Nov

9

Copyright Ave Maria

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

The ancient pile at the end of Ave Maria Lane which houses that most resplendent of City of London livery companies, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, rang out last night with the gladsome cries and throaty gurgles of the media market makers toasting the launch of yet another book. But this one is entitled “Copyright in a Digital Age”, and reflects the website contributions to a debate on the subject, convened and wonderfully edited by Trevor Fenwick and Ian Locks, who are owed at the very least a Sung Eucharist in this High Church of Copyright belief. I recommend you read it, either online at www.stationers.org, or by ordering it in print from that site. I shall not review it here, in part because I contributed, but I recommend in it a good summary of where we are from Clive Bradley, and a typically thoughtful piece from Mark Bide and Alicia Wise. The other reason why I cannot review it is an increasing impatience with the inability of the media to accept the obvious, or act coherently. Sitting in the open forum after the launch, while listening to James Murdoch (he is in the book too) keynote the issues, I could only speculate about how much of the present media marketplace must disappear in the next decade to allow a networked media world to emerge. Before I sank into a gentle doze, only to be awakened by the chairman reading out the question I had submitted for the panel discussion (thank goodness he did not ask if I had remembered it) I had settled on sixty per cent.

And upon the idea that this is a very simple issue, this copyright thing, or so complex it should be handed over to the Vatican for resolution sometime in the next thousand years. I incline to the former. Here is a point by point take on the issue, specially included for the kindly reader who tells me that this column is “tolerable, even though written in paragraphs”. Here are my points:

* Intellectual property theft is endemic in human society and has been since the first cave drawings.

* Copyright is an invention of the Statute of Anne of 1710, to protect the economic rights of a group of individuals in quite specific circumstances.

* All citizens should be able to assert their ownership of the expression of ideas (though not the ideas themselves) and have the right to ensure that those expressions are limited to media where they can be wholly safe-guarded, should such media have ever existed.

* All citizens have the moral right to be identified with works which they created, and these rights are immutable.

* The internet was created for the active passage of such works – “content” – to places where this material could be utilized. If you do not wish your content to be used in that context, and to drop out of the active use of the network, then you have a right to put your content into the dark web behind a paywall – and risk  it being ignored. Your choice.

* If the answer to the machine lies in the machine, we would all set up implied licensing schemes, charge users a micro-cent per access, give all power to the collection societies and back up our will with a set of international treaties. Maybe we will, and certainly we should, but it sounds like a daunting task to me.

* Meanwhile, most who write originally in the network do so for  reasons other than a flow of micropayments from a network debit card. Reputation, peer esteem, marketing, creating other income flows (like providing content to attach to advertising – as newspapers do in print) are all good reasons for writing on the Web, or in a scholarly journal, or elsewhere.

* Finally, the network lets those who want to do any of these things perfect scope to do them. Customers are seldom wrong, business models almost always are. Study the music industry closely. And remember that is is the customers who will decide in the end, not the producers.

As we left the hall, we were reminded that the UK government has set up yet another enquiry into copyright. Apparently, ministers are appalled to hear that our laws are so tough in the UK that Google could not have been borne amongst these dark, satanic mills. Swords will not sleep nor chariots of fire be doused until this has been corrected (sounds like another sop to the LibDems to me – “give them copyright and we can do what we like in Europe”). But amongst all this classic theological futility, we forget the one thing that is worth protecting. As content becomes more commoditized (eg heavily reproduced and widely available) it is the metadata which tells us what it is, what it relates to, often what it means, where  it came from etc etc. This must be protected. This is where the real network investment is being made. And we are on a value track here. Over time this metadata itself will become more available, and we shall add more value to create new things to protect – the thesauri, taxonomies and ontologies which provide the intelligent adhesive that allows this sea of content to be reshaped and recreated time and again. We did once pass a European Directive on the Legal Protection of Databases to accomplish this, though it never got a mention in Ave Maria Lane. I would have raised a glass to that!

Aug

30

Paradigm Lost

Filed Under Blog, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

So what happened in August? While I was on vacation the world seemed to change in mysterious ways, or, at least, I awoke to mysteries long in the making. Quite apart from England starting to win cricket matches on a regular basis, that is. Or summer to be sunny in these parts. Something fundamental happened.

I had the first inkling of this from the headline “Lycos sold for $35 million” (http://www.medianama.com/2010/08/223-lycos-ybrant/). So now we are 16 years on in the glorious history of the networked globe, and we have our first example of a start up with an almost complete cradle to grave financial history. Founded with a $2m investment from CMGI, this was the fastest company to the market when it floated on Nasdaq in 1996. By 1999, with a range of subsidiaries in some 40 countries, it became the most popular Website in the world. In May 2000, Telefonica of Spain bought it for $12.5 billion, according to cnet.com, and with the acquisition of Tripod, Lycos created the characteristic surge of the Bubble years – the Portal. When enterprize search failed for it, Lycos began to shed its subsidiaries, and sell off its local manifestations (to Bertelsmann in Germany, for example). The now diminished company was still innovative (remember Lycos Phone of 2006), despite its sale for $94 m to Daum of Korea in 2004. This latest sale, to the Indian advertising services player, Ybrant, emphasises that the current migration is to web advertising services. Revenues in 2009 were reported as $24.76 m. Ybrant made the acquisition for $36 m.

This is not a “how are the mighty fallen” story. It tells us instead how fast brands grow in the networks and above all how fast and threatening the steep slope of the success graph can seem for established players: Lycos and the creation of Terra Lycos was Telefonica’s vastly greater equivalent of the Murdoch Moment over My Space. And it is not a story about lack of ingenuity and innovation: Lycos genuinely moved with the tidal waters of business model change, and its history shows managers trying hard to re-position and re-use their access and brand position. This is a story about search.

At the root of the Lycos is Google and its growth. In many ways Lycos was a John the Baptist project, and the work which Google’s founders did was not so much an exercise in replacing the fundamentals of search created by Lycos and its competitors, but in adding back into the mix something of the experience of previous users (PageRank) in such a way that the user perception was “better results”.

Today Google has 85% of the market in search, and this year its results have begun to decline slightly. Not much, mind you. A peak of 86% market share followed by a near 2 percentage point decline is not a disaster, but it underscores something else: unless you are in India or China (and Google’s numbers are still roaring away in the former despite Google’s well publicized problems in the latter) the most significant global user communities are already on the Web – or unlikely to use the Web in significant numbers for very many years.

So will Google also and inevitably follow the path mapped out by Lycos? The pressure from the Semantic Web and the world of Linked Data certainly point in the opposite direction from keyword searching. But clearly not if the acquisition programme comes through, and the new business development programme matches it and Google are able to grow a new business alongside Search. The sector has never seen a company like Google for using its wealth to pursue opportunity outside of its core markets. From YouTube to Android, from DoubleClick to Aardvark, from Google Earth to Google Energy, the company sometimes seems to be restlessly evading its destiny while remaining 98% tied to advertising for its revenues.

For its destiny is surely now reasonably clear. There will be a decline in search as an apps orientated world moves more fundamentally towards solutions. Already Google is feeling some of this, as well as the continuing movement of advertising markets away from the traditional way of contextualization. There will be continuing pressure within solutions created for professional and business services for search to be customized to need, and good enough for active purposes (which may be better or more targeted or more rigorously selective or more representative of niche user groups than public search environments).

On their track records you would have to say that Google, driven by current management, will diversify and survive. But it may be a closer issue than many expected at IPO time, and some of this is reflected in the current share price decline. And if they do accomplish the building of a new company out of the old (an Internet first in itself) then it may be by rediscovering what users do in a way that the apps market already does. As someone wittily commented “if they had really cared about users all these years, the service would have been called Find, not Search”. But in the meanwhile business and professional information service providers may be relieved to find that insuperable Google pressures may lessen a little in order to allow integrated solutions to grow. This will create opportunities that are time limited, so nobody should sit around waiting for users to ask or rival revenues to grow.

And a final sob story. In 1994 our favourite comparison was the pornography marketplace, which blazed a trail in viral marketing and online portal techniques. Porn established itself as a sector to watch closely if you were in advertising markets, and a model of content protection and business model evolution if you weren’t. According to an article in Technology Review (www.technologyreview.com/web/26074/) porn is blighted by mass evasions of copyright on peer to peer networks and the rise of user-generated content. Wage rates are falling in the industry and so is program production. I do NOT know what the “solution” is here, but it is only to be expected that when all the other models created in early web days are changing then this one would as well.

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