HOW SOON WE FORGET

There is an oft-stated assumption that print media, especially books, are more accurate than what appears on the web. In fact you'll often hear it said that any information from the web is automatically suspect.

There's a sense in which that's true. But what the people making those statements forget is that information that appears in books is -- or should be -- suspect as well.

When I was a newspaperman (to resurrect an obsolete term) I was frequently amazed, and usually, appalled at how uncritically people accepted something as true simply because it had been committed to print.

Ah, but that's newspapers, the critics protest. Books are inherently much more accurate because they are written by experts and pass through an editing process.

To paraphrase Mr. Bumble: If the critic believes that, then the critic, sir, is an ass.

I've written books as well and I've seen first-hand how that 'editing process' works. Mostly it doesn't.

There is also the incontrovertible fact that there are a mountain of horribly inaccurate books out there. Some are wrong for political reasons, some are wrong because the information is outdated and some are wrong because they are simply, flat wrong and the writer's didn't know what they were talking about.

Case in point: I was just boxing up some of my library to give to Goodwill when I ran across a shining example I had picked up a few years ago in a fit of optimism. The title was "A Manual of Foreign Dialects For Radio, Stage And Screen", copyright 1943. Since I write fiction I'm always interested in improving my dialogue. And I figured this could help.

Boy, was I wrong!

It is painfully obvious the authors, a husband-and-wife team of dialect coaches, had tin ears and were massively ignorant to boot. While there's some good information in the prefatory parts of the book and they manage, after a fashion, some of the more common (in 1943) dialects, their advice on how to speak with, say, a Japanese accent is utterly ludicrous.

The example isn't chosen at random. I have visited Japan in much more than the usual tourist role, learned to speak Japanese at a kindergarten level and studied Japanese culture in something more than a haphazard fashion for a number of years. I am by no means an expert, but I have listened to a lot of Japanese and tried to reproduce faithfully what I heard.

The authors have no idea what a Japanese accent sounds like and their attempts to guide actors to reproduce it is absurd. Their 'explanations' are even more ridiculous. For example they claim kana (a phonetic syllabary used to write Japanese words) is a separate language.

They claim the Japanese don't like to pronounce two consonants together. It's not a matter of like. The Japanese syllabaries have only one naked consonant, "n". All the other "letters" are consonant-vowel combinations, or worse. Japanese are conditioned to add vowels after consonants, both in loan words (like basubaru -- baseball) and in speaking other languages like English.

Similarly they repeat the sterotype of Japanese hissing when they start to speak. In all the time I have dealt with Japanese, listened to Japanese, watched Japanese movies and television shows to help learn the language, etc., etc., etc. I have never, ever heard a Japanese hiss in this fashion.

Since I also spent some time in Ireland, I checked the section on Irish dialect as well. It is better, but much of it is not-very-good examples a form called "stage Irish" which the Irish abhor. Stage Irish is a phony Irish dialect that actors, mostly English and American, cooked up to 'sound Irish.' It is not at all the way the Irish speak naturally. (Hint: If you hear someone say "faith and begorra", whack him over the head with your shillelagh.)

In short, the book is a wildly inaccurate farrago of nonsense. Yet it was put into print and issued by a reputable publisher. And unlike a similar production on the web -- were one unwise enough to attempt it -- it can't be corrected by counter-postings from the more knowledgeable people. Instead it sits there like some strange insect preserved for the ages in amber.

The real point is that you can't automatically trust anything because it appears on the web or in print. Critical thinking is a vitally important skill and has been practically since the invention of literacy. The difference is that the web not only further highlights the need, it makes it much easier to cross check the information

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY STUPID

Personally I think "intellectual property" is surrounded by its very own stupid field.

It seems like every time the subject of copyrights, patents, or trademarks emerges, someone, usually a big corporation, gets enmeshed in the stupidity field and does something really, really dumb.

But now comes the defense industry with what has to be the all time low in stupefying copyright/trademark incompetence. The really bad thing is it isn't something new. It's been going on for years.

Big defense contractors are demanding -- and getting -- licensing fees from model airplane companies for making models of military aircraft!

This is so breathlessly dumb on so many levels words (very nearly) fail me.

Legal idiocy aside, this is a classic case of giving yourself a pedicure with a tommy gun, both practically and from a PR standpoint.

Now let's see... Who designs these aircraft and other vehicles for our oligarchy of bloated, inefficient defense contractors? Why engineers, of course. And where do we get engineers? From engineering schools. And who enrolls in those engineering schools? Why young men and women who have a desire to design and build things? And where did they get this desire? From building things in their youth, like, oh, I dunno, Model Freaking Airplanes!

Wanna bet that the French, the Chinese and the Indians aren't doing everything they can to aim their kids toward engineering by encouraging them to do things like build model airplanes. And what are our defense contractors doing? Right. They're demanding money so people can produce model kits that kids can build.

But of course that doesn't matter. In a few years we'll outsource all that design work to places like India and China anyway, and we'll buy more of our aircraft from the French. So who cares whether our kids get interested in the grubby details of engineering? Meanwhile, full speed ahead and soak those little so-and-sos for all we can get. Teach them what American capitalism is really about, by God!
Engineers? We don't need no steenking engineers. We got lawyers!

Nor are the amounts of money insignificant be it noted. The licensing fee amounts to up to 8 percent of the cost of an $8 plastic model. You have to be familiar with the hobby business to realize how big a bite that represents out of everyone's razor-thin margins.

The second little detail is this business is a PR disaster in the making for an industry that needs all the good, or at least neutral, PR it can get. At a time when the cost of our high tech toys has doubled from the confident estimates of contractors and the DOD a few years ago (The F-35 has gone from $30 million to $60 million, or more) the last thing the contractors need is to be seen as a bunch of penny-pinching money-grubbing SOBs.

Siphoning money out of children's pockets does wonders for that image.

While the amount of money might be a big concern for the model airplane companies, most of whom are tiny by defense standards, it isn't even pocket change for LockMart and the other hybrids that charge us stupidly large amounts of money for their products. In fact the few thousand dollars a year they collect on each of these deals probably doesn't even cover the costs of the legal thuggery involved.

And people are starting to catch on. There's a bill in Congress to end this nonsense and I'd love to see the defense bozos trying to defend their stand. Should be more fun than watching cigarette execs swear under oath that nicotine is not addicting.

Ironically the defense leeches are getting support from their minions (in the original sense of the term) in the Defense Department. As another story on this massive case of institutional dumbth notes:

The Pentagon, however, “strongly opposes” Andrews’ provision, devoting an entire page to the issue in its latest authorization appeals package. Such appeals are typically reserved for last-ditch efforts to save big DOD programs from funding cuts.

DOD “can envision no valid reason why a trademark owner should ever be compelled to allow another entity to use that intellectual property, even for reasonable license fees,” the appeal says.

Obviously someone at the Pentagon needs to get his or her eyeglasses cleaned -- or to get a new guide dog.

Or alternatively they can just spend a minute looking at how much it costs the Air Force to recruit someone to work on the real thing. If the clowns in the Defense Department had a lick of sense -- and could manage to get their noses out of the defense contractors' back pockets -- they'd not only prohibit licensing fees, they'd subsidize the model companies for helping them get recruits.

However this particular piece of military yahooism serves as an adequate introduction to the legalities of this tissue of nonsense.

First, of course, those military designs were developed with taxpayer money -- potloads of it. The designations, such as F-22 Raptor, were assigned by the government. Where do these vultures in pinstripes get off demanding money so kids can built toy replicas of American military designs?

I doubt seriously the basic shapes and external details of any aircraft, military or commercial, even be copyrighted, under the functionality provisions of the copyright law. Granted these guys are claiming trademark, not copyright, but I think that's even shakier for much the same reasons. But who's got the money to fight an arcane trademark case in court against the contractors and their law firm of Rich, Greedy & Powerful? They're sucking in so much money from the public trough they can bury just about anyone.

And even if by some miracle the outline of something like the F-22 can be copyrighted, or trademarked, what moron decided that the design should be owned by the company that built the thing with government money?

But enough. This is an utterly silly, massively stupid and finally pointless exercise. It simply demonstrates once more -- if there is some cave-dwelling Kallikak out there who still needs a demonstration -- how completely our intellectual property laws are broken.

(Whew) Thank you. I feel much better now.

COMMENT WOULD BE SUPERFLOUS

"There are some things it is impossible to parody. Today's parody is tomorrow's design document"
The collected sayings of Wiz Zumwalt

In his blog, Jeff Gomez is loudly proclaiming that print is dead. He adduces some interesting if not necessarily completely convincing arguments. For further enlightenment, Jeff suggests consulting the full form of his argument -- in a printed book called "Print is Dead."

Meanwhile, one of my favorite editors, Esther Schlinder describes her attempts to get press credentials to the Blog World conference and expo, which is devoted to blogging, Web 2.0 and other harbingers of the future. Before handing out credentials, the staff wants to see articles she has written on the subject. And it wants them faxed! Neat trick since almost all of the writing on the subject, Esther's included, appears online with no paper copies whatsoever.

And finally, the Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, has prepared a very good tutorial on its troubled SMI-S storage management standard. The tutorial -- all 116 pages of it in tiny little type -- is available as a pdf on SNIA's website. With printing blocked so you can't print out a copy to actually read.

Copyright redux

I really didn't intend for this to be a blog about copyrights, but it seems like every day brings new news highlighting the intellectual poverty of the old media in this area.

From Radiohead's new album to the latest RIAA silliness, to some other stuff, there's a lot of copyright news I intend to comment on.

It's not all about copyright. A fascinating essay of the wisdom of crowds and how it applies to everything from evolution to wikis (not my essay, but I intend to comment on it). More on community building, the crossovers between MMPORGs and network television, virtualizing reality versus really virtualized reality, and, of course, virtual trade shows.

As soon as things get sorted out, watch this space.

IRREGULAR SCHEDULE

THE IPHONE, COOK'S LAW AND WRONG BUSINESS MODELS

Over at TechCrunch Erick Schonfeld has a post on Apple's iPhone as an example of a company choosing the wrong business model.

In the world of high technology, plagiarism is called "using a proven business model." And it is. Every business has a model and nearly of them get at least most of their model from someone else. Which means nearly every company is building on pre-existing success. Or, sometimes failure.

Choosing an inappropriate business model can be anything from limiting to deadly, especially when a company introduces significant new technology. That means it's important to choose the right model.

Fortunately there's a simple rule to help decide when a business model is right. How closely does the model conform to Cook's Law?

Cook's Law, immodestly named after yours truly, is simply this:

Anything that doesn't add value to the person paying for it is not only dispensablle, it will be dispensed with

Someone, usually the consumer, pays for any good or service. Any feature or cost that does not add value for the consumer is surplus and will probably be eliminated.

Apple demonstrated Cook's Law brilliantly with the iPod and then violated it egregiously with the iPhone.

Pre iPod the music business consisted of selling albums at high prices. If customers wanted their own copy of the music, they either had to tape it off the radio, download a pirate MP3 or pay lot of money for a collection of songs, most of which they probably weren't interested in.

The price of albums is high because music travels through an unusually convoluted supply chain from the artist to the customer. The actual cost of production of a CD is typically only a few cents. But in addition to the artist, there are a host of others who must be paid, including the record company, the promoters, the wholesalers, the sales reps and the music stores.

Now, how much of that actually benefits the person buying the music? Well, the artist, obviously, and the cost of recording the music in purchasable form, but that's basically it. Everything else in that cost chain benefits someone other than the customer. Hence, under Cook's Law, everything else is dispensable - and going to be dispensed with as soon as someone finds a way.

The iPod represented a way. With an iPod customers could download only the songs they were interested in and pay less than a dollar each for them. Not surprisingly customers have swarmed to iPods, to the detriment of the traditional music supply chain. Suddenly a second-rank computer company found itself a giant in the music business.

Apple could have followed the conventional business model in the music industry, selling complete albums through kiosks in music stores for about the same price as CD albums. In fact there had been a couple of attempts to do just that with MP3s before the iPod. But that was the wrong way to do things and the companies sank without a trace.

So Apple comes out of the iPod looking like a genius, tries to repeat its success with the iPhone - and falls flat on its face.

As Schonfeld points out, Apple chose to model its iPhone on the cell phone business. Now cell phones have a lot in common with the traditional music industry. It is a complex business model with a lot of features that add no value whatsoever to the customer. In fact a lot of those 'features' benefit no one but the cell phone company.

Specifically what Apple chose to do was to lock in its US customers with ATT as the service provider. If you want to use an iPhone you not only have to purchase the device, you have to sign a service contract with ATT.

In fact the situation was worse with the iPhone than it was with conventional cell phones. I happen to use Cingular (ATT) for my phone service, but I was given the first phone on my account for free and only had to pay a nominal up-front cost for the other phones on my plan. The monthly fee per phone number is low enough that we switched our house phone over to my wife's cell phone. All in all, I'm not dissatisfied with the arrangement.

I say 'not too dissatisfied' because there are some things I don't like about cell phone service. You're locked into the provider and most additional services and features have to come from the provider. If there was open competition and the ability to change freely among providers, the price of service would be a lot less. Further, if I decide to change providers, I'm strongly discouraged from taking my phone with me

An iPhone has all these disadvantages and more. With an iPhone you have to pay several hundred dollars up front and you're locked in to one provider. This may be highly profitable for Apple and ATT, but it violates Cook's Law by providing nothing to the consumer. So it's hardly surprising that buyers started looking for ways around this lock-in.

Hackers being hackers, it wasn't long before a number of people had figured out how to unlock the iPhone and the hacks started appearing on the web.

Rather than recognize the mistake in its model, Apple is fighting back by making changes in the software which will deactivate cracked phones. That will work until the hackers produce the next round of cracks and the futile, expensive and ultimately pointless arms race is on.

This is a race that Apple can't win. More to the point it's a race that Apple shouldn't want to win. The only thing this accomplishes in the long term is to annoy its customers and to drive them to alternatives as the alternatives appear.

And they will appear, if the iPhone is the great idea Apple thinks it is. Heck, even the Newton, Apple's last attempt at a small-form computing device attracted competitors, and it was no great shakes in the market.

The cell phone industry took its business model from the landline phone industry, which traces its business model back to the days of the Bell monopoly. The cell phone industry is vulnerable as well and it is slowly changing.

What Apple has in the iPhone is a combination computer-phone. It would have done much better to model its iPhone business on the computer part of the combination. As Schonfeld points out:

"You don't ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?"

Why indeed?

And the iPhone device that ultimately succeeds - whether from Apple or anyone else - won't be any different. It will be sold like a computer, with all the freedom and customization you get with a computer.

WHACK THE GOPHER IV: THE FINAL CHAPTER

Except it isn't of course. The response I've gotten to these posts suggests we're going to be revisiting the issues as developments warrant. So let's just say it's the final chapter for now.

So, after parts I, II, and III of this series, the logical question is "what can we do about it?"

There is a lot we can do, but none of it is aimed at stopping people from posting copyrighted fiction on free sites. That ain't gonna happen, no matter how much the dinosaurs bellow in the swamps.

However that is a long, long way from saying copyrights are useless and authors can't expect to get paid for their work. Copyrights are not useless and authors can not only expect to get paid, most of the smart ones can expect to make more money in this brave new world than in the old.

The bad news is that genre fiction is going to be available for free on the internet. There is simply no way to stop it. SFWA can file all the DMCA takedown notices it wants. Individual authors can sue if they want. Crazed Luddite SFWA vice-presidents can rant about "netscabs" (on other people's pages because they're too technophobic to have one of their own). And none of it matters. People will continue to post copyrighted works for free. For every one you can shut down there will be two, or ten or 20 more.

The technology has simply moved beyond the kind of control publishers had a hundred years ago. Live with it.

(There is also going to be a sea change in the way genre fiction, especially science fiction and erotica, are going to be distributed in this country. This will probably mean the death of a lot of major publishers, and the transformation of the book store into something nearly unrecognizable. There are a lot of complex reasons for this and it really deserves a post of its own.)

The good news about all this is there is going to be a lot more genre fiction available to readers at a lot lower prices and as a class the authors are going to be a lot better compensated.

One way or another, most genre fiction is going to be sold over the internet. You'll either buy it directly on your own computer, or you'll get it in electronic or print form from something like a print on demand kiosk. You may even download and print books on your home system. That's not as big a job as you might think. To see what I mean DAGS "Blue Squirrel".

The Real Solution To Piracy

But while you can't stop free distribution you can stop is piracy for profit. Whether it's designer knock-offs, DVD movies or online fiction, if someone is paying for it, it's a lot easier to control.

"Stop" is a misnomer. You can't really stop piracy. But you can crack down on it hard enough to keep it down to an acceptable level.

The reason is that there's a money trail. If you can't locate the pirate through the work posted, you can locate them by following the money. That's why outfits like the RIAA have been a lot more successful at shutting down the commercial pirates than the file sharers.

The legitimate publisher has some advantages as well. One of the big ones is convenience. Why go to the trouble of searching out a pirate site, when you can go to someplace like Amazon and get everything you want in one place?

Today the incentive is money. Novels are expensive. When books are instantly available for, say, a dollar each, it becomes much less of incentive. In fact for most people it drops below the action threshold.

And yes, we can make novels available for a dollar or so each without significantly cutting into the author's royalties. In fact the late G. Harry Stine and I were in the process of forming just such an online publishing venture several years ago when Harry's untimely death ended the project. Our rather extensive calculations indicated that not only would the authors make as much money as they do now, but the profits to the publisher would be quite nice as well. Most of the cost of a book today is eaten up in an unwieldy system of production and distribution - but that's a subject for another post.

One of the reasons is that as cost goes down, sales go up. I firmly believe that low-cost books will sell enough to swamp the effects of pirate postings - which, as we saw in a previous post in this series, probably aren't resulting in that many lost sales anyway.

So, low price means high sales and less piracy. We've seen this happen before, specifically in the software industry. Back in the early 1980s Borland stood the software business on its head with Turbo Pascal, a full implementation of the Pascal programming language, complete with a nice little Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the amazing price of $35. That was perhaps a tenth of what competing versions of Pascal were selling for and Borland sold a ton of copies.

What was interesting about this was that unlike most of its high-priced rivals, Turbo Pascal wasn't copy protected. Borland made no attempt to stop anyone from copying the disks. Phillipe Kahn, Borland's saxophone-playing president, figured that by keeping the price so low - for the time anyway - he removed most of the incentive to steal Turbo Pascal.

It's worth noting that except for games, most software companies have followed Kahn's lead. Software copy protection as a field isn't dead, but it is generally moribund.

Okay, that's not the whole story. And the way it isn't the whole story is interesting in itself. Kahn did one other thing with Turbo Pascal: He provided a neatly printed manual, which was (misnomer alert) perfect bound (/misnomer alert) like a paperback book. That meant that if you opened it flat to copy it, the spine cracked and the pages fell out. What Kahn did (and having met the guy I'm sure he did it deliberately) was to provide a way to add value to a legitimate purchase that the pirates couldn't match.

Changes in the product

But what about fiction? It doesn't need a manual, after all.

No it doesn't, but that's the other part of the change we're facing. The nature of what authors sell is going to change as well. Increasingly, it won't be just a book or a story, it will be membership in a community.

Successful works of genre fiction tend to build communities naturally. You can see the proof walking the halls of any science fiction convention. Savvy authors are going to use new media tools to capitalize on this to build not just sales, but a loyal following and to provide other products as well.

To see a very early example of this, stop by Baen Publishing's web site and pay special attention to the "1632" universe in all its ramifications. 1632 was originally the brainchild of Eric Flint, who also manages the Baen Free Library. It is the story of a West Virginia coal mining town suddenly plunked down in Germany at the height of the 30 Years War. It is alternate history at its finest and most fun and the original novel has been followed up by a sprawling collection of novels and short story collections. It has also spawned a very active fan base, many of which hang out at the Baen web site, especially in the forum called "Baen's Bar."

The development is still nascent, but with a little imagination it's easy to see how something like the 1632 phenomenon could provide even more value to the readers - value that a lot them would be willing to pay for.

Changes in the authors

The other thing this encourages is a completely different approach to writing genre fiction. While there will undoubtedly be authors who will continue to do things the way we do them now, the ones who will be most successful will be the ones who embrace the notion of community-building around their fiction.

In a sense this is a throwback to the 19th Century when popular authors like Twain and Dickens made more of their money on lecture tours than they did from the sales of their books. However the effect will be enhanced, amplified and zoomed up by the use of everything from web sites and blogs to YouTube videos and MySpace pages.

The author becomes the focus of community and the only thing the free posters will do is build that community further.

The world will be different, the demands on the authors will be different, but in many ways, both socially and financially, it will be a much more rewarding world for those who are willing to adapt.