by Fred -

MTVM and the Battle of Participatory and Passive Media

After my first gee-whiz-I-love-nostalgia post, I had some further thoughts on MTV’s new music video archive site.

First, these kind of sites are are a bittersweet evolution, and in a sense, a compromise. While it is fantastic to see MTV pushing the music industry forward to a point where they’re offering content openly and gratis, the features of MTVM are simply not robust enough to sustain the long term health of our media environment.

MTV will still remain the gatekeeper of culture as they did as a television station — there’s no ability to upload your own videos to their network and the most interaction users have with the community is to add comments. There’s no ability to download the videos for remix (they’re also encumbered by Adobe flash) and the site seems to be generally lacking in the read-write attitude embraced by YouTube and other video platforms.

The web is a conversation, and with the success of sites like Seesmic, its clear that video can be as well.

The massive popular acceptance of sites like MTVM and Hulu, is compromising the natural interactive nature of the web for the sake of ease and passive consumerism. Where I like to think of the projects I’m involved in as breaking down the definition between consumer and producer, there’s a very real chance that popular culture will not want to put out the effort to create their own culture and simply continue to passively consume the work of others.

We’ve seen participatory lose out to passive before. When public access television was initially conceived and implemented, a lot of media scholars spoke to potential of the cheap and easy nature of video to bring down the gatekeepers of traditional media conglomerates.

Almost 30 years later, Public Access Television is pretty much a farm league for amateurs looking to get a start in the traditional television market. It is, not, as its early advocates predicted, a utopia of participatory culture that competes and challenges mainstream media.

Now, however, participatory media has achieved a significant lead on the web. YouTube has massively popular stars that created their own fame and content from their bedroom, and Wikipedia has reached an extraordinary level of cultural significance. Indeed, most of the big sites on the web are participatory — eBay, Craigslist, Google, or any blog platform. But we risk abdicating this leadership position by not challenging MTVM and NBC to open their network and content even further. In other words, keep the pressure on. Ask why the MTVM videos aren’t available for download, and then, why aren’t they Creative Commons licensed?

To some extent we’ve asked for this problem. Throughout the decade old debate over file sharing, a popular proposed solution to the lawsuits was for the content owners to simply offer free (or cheap) useful versions of the content fans were already sharing. They could compete with free and unauthorized (p2p) simply by offering easy and authorized. AmazonMP3, iTunes, and now Hulu all demonstrate that this solution works to some extent.

But I don’t think we can be satisfied with simply watching TV on the web, and we should do all that we can to keep the tables tilted in favor of participatory media rather than passive.

Second, can someone please make a “Be Your Own VJ” drag n’ drop playlist app with MTV’s API that will allow me to create an 1 hour of non-stop awesomeness? I’d love to have a little standalone page that just recreates the heyday of MTV minus the VJs. Basically, just MuxTape for videos. I’m going to start hacking a version of OpenTape to work with MTV’s API, but I’d love it if someone could beat me to the punch.

Third, does anyone think that the title “MTV Music” is ridiculously redundant? Music Television Music. Riiight.

by Fred -

Every Music Video Ever From MTV

Obviously Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” is the #1 viewed on MTV’s Music site:

Will this (obviously scientific) graph hold true for music videos?

song chart memes

Possibly, though I think there is probably more awesomeness here than standard TV. In some ways TV was not meant for short form video art with music in the background. Whether MTV continues to call itself Music Television should be up for debate, but I don’t think anyone is going to argue that the web isn’t suited for short-form video art with music in the background.

I think MTV may be cool again.

by Fred -

The RIAA Has Already Implemented Collective Licensing

The RIAA Logo.

Indulge with me in a thought experiment.

Suppose you download thousands of MP3s over filesharing networks, and then, one day, you get nailed with the threat of a lawsuit from the RIAA. The RIAA then asks you to pay a fee to settle it now, so that you don’t face huge infringement costs. You agree to do so, using your credit card, over the phone with an anonymous settlement representative (not actually a lawyer).

How is this that much different from collective licensing like ASCAP? The idea behind collective licensing for file sharing is to enable users to share files freely while paying a fee, similar to how radio stations and restaurants pay a fee to play whatever music they want. The details might get hideously complicated and I have serious reservations about adding more taxes to my ISP connection, but I do believe collective licensing is the only way out of the woods for those in the entertainment industry not interested in real sharing.

Anyway, what is the difference between how the RIAA is implementing their lawsuit campaign, and the way collective licenses might work for file sharing? You’re paying a ‘one-time’ fee to settle your debts to the recording industries for revenues they think you cost them while downloading and sharing files.

There are some differences. For one, the settlement fee the second time around is likely to be a lot higher and perhaps the RIAA won’t even offer you the right to settle the next time they contact you. You would probably end up in court facing massive statutory fines with no option of settlement. Second, the settlement fee is probably a lot higher than what the market would decide on. And finally, the settlement fee is being extracted by threat of impending lawsuit, not subscription obligation.

But the fundamentals of the transaction are very similar: users are already engaging in filesharing, the RIAA threatens with large fines if they don’t pay a fee, and then, when they do pay the fee, they’re off the hook for the time being.

The RIAA, knowingly or not, has effectively painted their way into a corner supporting collective licensing as the future of their business model. Whether or not the campaign is profitable is a matter of debate, but with fewer than 1% of RIAA victims choosing to fight the lawsuits, the math is in their favor: 30,000 lawsuits multiplied by a conservative $2,500 per settlement garners the RIAA at least $75,000,000 over the course of their anti-filesharing inquisition. While the payouts do not exactly make up for lost revenue from the death of their cash cow, and granted the settlements have been totally ineffective stopping file sharing, someone at the RIAA must have done the math and realized the settlements are now a full fledged revenue stream.

So while the RIAA may huff and puff and say the lawsuits are about punishing people for ‘making available’ (an specious legal argument to begin with) and exposing the rampant theft of our cultural heritage perpetrated by America’s youth, we should really see them for what they are: an adaptation by a business to secure a new source of revenue.

The pity it in all is that the RIAA is ruining lives by doing so. If they were to just embrace collective licensing as a legitimate form of revenue, there would be a lot less friction in the marketplace for music and filesharing.

*Note that this post doesn’t take into account the differences between collective licensing and voluntary collective licensing, and over simplifies the whole topic quite a bit, and for that, please accept my apologies.

by Fred -

Arts + Labs Astroturfing Content Filtering

by Scott Ogle

I came across a new ‘industry initiative’ called Arts + Labs to campaign for content filtering on the Free Culture discuss list and Wired Blog. While not traditional astroturf (the fraudulent masking of corporate agenda as a grassroots movement), because they admit that its funded by the telecoms, the campaign language and aesthetic insipidly borrows quite a lot from the Web 2.0, and free culture movements. Can you tell which of the following statements are from Arts + Labs and which are not:

The internet has become our community, our marketplace, our digital neighborhood. The internet connects us to our friends, to culture, to entertainment, to ideas, to the entire world. But the internet doesn’t just bring the world to us; it also brings each of us to the world.

OR

As creators and as consumers, each of us should be free to participate and prosper online.

Sorry, trick question — both sections are from Arts + Labs.

Anyway, what is more curious is that “The ArtLab” blogroll links to sites like TechCrunch, The Register, IP Democracy, Wired Threat Level, etc.

These are all blogs that have covered (and in some cases skewered) the efforts of telecom to filter the internet at the cost of network neutrality for the sake of appeasing big content. This is a brazen and sad attempt at blog diplomacy. It’s as if DailyKos added InstaPundit to their blogroll in some effort to be increase bipartisan communication on the blogs. While commendable on some level, does anyone really think that the shills who are writing the blog are going to even mention what GigaOM has to say about Network Neutrality?

I’m not saying someone paid by the telecoms can’t write blog posts linking to pro-network neutrality articles. That might even be a good thing. But what I am saying is that statements like this:

Arts+Labs is a coalition of Creative and Technology communities committed to a better, safer internet that works for both artists and consumers. At The ArtLab, we offer our information and ideas; our contribution to the conversation about the future of the internet.

come off as wholly disingenuous because Arts+Labs really represents the interests of a few corporations looking to end network neutrality. This is where the campaign is essentially astroturf and engaging in the kind of “fair and balanced” rhetoric that FOX News and Bill O’Reilly have pioneered. By putting links to blogs that sometimes carry critical (but not too critical — no links to Slashdot or BoingBoing, mind you) opinions of telecoms they’re trying give the false impression that they are interested in discussing things and engaging within a community.

They are not.

Viacom, NBC Universal, AT&T, Microsoft, Songwriters Guild of America, Cisco (don’t forget Cisco also makes and sells the routers to China that help block ‘dissidents’ from accessing western media) don’t want to talk about network neutrality with you. They want to end network neutrality.

They don’t want to think of you as the creators or the editors or the musicians. No, Viacom, NBC Universal, AT&T, Microsoft, Songwriters Guild of America, Cisco, think of you as the consumers. Why else would they have a page of “creativity” and only link to content friendly and corporately funded startups sites like NBC, MTV, and Comedy Central?

Why don’t they have Wikipedia, YouTube, or Flickr on there?

Its because those sites wouldn’t have existed in their view of the Internet. In Arts + Labs’ universe there is no amateur as creating professional media. There is no free culture, no free exchange of content, and no network neutrality. Their Internet is a Premium Content Destination® where we stayas consumers and they stay as the producers.

Notice, also, how in the above screen shot how they distinguish between “Creativity Online” and “Premium Sites.” This is a common tactic when arguing against network neutrality. Content company incumbents like to argue that abolishing network neutrality will encourage development of “premium” content channels on the Internet. That sounds good, right?

But what happens when Wikipedia gets classified as “premium” content and local ISPs, users, and most destructively, the Wikimedia Foundation, all have to start paying premium rates to reach their audience? That’s not so good. Wikipedia runs on a shoe string and would likely not be able to raise the exorbitant fees that big telecom would ravage them with. Who knows, maybe it would be time for Encarta to make a comeback. Surely, Microsoft has enough money to pay AT&T to push Wikipedia off the net.

So until Art + Labs adds Wikipedia (or some other actual source of creativity online) to their list of “Creativity Online” I’m classifying this campaign as 100% astroturf.

(photo of Astroturf by Scott Ogle under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution License)

by Fred -

Crowd Sourcing Crowd Sourcing (or self-referential Human Intelligence Tasks)

I’ve created a self-referential Human Intelligence Task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The task is to create more Human Intelligence Tasks that might be interesting or neat or funny. If I find any good ones, I’ll implement those.

I’m currently paying participants $.15 per idea, though I have no idea if this is a reasonable amount of money to compensate someone for coming up with the brilliant kind of ideas already on the site:

I’ve pleged $33 to this task, so that means I should have roughly 200 (minus some fees, etc.) ideas by the end of it. Go lazyweb!

by Fred -

Free Culture @ NYU Moves On

I started Free Culture @ NYU as an undergraduate during my senior year at NYU. I had actually wanted to start a similar club in high school. I was so engrossed in the 2600 DeCSS case at the time that I thought I needed a venue to discuss such things, and philosophy (my father’s focus as an academic) seemed like a decent front to talk about the 1st amendment and computer code. I actually ended up attending the 2600 appeals trial at the Southern District Court of New York, and getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:

I should have actually started Free Culture @ WHS, but things in the copyright activist world were just beginning, so starting the Philosophy Club had to do.

When I got to college, as an April fools prank in 2004, my Junior year, I made this poster:

The RIAA’s lawsuits against music fans had just began and the idea was to prank people into believing that they were coming to campus in order to offer immunity. Students could attend and ‘turn in’ any media with MP3s and receive immunity against copyright infringement suits. The conceit of the prank was that MP3s are not like physical objects, say guns, and even if you turn in a CD with MP3s on it, you could have just as easily made backups  beforehand. This was meant to demonstrate a) that the RIAA was stupid and didn’t understand this fact and b) that this problem was an intractable fact about digital media.

After staying up all night plastering the posters on every floor of my dorm at NYU my roommate and I crashed. The following day we didn’t hear or notice much, we asked our roommates what they thought about them and they told us what they thought — having not been in on the joke, their responses were quite colorful.

But a funny thing happened.

The following week, and the week after that I noticed people in my dorm’s court yard still talking. It had resonated to a point where it was actually a topic of conversation. I wasn’t sure if my peers had actually understood it as a prank or not, but one thing was clear, they were annoyed with the RIAA and thought the fake campaign was stupid.

At this point I realized that this subject was inherently political and that I should do what a lot of college students do at my age, and radicalize. I would start a club, a political club. I could do what people did on campuses in the 60s and 70s and protest and stuff.

Around that time I finished my copy of ‘Free Culture‘ by my future boss Lawrence Lessig and also read the NYTimes article about the Swarthmore students who had sued Diebold over a copyright battle, and who were also planning on starting a movement based on what they had learnt about the copyright world.

We’d name the movement after Lessig’s book — the free culture movement. We’d focus on liberating culture from the strongholds of a maximalist and litigious copyright regime designed only to protect corporate revenue and stifle innovative evolutions of culture.

Over the summer of 2004 I joined the newly launched and soon to be legendary fc-discuss list and got in contact with Nelson as well as many other budding activists. By the Fall of 2004 I was in contact with a friend of Nelson’s, Inga, who would be a freshman at NYU that Fall, and we decided to start Free Culture @ NYU. (Inga is now at Harvard Law school).

We protested DRM with Richard Stallman, ran Creative Commons art shows, screened public domain films, held conferences, invited speakers, organized film remix contests, got fired from our jobs for civil disobedience, organized panels with some of the best people in our community, and generally had a great time educating and building out the free culture community on campus and in downtown NYC.

Now, Free Culture @ NYU is no longer my project, and there are no original members left. But this is how it should be.

The club is now lead by Parker, John, Max, Aditi, Wesley, and Gabe. These are photos from their most recent OSA club fest tabling event:

They’re also having a club meeting on Monday at 8pm, so please visit the site and attend if you’re interested.

Reaching sustainability of a project through people you know, trust and like, is the really the ultimate goal of a project like this, and now that I’ve moved on from NYU, I couldn’t be happier leaving it in their very competent and energized hands.

Good luck guys!

by Fred -

Spore losing the DRM Fight


Spore, the long awaited evolved version of Sim City by game genius Will Wright has a DRM problem. As of this post, there are 14 “1 Star” reviews versus six 4 and 5 star reviews, by people who said that they won’t buy it (which admittedly isn’t quite the same as a review of the game itself) because it has DRM:

Thus Spore now has an average of 2-stars on Amazon. The game as gotten good but not excellent reviews, so this is surely of concern for the makers as people will probably take the Amazon rating seriously and might not buy.

Is this a concerted campaign to shame EA (Spore’s publisher/distributor) or a distributed disorganized consumer reaction against DRM itself? I tried Googling for “Spore DRM campaign” thinking I’d find a Defective By Design campaign about it, but couldn’t find anything.

The moment concentrated actions like protests lead to dis-organized collective action and rebellion en masse is very exciting. If these are actual consumers acting in concert but without prompting from a centrally organized campaign then it means that our efforts at establishing DRM as an anti-feature have been successful.

UPDATE: BoingBoing and Kotaku both linked here (thanks) and Spore now has 144 “1-star” reviews, but is #1 in games:

by Fred -

Cause Caller and Robocalls

Cause Caller

When I was developing my thesis project, Cause Caller, for my masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, I was routinely confronted with the idea of including a feature allowing ordinary citizens to have access to the auto-dialing capabilities that normally only telemarketers and political campaigns use.

In other words, should I have created the functionality where users can “robodial” politicians similar to how politicians harangue citizens? The technology is still trivial to implement — users could simply record one message and have it sent to every politician on a list automatically.

The Federal Trade Commission just passed a law “basically outlawing” similar telemarketing calls. But the  twist is that the law seems to specifically protect prerecorded political robocalls:

However for those who have called on the FTC to help eliminate the other phone scourge – political robocalls  – the new rule will not help.  Calls from political campaigns are considered protected speech an FTC representative said.

Somehow political robocalls are considered speech where business solicitations aren’t, and cannot be regulated by a trade commission. While this does give me better legal footing to launch such a feature, I’m still not thrilled about adding it.

Part of what makes Cause Caller fun (and effective, I think) is because citizens are obligated to verbalize their ideas to politician’s offices in their own voice, repeatedly. This has the effect of bringing them closer to the democratic process, because even if they are simply reading a script, they are interacting with another citizen about an issue they care about. By removing that human element I would effectively remove the core element that makes the exchange meaningful. Cause Caller would annoy politicians offices and that is about it.

by Fred -

Outsource Your Plagiarism with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

I saw “Amazing but True Cat Stories” on BoingBoing the other day and it inspired me to come up with some Amazon Mechanical Turk Human Intelligence Tasks. I’m looking into actually implementing some right now and will probably start running them soon, so I’ll write about them here when I have them up.

The Mechanical Turk is a web service run by Amazon that allows you to pay hundreds, if not thousands of people to perform menial tasks that computers are not capable of. It takes it name from the true Mechanical Turk, a hoax from the 18th century that could play (and beat) people at chess, when in fact the pieces were being ingeniously controlled by a midget. But I digress.

I’ve been investigating the HITs that are already on the site. I had looked through a lot a number of months ago, but they have only gotten better.

This one struck me* as interesting:

Rewrite 5 Sentences

Please re-write the below sentences 3 times each.

You should always start and end every meal with a flourish, and a delectable dessert is sure to make a splash. Now is the time to enjoy those tempting food baskets you have on hand, to sweeten up your dessert offerings. Try using the goodies from a gourmet gift basket.

A fruit tart with a tender, buttery crust is a perfect complement to imported chocolates from a chocolate gift basket. Whichever gift baskets you decide to use, your picnic will sure to be delicious.

A good rule of thumb is to start your meal with a bang and give it an impressive finish. A sumptuous gift basket dessert is just the finishing touch that your picnic needs. Gourmet gift baskets are filled with decadent goodies that you can pull out and use anytime.

Tasty treats like imported chocolate gift baskets and fruit baskets, with a flaky, buttery crust will satisfy the love of your life when you bring them for the dessert of your next picnic. Whatever the menu you ultimately decide on, your picnic will be the most delicious part of your day!

Otherwise, you can have fresh fruits, salted nuts and cheese after the meal. Nachos and crackers dipped in sweet sauce, likewise, complements your wine. Wine baskets or Fruit baskets tend to be the most impressionable!

Please upload .txt file when submitting.

The writer, by accepting this HIT agrees to extend an exclusive unlimited term license to the purchaser to use the original content developed. Once the article is accepted by the purchaser and paid for, the content written for this HIT may not be sold, traded or given away to any other individual or company, nor used for any other article writing assignment elsewhere. Moreover, the writer agrees that the purchaser has full rights to amend and modify the content at will and to use it wherever the purchaser deems fit.

At $3.50 this was the most expensive HIT on the site as of this writing. Why would anyone need such mundane cooking copy rewritten?

I’m certain its because someone is rewriting a cook book to resell commercially. But why is it just the text about a recipe and not the recipe itself? Recipes can not be copyrighted, so the actual ingredients and list of steps to make a dish can be freely copied.

Thessaly and I have discovered many, if not all of our favorite chef‘s recipes are available on line gratis from various spammy recipe sites. This is convenient when we’re cooking at friends or away from home and don’t have access to her cookbooks but know the recipe we want to cook.

The part of a recipe that isn’t copyable, however, is the text surrounding it or introducing it, or anything minimally creative about the recipe. This means that if Alice muses about how she came to discover the fact that grapefruit and avocado (can you tell I love this salad?) make a great combination when paired with a white wine vinaigrette and curly endive, you can’t copy that part.

It’s pretty clear that this HIT is designed to route around this “feature” of copyright law by hiring a massive horde of re-writers to do the dirty and boring work of plagiarism. I tried Googling some of the original phrases supplied by the HIT’s creator but nothing came up. Let me know if you recognize any — I’d be curious to discover the source material.

So just remember, the next time you want to blatantly plagiarize a book (or a college essay if you’re so inclined) you can hire hundreds of anonymous web users to do it for you.

*UPDATE: Monday AM my example HIT no long seems active. I’m going to search a bit more for similar ones and try to get a screen shot but I’m sure more will crop up soon.

by Fred -

Pseudo YouTube

Pseudo Logo

I was Googling around the other day looking for some vintage Silicon Alley article and came across a wonderful Wired article about Pseudo.com. Pseudo blew through millions of VC funds at the end of the 20th century on lavish SoHo parties, technology, and all kinds of behavior that no self-respecting startup kid would attempt in 2008. There are some uncanny things coming out of the mouths of this older startup set:

“When TV first came out, it had an impact like a social atomic bomb,” [Josh Harris] says. “But the mode of intimacy that I’m presenting, which we’ll experience via the Net, is going to be bigger.”

What’s so heartbreaking about it all is that Harris was right, really. Just at the wrong time. Broadband saturation wasn’t anywhere near where it needed to be. No one had Flash (or any other capable video codec) installed on their browser, and no one really understood the notion of viral media. People sent links and an occasionally MP3. I had a collection of .wmv files that I’d DCC to friends over IRC, but that was basically as far as it got.

Harris is convinced that when broadband Net access becomes ubiquitous, millions of consumers will end up doing exactly what he’s about to do. “Of course they’re going to be watching each other,” he says. “It’s inevitable. Everything I’m doing will be considered commonplace, just 10 years from now. It’ll be no more unusual than listening to a stereo or watching TV.”

What Harris really had wrong, however, was the death of privacy, which is a generational fight which will take much longer to settle. I’m still generally unconvinced that humans can live totally publicly, though things like Twitter, Facebook, and Google in general are contributing to an erosion towards attitudes about privacy erosion that we have very little control over. Harris is obviously an exhibitionist who understood the power of the ‘net, and perhaps predicted phenoms like Tila Tequila and Justin.tv, but couldn’t speak for all of us.

According to Jayson Blair (?!) Pseudo liquidated their assets in 2001 after the bust and their inability to find more cash.

But where are they now?

Josh Harris’ name is virtually ungoogleable, and Wikipedia doesn’t offer any help.

His girlfriend at-the-time, Tanya Corrin, however, wrote about her experience in the New York Observer:

Josh liked to tease me that he’d be the most popular. Getting press is one of the things Josh does best. Since living in public was his idea, he positioned himself as the “visionary” and me as “the hot girlfriend.” I would have preferred to be presented as more of a partner. But it was Josh’s project and money, and he was starting to freak out about the latter, so I let it go.

But what about the artist, Nico Haupt? He seems to be running with a 9/11 conspiracy crew and selling a shirt that simply says “TV Fakery” here, as part of his Haupt Couture brand.