Greed, Stupidity and Replication.

Medieval Printing Press - taken from http://www.renaissanceconnection.org/innovations_science.html - and replicated on your computer without permission.

I would like to pick up on the issues raised by Amanda, yesterday. We have raised these before on this blog and we will undoubtedly raise them again.

For most of the human experience one needed a bard to hear music or a story. Everything was created afresh because there was no way of replication. All this changed in the 15th Century with the invention of the printing press. The impact on human society was massive acceleration by orders of magnitude of any intellectual activity.

The Protestant reformation could not have happened without the replication of the bible. Science and art leapt forward. However, there were doormen. Replication required specialist skills, equipment and capital.

Fast forward to the 20th Century and we have new forms of replication for sound and vision. Some are transient, like the radio and television, but others are permanent, notably musical records. However, the same economic rules applied as for publishing. A lucrative industry grew up around the replication business.

Music is an interesting example because a massive industry grew up selling records. Note that they did not sell 'music' but replications of music and the major beneficiaries were suits rather than artists. Indeed, the music business damn near killed live music.

The first cloud on the suit's horizon came in the form of the cassette recorder. Anyone could make a replicate but it was a slow business and, in practice, easily controlled by the industry.

The digital world of the last two decades has changed everything. We thought of computers as symbolic logic processing machines when I started using them in the early 1970s. However, modern systems can just as easily be described as replication machines. They make replicates, quickly and cheaply. Replication is central to their very function. They can create infinite replications and distribute them anywhere.

The impact for the music industry has been devastating. How do you control the price of replicates when they can be produced in infinite numbers, free at the point of use, anywhere in the world? Well, you can't.

Lord Mandy of Rio, who actually runs Britain while Gordy sulks in his cage at No 10, has been persuaded by the industry to switch off the internet connections to those who download 'pirate' software. Well guess what? It turns out that the people who download 'pirate' software are the same people who are the customers who pay for music online. Duh! Well done the music industry!

All together guys, put the shotgun barrels in your mouth and pull the trigger. That'll show them that you are not to be trifled with.

None of this affects musicians all that much. The trend is to give away recorded music and then charge for live performances. Live music is back. It's the music industry that is in trouble.

The publishing industry has mostly adopted a firm policy of pretending nothing is happening, with the exception of some far sighted individuals like Jim Baen. This has worked up to a point because paperback books are cheap and convenient while reading fiction on an electronic machine has been an unpleasing experience. This is all set to change with the development of ebook readers.

The industry has no plan and no clue. Currently it is trying to pretend that an ebook is just a book in a different format. Hence, DRM, overpricing and the current skirmish between the suits at Amazon and Macmillan. That is a turf war between threatened clans over the last waterhole in a drought.

It is not clear how this is going to pan out. Ebook readers are still not as convenient as a paperback but they will only get better. There are still big differences between the publishing and music industry. For example, authors do not perform in the same way as musicians. However, one has to wonder how much of the infrastructure designed to convey a manuscript from an author to a buyer (the publisher, the distributor, the wholesaler, the bookshop) can survive when the consumer can click on a website and make a replicate on their computer that had a zero manufacturing cost?

Paying for internet news

Media Baron Rupert Murdoch’s News International has recently made a net loss of £2Billion. In response Mr Murdoch has announced that he is to charge for access to his news internet sites such as The Times, The Sun and the News of the World (and Sky News?).

The Guardian quotes him as follows:

"Quality journalism is not cheap," said Murdoch. "The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/rupert-murdoch-website-charges

This has raised eyebrows in the UK, partly because no one has ever successfully charged for the news and partly because of News International’s history.

This company changed the way newspapers were printed in London in the Battle of Wapping, the second great strike of the Thatcher era that sought the Unions brought to heel. Briefly, News International moved printing out of Fleet Street, where obsolete hot metal presses were wildly overmanned by ludicrously overpaid and underworked print workers, to Wapping (now Docklands,), where modern computer technology was employed. This opened the floodgates and within a few years all the major papers followed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute

Mr Murdoch had some interesting comments that are reported (in an edited version) here:

http://www.city-journal.org/article01.php?aid=1631

The paragraphs that I find interesting are:

“Today the pace of technological change is quickening, while the direction of change remains unpredictable. Technology is unpredictable partly because it depends upon the act of invention, and partly because even inventors cannot accurately imagine the place which their inventions will find in our lives. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, he imagined that voice recordings would be sent through the mail to replace written letters. The classic recent example is the fax machine. Many experts saw no place for it because they thought transmitting information by modem was more efficient. The funny thing is, they were right; modems are more efficient, but they are apparently not as effective, given the way we are organized right now. The history of invention is riddled with such tales.
The only thing we can be sure of is that, while technology adapts quickly, governments do not, which is why government policy is so dangerous in this field. Placing one’s faith in the thousands of voluntary decisions that together constitute a free market is not easy. One finds that faith only in highly developed societies, and even then it is a fragile late-season blossom, easily dashed by war or other crises. The decision to rely on market forces is the essence of modernization. Yet technological change often provokes atavistic, authoritarian responses. The real danger of the present technological revolution is that we may be panicked by future shock into regressive schemes of regulation.”

He was wrong about emails, fax was a very short lived technology, but is he right about the plan to charge for internet news content? Will anyone pay to read stories free elsewhere? Is News International riding the new technological wave into the future or are they responding with an “atavistic, authoritarian response”, to use his own words?