“As yet, we’ve seen nothing that fulfils the consumer demand of sharing music, for which most of the public would apparently part with a fair bit of cash. So this is software or a service announced in response to a Government edict.”
Stories
A Copyright Summit diary
Anecdotes about treating Korean internet addicts, Charlie Nesson, and the Comic Book Store Guy. The strong ‘negative’ rating suggests at least one of these touched a nerve. Dr Yong-Kyung Lee, head of Korea Telecom and a policy advisor to the Korean government, amazed delegates with his descriptions of high tech Korea. Lee was a Bell … Read more
‘Thousands’ sign up for legal P2P
Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form. It’s Choruss, the incubator hatched by Jim Griffin – a long-time advocate of licensing P2P sharing on networks.
Choruss won’t ultimately be in the retail or service business, Griffin told us in Washington DC today – but it may provide an “umbrella” for managed service companies such as Playlouder MSP, the technology partner for the suspended Virgin Unlimited music service. “We’re not in the business of distribution,” he said. Griffin was also on a panel at the biennial World Copyright Summit, organised by CISAC, the global organisation for collective rights management societies.
Griffin says this year’s phase of Choruss is designed to experiment with pricing. Different colleges will get different pricing schemes.
“The plan is to use next school year to run tests and experiments,” he said. Only after the scheme has been running will an assessment be possible – but Griffin told Summit delegates that, “We’ve had students tell us it’s worth $20 a month – to share what they want to share.”
The fact that such large numbers have volunteered to pay for a P2P service defies the conventional music industry wisdom that the only way to compete with the pirates is with free offerings. It also shows how much Choruss has evolved since it first broke the surface last April, when talk was of opting students in automatically, in return for a “coventant not to sue”.
Obama administration joins Google
Steve Jobs may have engineered the most audacious reverse-takeover in tech history when Apple “acquired” NeXT in 1996. Within a year, Jobs and his NeXT colleagues had purged Apple executives from all the key positions (although the chief accountant remained – which may tell you something about chief accountants). But that’s small beer compared to … Read more
Google’s doing to Twitterbook what it’s doing to copyright
Google has two prongs to its long-term strategy, but Wave, the “digital dashboard” it unveiled last week, casts light on a third. One strategy is to drive down the value of copyright material on the internet to zero. Google has a ruthless and calculating view of the real value of stuff. It reasons that if … Read more
Rescuing Nokia’s Ovi: a plan
It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong.
Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it finally launched its own worldwide, all-phones application store. It correctly anticipated a software market for smartphones back in the mid-1990s, when it was choosing the technology to fulfill this vision.
That was just one of the bets that came good. Leafing through old copies of WiReD magazine from the dot.com era, filled with gushing praise for Enron, Global Crossing, and er, Zippies, I was struck by the quality of the foresight in a cover feature about Nokia. (Have a look for yourself.) WAP didn’t work out, but I was struck by particularly Leningrad Cowboy Mato Valtonen’s assessment that “mobile is the Internet with billing built in”.
“The managers responsible for putting together the Ovi Store should be put on Nokia’s naughty step – and left there for the Finnish winter”
And so Nokia has been encouraging users to download applications for users. My ancient 6310i wants me to download applications. Every Nokia since has wanted me to, too. Seven years ago, the first Series 60 phone (the 7650) put the Apps client on the top level menu, next to Contacts and Messaging.
The problem is today, it’s Apple and BlackBerry who have the thriving third party smartphone software markets. For six months, punters have been bombarded with iPhone ads showing what you can do with third-party apps. And yes, it’s like Palm all over again, but they’re very effective. So if Apple’s store is the model, then what on earth is Ovi?
Breaking Bad: the joy of chemistry
Here’s a show with the perfect profile to be a huge cult British hit – black humour, suspense, all the stuff we love. But what’s puzzling is how the British public broadcasters dropped the ball by failing to notice the show – particularly the BBC. …Read more at The Register
Elbonia: Your next (and only) music destination?
Suppose the “one stop shop” happened to be located in Elbonia – where the economy is primarily mud-based – and you could obtain a pan-European license for music (all the rights in the EU) priced in the nominal Elbonian currency of the grubnick. Suppose the Elbonian performing rights society decided to price this very low … Read more
BBC’s science: ‘Evangelical, shallow and sparse’
The BBC’s environmental coverage has come under fire from a former science correspondent. Award-winning author and journalist David Whitehouse says the corporation risks public ridicule – or worse – with what he calls “an evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.”
Whitehouse relates how he was ticked off for taking a cautious approach to apocalyptic predictions when a link between BSE in cattle (“Mad Cow Disease”) and vCJD in humans was accepted by government officials in 1996. Those predictions “…rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data,” he writes.
“My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly.”
The Beeb wasn’t alone. With bloodthirsty glee, the Observer newspaper at the time predicted millions infected, crematoria full of smoking human remains – and the government handing out suicide pills to the public. Whitehouse feels his caution is now vindicated. The number of cases traced to vCJD in the UK is now 163 – and the only suicides were farmers who had feared their livelihoods destroyed.
Writes Whitehouse:
“Reporting the consensus about climate change…is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn’t believe them anymore.”
Radio whinge(r)s
Ed Richards cocked a sympathetic ear to the troubles of the commercial radio business yesterday – but the Ofcom chief could offer little in the way of instant pain relief.
With an end-of-life government meandering to its termination, and Carter’s Digital Britain review soaking up all the attention of bickering departments, he can’t set policy.
Largely as a result of their own greed, financial miscalculations and lack of innovation, large radio companies are suffering. They want to slash costs and merge. Richards, who was addressing the “Radio 3.0” conference in London, listed his preferred solutions. One was to put more emphasis on news and local radio as a community information service. (You could almost hear teeth grind at that one). This was especially useful “during flooding or heavy snow” or other times of crisis. (The grinding continued).