I was listening to a podcast talk from Mises University 2009 the other night called “Intellectual Property and Libertarianism”, in which speaker Stephan Kinsella made the usual Slashdotty-type case against IP from a libertarian perspective. This was novel for me, perhaps because libertarians tend to be very defensive of property rights, such as Ayn Rand’s assertion of IP as a right to the products of a person’s own mind.
Kinsella rejects Rand explicitly, saying her case offers little more than deification of the creator. His counter-argument is interesting: IP is inconsistent with property rights because it violates the rights of others to use their property. To wit, if I own a typewriter and a stack of paper, or a CD burner and some blank discs, then those should be mine to do with as I see fit. But because of copyright, I can’t use the typewriter to transcribe a book, or to use the burner to copy a CD, even if I’ve bought original copies of the hypothetical book and CD. IP asserts a partial ownership — enough to say “you can’t do that” — over this other property I own. That, according to Kinsella’s argument, is inconsistent and therefore invalid.
Interesting, and tricky, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.
It’s important because, of course, my income is highly dependent on the idea of IP. If I couldn’t charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development, I probably wouldn’t have spent hundreds (possibly thousands?) of hours over the last year and a half co-writing it. If I couldn’t charge for apps on the App Store, would I write them?
The counter-argument comes from the open-source crowd, who say to give away your content (which, by the earlier argument, you couldn’t own anyways), and make your money some other way. This is really appealing when you’re working in some field where the value isn’t in the content, per se. It’s easy to open-source your stuff when you make your real money using it for consulting projects, or running a service. It’s a lot harder to see a model that supports development of, say, productivity applications, where the value in the software is in what it lets the user do with their own data. Give that away and where’s the ancillary revenue stream that would fund future development? Tip jar? Selling t-shirts? Maybe this is why Linux has so few productivity apps of any note (a few mediocre-to-bad knockoffs of Office and Quicken and such, but you’ll likely never see something like Final Cut Pro on Linux).
Bringing it back to writing, there are economic models that can keep a tech writer going. One is that the owners of a technology can commission writing about a topic to spur interest: I’ve made more writing three articles on Core Audio for [redacted] than I made on my entire QuickTime for Java book. I think this is going to be an even bigger deal going forward, as books and feature articles become one more thing that platform owners will have to pay for themselves in order to get mindshare (much the same way that platform owners already provide technical documentation and tools… note that there’s much less of a market for commercial IDEs now that the Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Java platforms all have a free-as-in-beer IDE provided by the platform owners).
Another possibility is that the real value of writing blogs, articles, and books gets your name out there for consulting work, although in my experience, it’s hard to shake the impression that you’re “just” a writer. I just finished a month-long consulting/programming engagement and am working on a new app for the App Store, yet I’m still clearly far better known for my writing than anything else.
As for the IP of books and being able to charge for them, the existence of .torrents of pretty much any available eBook may put that issue to rest quickly enough. On the one hand, I think it’s absurd that developers won’t pay what amounts to about 20 minutes of the developer salary they’ll be able to charge once they’ve mastered its techniques. But maybe some/most readers would kick in some kind of payment if it were completely on a tip jar system? Enough to keep a writer able to pay his or her bills? Probably only on the most popular topics.
And that’s why you shouldn’t expect me to ever propose, no less actually write, the big Mac/iPhone media APIs (QTKit, Core Audio, etc.) book that I’ve kicked around for a few years. Something that nichey, combined with the rapidly falling price that readers are willing to pay for content, makes it effectively unviable.
This story starts, for me anyways, at WWDC. The theming for Moscone West was bursting, flying app store icons. Up on the second floor, the windows showed icons captioned with the name of an app, where it was created, and some fanciful stats (“Marriages saved: 700″, “Bullets fired: 2,000,000″, that kind of thing). One that caught my eye was this somewhat “Western manga-style” icon:
That’s Flo, the lead character of Diner Dash, the first and most popular of PlayFirst’s casual games (more on the series from Wikipedia). The game is based in time-management: you get more points by chaining your actions (seating customers, taking orders, delivering meals) in groups, so you try to juggle impatient customers, buffering them up for a few seconds so you can get them all in the same mode (ordering, eating, paying), and thereby build up a combo.
Since the original dates back to 2004, I ended up buying one of its more modern sequels, Wedding Dash, and have been playing the heck out of it. Between self-employment and high-maintenance kids, I don’t have time for long PS2 sessions (Final Fantasy got me in the mindset of setting aside at least an hour whenever I turn on the PS2, something I can never do), but knocking off a Dash level in five minutes is a nice break.
One thing that struck me about the game is the simple story that unfolds between levels, as lead character Quinn starts planning weddings for friends and slowly turns it into a career, and a business that Quinn builds as you progress through the game. Flo cameos frequently to keep Quinn’s head in her business:
About the third time that Quinn described the work of the game as her “business”, it hit me that there is a none-too-subtle message to this game, about building a business as a virtuous pursuit. With rare exceptions (like Miyazaki’s least typical film, Kiki’s Delivery Service), you really don’t see that often in pop culture; companies are much more typically portrayed as insufferable sweatshops, or rapacious empires. And given the times, Flo and Quinn’s DIY messages really stand out as a breath of fresh air: here in handout-happy Michigan, it seems like a lot of people are sitting around waiting for their share of stimulus money (i.e., their grandkids’ future taxes), and as video games go, it’s a sharp contrast with the “build a criminal empire” ethos of the Grand Theft Auto series and its many, many knock offs.
Continuing that message, PlayFirst just announced a collection of women’s apparel that builds on the idea of Flo as a 512-pixel Dagny Taggart. The t-shirts offer slogans like:
- Roll up your sleeves. Dreams take work.
- Not another princess. I’m my own Fairy Godmother.
- Elbow grease is the new black.
From the PR:
The launch of Flo’s Closet is deliberate in its timing as it aims to inspire and encourage women to strive towards success in challenging times. A recent study* reiterates this potential showing that female business owners are surviving the downward trend better than other businesses and Flo’s in-game character notoriously rejected the corporate life and aggressively pursued a more meaningful venture as a successful restaurateur.
So, yay PlayFirst. The games are fun, and the message is something that all of us, women and men, need to hear more of. I’m now following PF on Twitter, and the PF jobs Twitter is a nice feature with a shockingly low number of followers (13?!)
Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, quoted in BBC article Calls for open source government:
The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability – all the benefits that come with open software.
I can’t think of a more damning statement for a business model than to say that governments should force people to use it.
It was obscene when true.com tried to establish its business model as law in several states (including Michigan, embarrassingly), it’s obscene when Old Media insists that laws be crafted to suit its broken business models… so where’s the outrage in response to this? If anything, the OSS community should be worried that OSS’ benefits aren’t self-evident, and that it therefore needs to be propped up by the force of law.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.
Since returning to GRR, I’ve let the Mac Pro run overnight, downloading 30-some WWDC 2008 videos, which just became available on Friday. At an average of 500 MB each, I’m probably burning through 15 GB of data, which means that under some bandwidth-rationing regimes, I’d be closing in on a bandwidth cap. I ranted about this before, but this is a textbook case of why the US’ broadband oligopoly is going to hurt the country in the long run: somewhere out there, there’s an iPhone developer on Comcast or AT&T who can’t get needed iPhone development info because he or she has hit an arbitrary bandwidth cap. American developers are at a disadvantage, relative to the rest of the world, thanks to the crooked arrangement of just having one or two providers (if any) in a given area, enjoying a government-protected monopoly while not being expected to provide any specific level of service.
We don’t have a single provider taking care of everyone in the public interest, nor do we enjoy the benefits of genuine competition. What we’ve got is good old fashioned US-style cronyism, something that will only get worse as the government frantically borrows more money (WTF?) to buy more of the private economy (WTF?)
Having said that… why the heck are all these videos a half gig anyways?
If you look at the previous years’ WWDC videos or similar ADC on iTunes content (Leopard Tech Talks, for example), you’ll notice that by and large, the video portion of the file is just the slides. Except for the transitions and any demos, the video portion of the presentation doesn’t move. Yet if you zoom in on the text, you’ll see a little bit of an artifact that jumps every second or so as it hits a keyframe, meaning this non-moving content has been encoded as if it were natural, moving video.
And it’s a massive waste of bandwidth. Since QuickTime supports variable frame rates, you could have a single frame (i.e., a slide) that stays up for 10 or 20 or 60 seconds, and only need the data for that frame once. Then for the next slide, you’d only need one sample, however long it is. There are slideshow-movie-maker examples for QuickTime that do exactly this (I think I even did one in QTJ a long time ago, but it’s not in the book [should have been] and I don’t know where I posted it, if I did). I suspect you could do the slides with a lossless codec, like PNG or even Animation (which is just RLE), and still get a huge space saving over the current process of re-encoding that keyframe every second, and providing B-frames (deltas) that don’t convey any information because the image doesn’t actually change.
In fact, you could still use natural video for your demos by simply having a second video track that would contain samples only for those times when you’re actually doing video. Moral of story: QuickTime creative abilities remain freaking awesome.
So why not do this? Well, obviously, the videos need to be playable on iPods and iPhones, which only support H.264 (though I’d be interested to know if H.264 can do variable frame rates… I assume it can’t, at least not in the Low Complexity profile, but it’d be a real nice feature for exactly this kind of thing). You could use the variable length samples in production — drop some PNGs on a video track in your Final Cut timeline and stretch their durations and you’re doing exactly that — but once you export, you’ll get the same constant-frame-rate H.264 that you would if you were exporting your kids’ Halloween videos. Alas.
Our move to Grand Rapids is now a couple of weeks away (the non-sale of the Atlanta house continues to be a confounding factor, but that’s neither here nor there). Reading the Grand Rapids Press online, I note an interesting article that says Study finds young talent shuns Michigan.
My online comment, reprinted below, was removed at some point, presumably because of its use of the verb “fellate“. Vulgar or not, I happen to think it’s the mot juste in context.
I’m moving from Atlanta to Grand Rapids in a couple of weeks, bringing my family and my job (Java and iPhone software development and writing) with me. My primary motivation is to be closer to family in Michigan, which is something I’ve heard a number of other 30-40 types saying they want to do once they’ve had kids (countervailing force: nearly all the jobs are elsewhere, and in my business, the VCs want everyone to move to the Bay Area… you basically have to be completely location-independent to pull this off). Another factor for me: Atlanta’s climate and traffic suck.
One thing I think would really help Michigan’s image would be if the political leaders and media would stop fellating the auto industry and the UAW for five minutes, and instead become aware that There Are Other Things To Do In Life Than Build Cars (particularly when the Detroit Three and the UAW are so lousy at it). It’s bad enough to see the Detroit auto-makers say in the papers that they can’t compete on fuel efficiency with the Asian car makers; it’s worse when their ineptitude is coddled and encouraged by Michigan’s congressional delegation. The market is rightly punishing these companies, and Michigan is foolish to depend so much on their continued existence (Chrysler getting bought and dumped wasn’t enough of a hint?). Meanwhile, anyone who does anything else for a living gets completely ignored, and frankly, it feels like an insult. People, would you rather have the next Apple or the next Google get started in Michigan, or are you actually counting on GM and Ford to turn it around?
Noted in the Chron, an article saying Online bandwidth hogs to be cut off at trough, covering technologies being tested by broadband providers to meter internet usage and cut off heavy users, or at least push them into a more expensive tier.
It’s an interesting bit of bias to see how the article takes the ISP’s at face value by decreeing in the headline that heavy users are “hogs”. To be objective about it, just what is “hogging” the line? In a case study of a cable system in Texas cited by the article, Time Warner bumps users into the next pricing tier when they use more than 20 GB a month.
How much does it take to blow your limit, and can you do it without being a BitTorrenting media pirate? Well, I only have to look at my development work. For a while, Apple was putting out an iPhone SDK beta almost every week, at 1.5 GB each. So, four weeks of that and you’re up to 6 GB. Let’s say I also pick up a new Snow Leopard seed… recent Mac OS X install DVDs have been about 6 GB. Two of those in the same month and I’m up to 18GB. Add the documentation, a few software updates, an iTunes movie, any of the same downloads to a second computer, or just typical web use over the course of a month, and I’m over the limit, without ever having BitTorrented a damn thing.
Or, to hear the broadband providers tell it, I’m a bandwidth hog.
Their position isn’t too surprising, of course. If I were still trying to make 21st century revenues off 20th century infrastructure (or, in the case of the phone companies, 19th century), and I had a government-enforced monopoly to protect me from competition, then of course I’d want to give customers as little for as much money as I possibly could. And I’d get away with it, because exclusive government enfranchisement, funded with a small amount of campaign cash, would let me do more or less whatever the hell I wanted with my captive customers.
And if all the software development jobs move to less backwards countries, well, that’s not really the fault of the government and the ISPs, now is it? Nah, sleazy public-private collusion at the expense of the economy is the American Way.
