It's baby steps for Sony with online content

Ok, ok. Last post I may have heaped praise on Sony for doing the right thing by Jill and Kevin on YouTube. Maybe it was a little premature.

Today I read in the Guardian Rhodri Marsden has had a take-down notice from Sony slapped on one of his videos. Turns out Sony doesn't like it when their artists are put up in a humorous light.

The video Rhodri describes highlights the somewhat bizarre ramblings of young up-and-comer Ray Gun. I can see why Sony would have slapped the take-down notice on the video if it doesn't show Ray Gun in a good light, but you can't blame Rhodri for trying.

If Sony are going to go ahead and profit off videos such as Jill and Kevin then they should be willing to let others that might be a little left-of-centre go online too. The very least that can be said is that by profiting off a select few user-generated videos Sony has given implicate permission to all online users to use Sony content whenever they want.

Changing of the guard for online content recognition

YouTube and Read Write Web have both commented this past day on Jill and Kevin's wedding dance and the subsequent news that Sony has actively profited from the 'improper use' of the Chris Brown song that Jill and Kevin danced to.

The YouTube post discusses how rights holders of content such as music can actively manage their content through YouTube's click-to-buy which has been live for a year or so. YouTube highlight's the direct correlation between the appearance of J&K's wedding dance and the Chris Brown's year-old song rocketing back up the iTunes and Amazon charts.

Read Write Web then goes on to highlight the change in tactic Sony has employed going from restricting use of their content in these User Generated (UGC) videos to identifying themselves as the content owner of the music and adding in a click-to-buy advertisement pointing people to either iTunes or Amazon to purchase the song.

I think it's a great move on Sony's behalf and the proof can be seen in the dollars rolling in. YouTube's ClaimID system that can automatically identify a song and notify a rights holder would really be an ace up their sleeve if all major and independent labels encouraged the method Sony has taken.

Imagine all the machinima creators, vloggers and other creative types out there being encouraged to take their pick of any song they wish instead of a limited amount of home-study productions. I think we'd see a whole new wave of UGC being unleashed onto our screens.

This is a real win for fair-use and share-alike on the web and I only hope it can extend further. If logos such as Facebook and YouTube could have a ClaimID type system attached you would no longer have to fret about whether some big-bad lawyer is going to serve a take-down notice on your site because of the improper use of a logo or content.

I can also see Internet radio having a great time with this. One click to purchase any song playing live online right now.

Maybe for artwork and design too? One click on an image to go to an online shop to purchase the original creator's work.

Text? Could it go too far? Should we all just freely use each other's work and share-alike?

Maybe this new tack from Sony poses more questions than it answers, but the fact that everybody seems to win from the deal makes it such an appealing option.

What is the future for books?

I was waiting in the airport terminal the other day and decided that it was the right time for a new book. I was already reading one, but needed a fresh one to get me through yet another flight.

Now, I don't think I'm cheap, but for normal reading books (novels or history books) I try and set myself a AUD$30.00 limit. Now I think that is reasonable. With the price of CDs and DVDs plummeting in the face of more and more online content, when I buy a physical object I am demanding a lot more of it because I can just get it online otherwise.

So, when I found a book that I like - an Australian book published and (hopefully) printed in Australia - only to find it cost $37.95 I was shocked to say the least. The book, The Land of Plenty, by Mark Davis and published by Melbourne University Press, is $36.95 direct from the publisher, and $36.99 from Angus and Robertson so it wasn't just the airport book shop trying to get one over me.

Sure, this book probably caters for a niche market, and the costs of such a small run probably don't allow for any discounts, but surely there must be a cheaper alternative and I know there is.

E-book readers have been around for a while now but the average price is still sitting somewhere between US$300-500, so they are not cheap. But the fact of the matter is that from a publishers point of view the e-book should be a fairly compelling avenue to pursue. The value of a publishers work is in the IP the works contain and the traditional paperback has only been a means for distribution.

The difficulty in e-book readers is that they are trying to specialise with EInk display screens that are much more easy on the eyes than traditional back-lit laptops or PDAs. Because of this specialising, easy-on-the-eyes e-book readers have been held into a fairly niche market.

But, the technology is only ever one part of the equation. If the boffins at DELL, ASUS or HP were given enough incentive I'm sure they could create a pretty good easy-on-the-eyes screen mode on a normal tablet PC or PDA. Another reason for the limited e-book market is the ever-present rights management.

Amazon have been able to manage publishers IP through a DRM format of text and uses a direct Internet link from Amazon to the Amazon Kindle therefore assisting to make sure the text doesn't fly off online in the middle of the night. Other e-book providers have also created their own DRM formats, but as we have seen through the Walmart MP3 DRM fiasco customers are becoming more and more wary of DRM supported formats because of their tendency to disappear.

The only reason books have not gone the way of the DVD or CD is the fact that no-body apart from Google and a few universities could be bothered flipping so many pages over a scanner to digitise the books and as yet the hackers haven't decided to infiltrate publishers to get digital versions of new release books.

So what does this all mean? For me it means that as with the dodo and soon the CD and DVD, the paperback is destined to become extinct because the case for costs savings in publishing is too compelling for publishers. But, as with audio and visual arts, the global management of IP in a digital world has meant that e-books are being published at a snails pace.

I am hoping that when publishers and authors come around the the post-copyright era and embrace creative commons and digitised books we will be able to download books that we want to read for a fraction of the paperback cost whilst saving one more tree in the tropics.

Check-list for a post paperback world:

* Integrated PDA/phone/e-book back-lit/Eink reading panel
* Non-DRM file format
* International IP agreement (Creative Commons?)
* Value-added services (audio/video integration, authors blogs, hyperlinked bibliography ...)

Selling social media internally

This great diagram comes from David Armano via Beeline labs. I've been following Beeline for a little while since their tribalization of business study came out, and now thanks to Beeline I'm going to be enjoying David's great visualisations of social media.

I like this diagram because I can relate. It's nothing spectacular, not new, and is not unique to social media. Anybody trying to run a traditional, easy-as-you-like competition is likely to have experienced this curve as well. This is the traditional effort vs status quo fight anybody in marketing will have faced.

The opportunity that social media has in this space is that it is relatively new. While there are plenty of precedents in like cases and like scenarios, social media is redefining what the legal precedents mean.

In the post-copyright era where you're more likely to get thanks for spreading the word rather than scorn for 'ripping off' others' work, the creative commons movement is an example of how social media and the socialisation of the Internet is changing the legal game altogether. A maxim that I like to work by in this era is to have the benefit to the customer/consumer in mind at all times.

Working from this angle, it is possible to work with legal (also branding and many other internal departments) to ensure that if it is a viral campaign that you want to do, then it is done for the right reasons and with the maximum benefit for the customer.

I think that it comes down to the old effort versus status quo scenario and if you have the right effort behind your project, and the right argument for customer benefit, then it is possible to keep that viral campaign flying.

And in the spirit of the post-copyright era I would like to assert David Armano's ownership of the original design of the following diagram (as also seen above), but with my own personal touch. In this remix of the diagram I've added a little Chuck Norris. The trajectory of your viral campaign is proportionate to the amount of effort behind your thinking and the customer benefit. If Chuck Norris were to launch a viral campaign he'd make sure that it'd fly fast and far and get to where he wanted it!