This is in response to yet another attempt at artificially limiting distribution of information online to protect expired business models, the AP's NewsRight.

I originally wrote it as a rather large rant on Google+, but I guess it's too long for that medium, and probably worth blogging.

Aggregators provide a hugely important service both to me and to you. In this day, information is global.

It used to be the case that I'd be more likely to get my information from a local outlet; a paper published in the town or city where I live, or maybe a local TV station. These would often republish stories written somewhere else, and there was a very well thought-out system for them to pay for this.

Now I have access to information from the whole world. But that means, there's way too much of it out there. Attention and “eyeballs” have become a more scarce and precious resource than content. Why would I read your article, rather than someone else's, or even spend my time playing games or writing fiction? I have precious little time, and it's mathematically impossible to read everything written every day that could be interesting for me.

Then there's management/economy theory. The “new wave” of theory today is “consumer delight”. It used to be the case that most business defined their goals as “providing what their customer needs”. Then at some point in the 20th century the thinking changed to “making money”. Then in the 70s it changed to “creating shareholder value”. Some very smart people today are saying those goals are destructive, to the economy in general, to the customer, and to your own ability to compete. The idea is that the ultimate goal of a business is to not only provide what the consumer needs, but to do it with as much excellence as you can afford; the money you make is a means, a part of the process, necessary to sustain the business and the people, and not the ultimate goal.

From that angle, your ultimate goal is to write the best story, and your ultimate metrics of success are second that it gets read as widely as possible, and first and foremost, that the people who read it get the most value out of it.

Therefore the concern at the center of your business is how stories get produced; that is where good practises need to be preserved and new things need to be tried and optimisations made. The concern of how to get compensated is necessary but secondary, and that means it should be an option at any time to rethink the business model, turn it upside down even, if that's the best for the primary goal.

Back to aggregators then: how am I supposed to know about your publication? If once every two or three months (and that's being generous) you publish an article that's the absolute best about a topic I'm interested in, am I supposed to visit your website every day just because that chance exists? That would mean visiting dozens of websites every day to get my news. I'm more likely to go with a smaller number of sites that have inferior articles but a better average.

Aggregators are there to save both of us: if I can find a good aggregator that picks those good articles from you, that's great, because it's probably the only way that article will make its way to me; you get read, and I get better information.

Now, that is currently a problem, because your model for compensation depends on people visiting yoru site. Can you see my point of view, that in light of all this, the thing that needs to be fixed is your compensation model? That the compensation model is the one weak link here, the one thing that is clearly wrong?

It's like the debate about how much profit is lost because people download music and movies. The reality is almost none, because those people are in 4 groups: (a) being most of them, wouldn't have bought the content anyway; (b) already bought it and want it in a different format; (c) download, taste, and then go ahead and buy; and (d) the very few that would have bought it if they couldn't download. So in the majority, it's not a case of buying or downloading, but rather downloading or ignoring.

In the case of news it's not a choice of aggregators or going to the source, it's aggregators or not hearing about the article at all. So from the point of view of the aggregators, you should be paying them for getting your article to the right eyeballs out there. (Which of course is also preposterous, because before you can pay the aggregators for that service, you need to make money somehow, and it's in their best interest to help you figure out how, and help you implement whatever solution turns out to be practical.)

Here's an excellent post on the Python newsgroup, which I think anyone still not convinced that copyrights as they currently exist are evil should reflect on. Of course, this blog posting is a copyright violation, as I didn't ask the author (Steven D'Aprano) for permission to blog it. ;-)

He says (everything from here on):

> I'm glad it doesn't work that way here in the US.  Over here, something
> is copyrighted as soon as it's written (actually I think the phrase is
> "fixed in a medium" or something like that).

I'm not glad at all. The Change from an "everything is uncopyrighted unless explicitly copyrighted" model to a "everything is copyrighted unless explicitly exempted" model was only one of many deleterious changes to copyright law over the last half century or so.

It means the merest throw-away scribble on a napkin has equal protection to the opus an author slaved over for thirty years (although in fairness you are unlikely to win a copyright case over the words "Meet me at the bar" scribbled on a napkin then tossed in a rubbish bin... wink). It means that there is a serious problem of "orphan works", where rare and valuable films from the 1920s and earlier are rapidly decaying into an unusable powder because nobody dares copy them lest the unknown copyright owners descend like vultures and sue you for copyright infringement after you've done the hard work of restoring our cultural heritage.

(Although the orphan works problem is at least equally as much a problem of excessively long copyrights as it is to do with automatic copyright.)

I dare say that European countries which have had automatic copyright longer than the US have seen far more of their national heritage (early film, photographs and the like) rot away.

Discussions of copyright so often focus on protecting the author's privileges and ignore the opportunity costs of locking up works. When works needed to be explicitly copyrighted, something of the order of just ONE PERCENT of authors bothered to copyright their published works -- and just one percent of them bothered to renew it for a second 14 year term. That gives you an idea of how valuable copyright really is. For every Mickey Mouse, there are 100,000 or more works that don't have enough economic value to the creator to bother protecting -- but they're part of our cultural heritage, and maybe somebody else could build on top of it, like Disney built their empire on other folks' uncopyrighted stories and ideas. Even Mickey Mouse himself got his start in a derivative work of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.

This newsgroup is a perfect example of the fraud that is the idea of copyright. Every single post sent to the newsgroup is copyrighted, and yet they invariable have no economic value to the author. If they have any economic value, it is to the readers -- but they don't pay for it, and we authors don't ask for payment. In principle, anyone who forwards on something they read here, or uses a code snippet in their own work, is infringing copyright. We don't need copyright to encourage us to create works of this nature, and in fact this newsgroup can only exist by pretending copyright doesn't exist -- there are informal conventions that unless somebody explicitly states otherwise, any reader can forward on posts, copy and reuse code, and so forth.

(Disclaimer: for the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not suggesting that ALL creative works should be uncopyrighted, or that no creative works benefit from the encouragement of copyright.)

Yay, yay, yay!

So last week I was out on the 'nets looking for music licensed under Creative Commons, for a possible project. I headed over to Jamendo.com to see what I could find... and I was absolutely blown away!

I was looking for a number of different styles, and I found almost everything I wasted. There was, of course, lots of unusable rubbish; it is, after all, a site where anyone can upload. But a little digging produced gold aplenty. You can try a few of my selections via the widget on the right of the blog.

My PMP (which is actually my mobile phone) now only has CC music :-)

I'm really impressed. I think we may be near the edge of a whole new era here; when this reaches critical mass (probably still a few years down the road), it will turn the way we listen to music upside down.

Go Killing Jazz! Go Poulp! Go Camelot! Go try^d, go Auvernia!