Miles, the tinyapps.org guy, points us to a an article about yet another Microsoft vulnerability. It turns out that there’s a way that just downloading a jpg can let a virus in.

You can run a utility on this page to see if your machine is vulnerable (mine was), and there’s also a link to the page with the plug for the hole. It does not require you to upgrade to SP2, a fate some of us are postponing.

What next, viruses that get in if you type too slowly?

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Jeneane has found a portal to hell at her local video store…

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If you do a Google image search for typical person, this is the first photo of a person listed:

Typical Person

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I’d recommended looking at a small disk imager called Snapshot I’d found on tinyapps.org. I’d given it a little look-see. But now I’ve put it to the test: I did a full image of my laptop’s hard drive, reformatted, and restored it. Yup, the compact little bugger works.

It did take a little coaching from the creator who responded to my plaintive email ridiculously quickly and helpfully. I had to restore in DOS mode, and my laptop wouldn’t recognize the USB hard drive that contained the image. Tom recommended NTFSDOS, a freeware program that gives drive letters to your mass media. Miles of tinyapps.org says that had I used the UDMA driver included with Snapshot, the process would have been speeded up many times. (I don’t know what that means, but I trust Miles implicitly. He was ridiculously helpful during the restore process, too.)

Snapshot costs 40 euros, which is just about 50 in American. Well worth it for this one episode. Plus, once I get it set up right, it should be fast enough to make imaging my hard drive a regular part of my backup-and-floss regime.

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Well, that was an interesting way to spend a day!

For reasons beyond my ken, I got asked to talk to the Entertainment and Media section of a World Economic Forum meeting in NYC on Tuesday. How could I say no? Besides, the organizers are completely charming, open-minded, smart people. (Thank you, Alex.)

Dinner the night before

The event began with a gala dinner for all the assembled industries, held on Governors Island in NYC. From 800 yards away, the bottom of Manhattan looks like a really bad idea, an experiment in how much weight you can add until a land mass will sink.

There were about 75 people in the tent, about 90% men, and almost all white, with a few Asians and a dark face or two. Although the invitation said this was informal and men need not wear ties, just about every man did. Also, apparently you can’t have too many cufflinks. I was easily the worst dressed person there, which does not make me happy; I don’t like to be conspicuous.

During dinner (great wine, by the way), two panels were held. The first was on the economic situation in China. The highlight for me was hearing Li Lu again. Lu was one of the organizers of the Tianamen protests, and now is a VC. I had the honor of spending some time with him at PopTech a few years ago. On the panel, he first described the serious risks China’s economy faces and then he talked about the effect the Tianamen generation will have on China now that Jiang Zemin has ensured a peaceful succession. You only invest in China, he said, if you believe that the Chinese people will overcome every obstacle. And eventually, said Lu, the Tianamen generation will be in charge. Lu is an excessively modest hero, and a hero of mine.

This was followed by a panel on governance (= Sarbanes-Oxley), a topic that’s truly depressing. What a waste of time, paper and attention. I like locking up rapacious CEOs at least as much as the next person, but Sox seems based on the magical thinking that since rules limit risk, you can’t have too many of the cute little buggers. The Europeans I talked with are bemused by our punctilious bulwark against corporate evil, and are thinking that doing business with us is getting to be just not worth the paperwork.

The meeting

The next day, the Entertainment and Media group met in downtown NY. Thirty-five of us sat around tables formed into a large square. No PowerPoints, just discussion among senior people in the recording, movie and media industries.

The conversation doesn’t lend itself to detailed retelling. But it sure was fascinating for me. I came away with four overall impressions:

First, these people are thrashing. They’re floundering. They’re desperate to find a way in which their organizations still add value. They are in denial but, it seemed to me, they know that there’s just about nothing that the market wants from them. For example, at one point someone said, “Content is king.” I replied that judging from the content they’re producing, marketing is king; that’s where their real value is. Further, I said, on the Internet, connection is king. But then they want to know how to “monetize” connection. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you understand how monetizing it can kill it. The most convincing case I heard for real value was that only Hollywood can afford to make blockbusters. But beyond that…?

Second, they don’t understand what the hell we’re talking about. I can’t say that I made any inroads. To them, the Internet is a transport for distributing bits they own. Its lack of DRM is a hole that they will plug. They have no doubt that strong DRM is on its way and that it’s a good thing. (Cory could tell them.)

Third, they believe they’re responding to the market. They do not recognize that their market has abandoned them. They think that file-sharing is an aberration. In some unthought way, I think they actually believe that the legislation they’re back is something the market wants. They maintain this thought only by not actually thinking it out loud.

Fourth, they’re going to win. They own Congress and neither Congress nor the entertainment cartel sees any reason to compromise. Their Lakoffian frame tells them that they’re stopping theft, end of story. So they are going to kill the Internet and they don’t even know it. The worst of Larry Lessig‘s nightmares is coming true, at least in the US. Sure, there will be sophisticated hacks and analog holes and guys in back alleys with soldering irons who’ll remove the hardware restrictions so your kid can include a snippet of a movie in her social studies paper. But that’s exactly what losing looks like.

Depressed? You betcha. But then I think: That’s why G-d put Canada right there to our north.

These are smart people and I liked talking with them. They were willing to listen. Some, in fact, even agree to varying degrees. But they are riding beasts that are in agony, and the Internet will be a sticky stain on the bottom of their massive hooves.

We are doomed.

My pitch

I ended up giving a somewhat different pitch than the one I planned on.

I said that there was a huge gap in how this group understands the Net and how their customers do. (Yes, I appointed myself the Representative of the Net. So have a recall if you don’t like it.) We don’t mean the same thing by terms as basic as community, content, “consumer,” and something-else.

Then I described the End to End principle and how it’s enabled the Net to spawn an amazing marketplace of innovation. Tinker with the center and there can be disastrous unintended consequences. E.g., if packets contained bits that ID’ed the user in any strong sense, the Net would have been nought but a research library. (No, I don’t know that that’s true. Emergent effects are too hard to predict. It was just an example, and at least a few people nodded. Good enough.)

I said that I understand that to them the Net looks like a medium through which content passes, some of which people aren’t paying for. But, (sez I) their customers aren’t “consuming” content. We’re not consuming anything. We’re listening to music, We’re watching video streams, We’re talking with friends. To call it content is to miss why it matters to Big Content’s customers.

BigCon’s product, I said, is special. It’s published. That means it’s given over to the public for us to appropriate it, make it our own. We hum it, we quote it, we make jokes with it as a punchline, we get it wrong. We do that because it matters to us. And that’s how creative works succeed. They become ours in some sense.

Further, culture advances by our having the leeway to build on published work and incorporate it into other works. From The Star Spangled Banner to most of Disney’s feature length cartoons, that’s what we do.

So, we need the leeway, both to be able to continue as a culture, and — more important from their point of view — to continue to get value from what the Big Content folks produce. It’s our ability to absorb and reuse that gives their product value.

I ended by saying, perhaps too forcefully, “I’m here arguing for using this remarkable global connectedness to enable the flowering of culture the Internet seems born to provide…and you call me the barbarian?” I think it just alienated them.

I also made the stupid, self-indulgent error of saying that trying to “monetize communities” (the official topic of the session) was evil. Shoot, I’m in favor of monetizing communities. But, as the Greek doctor said, first do no harm. D’oh d’oh d’oh.

Luca Lizzeri has translated some of this post into Italian. Grazie!

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Pete Blackshaw of Intelliseek has a good article in MediaPost about the (mainly positive) influence of blogging on advertising, emphasizing the blogosphere’s ability to expose errors, lies and exaggerations. So, as a lifetime repeat typo and thinko offender, it is with reluctance that I offer up the irony that in the course of recommending Dan Gillmor’s We the Media, Pete misspells his name. Yo, Pete, I couldn’t not mention that without betraying my blogospherical loyalties, could I?

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Cory’s presentation to Microsoft on why DRM is bad for us and bad for them is other-worldly in its brilliance. Damn funny, too. It is a must-read. In fact, it’s a must-be-chiseled-into-lintels. (It’s in pdf and is presented by ChangeThis.)

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Here’s a message I received this morning:

This notification has been sent to inform you that a message has been quarantined by InterScan MSS for SMTP.

Subject: Blog draft
Rule: Incoming Policy
Filter: CONTENT FILTER
Problem:
Filter Type: Advanced Content Filter
Event:
at MAILBODY: CONTENT , “shit” violated Action on Attachment: NOT MODIFY

Action: Quarantine

So, this message quotes the word that triggered the quarantine. Apparently, then, there are uses of this word that are acceptable…

…unless, of course, my own spam filter were set to protect my virgin ears from such filth, in which case it would have sent it’s own rejection letter, citing the offending word, triggering a response from the original filter…

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[NOTE: Eventually, this wends towards an opportunity to make a case against DRM to the CBO. Click here to skip the context.]

The lunchtime speaker at the World Economic Forum meeting I was at yesterday was the affable Douglas Holtz-Eaken, Director of the Congressional Budget Office. I found what he said to be surprisingly sympathetic, and just one (big) step short of being all the way there. (Covering my ass: Yes, the CBO accepts that creative works are property, a fundamental error. Work within the system for just a few minutes, won’t you, people?)

The CBO advises Congress, trying to give a whiff of reality to their more hare-brained schemes. Douglas’ message to the WEF meeting of entertainment and media honchos and honchas was: Move slowly. “A great deal of caution should be taken about changes in copyright law.” Why? Because the laws of unintended consequences are particularly applicable. He said he urges Congress to ensure sufficient property rights only to provide incentives for creativity, and allowing the greatest possible use of creative works. (Good. This is what our Constitution charges him with saying.) The market should be left to decide as much as possible, he said

Then he talked about the concentration of control: The top 5 record labels have 75% of record sales; similarly for movie studios. He said that there’s been a lot of focus on the decline on music shipments, but “in our research, this is far from agreed upon.” And it’s getting easier for consumers to create their own music. The same will happen for video. “We’ve seen lots of responses” to the empowering of users, he said. “For example, the top 5 music companies have cut costs by $1.4B.” He did not sound hopeful that that would be enough, however. Prepare for being vitiated, he seemed (to me) to be telling the industry.

Of the 36 bills currently being considered by Congress that bear on copyright and digital distribution, he looked quickly at three that are typical. One funds educating consumers on copyright laws. (Sounded like a “Scared Straight” for file sharers.) Another “targets egregious unauthorized file sharing” and criminalizes the gross ignoring of the law. The third, the infamous Inducement act targets those who “induce” copyright. He also mentioned the Broadcast Flag, an FCC requirement. (In the Q&A, I and another person asked if any of the 36 protect fair use and the users’ rights. He said, yes, some do quite aggressively.)

Then he argued for a market approach: “There’s no reason to craft copyright laws to protect the status quo. Instead we should focus on copyright as a means of allocating creative works.” He ended by saying: “One of the most interesting things is the ability of DRM to enact a vast array of different contractual arrangements between producers and consumers. Congress should forebear to legislate which type of DRM. And we’re aware of the law of unintended consequences.”

I liked a lot of this, but not the ending. I expressed my fear that the media consolidation he referred to would tilt the market so that our choices are to either accept the terms offered by Big Content or become cultural hermits…that DRM will mean that Microsoft Windows, with 97% of the OS market, will be the de facto player and if you want to see the new blockbuster or listen to the popular song, you will have to agree to whatever terms the producers care to set.

Douglas replied: “We worry about this. We’re open to someone making the objective, quantifiable case that that would happen.”

(We’ll come back to that in a minute.)

Yossi Vardi, the estimable founder of ICQ, pointed out that the “pirates” are also the people buying the movies, CDs, etc. They have a sense of a lack of fairness, he said. For example, Yossi said, can someone explain to them why the outrageous copyright extensions will make Disney more creative? (I compared the social consequences of the great Net lockout with what happened during Prohibition. Yossi thinks I ought to float that as a meme…)

Afterward, I chatted with Douglas. I reminded him that this drive for DRM is solely at the behest of the entertainment industry; there is zero customer/market demand for it.

I started to say that asking us to bargain away our fair use rights is akin to asking us to bargain away free speech. I was about to expand on this theme when he said, “I know. We raise that very concern in the report in your binder”: Copyright Issues in Digital Media (Aug. 2004).

The report is disappointing. Although it’s open-minded, balanced and chockablock with information, it reads to me ultimately like an argument in favor of DRM as way of enabling more flexible licensing agreements. (I am reading into it. It does nothing but suggest options.)

So, here’s The CBO Challenge: Douglas is open to an analysis that shows that DRM will lead to an unfair, anti-consumer weighting of licensing agreements. I’m no good at numbers, analysis, or truth-based claims. But many of you are. This is an opportunity. Can any of you make the case? I do believe that Douglas will listen.

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The FCC is fining CBS $550,000 for transmitting the image of Janet Jackson’s bosom during the SuperBlow, protecting Americans from, well, Janet Jackson’s bosom.

Meanwhile, the portion of the SuperBowl most re-watched by TiVo owners was the part where we saw Janet Jackson’s bosom.

The market has spoken!

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