Android Tethering!

Don't tell Verizon, but I got (fairly basic) tethering working over USB with my shiny new Droid. The instructions are available at the TetherBot site, and work quite well.

A quick speed test shows that I'm getting basically the full speed of FiOS (my home ISP) when tethering using the Droid's WiFi (10Mb down, 2Mb up), and a respectable 1.2Mb down and 0.44Mb up when using Verizon's 3G wireless data. Not bad.

Of course, since the Droid can do nearly everything I would want my laptop to do, I don't see much of a reason for tethering, but it's nice to know that the possibility exists.

Got a Droid!!!!

YAYYYYY!!!!!!

It's so completely awesome I can't even deal with it. I can SSH to my server with it. Oh man, this is amazing.

It's Alive!!!

Update: With version 0.1.2, opening up a page is much easier, so I have edited the instructions below.

After nearly a month of (very sporadic) work on it, I have finally done the impossible: embedded a fully-featured web browser in Emacs. Behold:



I am calling my creation "Ezbl," pronounced "ease-able." It is a combination of Uzbl and Emacs. Right now, Ezbl is still in the early stages, but it can display a Uzbl window and receive commands from Emacs (over Uzbl's STDIN).

Currently, it requires a patched version of Emacs (available here) which supports embedding widgets and windows, such as Uzbl. It is still in an early state, and any of the drawing-related problems will be caused by the xwidget code. Joakim Verona is the genius behind the xwidget code, so talk to him if you have suggestions about that aspect.

Right now, I'm using the following code to start an instance of Uzbl (which can be called interactively):

(ezbl-open "www.google.com")

You will notice that it creates a buffer called "*ezbl-display-xxxx*", where "xxxx" is the pid of the Uzbl process. To browse to a different page, execute:

(ezbl-command-uri 1234 "www.yahoo.com")

Where "1234" is the pid of the Uzbl process. This will be cleaned up in the future with an "Ezbl" major mode and interactive commands.

Just recently, I've added a live(ish) updating display of the current page title and URL to the mode-line, shown here:



The interface still needs quite a bit of work, and it is not yet possible to type into text areas of the browser window. If you are interested in helping out, I have a GitHub project here to which I regularly push.

Eventually, I plan to have Emacs manage history and cookies, as well as multiple "tabs," which will be done by having one Uzbl window per buffer. It has a long way to go, and is not at all useful for real browsing at this point, so help is greatly appreciated.

Enjoy!

The music industry (again)

My dad wrote me another interesting email on the music industry. I couldn't help but to respond.

Interesting, but he equates "large recording companies" with "the music industry". Ignores live performances, and, apparently, any direct artist to consumer sales.

Which, importantly, are the ways that the vast majority of (especially big-recording-label) artists make most of their money. Most artists would be (and, in many cases, are) happy to give their recorded music away for free in order to attract more people to their concerts.

The last (only?) large music concert I went to was a Maroon 5 (a fairly popular main-stream band signed to Universal) concert Sophomore year. The tickets were either $40 or $60, and it was held in the TD Garten (formerly the Fleet Center) in Boston, which has a capacity of just shy of 20,000 people. I don't know exactly how many people were there, but it looked mostly full, so let's say 15,000. For a 4-hour performance, a gross of $900,000 was made. I don't know exactly how much they owe the venue, the lighting crew, their agents, etc, but apparently, walking away with 50-60% of revenues is the average for large concerts.

Apparently, this is a full flop from the 70's, when people did tours to sell their albums, according to this interview, artists are much more likely to give away their recorded music to sell their tickets. He says that the difference (for the large artists, at least) between the money they make from album sales and what they make from concerts is massive, not even comparable. Compare this with an artist's share of record revenues, to see how bad of a deal the bands get when they sign up for major labels.

On the other hand, it would be terrible if it ceased to be practical to be a professional musician.

I agree, to some extent, but it might be inevitable, and wasting taxpayer money to delay the inevitable seems like a bad idea. If it happens that the Internet makes professional music economically impossible, then we have to figure out what to do next; but trying to sue an industry into profitability doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of anyone's time or money.

Now, I happen to think that professional music is not in any serious danger, and may in fact be much healthier today than it was a decade ago, but it is distributed much more evenly. It is no secret that only 1 in 10 albums produced by the (major) record companies turn a profit, so the major labels are very much dependent on the album sales of a small number of large stars. They have a lot to lose from the "long tail" industry model, since their whole business is set up to maximize their profit from the "head" of the market.

In fact, they are so adverse to competition that they resort to illegal means, such as "payola" to promote their own music at the expense of independent artists who can't afford to pay. It is a scam worthy of Wall Street and goes like this: the music producer pays music radio stations to play its songs. This wouldn't be a problem, except that radios are required to disclose when they are playing sponsored music, and music selected by the DJ for "regular airplay," is not allowed to be purchased. The loophole the industry now exploits is that they can pay a third party "independent music promotion" company to pay the radio
broadcaster to play the music company's songs.

There is a level of accomplishment that can only be achieved with the total dedication to the work that only professionals can afford. But one has to be able to make a living doing it. If everyone feels entitled to steal the professionals' output, because it is easy, then soon the entire quality of music available will collapse. That would be a tragedy.

But if an artists work can be advertised with a minimum of friction (either in the form of cost or legal blocks), then they can reach a maximum audience, then they can attract large crowds to their concerts.

Also, there is the question of holding back progress that benefits everyone for the sake of a minority to whom we have an emotional connection. The printing press effectively destroyed the notion of a scribe as a professional and socially elite role, but it clearly did a lot to increase the viability of democracy. Yet, we are left with a world with no (or only very few) professional scribes.

Also, there has been music since the beginning of time, and nothing, not even government death squads, could stop people from creating music. Nowadays, there is a huge amount of money being spent towards "music" which doesn't directly support the ability of artists to live off of playing music. A huge portion of the spending on recorded music does not go to the artist, so all of that could be eliminated while still supporting the artist's cut of the profits.

What should the penalty be for stealing music. Let's make a few assumptions that are unlikely to apply in real life, but illustrate the argument.

From here:

In a 2003 case involving State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the Supreme Court invoked the Constitution's due process clause in ruling that punitive damages in most cases must be capped at 10 times compensatory damages.

The damages in this case were "statutory," but there are a number of people who argue the same rules should apply to statutory fines as well.

From the Ars Technica article discussing the verdict:

Tenenbaum filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ statutory damages claim on constitutional grounds, but Judge Gertner deferred ruling on the issue unless and until there was actually a damages award handed down by the jury.

We know exactly how many people downloaded each copy of each song shared by the primary thief.

Maybe. The software doesn't necessarily keep a record of this, and it could easily have been deleted sometime long before the trial started (so it wouldn't be obstruction of justice or anything). The only way (barring a wiretap or spyware) to get that information would be to look at the log from Tenenbaum's P2P program. The whole point of P2P is that no central server keeps track of (or even knows about) the transfers going on, so if Tenenbaum deleted the record, there would be nothing to go off of.

Say the criminal posts 100 songs online, a small time crook, but a nice round number. Let's say each song is stolen by 10 people. So 1000 songs stolen.

I obviously take issue with the use of the word "stolen," as nobody lost any property in transaction, but the numbers seem fine.

Now, lets say that each stolen song represents an album that was not purchased. I know, criminals will not necessarily buy things that they would be happy to steal, but again, simplifying assumptions.

Hold on. First of all, an illegally downloaded song would correspond to at most one legally downloaded song, at $1 on iTunes or Amazon. To say that a pirated song represents one album not purchased is like saying (modulo the lack of equivalence between digital copying and physical theft) "stealing one car represents the loss of 20 cars to the dealership." It makes no sense.

As far as the impact of piracy on music sales, here are two reports on the matter.

One report says:

This study reveals that for every five albums downloaded results in one less sale

Assuming the same ratio applies to songs (which may not be the case, because of the tendency of albums to contain filler songs), 1000 songs downloaded would mean 200 songs would not get bought.

According to another report:

The results suggest that, for the group of users of peer-to-
peer systems, piracy reduces the probability of buying music by 35% to 65%

So this means between 350 and 650 songs bought. Let's be generous and say 500 songs would have been purchased would it not have been for the piracy of those 10 original songs. Not an order of magnitude difference, by any means, but a change from 1,000 albums.

So 1000 album purchases forgone. Say the albums average $10 retail. So $10,000 lost to the legal music industry due to criminal activity.

No, it would be closer to $500, because the substitute for an illegally downloaded song is a legally downloaded one, which costs anywhere from $0.50 (on eMusic) to $1.29 (on iTunes). Most big-label songs can be had on Amazon for between $0.80 and $1, so let's make it nice and even and say $1 per song.

Does this mean that stealing these 100 songs should cost the thief $10,000? Of course not. That is just the lost income restitution.

So, according to the Supreme court, the maximum penalty should be $5,500; $500 for compensatory damages plus $5,000 for punitive damages.

There is the cost of investigating and prosecuting the criminal.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the punishment awarded for each song. I don't know exactly how lawsuits work, so it may be the case that the losing party has to pay the winning party's legal fees, but again, that is a separate issue from how much is owed per song. In this case, the jury decided on $22,500 in damages per song. That is what is insane.

If the damages were determined by the cost of investigation, I could just buy a bunch of private jets, crash them into a mountain, and claim that as part of the investigation cost. If the record company is only going to get $5,500 out of a trial, then it may well not be worth it for them to go after someone so small-time.

Now who should pay for the fact that the industry has to do many investigations to get one successful case?

This is false. Of the 18,000 people targeted by the RIAA, this is only the second which has gone to trial (the first was Jammie Thomas-Rasset). All of the other ones have settled out of court due to the embarrassing brokenness of our justice system for things like this (that's another story, though). They have a history of using illegal means to attempt to find individuals they suspect of file sharing, some of whom had never used a computer.

So who should pay for the illegal investigations? The idiots who are doing these investigations.

I would double the costs, at least. That way a successful prosecution pays for a set of lesser investigations that do not go all the way (losing in court does not appear to be a possibility).

Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with how much infringement of a single song should be punished.

Unless it was a short and easy investigation and prosecution, sounds like Tenenbaum got off light.

Well, part of the problem was that the judge denied a Tenenbaum any chance to argue his case. From the Ars Technica article:

Tenenbaum's case was dismantled piece-by-piece by a series of adverse rulings over the past several months. Judge Gertner dismissed his abuse-of-process claims against the plaintiffs and the Recording Industry Association of America; excluded four of his proposed expert witnesses and limited the scope of a fifth; and, in a coup de grace delivered less than eight hours before the start of trial, barred him from arguing fair use to the jury.

It's definitely not over yet.

Here is the future of the recorind business, as discussed on the NYtimes op ed page.

This was an interesting article, though it got some facts wrong.

Swan Songs?

The speed at which this industry is coming undone is utterly breathtaking.

Only to those who haven't been paying much attention. Napster was the sign that they were on their way out. A big, centralized distribution industry is unnecessary in an age when a college kid can, in his spare time, make a global music distribution platform that millions of people find more convenient than going to a record store. Distribution used to be hard; it isn't anymore, so it's not worth money.

First, piracy punched a big hole in it.

This is not nearly as true as the music industry likes people (Congress, especially) to think. They are not above blatantly fabricating numbers to make the problem seem much bigger than it is. This includes claiming (without so much as a shred of evidence) that the loss to the US economy due to piracy is greater than the "combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries."

These companies would love nothing more than a law to prop up their failing and obsolete business models.

Now music streaming — music available on demand over the Internet, free and legal — is poised to seal the deal.

He might be right on this. I personally buy much less music as a result of listening to Pandora (which is now ad-supported). Well, actually, I think Pandora has caused me to discover and purchase a lot of new music, but I am kind of weird as far as music listening habits go.

This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.

Now this is something with which I can agree. A lot of the music I listen to is used as background, filler music. I want some music to play, but I'm not as picky about exactly what it is. Pandora fits this situation perfectly. I don't necessarily need to own all of the music, but I just want to listen to it once in a while. There is a different class of songs which I do want to own, and am willing to buy, but it is smaller than the set of songs which I want to hear a few times and then am done with.

I think the problem is that they are used to having a constant stream of throwaway hits; songs which everyone has to hear a few times and then grows tired of. With physical distribution, the only way (aside from the radio) to hear these songs repeatedly was to buy the full album, which may only contain 2 or 3 worthwhile songs. To the RIAA, there wasn't a difference between someone who bought an album, listened to two songs a few times, and then let it sit on a shelf and someone who bought an album and listened to every song on it for years.

With streaming entering the mix, songs that fall into the "disposable" category can be streamed, rather than purchased, and since people aren't going to revisit them anyway, the lack of "ownership" of the songs isn't that big of a concern to the people listening to them. I imagine that this effect is more pronounced among the more technically-savvy and disposable-music-inclined 14-18 demographic, which accounts for the drastic drop in their purchasing habits.

In order to get album sales, the recording industry will have to produce music which is worthy of being listened to multiple times over an extended period, not just "summer hits" that are forgotten as quickly as they rise up the charts.

Even if they choose to buy the music, the industry has handicapped its ability to capitalize on that purchase by allowing all songs to be bought individually, apart from their albums. This once seemed like a blessing. Now it looks more like a curse.

In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good. You may have only wanted two or three songs, but you had to buy the whole 8-track, cassette or CD to get them. So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones. The resulting revenue provided a cushion for the artists and record companies to take chances and make mistakes. Single song downloads helped to kill that.

I have no sympathy for this problem. The only reason they were able to get away with this is that the distribution medium forced people to take the bad with the good. In essence what they (and the columnist) is saying is that "we got used to being able to charge $20 for 2 songs, and as soon as we give people a say in the matter, they are only buying what they actually like!" Cry me a river. If you want me to buy a whole album, make a whole album worth of music I am interested in buying. Competitive markets are tough, aren't they?

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.

this is a flat-out, baldfaced lie. Take, for example, eMusic, which only carries independent music. In 2008, it sold 75% of its 5 million songs, or 3,750,000 tracks. This excludes all major label music, so the "10 million never got bought" claim is patently false.

Additionally, PRS is hardly a neutral party. It, and similar companies, have been found by the European Commission to be in violation of antitrust laws. They have a habit of suing people for listening to the radio while at work.

All in all, the music industry is facing a similar problem to the newspaper industry: their main role was a distributor, and now distribution is essentially free. As with newspapers, there are a lot of complex issues at play, an just as "news" gets incorrectly conflated with "newspapers," so does "music" with "the major record labels." Music existed before the record labels and it will exist after them, and we will all be a lot better off once these gatekeepers are gone.

Riding the Wave!

The mighty gods of the Interwebs (Google) have deigned to give me an early Wave account! I have been playing around with it a bit, and two things have become abundantly clear:

1. It is dangerously powerful. I was talking with my girlfriend on Wave (they give you a second test account), and we found that there are a lot of different ways of holding a conversation, including typing into two separate blips. The realtime nature of it really does make a difference, since you can start responding before the other person is done. This may sound gimmicky, but it really does change the way you do stuff.


2. It is still buggy. I haven't been able to change my settings, because the "settings wave" doesn't seem to work for me. There are also a lot of missing features, and it has a habit of getting desynched or dying in weird ways. That's why they call it a development build.

Still, overall, it is pretty awesome. The simplicity of widget-making looks like it will enable an absolutely massive number of cool apps, and the open nature should do a lot to spur its growth.

I will have to say that it will probably be about 6 months to a year before the live editing of text and graphical doodles gets old. Well, that may be an exaggeration, but it is really freaking cool.

Now to start being useful and actually start developing for it; you know, like was the deal with getting the account.

I need to stop reading about programming languages

Every once in a while, I start reading about the cool things going on with programming languages. I'm not one of those people who generally spends his days musing over tuples, continuations, and monads (I still have no idea what they are), but it I do find it interesting to take some time to think about the tools that I use on a constant basis on a more meta level.

There is a lot of cool stuff going on in programming languages now and pretty much since the beginning of time, i.e. January 1, 1970. How to handle concurrency is one of the biggest things facing the language world right now, but there are tons of other things, like JIT optimizations and experiments in language interoperability (such as Parrot).

One example of a solution to the "concurrency is hard and threads suck" problem is the Termite language. It is built on top of the Gambit Scheme compiler/interpreter and implements the message passing style of concurrency. Take a look at the paper describing Termite; it has some cool examples of what you can do with message passing stuff. Of course, this is all stuff that Erlang has been doing forever, but nobody seems to want to use Erlang for anything but telco systems, for whatever reason.

Of course, as an Emacs fan(atic), talk of a cool Lisp-family language immediately got me thinking about a replacement for the desperately-outdated Emacs Lisp. That lead me to a proposed plan for replacing Emacs Lisp with Scheme... from 1996. It's been more than a decade, and as far as I can tell, there has been nearly zero progress in actually making that happen. The plan makes it sound like it would be relatively easy to do (barring some incompatibilities between Scheme and Elisp), but there is not any hint of it being in a better state now than it was then.

This is not a criticism of the people working on it; there are a lot of brilliant Emacs hackers, and the fact that it hasn't happened already means that it is a really hard problem to solve. It is more of an example of why I need to avoid spending too much time reading about programming languages: it's depressing. In comparison to most everything else in the computing industry, languages seem to move at a positively glacial pace. I get all excited about how some cool asynchronous, message-passing, migratable dialect of Scheme could be used to make a concurrent and fast Emacs implementation; then I go back to PHP for my programming, which doesn't have namespaces, integrated packaging support, or even a decent threading system, and cry a little inside.

I blame you, Steve Yegge. You made me dream again.

free vs Free

This started as an email reply to my dad in response to this article.

I saw this via slashdot, so you probably read it. Obviously I agree with Galdwell that taking digital recording over the web without paying for them is not simply a "choice" it is theft.

I get the sense that Anderson is not necessarily advocating copyright infringement (which is different from stealing, especially for things like newspaper articles which are given away for zero dollars), but saying that when the incremental costs are essentially zero (which they are on the web and internet as a whole) the price will go to zero. I haven't read his book, but from what I've heard, he talks about ways that a business can survive when it is selling things for free.

As an aside, though I don't think it is terribly important to this discussion, I'd like to make clear the distinction between the two definitions of "free." There is an ambiguity in English (which isn't resent in German and some other languages, by the way), namely that free" means both "costing zero dollars" and "freedom." This is the hing that the Free Software people always make a big deal about, sincethey are fine with people charging for Free Software, as long as the recipients of the program have the freedom to modify, etc. the program.

In this case, there is a phrase, invented by Stewart Brand, which gets thrown around that says that "information wants to be free." It's certainly possible to disagree with this, but it is primarily in situations of censorship; where it is very difficult to keep information hidden once it has leaked out. The idea is that you have to exert a lot of pressure (= time, attention, and money) to prevent information from flowing between people, that the uninhibited exchange of information is the natural state of info.

If you believe that "information wants to be free," then you would have to spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to keep it from being free, especially on the internet. This is what we've seen with the RIAA, where they are trying hard to give certain people access to information, while barring others, who haven't bought the song, or live in a country which hasn't agreed to certain licensing terms, for example.

A radically different way of looking at things, then would be to say that rather than try to put information in a little box and then give people access to only that box, take a step back and let information do what it does best: spread around. The "problem" with this is that you pretty much have to give up on trying to extract money from each transfer of info between two people, since doing so will vastly limit the usefulness and exposure of the information.

Or, to put it like a Mathematician, if you have a problem with people stealing things, simply define their action as not stealing.

Anderson argues, [the] magic of the word "free" creates instant demand among consumers, then Free (Anderson honors it with a capital) represents an enormous business opportunity

Arg, just what we need, another definition of "Free." Free Software people already have enough trouble getting their definition to gain traction as it is.

Anderson cautions that this philosophy of embracing the Free involves moving from a “scarcity” mind-set to an “abundance” mind-set.

I like this idea, since it is the only one that makes sense in the digital world. There isn't (for all practical purposes) any cost involved in making a copy of a set of bits, so the notion that there can be any sort of sacristy of any digital item is false. Companies have tried to artificially create scarcity where there is none through things like DRM or activation keys or licensing, but it goes against the natural properties of the medium, that there is no scarcity.

For a detailed, well-researched account of this phenomenon, look at this page talking about the complex issues involved in scarcity in Sony's "Home" service. A choice quote:

There are things about Home that are simply beyond my understanding. Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.

He gives the example that "if you approach an arcade machine and there is a person standing in front of it, you will not be able to play it." It is foolish to invent scarcity in a system which is free of it.

The problem is that our entire economy presumes the existence of scarcity, so we don't have a good way to deal with abundance, since we have never really encountered it before. The rules of economics will have to be rethought, or at least, some of the aspects reconsidered, in an environment which lacks something as fundamental to economics as scarcity.

More importantly, Gladwell makes an interesting argument that just because some costs of production have gone down, that does not mean the overall price of a product must go down. Instead, he cites examples where people
have absorbed these cost reductions, but turned their efforts towards ever more elaborate, and expensive, applications.

The YouTube example is an interesting one, since both authors use it. My take on it is that it isn't intended to make money now; Google knew that it was a money loser going it. I think that the idea for Google was that online video was a growing and important market, and they wanted to control the largest provider so that they would have a foot in the door once it matured. This may sound like a cop-out, but plenty of "traditional" companies have loss leaders, it's just that in this case, YouTube is not so much a loss leader for another Google project, but for the future, when it will be profitable (or that is Google's hope). If they didn't think it was worth it, they would drop it like it's hot.

In this case, I don't think YouTube is that good of an example for Anderson, since it doesn't show how a business can survive off of giving stuff away for free, it shows how a business is willing to take even very large losses in order to enter a market. The best I could see is that it is a good example of how people will react to free publishing and viewing of videos. So rather than looking at whether or not YouTube is profitable, look at whether or not people using YouTube as a platform can be profitable.

Genetic engineering means that drug development is poised to follow the same learning curve of the digital world, to "accelerate in performance while it drops in price."

I can see where he's coming from, but until the cost of physically producing the drugs is "too cheap to meter," I think pharmaceutical products will still cost money. What I could see happening is if a "pill printer" is invented, which would allow anyone with the blueprints for a drug to make physical pills, then the price of drugs would quickly approach zero. I get the sense that creating such a device is unlikely, or at least, unlikely enough that it won't be cost-comparable to paper printers. But assuming that did happen, then drugs would "only" be information, and a downward pressure on prices would arise the same way it has for music.

Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

Assuming that information wants to be anthropomorphized, I would say that the information wants to be free, but the drug company wants exactly the opposite. That is to say that if the "source code" of the drug ever got leaked, it would be very difficult to keep it from spreading around, the "wants to be free" part of the quote.

Overall, I think that Anderson has some interesting ideas, but may go a bit too far with them, since "Free: Sometimes a Good Price for Certain Things" wouldn't be as interesting. It could be that Gladwell overstates Anderson's commitment to the idea in order to set up a straw man, or Anderson overstates the point to try to push people's expectations; I'd have to read the book to know for sure.

I think that there is a lot to be said for free information, and that Free (as in Freedom) sharing without restrictions on use and reuse are best for the information, but not always best for the creator of the information. This is extremely dependent on the field and particular scenario, which is why it is so tricky.

The Open Source Software movement argues that Open Source development is a superior way to develop software, since the benefits to the code of low barriers to entry outweighs the harm to the developers of having a harder time of making money off of the code. This equation changes even within software development, as Open Source Software has had a hard time gaining traction in game development and video editing software. In those cases, the advantage to the coder of being paid for professional development outweighs the cost to the code base of having a limited number of contributors.

I would take an even broader look and find that as the cost of information technology has dropped, the returns to those who deal in information and intellectual property have increased, greatly.

And this leaves room for entities (not necessarily even "companies") which have vastly lower costs, by employing people part-time or on a case-by-case basis to eat their lunch. One interesting business model which hasn't been explored much (except by Amazon's Mechanical Turk) is the idea of "micro employment" (my term), in which people are paid per task, and the tasks last on the order of hours to days. Rather than hiring a journalist to a full-time position, you ask for stories, and pay people per story. Then, rather than paying for a copy of the story the person wrote, you would pay them to produce a story, which could then be read by anyone without restriction. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to this idea, so I'm not saying that this exact thing will be the future of all employment, but it could be an interesting way to go.

The problem for the recording industry so far, and coming for the newspaper industry, is that they sold a completely homogeneous product. My copy of a CD is identical to any other, whether I pay for it like a law abiding citizen, or steal it. Once it is produced it becomes generic information, both easy to reproduce and steal today, and equally valuable to anyone.

So, maybe rather than trying to sue people into supporting an old business model, you can embrace that fact and charge money before the information is produced, and then give out unlimited, unrestricted copies once it has been produced? For musicians, this is pretty easy, since a lot of musicians make most of their money from touring and merchandise anyway, abandon the notion that recorded music is a business and treat it like advertising for live shows. For a lot of artists signed to major labels, this is the only hope they have of digging themselves out of the hole that the recording company puts them in. But that is a whole other rant.

But what about intellectual property whose value is highly individualized?

I think this could be a major way forward. I would charge an individual to produce information (I don't like the term "intellectual property," because falsely equates physical property with information). In this case, the information I gave them would come without restrictions, except for proper attribution, which I consider even more important in an "abundance" economy than a "scarcity" one. If they shared the information around, it would actually be better for me, since it would be free advertising for other people to buy my service as well.

Legal or medical advice? Architectural strucutral plans for the building you want someone to put up for you? Not just "a database program" which you can steal, but an actual database that works, well, for your company?

Again, it is not "stealing" if the company intentionally gives away copies for Free (without any restrictions). Is it possible to "steal" Linux? Only if you take aspects of it and release them as closed source software, but it is impossible, by definition, to "steal" copies of Linux, so the term doesn't even apply.

This is what companies like Oracle do a lot of. It is the "infrastructure" model of Open Source software, in which you give away the infrastructure and charge for the customization.

A similar scenario would be giving away the plans for a theoretical bridge between two perfectly even concrete blocks over a big, perfectly flat, concrete base, but charge for building a custom-designed bridge in a particular place. I imagine that the basic ideas behind a bridge are given away freely in the form of textbooks, and that the real thing you are paying an engineer for is figuring out how to adapt those generic plans to suit a particular location (where rocks need to be blasted, roads re-routed, etc.). It would be to everyone's benefit to have some people who did nothing but think about how to make better generic bridges, and then gave that info away for free, so that the actual bridges could be made better. Concretely, the plans for "a suspension bridge" should be free, but you could charge for the plans for "the Golden Gate bridge."

The returns to people who do a good job at these things are high. They are higher now, relative to average compensation across the economy, than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago, when many of the tools they routinely use today did not exist.

This makes me think of the fairly abstract, philosophical issue of whether people "deserve" to be paid. Surely, I shouldn't be forced to pay someone who has dedicated their life to learning to hula hoop really well. If they want to charge money for a performance, that is fine, but they can't force me to go. Likewise, it would be unreasonable for them to expect the government to force people to pay them for making a plastic ring and wiggling it around their hips. If there were a large hula hoop industry that was seeing its revenues decline, they would probably whine about how they needed the government to set up laws to protect them.

Likewise, there is nothing that says that there have to be professional musicians, actors, or producers. We have those professions now, but if the technology changes to make their jobs useless, why should everyone else pay to keep them around? It doesn't need to cost anything aside from the bandwidth used to distribute music, so why do we need a company whose purpose is to distribute music? Similarly, it costs almost nothing to send bits of text around, so why do we need newspaper companies with a fleet of distributors?

People will lose their jobs. Maybe even more than will gain new jobs from new business models. But should we have resisted the development of cars to save the buggy whip manufacturers?

So a newspaper might have little future reporting on the small amount of real news, and large amount of nonsense, currently in a paper. But they might have a great future generating customized content to, for example, an oil company that wants to be up to date on economic, political, and weather issues that impact its industry. That company might have exactly zero interest in giving away the custom content it paid for because 1. it paid for it and 2. the only other customers are its competitors.

Or, the company would merely only want that information to exist, for its own purposes, but not care about other people getting it. Aside from the issue of competitors knowing, if I want to know stuff about the oil industry, why would I care if other people knew that stuff as well? I can see a system in which people care more about information existing than being able to prevent other people from having it. I pay money to learn to dance, but I don't expect that the teacher will prevent other people from learning what I did. Also, the teacher does not try to prevent me from teaching other people what I learned, because it serves as advertising of his teaching skill.

The Kindle sounds like a rip off to me- [I] have a computer, what do I need with another device that costs more than a mid range laptop? But I don't blame people for telling them to take a hike. Without readers authors are out of work. But without content there is no reason to buy a Kindle.

Well, the point of the Kindle (for consumers) is that it is much more pleasant to look at than a computer screen for long reads. The "E-Ink" display technology doesn't require any active light or power to hold an image, so it looks a lot more like paper than a computer screen. It is also light and portable if you are comparing it to a book. I don't read enough books to make it worthwhile for me, but think about how much cleaner your room would be if all of your books were consolidated in a single device. If you get the chance, take a look at one in a store sometime, they really do look like paper.

I do have some problems with it, like the DRM that Amazon has for downloaded books, but that is more of an aspect of their service, and not of the device itself. The newly released model, the Kindle DX, can read arbitrary PDFs.

It seems like the example of the Kindle at the beginning was more about who got what cut of the money than any philosophical debate about freedom and sharing. I bet that if you flipped the equation around, so the publisher got 70% and Amazon got 30%, there wouldn't be a complaint.

As for this part:

The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted.

I would have to look at the specifics to get a clearer picture, but it strikes me that the newspaper shouldn't care whether someone is buying an article on a Kindle, on a computer, or on an iPhone 58G QMBZ, as long as the consumer is paying the correct amount. The author shouldn't have the right to dictate on what devices their content can be purchased or viewed; they should only be able to charge for a copy. It would be like saying, "you may only read this book while in a brick house." Why should they even know what device I am using to view or purchase the content?

Again, I think this is a question of pure revenues; the publisher didn't really care that much about the third part licensing, except for the fact that Amazon might license the creator's content for less than the creator would have. If the "third parties" agreed to a price set by the content creator, then you probably wouldn't hear anything about it.

Again, I'd have to look more at this deal to learn the specifics, but I really don't like the amount of control authors have to deny access to certain devices or systems. It means that any new device coming to the market has to spend a huge amount of time and energy setting up licensing deals in order to be granted the "privilege" of purchasing and playing content. This greatly limits the amount of innovation that can happen around content-centric devices. A more open model, in which all content is DRM-free and a standard way of purchasing content exists and does not know or care about the particular device being used would be much better.

From someone whose entire livelihood depends on customized intellectual property.

I think that you are likely to be pretty well off, since, privacy issues aside, you only stand to benefit from your diagnoses being freely redistributable. A diagnosis of one person's X-Ray is pretty useless to someone else, except for someone trying to learn, and in that case, it would be good for society if the means of learning were as cheap and easy as possible.

In conclusion

It seems like there is a big split between the "old and not-really-applicable-to-the-internet" model of "information is a just like a widget, and you pay for each individual item" and the "new-but-incomplete" model of "information has no restrictions on its distribution." The new system is very incomplete and has a lot of problems, the biggest of which being "how do you pay for it?" Some people are starting to figure this out for certain areas, and I'm certain that more will follow. It is important to be open to the possibility that companies and even jobs will look dramatically different once this new model has fully set in. There might be less "9 to 5 in a cubicle" and more freelance-type work where people are paid for jobs lasting moths, weeks, days, hours, or minutes. It's exciting to think about what is ahead and to envision how these new technologies can change the way the world works.