Trust your customers, stupid
p2p news view / p2pnet: I’m writing this in the
cabin of an Easyjet Airbus 320 flying back from Venice to London, but
there’s no wireless signal evident so I’ll have to wait
until I’m back in Cambridge before I send it off for
publication.
That I’m slightly disappointed
because I can’t get online from 35,000 feet over France shows
just how much the network has penetrated into our daily lives, at
least here in the developed western world, and how we now notice the
places where we can’t get access instead of those where we
can.
More often than not I’m using wifi
to get online, and I was clearly wrong a couple of years ago when I
argued that wireless wasn’t going to be a disruptive
technology.
I’d ignored the network effects
that happen when a significant proportion of devices get wireless
capability, and thought too much about full-size computers rather
than the many other devices that can benefit from a net connection.
At home our desktop machines are
wireless, but so are the laptops
and my son’s PlayStation Portable.
And my daughter’s handheld has wifi built in which means she
can use it as a voice over IP phone and save on her mobile costs.
In fact the last device actually plugged
into the network with a cable is the Xbox, and once we get our hands
on a 360 that will go wireless too. If anyone wants a selection of
ethernet cables, grey, hardly used and in varying lengths then get in
touch.
We’re already seeing new business
models emerging on top of the growing number of home and small office
wireless networks. Martin Varsavky’s FON, for example, offers
you software that can turn your network node into a shared access
point, either free to use if you’re a ‘Linus’ or
charged for if you’re a ‘Bill’.
It’s an interesting idea, fatally
flawed by the terms of use of most internet service providers which
seem to make it a breach of contract to install the software, but we
will no doubt see lots of similar innovations before someone
‘does a Skype’ and gets it right.
Because if wireless had a good year then
Internet phone company Skype itself had a fantastic one, frightening
the telecoms companies, acquiring millions of users and ending up
being sold to eBay in September for $2.6bn down and another $1.5bn in
2008 if things go well.
Other successes, though rather more
modest financially, were the photo-sharing site Flickr and link
sharing site del.icio.us, both sold by their founders to Yahoo!
Neither offers the threat to a major
industry that Skype and VOIP in general do to the telecoms companies,
but both are good examples of how the network makes things that used
to be hard simple to the point that you don’t notice them. My
photos of Venice were up on Flickr long before I got home from my
break – thanks in part to a wireless connection, of course.
Whether Yahoo! will respect the values of
these early adopter communities enough to keep things going remains
to be seen – I like Flickr, but I’d move to another site
in an instant if it offered cooler features and Yahoo! should never
confuse geek approval with loyalty or lockin.
Still, it’s good to see some
second-generation internet plays finally coming good after the years
of caution which followed the dotcom implosion. It’s a shame
that the significant ones come, as before, from the US but we might
see Indian or even Chinese innovations come to the fore when we go
once more around the cycle – the next bust should be in 2009 or
so, with a rebound by 2012, so there’s time for things to
develop.
If social networking services did well
then it was a pretty disastrous year for the music industry and its
attempts to limit what we do with the music we buy.
After years of skirmishing on the borders
of copyright law and an
occasional more serious engagement over
file sharing and peer to peer networks, this year the depth of the
record companies’ contempt for and fear of its customers
became obvious to all when it was revealed that Sony BMG had been
installing illicit software on people’s computers and spying
on them.
The ‘rootkit’ debacle,
named because the XCP software shipped on some Sony CDs used the same
cloaking techniques as many viruses and worms, was made worse when
the company denied, obfuscated, retreated, released an even more
dangerous ‘uninstaller’ that didn’t uninstall,
were exposed as having used a second, even more malicious, copy
protection system on some disks and were then disowned by their
artists, some of whom began sending out unprotected CDs to aggrieved
fans.
It’s a mess for Sony, and has also
alerted the CD-buying company to the dangers that can come from using
a ‘protected’ CD. If I was a conspiracy theorist then
I’d suspect that a mole from one of the anti-digital rights
management campaigning groups had gone underground ten years ago and
worked their way up the Sony hierarchy just so they could suggest
something that was guaranteed to destroy the credibility of copy-
protection technology for CDs.
However I’m happy to accept that
it was stupidity coupled with paranoia that drove Sony into this
appallingly misjudged move. The real danger is if the music industry
responds not by accepting that they need to trust their customers
more but by trying to exert even more control, and perhaps using
their lobbying powers to change laws to make their systems
unavoidable.
The response of the music, film and other
digital content industries to the growing reach of the net is surely
going to be one of the main themes of 2006 – along with even
more wireless, of course.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based
target="_blank">writer and broadcaster.]
January 3rd, 2006 at 5:55 am
THE REAL DANGER IS IF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY RESPONDS NOT BY ACCEPTING THAT THEY NEED TO TRUST THEIR CUSTOMERS MORE BUT BY TRYING TO EXERT EVEN MORE CONTROL, AND PERHAPS USING THEIR LOBBYING POWERS TO CHANGE LAWS TO MAKE THEIR SYSTEMS UNAVOIDABLE.
In that one sentence, the author has emerged as a modern day Nostradamus; there is no doubt that the entertainment cartels have more money than they know what to do with, that elected legislators always need more money than they have, and that the two go together like hand-in-glove; thus the REAL DANGER he refers to is, in fact, a VERY REAL fait-accompli. Our only real hope, as a free society, is that the judiciary will fish around inside its collective underwear and find (shall we discretely call it: ) the cojones to rule in accordance with common law and common sense, in favor of freedom and justice for the common man, as opposed to privilege for the rich and powerful.
As for that, my faith in the judiciary is rapidly failing (witness its endorsement of the FISA and PATRIOT Act). Time to ascribe a Quatrain number to the above quoted paragraph.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:02 am
“Our only real hope, as a free society, is that the judiciary will fish around inside its collective underwear and find (shall we discretely call it: ) the cojones to rule in accordance with common law and common sense, in favor of freedom and justice for the common man, as opposed to privilege for the rich and powerful.”
There can be no hope in the judiciary. The judiciary is as bad or worse than the legislature. The judiciary is too easy to manipulate. Worse yet, no US federal judge has been removed due to a complaint since the 1930s, which means that over of over 50,000 complaints, not a single one has resulted in the removal of a judge.
The result is that complaints are hardly ever filed because they are a waste of time. Among the reasons for not filing a complaint, or why they are a waste of time are:
a. Complaints are never properly attended.
b. A complaint leads to retaliatory actions by the judges.
c. Complaints are evaluated, incredibly, by fellow judges.
d. The complaint system is hidden to discourage complaints. For example, if a person wants to read prior complaints against a judge, there is no way to finde them in the court or the Internet.
e. Not even the statistics are published, such a scomplaints per case, per judge, average time to resolve a complaint, judge removed, etc.
The problem has been recognized by the Judiciary Comittee in congress. Unfortunately, after making a few political expressions, nothing has come out of the comittee, The Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, James Sensenbrenner issued a statement on the problem over a year ago:
“The 1980 Act, which was amended during the 107th Congress, is based on a self-governing construct that allows the judicial branch large deference to police itself regarding matters of judicial misconduct and discipline. This system worked quite well during the
1980’s. . . . Since then, however, this process has not worked as well, with some complaints being dismissed out of hand by the judicial branch without any investigation.”
Actually, Sensenbrenner comments were less than honest, for the complaint system never worked, not even after the 1980 Act. Thenno changes have been made to the non working complaint system. Certainly no results have been seen.
That a bunch of lawyers working for the cartels dare to extort money in exchange for not filing frivolous lawsuits says it all. The judiciary need not be feared or respected because it can be manipulated at will.
Certainly nothing good can be expected from the judiciary until all the incopetenet or corrupt rotten apples are removed.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com