What’s the Future of Content?

This is my confession. I was a pre-teen intellectual property pirate.

Every thursday night I would sit in front of the television waiting for the “Top of the Pops” television show to come on with tape recorder primed and ready to “steal” my favorite songs of that week.

My piracy and “bootlegging” didn’t stop there. It only got worse.

Once my brother recieved his double-deck tape recorder we went into overdrive. We would make and swap mix tapes. Friends and I would copy computer games. There was no stopping us.

Only then we entered the world of video. Our first VHS machine became a paradise of counterfeit movies. We must of cost Hollywood tens of dollars in missing revenue. Maybe even a hundred dollars of profit. We were that hardcore by that point.

I say all this to establish that when I complain about my own intellectual property being ripped off that I am being a hypocrite.

My first experience of having something of my own “stolen” (in the purely digital intellectual property sense) was when my first book appeared on P2P networks. My friend Tony found it and showed me that it was being distributed by Kazaa or one of the others, I can’t recall. The publisher had offered the book as a PDF and now it was zinging its way around the intertubes with wild abaondon.

I didn’t lose any money, at that time I didn’t get any royalties and was hardly likely to. In fact it probably made me money because the more people who saw my name attached to the book the better. What it likely did do as a downside was make the publisher think twice about their persuing that line of business. Like a cold shower.

Like it or not, unlike my generation, this new generation have grown up with instant access to any media they want. I’m not even sure the thought of buying it enters their heads. My daughter and her friends do not even watch MTV, why would they wait for a popular artist to appear on some schedule when they can watch any music video as and when they like on YouTube? Don’t for a minute think people leave them on YouTube either, look into the right forums and you will see how easy it is for those preferred videos to end up on iPods, and other media players.

People over the age of 20 will likely know the great feeling of purchasing music or a video in a store, something we have been waiting to be released especially. I have seen kids grow tired of music that hasn’t even been released yet. Ripping open packaging is something they only associate with console games, and how long will that last? Games can be downloaded even officially now.

Once a product is entirely ones and zeros, and the culture makes it the norm to copy rather than buy, can we continue to act like the old rules apply?

As a person who makes a living out of content and information, I realize what a perilous situation we have made for ourselves.

What many of us produce now is ephemeral and intangible, where value is in the eye of the beholder, is it the future or just a blip in history?

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Content Licensing

Comments

5 Responses to “What’s the Future of Content?”

  1. Owen Blacker on September 30th, 2008 3:11 pm

    But don’t you know?

    Home taping is what killed music, isn’t it?

  2. Brad K. on September 30th, 2008 7:35 pm

    Years ago the music industry transitioned, to use music sales to boost concert and other live performance revenue. This doesn’t help the individual manager that is expected to keep sales revenues up, the the organizations, and especially performers, are not being hurt.

    And authors are finding similar things. You want to keep the price of things above free, yet you want the product – the book, the song – to support the overall picture of earning a living. You do *not* want to sacrifice total revenue to maintain book income.

    One point – recording off broadcast TV for personal use as you describe has been held for many years to be ‘fair use’. Turning around and trying to sell it is still infringement. Anything on the Internet falls under gestapo Digital Millennium rules, at least the parts that the courts haven’t dismantled yet. Cable seems closer to the Internet rules for copying, etc.

    Microsoft may be the biggest player in this hidden cash flow game. They sell products for a price for one reason only – to keep the price up on upgrades. The upgrades are where Microsoft has always made it’s bundle. That and the courts.

    Never confuse what a corporation or lawyer claims with truth and prevailing law. I recall in Silicon Valley when HBO was beaming their programming across the valley to a distribution center. Many engineers picked up microwave dishes to grab the signal. HBO sent vans around, sniffing out the microwave dishes on people’s homes, and published the names in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper, calling them pirates and claiming they were criminals. Only the courts didn’t feel that way. When HBO decided to encrypt the movies being beamed, the courts forbid them from changing the format.

    The motion picture lawyers have sued thousands of people. They have been settling out of court for whatever they could get, not based on what their losses were supposed to be. They haven’t actually won a case yet, in court.

    I figure a moderate amount of vigilance will keep a product productive, while keeping piracy under the table. As long as pirates are kept aware that they are being rude or illegal, the market should persist for quality product, and enhance the value of live presentations.

    I think you are seeing a change, not the end of content. Look at Michael Moore’s “Slacker Uprising”, his recent full length feature film just released free online. Just a different revenue stream.

  3. Danny Brown on October 2nd, 2008 5:12 am

    I think it’s like anything – there will always be new ways that we have to adapt to to make it work for us.

    Publishers (whether music, books or otherwise) are realizing that they have to engage their audience in new ways. Those that can adapt and actually make use of this new approach will succeed – everyone else will slip away.

    And remember, CD’s were going to see off the old-fashioned vinyl, but if anything vinyl is now one of the most popular audio formats around. People will always pay for something they judge to have intrinsic value to them.

  4. Cecilieaux on October 2nd, 2008 11:20 am

    OK, so music switched to concerts for revenue, yet recordings exist and cost money to create and involve lots of unglamorous people who like to eat.

    Written content has found no parallel alternative outlet for revenue. Newspapers and magazines are dying. When they do, they’ll have to drop their Web sites. Then, what?

  5. Time Tracker on October 6th, 2008 10:36 am

    Great points raised here, esp. about those of us over 20 years of age. I too, my friend, went a bit crazy with my dual deck boombox. Not to mention the heady days of Napster when I had a dedicated computer solely hosting, downloading, and expanding my music collection ten fold.

    Regarding the gaming industry and digital content distribution – an interesting model to look at is the growing popularity of free-to-play, microtransaction games. While they’re taking a while to catch on in the North American market, they’ve been a huge success in Asia. Based on the entire mechanism, these titles have neatly nipped piracy in the bud. Who wants to pirate a game thats already free? Perhaps this model will carry over into other genres?

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