Links and Thoughts 23: 10 June 2014
The Alan Parsons Project – The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.
(For the video, the song is matched to art from Dark Horse’s Creepy and Eerie archive editions)
Good Morning.
Cities and Citizens:
Some of these ‘anti-homeless’ solutions look like they’d make excellent bike racks — so long as we also address the needs of the homeless: that’s a trade-off I’d be more than willing to make.
Anti-public bench : Isabelle Rolin – dizagneur critique
Living Wage:
“Conway did find a way to make up for lack of tip money going towards his servers, however, by creating a system where servers can make either $10 an hour or 20 percent of their individual food sales each shift.”
Restaurant Issues Ban on Tipping : Foodbeast
Tech:
- Netflix got worse on Verizon even after Netflix agreed to pay Verizon : Ars Technica
- Netflix refuses to comply with Verizon’s ‘cease and desist’ demands : Ars Technica
- Netflix to Verizon: No, poor video quality is actually your fault : Quartz [full text of the letter at the link]
Media:
- The newsonomics of Time Inc.’s anxious spinoff : Nieman Journalism Lab
- Magazine Business Changes as Time Inc Spins Off and Distributor Shuts Down : Comics Worth Reading
- Time Warner may be looking to buy half of Vice after ditching its old publishing business : Quartz
The Economics of Entertainment:
“I first saw this discussed in an entirely different context as the ‘blue vacuum cleaner’ problem. A door to door vacuum cleaner salesman goes door to door. Even when the door is not slammed in their face, the prospect does not seem to be interested. Finally the prospect asks, ‘what’s color is it available in’, and the vacuum cleaner salesman says, ‘its available in white, beige, red, brown and black.’ And the prospect says they aren’t interested, because its not available in blue.
“And the vacuum cleaner salesman reports that they could sell a boatload of the vacuum cleaners, if only they were available in blue. So the company comes out with a blue model … but without the promised explosion in sales. The only change is now people say they want it in green.
“Obviously, what those people were really saying was they had no interest in buying a vacuum cleaner, but they expressed it by picking a feature that they had learned was not available.
“And this happens in online discussion spaces too. Lots of people advance what seems to them to be the more reasonable reasons … but those aren’t always the real reasons.”
…
“Because the reality is that there are a number of people hanging out in the online discussion spaces where you find out where to get bootlegs whose real reason for using bootlegs is that ‘I’m a freeloader who takes a free ride on the work of others just because I can get away with it’.”
…
“So as far the royalties-paying operation is concerned, they are phantasms. They just don’t matter, no matter how much noise they may make on some discussion forum. In this particular case, they do not offer any potential benefit to the creators of anime, and so whatever reasons they may offer as to why they bootleg instead of using legit content are of no particular relevance to the market.”
What It Takes for Crunchyroll to Satisfy Bootleg Consumers : Voices on the Square
— In the article linked above, I like how Bruce ties it back not just to ‘online’ pirates, but specifically to the subset of users who are highly conscious, high-information, very active online, and tied into a community. It just happens that the whole community is into getting things fast-and-free online. It’s a polar opposite to the “No Spoilers” crowd, who are also online but not fully engaged (‘I’ll watch it later, or maybe catch up once it’s out on DVD.’) — the anime pirate often places a higher value on the online discussion of the media even over ‘trivialities’ like proper payments to creators or legality.
see also: Copying Dickens : B&N Review
##
following up on that:
Today’s Book Recommendation is Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns (U. Of Chicago Press, 2010 paperback, 9780226401195), which covers how the ability to make copies eventually had to be reconciled with the new-fangled idea of copy rights — when copies are cheap, who gets to make money on cheap copies? [You might have noticed, we still haven’t figured that one out — or we feign ignorance or wrap ourselves in other conceits to get out of it.]
After you’ve digested 600+ pages of that, if you find yourself still hungry I’d follow up with The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement by Michael Strangelove (U. of Toronto Press, 2005 paperback, 9780802038180) which despite the subtitle isn’t so much about piracy, but rather how the very democratic and very distributed nature of the web, where everyone can be a creator, has the power to disrupt the old commodity economy entirely. (YMMV; I like the concept, but I also gotta eat).
If you’re still not done with the subject, Lawrence Lessig is the obvious next stop: of his books, the ones on-topic would be The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2002), Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (2005), and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2009).
I’ll get my to-buy links sorted out eventually. In the meantime, you can still use most readers’ preferred option.
##
Diary entry for 10 June:
Does anyone pirate video content in a vacuum?
We find out about the content because other people talk about it (to praise it or condemn it), and link to it, and index it, and make copies available — upload sites, torrents, IRC bots, and even old fashioned FTP archives. (I hadn’t heard of anime downloads available via terminal using Gopher, but I’m about 40% sure you might be able to get some episodes via Usenet binaries — yes, in 2014).
In a pinch, I suppose fans would hand around USB thumb drives and SD cards in much the same way that the 1980s anime fans handed around VHS tapes.
The thread that connects all this activity isn’t the technology (even though the tech makes it all-too-easy) but rather the constant chatter about content between fans — online, around the water cooler (does any office still have a water cooler? are we still allowed to hang around one if it exists?) — in print media, in movie trailers and TV commercials, in the tweets of celebrities and in the darkest depths of fantumblrdom.
Today it’s called ‘viral’ marketing; it used to be known as ‘word of mouth’ — the best kind of free advertising any major media company could hope for.
The new trick is: the companies get the free, near-universal advertising they always hoped for, but then their customers help themselves to ‘free’ content. —M.
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