Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-24-2010

[andrewducker]

• Site in brain where leptin may trigger puberty identified
  (tags: puberty brain childhood fat leptin)
• Expect more extreme winters in Europe, thanks to global warming
  (tags: globalwarming climatechange)
• Border collie takes record for biggest vocabulary - 1002 objects, categorised by function and shape.
  (tags: language animals dogs)
• You are what your father ate, too: Paternal diet affects lipid metabolizing genes in offspring
  (tags: diet health genetics parents)
• Racists Totally Freak Out Over Idris Elba Playing Norse God in 'Thor'
  (tags: comics thor marvel race racism)
• A Censorship-Resistant Web (fascinating discussion in the comments too)
  (tags: censorship authentication internet web)
• Naomi Wolf Versus Rape Victims
  (tags: feminism rape)
• How dating multiple people is like bittorrent...
  (tags: relationships)
• High-school cheerleader kicked off of squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist. Now going to Supreme Court...
  (tags: law rape EpicFail)
• A detailed insightful piece on ebooks, downloading, piracy and the like
  (tags: copyright books comics business law)
• Beware of the bearded white man
  (tags: islam terrorism christmas funny)
• Placebos work -- even if you don't believe in them
  (tags: medicine psychology placebo brain)
• Christmas is coming, I hope you filled out your paperwork...
  (tags: christmas funny)
• Scans could predict onset of schizophrenia
  (tags: brains schizophrenia mri psychology)
• The Humble Bundle (2) - some awesome indie games on sale for charity. Now redeemable on Steam!
  (tags: games indie software charity)
• What Scientologists believe. In animated form.
  (tags: scientology funny religion)
• Teach Parents Tech - a website for those of us with technically challenged relations
  (tags: google technology tutorial video)

Comments

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

On placebos - just a thought, did they adequately ascertain that the people actually knew what 'placebo' or 'sugar pill' meant? Did they in so many words explain that there there was no medicine in the pills, that there was no way that they could affect anything and that you might as well eat a jelly bean?

[andrewducker]

Good question. I'd hope so.

[fub.livejournal.com]

I stopped reading Paul Cornell's blog at point 4, where he equates illegal downloads with theft.

[andrewducker]

From an authors point of view it is. Which was rather his point. Someone acts in a manner which means they do not get the money they are legally entitled to. Whether it's by taking money out of his pocket or not putting it in in the first place doesn't matter come bill-paying time.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

I wasn't terribly impressed with Paul Cornell's piece on ebooks And Cetera. Whilst he had some good points he also had some pretty bad ones (point 4 being the first one I came to on a quick read), some of his points directly contradict those I've heard from people making six figures a year on textual products online, and there generally seemed to be a bit of a lack of clear thinking vs aggrieved sense of what people *should* do, dammit.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Bad business thinking. Motivations and hence counter-motivations for theft vs illegal downloading are very different and respond to different triggers.

[andrewducker]

He's not talking about motivations and triggers though.

[andrewducker]

Lots of those people are making money on selling associated products (usually dead tree books), which he makes the very good point, look to be on the way out as the dominant form of selling books.

And he's not putting forward a business plan - he's talking about how he feels about the matter, and the observations he's made.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

He is, though - "People just like stealing stuff", and the rest of his paragraph, are explicitly a statement on motivations for pirating ebooks.

His argument on this point seems to boil down to "people like stealing my books because People Are Bad". If he just wants to get that off his chest, fair enough, I'm not going to oppose a good rant. But for someone who makes his living on consumer IP, it's not a very smart way to think, and it's not a particularly useful POV to pass on to others who are presumably looking to him for wisdom.

File-sharing is much more complicated than he's making out.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure it's nearly as complicated as it used to be. Back in ye olden days there were all sorts of reason to share files - DRM, lack of availability, etc. Nowadays massive swathes of music are available, and DRM isn't an issue any more.

The remix, CC, etc. culture is certainly complex. And TV, games, etc. still have their issues. But when it comes to the piracy of music (which is the example he leads with) I can't see where the complexity is.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

True, but his observations are over-generalised and inaccurate, sometimes trivially provably so.

My feeling at the end of reading the piece was "Excellent, another potential competitor in the online storytelling market, with a bigger fanbase and more experience than me, auto-Darwinating himself out of the race."

(And nope, the "give it away, make money on dead tree" aren't the people I'm talking about. I'd venture that actually, the people who are following the Charlie Stross/Cory Doctorow model are actually in the minority of those making serious money through online book sales. I'm talking about people who make cash selling ebooks and other online information/storytelling product.)

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Correction. SOME of his observations are over-generalised and inaccurate. Some of them are excellent, mostly the ones that are closely related to his personal experience with publishers and his business - his discussion of ebook pricing, for example. As soon as he starts generalising away from his particular experience of publishing, the wheels start coming off.

[andrewducker]

I'd expect that from someone writing on their personal blog. If the post isn't filled with numbers and references I assume that anything more general than "Here is what I have experienced" is open to massive disputation.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Well, if people just like stealing, then why are they offering up libraries for other people to steal? Thieves are traditionally not big on cooperation. And P2P doesn't work without seeders as well as downloaders.

Some people put in a great deal of unpaid work curating collections of work for others to download for free. You don't see shoplifters putting in 20 hours a week curating collections of DVD players for other people to nick.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

BTW, this isn't a morality argument from my POV. There are still moral arguments to be made even for music downloading, but what I'm interested in here is the simple question of "how do we get more people to buy music/books/movies online?"

Note - NOT "how do we get less people to illegally download for free"? That question is totally irrelevant to any artist's revenues, because it has a massive, inaccurate built-in assumption.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough. I expect a higher standard than that from people commenting on business matters - fuzzy, evidence-free thinking is not a terribly good way to improve a business.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the question "Why do people buy music/movies/TV online when they could download it for free?" is a much more useful question than the inverse. Figure it out, do more of it, profit.

[andrewducker]

Because they feel like they're making something (the collection). That's a fairly common instinct. That doesn't make their urge to get something for nothing any different. Clearly they don't think of it as being a bad thing, but largely that seems to come from either not thinking things through to their consequences, or not caring about the consequences.

When it comes to theft (or copyright infringement) people are much happier to do it to faceless distant people than they are to people they're interacting with. Once you've downloaded a few things, and start feeling you're getting a service, it's only natural to want to help out the people that are helping you out.

[andrewducker]

Well, yes. But that has very little to do with Paul's post.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

True. I'm on the Digression Train at this point. Feel free to ask that it occupy someone else's track :). It's an interesting question, though.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

All of which is true, and all of which is already going some way to proving that "people still download music because people just like stealing stuff" is a less than 100% accurate statement.

[andrewducker]

I'd phrase it more as "People still download music because they can't see why they wouldn't."

(Excepting The Beatles, who I downloaded because they aren't available in MP3 format to buy.)

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Racists Totally Freak Out Over Idris Elba Playing Norse God in 'Thor'

While I do think that the Nordic people probably pictured their deities as white like themselves, ultimately they, the Nordic people, just didn't care. And, after much prayer and meditation, I have come to the opinion that Heimdall doesn't care either. If he is properly portrayed as an absolute Nordic God "I Fight Off Ragnarok" Bad Ass then all is good. :)

Blessed Be. :)

[andrewducker]

Naah, I'm happy to change tack :->

Because, yes, it's a fascinating discussion. My gut feel at the moment is that any method that worked well five years ago is now starting to have problems, and any method that works well now is probably going to be in trouble five years from now.

So there are probably plenty of things people can do right now in order to get publicity and drive people towards sales. The question is whether there's any such thing as a sustainable approach, or whether any technique will need constant re-evaluation.

Also - I'm not convinced that the entirety of the readership _want_ to pirate. Many people _are_ willing to pay for things. I'm ecstatically happy to pay £10 to Spotify for the privilege of not having to worry about which sites I'm going to have to wade through to find the music I want to listen to. Many other people that have money are happy to pay for things because they want to reward the creator. I suspect that the percentage of people who would choose copyright infringement over paying for the product is inversely proportional to both income and age.

In which case media aimed at youth is going to be marketed and sold quite differently to media aimed at older/richer consumers. Not that I'm entirely sure _how_, of course.

[andrewducker]

Well, exactly. There are many facets to Heimdall, and only one of them is colour. I'm fairly sure that he didn't wear armour like that either. Or speak with an American accent. And there may be just a _few_ liberties with the plot.

If Thor was supposed to be a faithful recreation of the original mythology then I'd have slightly more sympathy for the objectors. But they're complaining about a version of the superhero books that ripped off Norse mythology and melded into such comics as The Hulk and Spiderman. Asking for accuracy in this case seems a tad silly.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

LOL indeed!!

The armor is utterly ridiculous! I would have my Nordic deities (and I am very fond of them, mind you) in beautiful but REALISTIC armor. The kind of armor that looks like you would put it on when getting ready to battle frost giants.

But hey, I'm looking forward to the movie. :)

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

On Spotify - quite! There's a solid argument that the growth of Spotify has done more to persuade people to listen to music whilst paying (something) for it than all the world's anti-piracy efforts put together.

Also /agree on the constant reevaluation issue, partially because we've not yet got a handle on the landscape. I'm learning a lot about advertising right now, and one of the really interesting things about it is that many of the really great texts for learning to write advertisments were written 90-100 years ago. That seems to have been the time when advertising started to settle, and people began, rather than figuring out methods with a very short shelf life, to figure out durable advertising principles based on human nature rather than current culture.

I'm pretty confident that similar methods exist to deal with the digital world, ease of copying, etc. But I'm equally confident that very few if any people are using them and codifying them yet. We're still in the first 10 years of working on this, after all.

(And it'll go faster and more effectively when people stop treating this entire thing as a primarily moral rather than practical/business issue. Rant, rant.)

Income's an issue, of course, although it's my sense that generational viewpoints on the entire thing are a larger one. After all, it's the 18-35 demographic that's traditionally viewed as the cash-rich impulse-purchase one. It's not that younger people won't pay for things, it's that they're less likely to pay for IP in conventional forms. Moar Testing Needed. Currently it's my best guess (without seriously thinking about this answer and after some wine) that relationship marketing is the long-term key. It's all about what benefits paying as opposed to getting stuff for free offers - which often won't be quantifiable - combined with a healthy dose of framing (see the Washington Post's experiments framing a world-class musician as a subway busker) and relationship building.

To float an initial balloon: an artist who is percieved as *deserving* their music being ripped off appears to be hundreds of times more likely to be pirated than someone who is near-universally considered as not being so deserving. I think it was pirate copies of Serenity that ended up getting taken down after complaints from *other pirates*, for example.

[broin.livejournal.com]

So a usable file format *is* an issue for you, then.

[andrewducker]

Of course it is. One of the excuses for not paying for music was not paying for DRM.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Not two days ago you said DRM wasn't an issue!

[andrewducker]

Cite!

[broin.livejournal.com]

I'll cite you in the fucking arse, sonny jim #genehunt

"I'm not sure it's nearly as complicated as it used to be. Back in ye olden days there were all sorts of reason to share files - DRM, lack of availability, etc. Nowadays massive swathes of music are available, and DRM isn't an issue any more."

DRM, crappy formats and arbitrary decisions are still an issue.

[andrewducker]

This is why I qualified, using The Beatles as an example - there are a few bands out there refusing to go open (or in some cases digital at all) - but the vast majority are available DRM free in a format that can be played by every music player in the world. Hence, largely not an issue.