Canard du jour: Do residuals make you lazy? If the age of privacy is over, is the age of royalties over, too? — From time to time, you see a statement made that creators get paid repeatedly for work done once. Chris Castle takes on this silly canard. “Royalties, and especially residuals, are one of the breakthrough egalitarian concepts. I will create a song for your movie and you can pay me a bit now, but I will retain my right to receive income in the future on exploitations of my works.”
Online publishers need an edge — Concurrent Media takes note of a “key nugget” from this week’s 2012 State of the News Media report from the Pew Center. The Big 5 tech companies — Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL — capture 68% of online ad revenues. As Concurrent Media points out, this highlights the big shift away from a market where the incentive is on producing content to one where the incentive is on tracking and monetizing user behavior.
“Copyright Math” is a Joke — Ken Sanney looks at the recent TED talk by Rob Reid making the rounds about two statistics and the maximum amount of statutory damages available to copyright holders under US law. As Sanney puts it, “ It in no way lives up to the TED Talk’s mantra of presenting ‘ideas worth spreading.'”
A Reply to William Patry — At Barry Sookman’s blog, Dan Glover continues an online discussion with Patry concerning fair use that sprung from an earlier blog post. Interesting and enlightening.
This is why Google is losing the future — Says Bobbie Johnson at GigaOM, “First, the search giant offers a little traffic boost to sites that organize data in certain useful ways. Then it turns the game on its head and — without any notice — starts using that structured data to inform its own services. Finally, with a disturbing inevitability, it launches its own competing product that steps in and replace yours.”
The Case for Ultraviolet— “[E]very industry recognizes its own inherent need to evolve or perish. Leaders and innovators in the content industry firmly and publicly acknowledge the imperative to evolve the current content model to meet the needs and desires of today and tomorrow’s, increasingly sophisticated consumers. What we are witnessing is an established industry with a lucrative, legacy business model adapting to disruption via process evolution. Not every step on the way will be perfectly placed, but this is about creating a long-term, successful partnership.”
OnCopyright 2012 — Next Friday, March 30, the Copyright Clearance Center is holding its OnCopyright conference at Columbia Law School in NYC. Check the link for registration details or to watch a live stream of the event. Full list of participants here.
Gee wiz, waiting for the HR-2281 book that correctly argues 17 USC § 512(k)(1)(B) to get a plug here. Sorry if it makes everyone look moronic.