Former Google CIO & EMI Digital COO Guy Explains How File Sharing Is Good For Artists

from the oops dept

In April of 2008, EMI hired Doug Merrill away from his Google CIO position to lead the company's digital efforts. As we noted at the time, this actually seemed like an opportunity for EMI to really embrace what the technology allowed, though we feared whether he'd have any real power at EMI. Indeed, it wasn't too surprising to see him leave less than a year later, without a clear explanation at all. We'd heard some rumors of a bit of a "culture clash," and it appears that Merrill is finally confirming that in a recent speech he gave. What was the culture clash? Well, Merrill, like a typical Googler, decided to actually look at the data and found that it said file sharing could be good for artists and that users of Limewire were their best customers:

Merrill profiled the file sharing behaviour of people who used Limewire against the top iTunes sales and the biggest iTunes buyers were the same as the highest sharing “thieves” on Limewire.

“That's not theft, that's try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them,” he said wryly.

Not surprisingly, as we've noted over and over again, this sort of data and evidence (of which there are now at least half a dozen studies all saying the same thing) is simply not something that the major record labels are willing to hear. They just continue to deny the evidence. And then they wonder why they're flailing... Merrill apparently didn't talk about his departure from EMI, but it's not difficult to read between the lines.

Filed Under: customers, douglas merrill, music industry, sharing
Companies: emi, google

Turntable.fm Showing How Sharing Music Is Communication

from the the-shared-experience-is-what-makes-culture dept

We've already talked about just how amazing Turntable.fm is for its users. The key point we made was how it totally makes music social in a way that's incredibly powerful. I noted how much it reminded me of when I was an actual DJ on the radio many years ago, where so much of the fun wasn't just in playing music, but in hanging out with a bunch of friends and playing music together. Others are recognizing this as well. In one of the most splutteringly gushing reviews of the service, ever, Sam Grobart at the NY Times highlights this same key point by noting that sharing music is communication:

It doesn’t matter if you start a room with some nearby cubicle mates or with friends scattered across the globe: what you begin to realize — almost instantly — is that taking turns playing music with friends is a kind of communication. One song leads to another. Music, enjoyable in and of itself, becomes a sort of shorthand when played among people who have shared memories attached to it. Someone plays a song that was popular when you were college, then another friend plays another song from that same period and — just like that — you’ve traveled back in time. It’s like you’re all sharing in the same inside joke.

And this feeling is reflected not just in the choice of songs, but in the comments that friends post. Someone digs a lost hit out of the crates and the message board lights up with comments from friends (O.K., my friends) saying things like “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and “my head is exploding.”

Using Turntable can even help you make friends with people you only know in passing. If you’re D.J.-ing in a room with co-workers, you may never have realized that you and the guy across the floor both like Afropop. Now you have something new to talk about at the soda machine.

Later, he notes: "When your old college roommate surprises you with that Deee-Lite song the two of you used to rock out to, you know it’s more than just music: it’s a message."

Indeed. After writing my original post on Turntable.fm and how it reminded me of hanging out and DJing with a group of others -- people who I was close friends with at the time, but have mostly lost contact with -- I reached out to many of my former co-DJs to talk about setting up a "reunion" via Turntable.fm. It's hard to use Turntable.fm and not recognize that sharing music is a very legitimate form of communication.

In many ways, it's a further manifestation of a point about culture that Julian Sanchez raised a couple years ago, about how culture is built off of shared cultural experiences. It's the sharing part of culture that makes the culture valuable. If only you experience it, it just doesn't have the same power. Turntable.fm's key reason for being so addictive is that it's one of the first operations, whether on purpose or not, that has effectively taken that key aspect of culture, and turned it into a service.

However, separate from just how Turntable.fm highlights this key point, I think it also helps explain why the legacy recording industry and many politicians have made so many wrong and counterproductive moves concerning dealing with music in the internet era. Rather than realizing that music is communication, they look at it solely as a unit of content. When you view music as a unit of content, even as the fans of music actually view it as a form of communication, you're going to clash. That's because many of the ways that people communicate via music break down the concept of music being a unit of content. And, in the end, that's what a lot of the legal and policy battles have been about over the past couple decades. A very large group of people are communicating with music... and some big legacy players are simply not set up to even comprehend that, let alone cater to it.

Filed Under: communication, culture, music, shared experience, sharing
Companies: turntable.fm

First Totally Bogus Privacy Issue Over Google+ Raised

from the say-what? dept

One of the first things that struck me about Google+ was that the company appeared to be bending over backwards to make the privacy options extra clear and easy to use. It seemed like the opposite of Facebook... and even previous Google efforts, like Buzz. Clearly the privacy debacle around the launch of Buzz taught folks at Google a lesson, which they weren't going to ignore. So I was a bit surprised to see a headline claiming that there were already privacy concerns about the way Google+ worked. At first, I though that perhaps the company had missed things... but it turns out that (surprise, surprise), it looks like someone is overreacting to a basic feature:

Google's latest stab at a social network lets you categorize the people you know into different circles, so you can share with your friends what you might not want to share with your family.

The young social network, however, has a feature that lets you reshare what someone posts. By letting you reshare, the post goes beyond the circle or circles it was intended to be seen by. This loophole was first spotted by the Financial Times.

Um. That's not a privacy loophole. That's how everything on the internet works. It's how Facebook works. It's how email works. In fact, Google's setup here is even more conducive to privacy than pretty much everything else, because it actually gives you the ability to block that ability on each thing you share. I'm at a total loss to see how this is a "privacy issue." It's someone making up a privacy issue.

Filed Under: google plus, privacy, sharing
Companies: google

The More Music You Share, The More Music You Buy?

from the another-study dept

We've seen a bunch of studies like this in the past as well, but here's yet another report claiming that the more people share music, the more music they buy. Now, there are some caveats here. The report is done by a company that's trying to build a business around "legal music sharing," so it's a biased party. Also, its methodology is not particularly clear. So, even though it supports what plenty of other (more complete and open) studies have said, I'd at least take this one with a grain of salt.

Of course, there are some conflating factors in all of this. It wouldn't surprise me at all if some of the biggest file sharers are also some of the biggest music buyers, since they're often the biggest music fans. However, it would be wrong to then assume that because such people buy "more," it means that they buy more than they would have otherwise. That point has not been shown by studies. It may be true for some and probably is not true for many. However, what it does clearly suggest is that these file sharers are happy to pay for things when it makes sense. Once again, this reinforces the key point we've made before, that this is a business model challenge. These are underserved customers who are willing to buy, if the offer is reasonable.

Once you realize that, you quickly recognize the sheer pointlessness of the RIAA's strategy over the past decade plus. Rather than treating these people as underserved customers, who could be better served with better offerings, they instead treat them like criminals. That pushes them away, rather than making the more likely to buy anything. It's really amazing that the RIAA and the big record labels still haven't figured this simple point out.

Filed Under: buying, music, sharing

The War On Sharing As An Infographic Of Europe

from the where's-the-battle-of-moscow? dept

We already covered the RIAA's subpoena to Box.net, but ReadWriteWeb has a post on the story that's worth pointing out, because it highlights this absolutely wonderful infographic that Ashley Angell put together a few months ago, mapping out the "War on Sharing" as an infographic: Definitely click through to see the full image, and to Angell's explanation for the graphic. I'm sorry I missed this when it first came out, but happy I eventually spotted it.

Filed Under: infographic, sharing

RIAA Wants To Start Peeking Into Files You Store In The Cloud

from the of-course-they-do dept

The RIAA really just doesn't know when to give up attacking and to start innovating. Its latest legal move is to file for a subpoena to get information from cloud storage provider Box.net to see if some people are using the service to store and share unauthorized music. There are, of course, a variety of different services out there for cloud storage, that allow individuals, small groups and companies to share files -- not for illicit purposes, but because that's how collaboration and sharing work. I use just such a service to share photos with my family, and another to share documents with coworkers.

But, of course, technologically speaking, the actions of these systems can just as easily be used to share unauthorized content in a potentially infringing manner, and it appears that this is what the RIAA is targeting. As Eriq Gardner notes at the link above, it's not at all clear what the RIAA intends to do with the information it gets. It's difficult to see how it could sue Box.net, who almost certainly has no real liability here, but it could go after the users -- something we'd thought the RIAA had sworn off for the time being.

The whole thing just seems like a waste of time. This is what computers do. They copy. There's always a way to copy. Pretending you can stop that isn't rational. What would be rational is helping the RIAA member labels adapt, but for whatever reason, that just doesn't appear to be within the RIAA's skillset.

Filed Under: copyright, riaa, sharing, storage
Companies: box.net, riaa

IEEE Decides That Its Own Profits Are More Important Than Sharing Knowledge

from the sad-state-of-affairs dept

A year ago, we wrote about IEEE's somewhat ridiculous and aggressive policies towards republishing research it publishes. Apparently, it's getting even worse. An anonymous reader sent over Matt Blaze's story about how IEEE has made their policies even more draconian by forbidding authors from sharing the "final" versions of their papers anywhere on the web. Many academics post such papers to their own websites, or in some cases, to other aggregators or collections. This helps spread important knowledge and information -- which is the point of academia. But, as Blaze notes, IEEE and ACM -- who both should know better -- are being quite aggressive in trying to hold back such information sharing, unless they get paid for it. This is a shame, and reflects poorly on two very important organizations in the tech world. Blaze has decided to protest these moves:

Enough is enough. A few years ago, I stopped renewing my ACM and IEEE memberships in protest, but that now seems an inadequate gesture. These once great organizations, which exist, remember, to promote the exchange and advancement of scientific knowledge, have taken a terribly wrong turn in putting their own profits over science. The directors and publication board members of societies that adopt such policies have allowed a tunnel vision of purpose to sell out the interests of their members. To hell with them.

So from now on, I'm adopting my own copyright policies. In a perfect world, I'd simply refuse to publish in IEEE or ACM venues, but that stance is complicated by my obligations to my student co-authors, who need a wide range of publishing options if they are to succeed in their budding careers. So instead, I will no longer serve as a program chair, program committee member, editorial board member, referee or reviewer for any conference or journal that does not make its papers freely available on the web or at least allow authors to do so themselves.

It would certainly be nice if others followed his lead.

Filed Under: acm, copyright, ieee, knowledge, papers, sharing

Screaming Justin Bieber Fans Using Camera Phones To Capture Snippets Of Movie Premiere Berated For Piracy

from the cultural-divide dept

We've pointed out many times that the laws, especially around things like copyright, simply don't match up with the basic cultural norms of what it means to be a kid today. Remember, for example, the woman who was arrested and spent two nights in jail because she used a camera to capture a few very short segments of the movie Twilight, because she was trying to capture her sister's birthday party (with the movie showing being a part of the event). Now, TorrentFreak points us to an unintentionally hilarious article written by a woman who appears to make her living as a Marilyn Monroe/Anna Nicole Smith impersonator, complaining about how a bunch of Justin Bieber fans were thieves because they dared to film snippets of his new movie (wait, Justin Bieber has a movie?!?) at a special VIP Premiere ($30 a ticket!) with their camera phones.

Bieber fans watched the film and screamed with glee at the sight of him on the big screen, but many were also committing a crime. The crime was committed when they began taping the film for their own use. Since most of the audience consisted of teenage girls with their parents, I am left to wonder what parent lets their child commit a crime? Even scarier ,what kind of parent lets them do it in public?

Also I wonder how can Justin's fans call themselves true fans by stealing from the star?

Just what they "stole" from Bieber is not made clear, of course. Of course, there seems to be a bit of a cultural divide here. The Bieber fans aren't stealing anything. What they're doing is sharing with their friends. They're not sharing the movie, of course. I'm sure the screaming crew of Bieber fans are all begging their parents to take them to the theater (probably multiple times). What they're sharing is the experience of going to see the film. Filming a snippet and sending it to friends is a way of letting their friends know "hey, look, I got to go to the Premiere!" or something along those lines.

Of course, thanks to rampant lobbying by the MPAA, such filming is a crime. But this sort of situation just serves to underline why it's stupid to consider just any filming of a movie to be a criminal act. The screaming teen girls at the Bieber movie were not "pirating" the movie in any sense. They were trying to share a cultural experience. It seems pretty bizarre that doing so actually does put them at risk of being sent to jail for a few years.

Filed Under: cameraphones, justin bieber, movie, sharing

How Neil Gaiman Went From Fearing 'Piracy' To Believing It's 'An Incredibly Good Thing'

from the epiphanies dept

Public Knowledge points us to a wonderful short clip of Neil Gaiman, being interviewed by the Open Rights Group, explaining how he has completely changed his mind about "piracy" and copyright: He admits that early on, when he saw his works "pirated" on the web, it made him quite upset. At first, he (totally incorrectly) believed that if he didn't fight online copies, it might mean he'd lose his copyright (a myth based on a weak understanding of trademark law that sometimes people confuse with copyright law). Thankfully, he learned that wasn't true. However, where it gets interesting is when he realized that whenever his works got "pirated," it actually seemed to help his sales:

"Then I started to notice that two things that seemed much more significant. One of which was that places where I was being pirated -- particularly Russia (where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading it out into the world) I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. And then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies."

He then mentions that after a lot of persuading, he got his publisher to release a free digital copy of American Gods, and sales went up by 300%, even though it had already been selling quite well before that. And that was his epiphany moment that you're "not losing sales" by having stuff out there. And he explains how "piracy" is just a giant way of lending books, and points out that, when asked this question at talks, he asks how many people in the audience found their favorite author because someone lent them a book vs. going into a book store and buying it. And only 5 to 10% of people found their favorite authors first by buying the books.

"That's really all this is. It's people lending books. And you can't look on that as a lost sale.... What you're actually doing is advertising. You're reaching more people. You're raising awareness. And understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web was doing is allowing people to hear things, allowing people to read things, allowing people to see things they might never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that's an incredibly good thing."

Filed Under: copyright, neil gaiman, piracy, sharing