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Wednesday, December 30, 2009

William Patry's "Moral Panic" about MPAA, Dan Glickman and ACTA

Recently, some routine events occurred. Stars shone at night. Snow fell in winter. And, in a new blog post, Dan Glickman's Moral Panic, Mr. William Patry warned that another vicious "moral panic" has been launched by another representative of the copyright owners whom Mr. Patry has denounced as Maoist, Stalinist, Fascist, Terrorist, murderous, war-mongering religious-zealot stranglers who will stoop not only to "castration" but even to "name calling."

But Mr. Patry's latest attempt to smear a creative industry backfires as badly the "siege-engine"/"screed"/worthless book that he called Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars"). Consequently, Mr. Patry has again proven only that he is either the most incompetently diabolical "Master of Moral Panics" ever known or that he has become so unhinged by rage that he can no longer rationally comprehend or reply to even simple arguments made by copyright owners.

Continue reading William Patry's "Moral Panic" about MPAA, Dan Glickman and ACTA . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 6:05 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Copyright, E-commerce, Googlephobia, IP, Innovation, Internet, What We're Reading

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

review of Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

Auletta GoogledI just finished Ken Auletta's latest book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and I highly recommend it. Auletta is an amazingly gifted journalist and knows how put together a hell of good story. It helps in this case that he was granted unprecedented access to the Google team and their day-to-day workings at the Googleplex. I'm really shocked by the level of access he was granted to important meetings and officials--over 150 interviews with Googlers, including 11 with CEO Eric Schmidt and several with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. That's impressive.

The book shares much in common with Randall Stross's excellent Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, which I reviewed here earlier this year. Both books recount the history of Google from its early origins to present. And both survey a great deal of ground in terms of the challenges that Google faces as it matures and the policy issues that are relevant to the company (privacy, free speech, copyright law, etc).

What makes Auletta's book unique is the way we taps his extensive "old media" world contacts and integrates such a diverse cast of characters into the narrative -- Mel Karmazin (former Viacom, now Sirius XM), Bob Iger (Disney), Howard Stringer (Sony), Martin Sorrrell (WPP), Irwin Gotlieb (Group M), and even the Internet's "inventor"--Al Gore! Auletta interviews them or recounts stories about their interactions with Google to show the growing tensions being created by this disruptive company and its highly disruptive technologies. There are some terrifically entertaining anecdotes in the book, but the bottom line is clear: Google has made a lot of enemies in a very short time.

Indeed, the book is as much about the decline of old media as it is about Google's ascendancy. What Auletta has done so brilliantly here is to tell their stories together and ask how much old media's recent woes can be blamed on Google and digital disintermediation in general. "If Google is destroying or weakening old business models," Auletta argues, "it is because the Internet inevitably destroys old ways of doing things, spurs 'creative destruction.' This does not mean that Google is not ambitious to grow, and will not grow at the expense of others. But the rewards, and the pain, are unavoidable," he concludes.

Continue reading review of Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World As We Know It . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 11:10 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Googlephobia

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Friday, December 4, 2009

Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: EFF Condemns Patry For "Assembling the Rhetorical Siege Engines of the Copyright Wars...."

In my last post on William Patry's worthless book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, ("Copyright Wars"), I documented two simple points:

  • The rhetoric and metaphors in Copyright Wars are indefensible. Childish sanctimony led Mr. Patry to viciously condemn war or murder metaphors in copyright discourse--in a book about copyright discourse that aimed barrages of war metaphors at copyright owners ceaselessly accused of trying to "kill off" or "strangle" the Internet and innovation.
  • A particularly indefensible part of Copyright Wars is its juvenile, mad-dog tirade about the Stalinist, Fascist, chastity-belt-on-someone-else's-wife DMCA.
Today, I discovered an unexpected source of support for these views: a short book review of Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars authored by Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF").

Here is what EFF had to say about Copyright Wars' shrieking tirade about the DMCA: "If you're looking for a basic primer on digital copyright, or the DMCA, or DRM, this isn't the book for you...." That seems a bit understated: If you are looking for an advanced--or just non-childish--primer on digital copyright, or the DMCA, or DRM, then Copyright Wars still isn't the book for you.

But the gratifying sentences in the EFF review are those that criticize the rhetoric of Copyright Wars, the self-parody that so piously denounced anyone who has ever used harsh rhetoric and metaphors when discussing copyrights and the Internet:

There are times when Patry's frustration with copyright lobbyists shows through. In those moments, it might be fairly said that he's an energetic participant in assembling the rhetorical siege engines of the copyright wars, rather than a dispassionate neutral observer.
It is nice to know that even EFF agrees that Mr. Patry became an "energetic participant in assembling the rhetorical siege engines of the copyright wars" by writing a denunciation of harsh rhetoric riddled with war-and-murder metaphors that analogize copyright enforcement to Robespierre's Terrorism, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's centrally planned Terror-Famine, and Mussolini's Blackshirt Fascism--while sanctimoniously denouncing those who would stoop to "name-calling."

Nevertheless, I do like the "frustration-with-copyright-lobbyists" excuse for Mr. Patry's 250-page self-parody: It recalls the scene in Forrest Gump when the deranged SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader explains why he hit Jenny: "It's just this war and that lying [expletive] Johnson[/Jack Valenti]."

That is one of many reasons why I consider Mr. Patry's book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars to represent the simultaneous apogee and nadir of the "thought" of the Free Culture Movement.

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 5:17 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Copyright, Cyber-Security, Economics, Googlephobia, IP, Innovation, Internet, What We're Reading

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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Ars Technica Reviews Patry's "Screed," Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

I was puzzling over the timing of this blog post, when I learned that a review of William Patry's Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars was posted yesterday by Nate Anderson of Ars Technica. It is called Big Content: Using "moral panics" to change copyright law. It is both funny and devastating.

As the review's title indicates, Ars Technica is no cheerleader for copyrights or content industries. Indeed, its biases slant against them, but Ars is still worth listening to--it usually avoids the unhinged ranting of copyhate blogs like TechDirt, (and its coverage of the two Thomas trials and the Tenenbaum trial was invaluable and unique).

But that makes the Ars review of Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars") all the more telling. As Ars notes, "the tone [in Copyright Wars] gets so one-sided at points that all but the most hardened copyfighter will probably set the book down at some passages, scratch the chin, and ask, 'Really?'"

Continue reading Ars Technica Reviews Patry's "Screed," Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 7:09 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Copyright, Cyber-Security, Googlephobia, IP, Innovation, Internet, Trade

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Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The DVD Rental Window: Fiddling while Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars Burns.

It's been a rough month for William Patry's new book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars"). Negative reviews highlighting some of its profound defects can be found here, here, here, here, and here. More will follow. Worse yet, the book's associated blog, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, seems to have ceased providing substantive replies to douse the flames--just some ongoing fiddling.

For example, Mr. Patry's latest post fails to reply to any critique of his book. Among many other fundamental concerns, it thus fails to refute claims that American creative industries are "innovative" and that data-mining, file-sharing pedophiles are a grim reality--not some illusory "moral panic" "conjured up" by that "master of moral panics," Jack Valenti (p. 139).

Instead, the blog has merely resumed the book's complaints, (pp. 154-58), about DVD rentals. In Denying DVD consumers what they want, Patry reported that Netflix, (a content distributor) and movie studios (content creators), are considering delaying the rental window for a given DVD until two weeks after retail sales of that DVD begin. He thus concluded, "The only ones out of luck are consumers."

That claim may even seem plausible. After all, how could the even the Grokster/Lessig/pedophile-denying Mr. Patry stumble by posing as a Champion of Consumers so exquisitely sensitive that even a two-week delay in the opening of the DVD-rental "window" could move him to lamentation?

Easily, it turns out. Dishonesty can shatter any argument; it is the fundamental defect of Copyright Wars; and it inflicts its usual consequences here. Consequently, this seemingly can't-lose argument merely re-affirms a fundamental flaw that pervades the Copyright Wars book and blog.

Continue reading The DVD Rental Window: Fiddling while Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars Burns. . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 3:05 PM | Copyright, Cyber-Security, E-commerce, Googlephobia, IP, Internet, Mass Media

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Friday, October 23, 2009

Copyright Wars, "Welfare for Authors" and Pedophiles: Part Two of a Reply

In my first blog post on William Patry's book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars") I focused on three of its fundamental defects: 1) its absurd claim that the world's most successful creators and exporters of expressive works are "inherently non-innovative"; 2) its refusal to acknowledge the existence of inconvenient realities like Grokster; and 3) its anti-market economics that transform its attempted attack on copyrights into an assault on the differentiated, Schumpeterian competition critical to all copyright and technology industries.

Mr. Patry's response, Why I made Tom Sydnor's enemies list, ("Enemies List"), was packed with rhetoric. In The "Moral Panic" of Copyright Wars: Part One of a Reply, I replied to Mr. Patry's rhetoric and outlined the four substantive questions that I expect to answer. I will now address the first of those questions:

Would a thoughtful, honest analyst of recent debates between content creators and distributors be unable to think of "a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries"?

My answer will stress two points. First, the innovation and art of American creators and creative industries cannot be denied in any rational debate about copyrights and the Internet. Second, Copyright Wars' attempt to deny the reality of pedophiles on file-sharing networks eviscerates its Lessig-remix smear of the late Jack Valenti and reveals the "moral panic"--the book's central rhetorical device--as an unrealistic, backfiring monstrosity.

Continue reading Copyright Wars, "Welfare for Authors" and Pedophiles: Part Two of a Reply . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 10:33 AM | Books & Book Reviews, Copyright, Cyber-Security, E-commerce, Economics, Googlephobia, IP, Innovation, Internet, Mass Media, Software

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The "Moral Panic" of "Copyright Wars": Part One of a Reply.

In a recent blog post, I began to explain why I found Mr. William Patry's new book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars ("Copyright Wars") to be absurdly biased and so angry that its attacks on content creators often backfired upon content distributors. Labeling world-leading creators of a vast range of works "inherently non-innovative" is absurd. Sniping about Sony and file-sharing without confronting Grokster is inexcusable, especially from an author weeping crocodile tears over the genuine tragedy that so many content distributors advocated--copyright enforcement against consumers.

But no author likes criticism of his bouncing baby book. So the rhetoric in Mr. Patry's response, Why I made Tom Sydnor's enemies list, ("Enemies List"), did not exactly refute my "too angry" critique. In fact, it merely confirmed another a fundamental problem suggested in my first post. Copyright Wars is a self-parody: It warns that debates about copyrights and the Internet are being disrupted by demagogues who concoct "moral panics" to demonize their opponents as existential threats to society. And then it demonizes copyrights and content industries as existential threats to society.

I will thus divide my reply into two parts; this post will focus on the major component of Mr. Patry's response, its rhetoric. The next will focus on its substance.

Continue reading The "Moral Panic" of "Copyright Wars": Part One of a Reply. . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 7:20 AM | Books & Book Reviews, Copyright, E-commerce, Googlephobia, IP, Innovation, Internet, Regulation, What We're Reading

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Sunday, September 6, 2009

"Google Bigotry," Corporate-Bashing & Human Envy

Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about "Google Bigotry," or his belief that "media people are going after Google's success for no good reason other than their own jealousy." Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies:

newspaper people will use their last drops of ink to complain about Google's success and try to blame it for their own failures rather than changing their own businesses. .. It's not just that they dislike the competition - and they do, for it is a new experience for too many of them. If they were smart, they'd use Google to get more audience and make more money but they don't know how to (or rather, they'd prefer not to change). No, the problem is that Google represents change and a new world they've refused to understand.

Well, yes and no. I don't believe that every story penned about Google by a mainstream media reporter is rooted in envy, and certainly not the one that Jarvis alludes to as prompting him to pen this piece. Jarvis apparently received an inquiry from a French journalist at Le Monde asking for comment about "an article about Google facing a rising tide of discontent concerning privacy and monopoly." That doesn't necessarily sound like an unreasonable journalistic inquiry to me. So, I'm not sure it's fair to accuse every journalist who calls with a hard-nosed question about privacy and antitrust as being guilty of "Google bigotry."

That being said, some journalists are likely feeling a bit miffed about Google's recent success, thinking it comes at their expense, and, therefore, their envy might be prompting some of them to pen attack stories on the company. I think Jarvis in on stronger ground, however, in asserting that most privacy and antitrust complaints about Google are unfounded, and also based on envy. Indeed, Berin Szoka and I have have been cataloging the complaints that we believe are driven by an irrational form of corporate envy we call "Googlephobia." And in prior years we saw a similar form of Microsoft-bashing at work that we still have with us today. That's why I think Jarvis is on to something when he notes that Google-bashing represents a broader sociological phenomenon:

Continue reading "Google Bigotry," Corporate-Bashing & Human Envy . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 3:45 PM | Antitrust & Competition Policy, Googlephobia, Privacy

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Wired on Google's Coming Antitrust Nightmare

Great piece in Wired by Fred Vogelstein asking "Why Is Obama's Top Antitrust Cop Gunning for Google?" It paints a pretty good picture of the coming antitrust ordeal that Google is likely to be subjected to by the Obama Administration. And, as usual, I couldn't agree more with the skepticism that Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University Law School articulates when he notes: "The problem for antitrust in high tech is that the environment changes so rapidly. Someone who looks strong today won't necessarily be strong tomorrow." More importantly, as Vogelstein's article notes, we've been down this path before with less than stellar results when you look at the IBM investigation in the 70s and the Microsoft case from the 90s (a fiasco that is still going on today):

After the government initiated its case against IBM, the company spent two decades scrupulously avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. By the time the suit was dropped in the early 1980s, company lawyers were weighing in on practically every meeting and scrutinizing every innovation, guarding against anything that could be seen as anticompetitive behavior. A decade later, innovation at Big Blue had all but ceased, and it had no choice but to shrink its mainframe business. (It has since reinvented itself as a services company.)

Microsoft took the opposite approach. Gates and company were defiant, to the point of stonewalling regulators and refusing to take the charges seriously. "Once we accept even self-imposed regulation, the culture of the company will change in bad ways," one former Microsoft executive told Wired at the time. "It would crush our competitive spirit." Gates put it even more directly: "The minute we start worrying too much about antitrust, we become IBM." Microsoft's hostility to the very idea of regulation resulted in several avoidable missteps--including remarkably antagonistic deposition testimony from Gates--that ultimately helped the DOJ rally support for its ongoing antitrust suit against the company. Although Microsoft ultimately settled, the public beating appears to have taken a toll on the company, which has been unable to maintain its reputation for innovation and industry leadership.


Read the whole article for all the gory details. This is going to be the biggest antitrust case of all-time once it is finally launched and I feel confident predicting that it will make many lawyers and consultants very, very rich while doing absolutely nothing to help consumer welfare. But perhaps those DOJ lawyers can at least get Google to lower the prices for all those services they offer. Oh, wait, they're all free. But don't worry, I'm sure Beltway bureaucrats will do a great job of running something as complex as search algorithms and online advertising markets. Right.

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:50 AM | Googlephobia

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Zittrain's Pessimistic Predictions and Problematic Prescriptions for the Net

Well, here we go again. Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain has penned another gloomy essay about how "freedom is at risk in the cloud" and the future of the Internet is in peril because nefarious digital schemers like Apple, Facebook, and Google are supposedly out to lock you into their services and take away your digital rights. And so, as I have done here many times before, I will offer a response arguing that Jonathan's cyber-Chicken Little-ism is largely unwarranted.

Zittrain's latest piece is entitled "Lost in the Cloud" and it appears in today's New York Times. It closely tracks the arguments he has set forth in his book The Future of the Internet-And How to Stop It, which I named the most important technology policy book of 2008, but not because I agreed with its central thesis. Zittrain's book and his new NYT essay are the ultimate exposition of Lessigite technological pessimism. I don't know what they put in the water up at the Berkman Center to make these guys so remarkably cranky and despondent about the future of of the Internet, but starting with Lawrence Lessig's Code in 1999 and running through to Zittrain's Future of the Internet we have been forced to endure endless Tales of the Coming Techno-Apocalypse from these guys. Back in the late 90s, Prof. Lessig warned us that AOL and some other companies would soon take over the new digital frontier since "Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control." Ah yes, how was it that we threw off the chains of our techno-oppressors and freed ourselves from that wicked walled garden hell? Oh yeah, we clicked our mouses and left! And that was pretty much the end of AOL's "perfect control" fantasies. [See my recent debate with Prof. Lessig over at Cato Unbound for more about this "illusion of perfect control," as I have labeled it.]

But Zittrain is the equivalent of the St. Peter upon which the Church of Lessigism has been built and, like any good disciple, he's still vociferously preaching to the unconverted and using fire and brimstone sermons to warn of our impending digital damnation. In fact, he's taken it to all new extremes. In Future of the Internet, Jonathan argues that we run the risk of seeing the glorious days of the generative, open Net and digital devices give way to more "sterile, tethered devices" and closed networks. The future that he hopes to "stop" is one in which Apple, TiVo, Facebook, and Google -- the central villains in his drama -- are supposedly ceded too much authority over our daily lives because of a combination of (a) their wicked ways and (b) our ignorant ones.

Continue reading Zittrain's Pessimistic Predictions and Problematic Prescriptions for the Net . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 8:52 AM | Advertising & Marketing, Books & Book Reviews, Capitalism, Googlephobia, Googlephobia, Innovation, Internet, Interoperability, Mass Media, Net Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy, Search

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Sunday, April 5, 2009

New Heights in Googlephobia: "A Delinquent, Sociopathic Parasite"?

posted by Berin Szoka @ 8:17 PM | Advertising & Marketing, Googlephobia, Privacy

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review of Ken Auletta's Googled: The End of the World As We Know It
Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: EFF Condemns Patry For "Assembling the Rhetorical Siege Engines of the Copyright Wars...."
Ars Technica Reviews Patry's "Screed," Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars
The DVD Rental Window: Fiddling while Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars Burns.
Copyright Wars, "Welfare for Authors" and Pedophiles: Part Two of a Reply
The "Moral Panic" of "Copyright Wars": Part One of a Reply.
"Google Bigotry," Corporate-Bashing & Human Envy
Wired on Google's Coming Antitrust Nightmare
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