My friend Sam over at WrongBot has a piece up about the disconnect between price and value, focusing on how it concerns piracy. I have a lot to say in response, which I felt merited a post of its own.
Sam sets up a dichotomy between price and value, which he defines as, respectively, “how much you pay for [a good or service]“, and “how much a thing is worth”. The former varies quite a bit for a given good or service; the latter, for the most part, does not. He then goes on to describe a disconnect between the two, and how in recent years it’s gotten worse:
We now live in a world where the minimum price you can expect to pay for a piece of music is zero dollars. And if people have trouble telling price and value apart, which I think it’s clear that they do, then there are a lot of people who think that recorded music isn’t worth anything at all. Now, this is an obviously erroneous belief, because these people listen to music, and therefore it has value to them. But they don’t realize that. They think that the value is the price, which is nothing. And by “they,” I mean “all of us.”
The problem with this argument is that it’s too narrow a description of what people are willing to pay for. This argument views buying a album of music as a straightforward money-for-music deal. The real market isn’t that simple. There are other factors to consider: what can I use to listen to this music? What does it cost me in terms of time? Am I limited in any way in how I use it? Am I in danger of legal trouble for using or having it?
From the purest standpoint of a consumer, what piracy ultimately boils down to is a different distribution method, which has its own conveniences and drawbacks. Let’s take CDs as an example. Clear costs are in red (since some are debatable). A CD’s features are:
- Can be played in portable CD players or computers.
- Must be physically retrieved to be used.
- Can be optionally encoded to a computer.
- Can be easily shared with friends.
- Comes with art and lyrics and possible other features.
- Costs around $10-15.
- Requires either a trip to a brick-and-mortar store, or a several day wait to acquire.
Now let’s look at pirated music through the same lens.
- Costs nothing.
- Requires no physical storage.
- Can be easily shared with friends.
- Instant or very fast gratification.
- Can be played on computers and PMPs, or optionally encoded onto CDs.
- Requires users to organize their music themselves.
- Carries a minor risk of legal reprisal from authorities such as the RIAA.
It’s hard to argue from those lists that CD’s are a superior format, no? Takes up little to no space, can be played on any device (including much smaller ones than CD players), and it costs nothing! Not to mention, so few people have been sued by the RIAA that the lawsuits that have happened have served more to piss people off than scare them into paying for things.
When piracy first became a viable option for the masses–that is, when Napster became popular–the music industry’s response was to try to defend their operations by attacking it. For whatever reason, their thought was not “here’s a new opportunity, let’s learn how to make money from it”, it was “this threatens our business model, let’s destroy it”. And let’s be clear: this is a service that was better. Yes, it being free was a factor in that, but CD’s don’t offer instant gratification and will always require physical storage.
It took a few years, but music distributors figured this out. They know that instant gratification is very, very, very important if you want to get someone to pay for something. That’s why the iTunes Music Store is the largest music distributor in the world–it provides music straight into a user’s iTunes library in just a few clicks (effectively a music package repository). Amazon understands this with their MP3 store, which can automatically export its downloads into a user’s iTunes library or Windows Media Player.
And it’s also why streaming music is changing everything now.
I’m talking about Pandora, last.fm and Spotify. I’m sure we all know the former two–the latter third has made a tremendous splash in Europe, and will undoubtedly make a similar one once it makes its way to the USA. It’s basically like iTunes, except all of its music comes straight from their servers on demand, ad-supported or for a monthly fee. Let’s look at the feature list for that:
- Costs nothing.
- Allows personalized choices of music on demand.
- Instant gratification.
- Requires no physical storage.
- Can be played on computers and increasingly common internet-conneted portable devices.
- Costs money to remove ads.
This is better in almost every way, for nearly all use cases.
Economics has been called the Dismal Science for a reason: it’s amoral. It assumes that people don’t do what’s right: they act in their self interest. But there’s an upside to that: it means that piracy can be beaten by offering a better product. In the early days of piracy, it’s true that the technology didn’t exist yet for making current and emerging distribution methods practical–but it’s constantly getting cheaper, and as it does it’ll only become easier to make services like Spotify profitable.
For other examples in other media, there’s Audible.com, Netflix and Steam–all services which clearly have something to lose from piracy, and yet are doing pretty well. These businesses have all come up with ways to be better options than piracy for at least a lot of people, and they’re quite rightly doing well for it.
So yes, there may be a disconnect between what’s right and what happens in practice. But that’s no excuse for anyone to dig their heads in the sand and refuse to innovate. The world changes; if that threatens your business, then change your business. Draconian measures to protect a demonstrably inferior business model will not halt progress.
I’m a fan of Twitter. It’s certainly wormed its way into all of our hearts over the year 2009, becoming bizarrely ubiquitous in our media and in our minds. But despite whatever it may mean for democracy, communication, location-awareness or real-time trend monitoring, it brought with it a horrid curse upon the Web that endangers all of its users.
That curse is URL shortening. And yes, it did exist before Twitter, but Twitter both limits how much its users can post and depends on those users sharing content with each other, often in links–and those URLs can take up a lot of space. The growth of URL shortening has brought with it the growth of URL shortening services, which apparently hope to monetize it.
Leaving aside the issue of how monetizing such a thing can be done, URL shortening is bad from a user’s perspective for the simple reason that if someone shares a link with me, I have no clue where it’s going. If someone just posts “OMG this is awesome”, the shortened URL they post it with could just as easily be a rickroll attempt as it could be an evildoer hijacking their account and sending me to malware. And while I may be running Ubuntu, there’s no way of knowing that there isn’t some kind of zero-day exploit already being used on it (I have no illusions about Ubuntu being perfectly secure, after all).
This isn’t just a security problem–it’s also a usability one. What if I’m playing music and I don’t want to see a Youtube video? What if I’m working and only want to click on a link if I know it’ll be something quick? What if it’s a link to an inflammatory Reddit post that’ll just get me angry and ruin my mood?
Clever users may respond that there are browser extensions and Twitter clients that can solve this problem by showing a preview of the destination. Maybe, but if they don’t show you the URL, do you really think it would be hard for a malware writer to put up a fake display of the site at the destination? If they’re willing to meticulously fake the appearance of a Windows security warning or antivirus program, would it really be hard to put up a fake image of a Youtube page and then switch it out with Javascript if an actual browser is detected? Admittedly, this would likely have to target specific previewers to fake them out, but it’s a real possibility, and not one that an informed user can ignore.
In order to avoid subjecting people to this danger, I’ve installed YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener… clever!) on my hosting to try to avoid putting people through that. I don’t intend to let anyone else use it for URL shortening, just me–so you can be reasonably certain that if you see a short URL beginning with perpetualstudent.net/, it came from me and not someone who hijacked my account. Yes, my domain isn’t especially short, but it’s probably short enough for my purposes. YOURLS is a great project, if only because it shows just how little work it takes to make a URL shortener beyond thinking of a clever short domain name. All it takes is a cleverly-written .htaccess file, a bit of PHP code and a MySQL database. YOURLS even gives you all the same URL tracking features that the likes of bit.ly do.
So please–if you’re going to use a URL shortening service like bit.ly or u.nu, have the decency to explain in context where those links go and what I’ll get if I click on them. The occasional rickroll won’t kill me, but the last thing I want is to feel paranoid when clicking on links my friends share.
So at this point, anyone who’s following tech news should be pretty certain that Apple will unveil a tablet within a month or so. Despite Apple’s intense internal secrecy, rumors of it have long been pervasive throughout the tech world, since before the announcement of the iPhone. When it happens, it’ll undoubtedly be a game changer. Before it, tablets will have just been a curiosity for field workers or artists. After it, they’ll be… uh, the computing equivalent of coffee table books.
Well, OK–to be fair, we don’t know for sure. Steve Jobs definitely wants us to think they’ll be more than that. And would it really be out of character?
The thing I’ve always found fascinating about Apple’s branding is how much effort they put into making things shiny. Their strict policy of vertical integration–producing both hardware and software–allows them to deliver a perfectly seamless and visually consistent user experience, something their competitors are incapable of replicating. Not only that, they’ve shown themselves to be great innovators time and time again, creating software that not only feels fresh and new every time, it has a quality of magical allure to it that draws in geeks and non-geeks alike. And yes, “magical” really is the best word I can come up with for it–Steve Jobs has all the qualities of the eccentric visionary, and I suspect he’ll likely be remembered in the future as the Edison of personal computing.
In the case of the iPhone and the iPod, what Apple’s competitors repeatedly noticed was that they couldn’t out-Apple Apple. Try as they might, they never could get the publicity or the attention that always followed Apple’s venerable name. No matter how cutting-edge their products were, they couldn’t make them sexy. The iPhone, after all, was the first smartphone that captured the public’s attention and wasn’t written off as too expensive/too businesslike for “normal people” to be seen with, despite its relatively limited feature set at the time of its release. All it needed was a pretty touchscreen, a sleek design and interface, a rather subpar sound system and the Apple touch.
What I find interesting now is that there’s been a glut of tablet news lately. (Yes, that last link is to an article about very shaky rumors of a Google-branded tablet.) These companies know the Apple tablet is coming. They’re trying to steal Apple’s thunder by showing that what they’re doing isn’t all that special–others are doing it too. They don’t want the tablet space to suddenly be dominated by whatever Apple’s releasing. But will it work? Obviously this depends on how well Apple can maintain their freshness image, and the press attention they get for it–when it does come, it’ll be the denouement of literally half a decade of speculation, so clearly they’ll make at least some people happy regardless.
What I wonder is: can any other company ever manage to capture the shine that Apple represents? Google certainly has a bit of it, but they’ve yet to be seriously tested in the hardware marketplace, and the Nexus One is hardly a groundbreaker (despite its luminary status as a Google phone, and the fact that Google deliberately made its bootloader unlockable!). Microsoft certainly doesn’t have it–their entire corporate image just exudes mundane. So who can?
Complaining about Facebook changes is nothing new–every time Facebook makes some kind of layout change, there’s a wave of furious indignation in the form of militant fan pages and groups followed by those same people quietly getting used to the changes and forgetting they ever cared. (After the more recent changes, I’ve been consistently amused by people demanding “our old feed back”–the one that pissed those same people off so much when it was introduced.)
This most recent change consists of a revamp for Facebook’s already-substantial privacy settings. This change didn’t actually affect anyone’s settings who didn’t tell it to; users were greeted with an unavoidable menu asking them if they wanted to keep their old settings or switch them to new, simplified privacy categories–the default of which in a number of them was “Everyone”.
This is, to be perfectly fair, not something I really have a problem with. While “Everyone” was preselected for some users (UPDATE: apparently not all, since for some at least, it was set to Original Settings), they gave you all the information you need to decide whether that was actually a good thing. Plus, I get why they’re doing it; they want all the data they have on their users to be available to search engines and marketers so they can monetize it, and so they can position themselves as the search result that people might want to come up on Google searches for their users’ names. Monetizing profile data without incurring the wrath of privacy advocates is something they’ve been doing for years through, among other things, their own targeted advertising network (the one that’s known for selling sex to men and weight loss to women), the ill-conceived and ill-fated Beacon, Facebook Connect, and the notorious ads that use friend connections to make it appear as though a user’s friends endorse a product.
Many of Facebook’s users tend to forget that Facebook is neither free nor intended as a public service. They’re in the game to make money, and the data they’ve amassed on their users is worth a fortune to the right people. With that in mind, I don’t really blame them for encouraging their users to make their profile data public. (As long as, y’know, they’re not doing anything shady on the side in complete violation of their privacy policy.)
On the other hand, I imagine many of their users neither take the time to learn about how far their profile data can go nor care about the issue, and might very well absently click their way through the menu without thinking about what “Everyone” actually means. Frankly, I have little sympathy for those users, but the EFF disagrees. I would be quite interested in statistics on how many users actually changed their settings to Everyone as a result of this menu–those would presumably be the ones who just didn’t want to be bothered and thought “yeah, whatever”.
It just goes to show: as always, there is no replacement for a smart user. Internet companies will monetize however they can. It’s up to users to decide where they want their data to go, or if they even care.
Edited: Fixed a minor typo. Also, I’ve received reports that Everyone wasn’t always preselected, which is quite significant for the “yeah, whatever” cases.
In a sobering reminder to the Linux world that they aren’t as perfectly secure as they often think they are, malware has been discovered in theme packages on gnome-look.org, a repository for users to distribute display themes and other elements for customizing the appearance of many Linux-based OS installations.
No matter how secure your system is, there’s never a replacement for a well-educated user who knows to at least be wary of untrusted software packages. While a smart security framework can make a user pause before making a mistake, it’s ultimately still at the user’s mercy. (Though having such a system in place is certainly much better than not having one, or providing a false sense of security.) A Linux user who joyfully installs every package offered is really in no safer a position than… well, the majority of Windows users.
The iPhone App Store is, at heart, a package manager–not unlike the package managers that have been used for years in the Linux world. It provides a catalog of software that users can rummage through, finding applications that look shiny and easily installing them through an automated process that requires no user input between when the user hits the install button and when the icon appears on the applications menu. It’s a great system–it makes software browsing fun and easy, and it allows the distributor and developers to even charge money for their work, injecting revenue and ensuring a healthy ecosystem.
Except in this case it clearly isn’t healthy. The App Store has attracted quite a bit of negative press in recent months for its seemingly arbitrary, bizarre, anticompetitive and possibly even politically motivated submission rejections.
These rejections represent a fatal flaw of the system that dooms it to always being a subpar and unethically managed package manager.
Let’s step back.
For years in the Linux world, we’ve relied on package management to handle software installation and removal. We install our OS as a distribution from some sort of organization, which could be an actual company that makes money or just a hacker releasing software in their spare time. The important thing about installing software in Linux is that without some form of automation, it’s a pain–you would have to compile your software yourself after looking up all of its dependencies, a time-consuming process that really doesn’t make sampling software easy or fun.
So, to ease that process, the distributor of the OS runs servers that your machine can download software from, automatically handling dependencies and keeping track of what’s installed where on your system and what software uses what assets. Package management has only improved over the years, as software libraries expanded and user demand grew. Today, it couldn’t be easier to install a program in Ubuntu; all you have to do is fire up the Ubuntu Software Center, browse, click install, and enter your password.
But package management does have its drawbacks. There’s a bit of a security risk–while it’s pretty easy to use cryptography to reasonably guarantee that no one’s breaking into the server and sending you malicious software, you can’t know for certain that the distributor isn’t doing nasty things (and while I’m willing to bet there aren’t many users who audit all the source code of everything they install on their machines, releasing everything as source code still gives you the ability to do so, which there’s a lot to be said for). But by far the biggest one is that you’re completely dependent on the distributor for software availability. If something you want isn’t in there, or if it’s not up to date enough, there’s not much you can do besides try to manually install it, which tends to muck things up.
The App Store’s fatal flaw is refusing to allow independent distribution channels. Allowing them instantaneously removes the biggest issue package managers have by freeing developers to distribute their products their own way, instead of having to go through Apple. If such a thing were allowed, Apple could further create incentives for developers to produce software for them by not taking a cut of the profits (or maybe even taking it anyway through licensing agreements), thus enriching the platform. It’s how Microsoft became successful–by allowing developers tremendous freedom with their development frameworks and leaving the market open to grow according to demand. It would even force Apple to clean up their own act in order to compete with them (though that can hardly be seen as a good reason from their perspective).
But the iPhone is a very heavily locked down platform, which only ever gained the App Store to quell demand that was being satisfied by jailbreaking, before it became one of Apple’s main moneymakers when it proved enormously popular and lucrative. It’s fundamentally changed an industry, and yet it remains a painful symbol of exactly how unfair it is to have a single entity acting as the entire channel through which users can install software. Some users still jailbreak, but others continue to use only what Apple makes available, and that’s not good for anyone–not for Apple’s users, not for developers hoping to make money off of them, and not for Apple’s reputation.
If I were an iPhone user or programmer, I wouldn’t be happy. I’d be demanding that Apple open up the platform immediately to 3rd party distributors, not just developers. That, to me, is a prerequisite for software development. I don’t want to be at the mercy of a company that gets to decide what software I use on a machine that I purchased–especially if I hope to make money off of selling software for it. The Linux world figured it out years ago, and there’s no reason why Apple can’t. Even other mobile OS developers figured it out–Android and Palm both allow it.
Is it just too lucrative for Apple to give up? Maybe. It’s still more than enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to touch their development platform. I can do better. And until Apple cleans up their act, so can you.
Sorry to bother you, but I’ve just done that thing where I switch over to Feedburner and ask you to change the feed you’re using in case you’ve subscribed to my nascent blog. I know it’s annoying, but I’d really appreciate it, and it’d make the experience better for both of us anyway. So please, check it out. 
New URL for my feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/perpetualstudent/eEFV.
Rupert Murdoch does not understand the Internet.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he just wants to go back to the good old days when a news establishment couldn’t be challenged by people working in their basements. Or maybe he genuinely does believe he can completely block off the WSJ’s content with a pay wall and have people actually pay for something they’ve always gotten for free and could just as easily continue to get for free from elsewhere.
But for better or worse, the Internet is here to stay. He’d be better off, y’know, innovating. Instead of shouting about pay walls and blocking his sources of traffic and trying to force his competitors to do the same thing to avoid losing his readership over it.
By the way, traditional news companies can innovate. The New York Times is doing an excellent job of this, even releasing public APIs for other developers making mashups from their content! The BBC even released an open source Javascript library for other web developers to benefit from their work!
But if Rupert Murdoch wants to try to wish away the Internet, I’ve no problem with that. I’ll just keep reading the NYTimes, giving them advertising revenue and link traffic. I might even buy a subscription. Maybe even through TimesReader, which runs on all platforms where Adobe AIR does.
Imagine a world in which email is not free.
Imagine a world in which using email requires every user to pay someone–say, Apple–for the privilege of being able to read what others send you, or send them messages in the first place. Imagine a world in which Apple Mail were the only email client, and without Apple Mail, restrictive licenses and technical obfuscation would prevent you from reading or writing correspondence with others.
If that were how email worked, would it be nearly as ubiquitous as it is today?
Then why are so many people willing to store (or worse, distribute) important data in formats they have to trust a single entity for the privilege of using it?
Mind you: these people aren’t stupid. They’re certainly not malicious. But they’re victims of one of the greatest caveat emptor tricks of the computer age.
Incidentally, if you’ve ever emailed someone a Word document, I’m talking about you.
Now, I’m no free software zealot. I think free software is amazing–being able to understand, modify and improve the code of a piece of software you possess is wonderful and greatly increases its usefulness. But, I understand that there’s a lot of money in software, be it through the web or the desktop or the cloud, and that there are some things that require too much time and effort to be feasible to produce for someone working in their spare time. And I also understand that a developer whose livelihood depends on sales of said software might be reluctant to release it for everyone else to modify.
But, I submit to you now that it’s the ethical responsibility of any developer to write programs that store data in a human-readable, unobfuscated way.
Even if the program’s interface makes its innerworkings perfectly clear. Even if customer service is excellent. Even if a lifetime’s worth of upgrades are included in the purchase.
It is perfectly fair for a software company to charge for a license to use software that they developed. But data produced by the program does not belong to that company–it belongs to the user, and the user should have every right to use it as they see fit, be it by developing their own software to use it, or even importing it into software made by other developers. And in order to do that, files should be stored in plaintext.
Pre-2007 Word documents (and in fact, any file produced by a Microsoft Office program by default settings) are a perfect example of how not to do this. If you use a plaintext editor like Notepad to view what these documents actually contain, all you’d see is garbage. Nothing human-readable. The only way to decipher it is by feeding it into Word itself, which, as many people forget, is an expensive program. And one that makes no guarantee of being supported in the future. And with no documentation available to understand exactly how it’s stored in the file for posterity.
Other Office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Google Documents can read Word documents, but only by reverse engineering–an error-prone process that leads to imperfect importing algorithms. This is a format frequently distributed among users, often disseminated to many different users for review or perusal, with a tacit assumption that everyone can use it. There’s no guarantee!
Microsoft isn’t quite as bad as it used to be. In response to disapproval from governments, antitrust suits and intellectual desertion, they’re in the process of migrating users to the new Office Open XML format (you know those .docx files that drive everyone crazy? With a bit of effort, they can even be compatible with older versions of Office!), even going so far as to strong-arm the ISO into making it an actual standard format.
And, as we all know, Microsoft has never been all that good at encouraging users to upgrade software in a timely manner.
This behavior is nonetheless a huge improvement over past practices. Microsoft also recently announced a release of documentation on Outlook’s data storage model, which is undoubtedly a stride in the right direction. But the days of obfuscated data storage should be over. We live in a world where users routinely share data between vastly different systems; conforming to open, documented standards can no longer be considered optional. The Web suffers enough from an incompatible browser holding back its innovation; it depends entirely on interoperability across browsers and platforms. Its success makes restricted, proprietary data formats obsolete.
You may read this post as a cheap shot at Microsoft. I may rail against them a lot, but they’re not the only offenders here. Adobe Flash is another example that’s wormed its way into Web ubiquity, for example. (The player may be downloadable for free, but who is Adobe accountable to? And once you’ve made your .swf files, how do you break them down into components without Adobe software?)
So please–don’t send me .doc files. You don’t know I can use it. Use .docx, .odt, .rtf or even .pdf. Just no .docs.
We all take the Internet for granted today, so as a brainstorming exercise I thought I might try to think up a list of things that you can do with the Internet. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, and it’s surely not a list of everything the Internet will ever be able to let you do–I just thought I’d try to contextualize this point in history by pointing out how easy the Internet has made our lives.
On reading it, some food for thought: how much of this is new? How much of it is made easier? How much of it is worth doing?
- Pay your bills.
- Download a music album, video game or movie, legally or illegally.
- Learn the history of the life of Nikola Tesla.
- Download a free operating system.
- Collaborate on a calendar.
- Find out what your friends are doing.
- Collaborate on a massive trolling effort.
- Find out how much money is in your bank account, your IRA, or any stock market holdings.
- Choose from numerous comics to read, without buying a newspaper.
- Find out what a word means in any language with a web presence.
- Talk to a friend in real time on the other side of the world, for free.
- Find out how to get past a tricky part in a video game.
- Find a job, or network with potential colleagues.
- Find out what’s happening in real time in Congress, and read commentary from any political perspective in existence.
- Offer your own commentary, and maybe even convince someone you’re right.
- Learn how to make a web site or program of your own, using any existing methodology.
- Buy basically anything that can be legally shipped to you–and a lot of stuff that can’t.
- Reunite with someone you’ve completely lost contact with.
- Find porn of anything. (I’m not kidding, and you know it.)
- Aggregate all the most recent news about everything you care about into a single window.
- Learn how to program in any programming language.
- Learn about any topic in music theory.
- Have an affair. Discreetly.
- Read the entire text of a public domain book, or have it read to you.
- Acquire, modify, patch and redistribute the original source code of numerous high-quality pieces of software.
- Collaborate with many other developers who share your interests and intentions in doing so.
- Remotely and securely control a machine nowhere near you.
- Download a screensaver that constantly evolves based on user preferences.
- Participate in a revolt against an authority figure.
- Provide your own opinions, and maybe even make money doing it.
- Develop a new way to make money that no one in the world has ever done before.
- Get into an incredibly vitriolic argument, and enjoy every minute of it.
- Sell anything.
- Let whoever made a piece of software you’re using know if something is wrong with it.
- Watch TV shows from another country long before they’re ever officially brought to where you are, complete with subtitles.
- Teach the world how to do something.
Anything else interesting you can think of that I missed?
