encyclopedia content and pricing - compared to Itunes and napster

Think about this. Freely shared individual items of digital content - text, video, audio - all interactively and personally organized for you for no more than the price of a bottle of good wine - and no paucity of content from the supply side. If it can be done for educational content it can also be done for entertainment content

Varion and Shaprio have an interesting tale of pricing, versioning, and competition bewteen Britannica and Encarta - a tale that is pregnant with implications for the audio and video industry in the digitial age. In the late 1980's one would have to pay $US1600 (in late 1980 dollars so about double, $3000 todays dollars) for the full 32 volume print set of Britannica . In 2005 PC world quoted a price to students of US$35 after rebate for the deluxe 2004 CDrom edition......arguably much superior in accessibility and multi-media interactivity to the print edition for anyone with a pc. Britannica's current (jan 06) price for the 2006 deluxe edition CDROM , is $US17.95 One years subscription to the full online version is around $US70.



$18 is almost "for free". Not quite, but almost. Averaging out in terms of content - over 100,000 items of text , video maps and images we're talking a price per unit of about 1¢ per item . But the important point is not that low average price for hundreds of thousands of things you'll never look at , but the incremental price for the manybe a hundred or so items you will look at - and that is zero once a subscription or CDrom or online is purchased. This idea of a two part pricing scheme , one part for access , the other part a zero price for digital content is the key to the future of the internet (well one key - the other is versioning....see VS chapter 3) ) .

Think about that. Freely shared individual items of digital content - educational text, educational video, educational audio - all interactively and personally organized for you, your club/school, your church, your..... for no more than the price of a bottle of good wine - and no paucity of content from the supply side. Indeed bountiful riches of content. My guess is that these sorts of prices and practises would still prevail even if the copyright on EVERYTHING in britannica and Encarta was limited to one years duration max - or possibly no copyright time limit at all. It is not copyright on any particular item that creates the value, but the organisation of that (cheap) content. If it can be done this way for educational content it can also be done for entertainment content. Of course can doesn not imply should, nor predict will, . And entertainers, especially star entertainers - may have to take a cut in earnings :Stars will not be able to earn windfall profits in virtue of large sales revenue form pre recorded material. Will that dissuade them from producing? I doubt it - the level of rents and quasi rents (payments well beyond the minimal necessary to keep a person in business) in stardo in audio and video entrtainment is, i suspect, enormous.

printing press and social change 17th cent england

BBC' radio 4 has a fascinating 40 minute discussion of the influence the printing press had in seventeenth century England (mp3 download available for a week or so here, then later in the archives for In Our Time on radio 4). It's ironic listening to this program on the empowering nature of the printing press for the growth of democratic society and innovative culture in the middle of the 1600's and simultaneously reading the BBC's "permissions" rights associated with the download of the MP3 file .
"The BBC grants you a 7-day, non-exclusive licence to download this In Our Time audio. You may not copy, reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use this audio in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You may not use this file for the purpose of promoting, advertising, endorsing or implying a connection with you (or any third party) and the BBC, its agents or employees." . How would such a claim been received by citizens in the 17th century - just prior to the English civil war? I hope they would have ignored it as more censorship and social control from the crown and publishers in power ...as I am sure most 20the century internet surfers will do with the BBC broadcast today , at least in "private" whatever that means. perhaps the Public Knowledge sitecould/should point to these historical impacts of major technological change and ask the "what-if" question: what-if our regulations and enforcement were applied then and what if their regulations and enforcement were applied now? Which would lead to the more interesting progressive and dynamic culture??

Consider a practical example of what I mean. One of the panel discussants [Ann Hughes, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Keele,] explains (around 6:20 into the programme) the feedback and interaction between oral culture and print cuture in relation to ballads - a popular form of discourse and communication at the time. The BBC's current permissions statement on mp3 use would restrict that interpersonal and public use & re-use since the printed ballads borrowed and took from and built open the oral ballads and vice versa, the print ballads fed back into the oral culture of ballads - especially via communication from those who could read the ballads to those who could not read (1/3 urban men, 1/2 urban women at the time, according to later information in the programme). Then, around 20 minutes into the program, the discussion of the influence of printing on the civil war is that printing itself constructed/created communities in press - ie printing and publishing is an essentially social activity . So if there is an interweaving of print and oral discussion in an ongoing to and fro process the 21 first century mp3 restrictions not to "reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public" , if effectively enforced back in the 17 century would have stifled this interaction and feedback - ie cultural innovation. The essential dynamic links between the oral (still predominant but declining ) form of knowledge creation and transmission and the developing print forms would have been severed, cut, or at least seriously impeded. Contrast the effects of the Creative Archive Initiative or here.

preloaded used iPods for sale

Jan 23rds USA Today Preloaded iPods prompt legal ponderings and associated comments at the blog of author, Kevin Maney, are interesting, and clearly passionate, but uninformed...perhaps because impassioned. On the one hand we have the defenders of the "property" of the content creators, or content rights holders, passionately claiming exclusive and unlimited control over every conceivable use to which their creations may be put. Maybe they haven't read the Constitution, which says. . .
Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and
useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. quoted at page 130 of Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture [see Lessig's blog for links to the book].

Progress ,not income generating, all encompassing property rights entitlements for every possible use, forever, are the constitutionally determined purpose of legilsated creative property rights in the US. To be sure, limited private creative property rights will be part of any progressive, innovative democratic society - but so will open access to public domains of all kinds of technologies, including digital technolgies and digitized content. Consider the creative property in medicines, increasingly a kind of biological software, that passes from permission phase to open access phase typically in 20 years, at the end of the life of most patents. The June 2004 Health Affairs article by Amir Attaran How Do Patents And Economic Policies Affect Access To EssentialMedicines In Developing Countries? makes it clear that of the 319 medicines regarded by the WHO as essential medicines all but 17 are in fact off patent, generic, and in the public domain to be developed, cultivated, built on and other wise used without permission from their original creators of patent holders. How much music, video, text from before 1985 is available for free (= open access) use - including incorporating that music, those videos, that text preloaded on used iPods to encourage the progress of culture? If you get all worked up about the price of medicines and the (legally granted yet limited duration) monopoly power of pharmaceutical companies restricitng access to and use of a host of benefical medicines -including the ability to transform them into derivative works and tinker or reverse engineer them - why aren't you getting worked up about limitations on your ability to work this way with digital content? With the increases in copyright duration enacted by your congress you're welcome to download public domain content from 1920 - 95 years ag0 - onto your iPod. Go for it! Please read or listen to Lessig's book/audiobook Free Culture - the audio book is available for free download at the Internet Archive as are pdfs of the book see Lessig's blog

The defenders of the rights of purchasers, buyers, owners, users....of digital content should be asking: what do they get when they undertake a digital processing action and/or transaction? A poignant statement of this question question comes right at the end of the USA TODAY article on pre-loaded iPods :"The question that needs to be asked is, if you buy a DVD, are you allowed to put it onto an iPod?" Note the question: Are you allowed to? Who must you consult before undertaking a digital transaction? What permissions must you seek, what permissions do you have to obtain, before undertaking digital actions and transactions? Why, in an innovative creative democratic society should you have to ask anybody permission to do anything with what you "own" in the privacy of your home/school/church/club whatever, and whether those personal social spaces are physical meeting spaces or virtual meeting spaces...as they increasingly are. Purchasers/users/consumers of digital content should be very worried that use-rights that they thought were unregulated and hence private (eg to read aloud, to print, to shift in time and format or location , to timker with, to explore, to extend without asking anyone's permissions) for personal/private use are seriously being eroded. How so? Because personal private digital actions transactions carried out by your computing devices - iPods are, after all, simply small computers are inherently coming under the scrutiny of Government regulation that is increasingly being harnessed to extend the sope of private use rights of digital content creators and publishers, and by the surveillance technologies of the Internet and the code and hardware that make it tick.

How will artists/musicians/writers/film producers make a living? How will they get paid? Good question - the answer is, the way they always have, usually pretty poorly, often by chance, and in one hell of an increasingly competitive environment managing one two three or four jobs while peddling their wares, digital and otherwise. Wake up bro - the Internet and P2P just made life in the artisitc world a lot different, a lot more accessible for a lot more small scale producers of digital content who, in the end, will probably be forced by competitive pressures to give most digital content away. Get that "give away". Indeed giving away digital content will become part of a broader strategy of finding other ways to create value out of creative works. All this is explained very nicely in Varian and Shapiro's Information Rules . Artists may affiliate themselves with organisers of digital content like iTunes or Napster, but my money is on Napster in terms of their subscritption pricing policy - fixed fee for organising digital content - as compared to apple's piece rate pricing system. [Frankly it is Apple's ability to organise music content on the most user friendlt mp3 and digital video player around and cooredinate that nicely with home computers...not the strictly enforced copyrightable property rights in information...that have created their success.] Artists, as ever, and now probably more than ever, will have to make a buck (or many bucks) at live performances of their indiviudalized works rather than at precorded digital music sales in the local record store. But hey, thats life in the digital age - and you can bet that when a local band or artist goes on tour they will already have some sort of following or the venues they play at will be able to generate interest without an established label or recording company - their ISP and webHoster will be their promoter, or if the DRM doesn't kill it, P2p digital sharing.

originality

This morning I listened to BBC radio 4's program on originality from march 2003 .
In the mp3 audio file at about 11:40-12:46 Prof Catherine Besley gives a short answer to the question: in what sense was Shakespeare original? Her answer is by way of an example, that Shakespeare invented the romatic comedy. But by invented here she means putting together themes/things that were already circulating in the culture. For example the Roman (?? did I hear this correctl) comedy that typically at the time invovles a young couple wanting to be married and a father who will do anything to stop it is adapted so that the emotional and psychological characteristics of the young couple takes centre stage - and here Shakespeare drew upon two other currents: the circulating medieval love stories and romantic poetry. Is Shakespeare's romantic then an example of what Lessig might call "rip, mix and burn", of Disney style innovation as described pp21+ in Free Culture? If so maybe the Shakespearean experts could elaborate on it - having the originality of Shakespeare depend on a stong / broad concept of access to the public domain can only strenghten the argument in the book. [Besley herself does not spell out the components of the public domain in stories and/or poems that Shakespeare drew on]
Towards the end of the broadcast there is also an interesting discussion of an important essay by T S Elliot that maintains originality is, and must be, steeped in tradition. (WHat was this essay?) What I took from the discussion is that to capture interest, an expression (text? image?) must be deeply knowledgeable of tradition and then modify it as in building blocks - tradition then is no longer viewed as a dead weight, but as a springboard, for originality; springboard in the sense of a modification of the traditional.


So what "is" originality? Originality in the sense of something novel, different, eccentric, individual, idiosyncratic was the focus of the discussion, but a most interesting alternative idea emerged: originality for the Romantics means something that derives from origins . Since, in this view, we all (almost all) share the same "original" stuff, originality is common, true to the origins, NOT eccentric and weird or different .... Then, we have the concept of indiviudal genius coming through to modify this view ...something that in theis Romantic view derives from a specific living gifted person individual self that truly (in its origins, endowment?) is different from the common oridnary type (me and u??) - coleridge, wordsworth......

IS the (this Romantic, gifted individual self concept) notion of originality relevant for today? the discussants and moderator seem to think not; indeed one of the opening shots is how could it be given the commonality of language?? citing voltaire, originality is "judicious plagiarism". The broadcast does not discuss, but only mentions, at the end, the notion of originality in scientific discovery and in academic degree granting -what would Voltaire say here??

tattoo's and things

well here's my new tattoo - had it done by a terrific artist, Zane, at zealand tattoo

I am starting a blog on Varian and Shapiro's Information Rules to use in my courses (Health econ,intro to Game Theory).

I recently listened to the
audio version of Lessig's Free Culture. . A free pdf of the book itself can be found here. Any economist with an interest in the relationship between changing information technology, rent-seeking behaviour and intellectual property rights will find this an enjoyable and informative read. Unfortunately the audio content occasionally suffers from poor audio perfomances - not always but enough to put a dedicated audio book afficionado off . Still, quality control and free effort are strange bedfellows. I'm working on a comparison between Free Culture and Varian and Shapiro's Information Rules.updates on this to come.....