Good timing

A case of press releases:

The UK’s minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, Stephen Carter, has welcomed the announcement of Virgin Media and UMG’s unlimited streaming and downloads music service.

“Government has a role in creating the right legal and regulatory framework for rights and copyright,” says Carter. “However, the market will flourish through innovative commercial agreements between companies, and agreements such as this will help significantly in reducing any demand for piracy.”

The announcement comes a day before the expected publication of Carter’s Digital Britain report, which includes in its focus questions of how to fight online piracy while fostering legal music services. So it’s good (and presumably un-coincidental) timing on Virgin’s part.

From Music Ally.

A spokesman for Virgin Media said [Virgin Media CEO Neil] Berkett was in constant talks with Lord Carter in the run up to Digital Britain and piracy was a big part of the discussions.

From Media Week

Virgin Monday; Carter Tuesday

Cable TV operator Virgin Media is to launch a "ground breaking" unlimited music download subscription service through a partnership with the world's largest music company, Universal.

The service, which both sides describe as a world first, will allow any Virgin Media broadband customer to both listen by streaming and download to keep as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal's catalogue in return for a fee.

The music will be in the MP3 format, meaning it can be played on the vast majority of music devices, including the iPod and mobile phones. The service is set to launch later this year.

Virgin said as part of its cooperation with the music industry it would also work to help prevent piracy on its network by educating users and would, as a last resort for persistent offenders, suspend Internet access.

Virgin said no customers would be permanently disconnected, however.

Will these suspensions include publishing, films, non-Universal songs, software, audio books, data sets, images....And tomorrow is? From Reuters.


And here is Rory Cellan-Jones' initial take:

Then I read further down the press release and found what Virgin was offering in return - action against persistent file-sharers. Here's the key paragraph:

"This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access. No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media."

And here, one day before DB-Day, is a response from Lord Carter himself.

The UK’s [current] minister for communications, technology and broadcasting, Stephen Carter, has welcomed the announcement of Virgin Media and UMG’s unlimited streaming and downloads music service.

“Government has a role in creating the right legal and regulatory framework for rights and copyright,” says Carter. “However, the market will flourish through innovative commercial agreements between companies, and agreements such as this will help significantly in reducing any demand for piracy.”

How?

L'internet, moi non plus

And there are at least 29 positions on this.

In a video shot for an online news site, French legislators were asked whether they were familiar with peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. “No,” one lawmaker responded, rolling his eyes. “I speak French. Excuse me.”

While France has often prided itself on its contrarian approach to information technology — remember the Minitel? — the response summed up the ham-handedness of the latest digital initiative by the French government. The video appeared this spring, at the height of debate about a plan by President Nicolas Sarkozy to set up a government agency to disconnect persistent copyright pirates from the Internet.

From the NYT.

New Book @ £60?

Brand extension, coffee table accessory; the de Botton empire expands into the Interiors market?

In a carefully targeted brand extension, Monocle is launching its own library, with the first title Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and a print run of just 1,000. More titles will follow, ranging from social and political commentaries to out-of-print books meriting revival. "It develops and solidifies our relationship with our audience and our contributors," says [Tyler] Brûlé.

From The Guardian.

Subject for Investigative Journalism?

Now there's a little money.

...the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has announced a $15 million initiative to spur investigative reporting.

The grants, some ongoing, and others new or yet-to-be announced, will promote new economic models for in-depth reporting on digital platforms...

More here. How about investing some money in thoughtful analysis of the digital world, "free things" and "copycat" culture? The rush to report this subject badly is worthy of Usain Bolt.

Oh, book quote, 15th June, 2009

In some ways the online world has reinforced the joy of books. The best reading is not useful reading; it is useless. The Kindle is the first thing to annex technology for this uselessness: the joy of a comic novel, the journey of a historical biography, the diversion of a short story. Trust me: this took me by surprise. It will probably do the same to you.

More Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan gets E-Reader fever, Kindle style

Early Adopter syndrome, or the harbinger of the Tipping Point? Or Both?

The Kindle, unlike laptop or PC prose, is read in an armchair or a sofa or on the train. You can read it while holding it up with one hand. You can lie down and read it perched on your lap. Although it’s connected to the internet and you can buy a book and start reading it within a minute by pressing one button, it doesn’t facilitate web-surfing. It is not an iPhone. It doesn’t text. It brings you words, plainly packaged. The words, by their very plainness – like the plainness of a book’s print – demand respect. By removing some of the peripheries of reading – the shop, the cover design, the author photograph – the words seem to acquire more solitary authority.

I found that, unlike reading online, I was never tempted to open a new web window to appease my restless short attention span. For a blog addict like me, always vowing to get back on the wagon of a web-free life for a few hours a day, it’s a godsend. If there’s a long article you find online that you want to read later, you can e-mail it to your Kindle and read it later in the manner most appropriate.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make notes, highlight and underline passages. But the Kindle lets you do that using a mini-mouse – and your notes are then helpfully compiled in an appendix at the end. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to remember where I stopped reading last; the Kindle automatically remembers and takes you there. Looking for a detail you’d already read? Unlike a paper book, the Kindle can search the text for you.

More here (unless the Sunday Times starts charging for back content, or indeed access).


And when McCrum finally gets it...then we have a movement.

However, for all this, I still needed hard evidence that e-reading was here to stay - until last week, on the train from Liverpool Street to Norwich, it happened. I saw a woman happily ensconced with her ebook, lost in the words on the screen like any reader of traditional books.

For me, this is the tipping point. All the anguished commentary in the trade press, all the anecdotes from the US about New York editors reading "manuscript" submissions on e-readers, all this dwindles beside that thirtysomething train traveller quietly at home with her Kindle.

To see a regular commuter choose an ebook over a newspaper or a magazine, a paperback or a library book, indeed over any piece of conventional print, all competing literary distractions: that seems to me to be a moment of the greatest significance.

I still firmly believe that the new technology will not eliminate the old. It's not an either/or choice. That's the lesson from the history of IT, from Caxton to Google.

Perhaps McCrum is in fact the new George Routledge...trains eh? To Norwich. Alan Bennett beware.


And speaking of which:

Mr. [David] Sedaris wrote in a recent e-mail message that he has actually signed “at least five” Kindles, and “a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.” A frequent chronicler of his own eccentricities, the author often encounters his readers’ quirks at the book-signing table.

“The strangest thing I’ve signed is a woman’s artificial leg,” Mr Sedaris continued in his e-mail message. “Last year in Austin I signed an actual leg, and its owner had my signature tattooed into her flesh.

From the NYT.

Open Access and "false" History

A Russian perspective. From the St Petersburg Times.

[Dmitry]Medvedev’s commission “for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests” is headed by presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, who will control which documents remain classified and which ones are opened to the public. There are many reasons to be concerned that the documents most essential to an open and honest study and discussion of Russian and Soviet history will remain locked up.

Interesting stuff here.

Wow! That censor word, from The Times

Digital Britain will also try to tighten up rampant internet piracy of music and films, by trying to encourage the creation of an industry body that will have the power to censor pirate websites so nobody can log on to them.

Neil Berkett, the chief executive of Virgin Media, is today expected to spell out an alternative strategy as he unveils plans to launch a massive library of music available for unlimited download for a small fee in partnership with Universal Music, the record label behind Amy Winehouse.

Virgin Media believes there is no need for a bureaucratic body to decide what sites people can visit, and that piracy can be curbed by agreement with individual customers. Anybody who signs up for its unlimited music service will also have to agree not to visit pirate websites, or risk have their internet access cut off for one hour. “We won’t be suspending people’s internet connections. It will be more of an intermission to encourage good behaviour,” said one source familar with Virgin Media’s plans.

Censor pirate websites so nobody can log on? Internet access "off for an hour"...Tax breaks for people that buy vinyl? This is getting absurd.


In a slightly more positive mode, this from the Digital Britain team.

The report will also be commentable, of course, which provides a great route for feedback to Team DB. Obviously, this being the final report, there’s no scope for changes to be made to it on the basis of comments received. But we’d like to think that there is plenty that the community can contribute in terms of how the report’s objectives can be implemented.

The publication of the report is just the start of this process, not the end. We need everyone to stay involved and engaged to help us make Digital Britain a reality.

Saying and Doing

The FT reports on a YouGov report, published today. (Registration may be needed for these links).

A majority of British adults would back stronger government intervention against online piracy if it helped protect media industry jobs, according to a survey released today.

The poll comes ahead of tomorrow's release of the Digital Britain white paper, which is expected to include legislation to force internet service providers to work with content owners to block file-sharing websites and aid the prosecution of persistent illegal downloaders.

In a survey of more than 2,000 people by YouGov for the Industry Trust for Intellectual Property Awareness, more than half supported preventing access to "unauthorised content" online.

These polls: over 50% are concerned about "media jobs"? I think we should see the questionnaire. 1. What is a file-sharing website? 2. How is the "blocking" going to be achieved? 3. What is a "persistent" downloader. 4. Was anyone asked about "new business models"? 5. What about educational initiatives?

And in another article - again jobs are the angle - the FT follows this news up with a piece by the executive chairman of Kudos Productions, Stephen Garrett.

In this parallel universe, consumer rights have acquired the status of a fascistic mantra. What the consumer wants, the consumer gets, even if he does not want to pay for it. Everyone has, to some extent, colluded in this fantasy, blocking out the advertisements while consuming – for “free” – newspapers, films, television shows and music on legitimate websites. Now, and this has happened very quickly, consumers assume they have a right to these things. Free, and forever. Unfortunately this fantasy is unsustainable. All of these cost money to produce; in the case of TV dramas such as Spooks that my company produces, a huge amount. At the point when these creative products enter cyberspace, they are only partly paid for. Producers are dependent on revenues from DVDs and international sales, which piracy hits.

Piracy happens on the internet. The greater the bandwidth, the easier piracy is. We in the creative industries have asked (nicely) that the internet service providers should help tackle piracy by responding in a graduated way to customers of theirs identified as offering or downloading pirated material. The sequence would be along the lines of a warning letter, a “squeezing” of bandwidth, a further cut in bandwidth and then the ultimate sanction: a limitation of service.

It is worth noting here how film and music have (silently) become the UK creative content industry. Where is publishing? Gaming? Software? Academic publishing?

More Carter

The Guardian makes Digital Britain predictions too. Seems somewhat half-hearted, perhaps?

Online piracy

The government sees nothing to be gained this close to an election from making criminals, with no trial, of the estimated six to seven million people who have downloaded illegally copied material. Carter will not introduce a so-called "three strikes" system which results in people being summarily disconnected – instead he is expected to codify in legislation last year's memorandum of understanding (MoU) between several ISPs and the content industry, which resulted in warning letters being sent out to persistent illegal file-sharers.

All ISPs will have to sign-up to a new warning letter regime which will be backed up by "technical measures" that will see the worst offenders have their connection speeds reduced sharply. Exactly how those measures will work and what standard of proof and appeals procedure will be needed, will be the job of the ISPs and content players to work out through the auspices of the "rights agency" – although that will not, however, be its name.

Funding for the new body and regime will come from industry, although Carter is not understood to be in favour of industry levies on computer or internet equipment. But it will still be the responsibility of content owners – either individually or through their own trade bodies – to take any legal action against persistent offenders on whom "technical measures" fail to make any impression. The new regime, however, should deal with all but the most hardened file-sharer.

Digital Britain coming shortly, piracy concerns

From the FT.

Digital Britain's ambitious programme also seeks to reduce online piracy of music and other media.

Lord Carter's preference was for content owners and broadband providers to set aside long-standing differences about who should tackle piracy and agree a solution. But the two camps have polarised further since the interim report, so the government is likely to legislate after further consultation this summer.

A proposed "rights agency", which the government hoped would broker digital content rights and enforce action against pirates , proved divisive among ISPs and broadcasters. A new bureaucratic body of some kind is likely to appear in the final white paper, but its powers will disappoint some content owners who have lobbied hard to block persistent file-sharers' internet access.

This is fun

From the Open Content Alliance.

Copyright abuse: buy your own songs with other people's credit cards - get the royalties

And file sharing seemed a tricky thing. What about this:

An international fraud in which a gang allegedly made thousands of pounds downloading its own songs from online music stores with stolen credit cards has been cracked by the Metropolitan police and the FBI, the Met claimed yesterday.

The gang are alleged to have made several songs which they gave to an online US company, which then uploaded them to be sold on iTunes and Amazon.

Over five months they bought the songs thousands of times, spending around $750,000 (£468,750) on 1,500 stolen US and UK credit cards, according to the Met. The criminal network then also allegedly reaped the royalties from the tracks, pulling in an estimated $300,000, paid by the two sites, which were unaware of the fraud being committed against them.

From the Guardian.

Times says Lord Carter to return to Industry

From The Times.

The sensitive nature of his current role means political and industry opponents will be watching closely to see what he does next. His report, [digital britain] to be published next Tuesday, will propose measures to extend access to broadband internet services and changes to how public service broadcasting is funded. Most controversially, it will tackle the rapid growth of illegal downloads, which are hitting the revenues of the film and music industries.

The Government is thought to have backed away from proposals to require internet service providers to bar customers caught repeatedly accessing pirated material.

Instead, insiders expect Lord Carter to recommend the introduction of premium-rate internet services that will allow users to access what they wish. Providers would then be expected to compensate music and film producers from a share of the additional revenue.

Why Adopt? A VC speaks...

...and hundreds respond.

Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):

iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
Facebook - a social net with real utility
Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
Blogger - a printing press for everyone
Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before.

From Fred Wilson's VC blog. The responses are great too.

France, the Internet and Human Rights

On Nicolas Sarkozy's three strikes...

Some European countries, however, have all but succumbed to the pressure of the media industry; France, in particular, has gone the farthest, since the three strikes law was approved there by the French National Assembly with the support of the president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Now, however, this measure has been dealt a blow by the French Constitutional Council (highest legal authority in France), which rejected the idea that some newly created agency can have the authority to disconnect a user from the net. The Council said that free access to the internet was a human right, and only a judge should have the power to disconnect someone.

From Mashable. And CNET adds:

The council said "free access to public communication services on line" was a human right that only a judge should have the power to disconnect.

When I get old I want to stop being a hippy

In probably the saddest quote to feature in Around Robin, here's how - from Tubular Mike Oldfield.

"I'd probably say to my younger self, get yourself a whole collection of lawyers. Which is what I have now. I don't have any friends; I just have lawyers. At the last count I had about 15 different sets of them for all kinds of problems. And you can trust them because you're paying them. I know that sounds very negative, but that's the world we live in."

In the increasingly interesting Daily Telegraph.

Mess, not Big Idea: could be good; could be innovative

We’ve become accustomed to a media world dominated by monopolies and oligopolies. So we — and especially the paid journalists who remain in the craft — tend to imagine that just a few big institutions will rise from the sad rubble of the journalism business.

That’s not where it’s going, at least not anytime soon. We’re heading into an incredibly messy but also wonderful period of innovation and experimentation that combines technology and people and pushes great and outlandish ideas into the real world. The result will a huge number of failures but also a large number of successes.

From Dan Gillmor.

Sharing another Election Result

Sweden's Pirate Party, striking a chord with voters who want more free content on the Internet, won a seat in the European Parliament, early results showed Sunday.

The Pirate Party captured 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden in the Europe-wide ballot, enough to give it a single seat. The party wants to deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and reduce surveillance on the Internet.
"This is fantastic!" Christian Engstrom, the party's top candidate, told Reuters. "This shows that there are a lot of people who think that personal integrity is important and that it matters that we deal with the Internet and the new information society in the right way."

From Reuters.

The Internet and Government Recruitment

An interesting essay on the relationship of government to the Internet.

...take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com - all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

This common pattern of more powerful tools for citizens making life harder for traditional institutions is, for me, a cause for celebration. However, I am not celebrating as a libertarian (which I am not) I celebrate it because it marks a historic increase in the freedom of people and groups of people, and a step-change in their ability to determine the direction of their own lives.

The author, Tom Steinberg, offers some thoughts on the future of policy makers - in light of the above.

Coming up with new uses of technology, or perceiving how the Internet might be involved with undermining something in the future is an essential part of a responsible policy expert’s skill-set these days, no matter what policy area they work in. It should be considered just as impossible for a new fast-stream applicant without a reasonably sophisticated view of how the Internet works to get a job as if they were illiterate ( a view more sophisticated than generated simply by using Facebook a lot, a view that is developed through tuition ). Unfashionably, this change almost certainly has to be driven from the center.

Steinberg is the director of mySociety, a non-profit, open source organisation. He was a policy analyst who worked in Tony Blair's Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003.

A talk that should not be missed at the Saatchi Gallery

For the unintentional laughs.

CAN ART BE TAUGHT TO THE FACEBOOK GENERATION?
The Saatchi Gallery / Sunday Telegraph Art Prize for Schools debate, presented by Intelligence Squared

Speakers:

Camila Batmanghelidjh: Advocate for vulnerable children and founder of two children's charities, The Place 2 Be and Kids Company where she currently works with some of the most traumatised young people.

Stephen Bayley: Broadcaster and consultant. Founding director of London's Design Museum and outspoken commentator on all matters concerning art in everyday life.

Alain de Botton: Writer of a number of bestselling essays including most recently 'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work'. Co-founder of The School of Life, 'a new social enterprise offering good ideas for everyday living'.

Antony Gormley: Artist best known for his large-scale works such as 'Angel of the North' and 'Event Horizon' which explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Grayson Perry: Winner in 2003 of the Turner Prize which he accepted wearing a purple satin party frock. Best known for his elaborate ceramic vases which at a distance seem classically decorative but on closer inspection are covered with narratives and commentaries dealing with aesthetic, cultural, social and political subjects.

Chair: Joan Bakewell Journalist and broadcaster.

Event Information: The discussion will take place on 1 July 2009 at The Saatchi Gallery

Doors open at 6:15 pm. The discussion starts at 7:00 pm and finishes at 8:15 pm.

Tickets £15 from Intelligence Squared

And the representative of the "facebook generation" who is to be "taught" is who exactly? Surely the debate should be: What can the "facebook generation" teach us all about art?

Now this is how to promote a new book...

...the new old media/new media mash. Lovely.

From Canal Publishing. And here is the cut out foldable.

New Business Models: iPhone newspapers

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

From EditorsWeblog.
And if it works, what about every other kind of content? Interesting.

TUC: let's get militant about file sharing and jobs

Today's Daily Telegraph has an article by Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the TUC. He writes, under the in no way melodramatic headline One week to save the creative industries:

There is no doubt amongst members of our trade unions – as well as the rights-holders who are vocal on this issue – that file-sharing poses a serious but avoidable threat. What is hard to quantify is the number of productions that could have been made but never will be. The films never produced, tracks never recorded, DVDs never made available all cost jobs, whether it’s on the film set or in the high street store. A report released recently highlighted that 800,000 jobs across the economy depend on the creative industries and the production of new output.

Internet service providers hold the key to creating the change necessary to tackle illegal file-sharing. The ISPs have the direct relationship with the file-sharer and all the evidence suggests that, where a system is put in place for dealing with offenders, rates of piracy will fall dramatically. For the vast majority, simply drawing attention to the harm of their actions would be sufficient to correct behaviours but further graduated action should be taken against those who continue to file-share illegally - including limitation of internet access.

Clearly, informing the public about the impact of piracy would be effective. But the rate at which jobs and conditions are being damaged brings an urgent call to the ISPs to play the right role. Just as they need new television, film and music to fuel engagement with the internet, so they should live up to their responsibility to those who work in the production of the content.

What is so interesting - and there's not much here that is, other than a call to make the ISPs "policemen", which having sat in a briefing at lawyers, Clifford Chance, to the ISPA, is going to be a fiercely argued shift in agency that will make the law firms a very large profit and is far from happening - are the assumptions and absences here. How many films "could have been made but never will" is a question that has been asked of the British film industry since the birth of cinema. Why isn't Brighton Hollywood, is an equally relevant question.

Barber doesn't - as with so many of these type of pieces - define what is file-sharing. Has he heard about "darknet" sharing of (offline) hard drives? Does he know about RapidShare? Or about the Creative Commons? The thriving new business models of all types of creative content? Does he remember the new technology and newspapers debates of the 1980s? Does he know that education hasn't worked in these areas, and that we live digitally in an era of legal "free things"? Details, not polemic, are what we need: and forward thinking.

The Internet - and its ramifications - is not going away.

When Barber writes: "Clearly, informing the public about the impact of piracy would be effective." What does he mean? The TUC deserves much better than this: it deserves some detail, some understanding of the digital, and some acknowledgment of the power of the consumer.

Lazy. Almost Appleyard.


PS. From Peter Bazalgette.

Peter Bazalgette, the entrepreneur behind Big Brother, said: "The government decided a year ago that they would replace lost revenue from financial services by [turning to] the creative industries. The irony is that the faster the broadband, the more people will download content illegally."

David Lammy's IP Forum: the Comfort of figures

Tomorrow David Lammy, currently our IP Minister, will host a forum in London on the "economic value" of Intellectual Property with 40 invited participants. He and his team, with the help of the IPO and SABIP, will be seeking to establish "priorities for commissioning economic research on intellectual property". It should be interesting.

Also interesting is the scope of the discussion: it considers such issues as "determinants of patenting in firms", the "value of patents across sectors", "strategic behaviour in the use of intellectual property rights", the "relationship between IPR innovation and economic performance", the "implications of wider factors such as technological and social change..." and "the role, and effectiveness of alternative/complementary potential policies to stimulate innovation."

It is perhaps in these last two areas that the minister's forum can provide some major illumination. As our report (and part two) on digital consumer behaviours and attitudes showed, the debates about IP in the digital realm are being driven from the top down, but influenced from bottom up - by us the users. Issues of value and utility of content online are changing very fast. And, beyond the headline grabbing figures (about which I'll write in some length soon) there are profound questions about the nature of copyright in the era of "free things", the urgent need to investigate new kinds of business models, and the larger discussion about the creative industries and the public domain, that require the impact of us the users to be part of the discussion.

I hope that is the case. But as Rory Cellan-Jones wrote about our report:

This report was meant for the culture minister David Lammy, and feeds into the government's thinking ahead of the Digital Britain report, but it may provide him with little comfort.

So if not comfort, then at least, some food for thought. Here's one idea from the report that Rory picked up on:

For the digital consumer, many file-sharing services are now as big - and as trusted - brands as those of any large, legal corporation. So Limewire or Pirate Bay is seen as offering convenience and good service, just as older consumers might have liked to shop at the Co-Op or get their paper from WH Smith.

Looks like excellent "economic value" from this laptop. The minister has said that up to ten million people download unauthorized copyright/IP protected goods; and we, being naturally more conservative, have pointed to industry figures that claim it is at least seven million. Whatever the number one of the key questions for the Minister and the IPO is the "economic value" of prosecuting all of these people, or of initiating the expensive processes of "three strikes and out" or "turning down the access speeds".

The outcome of this particular forum is much anticipated.

So we are published: Copycats?

From the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones.

Oh no: another boring report about piracy by a strange body with an obscure title.

That was my first reaction on getting hold of Copycats? Digital Consumers in the Online Age [2.76Mb PDF] - a report for the Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property.

But when I read on, the report was full of fascinating insights into the way that we've all begun to think about the rights and wrongs of online piracy - or rather, "unauthorised downloading", which is how this report for the government carefully describes it.

I'll write more about the report, and what is means, later in the week. It's been instructive.

Boogle

According to media reports, BBC director general Mark Thomson is in negotiations with Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt about the possibility of hosting long-form BBC content on Google-owned video website, YouTube.

From Business Week.

On that Spotify/Apple showdown...

...

This week, European streaming music service Spotify demonstrated its Android app, which features on-demand streams of songs the user doesn’t own, as well as an offline synchronization and caching function that allows a listener to enjoy a song on the go, regardless of whether the phone is connected to a data network at that moment. That’s dangerously close to owning a song, and speculation is already rife that Apple won’t accept Spotify’s planned iPhone app because it’s too much of a threat to Apple’s iTunes music store.

From GigaOM.

Hey, my mate didn't just get Clooney, he got Stephen King too

It's not always easy when your friends get famous - there was that Morrisey song, wasn't there? - but in Olen Steinhauer's case it is very easy indeed. His novel The Tourist, mentioned before, has now received the Stephen King nod and hat tip:

Here's the best spy novel I've ever read that wasn't written by John le Carré. Milo Weaver is a CIA floater agent — a Tourist. His mission is to track down a brilliant hired killer code-named the Tiger. Milo succeeds, but's that's just the beginning of his problems. It's a complex story of betrayal anchored by a protagonist who's as winning as he is wily.

From King's top seven books for summer.


Thanks to my fellow contemporary nomad for this (Olen is far too modest), John Nadler. And guys...I will be back on the ole CN. Been writing a report on downloading culture, which will soon be published - and shared, I assume.

The Heat Map of Greed

From MSN. Great stuff.

Publishers? Writers? What's in a name?

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

From the NYT.

The Online post of the print published introduction to the new Newsweek responding to the new-ish world

Complicated? You bet.

There will, for the most part, be two kinds of stories in the new NEWSWEEK. The first is the reported narrative—a piece, grounded in original observation and freshly discovered fact, that illuminates the important and the interesting. The second is the argued essay—a piece, grounded in reason and supported by evidence, that makes the case for something.

What is displaced by these categories? The chief casualty is the straightforward news piece and news written with a few (hard-won, to be sure) new details that does not move us significantly past what we already know. Will we cover breaking news? Yes, we will, but with a rigorous standard in mind: Are we truly adding to the conversation?

More conversation here.

The Grateful Dead and IP and the CEO

From the CEO of Thomson Reuters...

I believe that The Grateful Dead discovered the new economic model for the music industry 40 years ago

Inside every CEO there's a deadhead waiting to be released, no?

What the Dead figured out a long time ago is that artists should give away recorded music, and make their money from touring, building brand and merchandising. Most of the band’s 5000+ live shows are available for download or at least stream on the internet (see www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead or www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Dicks_Picks.htm). Rather than suing fans to prohibit bootleg recordings, the Dead allowed its devotees to set up microphones at their concerts and also provided high quality tapes of every show right off the mixing board. Thus, the recordings themselves become viral advertisements for the group and build brand and demand for concert tickets and merchandise which are harder to copy.

From Tom Glocer's blog.


There are, of course, other arguments.

Whoever said copyright was dull?

It is unrealistic to demand new business models from the press without giving it the legal tools to succeed. Here are a few things Congress can do:

- Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine. Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the "fair use" doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts -- republishing a quote to comment on it, for example -- is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.

Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.

Such a rule would be no more bold a step than the one Congress took in 1996 rewriting centuries of traditional libel law for the benefit of tech start-ups. It would take away from search engines the "just opt out" mantra -- repeated by Google's witness during the Kerry hearings -- and force them to negotiate with copyright holders over the value of their content.

From the Washington Post. Lots here to read, copy and share...

New Business model, same lack of names

CNN: You plan to launch next fall - who is signed up so far?

Crovitz: I won't mention any companies but it's fair to say we've spoken to the largest news publishers in the world and every one of them has expressed an interest in moving toward a paid model.

The current recession has reminded publishers that advertising is a very cyclical business. That's proven today not only for traditional media companies, but even online-only organizations. There is pressure on online advertising to make a go of it, which really hasn't happened yet.

For many news publishers, a high percentage of readers come from outside the country .... British Web sites get a lot of traffic from the U.S., and so forth. Typically, capturing that audience been a very hard sell to advertisers, because most advertisers are not organized that way. (Micropayments for news articles) are a way to generate revenue from an international audience.

From the CNN interview with Gordon Krovitz.

Always touched by your book, dear

So again, I ask, what has the EBM got that the digital formats haven't? And again the answer is Presence. If people are going to continue to purchase paper books, publishers have got to do for books what the music industry failed to do for CDs. While the CD-stand or -case was almost de rigeur in 1990s interior decor, people soon realized that a tower of transparent plastic was not the personality statement piece they imagined it could be. Yet vinyl records, despite their obsolescence, retain their appeal for many, from nostalgic Baby Boomers to cool-hunting teens. Perhaps it is, after all, the sound quality, but I'm willing to bet that the labor put into sleeves and liner notes is what has guaranteed their enduring appeal. Records are fetishized objects, while CDs are shiny detritus disks. At this moment in time, books seem poised to go either way.

From the ever-wonderful if:Book, one of the projects of the Future of the Book Institute.

E-books, the flight of the legal free

This March, Google and Sony announced a deal to make 500,000 of the seven million out-of-copyright books that have so far been scanned into the internet giant's Book Search available for free as e-book downloads.

While all publishers are having to contend with the likelihood of titles being pirated, classics publishers are facing a more serious challenge of their own: free, legal competitors. Yet e-books still polarise classics publishers. While some are progressing through converting their lists, others are rejecting the push towards digitisation and inevitable competition with free editions—both legal and pirated.

From the Bookseller.

Follow Me, Follow You

From the New York Times - out the door service:

A new Web service, called Abandonment Tracker Pro, is in beta testing and scheduled for formal release next month. Developed by SeeWhy in Andover, Mass., the service will alert a subscribing Web store when a visitor places an item in a shopping cart or begins an application and does not complete the final step.

What distinguishes Abandonment Tracker Pro from other services is its enabling of remarketing “in real time,” SeeWhy says.

The idea that a visitor isn’t entitled to leave an online store empty-handed without being pestered sounds distasteful enough. But having that contact start immediately seems a new form of marketing brazenness

Hang on, didn't Sony just post some figures?

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”

At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

From Current.com

Legacy Thinkers, the Bryan and Clive Show, foxes go hedgehog

Your essay today: Is the digital different?

Even if you don’t indulge, your life has been changed. At every turn you are told to get online and buy. Increasingly, shops are being seen as mere adjuncts to websites. Lots of things out there in cyberspace — this newspaper, for example — are just plain free, and most things are a lot cheaper. Web 2.0 is in your head and your pocket whether you like it or not. It will change everything.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, to start with, it is historically ignorant.

“The internet”, says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, “is rather passé . . . It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

Edgerton is the world expert in tech dead ends. Fifty years ago, he points out, nuclear power was about to change the world; then there was supersonic passenger flight, then space travel. The wheel, he concedes, did change the world, as did steam power. The web is not in that league.

Good grief: not as powerful as the wheel? Hasn't perhaps changed the way we search, think, write, conceptualize, trust? Web 2.0:

...destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual. Clive James is no web-sceptic. He runs a superb website — CliveJames.com — and he regards the internet as “more of a blessing than a threat”. But he is wary of this focus on the individual.

Nothing to do with no such thing as society; or the past 25 years of Business School Dominated Politics? Then, at last, some self-understanding:

I know that this article — it always happens — will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it. I will be called a Luddite.

It is the cultists who threaten the web. They are the ones encouraging dreams of a utopia of the self. They fail to see that the web is just one more product of the biology, culture and history that make us what we are. In the real world, it is wonderful, certainly, but it is also porn, online brothels, privacy invasions, hucksterism, mindless babble and the vacant gaze that always accompanies the mindless pursuit of the new. The web is human and fallen; it is bestial as much as it is angelic. There are no new worlds. There is only this one.

Wonder if the Wellcome Trust, with its commitment to open source research is cultist? Wonder if the BBC's digitization of its entire archive is cultist? The Internet Archive? Obama's use of the Interent, before, during and after his Presidential victgory? Sneering because we can't think? The Internet at its best is about thinking so that we don't have to sneer at old ideas. Or men.


C- could do better. Try reading Isaiah Berlin on Two Concepts of Liberty. It might help your thinking. Available online, I believe.

Told You: it's all the BBC's Fault

From the "new" Evening Standard.

But the prospects for American journalism seem better than those of the British variety for one reason: the BBC. The corporation has a fantastic website.

That's hardly surprising, since it spends £145 million a year of licence-fee payers' money on it. According to Paul Zwillenberg of OC&C consultants, all Britain's national newspapers put together spend around £100 million on their online efforts. And the BBC's website is, of course, free, which makes it tricky for less well-funded competitors to start charging.

If the BBC is allowed to go on dominating online news it will undermine other news providers' ability to survive on the internet, and thus threaten the diversity of news sources that is crucial to a democracy.

If its freedom or funding is cut, the quality of its service will decline, but others will have a chance to grow.

Everything is in freefall, so cut the beacon of quality? The author is this piece begins:

When I first went into journalism it was a leisurely business steeped in tradition and alcohol.

The lunches were heavy, the duties were light, and in most newsrooms older members of staff snored the afternoons away over their typewriters, their slumbers undisturbed by the philistine notions of efficiency and shareholder value that elbowed their way into the business in subsequent years.

Philistine notions? The author continues:

Journalism helps society to hold politicians to account; molecular biology, or hairdressing, or whatever it is you do, doesn't.

Remind me who holds journalists to account? And who missed the credit crunch? And who watched without comment the Politician's Expenses for the last - what is it? - twenty years? (Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror now says that it is all Margaret Thatcher's fault):

Maggie Thatcher inflated expenses in the late 1980s to pad out MPs' pay packets with a nod and a wink.
The Rusty Lady's greater crime was to unleash a greed-is-good culture and trash the noble ideal of public service, civil servants required by the Tories to be One Of Us. The grocer's daughter knew the price of everything and value of nothing, fatally undermining the quality of public life.

Swedes File Share Less since Legislation

The Swedish Association of Video Distributors (SVF) commissioned a survey of some 2,700 people asking what their file-sharing habits are now in comparison to before the April 1st passage of the controversial new copyright law that gave copyright holders the power to obtain court orders forcing ISPs to divulge the personal information of suspected file-sharers.
It found that some 20% of Swedes aged 15-59yo have "cut down on or completely stopped file-sharing."

Perhaps more revealing is that a startling 36% of file-sharers aged 15-24yo said the same. This is the group that’s known to usually be the most prolific file-sharing demographic.

Interesting: as it this from May 4.

Last week Swedish ISP Tele 2 announced that as result of demands from it customers it will stop storing their IP addresses in a bid to fight back against the country’s passage of a law making it easier for copyright holders to go after individual file-sharers.
“In certain cases, this will make an investigation impossible,” said Stefan Kronkvist, the head of Swedish police’s internet crime unit. Passed on April 1st, the law allows copyright holders to seek court orders forcing ISPs to divulge the names associated with IP addresses suspected of sharing content illegally.

Both from ZeroPaid.

Kindling for those pulp things

So the gap between what the Kindle as is and what it needs to become to be viable for newspapers is even larger than I thought the other day. It would take even more ads at high rates, even higher subscription prices and a big shift in the revenue pie toward the content provider to make it even approach viability.

The maths of not quite giving it away.


Ryan Chittum at the CJR runs through the Kindle/Newspaper thing.

Tablets of Clay

Many, many more people are reading and writing now as part of their daily experience. But, because the reading and writing has come back without bringing Tolstoy along with it, the enormity of the historical loss to the literary landscape caused by television is now becoming manifested to everybody. And I think as people are surveying the Internet, a lot of what they’re doing is just shooting the messenger.

From a cracking Clay Shirky interview with the CJR.

Cool (Reading) Aid Test

New e-readers: wait ages and then two come along? This one is the Cool-er

You Can YouTube if You Want To, Minister

The Cabinet Office is to appoint a new "director of digital engagement" to oversee the Government's online communications strategy.

Andrew Stott, a senior civil servant and one of the Government's most experienced press officers, will carry out the role. His appointment is expected to be announced at midday today [Wednesday 13th, May].

Stott has been the Government's deputy chief information officer since 2004 and also oversaw the government's network of websites as head of service transformation at the e-government unit.

In his new role, he is likely to concentrate on improving the government's use of new technologies, including social networking sites and blogs, in an attempt to reach the audiences that use them.

From The Guardian.

The Future of Publishing

is safe.

"There's been so much written about and spoken about in the mainstream media and in the anonymous blogosphere world, that this will be a wonderful, refreshing chance for me to get to tell my story, that a lot of people have asked about, unfiltered," the Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Yes, the Sarah Palin memoir is slated for 2010 publication. Wonder if Jamie Byng will be buying it for Canongate?

Trusts - the future of the "free"?

Yes "free" has been out there, so why the change in tack: advertising revenues are under severe recessionary pressures.


This is from Measurement Matters: "How Do You Escape From Free"

A recent study of around 5,000 people in the US and Europe showed that readers were not adverse to paying for online content. Consumers would be willing to pay for coverage they where particularly interested in such as business and sport, provided there were no free online products of equal quality on the market.

And there’s the caveat – provided there were no free alternatives. On the internet there is always a free alternative, and that free alternative is only a click away. And when it comes to Free!, quality may not be as strong a differentiator as you might think. Look at the success of Metro, London Lite the London Paper compared to the “quality” paid for alternative, the Evening Standard. The Standard is under such attack that it is responding with a risky poster campaign ‘apologising’ for being out of touch with its readers.

Recently the Harvard Business School investigated the Guardian newspaper - as an example of journalism enabled, to an extent, by the "Trust" that sits above it. This is a big discussion: but as increasing numbers of creative industries are badly hurt by the "free" there is - obviously - the question of new business models (and the Can Spotify work? meme) and perhaps the debate about the philanthropic/governmental investment required to support our creative industries - from music and film through computer games, publishing (and academic publishing) and news itself.

News on News: how do we keep the quality?

A few key points from Price Waterhouse Coopers Newspaper Outlook 2009. The issue here, as in so many industries, is what will consumers pay for? There's no doubt they will - if the content has enough value.

Although there is a huge potential for growth online, print
remains the largest source of revenue generation for
newspaper publishers, and will continue to be so for
some time.

Newspapers have a long-term future and will coexist with
other media. However this is unlikely to be either in the
formats or volumes seen today and there will some
casualties and losses of well-known papers along the
way.

Consumers place high value on the deep insight and
analysis provided by journalists over and above general
or breaking news stories.

Consumers see breaking news and general interest news
as commodities, but there is always a market for high
value online content in specific topics. Our consumer
research indicates that consumers are willing to pay for
this content, but newspapers need to develop strategies
for monetising their content and intellectual capital.

As the Nieman Journalism Lab noted:

PwC found that 62 percent of consumers are willing to pay for online news. But the report itself qualifies this finding as well:

This does not mean that they would actually buy online content at this amount however. Free content is abundant online and consumers would choose free content when the quality was comparable or sufficient for their purpose. On average, respondents expressed no willingness to pay for general news and background information on e-paper or mobile devices, and they do not see them as alternatives for full newspapers.

Better Late Than Never

Chris Anderson, editor of wired, on "free".


An Advert

Mais, non. France goes on downloading offensive

French MPs todaypassed a bill that would cut the internet connections of those who repeatedly download music and films illegally, creating what may be the first government agency to track and punish online pirates.

The bill passed 296 to 233 in the lower house of parliament in a show of force by President Nicolas Sarkozy's governing conservatives after an initial failure last month.

From AP.

Yours for $99

From O'Reilly. 23 pages

Book publishers have long used free content as part of their marketing and selling efforts, with the vast majority of free content distributed in printed form. Digital distribution of free material, either intentional or via unauthorized availability through peer-to-peer sites and other Web outlets, offers a fast and expansive connection to consumers, but content can also be copied and disseminated without publishers' control. Some publishers are torn between the efficiencies digital distribution provides and concerns over piracy and print-sale cannibalization. This research report is part of an ongoing effort by O'Reilly Media Inc. and Random House to test assumptions about free distribution, P2P availability and their potential impact on book sales.

Buy it here.

e-books do furnish a hard drive, don't they?

A surge in book piracy has followed hot on the heels of the growth in ebooks, the New York Times reports. Publishers trying to stamp out unauthorized editions online say the ease with which books can now be copied online make their efforts little more than a game of "Whac-a-Mole," and hope to learn from the lessons of the heavily pirated music industry.

Unbelievable, eh? Who ever would have thought it?


From Newser.

Several publishers declined to comment on the issue, fearing the attention might inspire more theft. For now, electronic piracy of books does not seem as widespread as what hit the music world, when file-sharing services like Napster threatened to take down the whole industry.

Publishers and authors say they can learn from their peers in music, who alienated fans by using the courts aggressively to go after college students and Napster before it converted to a legitimate online store.

From the NYT.


Tomorrow, we hope to be publishing the full report of Copycats? Digital Consumers in the Online Age. A major review of online behaviours and attitudes and their implications for Intellectual Property. But the bottom line is that the sweetshop is always open; and its been created by a consumer electronics industry - hardware and software - that makes searching, copying, sharing and saving a one-click operation for all half-way savvy digital consumers in the age (except perhaps for Rupert Murdoch) of "free things". If Pirate Bay, then what about Google? If RapidShare then what about DVRs and Sky+? The UK IP Minister, David Lammy, talks of "one in four" having file shared (our report highlights 29 ways that we found to file share, it's not just P2P). That's 10 million people in the UK.


Much more tomorrow when our commissioning body, SABIP, launches the full report. Return here for the link.

Michael Wolff sits on the fence again

The Wolff is at the door.

Defending newspapers is just a nostalgic act. But what about journalism, the kind that’s produced, in Frank Rich’s self-congratulatory description, by “brave and knowledgeable correspondents?” Rich wants people to pay for that sort of newsreel-sounding journalism. So does Rupert Murdoch, who just announced a micro-payment system at the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s immaterial,” says Rich about whether that journalism is “on paper, a laptop screen, a Blackberry, a Kindle or podcast.”

But that’s nostalgic, too. Of course it’s material. The form and the means of delivery always change the content, for better or worse.

We’re in the middle of one of the greatest transitions in the history of news. There will neither be newspaper nor, for that matter, the television evening news.

There will neither be Frank Rich nor Rupert Murdoch nor cheap, crabbed, slow-to-respond, protect-their-own-ass, news organizations

Michael Wolff in Newser.

...Unique Visitors to twitter.com increased to 19.4 Million in April, surpassing the New York Times for the first time...

From Compete.

You Think You Have Traffic

...I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that's about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5GB per second) although typically it'll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month.

BBC iPlayer boss Anthony Rose, in an interview with CNET UK.

Really Local News

...newsrooms-cum-cafes are part of a new venture in so-called hyperlocal journalism, which aims to reconnect newspapers with readers and advertisers by focusing on neighborhood concerns at a neighborhood level: think garbage collection schedules, not Group of 7 diplomacy.

Hyperlocal publications have been springing up across Europe and North America as newspapers seek a formula for survival. But the Czech plan, the project of PPF Group, an investment firm, goes unusually far in its goal of weaving journalists into the communities they serve.

NYT on coffeehaus journalism.

The Three Rs

Reading, Writing & Arithmetic?


Typing and Reposting?

What will happen to us when we stop reading books not because we don't want to, but because we can't?

That day seems to be approaching for me. But I don't want to go down without a fight, so even though I knew I was doomed, I checked out that doorstop of a novel (Roberto Bolano's "2666," a mighty 912 pages) and took it home.

I made it through no more than 10 pages before I had to put it down and skim a magazine, but I was glad I tried. It seemed like a good book. So good, in fact, that I later consumed it the modern way:

I read the plot summary on Wikipedia.

From "Technology and books: Is the novel too much for our technology-addled brains?" in the cash-strapped Chicago Trib.

Meme: The Death of the Free, part three already

Consumers who have grown up during the past 15 years are completely at home in a world where much of what they want to hear, see or read will cost them nothing. True, in the case of some films and TV shows, the practices involved may skirt around the law a bit. Generally speaking, though, culture has become a happy free-for-all. Now may be the time to pay the bill.

Chris Anderson, a leading American commentator on the web and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, puts the matter concisely: "Somehow an economy had emerged around 'free' before the economic model that could describe it." Anderson's next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will both celebrate and analyse the effect of all this giving-away.

The author of influential 2006 book The Long Tail, Anderson is to suggest that few of the conventional rules of commerce, such as "supply and demand" and "economies of scale", apply any longer. While some suppliers, such as Sky Sports, might still get away with charging their audience, they would have to be pretty sure they offered a unique product.

From The End of the Age of Free in today's Observer.


This is really interesting.


Doesn't this play out so that Competition Lawyers "go" for the BBC? Or am I missing out too many connections along the way?


Terry Heaton is on the case, as ever:

...Murdoch can throw up pay walls and make legal moves to end the “wild” distribution of his content, but he faces two enormous problems in so doing. One, he gives up journalistic relevancy, for without the organic “spread” of information in the “current days of the Internet,” an institution of journalism cannot expect to be player in the world of cultural power. Two, regardless of what media companies do to increase the “value” of their content, the disruptions in the world of advertising will continue unabated

More tomorrow.

The Tourist & France Gall

France Gall, a central image in Olen Steinhauer's great new spy-thriller, The Tourist.

Strangely ignored in the UK to date, The Tourist has been in the NYT best seller lists recently, and it is easy to understand why. Perhaps it is too sophisticated for our British times.

I've just put The Tourist down, on a second read (I read an early manuscript version last year) and I feel sure we have the start of something big. Imagine if The International had a plot, or if Three Days of the Condor had a global canvas, rather than merely a New York-ish backdrop, and you'd be getting close to the richness of the text. Family is never far away, even when identity is vague, obtuse or simply impossible to understand.

Olen leaves us hanging in a triangle of paternity but in the apparent certainty that anti-hero Milo Weaver (played by Clooney, perhaps, in the film: he's optioned it, anyway) will be back. Blurbs evoke Le Carré's world, but if this is true it is to the early Smiley Le Carré, not the tone-deaf romantic of recent times, that we find in Olen's terse, dialogue-driven, tale of murders-within-murders; networks within networks; and Homeland v. the CIA.

Lovely.