How Much Would You Pay Per Song?

The longer the debate about file sharing and music pricing goes on, the more and more I am sensitive to price per song. It's to the point where I won't even buy music in stores anymore. Instead I just turn on the radio (can't wait till I can afford an HD radio) or go to Pandora and listen to hundreds of great songs.

The best part about the long-song list broadcast radio stations is they tend to play the same stuff over and over again so it's easy to tune out when I'm trying to work (plus it doesn't take any resources on my machine whose built-in laptop speakers are a little weak for the job anyway).

Exponential Distributions and Tag Clouds

I just noticed this and I have to wonder if it's a common thing or not: When looking at the number of posts with a given tag on my tag list, it has a vaguely exponential distribution. Discrete, of course, but it has that same downward slope and everything when the tags are ordered by number of posts. I wonder if the histogram of number of tags with a given post count is Poisson?

I may just take the current counts of this page, run them through R, and post the results. It would be really cool if lots of other people did this and posted the results below or emailed theirs to me for inclusion.

I wonder if it says anything about human behavior? Do we tend to clump most things into the same few bins and have lots of smaller ones?

Digital Copyright Protection

I've been reading a very fascinating debate at the New York Times site about the topic between--go figure--two lawyers. You can infer the joke about how the first commentators on an economic/business question are the ones with arguably the least direct training and experience therein.

First, let's start the debate over again. Why do people create content in any form? Two reasons. First, because they want to. Second, for some form of renumeration. In the case of corporations, this means monetary payment. In the case of open source coders (such as GNU contributors) I would say this is in the form of more usable software that does what they want it to do.

Then there's the US Constitution's granting of copyrights (I use this as an example only because I live in the States). Let's all remember they lived in an analog age where to infringe on a copyrighted work you had to either (a) hand copy it over and over again or (b) pay someone with a printing press to print copies. Either way you had to put in some serious time and money in hopes of making enough on sales to offset the costs. Let's face it, barriers to successful mass infringement were huge when those words were written and have been dropping steadily ever since. Computers and the Internet might be as low as barriers will go, but only time will tell.

What does this say about the debate of copyright protection on digital media? Very simply, it says that the only time such protection makes sense from an economic point of view is when it generates more revenue than it costs to implement. Does it? I don't know, but I know no protection system which allows the media to be played is going to ever stay unbroken forever. Moreover, it's likely that as time goes on it's going to get harder, not easier, to protect content.

I think any casual visit to doom9 or recalling the publication to the Internet of the key to hundreds of DVD titles a few months ago (not to mention the ongoing success of dvdlibcss2, which lets DVD's be played on Linux boxes or my history example above) will convince most reasonable people that in the arms race between "hackers" and "protectors", given time the hackers will win every time. It's not just software either. At some point the material has to be played, and a clever person with a Linux box could physically hack the monitor to record the imagery--unencrypted--as it gets displayed. This is not hyperbole, merely a more sophisticated version of sneaking a camcorder into a movie theater.

So what does this make copy protection schemes? I'd say "futile" sums it up nicely. Any system, not matter how strong, which enables playback will eventually get cracked. Period.

Then there's the argument that if we can't protect media we can keep it from being transfered. I refer back to my previous point about any system being able to be worked around. Maybe with enough draconian restrictions such a system could stop more transfers than it misses, but are we really willing to (a) pay the money or (b) the cost in civil liberties?

There's one last point that seems to get missed: some people pirate on principle, most because it's cheaper than getting an official copy (in terms of total expense of time, money, and effort). One key question is therefore this: of the people any copyright protection system prevents from pirating/having access to pirated materials, how many would buy a legal copy to have access?

I'll be honest, there are lots of songs and movies that if they were free to download I'd download and keep but that I would never buy nor rent. My favorite example is the annual James Bond marathons on cable TV. Yes, I like James Bond, but I'd not rent them, much less buy them. So if someone suddenly said to me "Goldeneye will never again be played on cable TV" this isn't a big loss and I'm not going to turn around and buy a new copy at prevailing store prices (even the Amazon ones I link to), but I might buy one used for half as much or better yet, for $1 to download. Radiohead's experiment in name your own prices would make for an interesting case study. One question I have is how many downloaded the album because they had never heard much of Radiohead's music and thought they'd try it out. Even more interesting, how many of those people then paid for a second download of the album? How many of those then recommended the album to others who then did the same thing? How many sales have happened since the cited articles? There are many interesting questions here that would inform the debate with hard evidence which, as far as I have seen, no one has bothered talking about to the public.

Whether we (or anyone else) likes it or not, Internet file sharing and downloading are here to stay. Is it legal? Not in most places. Is it ethical? I don't happen to think so and I think everyone who paid for Radiohead's album agrees. On the other hand, business is about the bottom line: profits. Is it profitable to fight the copy protection arms race? With several of the biggest music labels dropping DRM, I'd say the answer is probably "no", but the question is still open.

Never forget: in any market it's not the law that matters, but the bottom line. The world's lawyers need to sit up and take notice.

Google, Medicine, and The Expert

I was reading an interesting article this afternoon from the New York Times about patients Googling for health information. It's just more evidence that a little learning is a dangerous thing. I rather prefer Alexander Pope's verion: "People who know only a little do not understand how little they know and are therefore prone to error."

I really divide these people into two big camps. First, those well meaning, humble folks with an active curiosity and desire to learn. The second are the instant experts who think a few minutes on the Internet qualifies them to diagnose rare diseases or some such thing.

The former are really not a problem as with a little patience and preparation they can become useful allies once steered toward good sources of information. I'm one of them and usually apologize in advance for asking questions that are "probably obvious" out of my own curiosity and if I'm going to cite a source, I cite a source. None of this "I read it on the Internet" garbage.

The instant experts (read: instant idiots) are dangerous and annoying. Dangerous because they can now do something they couldn't before but don't have a good understanding of the consequences, much like the infamous blind axeman in a classroom, etc. Annoying because they can't resist butting into what should be the purview of the expert.

God save us from inquisitive idiots.

Facebook Externalities

Facebook: n. Website where you excersize limited (but somehow sufficient) powers over a webpage to post your entire life for large segments of the world to see which has somehow come to dominate the social scene of college-aged/-bound Americans and similar demographics in other parts of the world. Massive time-suck for people who would otherwise do things people used to do, like read, excersize, or just plain not be online sharing their ENTIRE LIVES.

Why again do people do these things? Network externalities. Here's one example. Person "A" has friends from work, high school, their college, other colleges, their hometown, the local youth group, etc. and everyone is in the process of going their seperate ways. Let's suppose the group of people is so large that letters/phone calls at a reasonable frequency are simply too hard to do (or too expensive). Let's further imagine that "A" is okay with loosing day to day or week to week contact with people, but once every month or so would like to to know how, say, "B" is doing. Except for those willing to do mailing lists or their own websites, etc, before things like facebook, "A" would keep and close touch with "C", loose touch with "B" in a couple years, and most everyone else in a few days to weeks.

Enter Facebook. Now "A" can make "B", "C", "D", and all the rest "friends" (no relation to the actual level of relationship in almost all cases) and maintain as close a relationship as desired but almost guarenteed a higher one than without it--assuming "B", "C", "D", etc are all on it too. Moreoever, if another person, say "G" becomes friends with "A" but is not on Facebook, it is less valuable than if "G" joins with even nominal participation (say once per week/month).

End result, Facebook is more valuable to its users when there are more users. So much so I no longer get the question "Are you on Facebook?" I only hear "I'll Facebook you".