Nobody owns anything. Part 2

#content #intellectualproperty

By Gonzalo López Martí        LMMIAMI.COM

• Last week I waxed metaphysical about the sorry state of intellectual property in the modern world.
• The famous Hollywood line “nobody knows anything” -traditionally applied in Tinseltown to the arcane art of creating multiplex-filling hits- is evolving into -wink wink nudge nudge-: “nobody owns anything”.
• Piracy is pillaging the box office.
• The same is true about TV, literature, music.
• Copyright infringement is rampant.
• Or let’s put it this way: IP as we knew it simply does not exist anymore.
• IP as in Intellectual Property.
• New paradigms must be tried pronto.
• Enter the “cloud + subscription model”.
• You know: Netflix, Spotify, Pandora and the soon-to-be-launched-with-the-usual-fanfare Apple Music.
• This new model is essentially an open bar approach which charges the user a flat fee for storage & pipeline usage, while leniently looking the other way when it comes to policing what the user does with the content.
• They’ve given up.
• Songs are fair game.
• The Cupertino consumer electronics giant and rock band U2 already started tinkering with the new model last year when they surreptitiously slipped U2’s new album “Songs of innocence” into millions of mobile and desktop devices through the iTunes pipeline.
• Free of charge and, oddly enough, without asking users whether they wanted the music downloaded onto their gadgets or not.
• Musical spam.
• It isn’t clear how this stunt was monetized by the parties involved or what the ROI could be.
• My guess: for the Cupertino behemoth it was an experiment with little to lose.
• Probably no money changed hands yet Apple tested a new distribution scheme and obtained in exchange a bit of the the cool factor, pop cultural currency and good will that might result in associating its brand with the aging Irish rockers.
• In exchange, U2 gained a mass audience and spared itself the embarrassment of releasing an album that pro’bly nobody under 45 would’ve bought anyway, while keeping its artistic brand alive AND heavily promoting its upcoming global TOUR.
• Sure enough, as we all know, heavily sponsored live gigs & a life on the road might be the ONLY revenue stream left for musicians these days.
• I repeat: HEAVILY SPONSORED.
• Nevertheless, Billboard Magazine columnist Chris Parker deemed the Apple + U2 effort “Biggest Album Rollout Fiasco”, to add: “… after the free release burrowed into people’s computers and wouldn’t leave, Apple finally was forced to release a ‘U2 Removal Tool’.”
• It certainly does not come as a surprise that Billboard Magazine, a venerable institution built on the shoulders of a defunct content distribution paradigm, would be quite twitchy about the state of turmoil in the industry.
• OK.
• Speaking of live performances: the Mayweather vs Pacquiao bout (north of 10 grand for a decent seat, 90 bucks on pay per view) was broadcast for FREE by dozens of smartphone-wielding ringside Periscope users to thousands –or maybe millions- of eyeballs.
• From a strictly literal interpretation of current copyright laws it was a massive breach.
• Go chase them.
• Welcome to the abysmal state of intellectual property.
• Complaining is useless.
• When it comes to content, nobody owns anything these days.
• The revenue streams of streaming content are seriously compromised.
• It is impossible to send a cease & desist letter to millions and millions of smartphone users.
• Let alone sue them.
• It’d be a class action lawsuit in reverse.
• Won’t happen.
• New ways must be devised to monetize proprietary content.
• We’ve done it in the past.
• It can be a bit of an eyesore.
• Okay, it is an annoying eyesore.
• SPONSORS.
• Put advertising on every imaginable surface.
• Think NASCAR cars and uniforms.
• Urban legend: back in the day, Héctor Ricardo García, sort of like an Argentine loony version of Rupert Murdoch, saw some young’un computer artist in one of his newspapers fooling around with Photoshop one afternoon.
• His curiosity was piqued.
• Hey, kiddo, can you erase the bank’s logo from the jersey Boca Juniors players wear on national TV?
• The computer artist, eager to please his leaving legend of a boss, did so.
• All the coverage featured on the sports section the following morning appeared with the airbrushed Boca Juniors gear.
• The logo was gone.
• Half an hour later, the bank’s marketing department was calling.
• How long until someone develops an app to remove commercial messages from streaming video?