The Web Difference

This was the first time our class got kicked off with music. We were treated to Brad’s track, Making Me Nervous as well as two other tracks.

Background:

Brad is a really successful one-man band and web musician. He offers his music online, on www.bradsucks.net. What is really unusual is his copyright policy – his music can either be downloaded for free or purchased. He has a pretty “liberal” copyright policy; essentially he allows the public to use and distribute his music in any way they wish.

I thought it will be best to summarize Brad’s views on a number of issues instead of transcribing the entire interview:

Music distribution model

With reference to the 6 possible models outlined in David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists – And Megastars, Brad thinks he uses a combination of the “self-distribution” and “license” models. He does mostly self-distribution through his website and other sites like iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, CD Baby). In addition, he has a non-exclusive 5-year contract with Magnatunes.com in which he gets a percentage of profits they make.

Why adopt such an approach?

Brad is interested in both music and the web. He saw the possibility of this model very early when MP3s become popular on the web, and it seemed obvious to him that music would now be accessed through files instead of CDs. The simple approach of cutting off “middlemen” appealed to him.

On copyright

Brad has stated on his website that the public is free to use his music. Original samplers may even be used commercially. This approach has worked well thus far. This model has been an economical way for him to attain publicity on a scale he had never imagined. He has been able to obtain “free advertising” and spread his music round the globe. Any kind of publicity is useful for a budding musician.

Brad also referred us to an article by Kevin Kelly that played a part in his development of this particular model of music distribution.

While Brad has come across instances when others used his music without giving him credit, he noticed how these projects do not normally go very far. Since he already has a presence on the web, it is easy for him to discredit such attempts through blogging. The publicity from such scandals can actually be beneficial for him.

Brad did clarify though that he still has financial needs, he is still a “capitalist”. He just does not think that revenue can be obtained simply by forcing people to pay for songs. Since he already obtains free publicity from his fans’ voluntary distribution of his music, he thinks he should “go easy” on copyright.

Ultimately, revenue will still be earned once he develops a relationship with his fans. Donations, sale of his CDs, purchase of his CDs and licensing will naturally follow. Brad has been earning his income from all this diverse sources. His music has even been noticed by William Gibson, author of Cyberpunk, who came across his music through a YouTube video. Brad thinks that his model of music distributorship, which was very novel when he first launched it, was actually instrumental in drawing attention to his music. He has also noticed that his fans seem more willing to donate because they are aware that he is an independent musician and the money they pay does not go to recording companies or large corporations.

While copyright has a place in protecting other parties such as corporation, in Brad’s opinion, it cannot ultimately harm him. On the contrary, any unauthorized use of his music will lead to more publicity for him.

The future musician and the music industry

Brad sees himself as a “humanized” and independent musician who builds relationships with his fans. His success is probably due in no small part to the connection his fans feel with him. Some of the things he has done to make him a “personable” musician include organizing a contest for background vocals, blogging and posting drafts of his songs online.

Brad thinks this model of distribution through the web allows him to be a semi-professional musician. He is able to be engaged in other activities such as programming, apart from music. Looking to the future, he thinks that it is probable that record companies would increasingly be open to alternative modes of distribution that include profit sharing. See, for example, rcrdlbl.com.

Web difference

How is the web crucial in causing Brad’s music to thrive? Brad finds that he would never have been able to succeed without the explosion of MP3s and the web. The web offers avenues for people to be easily connected to him and for them, in turn, to be connected to others and spread his works. File sharing through the web has essentially provided free marketing of musicians’ works. The numerous untrackable networks in the web, together with file sharing, have caused music files to be spread in most unpredictable ways. In today’s world, everyone has infinitely more choices than before. It is no longer the age when you could only obtain music through the radio or records.

Future plans?

Brad’s plans will be quite dynamic. The main focus will still be on giving his fans many options in using his music.

I think I’m not alone in thinking that this class was really inspiring, especially for any aspiring musicians amongst us. While we may discuss about copyright and web difference, it certainly helps to hear what an actual musician thinks about all our debates.

David Weinberger took us on a tour of thorny definitional problems in Class 2. The point of the class, on one level, was to draw lines: what do we mean by the “web”? How does that differ from what we mean by “the Internet”?

The readings are all classics: Reed/Saltzer/Clark on End-to-End Arguments in System Design; Isenberg’s Rise of the Stupid Network; Searls/Weinberger on World of Ends; and Tim Berners-Lee on Weaving the Web (chs. 1 and 4; not online; you have to buy it).

The web, David argued, is a standard. It’s a linking standard. It allows for hypertext links, which are highly decentralized. It mediates humans and technology.

What is the web, if not a standard? Some responses from the class:

- It’s a cultural phenomenon; a thing that people do.

- It’s a sum of pages that appear in the web format.

- It’s a sphere (DW wanted to know: is there an implication of incompleteness?).

- It’s a communications medium.

- It’s a marketplace.

DW also talked us through issues related to HTML 5. He surprised himself (and all of us, who know enough to be surprised, I suppose) by saying he actually likes the proposed HTML 5. The people who write standards like to make it easy for computers to understand what the standard has allowed the user to include. But that is not the same as making a system easy for human beings to use. HTML 5 adds a bunch of new tags, anticipating what people want to do with it. But what does this have to do with end-to-end? One of the points of e2e is that you don’t anticipate what people are going to want in future. David still kind of likes it.

David got some hard questions back from the class. One line of reasoning: when we talk a lot about “centers” of the network, which one apparently wishes to be stupid, how do we know if a part of the complex network is in fact “center” or “edge”? And, separately, in World of Ends — a polemical piece — it appears that he and Doc prefer a network with minimal control. As one student contended, from time to time, control would be required on the network — if not at the center of the network, then at the ends. Who is to say (cf. Zittrain) that control at the ends is better than control at the center? And how do we know that minimal control is a good idea anyway?

We ended up getting into regional differences in control in Class 3, on Monday, when we took up the work of the OpenNet Initiative.

Recap from last week:
-everybody but one person has downloaded stuff online.
Reasons why it’s OK:
-no obligation of fairness to record companies
-not like taking an actual thing/ “information wants to be free”
-necessity-type arguments (needed it for class, artists I like don’t get wide distribution)

Perfect DRM/ good pricing: a good thing?
Copyright underenforcement in some areas, like animations involving video games – free advertising for them. “Permissive use”/ “implied license.” Could be casualty of perfect control/good pricing.

Possible future scenario: Fisher Ch.3 – perfectly enforced “fairness.” Utopian or dystopian scenario?

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[Due to the format of the class (and maybe also my personal definition of what a liveblog is) I chose not to try to condense the discussion we had, trying to preserve as much of it as possible. Sorry for the resultant length! Also, there are probably some inaccuracies in here, apologies in advance, and feel free to comment if I mangled one of your points.]

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An addendum to yesterday’s class notes - this is the link to the video that JP mentioned regarding the Beijing Olympics (to which I have tickets!):

http://www.runnerspace.com/news.php?do=view&news_id=680.

Despite the fact that I volunteered to be the first class blogger, Professor Palfrey began the class by maligning for my NY Giants shirt. Evidently reluctant to linger on a sore subject, he was eager to move on to Internet filtering.

A. Palfrey began the Internet filtering discussion with a chalkboard exercise using Professor Benkler’s layers of the Internet as a frame. The layers include:

1. Content (e.g. this blog post)
2. Applications (e.g. Microsoft Word)
3. Logic Layer (e.g. TCP/IP and other standards)
4. Infrastructure (hardware)

B. For more on Benkler’s layers, see Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52 FED. COMM. L.J. 561 (2000), available at http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v52/no3/benkler1.pdf.

C. Palfrey then moved on to explain the inspiration for the Access Denied project. A number of scholars, Palfrey, Zittrain, and Business School Professor Ben Edeleman among them, set out to determine whether Internet users could access the same Internet from anywhere in the world. They tested the notion through a number of case studies, most notably Saudi Arabia and China:

1. Saudi Arabia – the Saudi authorities were reluctant to bring the Internet to their populace. They maintain a website (http://www.isu.net.sa/index.htm) that contains information regarding the state’s filtering program. It includes a mechanism by which Saudi citizens may request that a blocked site be made available. The Saudis were initially cooperative with the Access Denied project and blocked primarily pornography.

2. China – much less forthcoming. There is no analogous site that explains the state’s filtering policies or any process for requesting that a given site has been blocked unnecessarily.

3. With a smooth segue back to the Internet layers, Palfrey explained that the while both the Saudis and the Chinese filtered at low down levels of the Infrastructure and Logic layers, the Chinese also engage in higher level filtering at the Application and Content layers. They enlisted the assistance of the ISPs, OSPs, and search engines to engage in filtering.

a) Palfrey then brought up the Open Net Initiative Google China Search Comparison site and ran a number of search comparisons, including “human rights” and “Tiananmen Square.” Google.cn’s search results page states that “all results are not here.” The URL for the ONI Google Search is http://opennet.net/google_china/.

B. Turkey: A New Case Study?

1. Professor Palfrey is on his way to Turkey this evening to attend a number of meetings on Internet filtering. When Palfrey asked the members of the class who they expected to be involved in the discussions, people suggested not only major ISPs and application providers from both Turkey and the U.S., but also religious leaders and academics.

2. As Palfrey explains, in many countries, there are disputes between the Minister of Economic Development, who is generally in favor of an open Internet, and the Minister of Telecommunications, who is generally in favor of filtering on the basis of protectionism.

C. Timed Censorship Strategies - Recently, Palfrey and others have observed strategically timed censorship efforts in the context of elections. The preferred method of timed censorship strategies is overloading. Overloading the censored sites is an ingenious methods of censorship because it is difficult to distinguish from high Internet traffic.

D. Wikipedia in China - Why might Wikipedia be blocked and unblocked three times? It’s clear why it got blocked initially. Wikipedia is potentially dangerous for the Chinese government. But why would they unblock it? They probably realized the beauty of Wikipedia – that anyone can edit it at any time. As a result, the Chinese government may have figured they could win the propaganda war against Wikipedia users. Why block it again? Other countries (ex. Japan) may be dedicating the same resources to the editing war. And so the cycle continues.

E. Internet and Gender – In the last few minutes, Professor Palfrey turned to the question of gender differences on the web, in the context of the Pew survey. Understandably, many students had issues with the survey methodology, most notably the potential inaccuracy of a self-reporting survey method.

GO GIANTS!!!!

[NOTE: This is live blogging. It is therefore full of errors, omissions, bad paraphrases, and general misreporting.] After introductions — the course is over-subscribed, and there are about 35 people in the room — JP leads a half hour discussion of the “autoadmit” matter. As one of the students explains, AutoAdmit is an anonymous forum for people to compare law schools. The target audience is people trying to decide between law schools. One of the owners is a UPenn law student, and there may be a second, unknown owner. A while ago, people started posting some awful stuff: threats, name-calling, etc. E.g., one of the postings claimed that a particular student killed himself, although that was false. And there were allegations of sexual acts by that student. What was different about the fact these acts occurred at an online message board, JP asks.
A: The anonymity of the people posting. [Sorry, I don’t know student names at this point.]
A: Harder to figure out the responsibility of the host of the Web site. A newspaper might find it easier to track down who sent in an anonymous letter. So: 1. Should the host be liable? 2. If so, what is the duty of the host to find the name of the msg sender?

A: Many other users can reproduce the info and link to it.
JP: And the legal question is whether you can make someone liable for pointing to these nasty comments?
A: The repercussions are much broader because the site is public.
A: And it never goes away.
A: And that applies not only to the subjects of the defamation but to anyone who is involved in any way, including the host.
JP: It’s the difference between a river and a pool. If you overhear me say something, it’s gone in the river. If it’s online and you can search for it, it’s in the pool.
JP: ReputationDefender works in this space. These facts have given rise to a new industry.

A: One thing can be in multiple locations, raising jurisdictional questions.

A: Because there’s so much out there, defamatory postings may actually have less effect.

A: The transaction costs of spreading info are much lower.
JP: The cost of speech is almost zero. For whom else are the transaction costs lower?
A: The readers. The host.
JP: Maybe there’s a value to having slightly high transaction costs because it acts as a gate?
A: The lower costs means you can participate. You can be part of the story.
JP: Yes. Message diffusion takes on a different nature. And sometimes those messages get wrapped up in you. Maybe identity takes on a role here.
A: The person can respond exactly on the same page, not like if it were a printed pamphlet.
JP: Awesome. This is a read-write medium.
A: I’m interested in blogs where flame wars occur. E.g., a Yankees-RedSox site. In political flame wars, it can be who yells the loudest. People will keep repeating wrong info.
JP: What’s different about the Web?
A: The volume and the persistence.

A: It’s a question of authority. Anyone can say anything.
JP: This is a question about intermediaries: Who’s allowed to speak for whom? Dan Rather spoke for CBS.
A: The Internet makes it easier to know what’s been said about you, so you can respond faster.

JP: LT, what is the state of the law? Who do we hold liable?
LT: Generally the speakers. Not the intermediaries. Section 230 gives immunity to intermediaries.
JP: If it were a newspaper?
LT: They’d be liable.
JP: CraigsList has been found not liable for discriminatory ads that a newspaper would have been held liable for.

Then I lead the class in a discussion about whether friendship online is the same as offline. Is it possible? Is it the same? Most in the class think it’s possible. Some think the differences are negligible. Others think the differences are real. Conclusions (from my pov): 1. It can be difficult to identify differences and even harder to evaluate their significance; 2. Differences, possibly even small ones, can require us to think carefully about policy and software design decisions. [The discussion was more interesting than this preemptory summary. But I can’t live-blog and lead a discussion simultaneously.]
Corinna di Gennaro, of the Berkman Center, who has been sitting in, says that research shows that friendships do occur. Her research shows bloggers are less likely to make online friends and meet friends offline compared to email lists and social networking sites. [Interesting!] [Tags: webdiff autoadmit friendship john_palfrey ]