Power, corruption and lies

Me, writing about the Digital Economy Bill debacle:

Could Spotify work for ebooks?

As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago.

Could the same kind of thing work for ebooks? Is there enough ad money to go round? Do book readers want to social network?

we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades.

Could similar ideas work online?

Will piracy rip the spine out of ebooks?

Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes?

One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had it in X format, but the only legal versions were in Y format.

Publishers are keen to avoid the same thing in books.

I’ve fixed music piracy. Next week, the Middle East

Me, on Techradar:

According to BT and the Carphone Warehouse, it seems that implementing the proposed three-strikes system would cost at least £2 per connection per month – an enormous amount of money that will have little or no effect on file sharing.

Wouldn’t it be smarter to subsidise Spotify?

Let’s kick Lily Allen off the net

It’s always embarrassing when a campaigner against copyright infringement gets caught infringing copyright.

It’s all very amusing. Allen appears to have created Lily Allen’s Animal Farm, hastily rewriting the rules from “copyright good! Infringement bad!” to “Copyright good! Passing off other people’s work without attribution or payment better!”

Then again, you’re a bit daft if you’re expecting sense from an industry whose intellectual qualities peaked with Sir Mix-A-Lot’s cry of “I like big butts and I cannot lie!”

That’s an affectionate dig at Sir Mix-A-Lot, by the way. I think that line might be the greatest opening line in the history of popular music.

Update, 24 Sept: Oh dear. Techdirt has discovered Ms Allen distributing other people’s music from her own website.

Update again, 24 Sept: Oh dear. The blog appears to have been deleted now.

Will going legit kill The Pirate Bay? The odds aren’t good

Can former online bad boys go straight and not just survive, but thrive? The odds aren’t particularly good.

When the Pirate Bay announced its plans to go legit, a strange sound filled TechRadar Towers: “here we go again,” we sighed in unison.

Over the years all kinds of tech terrors have gone straight, and the stories rarely have happy endings.

So can internet baddies become goodies and not just survive, but thrive? Come with us as we discover what happened to some of the net’s most notorious sites and services.

You’ll recognise some of the names, I’m sure, but there might be at least one surprise in there.

Free isn’t easy

A superb review of Chris Anderson’s book Free by Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame:

The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.” Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.

[The New Yorker, via Jack Schofield]

eBooks won’t have a happy ending

Publishers are getting ready to embrace eBooks. I think they’re making a big mistake.

Books aren’t music. You don’t read a book when you’re concentrating on something important, you don’t skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don’t need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.

Unless you’re constantly hopping on and off planes or lugging around heavy textbooks, the electronic book is the answer to a question you didn’t ask.

…there isn’t much illegal content to drive hardware sales, which mean that the Kindle is some way away from being the iPod of books. If publishers are smart, they’ll keep it that way.

Techradar: YouTube versus PRS, and banishing software irritants

It’s Tuesday! First up: why the YouTube/PRS spat is bad news for musicians.

Ultimately, though, the spat is like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. On one side we have a multi-billion dollar corporation demanding that musicians pay the price for its inability to find a properly profitable business model; on the other we have a rights agency that appears to be stuck in a pre-internet age and can’t or won’t accept that online streaming simply doesn’t bring in the same amount of money as traditional broadcasting.

Also, 7 annoying apps you don’t have to put up with.

Printing, as Eddie Izzard once ranted, shouldn’t be hard. Control-P-Print! So why do printer manufacturers insist on installing applications for every conceivable task, such as programs that enable you to add gaudy picture frames?

Long-term readers will immediately spot that one of the nasties, Snap Shots, was briefly on this blog. I was young then, and crazy.

YouTube starts blocking music videos in the UK over PRS dispute

From the official blog:

PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the licence they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube – that’s like asking a consumer to buy a blank CD without knowing what musicians are on it.

We’re still working with PRS for Music in an effort to reach mutually acceptable terms for a new licence, but until we do so we will be blocking premium music videos in the UK that have been supplied or claimed by record labels.