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Sony CEO Proposes "Guardrails For the Internet"
testadicazzo writes "Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: 'Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
This is the equivalent of a shock statement followed by "Now that I have your attention ..." and is only appropriate when trying to address an auditorium full of teenagers.
I respect you no more than I would respect someone saying
The entire world is burning. Everyone is going to die soon. Period.
Now that I have your attention, I would like to discuss the occasional forest fires that threaten many homes in my state.
Piracy is a problem but it's your problem, not mine. And it's not on the scale you make of it. I am in no way a party to it so I don't want to hear you bashing the greatest communications tool to date nor do I want to hear suggestions of curbing the freedom I enjoy daily on said communications tool.
... yeah, I think we've been down this road.
You had to pack up your home DVD stores in South Korea? Do you think that your supposed "guard rails" will be readily implemented world wide and embraced? I'm sorry, go ahead and sue the whole country or pressure the government to crack down on it or stop releasing Korean dubbed movies or--horrors of all horrors--lower your prices to something people are willing to pay? You effectively prevent me from owning any of your DVDs when the technology to digitally duplicate them is readily available and dirt cheap. That's your choice and you're free to opt for that.
Your comparison to the Interstate Highway System is laughable. Please, do me one favor. In the future, when you draw comparisons of physical theft and huge undertakings like the Interstate Highway System to file sharing and "the Internet" do not confuse physical materials with information! There are major differences--for example: information can be freely replicated with no transfer of resources between the two parties involved! You draw a poor analogy and then *wave of the hands* we need protections like this. What "guard rails" do you suggest for the internet? I mean specifically, what do you have in mind? Have you thought this out at all? I'm sure you don't know but your engineers could suggest a small program from Sony that every internet user has to install on their computer to access the internet that has access to kernel space and
My work here is dung.
Isn't this the company that is losing billions of dollars, that is notorious for cheating their customers, installing rootkits, running their MMORPG's in an unethical manner? This is a company that for 15 years has been living off their name and the fact that it used to make rock solid quality products.
Yeah, I as a consumer SO need to be lectured on ethics by a stuffed shirt from Sony.
Corporatism != Free Market
In the very clever book "Virus of the Mind", the author defines an "association meme" as a social idea about how one thing goes with another. Examples of association memes include: "Cereal is for breakfast", "Muffins are for breakfast", and "Chocolate cake is not for breakfast". Merchants wishing to sell chocolate cake for breakfast (including Starbucks) must work within these memes, which is why they bake their product into a muffin shape. Quite a clever little manipulation.
Turning now to the summary:
To extend "Virus of the Mind"'s ideas, guardrails are an association meme. We associate them with benevolence, with keeping us safe, and with an obvious danger. Lynton is invoking that meme, muffin style, to manipulate us into accepting something we otherwise would reject. The chocolate cake he is selling for breakfast should properly invoke the meme of a school principle, but if it did, nobody would accept it.
I will contribute a dollar to any charity raising money to put Lynton onto a ship and dump him onto a deserted island, never to return. Let's see how he, a professional influencer who, in influencing the movements of billions of dollars, has never produced so much as a grain of wheat, fares alone.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The guy does have a point.
However, I have seen precious little from the entertainment business to meet this demand. Shopping for music online has become somewhat better, with reasonable prices, good selection and less DRM. But online movies? There's few choices there, if any. And the focus is still very much on DRM and/or streaming (the Pay-per-view model that they love so much), as evidenced by recently emerged standards such as HDMI and Bluray.
Many consumers are willing to pay for content. Especially if they get a better product by paying: encoding and compression rate to order, and no DRM. I want to select the quality, easily download the file, and then be able to play it on any of my PCs, my iPhone, and on my TV using a media streaming device. Guess what? Pirates are offering the better product, as things stand today. AllofMP3 let me select encoding and compression, and movies are generally available in various levels of quality, if you take the time to look for them. The movies provided by pirates can be played anywhere, anytime. Pirated movie downloads offer more convenience even than physical Blurays; perhaps Michael should start to understand why that is, and think about ways to offer a competitive product.
My advice: open an online store for movies, offer various download types (for starters: DVD, 720p and 1080p HD, perhaps also lowres files for PSP or iPhone), encode in formats that are generally accepted as the standard (just use what the pirates use), do not require any special players or software (so that the files can be viewed on any device), and do not add any DRM.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I just don't buy that the CEO of Sony has altruistic motives for protecting artists. This is all about the losses that continually climb from their Entertainment branches due to box office flops. They need a place to put blame, and since piracy is the big boogey man in the closet, it's become the reason for falling earnings.
Yes, we did. Yes, we got used to instant delivery of digital content to our PCs. We got used to being able to use the content to display on multi purpose machines (like, say, PCs) instead of having to buy a few dozen different boxes to achive the same results. We got used to ease of storage, being able to put hundreds if not thousands of songs, movies, books and other content on a single hard drive, taking up the room a single book or two CDs in jewel cases would.
Now some bozo comes in and says you can't have that. My only response is "why?". Why not? Because you don't want me to have it? You can't always get what you want, I, for one, would want people to have a clue before they're allowed to open their mouth.
But then we wouldn't ever have heard that gem from the Sony CEO. Which would be a shame. I dare say it has the potential to become about as powerful as the 'internet tubes' meme.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If one, for the sake of discussion, were to accept the bad analogies in this message: don't forget that Sony are the ones who shipped CDs with that caused "severe tire damage" to people who didn't even touch them... without so much as a warning that they were going to install a rootkit on your computer. If Sony's proposing guard rails, be sure they'll be electrified to 270 kVA with spinning tungsten-carbide blades and proximity-fused claymores.
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
I guess he never heard of the Betamax decision. Now what company was involved in that, again?
Not to mention the crises created by the invention of piano rolls, radio, and the cassette tape.
Speaking of which, why do you suppose the Sony Walkman was a roaring success, but Sony completely failed to come up with a credible competitor for the iPod? If Sony had run the "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign instead of trying to put guardrails on their music players, do you suppose history might have been a little different?
You know (bear with me on this), one thing that really annoys me on the internet is when someone spends considerable time and effort putting together a humorous photoshop/blog post/top 10, and the next day I see it, completely uncredited in a national newspaper. Some journalist has stolen it...just because it's on the internet...and stuff on the internet is like, free, right?
Much as I hate to admit it, I think on this occasion Michael Lyton has a point (dammit, I don't like what he says but I have to defend his right to say it). In the real world, no one would seriously contemplate reprinting the contents of a book they borrowed from the library and passing it off as their own, and no one would seriously contemplate walking into their local record store and walking out with anything that caught their eye just because they 'wouldn't have bought it anyway if they'd had to pay full price'.
Thing is, I also buy into the argument that illegal copying actually promotes music sales. Hell, I copied enough albums from my friends when I was a kid to know that I still bought a lot of albums. But don't try to con me that what I wasn't doing wasn't stealing (i.e. taking without permission). It's stealing when a journalist tries to pass off my website as his own work, it's stealing when I copy an album that I never wanted to listen to but my friend says I might quite like, and it's stealing when I download the latest star trek movie because I can't be bothered to pay for it at the cinema and after all, it's bound to be shown on free television at some point anyway.
So let's reboot this discussion. All illegal downloading is theft. Full stop. The more interesting question, is it theft like stealing a pen from work, or is it theft like stealing a car. And if it's theft like stealing a pen, then why is so much more like stealing a car when somebody does it to me.
Yet he posts his views ... on the Internet. Period.
He then refers to the "blogosphere", trying to reduce all criticism to a single entity: "Now, the blogosphere does not take so kindly to provocations like that"
Lynton may have been privileged to have been offered a publication in a traditional news site, on account of him being CEO of some company, but his words written on the Internet are no different to any kind of blogger. Period.
On what basis does he claim that newspapers have been harmed? Even if we accept that Internet piracy is causing harm, where is all the newspaper-piracy? Are people distributing copies of the Huffington Post on bittorrent? Is there a Napster for Broadsheets?
Period.
I got into an argument with an IFPI (our version of the RIAA) representative about the same thing. The topic was anime and the fact that it's near impossible to get them in any kind of timely manner (read: within 3 years of release in Japan) in Europe. No matter what you'd be willing to pay.
Their reply "Well, you want a TV with a built in toaster, but it doesn't exist".
No, sorry. It does exist. If it doesn't exist, why don't you build it, your customer wants it. Last time I checked, what drives the free market economy idea is that the supplier builds what the customer wants and those that don't will perish while those that do will prosper. But it does already exist. You just refuse to sell me that TV with a built in toaster. Me and a lot other people would gladly go and buy it from you. You don't offer it. Others do. Yes, they buy it from some backyard hack that just slapped together a TV and a toaster and sold it as a new gadget (I'm not kidding here, people, the discussion got to this inane level), but what if the customer just doesn't effing care?
The customer wants what he wants. Sell it to him or he'll find a way to get it. Period.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Excellent comment.
He reminds me of the Catholic church shortly after the invention of the printing press. Life was going to end once the unwashed masses got their fingers into the realm of the intellectual & financial elite.
And as for his "nothing good" comment, maybe Sony should just give back all the money it has made from online games since nothing good came of it...
Oh how I wish that this could be read by Mr. Lynton, but unfortunately even if he read it, he JUST WOULDN'T GET IT anyway.
.Lynton, sold an inferior product to your customers around the world and in your paranoia over piracy made sure that they could not buy a superior product from region 1 and watch it on their TVs at home. And to top it all off, while you and your Hollywood buddies have slit your own throats you are convinced that someone else has done you wrong. What's really sad is that doing things like having region codes to begin with and convincing Samsung and others to stop making consumer friendly DVD players has caused those customers to look for alternatives - "free" copies of your DVDs that don't have region codes in them so they can play them at home. So no, I don't feel sorry for you because you did this to yourself and what you and your buddies in Hollywood think that consumers want is not what they want at all. If you want to fix this, put out better product overseas and start encouraging those same DVD player manufacturers to make region free DVD players because until you give up on region coding and finally understand how much we, your potential consumers, hate it, you're basically grasping at sand and not understanding why it's running through your fingers.
Lynton refers to how Sony has essentially closed shop in South Korea because those sneaky Koreans can download his DVDs too fast, so they have no incentive to buy them. Well, I'll tell you why people in South Korea and elsewhere are bypassing Sony. It's your fault. And I'm going to explain why it's your fault and I'm not even going to go down the path of telling you that American movies mostly suck. While that's certainly true, that's not why South Koreans and others aren't buying from your stores.
Hollywood, which includes you Mr. Lynton, is its own worst enemy. Let's take a look at what you release to foreign markets. There's a huge demand for region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs around the world. Know why? It's because region 1 DVDs mean quality. Region 1 DVDs typically use progressive video and high quality audio (DTS for example). Region 1 DVDs often have extras and while personally I'm not real fond of extras most of the time, the marketplace here seems to want it. Let's look at what you give to people in South Korea, which is region 3 for those keeping score. Well, you often release a film with zero extras. You sometimes give them interlaced video and lower quality audio choices (AC3 only and at low bit rates). I have no idea if the subtitles you give them are any good or are as bad as some of those bad English subtitles we used to get on Hong Kong movies in the past. And here's the best part of all - you and your cabal have "persuaded" almost every single DVD manufacturer to stop making DVD players that can have the region settings changed. So now Samsung, a very large company in, hmmm, South Korea, simply does not make a DVD player anywhere in the world now that can be made region free. They are not alone in this. I participate in a large video forum and you know what one of our most popular questions from new members is? How can I make my DVD player region free? You know what the answer is? Often it is "You can't". So you, Mr.
I love XKCD as much as the next bloke, but let's at least be fair in our hypotheticals. Would Calvin & Hobbes* exist if Bill Watterson had been born twenty or thirty years later? I'm doubtful.
* Watterson was vehemently opposed to commercializing the art that he saw his comics to be -- hence the lack of any official C&H merchandise, as opposed to Randall's business model.
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> In the meantime, you're being completely disingenuous yourself. If you really believed that piracy
> was no worse with sneakernet than it is now, you'd be too stupid to have learned to type.
Yes the Internet has made things a little easier, but not as much as you seem to believe. I'm guessing you are too young to remember 'user groups'. All you needed was a couple of systems setup with two floppy drives and you were off to the races. A floppy could be copied in a minute flat on the better systems, a bit longer on the slow crappy serial based systems like the C64 and Atari. And copy they did, for hours while the users talked and talked. It was typical for everyone who attended semi-regular to have several shoe boxes of copied software.
Now it would be less practical because media capacity has outstripped transfer speed a little, but it is still pretty darned fast to dupe DVDs, especially if you cache the read and settle into stamping out multiple copies. CDs can even get pretty close to that one minute per copy speed of yore.
But what would totally reimagine sneakernet would be a new file sharing protocol that would allow two people to connect their disparate devices (laptop, mp3 player, smartphone, etc) on a local (wired or wireless) link and basically smartly sync everything between them. Smart in the sense that each user could set rules to decide what they want to receive so they don't fill up their device with a bunch of stuff they don't want. Have it remember you refused that pile of every episode of (insert name of series you don't particularly like) on your co-workers stash and never grab it even if it disappears and later shows back up on their laptop. Let the **AA clamp down on the Internet and watch how fast what I just described gets invented and popularized.
Give storage a few more doublings in capacity and music becomes a 'Pokemon' exercise. The top level packrats 'have em all' as in first every song that ever charted, then to every album commercially released and finally just every audio recording one could ever want. All available for sharing (via Internet or sneakernet) and spread around the world in so many locations no **AA effort could ever stamp it out. A few years later the same happens to movies and then TV shows. Children will be given a copy of 'everything' by their parents, supplemented by the cool new stuff by their friends.
How does the **AA continue to exist when that world appears? I believe the idea of copyright has merit even if the current eternal copyright is taking things way too far. But what I believe doesn't matter, the tech is coming and nothing I say or do, nothing you say or do, nothing the **AA says or does, nor even what government says, does or legislates is going to do more than hasten or delay that change a year or so.
Democrat delenda est