Paul Holdengräber Director, Public Programs, The New York Public Library
Jonathan Lethem. Author
Mark Tribe, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture & Media Studies, Brown University
Suzanne Vega, Singer-songwriter

PH: Is this conversation about copyright or about the dangers if pilfery? Plays a song "Tom's Diner," first by Suzanne Vega, then by numerous remixes of her works, including one in German and one with their own saucy lyrics.

TO SV: How does it feel to hear it? SV: Manager said that they were going to sue someone for a remix, she liked it, thought that they had added value, they didn't have any money anyway, why not release it as a single and perhaps it would help sales. Bought it in 1990 for a flat fee, every times they sold a version of that song they would make money. Then people started remixing it like crazy and sending it to her. Orignal money to the original remixer was low, then had to ask new remixers for their permissions in Denmark, Germany and elsewhere. Now there are 34-40 remixes of "Tom's Diner." Usually says yes to buying them unless they're too slick for for uses like a porn channel. Does it express something cool is the key. But she has the right. Listened to Dangermouse version. MT: The song has become an anthem of sorts, perhaps because people knew that it was a use and ask later tradition. SV: Dangermouse decided to use and "tried" to contact record company, worked it out later.

JL: Appreciated previous panel, by being articulate about legal matters it brought it up to the limit of what artists can do to express themselves. Made me think about incentivizing people to consider copyright. Really wanted to write books, discovered that he had to pay the New Yorker to get published. Gradually turned his writing into a middle class living, very few are incentivized by that prospect, a hundred better ways to make money. Most who go on doing it still have day jobs and the incentive never disappears. When you examine how artists create a work it takes enormous acts of imitation and appropriation and recombination, because nothing comes from nowhere. A baby acquires language by imitation, everything's an enormous mosaic of materials from previous experiences. Some of those works will be protected, and artists can express what it is about it that needs to be protected. Hemingway, Beckett, you encounter them and it seems totally original, but Hemingway's first collection was very derivative, as was Beckett. Everyone arrives by this same process.

PH: Does it belittle you that things were appropriated? MT: Doesn't belittle me at all, the concept of originality is suspect, but originality is different from how things are made. It's not just about the pleasures of pilfering for us, crucial for artists to have access to previous cultural works. Have to balance needs of previous artists and artists who need access to them to create new works. Culture about culture is what helps us to understand the society we live in.

SV: If you're a good artist, you can create something that's really your own, that's authentic. Bob Dylan was always appropriating things. JL: Dylan is sourced everywhere, yet he's unmistakably original. His songs wouldn't have existed without him. SV: Helps to make a living, especially if you're a single mother, that's why these things are called into question. JL: But the minute that you start generalizing you find yourself on shaky ground. Almost always immaculately specific.

PH: We all steal but it matters who we stole from and what we did with it. MT: Difference between sourcing and plagiarism? Need to pay the rent as an artist, need to be multiple motivations, cash is king in our society, helps to get paid. Lots of things contributing to free software projects, helps to get paid as consultants, there are other economic models. Grateful Dead allowed fans to come to record their concerts, even reserved them a special section, because they most of their money from touring. Lots of artists give it away for free and make money selling authentic or special packaged versions, lots of people paid for Radiohead album, even though they had it available for free online. SV: 9-Inch Nails artist tried a free release, disappointed that so many took it for free instead of paying, for a new release 26 songs were bundled many different ways, made USD 1.9 million dollars in a few days.

JL: When someone more powerful takes something from someone less powerful we notice (COMMENT: Chiffons' "She's So Fine" copied by George Harrison to produce "My Sweet Lord"). You have to follow the implications, trace it down into the tribal digital culture, seemingly effortless and half-baked YouTube videos. But like Beckett imitating Joyce, out of these humble or pathetic beginnings come other gestures. These gestures need to be validated by noticing the connections.

PH: But some regulation is necessary. JL: Sure, but if no damage is done, why pursue. Stealing a song is not like stealing a wallet. MT: Franfurt School of 1930s, works of art have an aura in which we hold it precious, when we have copies of the Mona Lisa everywhere, is the aura of the Mona Lisa diminished? Seems like appropriation will become more important and more ridiculous.

PH: How do artists survive? SV: I'm interested in that, thinking about the Mona Lisa aura issue, I don't think that it has, the actual painting when you go and look at it has its own presence. Hasn't happened with food, for example, heard one teenager compare the cost of a song to a Happy Meal, won't spend our money on songs. If we could press a button and get eggs, it would be rampant. The music industry is falling apart because of the ease of reproducing the quality of the original work. JL: Hyde's book The Gift, gift culture nests inside commercial culture, it's not either/or, but while you dont' question gifts you don't do that in your career oftentimes and in art experiences. If I buy a book for $20 no amount can match how it might change your life. Artists dwell in a gift economy, he charges universities handsomely, but other venues he does for free. Gift transactions inform everything, doesn't take me out of the mercantile economy, but it does mean that my actions are in a sense impure, they're an impure conflation.

SV: You have that option, you can choose. JL: Don't want to suggest that you should be giving your money away involuntarily. SV: If someone came into your house and took something as a gift you'd be angry. PH: Amazed that in the U.S. there were things that were "gift stores." JL: A totally impure case, 14 year-old punches on your remix and then goes to your next concert. SV: Dangermouse attended at least one legal class to understand the boundaries. JL: Author is alive for only a limited amount of time, yet now copyright easily outstrips their life. How can you incentivize a dead person to make more art?

Interesting panel, a real pleasure to hear Suzanne Vega talk about her challenges in trying to work with remixers, the others provided some insight into the gifts and what is reasonable from an artist's perspective. But at the end of the day it's not clear to me that artists are really grasping fully the opportunities for monetizing their content online. For music specifically, the suppression of radio on the Web has greatly reduced opportunities for licensed content in new contexts through social media. File sharing gets content there to some degree, as does iPods, but there's an inadequate mixture of business models. Commercial radio on traditional airwaves is utterly inadequate, it promotes a tiny sliver of content, makes it nearly impossible to build a fan base effectively and therefore makes it of little benefit from the vast majority of artists. By contrast online and mobile venues excel at these capabilities but are not well suited to channel revenues to artists in many instances because media companies are more concerned about making large sums of money off of the sliver rather than the rest of their catalog. Copyright is treated as the barrier, but the barrier is the lack of inventiveness about business models that copyright prevents. If distribution is now largely free to consumers and inexpensive or free for distibutors, then the value of a system based on the difficulty of distribution.

In the meantime a whole new generation growing up outside of this traditional system is creating a lot of value through their own original works of authorship and are begging for a system that will enable them to benefit from their works. There's a gap here which will be filled in the next few years, and it's a gap that major publishers may or may not benefit from directly.

Labels: copyright, copyright clearance center, intellectual property

Michael Carroll, Professora of Law, Villanova School of Law (moderator)
Allan Adler, VP, Legal and Government Affairs, Association of American Publishers
Pail Fakler, Partner, Moses & Singer, LLP
Stanley Pierre=Louis, VP and Associate General Counsel, Viacom, Inc.
[DISCLAIMER: These are notes of a fast-paced conversation on a "best efforts basis, actual details of the conversations may have varied.]


Michael starts by pointing out that we have a culture to support in a market based society so we need to find ways to get people paid. As soon as some form of coded creativity is created there will be competitors who will get a chance to take profits. Copyright is a temporary monopoly, a form of exclusion. Exclusive rights apply only to those with sufficient capital to invest in being a competitor. This form of law, because of the way that it's written, applies to this all, and its one-size-fits-all form poses problems today. To panel: what are the top 3 issues?

SP-L: Discussions of how to reform copyright is a discussion among elites and academics, but real threat is how innovators are innovating the payment scheme. Some exciting technologies don't really include an infrastructure and not the content, others bring the content. MC: Apple was able to go to market with iPod without getting a license, maybe they should be required to have a license. SP-L: Seeing people resolve this through business relationships (COMMENT: This is key, copyright is about defining terms for a relationship). PF: Need to avoid confusion between iPod and iTunes. Labels wanted to get paid on iPod, the hardware - a really bad policy. Wouldn't see a whole lot of products going to market. AA: That would also inhibit innovation in the content creation arena as well. PF: Oftentimes the problem resolves itself over time.

MC: So copyright has some value, where's the need for reform? AA: For the first time ever, copyright has become a civil rights issue, I would disagree, the way that it's been written by Congress and enforced by courts it prevents that, but digital technology brings more people in contact with copyrighted materials than ever before. AP-L: Grokster case, people camping out on court steps for days. People came by bus, by air. AA: Can be traced to advent of digital technology, when we were kids you had contact with movies if you snuck in to the theatre or paid to get in, no real TV contact, except for Million Dollar Movie. Now movie makers can sell the same movie six times - theatre, rental, purchase, on cable, on broadcast, etc. Now can see two versions in a DVD. Has dramatically changed relationship with consumer, so now they feel that they have more of a vested interest.

PF: There are aspects that need to be reviewed, current copyright act long in the tooth, initially a 20-year project, since then changes are by and large industry driven kludges when business models are threatened, not always with a lot of thought as to how it will affect the rest of copyright law. Needs to balance competing interests, can't rewrite it every five years. A fundamental change to how law changes happened, in 1990s with Republican Congress most copyright legislation drafted by lobbyists, which was not so much the case in the past. Who's going to do it nowadays? The tone of the debate used to be calm, now it's polemic, talking about piracy, theft, these rhetorical devices make it hard to get to a real discussion. On the other side of the debate reaching out to human rights rhetoric, that may not help either.

MC: RIAA seeks statutory damages, If they're in it for the money you may be able to determine profits, statutory damages based on number of items. The legitimacy of these claims are called into question when everyday individuals are claimed to owe millions of dollars. AA: You can't point to too many of these verdicts. MC: College kids know that it's USD 5-10,000 to settle, but then the headlines give copyright a bad rap. AA: Statutory awards were supposed to be a deterrant, but largely they haven't acted as a deterrant.

MC: Mom puts up a cute video dancing to a Prince song, Prince's record company sends a take-down order, is that appropriate? AA: Why aren't fair use advocates more aggressive about challenging movie producers, students stopped from using 10-15 seconds of film in a school project, knowing that a Federal judge will rule for fair use. Now advocates from Stanford who will deploy themselves to expand incrementally fair use via cases. Reality is that fair use remains alive and healthy. PF: Fair use is area in which the other side of the equation has the upper hand. Transforming for new uses is being embraced by the courts to short-circuit the work that juries have to do for fair use. SP-L: Soldja Boy video on YouTube, used commerical cartoon characters, not one take-down notice. Fair use is seeing a lot of shift on both sides of the equation. All companies are beginning to see that significance, that's why you're not seeing significant fair use cases going to the Supreme Court. PF: Fees awarded in fair use are rare because damages are difficult to determine. When you mount a successful case, it's rare to get attorney's fees and hard to bond appeals. AA: Cases are really the exception for fair use, fair use is alive and well in large part because there is so much that occurs without challenge. SP-L: Usually happens when there's monetization.

MC: That's what Google is doing to build their search engine. AA: Not all true, as a policy and as a practical matter they operate under a doctrine of implied consent. Clearly they're not the same, fair use implies that you don't need consent. PF: Shouldn't be mutually exclusive. AA: Judges are aware of doctrine, know how to apply it.

MC: Congress seems to say that we need more tax dollars spent on enforcement of existing laws on copyright. AA: Criminal enterprises figured out that there's big money to be had in piracy, idea of having Federal government to protect a part of the U.S. economy that exports heavily shouldn't be surprising. SP-L: If you put together all industries using copyright it's still significant, it's not as if people stopped pressing albums. MC: Sounds like you're doing OK, maybe the government shouldn't be involved. AA: Most owners do get involved, but it's still an appropriate role for government. PF: Legislation proposed would compel the government to spend a particular amount. Industry brought this to Congress, said we want this. Wouldn't say that Congress is crying out for this. Sometimes that's legitimate, but it's not like that the Justice Department cannot decide to take this on themselves.

MC: If copyright really broken? AA: Not hearing it from here. SP-L: In many businesses, new devices are invented by three guys in a garage, an enormous demand for copyrighted products and so a big demand for new devices, but enforcing copyright is not on the product checklist. MC: RedLasso, takes video content, clips it, lets clips get propagated. Doesn't have the money to take care of that. AA; A responsible technologist will assess the risks and will evaluate if it creates legal liability. PF: All you have to do is to get a secondary liability case to Supreme Court directly they're not going to help map old law on new technology. Would help if both sides would be along at the same table.

MC: You write a doodle, you're a copyright owner. Do YouTube video owners belong in the room? AA: Consumer manufacturers belong in room, networks, nobody belongs out of the room now. Now question is whether we can still write general rules that are technologically neutral. MC: Other knock is that it lasts too long. Economic value expires, orphan works crop up, don't know how to do the right thing so culture is stifled. New bill, would have allowed limits on damages, do a good faith search, was killed because one particular interest felt it would affect photographs. Maybe a nice case study of sector specific deals. On orphan works, if you can't fix term, can we do sector by sector deal? AA: Most people don't realize that book industry didn't take a position, publishers of Hemingway might look at this, but others looking at educational markets can't wait for it to go to public domain. Difficult to generalize, photographers will be affected differently, etc. How much that's going to continue different to say. SP-L: Not much new since DMCA, now Time Warner spinning off Time Warner Cable, changes what their position will be, angles change. AA: Most people identified as copyright owners are also extensive users of copyrighted content.

MC: Most people are users and producers, new angle: is there a vision baked in to copyright of the "good society" that's at odds with what the digital technology says it should be? I may not be at the top of the 1 percent who can write Harry Potter, but if I engage in slash fiction and make the characters gay, should author be able to control my product? Technologies invite people in. Dangermouse mashups, does copyright have it right? AA: Difficult to put culture on a pedestal when Paris Hilton is on a pedestal, original author may deserve recognition, but derivative authors are owed recognition as well. Have to remind people that facts and ideas are not copyrightable, this allows genre dramas and so on. Plenty of room to acknowledge creativity, but probably would be hard to draw a clear conclusion. SP-L: Many cases flip every time that they're heard. PF: Can't take transformative aspects out of copyright law. AA: What' sufficient transformative use? It's never been about Google's snippets, it's been about creating the largest digital library when they could have just as easily gone to copyright owners.

Have to wrap this up, my concern out of this panel is that copyright law has been trying to define so many gray angles on copyright law that we really are losing any sense of a coherent law. Copyright holders are pursuing cases against all aspects of copyright law fairly arbitrarily, without a sense of the broader issues outside of their narrow interests. In the process of doing so, people's productivity through copyrighted materials is reduced and the productivity of copyright holders to make money from their works clearly and effectively is reduced. To some degree this is why DRM software was so appealing: it's like a stone-walled castle in a realm of arbitrary forces outside their gates. All we have are the opinions of a wide array of judges in a wide array of cases in a wide array of jurisdictions, none of which makes commerce more clear. This makes it harder for people to make use of copyrighted content for derivative works and fair use - and society's overall productivity suffers as a result. Specific to Google, Google enables people to do things that original works usually don't allow one to do - they're creating and index for a database that enables people to see new patterns from existing content. The question isn't whether copyright holders should be paid when they're supposed to be paid, the question is what type of publishing is creating more value for society? In general, most new value in publishing over the past ten years has been created by derivative works. So why enable a less productive end of the economy have leverage, even if they are owed some rights? This is not to say that works with rights to them cannot provide and reap more value if given the right technology, but by tying that value to distribution instead of rights to value at the point of consumption then original works holders are working the thinner end of the value equation overall.

Labels: copyright, copyright clearance center, intellectual property, legal

Tim Wu, Professor, Columbia Law School kicked off with a discussion of fan content. Pulls up a fan page on Wikipedia for a fictional character in the television show "Lost" which includes copyrighted materials from the show, along with complete copies of screenplays from the show on Lostpedia. The question is, is this marketing or a copyright infringement? This is for copyright holders to decide, of course, in the instance of these materials fans are creating lots of value-add conent. The Harry Potter Lexicon was considered to be the most authoritative reference source for the many tiny details that make up the fictional world of Harry Potter and his friends. The site has not only content but opportunities to buy merchandise, so it was not entirely a work or charity. Unfortunately, his rock-star status of site creator Steve Vander Ark in the Potter groupie set has been stymied because of a copyright suit against him when he decided to pursue the publication of a print version of the reference. The fans decided to take author J.K. Rowling's side in the matter and, according to Wu, expelling him from events and online venues. This in and of itself has created a whole new stream of content discussing the case and its legalilties and social issues. Ironically, the fan site carries its own restrictive copyright statement.

Does this put a pall over fan sites in general? Author Douglas Rushkoff points out the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" aspect of copyright holders' relationships with such products. Gigi Sohn, President and Co-Founder of Public Knowledge, points out that copyright holders for Potter are not being sincere in their intent to create an alternative work, but it's different she thinks in Europe where artists have "moral rights." Ironically she has allowed other books to be created by fans, but Wu notes that the problem was that it was useless, that it was just her work resorted. Yet Wu points out that it's largely an index of where particular terms are referenced. Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, notes that this is not so different from a remix of a video online. To Matt it's not about the legal decision because the author has been ostracized.

Wu sees this as a verdict by the leaders of fandom, because fans get so much from their relationship with Rowling. It becomes, if you will, a social issue as much as a copyright issue. Are authors co-opting fans, as opposed to Vander Ark's advocacy for fans? Doug points out that this forces original authors to consider what it is that they can do that's valuable. If you're still the best at what you do, then that's great, but if amateurs respect your work enough to create original works in homage to you, doesn't that need to be respected, Matt notes.

Wu returns to the Vander Ark site, he points out that Rowling and her media companies didn't care about this site until they wanted to put it online. When it was going to be a physical instantiation she got involved. In the court case, when the judge asked why she didn't do anything before, she said that it wasn't a book so she wasn't concerned. GiGi points out that nobody is going to print out a 400-page book from online materials, books have a special status because they haven't been replicated easily. Matt notes that some books that were pirated in electronic copies created a market for millions of copies in print when they were introduced in foreign markets. Yet print is a different authority, Matt argues.

Gigi notes that in some ways people still consider the Web to be the realm of amateurs, Douglas notes that books and money are both products of the printing press era. The money that we use now was invented in the Renaissance, before that there were many local currencies. (COMMENT: this is a real key point, value exchange in Web content becomes far more pesonalized and localized. Media could be called content that's fungible via central value recognition vehicles - money.). Gigi notes that at a conference Michael Eisner was caustic with Ariana Huffington because she was giving content from others for free.

Wu asks if the online world, seen as a sandbox where anything goes and things like posted transcripts are infringements, as soon as you exit it are you in the "real world" of copyright? Douglas notes that copyright is used primarily to serve corporations who can put up toll booths, the Web is where we stand a chance of restoring a non-extractive model for human production. Gigi notes that it's not an anything goes model, Google gets thousands of take-down orders from copyright holders. Matt notes that all of these online materials don't replace the experience of watching an episode of Lost on television. It depends, he notes, on whose ecosystem will be shut down. Wu notes that at the trial it was revealed that the site made USD 6,500 over serveral years. Is it really about the money? (COMMENT: Social media creates different kinds of value that can be leveraged in different contexts).

I raised the point that in many ways the online Potter lexicon would seem to be making an original work of authorship by reorganizing the content into a unique index. I think that this is the key point for such issues, is there original value being created that does not replicate an original work of authorship? Wu pointed out that at the trial on the lexicon the defendant's lawyer argued that fair use applied to protect the original work, but I think that it's really not so much fair use as taking an original work and creating something with unique value. Vander Ark completely reorganized Rowling's content: you can't read his lexicon and say that you've had the experience of reading her book, even though you may have read the large bulk of the words that were in the book. It's simply not the same experience. It is, as Matt suggested, a huge remix.

Good comment from Douglas Q&A: he was at Sony Records and people were crying because they were working for people who didn't give a hoot about music. It's not a matter of making money but rather do you care about what you're doing? Matt notes that people thinking about how we can make USD 40 billion for our shareholders instead of thinking about how they can create value. He notes that in Silicon Valley people are getting worried because you really don't need the capital that one used to need to make an idea happen. (COMMENT: this goes to the issue of what is it do you own and why? Is copyright supposed to exist to serve corporate business models or does copyright exist to ensure the distribution of valuable information and experiences? Altruism is not about doing things for free but about creating different types of value.) Douglas later noted how corporations are struggling with the concept of death, that business cycles come to an end and that this creates problems for our economies. I loved the rant, it fits in directly with what I'm writing about in Content Nation, it is necessary for publisher to recognize that how people consume value moves on and that they need to adapt to that reality.

This was a really good panel that raised really good questions, but at the end of the day it would seem that the key problem is that Rowling and her publishers didn't address the use of materials online first. The print version is of little consequence if the essential value of the content reorganization isn't addressed first. Authors need to recognize that unless their original works are really being hurt directly by direct replication, then copyright is not the tool that they should be using to further their well-being as a source of creativity.

Labels: copyright, copyright clearance center, intellectual property

Chris Sprigman, Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law
Kevin O'Kane, President and CEO, RedLasso
Clay Shirky, Author, Here Comes Everybody

Kevin O'Kane of RedLasso, kicked off with a demo of their tool that makes it easier for bloggers to embed copyrighted content into blogs. Not so different in some ways from Voxant. Clay Shirky framed the real issue about today's publishing environment when he explained to his young daughter that you cannot get anything that you want on the television. She said, "You mean it's broken?" This to me points out one of the key issues with copyright: distribution control is not necessarily getting the right content to the right audiences at the right time.

Chris: Is the fundamental issue copying or who gets paid? Clay: where you see the word "technology," replace it with "reality." What you really mean is what's possible in the world has changed. Laws that can't be enforced aren't he notes, and when you give people a piece of equipment that enables then to do something law cannot always catch up in a democratic society. As a practical question, when everyone has a copying machine, what's the challenge to the law.

Chris: We didn't get copyright randomly, we got it for a reason, the way that the world was it seemed good to have property rights. What do we do now? Kevin: A third of media companies say 'right on,' a third say you're the antichrist, a third say they're going to retire now. As a "recovering broadcaster" innovation cannot be stifled. Clay: With RIAA, the predator/prey game create extreme evolutionary pressures, file sharing challenged with a network that couldn't be shut down easily. Was shutdown a failure of law or technology? Chris: A bit of each. Kelp in the ocean bends. Napster could have bent, RIAA could have bent, they didn't. RIAA "beat" Napster, but new networks evolved that couldn't be beat. Nobody to make a deal with now. Music business imploding, maybe not a failure of law verus a failure of ethics. Kevin: We believe that there's a value chain, we believe that we're in that chain, people should be compensated for their work.

Chris: Other Napster upsets in the making? Clay: New challenge is to the A&R department, harder to break new artists, no longer have to send out people to clubs to find the one person you want to monetize. Publishing was expensive and it was risky to create distribution. Pushing copies to end points is free, judgment is in play, editorial judgment no longer at the source. Collective filtering, such as in Wikipedia, determines what's important. Groups of people can make judgment without touching the means of production.

Chris: Look at RedLasso, I see democracy, in campaign debates a flourishing of discussions from the discussions, Madison's vision of democracy is taking on new forms. Copyright creates scarcity (COMMENT: that wasn't the original intent of copyright, the original intent was to create abundant access by protecting the ability of new technology to make a profit.) How do you make a living doing creative work? Clay: Open source software licsensing increases rights rather than decreases, most serious Linux contributors are paid by IBM, Novell or Sun to maintain it, they don't make money on Linux per se but participation makes money through services. People have started to calcualate ecosystem values in different ways, they see that they can ship more units of hardware and other software that is more valuable and make more money. IBM kept Microsoft from penetrating the mainframe market as a result with lower costs.

Chris: Music business having trouble collecting money from discs, well-known artists being signed by non-traditional deals, 260 degrees view of the person's value. MusicToday bought old factory, now a merchandising depot for band to create merchandising for their bands. If IP is not the value, how does the business change? Kevin: I play music, it's all about live, it's all about the sum of the parts. Clay: Depends on what you think is the critical piece, linotype operators laughed at the Mac when it debuted with nine fonts, twenty years later most are gone. Not a coherent unit of the industry per se. No society never existed that didn't reward artists. Kevin: Napster was putting out garbage, marketplace was demanding variety, choice. That fueled Napster. Chris: Hard to explain how different the music industry used to be, fandom is different, fans who "unearthed" nuggets really identified with them.

Chris: Newspapers are uniquely out of touch. Materials and equipment are very expensive, classifieds are far more effective online. Craigslist is a knife to the heart of newspapers. IP law says nothing about the value produced in Craigslist. Craigslist can do what it wants, newspapers will drown. Nobody talks about rights. IP is about who owns what, who can be paid, and so on, what should drive the conversation on who can use television footage? Kevin: Local papers are suffering, but online is thriving, have to look for values in distribution channels. Have to put the product where people are and capitalize on new distribution channels.

Chris: Why didn't the networks do this? In theory copyright centralizes ownership and makes investment easier, why is RedLasso in this business and not networks? Kevin: Hulu is a good example of where the networks are trying to do something, RedLasso is about extending the shelf life of content. Clay: If American Airlines was run by travel agents, Travelocity would have lost. Novelty comes mostly from the outside. (COMMENT: In Content Nation, marketing is not about defining markets so much as being the context in which markets evolve. It's a bazaar in tents, not a shopping mall). Theories based on property rights create maximum efficiency for resources. But economic theory will look towards maximum value realization. Clay: People who will create quality and defend it with enforced scarcity. Past a certain level, people care more about convenience than more quality (COMMENT: correlates to the Hawthorne plant, where brighter lights weren't as important about people caring about what they wanted).

Question: In institutions, they benefit differently from a teenager, what about people who profit from information rather than entertainment consumers. Clay: heading towards train wreck in genomics, people patenting genomes, will be harder to work on syndromic changes because it's going to be harder to assemble genomics rights owners. Will see much more movement towards open source model. Chris: Very important: process of figuring out the genome, this is where patenting should focus, now producing this information is relatively easy, the hard work is figuring out how mutations interact. Downstream reasearch more difficult and intensive, so patents put the cost on the part that doesn't yield market rewards, it's a tax.

Clay: Principle role of librarians in academic settings has gone from being facilitators to gatekeepers for access to licensed content. People with tenure in universities will not perish, get some to publish to open search engines and put the papers on LuLu. Chris: there's an investment to killing trees that tenure committees believe in. Put the best stuff up for people to see.

Good panel, pointed out strongly that the value of being able to facilitate collaboration is becoming more valuable than the distribution of content that facilitates collaborative value. We see this in our practice where B2B database publishers are increasingly offering one level of access to all of their basic content and value-add pricing for specific features that add value to specific groups in specific contexts. Copyright is still valuable as a way to identify value, but I think that increasingly what we're seeing is value in intellectual property moving to the coffee house from the printing press, to bring it to my Thomas Paine example in Content Nation. Licensing provides value in contexts that distribution facilitates but the value is what happens once a work gets into that context. It's not so much a matter of morality as a matter of asserting the real value of a work to its audience.

Labels: copyright, intellectual property, oncopyright 2008

Eun quote from Patrick Spain: value now comes from ubiquity, not scarcity.
Patrick: David, show us the love

Eun: Incredibly busy year at Google, share the landscape from our perspective, explain what we do with regard to content and how we partner with content companies.

1.2 billion people online, every subject available to create communities. Rural schoolhouse, have access to very fast Ethernet router, top researchers have same access to same information. Market is now worldwide. Internet has grown faster than any previous medium, TV took 45 years to reach a billion in revenue, Internet 3 years. An exabyte of new content every year. Would fill 150,000 Library of Congresses. Kids are consuming, trading, it's the way that people now look at the world.

Model was false scarcity, distribution windows thought out carefully, still compelling businesses, was delivering content to where they were. Today it's really about ubiquity, companies succeeding embrace ubiquity. Kid in hotel room wanted to watch a TV show an hour from when he wanted it, not used to not having home DVR. Instead of bringing eyeballs to content, bring content to eyeballs. No secret sauce or magic formula, we're not quite sure.

First thing is to focus on user, doesn't start on technology, back into whatever applications are interesting. The practice of this is remarkable. Bottom-up innovation, not one product comes from a senior executive, always a small group of people. We always say don't present me with a problem, present me with a problem with a possible answer. Googlers thought "wouldn't this be great"

Perfection is the tyranny of good enough, last 10 percent requires 90 percent of the time. Expectation is that it won't blow things away immediately. YouTube is new every six weeks. Media is used to making perfect products, now it's about keeping a good product fresh.

Mission is well known and used on a daily basis. Make information accessible and useful. Less than 15 percent of world's information is digitized. Content partnerships works with media companies, work with Web companies making sure that they get indexed. A few years ago if I had questions on Martin Luther King, Jr., I would find fantastic Web pages. Now I can also find news sites, books, buildings and sites in Google Earth, videos. Future - not quite sure, but a long list. We think broadly, this is all opportunity.

Long tail - media focuses on the head, the hits. See long tail in all products. 65 percent of all YouTube videos were visited at least once by someone in the world. Can now potentially monetize library content, other forms that would not normally get "hit" packaging. Also the "torso," the "sweet spot" where there are niche companies, professional companies with specific commercial objectives. Professional Bullrider's Association will not get a cable channel but in torso they will get a slot.

Traditional is large advertisers attaching to highly popular content. But smaller advertisers, local pizzerias, etc., who don't have access to content owners. Now match users to both content and advertisers. Today it's AdWords, more relevant ads may not have bid as much but they may get better placement. People pay thousands sometimes to get the right click. Apply same technology to partner sites via AdSense.

YouTube - contineus to grow, hundreds of millions of videos watched daily, hundreds of thousands of videos watched daily. Ten hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube, 19 local versions launched worldwide. Isn't just YouTube cut the power of video. Get video, sports, news, howto. Google is the platform, buys tools and services to help peple capture and upload content. Casio has YouTube branded portal for uploading videos. Can zoom in on Eiffel Tower in Google Earth, can click on it to receive video from YouTube relating to it. Panasonic TVs now have feature to watch YouTube through TV. iPhone has huge YouTube video audience.

In-video ads monetization - money very small compared to businesses built up over decades. Users around the world will sample via online video. 300x250 ads on side, translucent bar embedded in video, can close it and video resumes. Easy money in pre-rolls, don't know how much money you're losing to irritated users=. In-video makes it easy to help users onpass ads virally, many see them as part of the content.

For print, video is a whole new frontier. Consumers can get what they want, NYT is YouTube branded channel, people can sign up, a town hall, pages are controlled by partners. Forbes - different types of videos, shot differently, have a different response.

We are a technology platform, don't own content or produce it, want to work with people who do produce content. At steady state in AdSense, a billion dollars go to partners.

Consumers pay with time, I invest in putting in new video responses, attention is what advertisers want. Don't have to be smarter, just execute faster. Need to set expectations such that when we say it's in beta that we mean it, but it also means that you'll get an realy lead on data and have had tremendous benefit from exposure. Risks but also rewards.

Question: How does someone with a traditional background work in an engineering oriented company?
Eun: Is an engineering company run by engineers, shocking experience, people put a premium on efficiency, taking care of action items, who is going to do what by when, the antibodies may reject the virus, might be a few tidbits from outside that will help but it's radically different. Also a very young culture, lots of enthusiasm, not jaded, not cynical, cross between Red Cross and investment banking. On the other hand, you're working with a lot of young people, haven't seen a lot of ups and downs. Remind people that it's really not about them and their inabilities, you're privileged to work at Google. Very mission centered, don't talk about stock work. Money ideas have to pass through the filter of how this helps the user.

Contexutal model is promotional, stimulates interest. Draws people closer to the front door, in constant dialog with content owners, partners have paid models, happy to take content that will stimulate interest. NYT went from paid to free model, amount of traffic from Google increased large, not exact numbers but ten or twenty times maybe. Not always the case, not right for everyone, but on balance the way the web works seems to suggest that you focus on stimulating interest, use different interests.

QUICK TAKE: Interesting to listen to David, it's kind of the accepted Revised Standard Version of the world from my perspecive, central but no longer radical. It's also interesting that it's still early days for making money off of contextualized content. When I asked about helping people used to having people pay for access, the short version of the answer is that they're mostly doing not much beyond text ads. The key opportunity that will draw this all together for greater value if a broader approach. Instead of the softwar saying "Now that we're here, this is the right ad for you" the software should be able to say, "Now that I am here, what is the most valuable thing for me to do next that is acceptable to me, the content producer and the person renting space or action priority?" A simple algorithm with complex implications, implications that tools such as Attributor only hint at.

Great conference, well managed, way too much good food, and many, many valued colleagues who I thank so very deeply for their personal and professional support.

Labels: SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008 google, video advertising

Speaker: Daniel Sullivan, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs, U.S. Dept. of State

Innovation in software and communications helps to drive U.S. economic growth, high-paying jobs. State department knows how important your work is, 30 people dedicated to information industry policy and helping to create market oppotunities and social improvement, and yes, political freedom. Finally we recognize the continuing development of U.S. information industry is in jeopardy. 200 billion counterfeit content sold overseas. What is the state department doing? Answer is, a lot, it's a big focus.

Millions spent on IP enforcement on developing nations, embassises active in advocacy and education, Canada criminalizing camcording in theatres. Need to upgrade legal infrastructure, working on an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, working with E.U., Japan, Canada, spread it to other countries. OECD, get their leadership statements to reference IP protection. Almost always spearheaded by U.S. government. Also when necessary not adverse to bringing WTO action for IP, two WTO cases against China. Facilitating market entry through trade organizations.

Free trade agreement agenda, will level playing field, included chapters in all FTAs - over 12 since 2001 - that go beyond global rights protection. Australian FTA, combating Internet piracy, Singapore, number of FTA agreements exceed all previous administrations combined. Since 2000, sales to countries with FTA have grown as trade agreements with the rest of the world. Focusing now on passing three more FTAs, with Columbia, Panama, Korea, all of which have strong IP protection and transparency regulations that are important to U.S. companies.

Columbia FTA - will lead to significant benefits, huge tariff differential, ours 0.1 percent, theirs 13 percent, agriculture much higher. Going to zero on both sides will increase U.S. exports. To fail to do so will be false populism.

One of our broader goals is to work to integrate parts of the world that are disconnected from the world as a whole and with one another, FTAs help also national security interests. Secy Rice - half the world lives on the edge of survival, greatest threats come from poorly governed states not integrated into global economy. Post-9/11, threats now come often from countries that are weak and disconnected from the global economic system. Private sector is far from a bystander. Our best ambassadors are oftentimes not ambassadors but business people traveling abroad reflecting American values. Salute this sector, your impact domestically and globally is important.

QUICK TAKE: Notable that most FTAs that help IP are with developed nations where global media companies already have strong interests, there's a strong desire by many to extend U.S. copyright length to other nations by these companies, at the end of the day I believe that this will slow down countries most threatened by the growth of nations less particular about IP.

Labels: government, intellectual property, policy, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, State department

Moderator: Lisa Bodell, CEO, futurethink
Panelists:
Jim Brock,CEO and Co-founder, Attributor
Steve Goldstein, Chairman and CEO, Alacra
Darrell W. Gunter, Executive Vice President/CMO, Collexis Holdings, Inc.ein

[A little challenged with technology in the short transition to this panel, apologies to early speakers]
Brock: We harvest and help publishers to turn lemons into lemonade
Goldstein: We package and focus on customers
Gunter: Can show key concepts on a topic, shine a bright light on topics such as science, can show seconds who's the experts in your field. Also provide hypothesis generation. Make scientists happy, improve their critical path.

Bodell: How to make innovation happen.
Goldstein: Many publishing have enormous assets and they don't apply innovation to the raw materials. We have something that's worth x, how can we make it 2x or 3x.
Brock: Blogs and mashups are laboratories, you can understand how to do it in your own organization. We'll tell you which articles got the most play in the blogosphere.
Gunter: Researchers set up a coffee shop, we can show you in ten seconds who's really connecting with one another.

Bodell: How you can add value to content?
Brock: Thinks may be copied, if it's not linked to where you want it to go it doesn't have value [comment: key concept - hearkening back to Google presentation, copyright is really about controlling behavior].
Gunter: STM publishers have all this data, Elsevier putting reference works online, 10 billion industry, how do we extract value? A window of science, shows you what you know and what you don't know.

Bodell: How do you get aha moments?
Goldstein: We listen to customers, not necessarily an immediate thing, takes some synthesis.
Bodell: In our business it's a series of aha moments, with billions of things happening over and over again in algorithms, things can add up to a P&L, but engineers can see opportunities to reduce unit costs. A series of aha moments.
Gunter: When the customer confirms the aha moment is key. Some customers have great blogs, will let us know when we're on track.
Brock: Customers say "we did this with it," gives you great ideas.
Goldstein: Web 2.0 Summit useful, problem isn't ideas but how to make ideas real. Could be too much resource or a distraction.

Bodell: Which ideas to you execute upon?
Brock: We're a small company, usually it's a vetting and prioritizing and re-prioritizing process. Sometimes something interesting comes up you have to figure out how to slot it in. Have to trust your instinct and the instinct of the team.
Goldstein: Give summer interns an opportunity, industry wiki lead to internal wiki, site redesign, blog recaps. Trial and error with low investment.

Bodell: How do you do innovate?
Gunter: Simple things can be great things, deciding to do it could be the biggest step.
Goldstein: Know it when you see it, you see an opportunity for something marketable. How are you going to solve particular problems.
Brock: In team meeting saw that we need to recognize innovation, has to be a non-obvious way to do something new, could be a process, administrative.

Bodell: You get a great idea, how do you get it out the door?
Gunter: Need budget and stakes in the ground, set expectations, need design group to work with you to make sure that you're on track.
Brock: People and machines, leave facilities in the budget, leave unstructured time.

Bodell: Not easy to get people to be innovative, how do you get people to take risks?
Goldstein: Get as many employees out of the office to customers, trade shows and conferences.
Gunter: Main problem is to find which of the many ideas are the best ideas, opposite problem
Brock: Bring on people who have passion for the non-obvious problem
Goldstein: Be flexible, maybe Google's 20 percent rule is hard to emulate, don't look over shoulders too much, encourage people to learn on the job.

Bodell: Part of innovation is failure, what failures helped you?
Gunter: Early at Elsevier, tried to apply process from Wall Street to academic marketplace, fell on deaf ears, audience had other concerns on their minds. Had to understand traditional issues first and was successful afterwards, moving from one industry to another you have to adapt to new expectations.
Brock: Sometimes processes fail or are inefficient, learn from it. Hope that employees know that he's OK with failures, great employees always want to succeed the first time.

Bodell: Mindsets in innovators? How do you hire?
Brock: Ability to think of things in different ways.
Gunter: Someone well-read in the industry you're in.

Bodell: Emulative companies?
Goldstein: Twitter as smaller blogs, Facebook as MySpace for college kids.
Brock: LinkedIn, every few weeks there's some new ways to do things.
Gunter: Biomedexperts.com new site, life scientists are using it.

QUICK TAKE: Good panel, a great reminder that innovation can thrive in many publishing environments, it's not all about Silicon Valley but applying their lessons and the tried and true lessons - speak to your customers is Steve Goldstein's mantra, and it's an important one - is possible in any content company.

Labels: innovation, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008

We may be asking too much for fair use. Any legal doctrine needs to be coherent to be practical. Once we say it's x then we know that it's not y. Fair use is incapable of definition in some ways. If Google scans a million books under copyright we really don't know what follows. If a judge says something is fair use each case is ad hoc in general. Once fair use or any other doctrine is stretched to fit many new issues it usefulness gets stretched as a doctrine. The issue is really far broader than fair use, one doesn't discuss it dispassionately. Distressing to see an inability to discuss these things constructively. Given that state of affairs, why? Epistomology of copyright, how did one come to believe in your view, what did you bring to it initially?

Moast people assume what we assume that copyright is about is what others think. But if people come out in different places, what then? One bill in Congress is a "pro-copyright" bill. We can agree that copyright is a good thing in someplaces, not in others. You wouldn't say you're pro-medicine or anti-medicine. How does one become pro-copyright or anti-copyright? People see videos on YouTube and it's my property, that's mine, well, that's one way of looking at this. If you see copyright as a mark of property you're in one camp, but you could look at it as a regulation enacted by Congress. The word "property" has certain connotations. Usually when we say copyright is property we say that it's intangible property. So what makes intangible property versus tangible property? What does it mean that I own property?

Generally ownership means that one has dominion over things and to exclude people from doing stuff with your things. You can just say no, it's your property, it's your right. All that matters is that it's yours, end of discussion. Valente: If you can't protect what you own, you don't own anything. Well, do you own it, and if so, what do you own. Unlike Valente, not being able to stop each and every use doesn't mean that you don't own it. 1898, writer Augstine Berell, Western culture venerates property. Rights were supposed to be outside law, natural rights, without which society would not be possible. He who interferes with it is a thief or a tresspasser.

To describe someone as a thief or tresspasser you need an owner. Robinson Crusoe, cannibals in a cave, do the cannibals really care if Crusoe care about his property, no, they see him as food. To say that copyright it property over things, is problematic. What I assert is that it's a system for ordering social relationships. If Rowling has copyright over Potter it means company A can make a book, company B make a movie, and so on. It means that we can say who can do what, it's not a right over the thing itself. It's a social judgment. Courts choose between conflicting interests.

How do you order these social relationships and why does it matter? If you think that copyright is a property right, than any use is offensive and any one who does it is a heathen. It's not healthy or accurate. If instead you see copyright as a social system set up for really good reasons, you start thinking of what the goal is of copyright - namely furthering learning. A social system designed to encourage learning, if it is, then it's a good thing. You will stop people from interfering with people learning things. Not productive to say that people who use copyrighted works without permission are bad, just not true.

If copyright is to help people learn, how to we implement this? Learning requires a generosity of spirit, you can't have it both ways, you can't say you want innovation but not for your business model. Has to work that way for everybody. However the copyright system works it has to encorage innovation, don't want tenth goose to cut off all other golden eggs.

Question: A cursory reading of copyright law asserts temporary rights. Intent was built at a time when the commons were a common concept. How do you see the law evolving when the mass no longer attends to the intent of the law.
Patry: The constitution is a living thing, has to be adopted to current needs. Any law should be adapted to where people are. I don't think that most people abhor laws that don't really apply. There's an awful lot in copyright law to abhor, the legal system has enabled rights extraordinary, many people have evolved to see copyright as oppressive, I believe in copyright and found that problematic. Original term of copyright was 14 years, with one renewal possible -28 maximum. Now since 1998 everything can be copyrighted up to 70 years (Disney). There's no way in the world that we needed that extra twenty years. No living author says life plus seventy or nothing. It was for old works. Every single use has to be with permission, like a male dog walking down the street, you think everything was yours. Was no performance rights until 1909. The way that people are using stuff is in a collective way, a fanstasic thing, could not have come about if one central person said we need this and this and this. A long way to say that we have evolved in unproductive ways.

Question: Has to be that way, but how do we protect and encorage the creators?
Patry: In DC, pro-copright bill, everyone believed that anyone harmed by infringement should get all they deserve. Existing law is extremely favorable to copyright law. I do worry about people not respecting copyright law because it's too strong, that's a complete rationalization. As a practical matter would like to see change in public perception that people respect it.
Follow-up: Contradictory?
Patry: Speaking of copyright as a property right isn't productive, saying everything else is theft is bad for them, they need certain rights. Fair use is given as unpaid use, they shouldn't have to stop all uses. trick is to find the balance.

Quick Take: A well-constructed argument overall, if with some potential gaps, the question is how the ability of publishers to help people learn via enabling valuable to reach people who need it has to be addressed more specifically. To some degree it's mostly a matter of publishers recognizing that protecting the creation of copies is not the real issue, it's the rights associated with that copy that are at issue. In this sense we really need to think of copyright as context rights and to accept that online technologies need to evolve for authors and publishers to express their desires more effectively. We're going to see strong innovation on these lines over the next few years, I expect copyright issues to diminish and publishers who can adapt their models to making the enforcement of context rights the priority more successful

Labels: fair use copyright, google, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008

Moderator: Ken Doctor, Analyst, Outsell, Inc.

Panelists:
Ian Blaine, CEO, thePlatform, Inc.
Danny Fishman, President, Broadband Enterprises
Sean Morgan, Founder & CEO, Critical Mention
Shoba Purushothaman, CEO & Co-founder, The NewsMarket

Ken started off with a great compilation of videos seen by millions online that were cultural icons in 2007. Mainstream video still matters, obviously, but user-generated videos are creating their own cultural icons quickly, inexpensively and with a different kind of focus.

Ken: Tell us about your space.
Fishman: Started as a rep firm, struggled with scalability, built a pre-roll network, moving into brands and brand syndication. As opposed as to wanting to broadcast on a site or a channel advertisers wanted much more granularity. Started pushing out beyond sites like Warner, in syndication we're seeing people looking for specific programming and scale, need multiple distribution channels, have evolved syndication platform to provide contexutal syndication, mostly repurposed programming now, but now original online programming is hot, still a lot of iffy ideas being pitched, working with Hollywood production companies so that brands will enter. Long-form brand entterainment is now looking at online.

Shoba: On one side it's the news business, on the other side is the marketing industry, started knowing that text world was moving online and would need to integrate video content, created more effective distribution mechanism, free marketing videos available to media for free. Enabled news industry to buy and sell video content. Traditionally built around buying services from traditional video outlets like Reuters, news industry is searching for more efficient ways to get content. Also government, rollout of new 5-dollar bills. Launched 5 years ago, all of the news media were television stations then, over last 18 months 50 percent are print titles, niche trade publications, half of base but consuming 2/3 of content. Pfizer increased video for news by 80 percent. Still a lot of intimidation about technology, need to know what they need, do a lot of business in auto sector, all-time most popular ocntent was the launch of the world's cheapest car by Tata.

Blaine: There's a transition from this being a toy to a tool. Serve both media companies and B2B companies, one has a choice one doesn't consumer media has to do this, enterprise doesn't have to do this but it's a choice. On media side my 5-year-old has no idea about linear programming, that's a telling thing, its influence on television is huge. How to take the best of the Internet world and to make them both more available. Matching interests to inventory is key, as is the power of the crowd, people add value to content, cannot overestimate the importance of this. Some examples are things tagged as political debate but humorous, but advertisers will have a far different attitude towards humor clips. Working on learning more about the content, what it does when it goes places, info in the package makes it easier to put meaningful advertising in it.

Morgan: Two business lines, Critical Mention, focused on aggregating content for business intelligence, desktop subscription, Lexis/Nexis of TV, thousands of desktops licensed, infrastructure today is ingesting 13,000 hours of TV. Make it searchable by spoken word. B2B intelligence marketplace is very large but mostly driven by text. ClipSyndicate a but like ScreamingMedia, publishing tools, log into it, capture highly authoritative, respected news. ClipSyndicate does same for video, 300 providers, 240 network affiliates. Also emerging Web video brands, ExpertVillage, NYT, others providing online-only video. Video out to 20,000 URLs. Networks - McGraw-Hill, Penwell, Reed, Need a video news component. Close to 8,000 hours of broadcast news in U.S. alone every day. What is authoritative, what works in B2B, what provides value to end subscribers. Do we want to think about single search providing co-mingled text and video results, ClipSyndicate content is all licensed hours after it's been aired, newspaper industry was trained by Lexis/Nexis as to what a content royalty, video people say "what," video is not a revenue share business. ClipSyndicate brings in 50,000 discrete video assets from partners.

Ken: Basics, metrics are kind of a joke, what to we know about who's viewing videos, earlier viewing was younger and male, what kinds of programming, news vs. non-news, breaking news or orther verticals?

Shoba: Primary viewing is still happening with news video, in entertainment news video gets high marks, what is interesting is studies show that news video will continue to grow in influience, far from watching the evening news when we get home, most of the time my own news comes from the Web.

Fishman: So many types of news properties, has hit a critical mass, niche programming, news based audience is a very hungry audience. Lots of stats from research, my 100 year-old grandma knows how to do online video.

Ken: In terms of monetization it's mostly ads, little subscription.
Fishman: Has to be pretty niche for subscription to work.
Blaine: If you can access online for free you will, the more niche the more likely premium works. Subscription dwarfed by advertising. Belief is that studios are not going to go to an ad model ever.
Morgan: ClipSyndicate it's segmented into ad and subscription clearly, s..yndicating content into verticals with robust ad sales model. 80 dollar CPMs in niche sites, video changing ad dynamic, prosumer chosen video. Should be able to leverage video more effectively than banners deliver.

Ken: Half a billion dollars ads last year, what are CPMs this year, business high, 100 dollar CPMs, where's growth.
Fishman: Demand rising strongly, CPMs somewhat stable.
Blaine: Depends on the spectrum, known TV content will be high

Ken: Are we dealing with brands in a different way now?
Shoba: Brands more active earlieron, new model emerging, they have the ability to be a media company, Studio Dell enormous success, one of top ten sites, captivating content. Two years ago BudTV failed, but more brands are going to grow, setup costs are low and then they don't have to pay CPMs, this will eat into existing ad revenues.
Blaine: Works for a narrow range of brands.
Shoba: But if you're a niche B2B brand almost by definition you're a targeted audience, you're not trying to reach 50,000 people, you can drive people to you, a lot of trade publications have narrow topic areas,
Morgan: Real opportunity to take CPC advertisers and put them in flash panel players. When really relevant ad in players, click throughs can be in mid single digits.
Blaine: Not good for a tire ad next to why tires fail article.
Fishman: Banking future on contextualizaion, brands want to go to long format, too infomercially, let brand mangers work on this.
Morgan: Video's only in a browsable format, just text titles. A lot of focus needs to be not just browsable but via full-text services.
Shoba: Strong storytelling by may brands, Dell, many you can watch and feel that it's honest, will be blurring of lines, many stories will be told on their own Web site but more will be packaged for wider use in more conversational packaging.

Question: Video is passive, will it be more interactive?
Blaine: Not passive now, kids ineracts with friends while watching video, big cultural shift, for advertisers that's something that you can touch and learn something, yes, interactivity is coming.
Morgan: Lots of startup technology allows this now.
Fishman: We do overlays, hot-spotting on product placements, active integration, we're there now.

Question: Destination sites are they a dying business model, is it all about aggregation?
Blaine: For very few companies sites are enough, think about superdistribution, you're going to win if you meet them on the sites that they want to be in.
Fishman: Some organizations protective of content, in trouble, won't cannibalize their own brands, have to reach out.
Morgan: Learn from "walled gardens" of early online newspapers, will come a time that their content will go willy-nilly with some controls to protect it from shoing up on porn sites.

Ken: Age of multimedia is arriving!

Quick Take: Great panel, a lot more opportunity for brands to get conversational online, so sevices like TheNewsMarket will become more important as potential ad inventory once there's both long-form and teaser-form industrial footage.

Labels: SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, video