Slashdot and Piracy

by | Copyfight, Copyright, Piracy
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Wow, the past few days Slashdot has been putting up quite a few pro-piracy articles. I think it’s been one a day for the past few days. It’s generally dismal to read some of the comments there.

First, there was “Slashdot: The Pirates Will Always Win, Says UK ISP” / The Guardian: The pirates will always win, says Carphone’s Dunstone

Slashdot summary:

“The head of UK ISP TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone, has made the comment ahead of the communications minister’s Digital Britain report that illegal downloading cannot be stopped. He said ‘If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.’ Instead he advocates allowing users ‘to get content easily and cheaply.'”

First of all – he’s right in saying that it’s impossible at the ISP level to stop pirates for any length of time. As far as I can tell from the article, that’s what Dunstone’s argument was. Unfortunately, most people have generalized this correct observation into the incorrect claim (in the Slashdot summary) that “illegal downloading cannot be stopped”. Even the Guardian gets their headline wrong (“The pirates will always win, says Carphone’s Dunstone”), which again misrepresents what Dunstone said. I agree with Dunstone that legal downloading services are part of the fight against piracy – although, most of those are already in place. ITunes, Netflix Download service, Amazon Video-on-demand, etc are already there. Additionally, with sufficient legal pressure – we could also drive piracy down. The most obvious method is to go after filesharing hubs – like Pirate Bay. That’s a different method of attack than sifting internet traffic for illegal filesharing. What would happen then, is that piracy is marginalized. People don’t want to jump from one website to another every few months – so most people will just stop trying to skirt the law, and do it the legal way. Only the die-hard pirates will stick with it. The fact of the matter is that you don’t have to stop 100% of piracy. This isn’t a war that has one of two outcomes: you “win” or you “lose”. A world with 95% or 100% piracy is a very different world than one with 10% or 20% piracy. In both cases, piracy exists, but in the first case, creativity gets smothered.

What’s odd is the number of people who buy-in to the false dichotomy. They wouldn’t buy-in to similar dichotomies like: “shoplifting cannot be stopped” or “littering cannot be stopped”. We can do the same thing to piracy that we do to shoplifting or littering: minimize it so that its damage is minimized.

I read an article by Clay Shirky recently that seemed to imply that piracy cannot be eliminated because, if they have to, pirates will resort to the “sneakernet” – i.e. manually sending a hard-drive from one location to the other for duplication. The whole thing takes place without the internet involved. I couldn’t help but think, “well, duh – if pirates have to resort to those kinds of actions to pirate stuff, then piracy rates will be extremely low because it’s just too inconvenient for a large majority of people. That means it won’t be very threatening”.

Slashdot, of course, leaves out the fact that Charles Dunstone doesn’t call for the elimination of copyright or surrender to pirates, but, rather:

Charles Dunstone said, the solution is education about the benefits of respecting copyright coupled with services that allow consumers “to get content easily and cheaply”.

Obviously, his comment about “getting content easily and cheaply” means legal download services – like iTunes.

Then, Ben Goldacre’s article in the Guardian got posted: (Slashdot: Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry, “Illegal downloads and dodgy figures”, BadScience: Home taping didn’t kill music). I generally like Ben Goldacre. He’s probably most famous for combating the anti-vaccination groups. Most of his article dealt with unrealistic numbers of lost sales due to piracy. I think it’s perfectly fine to raise issues about bad numbers. Unfortunately, he makes some jabs at the whole copyright system, implying that piracy isn’t a bad thing. He seem to buy-in to the questionable results of the Norwegian “pirate” study. And the title of his article is rather odd (“Home taping didn’t kill music”) since his article has nothing to do with home taping. The problem, of course with the “Home taping didn’t kill music” argument is that home-taping is really inconvenient. It’s like the “sneakernet”. Internet piracy gives you free copies of digital media (read: perfect copying) and everything is there (often hours after its release). Home-taping on the other hand, gives you a degraded copy, you have to get a physical copy to duplicate in the first place, and you have to borrow that copy from someone else who has it. This means you probably can’t get what you want because your friend doesn’t have it either, and if he does have it, you feel like a leech when you ask to borrow lots of music.

Then comes the article saying that the Pirate Party has won a seat in the EU Parliament. (Link to my article examining the Pirate Party’s arguments) At least it’s only one seat out of 736. They’re hoping to make the most of it though, by being a one-issue party. They’re also hoping that other political parties chase votes by taking up their cause. It’s rather sad. The Pirate Party / Pirate Bay always remind me of the “killing the golden goose” story. They’re sharpening up their knives without understanding the economic issues going on with digital media. For a real treat, and to raise your blood pressure, just read some of the Slashdot comments. I feel frequently insulted by slashdot comments whenever the issue of piracy comes up. A few favorites:

All works intellectual creativity of should be given away free. We should only have to pay for retail services, and stuff that China and the rest of the world manufactures… not for what America does best. (Source)

Copyright is the antithesis of free speech. (Source)

Everyone who applies copyright restrictions, deep inside, knows doing so is wrong and screws all humanity over.

If you don’t want something copied, don’t release it. (Source)

Sigh. I never would’ve guess that working hard to make great software and earn a living would’ve provoked these kinds of reactions, just because I won’t give away years of work.

iPhone Development

by | Business, Game Development, Games
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I’ve been asked a few times about whether or not I’ll create iPhone applications. I haven’t looked into it much, prefer desktop/laptop development, and generally feel that the iPhone “gold rush” is over anyway. I think there was a time, a few years ago, when you could get a big benefit by being the first one there. But, everyone noticed the opportunity, and now there’s lots of competition. From what I can tell, there are a few success stories, and the vast majority of iPhone apps languish in obscurity.

Here’s two contrasting articles. The first one is written from the user’s perspective. You’d get the impression that iPhone development is a gold-mine. But, of course, he only mentions the most popular applications:

Last month, I became an obsessive air-traffic controller. The culprit: a terrific game for the iPhone called Flight Control. The premise is simple: You’re faced with a crush of planes, and it’s your job to guide each one to its respective runway…. According to Firemint, the game’s publisher, the 99-cent app has been purchased more than 700,000 times since March; at its peak, it was being downloaded 20,000 times a day.
…
Last fall, [Ethan Nicholas] spent weeks—some of it while cradling his 1-year-old son—writing a tank-war game called iShoot. The game, which sold for $2.99, hit the App Store in October, and in January, it shot up to the top spot—selling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning Nicholas enough to let him quit his job and take up iPhone development full-time.
Source: Slate

The second article is about iPhone development from a software-developer’s perspective. It isn’t the gold-mine you’d think it is. There are 40,298 applications for the iPhone. The author does some estimates to figure out the average profitability of an iPhone application (about $1,881). At that amount, you’d better be cranking out a decent application every month to earn a bare-minimum living ($22k/year). Of course, there’s a lot of variability in this: some huge successes and lots of applications that earn next to nothing. So maybe “average” isn’t the best way to look at this. Afterall, if you have 70 applications that earn $1 million each, 2,000 applications that earn $1000, and 38,228 applications that earn $100 each, you’d end up with his same numbers. It would look more like a lottery under these numbers – almost everyone would end up poor, and a handful of people would get rich. These same numbers would also produce a bunch of “success stories” – 70 of them – that the media could write about, as if the iPhone was a sure-way to quit your day-job and earn a great living.

From what I hear, the top-selling applications tend to get a boost by getting onto Apple’s Top 10 list, and (to a lesser extent) the Top 50 list. Again, this suggests that there are some big winners, and a lot of losers.

Update, June 9, 2009: It’s nice to get a little confirmation of my view. In a recent blog post, iPhone developer Rick Strom says:

First, so you know where I stand among the 60,000 or 600,000 (I’ve heard both numbers) registered iPhone developers: I have nearly 20 apps in the app store as of this writing.

Four of those apps are on the charts:

* Zen Jar #34 Social Networking (paid)
* Zen Jar Lite #54 Social Networking (free)
* Spirit Board #36 Board Games (free)
* Spirit Board Pro #95 Board Games (paid)
…
With two apps on the [Top 100] paid charts, one would assume I’m rolling in dough. After all, this is a gold rush, right?

The reality is much more startling. In order to place #34 on the social networking charts, you need 30-35 downloads a day. At the standard app store pricing of .99, and after Apple takes its cut, that means your app needs to bring in a little over $20 a day to chart at that position. And social networking is a popular category.

Perhaps you’d expect the game charts to do better. Board games isn’t a wildly popular category, but it still might surprise you that it takes about 6-8 downloads a day to chart. That means if you are making around $4 a day you’ll be in the top 100.

So what does this all mean? Well keep in mind there are over 36,000 apps in the app store. If the apps on the category charts are doing those sorts of numbers, what do you think the rest of them are doing?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The aren’t selling at all.
…
I post these numbers so people can understand what is really involved here. The app store isn’t a sane marketplace at all, any more than the lottery is. When you submit an app, you are buying a ticket. Maybe you will be one of the few who makes a couple hundred grand in a hurry, but most likely you will be just another shlub tossing your blood, sweat and tears into the void where it will be ignored.

Google Wave

by | New Technology
5

There was a recent buzz on the internet about Google Wave. It’s an extensible platform for allowing people to collaborate over the web. It also handles tasks like email and IM. I have to say: I’m just not that impressed. It looks an awful lot like a solution looking for a problem. My guess is that Google Wave will be something some edgy companies will use, but isn’t going to get much widespread popularity.

See the Google Wave presentation here (warning: the full video is 1 hour 20 minutes long).

The good things about Google Wave:
– It’s extensible and open-source. People can add-on to this platform, and that’s good. I’m sure some people will come up with some cool stuff.
– The contextual spell-checker is cool. The system can identify mistakes in these sentences: “I’m making been soup. I’ve bean there.” A spell-checker wouldn’t catch those errors because all of those words are spelled correctly. However, the google system can identify that you used the wrong words. (Note: Microsoft also has a contextual spell-checker within Word. You can check out details here.)
– The just-in-time language translator is cool. I’ve heard for a few years that google was getting good at translation. I hope it works well (and if it doesn’t, I’m sure it will get a lot better).

The weak things about Google Wave:
– Their system has an email-type system that can also function as an IM. The problem with this: what problem are they trying to solve? Email and IM work “well enough”. I don’t think there’s much of an advantage here to using Google Wave as your email system. The functionality – while cool – isn’t really improving things in any significant real-world way. My verdict: this feature will only be used by a few edgy tech companies.
– Document playback: they can replay how a document has grown and changed over time. That’s nice, but is anyone going to use this functionality – except in cases where people want to track down who made particular changes to a document (e.g. like a wiki)? It could be somewhat useful in a company, not very useful outside of a corporate environment.
– Collaborative document editing: Everyone can change a document at the same time. That’s nice. There’s actually a free product that does this already: etherpad (etherpad.com). It’s kind of cool. Not very useful for most people. I can’t think of any time within the last five years where this would benefit my life. A few tech companies might be able to use it in some circumstances.
– Ability to access twitter feeds, put photos together into a single page, collaboratively look at google maps, or mirror conversations on a blog. Not that useful. It’s cool that they can do it, but it fits more into the category of “neat technology, but more of a curiosity”. It’s cool that they made it so easy to do this stuff, but it’s not really stuff that people want to do.
– Ability to play games (like chess). I think this is a plug-in thing. I wasn’t quite clear on whether the system enforced chess-rules, or if it was just displaying a bunch of symbols on the screen to both users. Either way, I didn’t really see this as anything other than “look what I can do; not that you would actually want to do it”. The good thing about this demo was showing that Google Wave can display a variety of data.

I can’t figure out why they didn’t add VOIP (voice) capability. I’m sure someone will add it as an extension, but it seems like it would be difficult to collaboratively create a document without being able to talk to the other people you are collaborating with. Are you supposed to simply type your IMs to the other people?

I think they’ve confused “cool technology” with the question “does this offer any significant benefit to the user?” Yes, it’s cool. No, most people are going to ignore it because it isn’t offering them any significant advantage over existing systems. While they did their best to make it easy to use, it’s still too complicated for most users.

The contextual spell checker and translator are something that could easily be dropped into other products, so I don’t really see those as specifically “Google Wave” features. Which leaves “it’s extensible and open-source” as the only real selling point. Hopefully, we’ll see a bunch of cool stuff from users that will justify the existence of Google Wave.

June 1 Update: I just read a similar article over at DaniWeb.com – “A Curmudgeonly Look at Google Wave”

Coleran Reel 2008.06

by | Cool Design, Cool Stuff, Video
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This is just a cool little video. A “demo reel” or “screen reel” is used by artists to show-off their work in order to get more work. Mark Coleran makes the cool graphics displays used in movies. His goal is to make a display that looks ‘high tech’. It’s something that you never really think about – but someone spent a lot of time making the animations that appear on computer screens in movies. I like the video because have a lot of appreciation for intuitive, functional, sexy user-interfaces.

Free Coldplay Download

by | Free, Music
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Coldplay is giving away a free copy of their album (9 songs). This is apparently a way to drive up concert sales — they released the free album on the same day their North American tour started; free downloads will end on the last day of their tour in August. I’ve never been a big fan of Coldplay, but I figure there’s no reason not to check it out. If you like free music, get it here (FYI: they ask for your email address, but your email address is not verified by their website).