Quoted deep in an article by Blaise Alleyne in Techdirt, Music Fans And ‘Amateur Musicologists’ May Impact Coldplay/Satriani Copyright Battle, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP discuss the role of “amateur musicologists in Joe Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay for copyright infringement:

What makes the Internet commentary regarding the two songs particularly interesting is that much of it replicates the type of expert analysis that both sides will likely use if the case goes forward. In music copyright infringement cases, it is rare for parties to rely solely on bare assertions of copying or independent creation. Instead, they frequently engage “musicology” experts to undertake detailed analyses of every element of alleged similarity between the two works and conclude whether all or portions of one work were copied from the other. The parties and their experts in [this case] should consider the analyses of the “amateur musicologists” that have weighed in via the Internet and other media, if for no other reason than they may be informative of how a jury might ultimately view the case…

While Satriani v. Martin may not go to trial for a variety of reasons, it is clear that user-generated content sites like YouTube have the potential to alter the way music cases — and other types of copyright case — are developed. Because advances in technology allow the public to participate in real-time infringement debate, future parties would do well to monitor this “chatter” as it could uncover evidence and theories that may be helpful to the case of the copyright owner, the alleged infringer or both. [emphasis added]

Alleyne adds to the commentary:

The online discussion is largely what has made this case so unique. There have been successful copyright infringement lawsuits over melodies in the past …, but never has the public been able to participate so much in the debate.

…The melodies are undoubtedly similar, but the legal question is whether or not Coldplay copied from Satriani. It’s not just Coldplay’s word against Satriani’s, but music fans and “amateur musicologists” are gathering evidence and providing theories which are having a noticeable impact on the proceedings.

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Obviously experts and amateurs have their place: the opportunity is using combinations of both in the right ways and situations.

—

* Even “experts” have their odd deficiencies.
** Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: a “crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.”

The economics behind “freeconomics” blurs the distinction between “customer” and “user”; even though the user may not bear the cost, someone does. Companies that provide services to users for free still bear the marginal costs of the free services, therefore their business models are based on finding people and companies to subsidize the free services.

If the people subsidizing “free” go away (and that includes cash cow product lines, investors, venture capital, advertisers, paying users, buyers of aggregated and structured data, etc.), then what’s free right now may not be free in the future.

While the debate around “free” tends to center on the web, the web is merely one of many networks in use today. Take the examples of telecommunications (fixed and wireless), transportation (automobile, train et. al.) and energy networks: each network contains an embedded technological and economic structure that dictates the rules and incentives behind each interaction over the network.

But these networks aren’t static, and as each network becomes structurally more like the web their fundamental economics will change.

An example? Let’s start with the “mobile web”; Aaron Chua starts the discussion with Can Amazon be the default payment API for the Web? and I add in my comment:

Touching back to the piracy issue, is the [different economics behind the "regular" web and the mobile web] a failure of pricing mechanisms or is it a failure of distribution networks and transaction costs (including non-priced transaction costs)?

The digital economy isn’t forcing prices to zero; it’s forcing prices to their marginal costs. Marginal costs are higher in mobile (and virtual) at the moment because they have different pipes, different gatekeepers, different marketmakers, creators have substantially different access to the tools of production and distribution, low standardization of interfaces, etc. All of those create higher marginal costs, and combined with the “controlled” nature of mobile and virtual, there simply isn’t the same level of competition as in the non-mobile Internet… for now.

A day will come when the difference between the “mobile web” and the “real web” are framed less by the pipes and more by the access devices and their interfaces. Viewed more broadly, as innovation changes the structure of our networks, new technological possibilities and constraints will re-frame our economic structures, behavioral incentives, business opportunities and usage behavior.

Viewed simply, tomorrow will not be like today, tomorrow’s strategies will not be today’s, and what’s free today may not be free in the future.

And what’s expensive today may be free tomorrow: literally.

On the opportunity (and dying, crushing need) to revamp organizational structures:

• John Hagel, Attracting Talent in Spikes and Firms (via Ethan Bauley):

  Attract and retain vs. access and motivate. Talent strategies of companies often focus too narrowly on the talent that resides within the enterprise. … Few companies make a systematic effort to map the relevant talent that exists outside the company. Even fewer companies develop effective strategies to access and motivate that talent through networks of relationships, including positioning in relevant spikes around the world.

  … At the most fundamental level, the rationale for the firm is shifting. As JSB and I have written, the rationale for the firm articulated by Ronald Coase back in the 1930s – that firms exist to economize on transaction costs – is diminishing in importance as continued innovation in IT systematically drives down transaction costs. In its place, we are seeing a new rationale for the firm emerge – firms exist to accelerate talent development. This is increasingly the reason why people choose to affiliate with firms. They believe they can get better faster by working with others within the firm, as well as with others across firms, through the privileged relationships built by the firm. If firms can’t find ways to deliver on this promise, talent will exit and Tom Malone’s e-lance economy will flourish.

  And a more recent refresh:

• John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, Tomorrow’s Talent Networks:
  

  Operations, organization, and strategy must all be reconceived through the talent lens. They must be re-thought as part of pull platforms that treat all workers as capable creators who are continuously improvising in response to unanticipated situations. In this view, talent isn’t just the highly trained and deeply skilled knowledge workers one typically thinks of as talent: they’re just about everybody.

  Push programs have enabled scalable, cost-effective operations. But they’ve come at a steep price: the rigid standardization and specification of activities and tasks they require. What if instead companies were to create more flexible pull platforms to help employees access resources whenever and wherever they are needed? What if, rather than treating exception handling as a nuisance to be eliminated, companies welcomed these problems as opportunities for participants to tinker and experiment?

  Pull platforms are essential to fostering learning on the job since they can make it easier to access unexpected resources in unexpected ways and thereby encourage participants to try new approaches that simply would not be feasible in more rigid push programs.

  Structures compete for talent; as much as I talk about the frames creating the opportunities for a larger scale of entrepreneurship based on the structures for personal, distributed, collaborative value creation, the issue is truly about economic organization and the rationale for the firm. In essence, firms will adapt to create better structures for organizing and utilizing talent to compete for talent being lost to better organizing firms and to new ventures.

  How?

• John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The Strategic Advantage of Global Process and Practice Networks:
  

  … No matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?

  … Companies must also participate in (and sometimes orchestrate) new organizational forms and structures called global process and practice networks.

  … Both kinds of global networks — process and practice — create opportunities for talent to come together and generate “productive friction”: a powerful force that shapes learning, as people with different backgrounds and skills work together on real problems.

  While many executives pursue the nirvana of a frictionless economy, aggressive talent development inevitably and necessarily generates friction. It forces people out of their comfort zone and often involves resolving differences among people with divergent views and experiences.

  How? Organize the right environments to generate productive friction and innovate talent management within the firm. Read the rest of the post for details.

  What are firms doing to create better structures for organizing value creation?

  (Note: organizing value creation is not the same as organizing people.)

• Morten T. Hansen, Harvard Business Review April 2009, When Internal Collaboration is Bad for Your Company:
  

  Internal collaboration is almost universally viewed as good for an organization… But the conventional wisdom rests on the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. .. Our research [into 100 experienced sales teams at a large IT consulting firm] yielded a surprising conclusion about this seemingly sensible practice: The greater the collaboration (measured by hours of help a team received), the worse the results (measured by success in winning contracts).

  Wait, that’s a surprise? Since when was collaboration merely about the HOURS of knowledge sharing? Since when was collaboration merely about sharing information?

  The rest of the article spends its entire time creating a decision framework based on calculating the “collaboration premium” using the benefits and costs from collaboration. Yet no time or thought is spent on the strategies or tactics behind collaboration; the entire article is based on the premise that internal collaboration is equal to time, when in fact many of the real opportunities behind current technologies are to create better structures for collaboration, making time a much less important driver behind collaboration. Collaboration is much more than just sharing information. A waste.

  How about a better example?

• Aaron Chua, A crisis in human resources. My comment:
  

  The biggest opportunity is to change the structure of management, the hierarchical systems we created in order to pass down structures and tie people to processes. As our ability to communicate processes and needs improves through better, cheaper, transparent and archivable communication tools management will be less needed, leadership will be more important, and “linear progression” career paths will be less necessary and lucrative.

  People follow value creation, and people will follow the value creation to the edges. Now if the edges could just make money

  Maybe they can…

• Via Ed Cotton, The Open Company – Running your business as if it were an Open Source Project..

  Based on the idea that “self-organizing groups in many cases can outperform traditional organizations”, E-Text Editor is working to create structures to give people “the freedom to decide for yourself what you want to work on”.

  Imagine you had a company like this. Totally open. No concept of bosses or employees. Anyone could join in at any time, doing whatever task they found interesting, for whatever time they found appropriate. How could you possibly find a way to compensate them fairly?

  The key is in a technology called Trust Metrics. In essence this is a technique for rating each other, but with the key distinction that the way ratings are calculated makes cheating ineffective. This is a new technology, which has not been applied for this purpose before, but it has already proven itself as the underlying principle behind such well known technologies as Googles pagerank and the certifications on Advogato.

  By basing the compensation on continuous rating by your peers, it becomes possible to start out by just participating a bit in your free time, and then gradually, as your ratings increase, spend more and more time on the project. It may eventually come to fully supplanting your day job, becoming your primary source of income, or you may choose to just keep it as something you do on the side. And not only can nobody stop you from participating, there is nobody who can fire you either. This makes it a far more secure way to make a living, where your status is solely dependent on your own ability and effort, rather than on arbitrary decisions from some superior.

Can we “pagerank” an organization?


• Developing open, flexible and transparent platforms to power a new breed of organizations has been a recurring topic of mine: how can we develop the funding and organizational models…
  … to incubate and “scale our lives” by creating personal ecosystems…
  … using systems such as peer-production and the social venture commons…
  … to power our personal “freemium” life models…
  … by enabling us to create and “exchange” social capital…
  … and lower our inter-personal transaction costs…
  … and create cheaper context behind our value-creating actions…
  … to create our own hubs on the edges of value creation?

  Much more on this later…

It’s a fantasy to believe that the production of all the kinds of news that people value, particularly hard news, can be shifted over to amateurs or journeymen working for peanuts or some newfangled journo-syndicalist communes. Certainly, amateurs and volunteers can do some of the work that used to be done by professional journalists in professional organizations. Free-floating freelancers can also do some of the work. The journo-syndicalist communes will, I suppose, be able to do some of the work. And that’s all well and good. But they can’t do all of the work, and they certainly can’t do all of the most valuable work. The news business will remain a fundamentally commercial operation. Whatever the Internet dreamers might tell you, it ain’t going to a purely social production model.

I believe that people (non-commercial journalists) will have a role to play in producing and disseminating news, and I do believe that people are great filters of information. The social production model will play a large role in distributing and marketing news, but professional news sources and commercial journalists will still play an important role: to think that commercial news sources will not adapt is pretty short-sighted.

Most of the today’s technological and cultural changes impact how we distribute information and news (and perhaps that’s why we spend most of our time “talking about talking”). But the big question is how information and news will be created, and I would be surprised if professional, commercial news sources did not play a defining role in producing and filtering information. What are all the “citizen journalists” going to link to?

Continuing with Carr:

The newspaper industry is in the midst of a fundamental restructuring, and if you think that restructuring is over – that what we see today is the end state – you’re wrong. Markets for valuable goods do not stay disrupted. They evolve to a new and sustainable commercial state. Tomorrow’s reality will be different from today’s.

Perhaps; but instead of evolving towards a “sustainable” equilibrium, tomorrow’s reality might be more change.

Instead of trying to define a single answer, let’s start thinking about multiple models of information creation and dissemination to fit our variety of cultures, styles, methods, use cases and models of interaction.

But in any case, to think that today’s trends will continue in some straight-line, continuous path is a terribly misleading way to think about the world. To think that the rules of tomorrow are set today is incredibly short-sighted. Instead of focusing on what is, why can’t we think about what can be?

We’re living through an inflection point: for us, tomorrow is today. Let’s have fun with it.

—

Yes, I know I said I would leave this topic to others. C’est la vie.

Credit for the title goes completely to Umair Haque…

Jeff Jarvis in BusinessWeek, Detroit Should Get Cracking on its Googlemobile:

I don’t suggest that design should be a democracy. But shouldn’t design at least be a conversation?

In the same way that “markets are conversations”, “design” has always been a conversation; traditionally that conversation only occurred in the marketplace when people make their decisions to buy or not buy a company’s designs.

What’s changed is that the platforms and cultures are beginning to change to allow us to expand that “conversation” into the realm of the the organization; we (as companies) are able to involve people (our prospective consumers) in tactical product decisions before the products reach the markets. This expansion of the conversation creates new markets; new markets that create new value propositions, new core competencies and new sources of capital for organizations and people.

How?

Start thinking about:

• Umair Haque, Edge Competencies.
• John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The New Reality: Constant Disruption.
• Umair Haque, How to Chrome Your Industry.
• Ethan Bauley, commenting on the Android Market.
• John Hagel, Mastering New Marketing Practices.
• Tom Nixon, The Building Blocks of Social Media Strategy.
• Ethan Bauley, commenting on rethinking the rationale for the firm.
• Me, Social capital isn’t new, but everything about it is.
• Me, Content is cheap, context is expensive.

I’m not the only one thinking about the need for innovation in organizational structures. So much thought-provoking strategy gold on the web, where to start?

• The operating leverage of web businesses is rooted in the power of capability leverage.

  Fred Wilson, When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs:

  The web can create incredibly high operating margin businesses.

  … if [these companies in our portfolio] continue to do a lot with a little, their business models will be built on operating margins that are very high and can create a lot of value without a lot of revenue.

  I think that’s an important part of the economics of the web that are left out of most discussions of Internet business models. Yes, we are turning analog dollars into digital pennies in many cases. But we are also doing the same thing on the cost side, maybe even more so. And I think that “operating leverage” is going to create a lot of value.

  How are these small businesses able to create “operating leverage”?

  The high margins of small web companies are rooted in the idea of “capability leverage”. John Hagel, Exploring New Forms of Economic Leverage:

  Capability leverage—the ability to access and mobilize the resources of other companies to add more value to customers—is a powerful force for creating value in markets. Rather than one company trying to do everything, it can mobilize a broader network of participants to deliver highly specialized and flexibly tailored value to individual customers.

  (Thanks to Aaron Chua for the reminder of the power of “capability leverage”)

• “It’s open to the mainstream on their terms.”

  Jan Chipchase, Stickier, Less Complicated Relationships:

  There are a number of factors that suggest that (some form of) [businesses using Twitter] will become mainstream: it’s opt in and easy to unsubscribe should you decide it’s not for you; there’s an element of ‘personal’ yet it’s not intrusive; its delivered in formats appropriate to the customer … ; there is very little friction … ; it leverages existing infrastructure – no new hardware or software required. If not the next neighbourhood flyer then a useful additional to. It’s open to the mainstream on their terms.

  Taking it one step forward, how can we start to think about integrating all the tools? Hutch Carpenter, How to Integrate Social Media into Product Marketing.

• How do we build “capability leverage” into our lives?

  Related: a look into the history behind Twitter: Dom Sagolla, How Twitter Was Born (via Noah Brier).

  As I noted in a comment to Noah:

  Amazing how simple insights can lead to something far grander, all by being open to human ingenuity.

  Taking the idea further, how can we create better structures (technological, organizational, cultural and legal) to empower human ingenuity in a constantly disruptive world?

  I’ve got a couple of ideas; peer-production, the social venture commons and VenTwits are starts towards creating the open, flexible and transparent platforms to:

  Enable us to develop the funding and organizational models…
  … to incubate and “scale our lives” by creating personal ecosystems…
  … to power our personal “freemium” life models…
  … by enabling us to create and “exchange” social capital…
  … and lower our inter-personal transaction costs…
  … and create cheaper context behind our value-creating actions…
  … to create our own hubs on the edges of value creation.

  But as you know, it’s less about what exists and more about how we use them. Let’s try and find out what’s possible.

This started with a random tweet of mine:

I see tons of “twitter for business” tips and links. I want to see “twitter for dating” apps

I’m hardly the first to float the idea of using Twitter for dating; I’ve seen a number of thoughts from Howard Lindzon on the subject, Aaron Chua mentioned an idea using Twitter plus a “virtual gift” component as foundation for a dating service, and Olivia Hayes mentioned Twitter as part of the broader opportunity to use social media to find dates, to which I left the following comment:

But think if Twitter could match up substance better; everyone that uses the web (including Twitter) creates a lot of information about themselves that could be very powerful to use in matching up people.

We don’t need to replace the serendipity of life, just add to it…

There’s even an old, abandoned @twirting account (Twitter + flirting), indicating an old idea.

After my first tweet about my desire to see a “Twitter for dating” service I traded ideas with Scott Lundgren (@capitalfellow on Twitter), and since neither of us is really going to do anything with the ideas, we decided we would open up the conversation to a broader audience. If you feel like doing anything with it, go for it; all I ask is that I get a free account [1]…

Basically, it’s just a big database that collects information on people that want to use @TwitterDating and then matches up people based on their supplied personal information and a magical contextual analysis of people’s last 1-2 pages of tweets to create potential matches.

After that, @Twitterdating passes on the information on potential matches using the direct message backchannel and allows people to follow up on their own, perhaps direct messaging through @Twitterdating to eliminate the need for the public follow to create the backchannel conversation path.

Anyway: I’ve tried to do is condense the key points from our email conversations to focus on the key points; and to be clear, most of the real thinking is from Scott…

Key Points

• “The real “juice” of the application has to be the contextual analysis of one’s tweets for the matching”
• What fundamental pieces of information does one need to make a date/no date decision? Which ones are missing from Twitter? How can those be added? Hashtags? Custom application that uses Twitter for message passing & discovery?
• How can one parse intention from content?

Interaction Model

• Express interest: I follow @twitterdating
• Supply additional information: I d @twitterdating the necessary additional information, including my sex, my desired sex, geo, age, etc.
• Collect additional information: integrate Facebook Connect et. al. to access and collect relevant personal information?
• Contextual analysis: @Twitterdating indexes Twitter data page of users that have expressed interest (by following @twitterdating) and the additional information supplied to create a user profile. Past tweets are then indexed with the matching user profiles to create the content necessary to match people.
• Introduction: Twitterdating bot sends d to people to introduce, explaining why (in 140 characters) they might be interested in the other person, without giving away the other person’s username. If both people d back to @twitterdating indicating they want to hear more, both users receive a d with a link to a page explaining the match and giving the basic user profile details and twitter IDs to allow users to carry on the conversation themselves.

Implications

• Non-public intent: only the user knows they have expressed interest to participate, and the user information is not supplied to the public. Easier for people to try and test without people knowing they are trying, and keeping the information private reduces the incentive to game or lie on user profiles.
• Links create destinations: using the link approach allows @twitterdating to provide a destination page with more information for the users that can also be monetized using highly-targeted advertising, per-interaction promotional strategies and per-month payment options. Imagine using Tipjoy as a micropayment mechanism to get access to potential matches by “paying” @twitterdating…
• Link pages can pull in information from other, non-Twitter sites: if the user provides additional data on their profile with links to other pages, the pages will be able to pull in other data from Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect (right?).
• Profiles can store user preferences: users could select notification frequency and store potential matches to allow users to look back at suggested matches and the reasons why they were matched, helping users modify what they tweet about.

Comparisons and Reference points

• Mr. Tweet
• Twitterbirds
• My Tweetheart
• Hot or Not

Extensions

• Could Twitter be used to match up business partners in the same way, using contextual analysis of tweets, links, user data and location to parse intent, capabilities and potential partnerships?

Thoughts?

—

[1] Seriously. I could use it.

I write a lot about photography and the photography business over at my other blog, Taylor Davidson: Photography, and since it’s difficult for new readers to dig into past content I’ve picked out the primary articles I’ve written on the topic in 2008. More articles are highlighted on TaylorDavidson.com: Start Here.

Five Lessons
Five Lessons on how photographers can take advantage of the opportunities in the changing photography industry:

• Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

  Technology has democratized access to the tools of production and distribution, leading to a surge of creators, squeezing the middle class of the industry; the long tail of photographers are getting squeezed.

  We are seeing a massive mismatch of supply and demand; photographers have flooded the market with an oversupply of images created and distributed using mediums and based on economic models no longer in demand.

• Lesson 1: Photographers are your customers, not your competition.
  

  The way to make money in photography is to sell stuff to photographers

• Lesson 2: Take advantage of the atomization of demand and expand the scope of consumption.
  

  People spend their money, time and passion to better their lives, not to better yours. Accept it. Remind yourself of this mantra every time you create, market and deliver a product or service, and it will make you focus on exactly why someone should spend their money, time and passion on you.

• Lesson 3: Take advantage of the oversupply and target your brand, your niche, your fans, your customers.
  

  Forget about fighting the market. Stand above the market and create your own.

• Lesson 4: Connect with context and content.
  

  It’s always been about creating great content, but there’s now a larger opportunity than ever to deliver great context.

• Lesson 5: Make great work.
  

  People still love photography. People still love seeing stories communicated through images. We’re living in a world with a far wider range of mediums in our daily lives that can create, manipulate and display images. We’re not limited by options, we’re limited by our desire and vision.

The Changing Photography Business

• Photography needs a new business model

  The fundamental shift has been the democratization of the tools to create share, promote and distribute content. The tools are no longer available only to the rich, the connected, the judges or connoisseurs of taste: available and open to all, we now have the opportunity to create ourselves, distribute ourselves, and rate and rank by ourselves. Eliminating the opaqueness of the process has spread the opportunity to the masses and increased participation and interest.

• Can the photography business create a new DNA?
  

  The basic economics of the photography industry have been absolutely, fundamentally, permanently upended, flattened by the democratization of the tools of the production and distribution and a shift in the technologies, mediums and methods of communication.

• Everyone is a photographer
  

  Communication has never been about pure quality, but rather about exchanging information efficiently, and once you accept photography as a form of communication then you completely change your expectations and use of the medium.

• Are we losing our focus? (on the Canon 5D II)
  

  “The medium is the message”; multimedia and video communicate differently than static images simply because of the medium used. Not all stories can be told the same way.

Stock Photography Business

• The stock photography industry needs to be unbundled

  We need to unbundle the functions of the traditional stock photography agency. There is no fundamental need for the image delivery and management platform to be delivered by the same company that makes the market and connects buyers and sellers.

• What will the stock photography business look like in 10 years?
  

  What will the stock business be like in ten years? Will the traditional functions of the stock agencies be unbundled?

  … What are the pain points in the stock photography industry?

  … The existing industry structure is simply not sustainable.

• Digital Railroad continues the “rebalancing” of the photography industry
  

  Digital Railroad’s problems have nothing to do with the current macroeconomic credit deleveraging and rebalancing; it’s about a dead business model, a reliance on old DNA, a failure to adapt to the industry’s fundamentally different balance of supply and demand of images, photographers and publishers.

  What will the industry do? Instead of trying to sell images, we’ll probably see a continued focus on selling stuff to photographers.

Assorted: Critiquing, defining, learning

• How can people define their brands in physical spaces using digital content?
  

  How else do people display objects to create their image or “brand”, and how can the content you create help them build their image?

• You can steal content, but you can’t steal me
  

  You can steal my content, you can steal my thoughts, you can steal my photography, but you can’t steal me.

• The importance of looking around
  

  Looking around, exploring viewpoints, is how a photographer explores their eye, surveys a scene, and “sees” the world in a way to extract meaning.

  The same applies in business.

• Messages and Messengers
  

  Instead of critiquing his eye, it seemed far more meaningful to help him develop his voice.

Search: all posts on TaylorDavidson.com on “photography business”.