Copyright and Fixing File Sharing

As I'm a writer, I have an interest in strong copyright protection, and understand why the music labels and others dependant on content for income object to passing files around. It would be as though a farmer grew corn and then someone could magically make copies of the corn, complete in every detail, which elminates most of the potential revenue. The market is discounting the value of all the risks the farmer makes and decides that no one should have to pay. Evne if you sell a few ears, that doesn't help when most of the market becomes closed to you and others essentially profit from your work by not having to pay for it.

But why do we have to look at file sharing as the inevitable multiplication of copies? What if there were a system in which people could register copies that they had bought or otherwise legally had and then trade them with others for some period of time. While you swapped, you could enjoy the other person's music or writing or video or what have you, but you'd surrender the copy you originally had. And then, when you were tired of the deal, it could revert.

This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but I think it offers an interesting approach to comehow reducing the draconian approaches taken by so many in the creative industries while protecting legitimate interests. If you and I buy CDs, we can legally swap them, whether temporarily or permanently. No music label can preven that because they are our property. Couldn't there be a way to enforce the same sort of activity over the Internet? Sure, I could have made a tape of teh CD, or a photocopy of the book or what have you. There will be some people who figure out how to abuse the system. But I wonder if many more wouldn't stick with the deal, because they want the freedom to listen to new things and let their friends listen/read/view what they have. The online distributors could possibly act as referees and facilitators for the process, which would only reinforce the vendor-customer relationship and improve their businesses in the long run.

New York Times and Reinventing the Newspaper

There's a reason that the New York Times has been spectacularly successful online compared to other newspapers - they're not trying trying to do what in web marketing used to be called brochureware. Reading a book on television is not compelling programming. Showing movie stills in a magazine is boring. Writing for the stage is different from writing for the page. Every outlet has its own structure, form, and demands.

Too many newspapers, magazines, and other publishers are just trying to take what they have and somehow do that "web thing." And while the TimesSelect premium online service isn't perfect, it's a lot smarter than most of its competitors. I just got a mailing from them that highlighted its video site (where you can find all those clips that they are trying, not with complete success, to integrate with their print stories online). What are they offering that's new? L'Eau Life, "a short animated film created for TimesSelect by artist Jeff Scher." That is the online counterpart - not translation or relocation - for that perennial favorite section, the comics. Now that's reinvention.

Slippery Slope of User-Generated Content

There's an amusing piece in the New York Times about companies looking to customers to create ads and the pain of the experience.

This is a concept that I think is flawed because the companies generally aren't approaching it the right way. You aren't going to get a professional spot from the vast majority of consumers. The writing, production qualities, and acting are more likely than not going to be bad. There's a reason people make their livings doing this sort of thing. If everyone could do it, you'd see much better marketing on television.

You also aren't going to get a whole bunch of spots that sees your product the way you'd like to see it:

One of the most viewed Heinz videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler [an advertising executive not involved in the Heinz consumer commercial competition] saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Yup, often people will mock your brand, your product, what part your product plays in life, and your reasons for looking to consumers for your advertising content.

But companies like Heinz could learn something by removing the ketchup-tinted glasses. Forget for a second that you would hope to get a useful commercial out of this. Why not use it as a window into what consumers are thinking. How do they react to your product? What associations do they make subconsciously that come out through the work? You've essentially asked for an admittedly self-selecting set of customers to hold forth on what you do. For a company, this is the value that the Internet really provides - not using the web to promote your own view, but seeing how you are perceived and how people perceive themselves. Look for archetypes, themes, and associations that might help you talk the customer's language. That makes a whole lot more sense than hoping to find the advertising needle in the haystack of would-be funniest home videos.