apparently I'm A Google Shill And I Didn't Even Know It

from the well-that's-awkward dept

So, there's been this slightly weird tangent in the Oracle/Google patent & copyright dispute, in which Judge Alsup -- for reasons that are still not clear to anyone -- ordered both companies to disclose the names of any "authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have and/or may publish comments on the issues in [the] case." Both sides made filings last week, with Oracle disclosing -- as was already public -- that it had blogger Florian Mueller on staff as a consultant, and mentioning an Oracle employee who blogged about the case. Google, on the other hand, told the court that it hadn't paid anyone to comment on the case at all, but did mention that in the course of its regular activities, it does give money to various companies, some of whom may have had employees who commented on the story. Judge Alsup came back earlier this week and told Google it didn't try hard enough and to find some names to name.

Earlier today, Google did its filing and apparently found some names... including mine! Yes, I know that we've had some haters declaring for years that I'm a Google shill, so this must be the confirmation of all their conspiracy theories, rumors and attacks, right? Well, no. I'm named in the section about CCIA -- the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Why? Because CCIA sponsored some research that we did. Here's what the filing states:

The CCIA has commissioned studies by Mike Masnick, CEO of Floor64. See http://www.floor64.com/about.php. Mr. Masnick has commented on the case on the TechDirt website and on his personal friendfeed.com account. See Ex. X (available at https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120523/11050519050/boom-jury-says-no-patentinfringement- google-oracle-case.shtml and at http://friendfeed.com/mmasnick/a3a94012/jurygoogle- did-not-infringe-on-oracle-patents).

And, yes, CCIA has commissioned a study by my company (Floor64) which I co-authored. And that's, uh, public knowledge. Here's my post back in January announcing the Sky is Rising report, in which it says, upfront, that it was sponsored by CCIA. And, of course, you can go check out the Sky is Rising report yourself directly, which has a nice big CCIA logo on the front. Hell, if you want, you can also donate some money for the ebook version -- and it, too, will come with the CCIA logo.

I'm not sure how that has anything to do with Google. Google is a CCIA member, as are a bunch of other companies. And, honestly, if you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said that I thought Oracle was a CCIA member too, because it's an organization that represents a bunch of top tech companies, including Microsoft, eBay, Sprint, Facebook, AMD, Fujitsu, Dish Networks and more. However, it appears that Oracle is not a CCIA member, though I only learned this today from the filing, which also notes that Oracle and Sun used to be CCIA members. So, I'm not sure what any of that says about anything.

And, of course, if the point of this exercise is to uncover "shills" who are really speaking on behalf of companies without disclosing it, once again this argument falls down. My position on issues related to copyright and patents has been pretty damn consistent since before Google existed. And that continues up until today. I will regularly call out Google for patent and copyright behavior that I believe is bad. And that's because I say what I think. The editorial content of this site has never been for sale, nor will it ever be. Because the only way I survive in this business is with my reputation.

Also, I'm not sure what's with the Friendfeed link in the filing. To be honest, I'd completely forgotten about Friendfeed, which I thought was shut down after Facebook bought the company. But I believe my Friendfeed just sucked in my Twitter account and Techdirt's Twitter account into a single feed. And apparently it lives on without my knowledge.

Separately, because all of this struck me as interesting, I remembered that we did some work with Oracle too! And, just as with what we did with CCIA, it was disclosed publicly at the time. Oracle (along with Intel) sponsored a section of our site, and a series of webinars that we did. And yet, Oracle did not disclose me in their original filing and I don't believe that they filed a new filing here either. Of course, as with CCIA, our relationship with Oracle did not include them having any say in editorial either. In fact, with the order as broad as it was from Judge Alsup, I'd argue that there's a much stronger argument that I should be in the Oracle filing than the Google one. But, of course, Oracle didn't include us because it was a random blog sponsorship thing they did a while back which had nothing to do with editorial (or even intellectual property issues).

In the end, this comes right back to some of the concerns that were raised about Judge Alsup's broad order in the first place. If you want to find tenuous connections, they exist. In fact, Google's filing lists out a bunch of other names (including many people who I know or consider friends), almost all of whom have a long, long history of holding the exact same positions, and where the connection to "Google money" is, at best, weak.

Like many folks, I was curious to see who would be named on both of these lists, but the order was so broad that it seems to have swept me up into it (on one side, though a broad reading says it would make more sense for me to be on the other one!), and that's silly. I'm a big boy and I can handle people not understanding the details here and attacking me, but the fact that we did unrelated research for a different organization that Google is a member of -- and that gets me named on a list of "shills" just doesn't seem right.

Filed Under: bloggers, commentary, disclosures, shills
Companies: ccia, floor64, google, oracle

Results From Our CwF+RtB Business Model Experiment

from the cwf+rtb dept

Before getting into the "meat" of this post about how our CwF+RtB experiment worked out, I want to announce that we've "replenished" the store with some new t-shirts and hoodies. These are brand new -- not the same t-shirts and hoodies we had before, which are sold out. You have a choice of either a t-shirt or a hoodie with the full Techdirt logo, or my personal favorite DMCA takedown t-shirt which says on the front:
The content of this t-shirt has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice.

Consider the message on the shirt a good way to engage people in a conversation about the abuses of copyright law and the DMCA. The hoodies come with a copy of my Approaching Infinity book, while you can get the t-shirts without the book or with the book.

Also, we are doing one thing differently this time around. Rather than just waiting until we sell out to stop selling these shirts, we're taking open orders for two weeks only and then will make the shirts and send them out. So if you want this shirt from us, you have two weeks to order. And that's it. On to the post itself...

---

After seeing many musicians setting up various interesting/amusing "tiers" of scarce value worth buying, while also working to connect with fans, we decided to launch our own CwF+RtB tiers, at the end of July, as an experiment to see what we might learn. We knew that this sort of thing worked for music, but had no idea if it would work elsewhere -- say, for a blog. It wasn't designed to replace our existing business model, but just as an experiment to see what would happen -- and what we could learn that might help others implementing similar business models.

I should apologize, as this post detailing the results is way, way, way overdue. We had most of the results and lessons within about a month, but this is a big post to write up and I kept procrastinating. No good reason why: there was just always something going on in the news that seemed more urgent and every so often I do like to catch up on sleep.

The quick summary: we consider the experiment to have been a huge success.

• We brought in approximately $37,000 total due to this experiment, mostly in the course of that first month.
• Nearly $12,000 came from direct sales to individuals of the tiers between $5 and $150.
• As was revealed in an article at Wired, another $5,000 came from an individual, Didier Mary, who was working on a business plan and bought the Techdirt Reviews Your Business Plan package. The package included an Insight Community conversation, which recently concluded, about his business model idea. Didier has told us that "it was a great experience" and very useful to him in moving forward with his plans.
• Another $20,000 came from larger companies, which purchased Insight Community packages after learning about them through this effort.
• The effort also resulted in potential future deals, as it led many more companies to contact us to learn more about the Insight Community.
• Other companies, with whom we were already talking about the Insight Community, contacted us after we launched this, with one noting that if what his company had been discussing with us was on the list, he probably would have just "clicked buy" right away (though, with that company, we're still discussing a deal and have not yet completed it).
• Ignoring the higher end Insight Community deals, the average amount paid by users was over $70. This was significantly higher than expected.
• Sales came from 15 different countries around the globe. North America and Europe were obviously the biggest, but we also got sales from Asia, South America and Australia (no Africa). The international sales might have been bigger if we had launched international sales the same day we launched the overall effort. Unfortunately, we didn't have all the details on that sorted out until a week later, and I think we probably lost some international sales that way. The US Postal Service does make international sales much easier these days -- especially with its "one rate" boxes, but shipping is still really expensive, and many countries then add annoying tariffs on top of everything. This was annoying, but (unfortunately) unavoidable.
• Our highest selling item was not the cheapest, second cheapest or third cheapest offering (contrary to the claims that people just want the cheapest item). Instead, the biggest seller -- by a pretty wide margin -- was the Approaching Infinity package, that included both a copy of my book and a t-shirt.
• For quite a while, the hoodies (which we almost didn't offer) outsold the t-shirts... but in the end the t-shirts barely passed the hoodies.
• The Techdirt Book Club outsold the Techdirt Music Club by a factor of three.
• No one bought the Day with Techdirt package, though we actually got a lot of inquiries about that, with multiple people who don't live in California saying that if they were closer, they would have bought it. This is still available, though.
• And, fear not, no one bought the $100 Million Silence Techdirt offer (still available as well!), though we did get a few people who were worried that someone would actually take us up on this -- and one satirical offer from someone claiming to be from the RIAA, which made me laugh, saying the RIAA would pay up, but wanted to guarantee "exclusive rights" to the RIAA, such that it would be able to "pursue appropriate legal action against any and all 3rd parties that make use of this silence purposely or inadvertently" including, of course "the right to pursue similar action against any individuals who are also not reading Techdirt and therefore infringing on our own licensed agreement to be the sole recipient of a Techdirt-free world." Brilliant.
• However, the $100 Million Silence Techdirt offer did get the most traffic of any of the tiers, by a factor of three -- though, it also drove many people to check out the other tiers.

Lessons Learned

So, what did we learn? Lots of things:

1. This works! These sorts of models can absolutely work in connecting with fans and in making money.
2. All of you, in our community, are awesome. Not just for buying, obviously, but because the overall response we got was incredible. This included many really, really nice emails that made us feel great, along with happy emails and Twitter messages from people receiving their packages, and telling us stories about wearing the clothes, reading the books, etc.
3. It's fun making people happy. Really. It really gave all of us here at Floor64 a great feeling every time we heard back from happy community members.
4. Logistics and inventory management are more complicated than you expect. We sort of knew this ahead of time, but you realize it first-hand when somehow, somewhere copies of signed books go missing, and you suddenly need to ask for an author to send extras. Also, dealing with sourcing inventory from so many different people for the Book and Music club is doable, but takes a lot of time to manage. Though, I have to say, every one we worked with -- from authors and musicians to publishers, agents and record labels really were fantastic. We didn't have even the slightest trouble from any of our partners in this endeavor. Shipping out the products definitely was an effort, but we tried to make it fun, with a group of us working together to package up and ship stuff (and on this one, the team here, lead by Gretchen, did a fantastic job, going above and beyond to get everything organized and shipped).
5. Having lots of options was a good thing because we weren't very accurate in predicting what would sell. We came close to not offering the hoodies at all, but those were incredibly popular.
6. You can't keep everybody happy, but you should try! We had to set up a better process for "customer support" as we launched this (nice job, Dennis!) and then work with and respond to customers who had questions or (in a few cases) problems. A few times the problem was that we did not explain things clearly enough, and sometimes there were problems with shipments (or, in one case, a hoodie that was frayed). But we tried our best to make sure everyone was happy and hopefully succeeded (mostly).
7. What you're selling should match your audience. The Book Club sold really well. The Music Club, not as much -- despite being awesome (seriously, the combined Music Club items are really, really cool, and the music is great as well). But, in retrospect perhaps that made sense, as the books in the Book Club directly related to everything we talk about here. The Music Club, while supporting artists who did things that we talked about here, was a bit different, and required people to like the music as well, which is a lot more subjective. Bundling together four separate musicians with different styles was, perhaps, not a great idea. On top of that, we perhaps did not do enough to promote the music itself to get more people to enjoy the work of those musicians. Finally, while some of the offerings were "unique," others could be purchased elsewhere, which limited the "scarcity" of the overall package.
8. Some promotions worked really well. The first promotion we did was offering anyone who bought both the music and book clubs together a choice of either lunch with me or a free hoodie. This helped motivate a bunch of folks to step up and buy -- and resulted in a handful of lunches.
9. Having lunch with people was really, really cool. I have to admit that I was a bit nervous going into the lunches from the above promotion, but they were all really amazing, often in very different ways. Each individual was really interesting and the conversations were quite engaging and thought provoking and fun. I'm pretty sure every lunch ended up lasting well over the allotted hour. I ended up learning a lot and had a great time at every one. I'm hoping to set up more ways to do things like that, if not the same thing.
10. Even the tiers that didn't sell, still generated interest in other things we were doing. A bunch of people contacted us about the Day With Techdirt package, and while no one bought it, many of them bought other packages instead.
11. Not everyone who says they will buy will buy, but that's okay. It was interesting to note that some people who told us they would buy (or even announced it on their Twitter/Facebook feeds) never actually did buy for whatever reason. That's fine, of course. Everyone is free to do what they want, but it was interesting to note. Just because someone says they'll buy, it doesn't mean they will.
12. Communicating directly with everyone can be difficult. While others here handled customer service requests, I started getting a bunch of emails personally from people who participated, sometimes with long and detailed questions. I tried to reply to most of these, but it was difficult, and I'm sure I missed a few.

Anyway, that's the basic summary. This really has been a lot of fun and quite educational at the same time. We've still got lots of things planned and will be trying a few new things as well, but thanks to everyone who participated and a big thanks to all the authors and musicians who partnered with us, along with the team here at Floor64 for helping to make this all work.

Filed Under: cwf, results, rtb, techdirt
Companies: floor64, techdirt

Hacked Recap

from the well,-that-was-fun dept

As mentioned over the weekend, we were briefly hacked on Saturday evening. We've put in a bit of time to figure out what happened, clean up the mess and correct the problems (and harden some other defenses as well). The short story is that we left open a big hole that we shouldn't have left open. Yay. We had certainly locked down most of the obvious holes, and people try to hack us on a semi-regular basis, with little success. But, if someone's persistent enough, they'll find a way. In this case, though, we made it a hell of a lot easier than we should have. This particular hacker tried hitting a whole bunch of different routes early Saturday morning, most of which got rejected (some people noticed his attempt to do a SQL injection via the comments -- that failed). However, he went on to try SQL injections just about everywhere and eventually found one where we hadn't properly escaped things, and bam, that's all it takes. As you probably know, this site has been around since 1998, and while we've dumped/updated most of the old code, and most of the new code is properly secured, there were still a little pieces left over from the ancient code -- and that's where the big vulnerabilities were. That's not an excuse. We should have caught it earlier (in fact, we actually had been testing some code to replace some of the vulnerabilities, but hadn't deployed it yet -- but, we now realize it wouldn't have blocked all the problems). But, it is what happened.

From there, the hacker got into part of the blog admin (don't want to get into too many details of how the blog backend works, but it actually involves two separate admins -- which are separate from other stuff we do). Then, he basically had pretty good access to doing some stuff (though not everything) on the blog. He poked around a bit, deleted a bunch of comments, deleted a whole ton of old story submissions (most of which were junk anyway -- so thanks!) and then replaced a few stories on the front page with his fancy "hacked!" claims.

After that, the story is pretty straightforward. Once we realized what happened, we put the old stories back in place and made sure to quickly toss up some more secure walls to keep him out of the admin. We also shut down comments and submissions for a while, even though we were pretty damn sure the vulnerability wasn't there (it wasn't), but we wanted to make sure. Then a few of us spent some time digging around to understand just what the guy did so we could retrace his steps and make sure we killed off the basic vulnerabilities. Considering that he tried to hit us from a bunch of different angles, this took a bit longer than expected. But, once we figured out the basics, it was just a matter of tracking down the actual holes in the code. It was a little frustrating, since we really thought we'd blocked out SQL injections -- but in the end, it turns out we didn't do it absolutely everywhere. Anyway, there's a fair amount of code to go through, so we've been going over it with a fine-tooth comb, and checking it twice, then locking it down again.

Finally, we've been restoring the lost comments (we're doing that right now, so they might not all be back yet), of which we believe we didn't lose any (there's a small chance that a very very small number of comments were lost). Restoring the lost submissions is a bit much at this point (as I said, most were junk anyway), so if you submitted stories late Friday or Saturday, and really think we should see them, perhaps submit them again.

On the whole, there's not that much to say, other than check your code carefully, folks. If there's a hole somewhere, eventually someone's gonna find it. Luckily, this guy didn't do much damage -- just a bit of vandalism -- and he kept a few of us from enjoying what had otherwise been quite nice weekends with our friends and families. But he got us to go over our code pretty carefully (and mentally kick ourselves a few times), and get in touch with our inner CSI detectives to track down exactly what happened.

Update: Well, that was just great. Less than half an hour after posting this, our network provider went down for nearly two hours, despite supposedly having all sorts of redundancies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the hack, but was a bigger issue for the provider. However, it did slow down us restoring the comments, meaning that comments need to remain off for probably another few hours. This has really been a fun weekend.

Update 2: Comments are back. We did end up losing a few comments, mostly those right before the hack. Really sorry about that. If you said something really important and it's missing... say it again, please.

Filed Under: hacked, sql injection
Companies: floor64, techdirt

Wired Reveals First Buyer Of The Techdirt Reviews Your Business Plan Offering

from the cwf+rtb dept

Wired's Epicenter blog has a nice writeup all about our Connecting with Fans Experiment, and got to break the news about the first buyer of the Techdirt Reviews Your Business Model offering, Didier Mary. We'll have more details on the overall program shortly, but wanted to make it through at least the first month to have enough data to start sharing some of our lessons. Still, I'll say that the program has been a success well beyond what we expected...

Filed Under: cwf, rtb
Companies: floor64, techdirt

CwF + RtB = Techdirt

from the a-little-experiment dept

Techdirt's CwF + RtB

Time for a little experimenting from Techdirt... For years, we've been talking about various new business models in the digital era, and how they can work. More recently, we've seen a rapid increase in musicians who have figured this out (though, we're seeing it in a few other industries as well). Back in January, for a presentation that I did at the music industry event MidemNet about Trent Reznor's various experiments, I tried to simplify what he had done into a simple equation, and came up with
Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

That simple formula has resonated incredibly well, to the point that I'm receiving emails daily about it specifically -- and not just in the music industry, but many other industries, asking how they can apply it themselves. Some complained that such a model only worked for "big" name acts like Reznor, so I later expanded the original presentation to include many other acts of varying levels of fame and success to show how it could work at many different levels. Most recently, I used those examples to show where I believed the overall music industry was heading.

But, it actually goes beyond just the music industry. In fact, I'd argue that these models apply to many different industries, including the media business. After doing all those presentations, some of us here at Floor64/Techdirt got to talking about ways that they could be applied to other industries -- and one thing led to another where we began to wonder why we didn't test them out ourselves. So, we looked at the various models and thought about what could we do along those lines. I certainly love the "tiered" models, where there are numerous options of increasing value that people can buy into, and we figured, why not test that out ourselves? It would be a fun experiment and a great learning experience. So... here we are introducing:
Techdirt's CwF + RtB

We had a lot of fun putting this together. There's quite a range of things on the list. Of course, everything you are used to here on Techdirt remains as free and open as ever. Then there are all sorts of relatively inexpensive extras you can buy, granting you some extra abilities, like the chance to see some Techdirt posts before everyone else, followed up by some fun products -- such as t-shirts and a package that includes both a t-shirt and a book written by me. Like hoodies? We've got those too.

Beyond that, however, is where we really started to explore the possibilities. We realized we also wanted to use it to help promote others who understood this vision (it's not just about us, of course). So we put together two great offerings that I'm incredibly excited about. The first is our Techdirt Music Club offering, that doesn't just promote four musicians (Jill Sobule, Amanda Palmer, Moto Boy and Joe Pug) -- all of whom we've discussed at times for the cool things they do with new business models -- but also offers you something unique that you can't get anywhere else. All four (and their management) have been a tremendous joy to work with through this process. It's great brainstorming with creative, positive people.

Next is the Techdirt Book Club, which is a fantastic collection of must read books from a bunch of authors whose thinking on this is far beyond what else you might find out there. Even better? All of the authors involved -- William Patry, James Boyle, David Levine, Michele Boldrin and Michael Heller -- are so enthusiastic about this experiment that they've agreed to provide signed copies of the books in question. It's the ultimate signed book collection -- and, as a bonus we throw in additional features for Techdirt and the book that we put together from my writings -- which I'll sign as well.

From there we've also got a chance to hang out -- and spend the day with us and some friends. See the magic that is writing a Techdirt post and (much more exciting) have some entertaining discussions myself and with much more interesting folks like Mark Fletcher, Andy Kessler, Rich Skrenta and Eric Goldman. We'll have some meals, we'll hang out at the office, and we'll go out and have some fun as well. Should be a blast.

Above that level, we have a whole series of options that are more for the corporate level -- though, if you're feeling flush, individuals are more than welcome to take part, utilizing the business side of what we do here at Floor64/Techdirt. You've got a variety of different options that include some opportunities to use the Insight Community to get some smart analysis on your business model. Or you can help pick a theme for a week on Techdirt, complete with an Insight Community case and additional posts. There are also offerings where I'll speak at your company or event... all the way up to a full on Techdirt Greenhouse production for your company, both of which include cases with the Insight Community. And, if you really want to dig in, and get every single thing that we have offered... that's available as well.

And, of course, these offerings are targeted at the folks who like what we do, enjoy it and would like to interact with us some more... but we like to offer up things for everyone, including those who aren't huge fans, and would rather we shut up and go away. We've even got a package for you! Though, I warn you, it's a bit pricey. We may be offering something for you, but we never said we'd make it easy for you.

Anyway, we hope you have some fun checking these out -- and find something worthwhile to you. We enjoyed getting the whole thing together, and we're curious to see what we learn from this experiment. Special thanks to the team at Floor64 for putting in some crazy hours before this launch, and to everyone else (authors and their publishers, musicians and their managers, entrepreneurs, etc.) who agreed to take part in this experiment.

Techdirt's CwF + RtB

Filed Under: cwf, rtb
Companies: floor64, techdirt

My Keynote At Mesh: Growing Communities And Adding True Scarcities

from the have-fun-with-it dept

A bunch of folks have been asking for video from my keynote talk at the excellent Mesh Conference, and here it is (and if you really want to download it, there's an iTunes link as well). It's also embedded below if you click through. The whole thing is an hour, but split into four separate videos. The first two are my presentation and the second two are the Q&A that followed:





It was, as always, lots of fun to do. Also, I met tons of great, wonderful, interesting and fascinating people at the event. Interacting with people is always the best part of these things. Thanks to everyone who came out -- and a special thanks to the Mesh Crew: Mathew, Rob, Michael, Stuart and Mark who have created something really special with the Mesh event and who are each amazing individuals as well.

Also, since people were quizzing me about it later: I actually do "memorize" the presentations and what's coming next. I don't see what the next slide is before I bring it up and no (as two separate people asked me...) I did not have a little device in my ear telling me what was coming next....

Filed Under: business models, economics, keynote, mesh, scarcities
Companies: floor64

New Models To Compensate Journalists And Writers

from the it's-possible dept

We're seeing plenty of stories of old school journalists pining for the "good old days" (that never really existed), and that's exactly what the Wall Street Journal recently published with a ridiculously vapid opinion piece by a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, Paul Mulshine, who dismisses the entire world of bloggers and internet reporters because some people he hears on the TV and radio can't pronounce the word "pundit" properly. Beyond the sheer irony of dismissing internet reporting as being untrustworthy based on a few people on TV and radio who pronounce a word incorrectly, the guy also dismisses all new business models for compensating journalists, by saying:

The old model for compensating journalists is as obsolete as the telegraph. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can tell me what the new model is, I will pronounce him the first genius I've ever encountered on the Internet.

Perhaps Mr. Mulshine should stop listening to talk radio and actually get online -- where an increasing number of folks have actually figured out how to make journalism pay. We recently pointed out that, in the sports world, salaries for top journalists were going up, as national sites like ESPN looked to hire the best of the best.

Or perhaps he should talk to Mark Cuban -- though, I'm guessing Mulshine's old school views on journalism would have a serious problem with Cuban's recent suggestion for how to save newspaper sports coverage. Cuban points out that sports leagues need local beat writers to cover their sports, as they do a much better job than the national sites like ESPN and Yahoo Sports. Yet, he knows that newspapers are struggling -- so his suggestion is that the sports leagues should fund the journalists, while leaving the editorial control entirely up to the papers, aside from a guarantee of a certain amount of coverage in the local paper.

This is, obviously, a controversial suggestion (even with editorial control separated from the dollars), especially for those who believe in complete editorial separation of church and state. But, as Cuban notes, considering the state of the newspaper business these days, perhaps it's time to revisit that church. He also leaves out the fact that this isn't quite as far fetched as it sounds. Media companies have a pretty long history of also owning sports teams, seeing synergies between the media properties and the teams, though they've often failed to recognize those synergies (and these days, many media companies are trying to sell off the teams). The Tribune Company is trying to sell its stake in the Chicago Cubs. The NY Times has put out feelers to sell off its stake in the Red Sox (more of a fit for the NYT-owned Boston Globe). Cablevision, in NY, owns the Knicks. The concept has worked in reverse at times as well -- with much of the NY Yankees' recent fortunes coming from starting up its own media company, called YES (not to mention that before the current ownership of the Yankees, the team was owned by CBS).

Either way, the suggestion is actually worth exploring in some format. In truth, this is often what has happened anyway, with local companies buying ads in the paper and expecting coverage of the local sports teams, even when there wasn't a direct need for it. Making it more explicit, while also making the editorial controls clear, doesn't seem so unreasonable. In fact, it seems like it might make a lot more sense than the old way of doing things in that it gets everything out in the open. As for Mr. Mulshine, he also seems to be harkening back to good old days that didn't really ever exist. Nearly 100 years ago, there was apparently an eerily similar debate over newspaper business models, with people fretting and worrying about how the traditional newspaper business models of ad sales and subscriptions simply couldn't support enough journalism. While not many of the other proposed models took hold, perhaps it's time to take another shot.

And, in fact, this is part of what we believe we're able to do here at Floor64 with our Insight Community offering. Companies have been tapping into the Insight Community to generate interesting and relevant content, while ceding all editorial control to us. For example, American Express has been using Insight Community content on its own award-winning Open Forum blog discussing trends and issues related to small businesses. American Express does not have editorial control over most of the content, and the content is pretty clearly not specific to or slanted by American Express's sponsorship of the endeavor. And, as some people are noting, that blog is full of such wonderful content, that plenty of other mainstream publications, including the NY Times and the Financial Times, are noticing that such a publication really is no different than a small business trade publication now.

Except, rather than American Express having to buy ads in random small business trade publications, it gets to sponsor the whole thing -- while ceding much of the editorial control to others. Obviously, we're a bit biased here, because we believe this is a tremendously viable model, but if you read the content on that site -- or, say, the content on the Digital Nomads site, sponsored by Dell, that runs under a similar model, you can judge the quality of the content yourself -- and recognize that for all the whining and complaining about the old models going away, there are tremendous new opportunities opening themselves up, as well.

Filed Under: business models, compensation, journalism, mark cuban, paul mulshine, sponsorship
Companies: floor64

What You've Been Missing Over At The Insight Community

from the virtualization-and-digital-nomads-oh-my dept

We've been pretty busy on a bunch of fronts and haven't had much of a chance to mention some of what's going on over at the Insight Community lately, and wanted to pass along some of the cool things that have come out of there recently. First up, we had a case sponsored by IBM and Intel all about virtualization that went amazingly well. Originally, the plan was to only take the three best insights and put them on the Virtualization Conversation blog, but they were so blown away by the content that they agreed to up the deal to take eight. Check out Stephen Foskett's post looking at where virtualization of data center infrastructure will take companies in the future. Then there's David Mould looking at three scenarios that benefit from virtualization. More posts will be going up soon.

Then, of course, the community's been doing some great work diving into all the various details of digital nomads for the crowdsourced whitepaper about digital nomads, sponsored by Dell. The community has already generated nearly one hundred different insightful thoughts on how the rise of digital nomads impacts everything from business decisions, workplace environments and IT decisions. From all that great content, a fantastic digital nomads wiki has been created, and some of the best output from that wiki has been turned into a downloadable whitepaper (pdf) if you're looking to understand things like how to determine the ROI on digital nomads in your business.

And, of course, there have been a variety of ongoing Insight Community insights showing up on American Express's Open Forum blog (including a post I did on what small businesses can learn from Tabasco sauce). There's plenty more going on in the Insight Community as well, we've got a bunch more lined up and coming soon, so if you're not already a member, why not?

Filed Under: insight community, insights
Companies: floor64, techdirt