Monthly Archives: September 2009

Is MKV the MP3 of video?

September 14, 2009
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The release of the Napster client in 1999 is seen by most in the music industry as a watershed event. It was the moment when millions of people began “trading” individual music tracks over the Internet and–in the received version of the story–stopped buying CDs. The industry’s response was, first, panic, then to attempt to get the genie back in the bottle by suing Napster and its creators Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. That led to similar suits against Friendster, Aimster, Grokster,  and any other peer-to-peer network ”operator” the RIAA could identify clearly enough to serve with papers.  

napster-logoWhat had really hit the music industry, however, wasn’t P2P technology so much as the MP3 codec. The first MP3 encoder was released in 1994, and by 1995 it was being used in commercial consumer software such as WinPlay, and later WinAmp. Using MP3 compression, WinPlay users could store tracks ripped from a CD on a hard drive in files that were a fraction of their original size (a critical issue at the time given the small size of most consumer hard drives), albeit with some loss of sound quality. All Fanning had really done was to figure out a practical way to tie those hard drives together into ad hoc networks so that compressed music files could be exchanged at the relatively slow bandwidth speeds then generally available. Read more »

E-book madness

September 11, 2009
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For a market that amounted to only $113 million last year, e-books sure are attracting a lot of interest these days. Case in point: the DVD Forum Steering Committee, which administers the technical spec for the video disc format, recently considered a proposal to create a new specification for e-books based on the DVD format. The idea, I guess, was to use DVDs to store and distribute e-books, which seems a rather inelegant solution for a business already dominated by purely electronic delivery of content via high-speed wireless networks.

Apparently, some members of DVD Forum thought so, too, because the Steering Committee ultimately rejected the proposal, according to the minutes from its last meeting.

asus-ereaderStill, barely a week goes by, it seems, without word of a new e-book reader, either announced or rumored. This week’s haul includes reports of a double-truck reader from Asus, and the leak of an internal Time Inc. document indicating the publisher is at least considering introducing its own electronic reader, reversing its earlier position that it would stick to publishing content.

The proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case, meanwhile, has engaged the attention of technology giants like Microsoft and Yahoo, all three branches of the U.S. government, two foreign governments and the administrative arm of the European Union.

Pretty impressive for a business based on an immature technology, uncertain economics and unproven consumer demand.

Authors Guild doesn't like the sunrise, blames the rooster

September 4, 2009
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The Authors Guild is not impressed with Amazon’s opposition to the Google Books settlement.

In a 49-page brief (pdf) filed with Judge Denny Chin on Tuesday, the Kindle-maker warned of the potentially anti-competitive effects both of the blanket license in the agreement for Google to scan and sell orphan works and of the price-fixing power of the proposed Book Rights Registry, which Amazon described as a “cartel of authors and publishers” operating with “virtually no restrictions on its actions.”

The Authors Guild fired back the next day in a statement on the group’s web site:

Amazon’s hypocrisy is breathtaking.  It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry.  At this moment it’s trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss.  It won’t do that forever, of course.  Eventually, when enough readers are locked in to its Kindle, everyone in the industry expects Amazon to squeeze publishers and authors.  The results could be devastating for the economics of authorship.  

Amazon apparently fears that Google could upend its plans.  Amazon needn’t worry, really:  this agreement is about out-of-print books.  Its lock on the online distribution of in-print books, unfortunately, seems secure.

Well now.

While authors and publishers have ample reason to be wary of Amazon’s market power, as I’ve argued in previous posts, the Guild is drawing an apples and bananas comparison in this case. It’s not as if Amazon came by its market power through nefarious, or even non-transparent means. Read more »

Orphans in the storm

September 2, 2009
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Pity Judge Denny Chin, the federal district court jurist in New York presiding over the Google Book Search case (The Authors Guild, et. al. v. Google, Inc.). Having steered the long, complex class action to within sight of the finish line he suddenly finds himself the object of an intense last-minute lobbying campaign from interests that were not party to the case and at the center of budding international incident.

google-books-imagen1In my previous post, I discussed the commercial interests that began lining up last week in support or opposition to the proposed settlement between Google and the class-action plaintiffs, including Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Sony. Now, foreign nations, and perhaps whole continents, are throwing down markers.

On Tuesday, lawyers for the government of Germany filed a strongly worded brief (pdf) with the court declaring that the settlement, if approved, would “run afoul of the applicable German nationallaws,” “irrevocably alter the landscape of internationalal copyright law” and potentially violate U.S. treaty obligations.

Some European Union officials, meanwhile, have come out in favor of the settlement’s terms (if not its legal implications) and have suggested importing it to Europe. A meeting on the issue is scheduled for Sept. 14 in Brussels.

How did it come to this? Read more »