by
Chris Gilbey
on September 1, 2007 10:42AM (EST)
What a mess is being made of copyright in the online world.
People steal works from others. People borrow stuff. Some people rely on what they think is the "fair use" provisions of the copyright act. People in Australia think that because they have read an article online about how Google appears to be fighting the Viacom lawsuit that they can use similar arguments in Australia, where copyright law is different to the US.... and on it goes.
And then you see this kind of story appear and you realize that the whole thing is a rats nest of infinite proportions. (And thanks to Laurel Papworth and her blog for pointing to this story).
Seems like Viacom has muscled YouTube into pulling down a piece of content that was part of a program on VH1. Only problem is that the program on VH1 used the material that they have forced YT to pull without permission in the first place. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
We have to realize that copyright in the digital age doesn't work in the way that pre-digital legislators and rights owners contemplated (and the rights owners were the people who lobbied for the laws in the first place, and essentially wrote th first drafts of the statutes anyway).
It is a really interesting time for this discussion too because we are moving rapidly to a point where the amount of time spent consuming media online will be greater than the amount of time spent consuming traditional electronic media. I read the following in a report from Strategic News Service that came out last month:
Video will drive a 21% CAGR in IP traffic across WANs through 2011.
Consumer traffic will surpass business in 2008, causing overall IP traffic to nearly double yearly through 2011. Est. CAGRs: consumer is 58%, business is 23%.
Total IP traffic will nearly quintuple between 2006 and 2011.
Business IP traffic will grow most quickly in developing markets and Asia- Pacific.
Consumer IP traffic will exceed 17 exabytes per month by 2011; business, 10.
40% of consumer IP traffic will be Internet (non-video) traffic, 60% will be “traffic generated by the delivery of traditional commercial video services over IP within a single operator’s network.”
So you can see with this sort of growth infrastructure will grow apace. And content will then have the air to also grow at a phenomenal rate. And at the same time the dirty little secret of the long tail will be there biting us on the bum. That secret of course is the corollary of the millions of markets scenario. This is the fact that content in the digital realm never goes away and continues to propagate at an ever increasing rate.
Which means that copyright owners (copywrong, I prefer to call them now) are going to find that the instances of their works are going to keep on appearing somewhere...
And unless they start by measuring the number of uses or number of occurrences they will never know how much money is leaking out of the system, how much revenue they are foregoing.
And of course this applies perhaps more strongly to new and emerging copyright creators and authors than it does to the incumbents. The incumbents already tend to be paid more than their due, because of the existing policies of the various societies. The rules of the societies are to pay the black box monies on a follow the dollar basis (of course they always deny the existence of a 'black box' but it is there under a variety of names).
So where does all this lead?
You have to have measurement, metrics, analytics. Not just so that advertisers can figure where the best spot is to place an ad, but so that a proper system of reward can be instituted for the creatives in the community.
This is really an imperative for collections societies, I believe. Whether we move to a Larry Lessig vision for the adoption of Creative Commons licenses or some other model, you need to start first with measuring the market. (Full disclosure: This is the vision for Vquence now, which I am a director of, to measure every aspect of social media online).
Well, after a long haul, yesterday we finally got our first 'real' deal done at Vquence.
We are supplying a quite complex set of video solutions to an about to be launched web site that is focusing on the forthcoming federal election. More on this once we are green lit to be able to talk about it.
But we think that the set of solutions that we are providing are going to be very cool for people who are interested in following all the video activity of both the pollies and the public.
There is now no doubt that we are in the early part of a massive shift in the culture of Australia.
We are about to become a fully integrated YouTube society.
For a lot of people this will not be apparent for possibly several years. By that time the momentum will be sufficient that many marketers and PR people will not be able to get their clients and employers onto the bandwagon.
The amazing thing is that this revolution is being led by the mainstream political parties in Australia. First the Liberals with 4 major policy statements being announced by our Prime Minister, John Howard, on YouTube.
Then, the launch yesterday of the Kevin07 website. Laden with video - that is also on YouTube - it, together with the PM, is setting the pace for communications this spring in Australia as we head into a Federal Election.
At the same time there are new websites in the process of coming onstream like www.federalelection.com.au. The goal of this one is to provide the total forum for debate in the coming months. A site where all parties and candidates can be presented side by side. Great idea. Not sure if they are going to be able to make it the commercially viable success they would like as rapidly as they would like. We shall see.
What I find amazing is that this sea change to our culture. Because this is as big as when TV became the debating platform in the US. And Richard Nixon became 'Tricky Dicky' because under the powerful TV lights his 12 0'clock shadow made it look like he wasn't clean. Or prior to that when Eisenhower used TV to advertise in his presidential campaign. These were firsts.
Now in Australia we will have the first true YouTube election anywhere in the world. It stands to be a bell weather that campaigners in the US and UK will watch and use to avoid mistakes. And it should also set some examples for how we can expect corporations to get their marketing messages through to us in coming years.
(By the way, at Vquence we are starting to realize that the tools that we have been developing that enable us to rapidly crawl video hosting sites and monitor changes in near real time also provide us with a huge amount of raw data that can be massively valuable to companies that want to play in this space.)
THEY are known to television executives as the “Lost Boys”—the generation of video-gaming young men who are watching less television and, thanks to ad-skipping technologies such as TiVo, even fewer advertisements. The obvious response is to start putting advertisements into games instead, by incorporating billboards into the game environment, for example. But incorporating static advertisements into games is unsatisfactory. Now that most PCs and a growing number of games consoles are connected to the internet, however, it is possible to update advertisements when required. As a result, static in-game advertisements are now giving way to dynamic adverts, which accounted for $26m of the $76m spent on in-game advertising last year, and will account for 55% of the $182m spent this year, says the Yankee Group, a consultancy.
Topic-specific search-engines hope to challenge Google, at least in some areas
ARE you a generalist or a specialist? The question can be asked of people, but it is increasingly being asked about internet search-engines, as specialist or “vertical” sites take on generalists such as Yahoo! and Google. Some are already prospering: GlobalSpec.com, for example, a profitable search-engine for engineers, has 3.5m registered users and signs up another 20,000 each week. “They own that market,” says Charlene Li of Forrester, a consultancy.
This is due in large part to GlobalSpec's definable customer base. Its knowledge about the needs of its users sets it apart from the generalist search-engines, says Angela Hribar of GlobalSpec. Vertical sites, which serve up search results from a carefully selected group of topic-specific websites, can also target advertising at particular audiences more precisely...
Over the past week I have posted quite a bit of video to my blog.
Some of the video that I posted were in the form of vquences - mashed up thin slices of content - with fairly random themes - and some were full videos of pieces of content that I thought it would be good to share.
The ability to share, or socialize, video and to do it rapidly, seems to me to be in the process of becoming a serious part of internet activity. OK, I know this is not new. That is not the point. It is about our desire to share extremely rapidly.
Videos happen to be an extremely efficient way to transmit memes - idea viruses.
Now what we want is to be able to have the water cooler conversations that we used to have about the latest Seinfeld episode, about the hottest new video on YouTube. It may also be that the hottest new video on YT was also the hot piece of programming that was on network TV last night - something from John Stewart's Daily Show, a piece of footage shot on a mobile phone of the latest shooting at a US high school, a bomb going off in Baghdad or Tel Aviv...
These water cooler conversations are what enables all profitable media organizations to stay profitable. Because they maintain and grow the consumer engagement with the core media brand.
We also know that video on a web site makes that site much more sticky. I heard the other day at the Future Of Media conference that the CNet game site, Gamespot, gets user engagements averaging over 2 hours per visitor! I understand that YouTube's time of engagement runs out to about 20 minutes per viewer. Big numbers.
Since all of us have a finite amount of discretionary time, one would have to deduce that the impact of video on traditional media web sites must be huge.
So it is not surprising that they are rushing to include video in their offerings.
What they havent figured out yet, for the most part, I believe, is that there is no universal panacea in just putting video onto a web page.
The real answer in building an ongoing value in the relationship between media brand and consumer is to give the consumer the tools that will enable him or her to instantly share a video with his or her network of friends. An automatic alert that enables the meme to connect as rapidly as possible. And for the meme to be branded to the media outlet, regardless of where the underlying content comes from (or is hosted).
Surely the delivery of a service that provides this solves the pain of the consumer/user and the media brand?
However, it also raises huge questions about ownership of the underlying content, attaching a new brand to that content etc....
Here is an article I wrote for a new online magazine called The Marketing Leaders about business ecosystems and online video search.
Sometime, somehow, somewhere during the last ten years we
reached and crossed a tipping point. We individualised communications
on a global scale. Now, the past is dead. It just remains to be buried.
But why?
Two-way conversations have broken out. Web
2.0 is the foundation of our new order. In a swift and continuing
evolution, the internet’s progress in realising the promise of the
nineties has been stunning.....
It’s time to toss the old tube to the dumpster. Well, not if you have one of those 47” plasma ones, but…you know what we mean. The future of media is the Internet, and television is no exception. Instead of browsing through the channels with your remote, you could be browsing through the free online TV providers on your computer - hell, if you like, you can watch them all at once (in really tiny windows). It’s time to reach out and see how much free online TV we can find..."
This Forum is where the partners in Perceptric Limited invite you to join us and explore issues that impact on business, consumers and communications.
Perceptric's mission is to help companies and people reach their goals and exceed their expectations.
The essence of this mission is for us to be clear thinking about business and change. This will often mean offering counterintuitive conclusions.
Our view? The shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line. It's the number of people needed to be present in a human network to influence and deliver positive decision making.
Each of the partners in Perceptric has been extremely successful in their chosen field by working this way. More than theory we each know it works.
As a company we work with our clients in the United States, Asia and Pacific regions, including Australia, to maximize their opportunities in an ever accelerating change environment.
