Intangitopia is a knowledge platform initiated by an interdisciplinary group of 5 graduate scholars. Our primary focus is on the use of the legal, financial and technical arenas to leverage intellectual assets,
property and capital; in the light of the emerging knowledge economy.
Showing posts with label Internet and IT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet and IT. Show all posts
On Thursday, Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Telecoms and Media gave a speech on “Digital Europe”. An initiative for the next five years and how to boost Europe’s digital presence.
Have we really looked at the issue through the eyes of a 16 year old? Or only from the perspective of law professors who grew up in the Gutenberg Age? In my view, growing internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions.
She asks herself an interesting question and the answer to it is in my view even more interesting. Think harmonized and easy ways of clearing rights between countries in Europe. Perhaps with only one internal market for all digital content...
First of all, we could facilitate the licensing of intellectual property rights for online services covering the territory of all 27 EU Member States . Today, right holders and online service providers need to spend far too much time and money on the administration of rights, instead of investing this money in attractive services. And consumers often cannot access online content if uploaded in another Member State. ... We had a similar problem when commercial satellite TV started more than 30 years ago. As right clearance for this per se cross-border service became increasingly complex ... I believe it is now time to develop similar solutions for the evolving world of online content.
The 1709 Copyright Blog also has a comment here. A transcript of the full speech can be found here.
Sometime ago I had the pleasure to visit Media Tech at the Frankfurt Exibition. One of the presenting companies was Qflix. They have a similar approach to DVD as Johan so nicely fleshed out regarding in-store printing three day ago. The Technology Without going into detail the system is deployed close or in immediate contact with the point of purchase. The user chose a DVDtitle and sends a request to the Q-Flix system. The system starts the burning procedure, labeling and packaging. All in a couple of minutes from that the customers have made the choice. Naturally, the more advanced in-store burning kiosks can handle multiple request at a time.
This might look like a fairly simple technical task to perform and I am not really knowledgable enough to commnet on that. However, for those of you knowing about DVD crypto keys to prevent copying and printing a DVD label in less than a minute can perhaps figure out that quite some engineering is encumbered in the solution.
Intangible Assets and Capabilities The most important asset is access to content. Currently Q-Flix claims to have agreements with all major studios and access to 14,000 movie titels and over 2000 TV episodes. Another asset is compliance to standards. The DVDs bought from a Q-Flix system must be no different from the ones I buy online of off the shelf. The third asset is strategic alliances. Currently Q-Flix has an alliance with Dell, where Dell is acting as a technology supplier and retailer. They also have alliances with other companies to get access to their distribution and sales channels.
Providing access to the Long Tail and the merchandized feeling Well, given that you now can reduce/remove the shelf space and there is not capitalization in stock the Long Tail of golden oldies and niche movies can now be brought back to the supermarket. Moreover, since there is a digital process forming the image to be burnt onto the disc customization by the customer and merchandizing by the provider is possible.
Closing comments
Weather or not this will save the optical information carrier from disappearing is quite unclear. I like the approach though, at some sense it is greener and it enables more spontaneous shopipng for physical copies of old or more niche copies.
“Sometimes, I am ashamed to say I am an IP professional. I rather say I work with Innovation or just general business development.”
Massive attention is directed to the trail and verdict for the founders of The Pirate Bay, a.k.a. the spectrial. Today at 11:00 CET the verdict was released and 15 minutes later the Chairman of the Court, Tomas Norström, held a press conference. The press conference can be heard in Swedish here.
The verdict states that the four convicted are going to pay $905K each and are sentenced to one year imprisonment. The appeal will come is a matter of course, so the outcome is far from set yet since this is the lowest out of three instances. The verdict could be found in Swedish here.
Regardless the stage in the process, the reactions is substantial in the digital community and the rumors are that demonstrations are going to be held in Sweden in the near future. This blog post is not about whether or not the verdict is correct, it is about the bad press intellectual property as concept receives in this process.
So what is Intellectual Property?
Still the term is quite ambiguous and used in many ways dependent on context and market. This is just one non-exhaustive description of the perception which is mine and taught at ICM.
Intellectual Property is one of the primary vehicles for wealth creation in the knowledge based economy. Intellectual Property makes intellectual/immaterial assets translatable, and thus economically functional and managerially controllable.
Consequently, the concept facilitates properties needed for entrepreneurial activities such as turning an invention into an innovation to enable creation of so called intellectual capital, where commercial interaction is a subset of intellectual capital. A quite positive and needed mechanism, don’t you agree?
Where things went south
Currently, copyright and patents are the IPRs mostly attacked and connected to the phrase IP in media. The IPR system is accused not to cope with the technical developement and is percieved to represent the rights system pre-internet.
Copyright – Copyright is seen as something holding creativity and creation back. Both due to the quite long life time of the copyright, but also due to the change in how we consume copyrighted materials nowadays. One of the most disruptive pattern in this is file sharing, now enables global dissemination of knowledge and culture practically for free. File sharing is seen as one of the primary democratic vehicles but in the same time as the technology version of Beelzebub destroying copyright holders’ opportunity to preserve the moral and economic rights over their copyrighted material.
Patents – Patents are commonly plainly coined as intellectual property, which naturally is wrong since the concept is much broader. Patents have gained a lot of negative publicity lately in relation to software patents, but also in relation to Big Pharmas use of their patent portfolios.
This is a free translation from one organized entity against intellectual property´s conclusion:
“[...]Thus, the only ones who actually benefits from the use of patents are the paten attorneys or IP lawyers. Without a patent system, they would be unemployed. Unfortunately, these people form the politics and policies in our society despite their lack of objectivity.[...]”
(The reason why I dont state the source is that I dont want to direct more attention to this organisation, for most of you who follows the debate surrounding the Spectrial knows which entity I am citing. However, for transparancy reasons I am happy to provide the source via e-mail)
How to turn the direction of where the perception of IP is heading
I guess the youth of today imagine Intellectual Property professional to be a greedy, filthy rich, old fart making his living on exploiting what they perceive almost as human rights. At least this is the perception I’ve got following the spectrail discussion, my own twitter feed and other media.
To change this, the mindset of Intellectual Property owners must change. IP is not an exclusive right to exclude others from using the captured assets constituting the IP. It is not a tool to keep the third world from the global trade. It is not a tool to hunt poor counterfeiters to increase bottom line results for multi-national conglomerates. However, that is the way IP is presented in media and often used by the IP owners.
We need to see change in how IP is used in the business arena. The positive properties with IP as facilitator for the development of our society must be communicated. It must be brought back as the primary asset for entrepreneurs regardless if they build they utiliza online business models or not. I hardly believe spectrail helps in that. We need more initiatives such as Spotify, TED (CC-licensed content), Hulu, last.fm, etcetera. They leverage the technology development of file sharing and streaming without violating the underlying IPRs. Let’s pray to improve the perception of intellectual property and to get help by a more innovative culture industry, an industry taking the step into the knowledge based economy.
For further reading about perception of IP, please read Roya Ghafele´s Perceptions of Intellectual Property: a review. For further reading about IAM/IPM in the business arena read Tobias Thornblad’s splendid post.
EDIT: the youth political organization Ung Pirat or Young Pirate in English, is now the largest in Sweden. However, Larry Lessig had somewhat of pin pointed the question already two years ago at TED.
Some time ago we posted a some thoughts about Quake Live's business model and way of delivering the value experience to the users in a new and inventive way. Well it seems like that business model have been extended and altered.
Onlive is a new service enabeling a high-octane gaming experiance on your low-end notebook, laptop or even TV. Unlike Quake Live you need a micro console and a handcontrol to play with it. So in that sense it is actually a clear competitor to the existing gaming consols currently available.
So, by scrutinizing Onlive's business model according to tbmdb.com's business model components you clearly see that Onlive innovates upon several components. But essentially, the end-user have the same or an enhanced value experience for less money and in a more flexible manner. However, Onlive needs diffrent skills to manage external relations, create the propert control mechanisms and expecially create the capability and assets needed to have virtually zero downtime on the service since that have a huge impact on the value reciver - the customer - .
One thing is for sure, this is a clear and awaited model for how to treat piracy issues without deminishing the value experiance by the customer. That clearly talks in favour for the adoption of this model of delivering consol gaming. But whether it is Nintendo, Microsoft or Playstation who will do it in the long run, or if perhaps Onlive can claim a sustainable market position, is still to see.
Have a look at the promotion video and see what you think. I'm quite sure that I will never go back from having only a laptop. Further it is always nice to enable gaming without installation on a system managed by a grumpy ICT staff.
However, its getting increasingly clearer that in the future we will see a consolidation of IP-TV, gaming in the cloud and other similar services. They will probably utilize the same hardware and will be provided by the one service provider.
Via Wikonomics, for more great frameworks for understanding business models: tbmdb.com
The newspaper industry has for quite some time been struggling with declining sales and uncertainty in how to get paid for content proved on their websites. For most part the content has been proved for free and revenue has come from advertising.
It has proved hard to get a viable business model based on this and also to utilize the full potential of the material created by the journalists. Just imagine what amount of interesting articles there are published every day and potentially could be used over and over again in different forms and different media.
From my point what has been lacking is both the willingness to spread the material created, far from all newspapers have all their material available on the web. But also the means of actually making it available has been lacking. That is why I look at the British newspaper the Guardian’s new attempt to make money out of their huge catalog of content as a really good sign of that there might be a change.
“The Guardian today launched Open Platform, a service that will allow partners to reuse guardian.co.uk content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet".
Open Platform launched with two separate content-sharing services, which will allow users to build their own applications in return for carrying Guardian advertising.”
“The Cass Sculpture Foundation is using the service to add Guardian articles about British artists to its site.
Other partners for the launch of the service include web design firm Stamen and OpenStreetMap, a free, open alternative to commercial map data services. Stamen and OpenStreetMap developed a service that they hope will encourage Guardian readers to "geo-tag" the newspaper's content, positioning every article, video and picture on a map so users can find news, commentary, video and other content related to their area.”
I think that one of the keys to success as a newspaper in this era is to see that you actually have a huge content database which is not only usable as part of the day-to-day reporting but also as something much more. In the Long tail model, which I think is applicable in this area, one of the key issues is to have a good search engine/model. Not just to provide the content but also to make the users understand that it is there and make them understand that they want it.
Spreading the content through the help of other actors is probably one of better ways to get your content out. That is also why I am so interested to see how Guardian’s Beta testing turns out. There might just be a working model, there might just…
IDsoftware has with its latest product surely taken the way of how gamers are able to play a full-scale 3D game to the next level. The provided Quake live platform enables players to play their favorite game directly through the web browser. Once the game is set to full-screen mode, the player will not be able to distinguish the online game from the original game Quake 3 which Quake-live is built upon. More information for the less informed reader could be found here, here and here.
Revenue stream This brings us to the key question of how a company can keep a game alive and have a revenue stream when players do not follow the conventional pattern of buying new games in order to satisfy their hunger for challenges. Game companies have since long realized how important it is to keep the customer base once they have released a blockbuster game. The enormous online society of World of War Craft is probably the best example in how to keep customers close. The difference between WOW and Quake3 is extensive, not only are these completely different games but that WOW players still expect new features and updates whereas the Q3 players do not.
Shifting focus from hardware to bandwidth? IDsoftware seems to have a good approach to the solution which is a quite remarkable one. As of today, they are still looking for beta-players to test the game and the potential of the site. More than 1.200 players are already testing the game which only requires a small client-program. It should be highlighted that the game in question, is a full scale 3D-shooter game looking just like Quake 3 which back in 2001 required the best hardware available. I dare to say that this is truly revolutionary if they succeed to accomplish to provide a service where the game floats without delays, which is the most crucial performance parameter within this game genre. As of today, there are no indications of such drawbacks. This unique platform will enable players to compete against others, participate in tournaments and track their game statistics.
What will the business model look like? The concept is clever in many ways from a business point of view. The company will be able to establish technical control since the players will only have access to the game through their site and since the game is run completely on the server provider’s side, the possibility to cheat are close to zero and facilitates updates. For industry actors, e.g. hardware manufacturers, the site will provide great opportunities to sponsor tournaments and brand themselves among players. The possible opportunities remind of sponsored tournaments on internet-poker sites where the sponsoring party is providing a tournament with a variable price sum. With the strong brand name Quake the future opportunities for the Quake-live platform look promising. Let’s hope that advertising will not be their only revenue strategy.
Whether Quake-live will be a success or not is difficult to say but it is still a happening worth mentioning due to the innovative nature of the concept in an already innovative industry in today’s knowledge-based economy. To re-release an old game, packaged in a new concept and technology and make it financially profitable is surely not an easy task. However, the concept opens the door for a new paradigm for how games are distributed to customers and to strengthen IPR control technically. It is really taking virtual products to its limit and further diminishes the importance of operating systems towards an increasing focus of online applications which can be observed by looking of how Google continuously works its way to move office applications into the online applications domain.
Nicolas Preisig is the second guest blogger invited to post his thoughts here at Intangitopia. He is a part of the new generation of highly talented engineers, lawyers, and business managers pursuing modern skills and tools necessary to create value for industry, universities, and society in the emerging knowledge-based economic paradigm. The ideal education to acquire this skills and tools is the School of Intellectual Capital Management at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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