A 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!

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 8:47 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under FTC, advertising, creators, culture, internet, property rights, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.