Hype vs. Reality
Friday, November 6th, 2009 by Patrick RossA key part of the copyright debate is that copyright somehow inhibits innovation. Yet if you look around, innovation has been occurring and continues to occur at a dizzying pace. Hype quickly follows that innovation, and assumptions surround each new innovation. We hear lots of references to Schumpeter, as if the Austrian economist who focused on the concept of market disruption is some modern-day Nostradamus, predicting everything from the iPhone to Google. (I wonder if there is reference to the coming of Twitter in the Mayan calendar?)
Some of us who have been in this tech space a few decades know that there is revolution and evolution, and the latter more often is what actually occurs. I’ve long argued the Internet is an evolution of communications, the next step from the telephone, which was the next step from the telegraph. The telegraph was revolutionary, allowing President Lincoln to hang out in his War Department and get real-time updates from Civil War battlefields hundreds of miles away, and making possible near-instant communication across oceans. The societal shifts resulting from the telegraph were more paradigm-shifting than even the most amazing Internet apps available today.
Often the folks who attach revolutionary adjectives to the latest tech toy (does anyone remember the Palm Pilot, which used touch screens for years before the iPhone?) also confuse fad with a new societal order. Corporations routinely bite on this. In the mid-1990s, when the Web came into being, suddenly every company needed a web site. But some believed that the Web would revolutionize their business, and massive investments were made in “portals” such as Pathfinder, now just a shadow of the hype that surrounded it a decade ago. (Apologies to a Copyright Alliance board member for poking fun at their past attempt to “revolutionize” the Internet.)
Of course the latest “revolution” is Twitter, which is now known even to folks who have just upgraded to a color television and still lease their phone from Ma Bell. Corporations are rushing in, celebrities are bypassing their corporate partners and the paparazzi, and now you not only have to own an iPhone, you have to use that iPhone to post and forward tweets. Of course, my 14-year-old daughter looks at it and says “It’s just the Facebook status update without all the cool stuff in Facebook like games.” Yup.
What is Twitter’s ultimate fate? I think it will hang around, and those who find it truly useful will keep using it. There are still people, I hear, using Friendster, and some people very close to me still use their AOL email address. But it’s safe to say that, since Twitter is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, it will within three years lose its cultural relevance.
The perfect example of this is Second Life. It was just three years ago when, like Twitter, the Linden founders were turning down comically high dollar figures for their virtual world. You weren’t cool if you didn’t have an avatar. People were taking real money and converting it to Linden dollars, buying virtual lattes and mini-skirts, and becoming pretend real-estate moguls. (Actually, during that time there were people becoming pretend real-estate moguls in real life, as mortgage defaults have shown in the last year, but that is a separate story.)
Like Twitter, companies rushed in. You weren’t consumer-friendly if you didn’t create a virtual retail front of your real retail establishment. Corporations put out press releases advertising that they were using Second Life to host virtual board meetings. Politicians held campaign rallies (and while doing so ignored crashers such as floating dragon avatars drifting by and emitting virtual farts).
Long discussions were had online about whether Second Life should remain a lawless libertarian paradise, or if Linden or the residents themselves should start putting in rules, such as property rights. When techies figured out how to clone and “steal” others’ programs such as clothing designs, those hoping to earn Linden dollars from their creations protested. Actual law suits were filed alleging virtual harms.
When was the last time you saw a panel put together at a conference or think tank to discuss the impact of Second Life on society? It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
It dawned on me how yesterday Second Life is in our cultural conversation when I saw the Federal Trade Commission is putting out a report on Second Life and other virtual worlds next month. Way to stay ahead of the curve, FTC.
The folks at Linden say Second Life is as popular as ever. Presumably the Pareto Curve applies there, where the 20% or so of participants who really found value have continued to contribute, and the fad-following 80% moved on are now like the father in the phone commercial annoying his son by tweeting and saying out loud “I’m… sitting… on… the… patio.”
We need to remember that (1) most “innovations” are evolutionary, not revolutionary, and (2) evolutionary technologies will find a hard-core audience but are begging to be supplanted by the next evolution, or generation. YouTube is a lot of fun, but there have been distribution methods for video since Edison showed a motion picture to some friends in Menlo Park. We can’t look to change rights models for creators just because somebody comes up with a gee-whiz service that itself isn’t a true “change.”
Some will say the premise of this post is a stretch, and has less to do with copyright than it does with the cranky old man that has been a part of me since early childhood, and he’s emerging to shake his fist and tell kids to get off of his lawn.
They’d be right. But the cranky old man in me doesn’t really care.
Have a great weekend!
November 7th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
This post seems to have a peculiar and probably unforeseen corollary. If most innovation is evolutionary and not revolutionary, thus being slight improvements on existing ideas, would that not mean that intellectual property (both copyright and patents) does indeed inhibit innovation by definition (as revolutionary ideas generally would not run afoul of existing copyright/patents, while evolutionary ideas would)? I strongly suspect this wasn’t what you had in mind with this post, but isn’t that exactly where your logic leads when followed to its natural conclusion?
Anyway, I never saw much practical value in microblogging in the general case (although it may have some specific uses). I’d say Second Life and YouTube count as revolutionary in that they provide new platforms for expression by users vastly beyond anything previously available, though as you mention both have a pretty limited range of uses, and are not be-all-and-end-all technology; but then, most revolutionary inventions aren’t.
But getting back to copyright. A couple days ago I mentioned here that enforcing copyright on the internet is incredibly difficult, and social media sites like YouTube are the pinnacle of this difficulty. While I can’t deny the possibility that user-generated content might end up being just another fad, I think there’s plenty of reason to believe it won’t.
This entire idea of “creators” vs. “consumer” is largely a western, European one. Elsewhere in the world artistic media such as music are largely communal efforts; there is minimal distinction between “performer” and “audience”, and usually most of the “audience” participates in the performance in some way, even if it’s not highly prominent. If anything, the prominence of YouTube and other user-created content sites seems to demonstrate the flaw in our western concept, and demonstrate that even those who aren’t “creators” in the traditional sense have plenty to express in creations of their own.
I think world music and (unrelated to this post) social psychology are by far the most informative and useful electives I took.
November 9th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Justin. you’re exactly wrong. Jazz musicians would routinely take songs, change the rhythm and the melody and have a new song. This is a clear example of evolution that violates no copyright. People who claim that copyright impedes innovation are usually referring to being able to sample all or part of a piece and using it pretty much unmodified in another piece. Personally, I don’t see that as being particularly innovative or creative.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Why are we even entertaining the thought of whether or not copyrights are a valid system? I’ll tell you why. It is only because we made a serious mistake opening the information pipeline containing most of the unfiltered knowledge known to man which also included copyrighted materials. So now the “consumer” is thinking that rights holders have got a lot of nerve messin’ with the information available in the pipeline when it is the public’s right to access and manipulate that information in a free and open society.
Whew!! What a mess. This could have been avoided with statutory rates for copyrighted materials working in the background at the ISP level BEFORE the Internet was available for MASS public use. Now the public is outraged that someone is trying to take that free right to copyrighted materials away from them!
In the mean time the CREATORS of copyrighted materials are losing their rights to control what happens to their creations. Very few would decide upon a career as a writer or publisher once they had to support a family if there was nothing more than a “warm fuzzy feeling” that they created something. At that point it would most definitely inhibit innovation. And so, it is the CREATORS that are getting hurt the most. Ironically, their rights are protected by the Constitution of the U.S., where is the gov when you need them?
Let’s not make this same mistake with the “second edition” Internet, Mobile Networks. After all, there will be way more transactions done via mobile networks then the “first edition” tethered Internet……..eventually.
November 12th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Max, if I understand you correctly, you advocate a securitized system for mobile networks. In order to restrict the “black market” flow of copyrighted materials, all information flowing over mobile networks would have to be inspected. Any devices capable of connecting to the networks but allowing “too much freedom” would be made illegal, and you could develop no device or network before making sure it couldn’t be used to secretly transfer Britney Spears mp3s. Of course, encryption would need to be deeply regulated and private communications would be rare.
Perhaps we’ll be done with the first prototype of said system by 2050.. a small price to pay to protect the members of the MPAA and RIAA!
November 12th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
lol….that’s funny but incorrect. This is about CREATOR’S rights not the RIAA etc. Remember, the RIAA and that whole sector tried to reduce or eliminate publisher’s statutory rates a few years ago. Thankfully and righteously so, they lost.
You see this is the problem. Most of the general public doesn’t really understand what copyrights really stand for!
Please visit http://datarevenue.org for details.
November 13th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Clarification for SteveAK; there are underlying copyrights which represent a CREATOR’s rights in their work and there are copyrights for the fixed manifestation such as a sound recording, (this is what the RIAA etc. trys to protect). The fixed manifestation rights are separate from the CREATOR’S rights.
It is the underlying rights to the original work that is in jeopardy from the undermining of copyright laws, as it will hurt a CREATOR’S right to decide what may or may not be done with their creations including what happens with the fixed manifestation.