Kitty Hawk and Post-Digital Copyright

Letting the current generation of lawmakers decide what is and isn’t permissible online is like letting the pre-flight lawmakers decide that land ownership extends infinitely up into the air.

Which, if I’m not mistaken, is exactly what some people thought should happen, in the post-Kitty Hawk USA.

This is the level of absurdity we’re talking about, when we talk about demanding that bits be treated as the legal equivalent of atoms.  We’re talking about banning air travel because a spot ten thousand feet above Jim-Bob’s cabin is somehow a key element of Jim-Bob’s day to day life, and flying over unnoticed infringes on his rights.

There’s a collapsing content business because people are still trying to legislate bits into atoms, and spending countless millions on lawsuits, lobbying and hackneyed technologies to make this happen.

It won’t work.  The invention of the plane made it necessary for Jim-Bob to let go of the imaginary right he had to the space above his head, the same way content industries need to let go of the imaginary value of text and images that can be instantly copied at no cost, and transmitted at no price.

I don’t care if the world worked one way for your entire career.  It doesn’t work that way anymore.  Making it illegal for the world to have changed just ruins any chance of developing sustainable businesses.

Put another way, prohibition created organized crime.  Endless rivers of money went to criminals because, well, people were gonna drink anyway.  A law that does not change behaviour isn’t a law, it’s failed governance.

Let the planes fly, because the second we realized they could, the world changed.

[Edit: apparently I am accidentally stealing this comparison from Lawrence Lessig.  This isn’t shocking, because I make a point of reading as much of his work as possible.  Still, apologies.]

3 Words on the Future of Content: Alternate Revenue Streams.

The seemingly universal assumption that advertising revenue will save us, will keep art and culture online solvent, will fill the gap between VC and buy-out that most people actually consider a business, is by far the largest threat I see to the internet, moreso than telcos that think they own everything created online, more than absurd copyright lobbyists, more than politicians who actually conceive of the thing as a ‘series of tubes’.

We’re a world that, by and large, doesn’t have a plan.  Some people will survive, and thrive, on ad revenue online.  Off the top of my head, we have Google and Gawker.  Google will survive because they make money from more content than any one media brand, any one company, could ever create.  Gawker will survive because the association with their brand is worth at least as much as the ad campaign, and because they have a demonstrated willingness to blur the line between selling advertising, and selling integration into the editorial content of their properties.  I don’t know where Nick Denton’s line is, and I don’t care - he gets it, and he will make money.

But if your plan is 1. Get traffic 2. ??? 3. Profit, you should know that banner ads aren’t really going to cut it as a step two for a huge number of companies.  And the point where waiting for the rates for online advertising to go up seemed intelligent was about 5 years back.

We need to get working on a new plan.  One that goes further than selling eyeballs.  The internet depends on it.