Media Revolution?

This week, Google tried to take a chunk out of EBay and EBay bit back. Here’s a piece by Janet Whitman in the New York Post. In a nutshell, Google tried to get Ebay to allow people to use their version of PayPal, Google Checkout, on the EBay site. EBay makes a lot of money from PayPal so, they weren’t going for it. EBay then pulled money from the Google AdWords program. EBay found that their traffic didn’t decrease a whole lot because the same info shows up in the free search results. Google blinked, EBay has spent some serious cash on the little ads in the right hand column (I never click on those, do you?). Other companies are watching this closely. Google is in a bad spot here; people go to the search engine because it’s efficient, because the search engine is efficient the ads are superfluous.

Is this a paradigm shift?

Along those lines, here is a short film about the future entitled “Prometeus-The Media Revolution”, that was produced by an Italian marketing firm, Casaleggio.

This reminds me of that old cartoon that said we would all be flying personal helicopters by 1980.

One thing I found interesting was this bit of narration.

The concept of static information - books, articles, images - changes and is transformed into knowledge flow.
The publicity is chosen by the content creators, by the authors and becomes information, comparison, experience.
In 2020 Lawrence Lessig, the author of â€˜Free Cultureâ€™, is the new US Secretary of Justice and declares the copyright illegal.

There appears to be a growing number of people who think that copyright laws should be abolished. I have come across several people lately that feel this way and we have discussed about copyrights. For the record, I’m all for copyright laws. I have not read any of Lawrence Lessig’s books but I don’t think he is fundamentally opposed to copyrights either. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that Lessig helped found has this in their mission statement.

Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commonsâ€™ current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

So, they don’t want to destroy copyrights they would like a system where the content owner can choose which rights to reserve.

Anyway, I would like to state a few things about copyrights that I have learned.

First, the most useful part of owning a copyright is this; If someone were to use the content that you own, illegally, and, somehow, make a lot of money, you would have recourse. For instance, if someone used your song or piece of film in an ad campaign you could prove it’s yours and get paid.

Second, the folks who own the most copyrights and also the highest percentage of ones that are capable of garnering income are huge companies. This is a trend that is growing as multi-media giants have gone on intellectual property buying sprees of late. They know the future is in licensing content. The influence that these companies hold is also a reason that you will never see the end of copyright laws.

Also, these companies have not made it a general practice to shut down every nickel and dime operation that uses their content. There are notable exceptions such as Disney and the Elvis Presley estate that have been widely publicized for going after small time players but, for the most part, these companies that own content are really only interested in what you are doing if it’s making money.

Third, if you would somehow be able to end copyright laws, you would also greatly reduce the amount of truly creative content that would become public. Creative people would not stop creating. The fact is, there is a lot of added hassle in presenting creative material to the public. If the incentive (real or imagined) of commercial success is taken away then the creator is more apt to keep it to himself. For example, I often hear musicians say; “I play for the love of music”. Every musician I have ever met, that is worth a damn, loves music. That’s how they got to be good at it; they couldn’t leave it alone. If there were no money in playing a gig, it would be a lot easier to do it at home. You don’t have to drag all the gear around.

When I hear someone saying they want an end to copyrights I think what they really want is guilt free access to all creative content.