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Once Again, Using Industry’s Own Methodology Shows That Copyright Exceptions Contribute More To The Economy Than Copyright

The Copyright Industry absolutely loves to trot out its "numbers" about how much copyright contributes to the economy in terms of both dollars and jobs. The problem, as we've discussed, is that these studies have a counting problem. They simply list out every industry for which you can get copyright, then sum up all the revenue... and pretend that all of that revenue is because of copyright. This is, frankly, ridiculous and stupid. And yet, because Congress and reporters don't bother researching this, they take the numbers at face value. What pisses me off about things like this is that it automatically counts my own revenue as being in support of copyright laws today, when I'm obviously anything but that. Even worse, the industry uses this argument to claim that they need more and stricter copyright laws, as if there's any causal relationship between that and the revenue in those industries.

For a few years now, CCIA has countered these claims from the copyright industry with its own study, using the exact same methodology, but counting up how much "exceptions to copyright" contribute to the economy, and showing that it's actually much larger than copyright. It's not hard to figure out that they're doing this to point out just how ridiculous the numbers from the copyright industry are. What's really funny is when totally clueless copyright maximalists, such as the folks at The Copyright Alliance, attack the methodology of the CCIA fair use/exceptions report, not realizing that they're attacking their own methodology at the same time. Amazingly, after having been called out on this, the Copyright Alliance still tosses out its own version of the study with the methodology that its own "founder" debunked when it was in a different report. In fact, despite the fact that we totally mocked the Copyright Alliance for this last year... this year they're right back at it mocking the CCIA's methodology. And, it looks like the MPAA has joined them in whining about the methodology. Apparently both groups are so clueless they don't even realize they're mocking their own methodology.

To drive this point home, the MPAA complains that the CCIA's report includes the movie industry as part of its "fair use industries." Indeed. But the studies that MPAA uses includes the exact same methodology, and includes companies like my own as a "copyright industry." The whole point -- which the MPAA and Copyright Alliance are apparently too clueless to recognize -- is that both methodologies are totally bogus and significantly overcount, but why is it that the MPAA gets to continue using its totally bogus study results, while slamming CCIA for using the identical methodology? It would be funny, if politicians didn't repeatedly fall for this crap.

Thankfully, not all of them do. When CCIA released its latest version of this copyright exceptions report showing, yet again, just how much exceptions to copyright law contribute to the economy and jobs using the exact same methodology as the famed "copyright" report. And, once again, if we use this methodology, copyright exceptions contribute more to the economy. The numbers are also growing really rapidly. So, based on the Copyright Industry's own logic... shouldn't we be adding more exceptions to copyright law?

The other good news is that Rep. Jared Polis showed up at the event where CCIA released the report and noted how it was important, and spoke out against PROTECT IP. We keep hearing from supporters of the law that only Rep. Lofgren and Senator Wyden are worried about PROTECT IP, but we're learning that a growing number of our elected representatives are, indeed, concerned about the law.

Honestly, I think that any time the Copyright Industry tosses out its numbers, it should be required that people point out CCIA's numbers as well. If you see anyone repeating the Copyright Industry's claims about how much copyright "contributes to the economy," demand that the same politicians and reporters also use CCIA's exceptions to copyright numbers which, again, result from the identical methodology.

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Oops: Dropbox Left All User Accounts Wide Open For Four Hours This Weekend

Dropbox's security has been under increased scrutiny lately, after some security researchers claimed that some of its security practices were questionable. So, it was probably the worst time possible for the company to have a "programmer's error," leaving all Dropbox accounts completely wide open to anyone for four hours on Sunday. Apparently, during that period of time, you could log into anyone's account with any password. Just type in a random string of gibberish and you're in. Not surprisingly, the company is apologizing and investigating how this happened. At the very least, it seems like a good reason to explore alternatives if you're doing remote storage.

Of course, this also raises interesting points concerning the big question of "cloud" security. Many people have suggested that relying on some third party -- such as Dropbox -- is inherently insecure. However, that assumes that an individual who goes a different route would be able to create a more secure system on their own. I'm sure that's true for some people, but it might not be the case for the everyday user. In the long run, you would hope that these remote service providers can implement stronger security, so that individuals don't have to. But, in the short run, I wouldn't be surprised to see more such stories of less-than-optimal security being exposed at these kinds of service providers.

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El poder adquisitivo de Apple a final de trimestre: 70 mil millones de dólares

Esconded los saldos de vuestras cuentas corrientes, porque tengáis el dinero que tengáis va a parecer calderilla con los números que vamos a comentar aquí. Durante las últimas ruedas de prensa de resultados financieros de Apple ya hemos oído hablar de la gran reserva de dinero que se asegura la compañía, por si le diera por adquirir alguna otra empresa. Hace algo de tiempo Steve Jobs presumía porque Apple era una compañía de cincuenta mil millones de dólares… ¡tonterías! Todo indica que Apple tendrá nada menos que setenta mil millones de dólares en sus cuentas al terminar este trimestre fiscal.

Repito: setenta-mil-millones-de-dólares. Lo que vienen a ser unos 48,85 millones de euros al cambio actual. Puede que con la crisis económica estemos acostumbrados a oír estas cantidades de dinero en forma de rescates bancarios, pero en el mundo empresarial es una bestialidad. Para que nos hagamos una idea, Apple podría comprar tranquilamente Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola y Sony Ericsson. Y no separadas, no, todas al mismo tiempo como quien compra ingredientes para hacer un gazpacho.

Lógicamente, eso es algo que no va a pasar por no tener sentido (aunque de ocurrir Apple acabaría con gran parte de su competencia directa de un plumazo). Pero es un buen ejemplo del poder que tiene ahora mismo Apple. Sólo hace falta que alguna compañía se convierta en una amenaza para que en Cupertino empiecen a pensar en una adquisición y quitarse el problema de encima. No está nada mal tener esa cantidad de dinero a modo de seguro. Y si el progreso de Apple sigue el mismo ritmo, hay analistas que afirman que el valor de Apple podría superar al de la industria de telefonía móvil al completo.

Vía | AppleInsider
Imagen | Gisela Giardino
En Applesfera | ¿Qué ha querido decir Steve Jobs con eso de “creemos que hay una o más oportunidades estratégicas”?

Why Propping Up Old Business Models Is Bad For The Economy And Bad For Innovation

Certainly a common enough theme around these parts is the effort of old companies with legacy business models to do everything in their power (often through regulatory capture and other political tricks) to retain their market position by regulating in a specific way. This means regulations that empower legacy firms specifically, or by outlawing and/or limiting disruptive upstarts. All too often, these firms succeed in convincing politicians (and even the press and some portion of the public) that their own potential failures mean the failure of a larger industry as a whole. And yet, that's almost never the case. In fact, the protectionism often does the exact opposite of that, in that it prevents the necessary innovations from flourishing, thereby limiting an industry and, at times, making it uncompetitive with other industries in other countries.

A recent Planet Money episode discussed this in talking to economist Tim Harford about his new book, Adapt, which talks about how important failure is for economic growth and innovation. This should intuitively make sense for many regular Techdirt readers, since we make this point, in a different manner, quite frequently.

In the Planet Money episode, they do a "walking tour of failure in New York," looking at things like the Gutenberg bible, which many credit with kicking off a revolution in printing, but was a giant commercial failure for Johannes Gutenberg, who put up the money for it, but couldn't find the buyers (yes, for the first printed edition of the best selling book of all time). Elsewhere, they talk about the failure of Woolworth, which had been an early retail innovator, being one of the first retailers to realize that putting goods out where customers could see them and touch them, rather than cramming it all behind a counter, was a good idea. But, eventually, others out-innovated Woolworth as well. In many ways, this reminds me of the book Copycats by Oded Shenkar, which we spoke about last year and which had plenty of similar stories.

Some of the discussion also reminded me of our discussion on the series of economic studies that have shown that people changing jobs is often a key indicator of economic growth because it helps the spread of ideas and innovations faster across the economy. While that might not seem to directly impact the question of "failure," Harford mentions the research of economist Randall Morck, who found that (and I'm paraphrasing from Harford's brief summary of Morck's work) in places where there is greater turnover of big companies failing and upstarts taking their place, there is greater economic growth. I have to admit being unaware of Morck's work previously, but now have it on my list to dig in and check it out. I can definitely see a connection here.

Big companies often get stagnant, focusing less on innovation and more on protecting a market. In the Clayton Christensen world of the Innovator's Dilemma, they focus on incremental innovations and market protectionism. And, as Andy Kessler noted in his most recent book, the innovators, who get around those things and unleash value, are often derided as thieves and criminals for undermining established business models. But what comes out of those upstart efforts is, generally, much better for the consumer. And, on top of that, the collapse of those big firms often allows many of the folks, who did have good ideas and knowledge within those firms, to spread out and to join the more innovative upstarts, which will actually implement and execute on those good ideas, rather than be stymied by bosses who don't want to undercut the old business models.

This is why we should always be wary of efforts by politicians to protect jobs, companies, industries and business models. These efforts may come from a reasonable place -- in the belief that it's for the best to "protect" such a large company. But history has shown over and over again the value of creative destruction and disruptive innovation. While it may take down old legacy players, what rises in its place is almost always better for everyone.

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How Important Is It To Preserve Our Digital Heritage?

Having recently been part of an effort to preserve videos on Google Video, in light of its announced shutdown, it's made me more aware how brittle our current culture is, with many many artifacts available only in digital form. There are conservation efforts such as the aforementioned one, part of a larger group called Archive Team. Google changed its mind and promised to keep Google Video online and try to move as much as possible to YouTube where it has permission from the original uploader. This is, obviously, a win for the archivists, who kept the effort going just the same and are still in the process of uploading all of Google Video to archive.org.

Contrast this with Friendster, where the Archive Team project was unable to save everything before the end of May, when everything was set to be deleted. Much has been downloaded and it will still give a good picture of what this early social network was like. Similarly, the Archive Team was able to rescue much, but not all of GeoCities, before Yahoo shut that down last year, releasing its collection as a massive 1 TB bittorrent file.

Now you may ask yourself is Friendster (or even GeoCities) worth saving? Answering that question purely myself, I'd say no, but I have no connection with those sites. Looking at the question however from the perspective of people who have spent many hours building these profiles and interacting with each other, I can see there's clearly value there to those who used them. Answering instead as someone with a deep interest in history, it's not for us to say what will eventually prove worth saving. Instead, that's something for the historians, archeologists, sociologists and other interested parties in the future to decide. But they can't do that if the information isn't even there.

How often have we not wished more of a particular point in our history had been preserved? Ironically many of the analog writings of our past are in a better state than some of our digital ones, even when it's often pointed out how easy it is to make bit-perfect copies of something in this day and age.

All of this, leads me to ask the following questions: Do you agree the digital aspects of our culture should be better preserved?
Should we have, maybe even one on each continent or in each country, a modern Library of Alexandria? (identical copies in different places to prevent 'a fire' from destroying it)
What would such a world-wide archival effort look like, technologically?
What should we do about copyrights and patents (and DRM) that might get in the way of preserving our heritage?
How do we go about archiving software for a computer that's available only in a museum, to preserve interactive access?
What about the proliferation of file formats? Do we transform everything into a canonical form where we can, or do we store the original along with software to interpret?
I think we owe it to ourselves that this generation doesn't look like a black hole when viewed from the future, and by extension, I'd like to make it easier on future historians to learn about us than it has been for us to learn about previous societies (e.g. Sumerians).

I'll start off by saying that though little personal correspondence has been preserved of earlier times, we should recognize the right to privacy and any such posited archive would be allowed to include private communications only if you explicitly opted in. Valuable though these are for historians, if we preserve as much as we can of the digital domain, enough can be inferred from context that this would be an unwarranted intrusion.

But what about the wider issue of preservation of public content that can be wiped out by shutting off a power switch?

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