I make my living developing copyrighted content. I pay my Federal and Michigan taxes with the income I derive writing iPhone and iPad apps, and books about programming.
It is absurdly easy to pirate my work. Google for “adamson ios sdk torrent” and you’ll find the latest book I’m co-authoring available by BitTorrent, despite the fact that my co-author and I haven’t even finished the book yet. Jailbreaking of the iPhone also makes it easy to steal the apps I write.
Nevertheless, I am appalled by the proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), and the manner in which it has been brought before Congress. The December hearings in the House featured effectively no competent techincal testimony from Internet engineers, and looked to me like it was meant for show at best.
The legislation is rife with over-broad language and unintended consequences, and has little prospect of effectively stopping piracy, while causing massive collateral damage to all manner of legitimate and productive business and art.
Its supporters in Hollywood claim they’re protecting jobs, but what they’re protecting, at best, are their own outdated business models of deliberate scarcity. If you want to reform IP law to protect jobs, how about cleaning up the granting of software patents for trivial ideas, something that presents an imminent mortal threat to my industry?
This is terrible, terrible legislation, and it is shameful that the Congress has allowed it to get as far as it has. If it passes, you will be held accountable.
Your constituent,
Chris Adamson
A day after Apple’s third quarter earnings announcements, it’s time for the reading between the lines and amateur Kremlinology.
Here’s one thing that doesn’t make me very happy. Grab the earnings call audio (and notice from the .m3u8 extension that it’s in HTTP Live Streaming!), and scroll to around 24:50 in. The question is from Bill Schultz of Goldman Sachs:
OK, and a quick followup. There’s been a lot of news about, you know, patent disputes of late. Some seem to have gone in Apple’s favor while others haven’t. Can you help us understand, Tim, how to put these events in context… how we should think about your IP strategy overall and perhaps, you know, how all this is potentially impacting the competitive landscape in smartphones and tablets?
The much quoted response from Apple COO Tim Cook:
We have a very simple view, here. And that view is we love competition, we think it’s great for us and for everyone… but we want people to invent their own stuff. And we’re going to make sure that we defend our portfolio fervently.
That seems to speak obviously to Apple’s recent ITC win over HTC. And it’s probably meant as propaganda and spin as much as anything else.
But notice that it ignores the patent cases that have gone against Apple, such as Kodak and Personal Audio. Does Cook’s absolutist stance on patent mean that maybe Apple should have “invent[ed] their own stuff” in these cases? Maybe it’s a more relative morality, like every tabloidy legal case where whichever side wins declares to the TV cameras that “the system works.”
The elephant in the room is the patent trolls’ assault on indie developers, the consequences of which are spelled out by The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry in The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer. Cook’s response didn’t address Apple’s attempt to intervene in the Lodsys cases, or its current absence from even more galling patent claims against indie iOS developers by MacroSolve and others.
Is Apple going to step into every case that claims third parties violate patents by using Apple’s APIs? Well surely, they’re not going to commit to that publicly — barring a surprise “Thoughts On…” letter from Steve — and with the rate at which this nonsense is picking up, we should watch to see if and when Apple backs off and leaves indie developers to their fate. Apple could probably survive the worst-case scenario, the total collapse of third-party iOS development, considering that’s how they launched the iPhone in the first place (and considering how well Android phones are selling, despite a far weaker app ecosystem).
What’s discouraging is that it’s clear, despite hopes to the contrary, that Apple has no philosophical problem with software patents whatsoever. Indeed, in the Lodsys case, it’s not trying to invalidate the junk patent; it’s asserting that Apple’s license of the patents covers its use by third parties. The instinct may well be in their corporate DNA (and that of other large tech companies) that patents are a critical strategic asset, something to be amassed and protected whenever possible. That MacroSolve could patent electronic form submission, in 2003, seems not to bother them. Patents are, apparently, too important to be doubted.
I’m writing this in flight, Grand Rapids to Denver, connecting from there to SFO and WWDC 2011. Screen typing isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but the small size of the iPad, combined with its shape (no fold open screen like on a laptop, which would only collide with the reclined seat in front of me) makes it reasonably practical.
Lots of people precede WWDC with predictions and wish lists… I’m going to use this blog for a justification, in other words, why the thing I’m hoping for might make sense.
The surprise I’m hoping for is an Apple TV SDK. Not that I’m the biggest Apple TV fan… not only do I not have an Apple TV, I don’t even have a TV that will accept its HDMI connection.
But man, would I get on board quickly if there were an SDK.
And no, not to play Angry Birds on the TV. If anything, the potential for general-purpose apps on the TV is badly overstated, and has been for years, if not decades. QUBE, WebTV, various cable box standards (what was that Java one that I used to write about at java.net and was roundly ignored?)… the space has been an unbroken string of failures.
But let’s narrow our foucus. What if the SDK was optimized for streaming AV content, and providing just enough UI for browsing and choosing content (i.e., nothing more than Electronic Programming Guides [EPGs]), ignoring most of the power and elegance of the underlying iOS frameworks? What if Apple only allowed apps in this genre, rejecting anything that wasn’t an AV streaming client?
It would be awesome.
Here’s the thing: the iPhone and iPad gold rushes have motivated a lot of content providers to make their stuff available in iOS formats. Movies, TV shows, live sports, niche programming, tons of stuff. More variety and depth than you can get from a cable TV subscription, without the tyranny of the cable company taking away your favorite channel in a carriage dispute, with no recourse for viewers. And it’s a la carte: buying the Major League Baseball app doesn’t require you pay for a CourtTV or Lifetime app.
Yeah, you see where I’m going with this. Using apps as a content delivery platform, Apple TV could grab a lot of those monthly subscriptions that are currently going to cable and satellite television. And with providers taking 70% of content subscriptions sold through in-app purchase (or 100%, if users can be convinced to purchase via the provider’s website instead), there’s huge money to be made in cutting out the middle man.
More content for viewers, just the stuff they actually want, and more money for the people who actually make the stuff. Win-win. The only loser is the middle man – the hated cable companies – who get cut out of the equation because they’re no longer necessary.
So what’s the case against? Apple is careful to pick its battles, and this may not be a hornet’s nest it wants to kick up this year. Let’s war-game it: what would cablers do in response? They’re dreadfully afraid of becoming “dumb pipes” (even though that is clearly their destiny), so they can be counted on to fight this as hard as possible. They might want to block the offending streams, but the nature of HTTP Live Streaming makes that difficult: you can’t just switch off port 80, nor can you block content delivery networks without collateral damage. So they could be counted on to revive the “content providers are getting a free ride off us” spin.
More importantly, cable companies by their nature are whores of local governments, and could get legislative and regulatory attention by pointing out how much cable fees go into local government coffers. An Internet TV world is one without public access channels, without the goddamned useless “city council meeting that lasts forever” channel, and who would want to live in a world like that? Well, pretty much everyone, actually, but good luck getting a bureaucrat to listen to that when their paycheck is partially funded by Charter.
Local cable franchises are a relic, but a lot of parties have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Apple would have to be eager for a thousand little battles to pull this off.
Provided, of course, that cable sees it coming. They might not.
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. ~Erwin Knoll
I ended up spending a fair amount of time disproving an obviously wrong newspaper story last night. It didn’t work.
In college, I was a member of the Stanford Band, a group I keep up with via Facebook and alumni e-mails. They were featured in a Miami Herald front page story this weekend, about their antics and their upcoming performance at the Orange Bowl pregame.
Imagine my surprise when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Band was banned from performing at halftime. Surprised, because the story is totally wrong.
The Chron story sources an MSNBC story, which itself cites no sources, and whose URL suggests it is a local affil item submitted to MSNBC. The MSNBC story’s facts are all from the Miami Herald write, and is likely its only source, and uncredited at that. Here’s the last two grafs of the Herald write:
South Florida is not exactly Arkansas, but cautious Orange Bowl organizers have reduced the opportunity for indignity by keeping both college bands off the field at halftime; they’ll be restricted to brief, six-minute pregame shows.
Stanford Band bosses are keeping mum about their plans, saying only that the show is titled Recent Events in the Pro Sports World in Miami. Look out, LeBron.
This omits a crucial fact — Orange Bowl halftimes are always gala affairs that do not involve the marching bands — but this is written around in an amusing tone that’s consistent with the rest of the article.
The MSNBC affil didn’t pick up that fact, or on the light tone, and took those last grafs for their lead:
Fearing an en masse pants drop, or just wanting to protect their newest celeb athlete, LeBron James, from OJ Simpson-style mockery, the Orange Bowl administrators have decided to keep the bawdy Stanford Band from performing at halftime.
MSNBC picked a few highlights of the Band’s antics for the body of their article, then returned to the “banning” in their last grafs:
Denying the Stanford Band a stage also denies Virginia Tech one. The Orange Bowl will only allow the teams’ bands to perform in six-minute bursts before kickoff.
The Band’s show is entitled “Recent Events in the Pro Sports World in Miami.”
Whose talents could possibly be targeted, er, featured?
Using the MSNBC write as its only source – and with apparently no vetting of the facts via a local call to Stanford’s athletics department – the Chronicle turns the lightweight kicker from the Herald into a hard lead:
Orange Bowl administrators, determined to make tonight’s matchup between No. 5 Stanford and No. 12 Virginia Tech less entertaining, have decided to bar Stanford’s irreverent band from performing at halftime.
The move comes after the band announced its show was entitled: “Recent Events in the Pro Sports World in Miami.”
This is where I got involved. Hopping into the article’s comments section, I posted a series of followups, determined to prove the article false. The last comment I posted linked to four sources that could completely dispel the story:
- The original Miami Herald write.
- A press release from the Orange Bowl, announcing the Goo Goo Dolls as the game’s halftime entertainment, proving that neither the Stanford nor Virginia Tech band was ever expected to perform at halftime.
- The same presser as posted to the Goo Goo Dolls site and dated November 18, meaning that the halftime show was set before the teams were even picked for the game.
- A Tweet from the Washington Post’s Virginia Tech correspondent: “Stanford band did get to strut their stuff pregame and did a spoof of LeBron James decision.”
I also e-mailed the writer of the article. I would have thought this would be enough to get the article – demonstrably and totally wrong – retracted.
Instead, it’s still on SFGate’s front page the next morning:
Obviously, this has hit a nerve with me. I can’t help it: I used to be an editor. When ESPN ScoreCenter sent me a push notification of the game’s final score, including the text “A. Luck(STAN) 4TD, 0INT”, my first thought was “Bullshit, he threw a pick in the second quarter.” Loyalties be damned, A is still A.
To see a major newspaper so sloppy and so obviously wrong is shameful. When I was writing and editing at CNN, if I had ever used a single source, which cited none of its own sources, with no vetting and no common sense fact-checking, I’d have been busted back to separating carbons in the printer room within a week.
Frankly, I’m going to get a good chuckle the next time one of the Chron’s 27 liberal columnists complains about obvious falsehoods on Fox News. It should also rankle that Wikipedia gets this more right than the Chron does. From a overnight edit to the Stanford Band article:
Despite Twitter rumors to the contrary, the band was not banned from performing during the 2011 Orange Bowl halftime. The Orange Bowl traditionally has major-label recording artists perform the halftime show, not school marching bands (The Goo Goo Dolls performed the 2011 show). They did, however perform during pregame, which was briefly shown on the game’s national broadcast. The theme of that show was “Recent Events in the Pro Sports World in Miami.”
Yesterday was a really rough day for me in terms of getting things straight. I also, perhaps foolishly, hopped into discussions of a Detroit Free Press article discussing the possibility that Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh could be the one to turn around the University of Michigan’s slumping football program. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for that here in Michigan, and I’ve been trying to throw cold water on it. Sure, I’m motivated by the implicit slight to Stanford. But moreover, it’s not a given that Harbaugh would want to give up a top-5 program that he’s built in order to start over with a reclamation project, one that he pointedly insulted a few years ago. It would, you’d think, at least take a dump truck of money. Moreover, a number of NFL teams are openly courting Harbaugh. I posted comments with links to articles indicating the 49ers, Broncos, and Panthers were openly pursuing him, along with a nice New York Times profile that covered Harbaugh’s options.
The result? A lot of people calling me various names, and one poster in particular who insisted repeatedly that it didn’t matter because Michigan had already hired Harbaugh a month ago. Now how does this even pass Occam’s Razor? Why would the NFL teams waste time and money, and a chance to land coaches who are actually available, if U-M had already secured Harbaugh’s services, or even thought they had? Why would anyone even be talking about it if it were a done deal? It can’t be, not yet anyways, and yet this guy stuck to his guns.
And yet, how is that any different from the Chron? There’s no penalty to being obviously wrong. When the facts aren’t on your side, just yell louder. The Big Lie works, in part because people believe what they want to believe. The Chron’s totally wrong article has been shared to Facebook nearly 1,700 times as of this writing.
We all know the internet is a breeding ground for ignorance, that you can find seemingly reputable sources for whatever stupid nonsense you care to believe (Obama’s not really American, 9/11 was an inside job, the CIA created AIDS to kill black people, etc.), but it’s still ghastly to see it in action.
My local paper recently declared it’s getting tough with trolls in its forums, and while I wish them the best, I wonder if it isn’t better in the long run to just ditch user comments altogether. I find I enjoy the consistent voice of an author – Daring Fireball is the obvious example of this in the Mac/iOS world – whereas I rarely find anything of value in feedback forums, just a mudslinging scrum among various partisans.
Comments should allow for readers to communicate back to publishers, and could provide a valuable means correcting bad information. And as professionals, publishers should want to be right: it’s the only thing that distinguishes them from any random Joe with a website.
But that’s where we started. I tried correcting them. It didn’t work. And the Chron is still happily collecting hits on an article that’s demonstrably and totally wrong.
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?!)
