How to kill your business or The RIAA's take on Fair Use

It just keeps getting weirder...

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RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use

February 15, 2006

It is no secret that the entertainment oligopolists are not happy about space-shifting and format-shifting. But surely ripping your own CDs to your own iPod passes muster, right? In fact, didn't they admit as much in front of the Supreme Court during the MGM v. Grokster argument last year?

Apparently not.

As part of the on-going DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA and other copyright industry associations submitted a filing that included this gem as part of their argument that space-shifting and format-shifting do not count as noninfringing uses, even when you are talking about making copies of your own CDs:

"Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use."

For those who may not remember, here's what Don Verrilli said to the Supreme Court last year:

"The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod."

If I understand what the RIAA is saying, "perfectly lawful" means "lawful until we change our mind." So your ability to continue to make copies of your own CDs on your own iPod is entirely a matter of their sufferance. What about all the indie label CDs? Do you have to ask each of them for permission before ripping your CDs? And what about all the major label artists who control their own copyrights? Do we all need to ask them, as well?

P.S.: The same filing also had this to say: "Similarly, creating a back-up copy of a music CD is not a non-infringing use...."

Machine Generated Culture vs. Editorial Perspective

Something hit me recently about the value of culture defined by google vs. blogs. Machine readable culture vs. editorial.

Which is better? Which do I (in the gestalt) trust more?

Ask yourself this: when you want to form an opinion about something, your very own personal opinion, what do you do? Do you go Google and search or do you read blogs written by individuals you trust or, at the very least, are entertained by?

Google is the collective mind. The wisdom of crowds. The value of results computed by the sum total of links to the highly rated hits.. machine generated from the internet.

Blogs are individual voices from specific minds of people you know (or know of through their blogs). Many are deep experts in areas that you might be interested in. Some are just plain smart and interesting to read.

I do both, but I'm finding myself, more and more, searching for that individual voice (or voices) on particular topics, that I think has a ring of truth to it.

Of course, I often use Google to find these voices. The whole damn thing is circular as hell when you approach it that way.

Then, there's the personal recommendation thing. For instance, I like a couple of VC blogs. One from Brad Feld, a Colorado based VC and exceptionally straight shooter, damned smart and all around good guy. And a fellow named Fred Wilson in NYC.. same general description.

How did I find them? Through friends. Folks I trust telling me 'you've gotta read these guys blogs'. It helps to actually meet them as well (Brad, who's local to me, I've met and Fred's geographically a bit too far, so it's only been a bit of email).

It's funny though how I feel like I really know these guys. They're a part of my daily life. I subscribe to around 100 or so blogs and I read some percentage of them every day, Brad and Fred (along with 10 or so others) I ALWAYS read.

I read them more than I bother reading my $99 a year online Wall Street Journal. And in their specific area of expertise, I trust them (far) more than I do anything written in the Wall Street Journal or that I find through a Google search.

So... having thought this out via writing it down here, I think I have my answer: Blogs are 'more' real, from an informational trust point of view, than Google (or any other machine generated culture).

I love the gestalt.. the global mind. I have faith in the wisdom of crowds. But in the end, I TRUST individual minds like those owned by Brad and Fred.

We finally got our blog up

Well, that took too long.

We finally got our official blog up and running. We've had one for months, but the development team convinced me it would be bad form not to have it running on our own software (I was pushing to a typepad or (gasp) blogger account.. just to get something going).

So, it's there. Check it out at: www.clickcaster.com/blog

Creative name eh? Heh. whatcanyado?

A day with the Venture Capital Investment Competition

I spent the day today at the University of Colorado participating in a unique and interesting program. The Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC). Imagine, a room full of about 40 MBA students and 5 or six local venture capitalists. Also in the room: CEO's from 5 local early stage companies looking for funding.

Each CEO gives their pitch, limited to 10 minutes. Wrap up, next CEO. Audience of said MBA students, VC's and fellow CEO's watching. OK.. interesting, cool even. Fun watching other CEO's pitches (it’s unusual for CEO's to do this together at a VC oriented event).

Next, the work. Break out the MBA students into teams of 5. 8 Teams total. Each team grills you like they were a VC to determine if you're someone they're 'fantasy' VC firm would invest in. Two minute break between each 15 minute session.

1 CEO, 1 or 2 VC's 'monitoring' on the sideline and 2 solid hours of grilling broken into 15 minute chunks with a new group every 15 minutes cycling through.

Pretty eye opening, actually. These are the future junior VC's we'll be dealing with 2, 3, 5 years from now.

Some where funny. Some where naive. Some where hard and nasty (well, they tried to be). Some were arrogant, Some got it and some didn't. Some were intensely intelligent. Some, not so much.

Kinda like dealing with VC's, actually. Under developed. Didn't really know the lingo yet, but pretty much the same general themes.

What's interesting is I could SEE the kind of VC each of these guys would make in the future if VC work is something they actually went into. You know how you can tell what the personality of a child is when they're very young? Even under a year old?

Same thing here. You could spot the ones who were going to be assholes in 5 seconds. And you could tell which ones would be insightful and fun partners who could also make the hard decisions when needed in the first 30 seconds.

In terms of what I learned, well, some, but nothing earth shaking. Mostly validation of things already known. I didn't get any laser like insights. All of them told me they 'loved' my business (but who knows... part of their job was to get me to like them and rate THEM highly).

Maybe they were practicing that time honored VC tradition of 'the slow no'. Heh.. yea.. some definitely where. “be nice to the little startup guy.. you never know”. Some honestly liked the business. And with some of them, the space (consumer software with a business and social network twist) obviously confused them.

I did learn that some of them actually found this blog (which as I've noted before, I'm pretty sure no one reads but me and a few close friends). That, actually, impressed me. I don't advertise or link to this blog from any of my company related sites. You have to dig a bit to find it.

A few even logged into ClickCaster, my startup company's site, and created podcasts. All who did (seemed) impressed that it actually worked as advertised.

Style varied widely. One group shook my hand, sat down and started pounding me on the financials. I damn near said something like "what.. no foreplay"?.

Another glad handed and joked around for the first few minutes, selling me on why they were a great group to work with, then pounded me on the financials (among other things) and got reasonably deep reasonably quickly but never intrusively so. (they got my #1 vote).

There was the early evening mixer with VC's, CEO's and student advisors from CU as well. Good folks. Colorado has some very together VC's. I have yet to meet one I didn't like (not something I can say for every VC I’ve met over the years).

I talked with the other 4 CEO's. Several of them agreed we need a 'startup CEO' regular get together in the Denver Metro area. Think I'll put that together in the next few weeks, see if we can get something interesting going.

Overall, any startup CEO that gets a chance to do this shouldn't hesitate. It's a very mental kind of event and you're likely to feel a little like you've been the ball in a pro tennis match by the end of the day, but it's fun and you're giving back to the universities that sponsor the event (and the students) in a way only you, as a real world startup CEO, can.

Heh.. MPAA caught Pirating!

I love this (click on the post title for a link to The Register story on this). The MPAA, after promising not to.. PIRATED (made illegal copies) of a Documentary Movie on how the MPAA does rating of movies in America. Heh.. I love it. The MPAA Response? "We're above the law" (my interpretation).

What happened to Google's 'don't be evil'

With the announcement of Google opening a search engine in China, and agreeing the the Chinese government's limits, you have to wonder: Is Google becoming evil?

Could be.

Or, just maybe, it's a trojan horse.

Here's my Doing Business With China story and how I think it might relate to what Google's doing right now with it's internet business in the Middle Kingdom.

I used to work for Motorola back in the mid to late 90's where I ran new business creation for a recently created multimedia group. This group lived inside of a business unit that was responsible for creating services business within 'greenfield' (not yet penetrated by the company) markets. Places like Asia and S. America. Mostly for Motorola products like cellphones and pagers.

So, after I'd been there for two weeks, they asked me: What can we do with some of our new products and with our friends at Kodak?

So I made up a product and business that combined Kodak digital camera's (just coming into their own) and the Irridium sat phone technology that Mot was just getting up and running (a sat based phone that would work anywhere on the surface of the planet).

The idea was: Create a kiosk with a camera in it that would link the mass of young adults who were moving from China's countryside to the cities back with their parents. The kids (about 100 million of them) would send emails and pictures back to their rural parents through these kiosks placed a post offices around china. The kiosks would have Kodak cameras in them, and it would be linked by the Irridium network (since there was no infrastructure in China's rural areas).

I thought is a kind of interesting. But only kind of. It was one of several ideas but it had a Camera in it, and our boss was friends with the CEO of Kodak. So..we pitched it to the CEO of Kodak at the time and he loved it (go figure). A 30 min meeting with him went on for 3 hours.

So we went to build a prototype. I spent alot of time in China and in New York (Kodak) getting things worked out.

My secret goal: Sneak the internet into China. Create informational freedom. Open up the country to new ideas and the internet way.

It's SO nice to be ignorant of reality at times. But only in the beginning.

I wanted to use an internet protocol based server in each kiosk (using standand POP type mail to send the pictures and messages around the country). I figured, if I could get an internet server into every city and village in China (or, at least, several thousand), I could backdoor the Internet into the country. And if there was a company that could pull it off, it was Motorola. It was worth a shot.

Man, was I ever wrong.

China get's the power of information. They control it. Period. The post office, in China, is run by the Military (yea.. it would be like the US Army 'owning' the mail system in the US). They required that we give them tools to read every message sent over this system. EVERY message. No exceptions. If we wouldn't do that, they wouldn't let us put it in place.

(side note: I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, people in China didn't seal their envelopes when sending standard paper mail. They knew it would be opened anyway, so why bother?).

I agreed to do this. I hated it, but I also thought: well, it's a crack in the wall. Maybe, just maybe, we can still work real internet access in over time. I was willing to allow some 'evil' (the government reading all your messages) in order to get my foot in the door so, later, I could do some good (you can't really control the internet, once it's in place- or so I believed at the time).

So how does this relate to Google being evil or not being evil?

It's China, not Google, that's being evil (relatively speaking).

If you want to be in China, you do business by their rules. No exceptions. If you don't, then you're out. Since every 5th person on the planet is Chinese, it's a bad idea to ignore them if you're in the 'capture all human knowledge' business like Google. So, you play by their rules.

AND, if you're enlightened, you hope, over time, the power of the internet, like water on a rock, will eventually wear down the Chinese government walls of censorship and oppression of information.

Personally, that's what I think (hope) Google is doing here.

Time will tell.

Overload!

OK.. it's happened. I am offiically overloaded on data from the blogosphere. I've always been a data sponge, soaking up any and all information that came my way but the tools are now SO efficient that I'm overwhelmed.

And not just by 'too much data', but by too much actual knowledge!

I've always catagorized 'media' into Data... Information... Knowledge and, finally, Wisdom. And they go up in value as you move to the right.

The first three you can get externally, the last is what you create for yourself by putting together the other three in your mind into something useful (at least to you).

I started using Bloglines about 6 weeks ago. I found many blogs that were loaded with great information and many with real knowledge. I subscribe to around 60 or so blogs on topics of interest. Well, I'm finding that many of these guys are just frigging brilliant. I can't not read them. Insights, views, perspectives... it's incredible.

And it's becoming amazingly mentally fatiguing. I'm not dumb, and, in the past, I've never really hit a wall on what I could absorb, but it's finally happened. I can no longer keep up with the flow and volume of valuable knowledge being pumped my way by Bloglines. I feel like it's spilling out of my ears by the end of the day.

So.. simplify. Cut back the data needle into my brain. It'll be painful at first, (I just KNOW I'm missing something juicy.. damn!) but it's getting out of hand.