Products containing high fructose corn syrup cannot be considered 'natural' and should not be labeled as such, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said.
The decision is likely to cause a massive stir in the food and beverage industry, where a discreet battle has been raging over the status of the controversial sweetener.
Awesome! Anyone even slightly concerned about eating "Naturally" should take note. I hope this will raise awareness to the fact that corn syrup has laced nearly all of the foods you can buy at a regular store. Now I can only hope that manufacturers return to more realistic ingredients like sugar and evaporated cane juice, and not delve deeper into creating another evil sweetener.
]]>Collective licensing solves a tricky legal problem, but creates an uneven playing field for artists.
At first glance collective licensing seems like a perfect solution. You have ISP's take a little money from users and then give that money to the music industry. Then money should flow to the artists to compensate them for "lost sales" due to P2P traffic. The keyword here is should.
If you go and sue P2P downloaders and get money from them, that money should flow back to the artists, right? Well, that's not happening. The artists haven't received any money from the RIAA & Co -- remember the music industry is full of rat bastards.
But, lets give the "music industry" the benefit of the doubt for a minute. Now consider this uneven playing field:
Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.
Just how do you intend to measure the infringement to pay artists? Given that the recording industry has proven itself completely incompetent (intentionally or otherwise) I don't trust them to do this right. Figuring out who deserves what turns out to be a hard problem fraught with many perils, unless you simply put the music industry in charge.
From everything I've learned about the music industry, they relish opacity in their accounting. Labels commonly hide behind numbers in obscure contracts which prevents artists easily asserting their fair share. The artists lose this struggle because they have to fight for money tooth and nail (with lawyers and accountants, who cose $$$).
The labels would love to have a spout of money turned on and poured directly into their opaque accounting cash cow. Little if any money would ever come out and then only the big artists sucking up to their labels will see any cash. The rest gets squat.
This makes life for indies harder and harder -- unsigned artists get infringed on just like signed artists, yet with this system the indies would never see any cash. Collective licensing could put the big labels back on top with an ever firmer grip on the music industry -- it would have the cash to squash the edgy Internet labels and Music 2.0 companies. The quality of music would continue to go down and the prices would still be kept high.
Ugh. No thanks. Please let the free enterprise and our legal system figure out the best approach! I feel that we're getting close to striking a realistic balance between the needs of fans, artists and the labels.
Say no to collective licensing!
]]>Case in point Divx recently shut down Stage6:
So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide.
While filling a need or building a cool site on the net is fun, the laws on the Internet apply to everyone: Success is expensive! Building a cool site like Stage6 may fill a need on the net. But if you don't have the business model to support your service, success will kill it. This sounds totally counter-intuitive, but hosting tons of traffic on the net isn't cheap -- especially if you're serving tons of video! Its important to have income match your traffic -- if you cannot derive cash from traffic, you're going to die. Its really that simple.
Wikipedia is in the news again, for the same reason:
"Imagine if the other top 10 websites in the world, like Yahoo or Google, tried to run their budgets by asking for donations from 14-year olds," said Chad Horohoe, a 19-year-old college student in Richmond, Va., who was until recently a Wikipedia site administrator, one of the 1,500 or so people authorized to delete pages or block users from making changes to articles. "It isn't sustainable."
Sad, but very true. A few years ago I had hoped that donations could help artists/musicians/hackers etc, but I think I'm finally done with that notion. People aren't willing to open up their wallets enough to really make anything serious happen. Hosting a site with donations? Yes. Paying a paycheck: Not bloody likely.
Case in point: MetaBrainz took in 16.5% ($14,780.59) of total income in end-user donations in 2007. Our hosting expenses were 13.6% ($12,240). But paying out one meager salary (at about 1/3 of market value) was 44% ($39,500). Our donations were not even close to covering that cost.
The moral of the story: You need a business model that works. Especially so, if you're in the non-profit sector since the "sell out to Google" model doesn't work. So, Wikipedia, find a model to license your pages for commercial use -- do it now!
Call me if you want me to pop in sometime and share my thoughts with you. :)
]]>... when the typical person is a teenager, they’re spending a lot of time looking for more. “What’s the new thing, what’s the next thing, what’s the new thing?” But these guys don’t want that. They want to remember THEN, they don’t go looking for the new thing. And, it’s not your fault they were baby boomers, it’s not your fault the baby boomers are getting old.
At the excellent San Fran Music Tech Summit last week had a panel with a guy who worked on the original Napster. This guy now works for a music label and was totally surprised by the fact that teenagers stopped buying CDs. Its clear to me that the labels are blind not only to technology, but to general trends in their customer base. Having a marketing person like Seth Godin chime in rounds out what the Internet has been saying about labels for quite some time.
]]>Making the RIAA go away and seriously rethinking the priorities for the IFPI would be an excellent way to change the attitude of the music industry towards their customers. The Swedish government has gotten a really big clue about Internet piracy (thanks to the Pirate Bay, no doubt) and they are advocating making file sharing legal:
Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet.
That is very true and very smart for a government to be saying these things. Even further, legalizing non-commercial file sharing is the only way that the record (and movie) companies will ever fully adopt a strategy to embrace the Internet. Having it be legal forces the labels to embrace a model that assumes that its going to be easy to pirate content. Only when labels fully understand this concept will they change to a meaningful business model.
I'm tickled pink to see progress be made -- finally!
]]>Ars Technica did a nice piece on the continuing decline of CD Sales late last year -- looks like the big labels finally realized that people are giving up the CD in favor of digital downloads. And they finally realized that DRM prevents sales altogether, so previously there was no viable transition from CD income to download income. But now without DRM, they stand a chance to survive.
Now it remains to be seen if the labels can reinvent their businesses to survive on the Internet. I have one concrete suggestion on how to save money: Stop funding the RIAA -- your customers are increasingly boycotting artists who publish music on labels that support the RIAA. If you pour the money you give to the RIAA to serving your customers and taking care of your bands, you may have a viable business model again!
2007 was quite the turning point for DRM. I wonder if the rest of the industry can wake up in 2008 and finally embrace the Internet fully!
]]>Fortunately David Byrne has written this Artist HOWTO!
David lays out the realities of the music industry and outlines what models will work on the net. He's included lots and lots of good quotes from people who tell it like it is. This is simply the best concise wrap-up of the state of the industry today. Read it!
2007 may be the year the music industry broke. But the new music industry is already here -- we've been building it for the last 10 years!
]]>Now a small grocery in Seattle has declared itself free of HFCS:
There are no Wheat Thins at PCC Natural Markets, no boxes of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, not even any Sara Lee whole grain bagels or Oroweat cracked-wheat hot dog buns.
What customers will find is almost unheard of: a supermarket free of products containing high-fructose corn syrup.
Three cheers for PCC! I hope that Trader Joes will follow suit and nuke the remainder of HFCS products on their shelves.
]]>What?
That's right -- Live Nation is a concert promoter and not a label. While there is plenty of speculation about the finances behind the deal and wether its good for Warner and bad for Live Nation, the deal sends one strong message: The concert is the future of the music industry.
Music fans are less likely to spend money on music these days and the ways of getting the music for free are numerous. But, seeing a concert is a big ticket event these days. Ticket prices are skyrocketing as artists are trying to make up for losses in music sales.
But, I see problems with this approach as well. I personally won't shell out in excess of $100 for a massive concert where I get searched and can't bring in my own water. Attendees get gouged at every step and turn in these concerts and fans are increasingly staying away from these concerts.
So, the new music industry is going to have to reinvent the concert experience if they want it to be a serious part of their income. I'm curious to see how this will turn out.
]]>Seriously, this is where the music industry should've been 10 years ago when mp3 first appeared on the scene. But what did they do? Nothing at first. Then came Napster to prove that there was demand and the labels balked and sued Napster. Never did they open their own store to meet the market demand.
What happened in light of this? People figured out the tools to rip their own CDs. The learned what it meant to enjoy music in the digital age, even though many rips were crap and early mp3s sounded pretty awful. The metadata was a total mess, but with a little effort you could be in control of your own music collection. In other words, they lost the consumer. Forever.
The music industry missed the opportunity to sell the old catalog once again. People have been willing to buy CDs, even though they bought the same cassette tape years earlier and the labels failed to capitalize on that. Instead, the balked and started suing their customers.
In the meantime the value of recorded music drops to near zero as BitTorrent makes the experience to pirate better than the experience of going to the store to buy the media. (This is especially true with movies today where you do not have to sit through endless trailers that you can't skip. BitTorrent the movie and you get no heavy handed trailers and only the movies you wanted. For free.)
By focusing on their insipid desire to self-destruct, they neglect the artist. Artists have been ripped off for years and when the consumers/fans bail on the labels, the artist are stuck holding the bag. So, what's the logical conclusion? The artists revolt and dump their contracts as soon as they can.
The blindness of the label caused them to lose the consumer and the artist. Gone. If you have neither, you have no business left. Expect massive lay-offs or total collapse at the labels in the next few years.
Finally -- I've been waiting for 10 years.
The new music industry is here. CD Baby, IODA, iTunes, Amazon already provide lots of means for artists to get their music out to fans. After being bitter about the utter lack of progress for so many years, I'm enjoying sitting back and watching this whole scene unfold. Finally.
]]>Microsoft has just announced that it will sell more than a million DRM-free tracks in the Zune store. In other news, Satan just sent out for a snow-shovel.
This gives me hope that the high tech music industry will finally have a chance to flourish, now that DRM free mp3s allow for interoperability between music sellers.
]]>She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent "millions" on the lawsuits, she then said that "we've lost money on this program."
I've suspected that this program wouldn't make them money ever since it started and its nice to get that confirmed now. What's even more amazing is this:
"We haven't stopped to calculate the amount of damages we've suffered due to downloading, but that's not what's at issue here," replied Pariser, who was reminded by Judge Michael Davis to answer the questions actually asked by Toder, not hypotheticals.
Toder then pressed the Sony executive on the question of how many people actually downloaded music from the defendant. "We don't know," she replied. "I can't identify any other entities aside from what SafeNet reported, but I know that many others did... that's the way the system works."
Wow! This program is costing them money, creating tons of ill will, yet they have no means to quantify that its working at all! When you conduct business in this manner there is only one way to go: Out of business. Anyone with an ounce of business intelligence would do a rough ROI analysis and immediately figure out that its amazingly stupid to have started this program in the first place. Of course they say that "Lawsuits are punitive, not business " -- I'd hate to tell you this, but if you're losing money, its business!
Of course this information comes from the same source that tells us that CD Ripping is stealing. You can't possibly go out of business one moment too soon!
]]>First off, DRM peddlers are not happy about the state of the industry:
Among DRM peddlers, there's also a bit of jealously because some DRM systems are "successful." Take the comments made by Talal Shamoon, CEO of InterTrust (a company working on interoperable DRM schemes, among other things): "Apple is using encryption to try to do what Ma Bell used to do with the phone network: wall people in," he said. "It frustrates consumers and ultimately feeds piracy."
That's the pot calling the kettle black if I ever heard it. The bottom line is that Apple is the only company making head-way with music right now and everyone else is left holding the bag. And that feeds discontent and finger-pointing in the DRM circles. Awesome.
Concrete examples that show the DRM is failing also came about this week. Virgin Digital decided to shutter its DRM laden digital download store:
Virgin Digital, the online presence of the UK-based Virgin Group that owns Virgin Megastores, has announced that it has begun closing its doors in stages, beginning last week. According to a message on the site, the online music store has already shut its doors to new customers as of last Friday, and as of this coming Friday, it will cease selling individual tracks to current customers.
. . .
The site now advises its customers who have purchased tracks to back them up, as they will not be able to download them again once Virgin Digital has closed. It's unclear whether the purchasers of individual tracks will be able to access their songs without burning them to CD and reimporting them as MP3s, but it's better to be safe than sorry if you're one of those customers.
Now Virgin Digital tells its customers to circumvent its DRM in order to retain access to the files after the store closes. Let's count the things wrong with this:
Proof once again that DRM sticks it to customers and not the Pirates. This also reminds me of a quote from someone at the Future of Music Policy summit:
"There is a $1B gap between CD sales and digital audio download sales. The download sales are not making up what we've lost in CD sales."
I wish I would've written down who said that -- its clear that this person didn't understand that DRM is hampering the transition from CDs to digital downloads. Music sellers like CD Baby who sell their content to anyone who wants to offer it for download on the net, DRM or not, are doing great! They have no $1B gap to worry about!
Finally, Amazon.com opened its DRM free digital download store in beta today. We lost one crappy DRM site and gained a new download store from a reputable seller. We win, DRM loses!
]]>Then during the Q&A portion I asked (paraphrased):
The anti-circumvention clause in the DMCA has spawned a number of copyright unrelated and stupid lawsuits. I'm talking about garage door openers, inkjet printers and now even a religious case. As a geek and engineer I object to the anti-circumvention clause. Can we dump it yet??
C-Net picked up on this question and promptly wrote about a portion of her answer (and they didn't mention me :-( ). Then Slashdot picked up on the C-Net story and it was all over the net. However, what C-Net didn't blog about was one comment that Mrs. Peters made:
All the lawsuits that have been spawned from the anti-circumvention clause have turned out right.
I'm not sure if all, but she does have a point that the major suits have been found in favor of those doing the circumventing and against those who tried to apply the DMCA outside of its original context. While she has a point, I fear that her and I are diametrically opposed on the virtues and the vices of the DMCA. Mrs Peters likes the anti-circumvention clause, but she doesn't like the safe-harbour clause:
Peters indicated she was less thrilled, however, about a portion of the DMCA that generally lets hosting companies off the hook for legal liability, as long as they don't turn a blind eye to copyright infringement and remove infringing material when notified.
The safe-harbour clause is the only redeeming clause in the DMCA, in my opinion. Thus Marybeth Peters and I (and I suspect tons of geeks in this country) are diametrically opposed on the DMCA. But this shouldn't come as a surprise as I am a tech geek and Mrs Peters is a luddite.
This country is sooo broken its sad.
]]>A youth counsellor snapped a picture of one of his students and then posts it to Flickr with an attribution license. Commercial use was allowed! Virgin Mobile Australia finds the picture, uses it and gives attribution to the photographer -- nothing wrong was done here. Then the student finds out that she is part of the Virgin Ad campaign, gets pissy and sues Virgin Mobile in the US and the Creative Commons.
The family says that:
The experience damaged Alison's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and scrutiny from people who can now Google her, the family said in the lawsuit.
"It's the tag line; it's derogatory," said Damon Chang, 27. "A lot of her church friends saw it."
Oh please! This lawsuit boggles the mind -- I can't believe that they found a lawyer willing to file it. The Creative Commons didn't do anything wrong -- they provided the license, but had no hand in actually licensing the picture. Virgin Mobile USA wasn't involved either, yet they and the CC are the plaintiffs of the lawsuit.
It makes sense to sue one person in this case: The youth counsellor. But I'm guessing that this guy doesn't have deep pockets, so why sue him? Let's sue everyone tangential to the actual case, in hopes that someone is going to fork over cash to make this lawsuit go away.
I hate stupid people and I hate stupid lawyers that write suits like these. I hope that Larry argues these fools into the ground -- I'd pay to see that!
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