Cory Doctorow Explains Why 'Free' Isn't His Concern; But Restrictions On Individual Rights Are

from the pay-attention dept

We had already covered Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall's absolutely ridiculous and logically tortured attack on people who recognize the value of "free," by mocking them for charging people to speak at their events. We already explained how misguided such an argument is, but one of the people she specifically called out, Cory Doctorow, had responded in a detailed manner in the comments, pointing out that Lindvall's claims about his own speaking fees were flat-out wrong, and the vast majority of his speaking is for free. He's now written a full response to Lindvall that is absolutely worth reading. You can skip over the stuff at the beginning about his "speaking" fees, and get down to the meat of the topic in the second half of the article.

Doctorow points out the simple fact that he doesn't tell people they should give away their works for free. He just points out that it's worked quite well for him, and he notes that if you understand the market, it makes a lot of sense. However, if you can figure out a way to do it differently, then go ahead. He just doesn't think it will work. But, what others do concerning what they charge isn't really a concern to him. Then he gets to what he really focuses on, related to this topic:

But here's what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using "digital rights management" technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won't be able to catch infringers if you can't spy on every video.

From there, he details the various plans in various countries to kick people off the internet and to censor the internet, all in some misguided attempt to hold back what technology allows, so that a few people can try to pretend that they can avoid economics. And that, reasonably, bothers him.

It's a fantastic response (not that you would have expected much less), though I doubt that will stop anyone who already wants to deny reality from simply claiming that Cory and others like him are telling everyone they "should" give away their works for free.

Filed Under: civil rights, cory doctorow, free, rights

If The BSA Is So Sure Companies Would Pay For Software, Why Did It Use Free Webserver Software?

from the well,-look-at-that dept

We recently did our latest debunking of the BSA's latest laughable report on "piracy" of software and its impact on the economy and jobs. We have to do this every few months, as the BSA continues to trot out the same laughable and debunked analysis, including the flat-out ridiculous idea that every unauthorized copy is a $1 for $1 lost sale. A few years ago, when a BSA VP and IDC VP called me up to defend the report, they insisted that "their research" showed the $1 to $1 ratio was pretty accurate, insisting that companies who need software really want proprietary software, and that open source or other alternatives generally aren't what they're looking for.

Of course, most people know better than this, but a recent Matt Asay column highlights how more and more of the world moves to open source and cloud-based solutions could seriously change that equation. In it, there's a lovely tidbit about how much the BSA itself doesn't seem to believe its own claims about open source software -- or, even that good software is worth paying a license for:

Ironically, the BSA has discovered one of the few ways to "pirate" open-source software, and is apparently an advocate. The BSA's website apparently runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone CentOS. Surely a license-respecting organization like the BSA would want to pay full freight for a RHEL license rather than undermine Red Hat by choosing CentOS? Evidently not.

Yes, so even in a case where the BSA itself can pay for a nice open source license, it chose to go with a free version instead. This is, of course, perfectly legal. But it seems pretty ridiculous that the BSA would claim that others wouldn't do what it seems to have done. That said, as you look into the details, it appears that the main BSA site does, in fact, run on Microsoft IIS (I'm sure with a nice license from BSA favorite member, Microsoft). The site that was claimed to be on CentOS was a separate "educational" (and I use that term loosely) site called b4usurf.org (gotta love the attempt to sound relevant using txt-spk). Oddly, I can't find any info on what that site now runs on Netcraft. Anyone have a better way of figuring this out?

Filed Under: free, licensing, open source, software
Companies: bsa

Once More, With Feeling: Embracing 'Free' Doesn't Mean You Make No Money

from the how-hard-is-that-to-understand? dept

We've gone through this about a hundred times already, but every few months, someone, who doesn't seem to comprehend what's being discussed, jumps up with a "revelation" that people who are embracing "free" are also (gasp) "making money." The latest to walk down this path is Helienne Lindvall, a songwriter and Guardian columnist, who has been writing a series of columns recently that I've been meaning to respond to, since each one seems more confused than the last. I'll start with this one, though, where she mocks a bunch of people, who talk about how to use "free" to your advantage, because they charge speaking fees (and pretty large ones at that). Except, she's making a rather fundamental mistake: no one claims everything should be free. In fact, of all the people she names, I'm pretty sure every single one of them spends time explaining how to use free to help you make money elsewhere.

It's the same point we've made for years. The point of understanding "free" isn't that everything is free, but that you need to understand what makes sense as free, and what doesn't make sense as free. Someone's time -- which is scarce -- is something that it makes sense to charge for because it cannot be copied and distributed freely. Oh, and should I even mention that Lindvall's column, where she insists that the free business model has been proven dead... is available for free? I usually like The Guardian, but Lindvall's work is not up to its normal standards. Free is a part of a business model. That's all anyone's saying. And when you say that it means you do believe in a larger business model, which means making money. I'm always amazed at how people like Lindvall seem to have their brains stop in their tracks when they get to the big 0, and never reach the other side of the tracks where it's explained how you use that $0 to make money elsewhere.

Filed Under: business models, economics, free

Literary Critic Blames Google For 'Undermining The Literary Tradition'

from the someone's-not-feeling-lucky dept

Reader dave blevins alerts us to a recent column by literary editor Robert McCrum, where he appears to blame Google for destroying literature. It's an oddly written piece, actually. I believe it's sort of supposed to be a review of a book by long-term publisher André Schiffrin, called Words & Money, but it quickly turns into a rant, where McCrum feels that Schiffrin is so "disoriented" by what's happening in the publishing industry that he fails to adequately blame Google and its book scanning project:

It is a measure of the profound disorientation experienced by seasoned professionals in this new environment that nowhere in Words and Money does Schiffrin really get to grips with the so-called Google Print Initiative, the biggest copyright heist in history.

And, once started, he decides to go after that project, noting that the old way of doing things is being "torn up [as] a new one (entitled "free") was being written, mainly by geeks in California." And, the problem, of course, is that Google Books is apparently destroying the ability of authors to make money:

Books, like newspapers, are an essentially middle-class phenomenon whose market is the self-improving professional. As a bourgeois medium, books and their authors depend on the cash nexus. Johnson went straight to the point with: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Johnson was right. Words that get written for money are likely to be superior to words spun out for nothing, on a whim. California's "free" movement wants to argue that literary copyright is an intolerable restriction of the public's right to access information, and that words should be free. That's a profound threat to the western intellectual tradition. I hope that André Schiffrin, having raised the alarm about the demise of serious publishing and journalism, will urgently turn his attention to the new, possibly darker, threat of digitisation and its consequences.

McCrum is, of course, quite confused. In his rush to condemn in elitist tones, it appears he did not bother to understand the details of what he was criticizing. The first problem, of course, is that he has confused "free, as in speech" with "free, as in beer." When people talk about "freeing" words, they do not mean that people should write without money. So the entire argument made here is silly. We just think that there are other business models that fit better.

And, in fact, Google Books seems to help those who embrace it. We recently pointed to some researched that showed the Google book project was increasing revenue for publishers who embraced it -- and publishers who have embraced it have been quite happy once they realized the benefits. Nothing about Google's book scanning project is about making the works entirely free, so McCrum seems rather ill-informed on the subject.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Google's book project (and I still think the "settlement" is problematic), but the idea that it's somehow "undermining our literary traditions," is a statement wholly without support, and one that you would think an elitist literary critic would find some proof behind before making such a statement.

Filed Under: andre schiffrin, copyright, free, google books, robert mccrum
Companies: google

Evidence Shows You Can, In Fact, 'Compete' With 'Free'

from the but-of-course dept

I've argued in the past that the claim you "can't compete with free," is entirely bogus, not just because people do it all the time, but because the very premise of the argument is wrong. Competition has always been about a lot more than price, and the "free" part is meaningless if a competitor can drive price to a lower cost then your marginal cost -- no matter what that price is. But, now there's actually some growing empirical evidence that the claim "you can't compete with free," is really, really untrue.

Modplan points us to a recent talk given by professor Michael D. Smith at Google. Smith is from Carnegie Mellon and is discussing some of his recent papers, such as one on whether or not "piracy" acts as promotion for movies and another one on how digital sales, when set up right, don't actually cannibalize other sales. That latter one debunks the silly claim from Jeff Zucker and many others that they're "trading analog dollars for digital pennies." Some of the key points:

• Contrary to the claim that free viewability of movies decreases demand, research shows that when a movie airs on TV for free, it increases demand for the movie both in DVD sales and via file sharing. And, on top of that, the greater demand for the content in file sharing does not appear to hurt the sales of DVDs.
• One bit of research involved the natural experiment that happened when NBC Universal, due to a contract dispute with Apple, removed its TV shows from iTunes for almost a year before putting them back. So, what happened when the content got pulled? Well, first, piracy rates increased -- and not just in absolute numbers. The research compared piracy rates against the other major TV networks, and found that the rates tracked almost exactly prior to the content getting pulled from iTunes... but the second it got pulled, NBC piracy rates were noticeably higher than the other networks. In other words, not offering consumers a way to buy your content legitimately increase unauthorized access. No shock there, but nice to see the data to support that. Specifically, the data found that the "demand" for unauthorized versions increased by 11%.
• Separately, the research showed a smaller, but still significant increase in demand for unauthorized content from those other networks. The theory here is that once NBC pulled its authorized content from iTunes, people who started getting it via BitTorrent suddenly realized they might as well do the same for non-NBC content. So, NBC's decision not to offer authorized content may have actually increased demand for file sharing on other networks as well
• Here's where it gets interesting: what impact did this have on DVD sales on Amazon? Again comparing NBC data to other networks, there is no noticeable impact after the content is removed from iTunes as compared to other networks. In other words, while the action did increase "piracy," there's no indication that increased piracy decreased DVD demand.
• Next experiment involved a move in the opposite direction. Looking at the "demand" for unauthorized BitTorrents of shows from ABC right before and after ABC added its shows to Hulu, again, as compared to the other networks. And here, there was a massive decrease in "demand" for the unauthorized works on BitTorrent.
• Again, however, when the content went "free" on Hulu it did not harm DVD sales. Actually, DVD sales went slightly up (not enough to be statistically significant).
• The final study looked at what happened to demand for movies that went on HBO, which created an interesting situation, because before HBO will air a movie, it requires the studios to remove that movie from video on demand or other digital distribution channels like iTunes. So, the content disappears from those other channels for a few weeks before it shows up on HBO. The research looked at where former iTunes and video on demand customers went for content in the window between the content being pulled from those channels and when it aired on HBO.
• What the research showed was actually no statistically significant change in demand when the content got pulled from the digital distribution channels... but a big increase in demand after the movie aired on HBO.

It's an interesting talk with lots of great data. The key conclusions:

• You absolutely can compete with free.
• If you offer a convenient and reasonable offering, eve people who were getting content in an unauthorized manner, will often buy (i.e., it's possible to turn "pirates" into buyers). That is, it's not the "free" part that's the driving aspect of much of their behavior, but the convenience factor.

There's obviously a lot more that can be done here, and I do wonder if all of these findings hold up over time, but it's a nice look at some of the current research.

Filed Under: competing, free, michael d. smith

Lessons In Smart Trademark Management: Free Licensing Of The Mark From Twitter

from the a-good-way-to-do-things dept

A year and a half ago, we noted how nice it was to see Twitter's rather laissez-faire attitude towards trademarks, where it seemed to have no problem with third parties making use of Twitter-related terms in their own names -- such as TwitPic, Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and many others. So, at first I was a bit surprised to see a report claiming that Twitter might be cracking down on those who use such names. The truth, however, actually demonstrates how many companies should respond to many trademarked situations.

First off, it's worth pointing out, as people always do, that one of the oddities of trademark law is the idea that a trademark holder has to prevent others from using the mark without permission, or they run the risk of losing the mark. That leads to lots of nasty cease and desist letters from lawyers, and people defending them claiming they "have to" do this. But that is not so at all. First off, they only have to do that for cases where there is a likelihood of confusion, so they can certainly leave many other cases alone. But, more importantly, there's another option out there, which very few trademark holders embrace: they can just give a free license out.

The story about Twitter is really just that the company has filed for a trademark on TWEET, which is perfectly reasonable. Just because you're getting a trademark, it doesn't mean you're going to stop others from doing things (and, the TechCrunch post seems confused by a different trademark on Tweet -- but trademarks are specific to areas of use, so it's possible to have multiple trademarks on the same term in totally different areas of use). And, in fact, Twitter made a statement pointing out that it does, in fact, freely license its marks:

"We freely license "Tweet" for ecosystem partners who are using it correctly as part of accessing the Twitter API. That said, "Tweet" means something specific and we aim to protect that meaning. More on this can be found here: http://support.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/77641."

This seems like not just a perfectly reasonable trademark policy, but a smart one for encouraging others to help promote you and feel comfortable working with you as a partner. It's really surprising how quickly most other companies go for the legal nastygram, rather than "freely license" trademarks in cases where the use is clearly promoting the brand.

Filed Under: free, licenses, trademark
Companies: twitter

Brazilian Technobrega Musicians Embracing Free Distribution Even More

from the good-to-see dept

Three years ago, we wrote about the phenomenon in Brazil of "technobrega" music, and how the musicians involved had embraced piracy to help spread their music, and then capitalize on other business models, including free. Since then, I had been wondering if more established "industry" types would move in and try to lock down the music. Thankfully, reader tuna sends over a more recent article about technobrega, and it appears that technbrega artists are embracing free to an even greater extent than before. Last time we wrote about it, the technobrega artists would rush copies of their (hastily burned) CDs down to street vendors, who would burn and sell copies of it (with none of the money going to the artist -- but they didn't care, because they wanted more people to hear). Now, they're even skipping that middleman and focusing on getting the music online quickly and spread as widely as possible. As Jose Roberto, who runs a technobrega website notes:

"If you don't have an official CD, then what is piracy?"

So why are the artists so eager to give away their content for free? Because the bigger your reputation, and the more people know who you are and like your songs, the more money you can make with live shows. Quite similar to the history of Jamaican music in the 1950s and 60s, the technobrega musicians and DJs have built up traveling soundsystems. Another way to make money is in dance classes. Apparently, learning the complicated dance steps is a big business. A researcher, Ronaldo Lemos, who has studied the technobrega business, notes that it's doing amazingly well by embracing technology and embracing file sharing:

"The crisis in the music industry is widely talked about... Tecno-brega is an industry that makes millions, but it is a completely different model of business. It doesn't see technology as an enemy but as an opportunity."

And yet, I'm sure, we'll soon hear from folks trying to explain why this could never work anywhere else.

Filed Under: brazil, business models, economics, free, technobrega

Sub Pop Leaning Towards Giving Away The Infinite And Charging For The Scarce

from the good-for-them! dept

If you like good music, you're almost certainly aware of the iconic indie label Sub Pop. Apparently, Sub Pop's creative juices aren't just focused on putting out great music these days, but they're considering how to adapt their business model to the changing music landscape, and I'm happy to see that they seem to have realized the key point that I've been making for years: infinite goods make scarce goods more valuable, so free the infinite and sell the scarce. Sub Pop is apparently considering starting to give away new music, while focusing on selling tangible goods related to the music (found via Hypebot):

"Although Sub Pop is primarily known for its many fine artists and their really very fine recordings (also grunge), we're not at all opposed to expanding into the fine world of t-shirts, hats, beer cozies, and key chains," Jaspers says. "We used to give many of these tchotchke items away for free in an effort to entice people to pay for the music, but we're considering flipping our strategy so that people pay for the toy and receive the music for free. Just a thought."

Basically, it's a recognition that people want the music, but they're also willing to pay for a physical good as something of a "souvenir" or additional scarce and valuable "art" that is made more valuable by the connection to the music. Sub Pop's art director, Jeff Kleinsmith, is apparently looking to go in creative directions with this:

Regardless of age, there's always going to be people who prefer to touch and make stuff that's like, physical. CDs may end up being little books. We've talked about this at work, where you might spend the time to do a cool package, it just doesn't have a disc in it. And instead of a disc, you've got a little piece of paper that says "go here for your download." So you're getting everything about it except for that plastic disc, you know. I would love to see that.

And that could be a magazine, it could be a shirt, it could be a sticker on a banana, it could be anything, really, that has that download. It could be a poster, a thing associated with this music.

Of course, we've seen some examples of this already. Earlier this year, we talked about a Swedish band that was releasing its latest album as a magazine. Last year, Mos Def tried releasing his latest album as a t-shirt with a download code. And, we just wrote about Kristin Hersh's latest album being released as a book. The idea, of course, is to give fans a real reason to buy beyond just the music -- which is effectively free for many people. But providing scarce value can really do amazing things.

Of course, considering it sounds like the Sub Pop folks are still thinking about this, they might want to consider that selling scarcities can also expand a bit beyond just selling tangible goods. There are intangible scarcities that go well with music as well -- including things like access and attention. Either way, it's great to see such an iconic label realizing that there could be serious value in embracing (rather than complaining) about "free" within a business model, and looking at opportunities to use it to their own advantage.

Filed Under: business models, economics, free, infinite, music, scarce
Companies: sub pop

Dear Jeff Zucker, Whether You Like It Or Not, Content Will Stay Free

from the economic-confusion dept

It's sometimes entertaining when powerful executives don't seem to understand the rather basic market forces that they're facing. Take Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, who's done a pretty good job driving the operation into the ground over the past few years. In a recent interview, he apparently said (as he's hinted in the past) that it might make sense to charge for TV content online, noting that:

I do not think that it is a foregone conclusion that content should be free on the Internet.

The problem, of course, is that we're well beyond should. Sorry, Jeff, but you don't get to decide that. The technology and the market have already decided that the content is or will be free online. It might not be authorized. It might not be legal. But the content is free. "Should" has nothing to do with it, because the technology and the market don't care about "should." Yes, this sucks for those who only understand how to run a business when they're a gatekeeper who controls things, but it doesn't mean there aren't really good businesses built on free content. NBC should know this, since an awful lot of its history was built on exactly that... And I don't recall Zucker's predecessors whining about that darn "free" broadcast TV.

Filed Under: content, culture, economics, free
Companies: nbc universal

Reminder: Webinar On Smart Uses Of 'Free' For Businesses

from the how-to-use-it-properly dept

We talk about the importance of understanding "free" within the realm of economics and business models all the time here on Techdirt. One of the problems, however, is that time and time again people hear the "free" part, but don't think through the actual strategies of how to apply it properly. This sometimes leads to situations where they just randomly make some stuff free, and then complain that "free" doesn't work. Understanding how to use "free" properly means doing more than just "give it away and pray." So we're hosting a webinar, tomorrow, July 28th at 2pm ET/11am PT which will dive into the subject of how to use free intelligently as a part of your business model. You can register here (again, this may pop up a "preference" page before you can get to the actual signup page -- we've tried to get rid of it, but so far, no luck). Joining me for the webinar will be Simon Morris, VP of marketing and product for BitTorrent Inc., who will talk about various business models that use "free" as a component, highlighting examples of what works and what doesn't. Then we'll have Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, who will share a detailed case study of how Evernote does "Freemium," and what lessons they've learned in implementing a Freemium type of solution to make money. After that we'll have some Q&A and discussion as well, so come ready with questions. The webinar itself is being sponsored by Verizon, and it should be a lot of fun. We look forward to having you join us tomorrow.

Filed Under: free, webinar