It’s actually not so different from the potted history of every media company that rises to popularity on the back of a new medium – take radio, for example – then sells out at the top of the market. Only in the case of Web 2.0, companies go from “pre-revenue” to “post-revenue” without any revenue in between. That’s where you need a bigger idiot.

It’s cute to read arguments today that depend so much on historical inevitability – or else rely on natural, or physical “laws” – laws which turn out to be dodgy metaphors that only exist in the author’s head. When we look at history, we learn something quite different, which is that all media companies reach a settlement with creators, eventually. The two are mutually symbiotic: copyright is a social agreement created in response to technological innovation, and technology needs copyright material, or else it’s bunch of empty pipes, or at best a low-value telephone network.

Occasionally, history throws up odd wrinkles, such as the absence of a performance rights deal on sound recordings on US radio, but these are very rare exceptions. In the absence of a viable business, the hope of New Media startups has been to find a wrinkle they can drive a bus (or a business) through. The original Napster hoped to change the law, and when that failed, it tried to reach a settlement with the record industry.

…Read more at The Register

Move over Fifty Quid bloke – and make way for 14p man.

Statements seen by The Register indicate that’s all the hit music service Spotify makes per user from its advertising-supported business. The difference is the middle-aged spender coveted by the movie, games and music businesses plunks down £50 per week – but Spotify earns its 14p per user per month.

The figures – which we can disclose for the first time – make for interesting reading. They confirm Spotify’s explosive growth – topping half a million registered users in the UK in May from a standing start in January.

But revenues at this stage are negligible. Advertising income was just over £82,000 last month, hence the 14p figure. We can also reveal that despite the phenomenal growth, the takeup of the tenner-a-month subscription program is small, and as a percentage of users, is falling.

Fewer than 17,000 UK users were signed up to Spotify Premium in May, an increase of 2,700 over the previous month – despite the service adding 170,000 registered members overall.

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WiReD magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has copped to lifting chunks of material for his second book Free from Wikipedia and other sources without credit. But it could be about to get a lot worse.

In addition to the Wikipedia cut’n'pastes, Anderson appears to have lifted passages from several other texts too. And in a quite surreal twist, we discover that the Long Tail author had left a hard drive backup wide open and unsecured for Google to index, then accused one of his accusers of “hacking”.

Does the WiReD editor and New Economy guru need basic lessons in how to use a computer?

Waldo Jaquith of Virginia Quarterly Review unearthed a dozen suspect passages after what he called “a cursory investigation”, and posted his findings here on Tuesday. Wikipedia entries for ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch’, ‘Learning Curve’ and ‘Usury’ had been pasted into Anderson’s book.

In addition to Wikipedia citations, which Anderson reproduced with the errors intact (oops), Jacquith suggests he also lifted from an essay and a recent book. Presented with the evidence, Anderson blamed haste and (curiously) not being able to decide on a presentation format for citations, for his decision to omit the citations altogether. Other examples were “writethroughs”, he said.

Then lit blogger Edward Champion documented several more examples which he says show

“a troubling habit of mentioning a book or an author and using this as an excuse to reproduce the content with very few changes — in some cases, nearly verbatim.”

Champion’s examples of churnalism include blog posts, a corporate websites and (again) Wikipedia.
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Read more at The Register

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Dr Yong-Kyung Lee, head of Korea Telecom and a policy advisor to the Korean government, amazed delegates with his descriptions of high tech Korea. Lee was a Bell Labs R&D guy for years, but for the last decade has had an entire country to play with.

But one factoid emerged unscripted.

There are now 100 hospital centres to treat people for internet addiction in Korea, he told us casually.

This brought gasps of astonishment from the audience, as well it might. Can anyone confirm this? Have you checked into a Korean internet addiction centre recently? If so, send us an email. In fact, send us an email if you’re in Korea and had an accident and were looking for A&E, or were visiting a relative, but wandered into a Korean internet addiction centre by mistake. We don’t care. We want to know more.

When Carter’s Digital Britain report is published, we’ll look out to see if the therapy industry will be rewarded here, as it is over there.

It’s going to get Britain booming again.
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Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form. It’s Choruss, the incubator hatched by Jim Griffin – a long-time advocate of licensing P2P sharing on networks.

Choruss won’t ultimately be in the retail or service business, Griffin told us in Washington DC today – but it may provide an “umbrella” for managed service companies such as Playlouder MSP, the technology partner for the suspended Virgin Unlimited music service. “We’re not in the business of distribution,” he said. Griffin was also on a panel at the biennial World Copyright Summit, organised by CISAC, the global organisation for collective rights management societies.

Griffin says this year’s phase of Choruss is designed to experiment with pricing. Different colleges will get different pricing schemes.

“The plan is to use next school year to run tests and experiments,” he said. Only after the scheme has been running will an assessment be possible – but Griffin told Summit delegates that, “We’ve had students tell us it’s worth $20 a month – to share what they want to share.”

The fact that such large numbers have volunteered to pay for a P2P service defies the conventional music industry wisdom that the only way to compete with the pirates is with free offerings. It also shows how much Choruss has evolved since it first broke the surface last April, when talk was of opting students in automatically, in return for a “coventant not to sue”.

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Read more at The Register

…Read more at The Register