It’s been about six weeks since I’ve posted anything, but it’s not been for lack of things to post. It’s just been a busy and fun summer. Now that Labor Day is approaching, I thought I’d turn in an essay on what I did this summer.

First of all, let me point out the animated image on the “Links” sidebar. That animation was created by Uri Kirstein, a designer. It was an unsolicited contribution to the site — Uri wrote the following in an email to me —

This has got to be one of the most bizarre ways to meet someone. Although it does say something, the fact that I happened to pick the same letter and number (randomly) as you did for your domain.

Again thanks for the image, Uri.

I’ve written a third article for Builder.COM called “Bootstrapping a Development Team”. It hasn’t been posted yet — I expect to see it around the second week of September. When published, there’ll be a link on the site with more shameless self-promotion.

I’ve been pre-occupied of late developing a new piece of software. There’s nothing like a complex, multi-threaded piece of software to keep one out of trouble during the summer. In the process, I’ve run into some very good open source software that has helped me out. I’ll post future columns on these components, including an embedded data store and XSLT processor. I’m not ready to talk about the details of this piece of software, but suffice it to say that it’s pretty cool and is sparking the imagination of the few folks who know about it.

Fortunately I didn’t waste my entire summer writing code. In between, I mixed in a little motorcycling, including a great trip to visit the Amish in Lancaster PA. I also saw Rent on Broadway in NYC — this show definitely qualifies as one of the better shows I’ve seen.

I should probably put in a few words about things that concern me in the technology world, but right now things don’t seem to have changed significantly. I’m still actively watching the RIAA and MPAA to see what their latest blunders will be. The RIAA, of course, has had it’s website hacked twice recently and has been suffering from a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Maybe this is just the public opinion poll they were looking for. I’m sure the RIAA thinks it’s just a few bad apples — the world’s a happy place when you are delusional. And from there, the push for Digital Rights Management solutions continues, in hopes of solving the music copying problem. CNet reports on JVC’s new anti-copying scheme for CDs — perhaps that will become something interesting. It sounds like an IBM initiative from not long ago, that was tied to pre-keyed discs.

In the meantime, I’m contemplating acquiring an MP3 player, probably one of the 20-30 GB units. I’ve been using my iPaq with a CF card to hold a few MP3s, but I can’t imagine that anyone actually bothers to continually load one of the 64MB or 128MB MP3 players with music regularly. It got old after the second time. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know what I want to listen to until the moment I press play — I need my options. Anyone out there have a unit that they particularly like?

I suppose that’ll be it for now. I’ll post more entries soon diving down into some of the specifics of this post.

Gene Kan, a pioneer in this emerging era of peer to peer technology, died June 29th, apparently of suicide (see John Borland’s article on CNet). I’ll tell you up front that I didn’t know Gene personally, but his work put him among the top names in the P2P community.

Kan was most identified with Gnutella, the protocol that Limewire and similar file sharing applications use to conduct searches. His startup, InfraSearch, was acquired by Sun, but I have always figured that Sun bought the company so that he would work on JXTA.

I’ve heard Kan speak several times and his ability to engage with the crowd was much better than with your typical techie. Kan and Sean Fanning are often put side by side as the guys who got the whole P2P revolution rolling, but they represented two very different things. Fanning developed an alternative namespace in which systems could connect to each other by a manual search of a large directory (Napster). Kan, on the other hand, contributed to the development of a protocol on which many other applications have been developed.

He was way too young to leave this planet — his contributions had only just begun.

• Gene Kan’s Blog
• Yaroslav’s Tribute

Apologies on the length of time between posts — it’s summer.

On Tuesday, 25 June 2002, I attended a panel discussion on the future of digital music. On that panel were the following individuals — Michael Bracy of the Coalition for the Future of Music, John Coletta from BMI, Philip Corwin from the law firm Butera and Andrews, Mitch Glazier of the RIAA, David Liebowitz of Verance, and Lee Shubert of KMZ Rosenman.

The notables on the panel were really John Coletta, Philip Corwin and of course Mitch Glazier. Mitch came off as the devil himself, blasting people who download MP3s as pirates and denouncing Kazaa and Morpheus as criminal tools. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that actually downloading those software packages was criminal, but indicated that there are ongoing court cases to make that determination. Obviously he was cautious about making statements to further alienate consumers of music, but it’s clear where the RIAA falls in all of this. They believe that the MP3 trade has caused a decrease in CD sales (I believe them, in spite of some of the studies) and are going to go to great lengths to convince consumers that trading MP3s is wrong.

Philip Corwin represents the folks over at Kazaa and Centerspan, P2P technologies that are all about trading music on-line. He believes that we’re not far away from compulsory licensing — a mandate by the government that MP3s can be traded on line and that a tax (or similar) will be added to Internet service (or similar) to pay for those licenses. This is the same arrangement that the music industry has with radio stations.

There were some great statements made at this discussion:

• “The one that gets the most eyeballs will determine the business model.” This remarkable comment came from Mitch Glazier. I found it unbelievable that he could even make a statement like this considering that the most eyes right now are on Kazaa and Morpheus and were on Napster. I think the problem is the eyes of the RIAA are blind.
• “Drawing consumers to legitimate business sites is a real problem for the RIAA and will thus continue to litigate.” Yup, another one from Mitch of the RIAA. So, let’s see if I have this right — can I expect the RIAA to send in the cops to raid my network?
• “The ones with the fewest rules will win.” I forgot who made this statement, but it’s probably true. This is why the record industry keeps failing with their own attempts to put music on the Internet — they have too many rules.
• “The Internet is a p2p technology.” Well, it used to be anyway. Philip Corwin made this comment and, technical realities aside for the moment, it’s true. He made the statement to justify the Kazaa approach to MP3 sharing.
• “Financing the development of bands is a good business model.” Philip Corwin made this statement also. I tend to agree with him, but the RIAA rep seemed to think otherwise as the next comment indicates.
  Every consumer thinks that he has the right business model.” Guess who said this? Mitch from the RIAA of course. He’s really right — everyone thinks they know best. He did make a couple of points that were important to realize. The record companies have a number of contracts in place now that dictate how they do business with artists that will have to be reworked in this new Internet era. He mentioned that this could take years, but I think that’s an excuse for not reading the writing on the wall.

• Technology has not been developed yet that will drive the business model.” Lee Shubert said this to indicate his optimism that MP3 sharing will change as technology improves. I disagree with him on this point, however. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s important to recognize that consumers are now going to expect free music. This is the same situation that occurred in the software industry as it was emerging and now you can barely start a company to sell software to consumers.
• “It’s important to look at radio as a cautionary tale.” Michael Bracy said this as an intro to the comments on compulsory licensing for radio stations. The caution goes both ways. The record industry ought to act fast regarding licensing their content in a way that’s palatable to consumers or they will definitely be hit with a compulsory license. Similarly consumers need to watch out for big Internet taxes from their ISPs.
• “Piracy and P2P are not the same thing.” Philip Corwin’s comment, asserting that Kazaa and Morpheus and others are perfectly legal and you just can’t help what consumers do with them. Not that I disagree with him, of course :-).

What conclusions can one draw from all of this? Well I found a certain amount of cluelessness in the room. The big assumption is that everyone in the music sharing is doing it for profit, but that’s clearly not the case. There are companies that are trying to make money on sharing MP3 files, but there is clearly open source code out there that many use. I get my music from Limewire or USENET these days, neither of which is a money making venture.

I believe that the RIAA needs to sharpen up. They don’t have enough technical juice to really engage with the community of folks that will be continuing to crack every last method of securing music. They need to educate the consumer, not litigate. They need to allow some of the services to exist and just work on extracting a license from them. While the RIAA probably worries that this will open the floodgates forever, that’s truly doubtful. Things change very quickly out here in technology land. With some real options that are supported directly by the music labels, options that don’t look like crass attempts to command $15 for 10 songs, things could change.

But I don’t think that they are smart enough to realize it. They are too busy trying to preserve the bottom line that they are willing to sacrifice virtually everything in the process. Look for a huge crash in the music industry in the next year or two — you know it’s coming.

Film88.COM e-mailed me a notice this morning asking that I read the the following open letter on their website. I’m posting the text here because I have no idea how long that site will be operational —

Dear Valued Users and Geeks,

Film88.com


This epilogue is worth a little discussion.

The first issue would ultimately have caused the business to fail if no adequate solution was ever found. Technology for streaming media has existed for quite some time, but not with the wealth of content that Film88 was pushing out to users. With a price of $1 per movie, they could have anticipated a huge number of users on the service. Movie88.COM, their predecessor, saw this also. I recall watching one or two of the free movies and noticed that several times the site was just jammed. There are probably other technical issues, some likely related to maintaining the content and the processing power required to deliver it at various bandwidths, that will also have to be resolved. But that’s cool — this is emerging technology and those glitches are to be expected.

Their second point on payments comes closer to the heart. A service like this without major studio participation will almost certainly fail. I believed that Film88 was being truthful when they indicated that they were not pirates. Many disruptive changes occur because individuals and businesses are willing to take a chance on pushing their ideas into the market and dealing with the consequences later — sort of the “don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness”. Film88 and Movie88 are examples of that. Frankly, so was Napster (now dead). The original video rental stores were also of that very same ilk.

I believe that these guys should keep trying because at some point, with the right combination of pieces, they will be able to force Hollywood to the bargaining table. I’ll actually go a bit further and state that if someone like Film88 doesn’t achieve sustainability, then the next thing we’ll be seeing is a personal computer that has a rigid set of restricted capabilities, unlike the computers we use today. Hollywood and the record industry would like nothing better than to see the general purpose computer go away in favor of a more expensive appliance that only shows their brand of copy-protected content. The video stores stayed in business because of Macrovision, a technology that makes it hard to copy video cassettes; don’t think that the MPAA and RIAA wouldn’t like to make it so that CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are unusable for their content. And the way that they’ll do this is by forcing computer manufacturers to stop producing computers that can be used for a variety of tasks. The computers in the future will be like audio/video components and we won’t be able to load new software onto them.

Now to point three. I’m not sure which category I fall into — I presume that they think of me as a fair journalist since I continue to be on their e-mail list (although I think I fit the Geek category best). I understand Film88’s statement about not being involved in politics and the borderless Internet, but there are some realities that have to be considered. Iran is not a friendly nation to the US — President Bush has declared Iran to be part of the “Axis of Evil”. I’m not going to make any statements about whether I think the President is correct about that, but on a personal level, I found the choice of countries to host the service to be a little troubling. My main concern, expressed in my first comments on Film88, was that this was a means for US dollars (and other money) to flow into Iran. I’m sure that there would be taxes paid by the business to the Iranian government (like in any country, although I am unfamiliar with Iranian tax law), and so in an indirect way, my consumption of a service like Film88 would be aiding a country that I’m not so sure I want to support. I’d have a similar problem if the service were in Libya or Iraq or Syria or North Korea.

I’ll take Film88 at their word that politics didn’t play into choice of country and certainly nationality and race don’t play into this for me either. I do wonder if the current political situation in Iran with respect to the US might have made Iran more eager to help Film88 succeed. Would Iran benefit if suddenly Hollywood were robbed of its profits? Maybe. The loss of Hollywood revenue would cause less tax dollars to flow into the federal and state governments. That might have an impact on the US economy. Considering how Western culture (like film) is viewed in Iran, it certainly made me wonder why they would allow a web business that does nothing but sell (inexpensively) Western culture. So while Film88 might not have been engaged politically, I don’t doubt that someone clever in the Iranian government decided that there might be some political benefit to Film88 being in Iran. (If the folks at Film88 would like to send me some comments on this, I’d be happy to work them into another post.)

So the Internet is zero for two versus the MPAA. The RIAA has their hands somewhat because the bandwidth requirements for moving songs around in the form of MP3s is a managable problem and decentralized solutions Limewire, Kazaa, and Morpheus are essentially uncontrollable — there’s no one site to shut down. Anyone with a 56k modem can download music without too much extreme pain. Motion pictures are much larger and it still takes a long time to download a gig or two from the net. That will change as more households get high bandwidth connections. People are already starting to download movies from some of the services that were originally just moving MP3s around.

Again, I’ll state that I think it’s time that the MPAA legitimize Film88 or something very much like it. Bits played through Real Player are fairly hard to capture and redistribute. There are some tools that help you do it, but basically it’s something of a pain in the neck to install and use. And even then, you have to watch the entire 2 hour movie before you could even attempt to redistribute it. Considering the relatively low quality of the movies that can be delivered through the Internet (Film88 was attempting to go as high as 500k, which is still much lower than VHS quality), a low price service would keep the copying to a minimum. It’s the video rental effect — you can rent a tape or DVD from a video store and most of us don’t bother copying them because it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Macrovision, while not perfect, ended up being good enough to stop people from copying every tape they rent. People who rent DVDs do so because they want the quality and won’t bother taping the motion picture for later viewing. Streaming media has very much the same effect — it’s too technically complicated for most people to bother with and for a dollar or two, no one will want to spend the time to copy and redistribute a low quality film.

So here’s a message for Jack Valenti — you’re sitting on a huge opportunity here to bring motion pictures to the net in a way that you would actually make money and not harm your existing businesses. It is beginning to look like you’re digging in your heels because you think you can rather than engaging with these folks. That’s going to be counterproductive for you in the long run because if you don’t allow one of these services to exist, then someone will eventually set up a service that you can’t control and when that happens, you will lose.