Suitwatch February 21, 2001

The real convergence

A few years ago I was approached by Dave Feinleib, who was then a highly placed executive at Microsoft. Dave was putting together a book on the convergence of the Web and television, to help drive some understanding of what the world -- and Microsoft -- faced in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of WebTV. The book was to be a collection of essays by thinkers on the subject.

Among the collected authors were heavies at NBC, various other creators and distributors of entertainment content, and myself. At the time I was a marketing consultant, but of a rather contrarian sort (I as also a contributing editor to Linux Journal). My chapter was titled "The Message is not The Medium," and it served as a test bed for a ideas that later made it into The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Basically I said convergence with the Web would undermine commercial television's relatively inefficient and unaccountable business model -- one in which the customers (advertisers) have little way of knowing how many people they reach, or of connecting with them to do business. I also called television a drug, and added this:

Drugs have their uses. But it’s better to bet on the nurtured market than on the drugged one.

Trees don't grow to the sky. TV's $45 billion business may be the biggest redwood in the advertising forest, but in a few more years we'll be counting its rings. "Propaganda ends where dialog begins," Jacques Ellul says.

The Web is about dialog. The fact that it supports entertainment, and does a great job of it, does nothing to change that fact. What the Web brings to the entertainment business (and every business), for the first time, is dialog like nobody has ever seen before. Now everybody can get into the entertainment conversation. Or the conversations that comprise any other market you can name. Embracing that is the safest bet in the world. Betting on the old illusion machine, however popular it may be at the moment, is risky to say the least.

Dave and I both came up with some terrific titles for the book, but in typical Microsoft fashion it was given one of the worst titles in human history: "The Inside Story of Interactive TV and Microsoft WebTV for Windows."

The book sank. So did WebTV. (It's now MSN TV.) Dave left the company not long after the book came out. And Steve Perlman, one of the founders of WebTV (which was sold to Microsoft nearly half a $billion) is off and running Moxi Digital, which makes the very cool Linux-based Moxi Media Center.

But convergence marches on -- with a difference. Before we were talking about the convergence of media. Now we're beginning to shift our attention to the real locus of convergence: the infrastructural framework of protocols and open standards we call the Net.

On one side are those who want to keep improving what the Net already is: a free and open commons. On the other side is the entertainment industry. Between the two, trying their best to cope, is the computer industry, and all of us who work in it.

I'm not the kind of guy who likes to use war and battle metaphors, especially to describe ordinary competition between companies and ideas. But what we have here is a territorial battle over public property. Simply put, one side wants to keep the Net out of private hands, and the other wants to own as much of it as possible.

Here's another way to look at it. One side sees the Net s as a public place, while the other sees it as a distribution system -- one in which it is perfectly legitimate for private interests to control the means by which the system works. It's a lot harder to converge differeing concepts than differeing technologies, because concepts determine the terms by which what we understand something. Either we understand the Net as a public place or as a private set of content conveyor belts. One side has to win. It's life or death.

Obviously the entire free software and open source communities -- including Linux developers -- are in the first group. But we can't fight this thing alone. Perhaps the most auspicious help is arriving from an effort led by Larry Lessig, the Stanford Law professor and author of "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace", and "The Future of Ideas". The effort is called Creative Commons, and its purpose is to provide a place where writers, artists, programmers and other creative types can get help defining what constitutes acceptible use. The basic idea is to put artists in control of their work, rather than the usual distributors (publishers and record companies, to name two). Outside the context of mass market distribution, it's more likely that artists and those who enjoy their work can relate directly, and on their own terms.

The nastiest Usual Suspects on the other side are the entertainment conglomerates who lobbied the DMCA through Congress, and whose latest shenannigans center around the new MPEG-4 video compression standard. A group of entertainment heavies called MPEG LA has proposed a Visual Patent Portfolio License that is thick with costs for everybody.

Upon learning from Larry Horn, Vice President for Licensing at MPEG LA, that "the patents that will constitute the MPEG-4 Visual Patent Portfolio License support the charging of royalties on the use of MPEG-4 Visual streams in Europe", EuroLinux sounded an alarm with a press release that came out yesterday. One excerpt:

MPEG LA strategy consists in charging all possible uses of MPEG4 technologies wordwide and to block the diffusion of independently developped innovations in the field of video software technology. In particular, MPEG LA is charging 0.02 USD per hour of compressed MPEG4, which is actually more than the copyright royalties most movie writers receive.

The MPEG LA strategy leads to levying a tax on all cultural goods and is a typical example of the way patents on Internet standards are a tool for private taxing of all economic activities.

No wonder Apple recently declined to implement the standard in its new version of QuickTime.

Apple is one of those companies trying to make a living in the creative commons, struggling to find a way to reconcile its conflicting interests as a private company trying to make money in a public space. These involve constant compromises. So, while Quicktime is based on Apple's own proprietary technologies, the company also tries to make the most of open standards -- and in some cases also to open-source some of their own technologies (such as the VP3 codec).

The big question for companies like Microsoft and Apple isn't "How do we own a public space," but "How do we make that space better for everybody -- including ourselves, and our business?"

But don't think that's a question at all for the entertainment industry. As long as guys like MPEG LA see the Net as a plumbing system for "content," they're going to fight those who don't. I trust the bitter end will be theirs and not ours.

One way to hasten that end is by signing the EuroLinux No Patents Petition: <http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr1.html>

SuitWatch

Weekly views on Linux in Business
by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal

SuitWatch

Weekly views on Linux in Business by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal

Weekly views on Linux in Business
by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal