Tim -- I think your critique of Anderson is generally right. While the typical amateur might, sensibly, not object to further copying, this hardly means that those who want to promote further copying are always amateurs.
I've posted an SSRN draft of a piece that tries to put this shift in the context of reputation incentives vs. monetary incentives. As I argue in the article, creativity fueled by reputation incentives has a long tradition and it is not necessarily anti-IP or anti-market. If you consider the enormous investments in advertising, for instance (and particularly in viral advertising as an effort to harness decentralized P2P-like distribution), you can see markets and big corporate players spending a good deal of money trying to get people to make copies of creative works.
It's forthcoming in Boston University Law Review (Feb. 2007).
Tim Lee
· 3 years ago
I will check it out. Thanks!
eee_eff
· 3 years ago
This, in turn represents a serious threat to the hit-dominated culture of incumbent content companies, whose businesses are carefully tuned to cranking out mainstream fare that will appeal to the broadest possible audience.
And as this hit dominated culture loses ground, it will start to lose money, and at a certain tipping point, that hit-dominated culture will become a money loser, and it will very quickly evaporate. But the process won't be pretty--I am sure we will see all kinds of legal challenges to distribution of long-tail content.
Interesting, also, that the paper above itself is available for free download.
Noel Le
· 3 years ago
Greg, would it be OK to copy/paste your paper onto Wikipedia?
Enigma, perhaps you can do the honors.
Luis Villa
· 3 years ago
Tim: I'm fairly sure that if I registered 'koswithoutadvertising.com' and republished all of Kos's stuff, he might get a little miffed- probably less miffed than madonna might be at 'madonnawithoutfifteendollars.com', but still miffed. Bloggers may start from a generally more lenient copyright perspective, but once revenue gets involved, they are still likely to get itchy if the revenue is threatened. And quite a few blogs these days are popping up with very traditional 'all rights reserved, no republication without request' copyright notices from day one- even when no revenue is involved.
Greg: sounds like a fascinating paper, thanks for the link.
Noel Le
· 3 years ago
Good point Luis. Well, Greg, you have a "natural monopoly" on the paper- your ability to answer questions and explain it would deter any effort at misappropriation. Still I thougt Enigma could easily be baited given his glee at anything about Wikhpedia.
Tim Lee
· 3 years ago
Luis,
That's an excellent point, and one I can't really quarrel with. I was being sloppy when I said that people at the head would eschew copyright. Clearly what the top bloggers have been doing is dramatically relaxing their the terms on which they offer their content. But they're not abandoning copyright entirely, and they're unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.
But as a practical matter, I don't think that koswithoutadvertising.com would have much of an impact on Kos's bottom line. Kos's readers like Kos, and they're probably happy to help him out by looking at the version of his site with ads, assuming the ads aren't intrusive. And if the ads were intrusive, koswithoutadvertising.com would be the least of his worries. The far bigger worry would be all the traffic he'd be losing to Atrios and TPM.
So yes, Kos would probably miffed at the existence of koswithoutadvertising.com. But he wouldn't be anywhere near as fixated on that as the RIAA is on stamping out bootleg Madonna songs. Sites that knock off content that's already available for free are going to have a much harder time gaining an audience than sites offering content that costs money elsewhere.
Seth Finkelstein
· 3 years ago
"Why should people pay to read the Times's anointed pundits when there are as good (or at least nearly as good) pundits whose work is available for free?"
For the same reason they pay $$$ for WATER when there is as good (or at least nearly as good) stuff coming out of the kitchen faucet.
I'm not going to bother finding the links, but there's a lot of debunking of Anderson, to the extent that yeah, there's a shift, but it's more like 80/20 to 70/30 - matters if you're in the retail industry, but nowhere near as big a deal as it's being hyped.
Beware anyone who tells you "This new technology makes things all warm and fuzzy". It has a habit of not working out that way (things change, but not necessarily the way the hypester predicts).
Exhibit A: The DMCA.
Ned Ulbricht
· 3 years ago
As Anderson acknowledges, Instapundit, Daily Kos, Atrios, and other blogs at the top of the blogospheric totem pole link and quote one another promiscuously, with nary a word about copyright protection.
I seldom frequent the huge “shopping mall” blogs like Glenn Reynolds &c, so I'm not exactly sure just what “quote one another promiscuously” really means. But how is quoting an excerpt even from a New York Times editorial, for the purpose of commentary and criticism, anything other than a fair use? Why is copyright even entering the picture here?
Tim
· 3 years ago
Ned, most of that quoting probably is fair use, although in some cases a blogger will quote the entirety of another blogger's post, if the post is relatively short, which might be a grey area as far as copyright is concerned.
But my point is more about peoples' attitudes towards such quoting. The music industry and Hollywood will sue if a 2-second clip from one of their songs or movies appears in a mash-up. In contrast, bloggers tend to be happy to have even large selections of their works quoted by other bloggers. Whatever the legal status of those behaviors, the attitudes toward unauthorized copying are clearly different.
All Comments
I've posted an SSRN draft of a piece that tries to put this shift in the context of reputation incentives vs. monetary incentives. As I argue in the article, creativity fueled by reputation incentives has a long tradition and it is not necessarily anti-IP or anti-market. If you consider the enormous investments in advertising, for instance (and particularly in viral advertising as an effort to harness decentralized P2P-like distribution), you can see markets and big corporate players spending a good deal of money trying to get people to make copies of creative works.
Here's a link if you are interested:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract...
It's forthcoming in Boston University Law Review (Feb. 2007).
And as this hit dominated culture loses ground, it will start to lose money, and at a certain tipping point, that hit-dominated culture will become a money loser, and it will very quickly evaporate. But the process won't be pretty--I am sure we will see all kinds of legal challenges to distribution of long-tail content.
Interesting, also, that the paper above itself is available for free download.
Enigma, perhaps you can do the honors.
Greg: sounds like a fascinating paper, thanks for the link.
That's an excellent point, and one I can't really quarrel with. I was being sloppy when I said that people at the head would eschew copyright. Clearly what the top bloggers have been doing is dramatically relaxing their the terms on which they offer their content. But they're not abandoning copyright entirely, and they're unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.
But as a practical matter, I don't think that koswithoutadvertising.com would have much of an impact on Kos's bottom line. Kos's readers like Kos, and they're probably happy to help him out by looking at the version of his site with ads, assuming the ads aren't intrusive. And if the ads were intrusive, koswithoutadvertising.com would be the least of his worries. The far bigger worry would be all the traffic he'd be losing to Atrios and TPM.
So yes, Kos would probably miffed at the existence of koswithoutadvertising.com. But he wouldn't be anywhere near as fixated on that as the RIAA is on stamping out bootleg Madonna songs. Sites that knock off content that's already available for free are going to have a much harder time gaining an audience than sites offering content that costs money elsewhere.
For the same reason they pay $$$ for WATER when there is as good (or at least nearly as good) stuff coming out of the kitchen faucet.
I'm not going to bother finding the links, but there's a lot of debunking of Anderson, to the extent that yeah, there's a shift, but it's more like 80/20 to 70/30 - matters if you're in the retail industry, but nowhere near as big a deal as it's being hyped.
Beware anyone who tells you "This new technology makes things all warm and fuzzy". It has a habit of not working out that way (things change, but not necessarily the way the hypester predicts).
Exhibit A: The DMCA.
I seldom frequent the huge “shopping mall” blogs like Glenn Reynolds &c, so I'm not exactly sure just what “quote one another promiscuously” really means. But how is quoting an excerpt even from a New York Times editorial, for the purpose of commentary and criticism, anything other than a fair use? Why is copyright even entering the picture here?
But my point is more about peoples' attitudes towards such quoting. The music industry and Hollywood will sue if a 2-second clip from one of their songs or movies appears in a mash-up. In contrast, bloggers tend to be happy to have even large selections of their works quoted by other bloggers. Whatever the legal status of those behaviors, the attitudes toward unauthorized copying are clearly different.