Apple is holding my data hostage

When my boys' videos started getting some interest via their podcast and the Make film festival, I got 2 emails in a row from Apple's mac.com service saying I was exceeding bandwidth limits, and then I was cut off.

Back when I worked for Apple, they launched mac.com as a free service, and I bagged our family names in their namespace. The integration of iDisk into the OS made it a simple way to post files to the web, and I used it for both work-related sample code and personal bits and pieces.

Later on, Apple did a bait and switch, and started charging for mac.com. I decided the cost wasn't too onerous, and we could keep the email addresses and the hosting. It costs $100 a year, and $10 for each extra email address, but the switching cost seemed high, as we have a lot of friends who use those email addresses, and the hosting integreation is handy.

Later on, I kept getting 'your email account is full' crap, and pointed out that gmail offered 100 times as much storage for free, and they later relaxed the terms a bit.

Then came this, from noreply@apple.com:

Dear .Mac Member,

Please be aware that you have reached 100% of your .Mac data transfer quota for this two-week period and we have turned off external access to your site(s). Attempts to visit there will produce a page explaining that your site has gone over data transfer quota and the material requested cannot be displayed.

You can still publish to your site(s), but you will not be able to view any changes on the Internet until your site is reactivated. Reactivation will happen on the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first. To review your data transfer usage, click here. To increase your data transfer quota by purchasing additional storage space, click here.* For more information see Help.

I thought 'OK, I'll move my stuff to other hosting, and redirect my links' - but the iDisk 'Sites' folder is also disabled on my machine, so I can't get at my files to move them.

So, if some of my posts here are missing movies or images, that's why.
Amazon's S3 service is looking interesting, both Google and Microsoft are preparing hosting services, and there are a plethora of video hosting sites like blip.tv.

Apple's terms are uncompetitive, and stopping me from accessing my own files until I pay is a nasty kind of blackmail.

Technorati Tags: Apple, hosting, mac.com, podcasting, QuickTime

Andrew and Christopher won the Make Movie Festival

Andrew and Christopher
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks.

Bre Pettis writes:

With so many great entries it was hard to pick a winner, but the Marks Brothers' Fun with Dry Ice shined through. Their top notch explanations of how to have fun with dry ice was really great. The grand prize is a box set of Make Magazines signed by the Make Magazine staff, a Make: t-shirt for each brother, and Make: license plate covers, which they'll have to wait until they can drive to use!

The boys, Rosie and I are dead chuffed.

The Copyright Extension scam

In the UK, the copyright term on sound recordings is set at 50 years. It's been this way since 1911, but suddenly, with the Gowers Review coming up, there is an orchestrated attempt to get it extended. The record labels (who will get a huge windfall if this happens) have dug up Cliff Richard to plead poverty:

According to the singer, many musicians recording in the 1950s rely on their copyright payments as a pension.

"It seems terribly wrong that 50 years on they lose everything from it."

Now, copyright is a tradeoff, whereby a monopoly of limited duration is granted to the creator to exploit the work, after which it passes to the public domain. The thrust of the record labels' campaign is that artists don't make enough money from these recordings to save for a pension. Letting the labels continue to pay them a tiny fraction of revenues for another 45 years, when the sunk costs were accounted for 50 years ago makes no sense at all.
Louis Barfe attacks them on these grounds:

To extend the copyright period in sound recordings would make an already complacent industry even more unbearably smug, and give a clear signal that they can get exactly what they want if they whine loud enough. The losers will be the artists who continue to have their back catalogue sat on by the fat corporate arse of the record companies, the small record companies who have made available numerous archive recordings that have passed into the public domain (which would almost certainly not be made available any other way), and, of course, the general record-buying public.

I’m a reasonable man. Here’s a counter proposal: Record companies can have copyright for as long as they want, as long as they make their entire archives commercially available in some shape or form at a reasonable price. Until then, no sale.

However, this concedes too much. The labels are trying to have it both ways here. In a digital world, the back catalogue can be released by simply digitising the songs and putting them up for sale online. The investment needed is tiny, and certainly doesn't justify conceding any more monopoly rights.

The labels' traditional pitch to musicians is that they have huge advantages in marketing and publishing through their marketing and connections, their economies of scale and skilled professionalism, which justifies them keeping over 90% of revenue.

If this is true, why are they so afraid of competition?

With 50-year-old recordings, the production has been done, and the distribution costs can be made tiny with online digital sales; even CD pressing is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was 15 years ago, let alone 50. If the recordings are set free, others can publish them, including the original musicians, and keep more of the revenue for themselves. After all Magnatune pay a 50% royalty on Creative Commons licensed music.

The question to ask the labels is, if copyright expires on a recording, will you cease to sell it, or will you just cease to pay royalties to the musicians?

Looking back 60 years, a big artist then was Vera Lynn - and her recordings seem to be abundantly available in the UK.

So, are the labels still paying her royalties? Or are they pocketing the money themselves?

Technorati Tags: 2006, copyright, Digital Commonwealth, digital rights, economics, music, Open Rights Group, ORG, rhetoric

Between England and America

Michael Moorcock eloquently explores the cultural tensions I recognise.

Technorati Tags: culture

Valleyspeak contest

Valleywag want neologisms.

WiFired

getting thrown out of an internet café for spending 4 hours 'working on your startup' after buying one small mocha.

San-Franinsular

The uncomfortable anomie San Francisco hipsters get when they come down to the Valley for a geek event, caused by the sunshine and available parking.

Update: WiFired made the final round, so do go and vote for it at Valleywag.
Further Update: I won! Thank you all for your support. My initial reaction is to buy every track mashed into the sublime Raiding the 20th Century by Strictly Kev, Paul Morley and a cast of thousands.

Technorati Tags: valleyspeak

ABC's TV on demand sounds unattractive

Jeff Jarvis points to ABC's mooted online free shows:

On April 30, ABC will unveil a revamped Web site that will include a “theater” where people with broadband connections can watch free episodes of “Desperate Housewives,” “Lost” and other hit shows on their computers. Episodes will be available the morning after they air and will be archived so people can eventually view a whole season.

Episodes of the ABC shows — which can be paused, rewound and fast-forwarded — will contain commercial breaks that viewers can’t skip, making Disney hopeful it has figured out a way to turn the delivery of programs over the Web into a profit-generating business. Ten advertisers, including Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Unilever, already have signed up.

Well, it's nice to add another option, but this one is only attractive compared to classic over-the-air or 'live' cable broadcast. Let's do a comparison table:
<
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Delivery	Cost	Time constraint	space constraint	pros and cons
Broadcast	Free	must watch live or VCR	On your TVs in the US	Commercials interrupt - mute and wait
Cable	Monthly fee	must watch live or VCR	On your TVs in the US	Commercials interrupt it - mute and wait
TiVo	Monthly fee for cable and for TiVo directory	Can watch when you like, though will delete itself unless you check it	On the TV with the TiVo, in the US	Can fast-forward commercials; must subscribe or record in advance
New ABC Live	Monthly fee for broadband	Can watch when you like from 1 day after TV	On your computer with a net connection - US Only?	can't skip commercials
ABC on iTunes	Monthly fee for broadband; $1.99 per show with discounts for seasons	Can watch when you like from 1 day after TV, if you have a US credit card	On your computer with a net connection, don't need net connection after download; can transfer to iPod	no commercials; quality is not great
Bittorrent bootleg	Monthly fee for broadband	Can watch when you like from a few hours after TV, anywhere in the world	On your computer, don't need net connection after download; can transfer to iPod and other players; can make DVD with effort	Commercials edited out. Is of dubious legality.
DVD	Pay per series - prices vary	Can watch when you like from a few months after TV, region coded to annoy you	on your DVD player; On your computer, can transfer to other players with effort and semi-legal tools	Commercials edited out. Maybe extra features

Overall, the options are awkward. I can see some interesting gaps there - if I could subscribe to DVDs by mail every fortnight or month, while the series is still airing, that would be attractive (much more attractive than US networks' scheduling, which seems designed to confuse and disappoint and lose the flow of plot).
The iTunes series subscription could be attractive, if it was closer to the quality you get from HD-ripped Bittorrent or DVD. Tom Coates was saying something similar recently.

The other missing piece follows on from my post about net video last week- what if the cable companies had a cache of shows for a while after airing, or let you retrieve them from each others' PVRs? As the smarter ones have very high speed networks in their served neigbourhoods, this could be very responsive.

Update: Well, that was fast - Time Warner Cable are talking about just this kind of thing, though
the closing line "TV is more powerful than the Internet at the end of the day" is a bit of a shame.

Technorati Tags: ABC, bittorrent, Live TV is Dead, meme, movie, podcasting, QuickTime, streaming, television, video

Patent Trolls

I broadly agree with Paul Graham's essay on Software Patents, but I do think he underestimates the damage from patent trolls, and from what he calls the mafia-like behaviour of some patent holders.

Paul has been lucky in the field he has worked in, but in the Audio and Video area there are many patent thickets. Perhaps it is the history of Farnsworth's victory over RCA that makes video engineers patent hungry.

My first startup, The MultiMedia Corporation, was a spin-out from the BBC in 1990. One of our products was a program called MediaMaker that combined video from tape or videodisc, CD Audio, Pictures, digitised audio and Director animations into picture icons on a timeline for making presentations. It was demoed on stage at Macworld by the CEO of Apple, and we got Macromind to publish it.

Then the patent troll showed up. A company called Montage had made a video editing system that included several video monitors showing edit points from tape. The company had gone out of business but a lawyer had bought up the patents, including one on using a still image to represent a video sequence. The troll was working his way round the video companies, and he caused enough trouble to stop work on the product while we worked on a legal defence instead.

Later, while I was at Apple on QuickTime, there was a steady stream of patent trolls claiming that Apple should pay them royalties; enough to keep several lawyers busy, and a lot of engineers spending time working on prior art evidence demonstrations.

Several potential features were excluded from QuickTime due to patent thickets. The obvious one was the Unisys LZW patent that encumbered GIF, but there were other more subtle pressures that meant adopting open source codecs was discouraged. Working on the patent license agreements for MPEG meant that technology ready to ship was deferred pending legal agreement on more than one occasion.

So I'm much lass sanguine than Paul about this. I think software patents should not be granted, and the European Union's banning of them is the right decision. I hope the Gowers Review in the UK makes this UK law as well.

Video on the net is a solved problem, many times over

So why are AT&T and Verizon arguing they need special legal exemptions to build an internet for video? This article is buried in misconceptions so deep, it's hard to know where to start. The basic argument is that in order to provide streaming movies over the internet, they need to build a dedicated connection between content companies and viewers. This is demonstrably false on several levels.

First of all, streaming is pointless - it's applying the TV model to the net, which doesn't fit. The only reason to stream video is if it is live and two-way - an audio or video chat, an interactive game, or a conference with backchannel. In those cases, you can perceive lag between the ends, and you need latency kept low enough - well under a second for the first two, around 10-15 seconds for the third. We can do this over the public internet today, using Skype, iChat AV and QuickTime Broadcaster (among others - I worked on the last two, so you can excuse me mentioning them).

But you don't need low latency for movies. QuickTime has been using plain webservers to serve video for 10 years, very sucessfully. In fact, Netflix have built a very successful movie business over a content delivery network with very high latency, called the US Post Office.

If you do want to deliver movies over the net, and they get popular, your servers and your upload connection may get overloaded (especially if you are an individual user that the telcos have sold an Asymmetric DSL line instead of the fibre to the home they promised us 10 years ago in their last bout of special pleading).

Fortunately there are hosting companies that will cache it for you in their datacenters, like youtube or mac.com. If your movie gets really popular, what helps is distributed caches, closer to the people downloading. Akamai run a service that offers this to companies with lots of money - Apple use it for their high definition trailers.

If you can't afford that, don't worry, we've solved that one too - Bittorrent provides a way for everyone downloading the movie to act as a cache for each other, so you only need a single server seeding them all - Prodigem makes this nice and easy.

So, none of this needs special new 'dedicated pipes', or a VPN. They lost that argument before with ISDN and reserved bandwidth - it was a bad idea then, and it still is, but apparently telcos can't let go of the circuit switched model, even when their circuits have all been replaced by internet protocol.

What makes all these choices for sending video over the net possible is precisely the content-independent end to end principle that the telcos want to throw out so they can privilege their 'dedicated pipes' of packets over ours. Their argument is a tottering inverted pyramid of bullshit, and they need to be called on it publicly.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, digital rights, f2c, Live TV is Dead, podcasting, politics, QuickTime, streaming, television, video

Evolved Economics

Doc's post on Nat's blog about morality:

We can approach everything through one of three moral systems:

Morality of self-interest

This gives us "owning", "domination", etc. The Old School. Industrial Age shit. Still prevails in many business plans that are just for killing other companies.

Morality of accounting

We balance everything. "Paying debts", "owing favors". This is our system of justice, by the way. It's all about accounting. (Note the scales of justice symbol.)

Morality of generosity

We give. We are open. We love without expectation of reward, or even accounting. (In fact, when you bring in accounting, you compromise it.) Think about how we give to our spouses, our children, without strings. It pays off, too. But that's fundamentally not what it's about.

This reminded me of a passage in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate:

The anthropologist Alan Fiske has surveyed the ethnographic literature and found that virtually all human transactions fall into four patterns, each with a distinctive psychology. The first is Communal Sharing: groups of people, such as the members of a family, share things without keeping track of who gets what. The second is Authority Ranking: dominant people confiscate what they want from lower-ranking ones. But the other two types of transaction are defined by exchanges.

The most common kind of exchange is what Fiske calls Equality Matching. Two people exchange goods or favours at different times, and the traded items are identical or at least highly similar or easily comparable. The trading partners assess their debts by simple addition or subtraction and are satisfied when the favours even out. The partners feel the exchange binds them in a relationship, and often people will consummate exchanges just to maintain it. For example, in the trading rings of the Pacific Islands, gifts circulate from chief to chief, and he original giver may eventually get his gift back. (Many Americans suspect this is what happens to Christmas fruitcakes). When someone violates an Equality Matching relationship by taking a benefit without returning it in kind, the other party feels cheated and may retaliate aggressively. Equality Matching is the only mechanism of trade in most hunter-gatherer societies. Fiske notes that it is supported by a mental model of tit-for-tat reciprocity, and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown that this way of thinking comes easily to Americans as well. It appears to be the core of our intuitive economics.

Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called Market Pricing, the system of rents, prices, wages and interest rates that underlies modern economics. Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplication, division, fractions and large numbers, together with the social institutions of money, credit, written contracts and complex division of labour. Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it played no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writing, money and formal mathematics which appeared only recently.[...]

When people have different ideas about which of these four modes of interaction applies to a current relationship, the result can range from blank incomprehension to acute discomfort or outright hostility. Think about a dinner guest offering to pay her host for the meal, a person barking an order to a friend, or an employee helping himself to a shrimp off the boss's plate. Misunderstandings in which one person thinks of a transaction in terms of Equality Matching and another thinks in terms of Market Pricing are even more pervasive and can be even more dangerous. They tap into very different psychologies, one of the intuitive and universal, the other rarefied and learned, and clashes between them have been common in recent economic history

David Weinberger, in his speech at F2C today, referred to the spurious appeal to fairness made by publishers of cultural goods, that the creator should be paid for any benefit received from a cultural good. This is stated at more length in Fair but Wrong.
Which brings me back to DRM - Ed Felten notes that Korean music publishers have quantified DRM's value destruction at 40%, which is more than the iTunes differential from CDs, though there the convenience factor is worth something too, though the downloadable movies at twice the price of DVDs scheme is sure to fail.

Technorati Tags: digital rights, DRM, economics, education, ethics, f2c, iPod, law, meme, movie, Open Rights Group, politics, rhetoric, video

Unexpected agreement?

I've been saying for a while that the left/right split is often irrelevant to the politics around the net; it is much more about freedom and control, about trusting the public en masse or fearing them.
I have two illustrations of agreement across political lines tonight. First, danah boyd and Bill O'Reilly of Fox News in striking agreement over myspace.

Secondly, Tara Hunt's Marx-citing on marketing:

But re-reading the Communist Manifesto, I was, once again, swept up in the following passage:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. [...]

THE COMMONS WILL OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND WILL CALL THE SHOTS. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty rockin' to me. But then again, I have faith in human beings.

aligns with Mark Steyn and Glen Reynolds as cited in Steyn's review of Army of Davids:

The professor thinks we're in a transformative moment: "the triumph of personal technology over mass technology. . . . Starting around 1700, big organizations became the most efficient way to do a lot of things," he writes. But today, "economies of scope and scale" no longer favour the big, and those organizations that don't get it are like the old joke about the Pravda headline boasting that the Soviet Union made the biggest microchip in the world. "The empowerment of individuals," says Reynolds, "may lead to an interesting twist on Karl Marx's goal: workers control the means of production, all right, but it's a far cry from Communism."

That rang a vague bell with me and, after rootling through my mouldering clippings, I found an old column of mine from five years ago -- before Reynolds had started Instapundit or I'd even heard of "blogs." "We have arrived at the situation Marx and Engels urged upon us, in which the proletariat would rise up and seize control of the means of production," I wrote. "Their only mistake was that they were envisioning a workers committee running the local steel mill. But the steel mills have gone, and today the biggest industry in the United States is entertainment. That's the one the masses are kicking down the factory gates of."

It's not just media.