Robert Switzer

The companies that sell this stuff are, at best, bunkum peddlers and, at worst, out and out fraudsters. Their wares simply can’t work - not without changing the laws of physics, maths and information science.

DRM costs millions, takes years, and is defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists.

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This is an interesting angle. I’ve worked in enough corporate environments to understand that, outside of technology companies, top managers are seldom conversant with technology and view any attempt to understand it in depth as a waste of time best left to the losers in the IT departments. So, when someone shows up who looks and talks like they do, and tells them what they want to hear — i.e. that their precious ‘content’ can be ‘protected’ from pirates and others who would ’steal’ it and impact their ‘revenue stream’, they are inclined to believe it, even if it’s bullshit. Perfect DRM could only have a chance in a tightly controlled environment where every advantage would accrue to those who wanted to do the protecting. Think a situation where technologies of production are both incredibly expensive and technologically opaque, distribution is a single-player closed shop, and marketing is achieved via exclusive access to a closed channel …. uh, wait … that sounds a whole lot like the world of media and popular entertainment, pre-internet.

I think the only way DRM will succeed is if the Internet can be turned into or replaced by a neo-broadcast technology, that is a technology that is bi-directional, but massively asymmetric in favor of the broadcaster … in other words, the channel down to the audience is broad and rich, and the channel back to the source is narrow and small to facilitate purchases, and little else, save maybe an old fashioned letter to the editor or two ….

After the IFPI pressured credit card companies not to process payments to AllOfMP3.com, the company sued in a Russian court, claiming that its credit card processing contract had been broken illegally. Now, despite the fact that AllOfMP3 is no more, the company behind the service has apparently won a judgment against Visa’s Russian agent.

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Hmmmm ….. Perhaps this means that the credit card processing denial-of-service attack perpetrated on the discount Russian sites at the behest of media cartels here in the US isn’t going to stand up in Russian court ….

AllOfMp3, the popular online music store, has been shut down by the Russian government. Pressure from the United States, and a refusal to enter the World Trade Organisation (WTO) convinced the Kremlin to take the website down for good.

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Yes, it’s finally gone. Former allofmp3.com customers will be forced to go here or here or here …… well, you get the idea …

It’s highly unlikely that the disappearance of one discount music download service that takes advantage of international differences in intellectual property law will change the overall landscape or the direction of an inevitable trend.

I still can’t understand why media companies can’t process the obvious lesson here. If I were them, I’d be running with the wind on this one, instead of against the wind, as my ship slowly sinks …

After being sued in US federal court last week by the RIAA, AllofMP3 has made clear that it has no intention of buckling under the mounting international pressure. In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the company said, “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3.com does not operate in New York.

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The Internet Archive has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand its book-digitizing efforts, which so far have resulted in the scanning of about 100,000 books now available on the group’s Web site.

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The RIAA is suing the website AllofMP3.com on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music in the amount of $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs that were downloaded from June to October of 2006. That comes to a lawsuit totaling $1.65 trillion!

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The disinformation campaign continues. Or maybe it’s just clueless frustration on the part of the RIAA and the record companies. After all, if a little bit of litigation failed, maybe a lot of litigation will be successful.

Allofmp3.com is a Russian company operating legally under Russian law. I have no idea what impact suing the company in the United States will have. My guess is that it will have no impact at all, aside from the attendant publicity blitz and the resulting FUD that may discourage consumers in the United States who haven’t yet tried Allofmp3.com from doing so.

An attempt made under Russian law to shut down Allofmp3.com failed. Under current Russian law, the business is operating legally. Detractors also claim that both Mastercard and Visa have stopped processing transactions from Allofmp3.com. I know from first-hand experience and discussions with others that this is bullshit, at least on a practical level. Many people have successfully used Mastercard and Visa to add money to their Allofmp3.com accounts, despite the fact that detractors have claimed that processing has been stopped.

Large corporations have no compunction about taking advantage of global differences in labor and environmental laws to make or save a buck. There is absolutely no reason why we as consumers shouldn’t do the same.

The media companies themselves should be looking at Allofmp3.com and extracting the obvious lesson from it’s success. This obvious lesson is that the Allofmp3.com business model is a piracy buster. Allofmp3.com offers a quality product for less than the opportunity cost of piracy.

I would be willing to bet that if iTunes were to adopt the Allofmp3.com model, sales would go *up*, not down. Because at less than $2.00 an album, or $.25 a song, people will broaden their horizons and buy a greater variety of music than they might have otherwise.

Artists and record companies need to start thinking of downloads as *broadcasting* rather than record sales. These days, Clear Channel Communications has a virtual lock on traditional broadcasting. Why not think of downloads and peer-to-peer sharing as a form of broadcast? Most of today’s recording artists get no traditional airplay at all.

Artists can continue to sell artifacts, too. Let the downloads be loss-leaders. Then sell signed, numbered limited editions on vinyl or in premium packaging to the fanboys, fetishists and collectors, who will be more than happy to pay top dollar for scarce artifacts or early access to new works.

So far, every strategy that the RIAA and the media companies have tried to thwart or shutdown Allofmp3.com has failed. Why not do the artists represented a favor, and start negotiating with ROMS, the Russian royalty management organization, and start collecting the money that the artists are due?

The Russian music store tells US citizens that purchasing music from AllofMP3.com is legal - probably.

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Heads up, media companies. Allofmp3.com is the dog that hunts. Pay attention — this is the business model that works: Low-cost downloads, large selection, no drm, multiple bit-rates and formats. Pre-paid user accounts create a very profitable float. Ask the banks and phone companies about the profitability of pre-paid calling and credit cards.

Russian intellectual property law uses a broadcast paradigm to deal with internet downloads, much like the ASCAP/BMI model in the United States. A blanket license is purchased, and the licensed business remits a small amount per broadcast or download instance to a central rights-management organization that then distributes these funds to the artist or their representative on demand, in much the same way that ASCAP/BMI distributes payments for radio broadcast royalties in the US.

Some high-profile figures in pop music have come out against allofmp3.com, calling it outright piracy. I have three questions for these people. The first question is, “How much airplay are you getting now?” the second question is, “Wouldn’t more exposure be a *good* thing?”. And the third question is, “If you haven’t been paid by the Russian rights management organization, has your record company or management *approached* this rights management organization and asked for an accounting?”

Large media companies are refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Russian approach to downloadable content. So none of the large media companies have even approached the Russian rights-management organization to demand payment on behalf of the artists they distribute. To do so would be to validate the legitimacy of the arrangement.

So the artists lose. Not because the Russian rights management organization has refused to pay, but because the media companies that represent these artists prefer not to demand payment, as doing so would legitimize the download-as-broadcast paradigm versus the download as physical product model that they prefer.

Meanwhile, the RIAA and the MPAA continue to conduct disinformation campaigns suggesting that allofmp3.com is illegal and that it will be shut down ’sometime real soon’ while allofmp3.com continues to do a land office business giving people what they want and getting paid to do so.

I suggest that anyone reading this go to allofmp3.com, read the faq there, and then make their own decision about the legality of the service on offer and act accordingly. I have.

I further suggest to artists that fear piracy that they should fear obscurity instead. Back in the day, a musician performed to promote the sale of recordings. Today a musician makes recordings to promote the sale of performances and merchandise, and the name of this game is high visibility. Downloads and other viral distribution channels build visibility, supporting the sales of concert tickets and merchandise.

Piracy can be defeated by creating a distribution structure that beats piracy hands-down on quality, consistency, and ease-of-use. And then pricing this service significantly below the opportunity cost of piracy. Allofmp3.com is the closest thing I’ve seen so far to a service that could eradicate piracy by beating it in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.

Will Google Book Search uncover long-buried literary crimes?

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It depends on how you look at it. A plagarist’s nightmare? Maybe. But perhaps the act of creation is, and always has been, a bit more collaborative than what our collective artist-myth has allowed us to believe.

If two works of scholarship are found to have a sentence or two in common, does this diminish the value of one or the other? If so, how so?

How original is originality anyway? Artists routinely borrow concepts and ideas from others who predated them, and call these influences. And, on a darker note, artists often borrow with impunity from contemporaries who have less visibility, less credibility, or a smaller media footprint.

A couple of months ago, a famous video artist — someone with work in the Museum Of Modern Art — was outed on an email list I subscribe to. This artist had copied the website of another video artist, altered the creation date to predate the original site, and had posted it on the Internet as his own.

It was an obvious and direct lift, not a parody or a commentary. The artist who had copied the site, older and far more famous than the doner artist, probably didn’t know about archive.org and how easily illuminated his borrowings might be.

Once outed, the response of the older, more famous artist was silence. No justification or explanation was offered.

Perhaps originality, like history and property, is the prerogative of the winners.

I think Google Book Search is a superb idea, though I don’t want to see digitized books under the control of a corporation replace paper books and public libraries.

Maybe what we’ll find out with tools like Google Book Search is that our ideas of originality in scholarship and art may need to be re-examined.

“So the guys who started this business all cheated somebody to get there, and now they’re being cheated, perhaps, by all these crazy, geeky people all over the internet. I must say, my anguish level is not great.”
Richard Dreyfus

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I couldn’t agree more with Richard Dreyfus. “A human-centric, socially-accountable media ecosystem, built around great art, music, storytelling and ideas.” Hmmm. Now that sounds like a much better idea . . .

Today at the second annual Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that MIT’s $100 laptops will all include a copy of Wikipedia. He also announced the launch of Wikiversity, an online community for generating learning materials, and Wikiwyg, a easy-to-use interface for editing Wikipedia.

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Wikiversity. Wow. What a great idea. A free, online platform for creating free materials and communities for learning. Available within a month. Great. I’ll be watching for this one.

I’m a major fan of Wikipedia and the driving concept behind it. As far as I’m concerned, it works. Shortcomings abound, of course. But that’s part of the idea. Wikipedia is a highly calibrated and efficient self-organizing system. I believe that self-organizing systems are the only agents smart enough to deal with mushrooming complexity. My personal experience with Wikipedia in areas I’m expert or well-informed in has been overwelmingly positive. And as a result, I generally trust Wikipedia for casual inquiries in areas I’m less familiar with.

Applying the Wikipedia concept to create a free online University is a flash of brilliance. I’ll be there.