Liebowitz sees decline, blames downloading. I disagree.

Stan Liebowitz has posted an updated and revised examination of the impact of MP3 downloads on record sales.

The bottom line: MP3 downloading is harming sales. No other explanations that have been put forward to explain the recent decline hold up under analysis.
Nevertheless, how far should we be willing to go to protect the record industry from a 20-25%
decline in business? Are recent proposals, such as the Berman bill going too far? My own view is that
such proposals are going too far. Should we switch to a non-market alternative as suggested by Lessig,
Natenal, and Romer? I believe that switching to a non-market alternative should be an absolutely
last-resort policy [...] Allowing record companies to protect their wares using digital right management technology seems to be a far more reasonable alternative.

I've just managed to read this through in detail; it is a thorough piece of work, as before, and measured in its conclusions, but it is still missing a few key measures.

Stan notes that the 'amount of time spent on activities' survey he uses to dismiss displacement of music by DVD or other activities, is methodologically flawed.

The librarying of DVDs rather than albums is not really tested. Seeing per capita DVD sales (and rentals) on the same composite chart showing the different music formats would be very interesting.

The cell-phone/text messaging/chat displacement should not be underestimated either. The amount spent on cellphone connectivity by the text-message generation is enough to displace a fair bit of prerecorded entertainment spending.

These quibbles aside, there is a key methodological problem at the core of the project. It works from the assumption that the RIAA records sold represent the totality of music consumption, and that any online music downloaded necessarily is an infringement of RIAA copyrights.

In fact, there is a great deal of music available online that is from artists outside the RIAA orbit, and freely made available, sometimes to promote CD sales, sometimes just for pleasure. This does reduce RIAA profits, but by displacement, not by theft.

A more subtle point is that network theory predicts that as interconnections between customers grow, the chance of a big cascade hit grows at first, but then as they are exposed to a more diverse range of advice and opinions, it falls off. The hugely increased connectivity that the net and cellphones enable may have caused the phase transition on the customer base.

This is discussed in Duncan Watts' classic paper.
In either of these two scenarios, the independent labels and musicians do better.

why are communications so much slower than chips?

Martin Hellman ponders why we haven't seen the kind of growth of speed in networking we do with chips.

I have a 54 Mbps wireless network at home, connected to the 'net by 56 kbps dialup.
So I don't have a 'last mile' problem - the last 300ft are fine.
I just need to grow outwards from that.

Blog clothing

Show the body part most commonly fact checked by weblogs:

AlienAid - expats - UK to Spain

Bar�ablog talks about the expat life in Spain. Much the same is true in the US, but the fact that you can communicate in English reasonably well makes it less obvious.

Blogrepping

Dave Sifry's new Technorati search is cool enough to need a verb, like 'googling'. I propose 'blogrepping' - from 'blog' and 'grep'.

Social software readings

Liz has a good reading list
I'd say don't forget those game designers:
Richard Bartle's classic paper on the kinds of players you need in MUDs
Stuart Cheshire on the Monopoly effect
Some other good sources I gathered for mediAgora

Make your customers your partners

Dave writes an essay worrying about who will pay for software. This is a hard problem, and the bundling model whereby Microsoft or Apple include the software in the cost of the hardware does not scale well to all kinds of software, attractive as it is when it works for you.

My answer to this is the same as my answer to the media issue. The way to win is to make your customers your partners. Give them an incentive to generate sales for you, and they dynamic changes. mediAgora's Promoter model would work very well for shareware, and the derivative works model could work well for software libraries, with applications that incorporate the libraries being rewarded for incremental sales.

Gibson on media

William Gibson's speech to the Directors Guild of America should be read in full, so I won't excerpt it here.

He expresses the same sense of awe that I did in 'I can read people's thoughts', but extends it to film and music too.

He also eloquently points to the need for a new model for media once it becomes malleable by any viewer, which is what I have proposed over at mediAgora .

Music I remember

Excellent program on 80s Electronic music hosted by Phil Oakey on Radio One. Shame it's only up in low bitrate Real8

Why isn't all this on the iTunes Store? I'd buy it.

Wait 50 years, then pay

Larry Lessig is trying to pass a law that will require copyright registration, as $1/year after the 50th year:

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 comment maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

A step in the right direction. Even better if the fee doubles every year thereafter, but that can come as an amendment later.

DRM as crime

David Weinberger explains clearly why using computers to enforce laws is foolish and dangerous.
In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another - and only human judgment can discern the difference. As we write the rules of use into software and hardware, we are also rewriting the rules we live by as a society, without anyone first bothering to ask if that's OK.

Potemkin DRM

The iTunes Music store has the same approach to DRM as the original iTunes did.
Don't annoy customers too much. Make it very easy to do the desired, legitimate thing, and awkward to do the undesired thing, but don't waste too much effort trying to make it impossible, as leeway is important.

Creative code

Paul Graham writes a very perceptive essay on coding.

Rebuilding Iraq

There are a couple of people who should be persuaded to help rebuild Iraq. The first is Hernando de Soto, who should be put in charge of creating a land registry.
The second is Mohammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. He should be give the task fo setting up the Iraqi Oil trust.

Maf Awakes

Nearly a year ago, I told Maf he should start a blog, and made one for him, which he resolutely ignored. Now he's started posting to it, and it's helpful stuff too, about Curry and how to make DVD players useful.

So go and read Maf's blog