Now what?

Mar26

“I reckon an education notice can’t just say “don’t do that”. It needs to include what to do instead otherwise it’s not education. “

– Br3nda via Twitter

“The biggest threat to an author is obscurity, not piracy.”

– Tim O’Reilly

I was overseas and missed the bulk of the debate about Section 92a of the new Copyright Amendment Act.

But the outcome was pretty interesting, even from a distance.

The #blackout campaign, initiated by Creative Freedom NZ and supported by a huge number of people, managed to get a lot of coverage of the issue and convinced the government to delay the implementation of this part of the Act.

And then, earlier this week, they announced that they were scrapping this altogether and going back to the drawing board.

So, here is a question for everybody that supported the campaign (i.e. everybody who changed their avatar in Facebook and/or Twitter):

Now what?

The current wording of s92a is dumb. All agreed. But, how should it read?

I’m not sure that I’ve heard anybody propose a solution that everybody would support, which I assume means that this is a much more difficult problem than we think.

The Creative Freedom site lists three goals:

These are fine goals.

I think everybody would nod in furious agreement as they read those.

(If you haven’t already I encourage you to follow the links above read the details).

And I think that most people would also agree that the groups representing the various rights owners have to be part of the solution, even though they have not seemed very willing to engage in the debate (for example, when RIANZ CEO Campbell Smith describes a requirement to provide evidence of copyright infringement as “impractical” and “ridiculous” he just looks silly).

There just doesn’t seem to be a middle ground at the moment.

So, it’s a stalemate.

On one side we have people who consume content who, it seems, would probably prefer to keep the status-quo where they can reasonably freely download and share whatever without risk of being caught (it’s hard to beat free, eh!)

That might be unfair, but I haven’t really heard anybody on this side of the debate come out strongly against copyright infringements and say “we think it’s terrible that it’s so easy to steal, and we think it should be enforced like this …”.

Perhaps it’s a case of people in glass houses being a bit cautious about throwing stones?

On the other side are the content producers and rights owners who seem incapable of grasping the size of the opportunity they are missing out on by sticking to their old business models and a mindset of having to hold on so tightly to the content they own.

As Elan from Plex said so well in his recent open letter to media companies…

“You have to stop being scared that I’m going to steal your content, because I’m already stealing your content. Your goal should be to get me to give you the money I’m already giving to others.”

And

“There is a holy trinity of things I want desperately from you, because I can’t get them anywhere else: availability, quality, and metadata. By availability I mean give me access to full catalogs of content. More is more. If I can’t get it from you, I’m going to have to go elsewhere, and you don’t want that. Secondly, give me quality: why would I go to you for SD content when I can get HD content elsewhere? Why would I go to you for ad-laden content when I can get ad-free content elsewhere? Lastly, give me rich metadata: reviews, related content, recommendations, transcripts, and credits. And give me an API interface to that data. In return I will give you my money every month, and I’ll rub your feet at least once a week.”

And stuck in the middle of all of this are the ISPs of various flavours, who would, I suspect, much rather just invoice monthly than have to get involved in the messy business of being adjudicator and enforcer.

That seems like quite a big gap to try and bridge.

How do we break this deadlock?

What’s the next step forwards?

Are there examples from overseas that we think would work here – i.e. the American model (which gives a bit more power to the rights owners) or the European model (which gives a bit more power to the consumer)?

Or perhaps we try our own hybrid, with some form of industry self-regulation?

Would that work?

Or do we just think it’s all too hard, and so stick with the status-quo by default?

Interested in your thoughts.

In the beginning…

Mar22

This month it is 10 years since Trade Me was launched.

Last night there was a party for staff to celebrate the milestone.

As part of this they kindly invited a few of us who were there in the beginning to tell some stories about how we got involved and about the early days of working on the site.

Here is my part of that (the extended director’s-cut edition) …

—

In 1999 I was working as an IT consultant in Sydney and really wanted to move back to Wellington.

In those days to find a good flat you needed to get up really early on a Wednesday or Saturday and buy a paper and hit the phones – and by lunch time normally all of the good ones had been taken.

So, that obviously wasn’t very convenient for me over in Australia.

This was also the middle of the dot-com bubble, and I had this nagging fear that I was missing out on something, and was really keen to get my hands dirty and try to build my own website.

So, I put those two things together and came up with the idea for Flathunt.

That was all good.

The first version of the site was a bit rubbish, but I was proud of it.

Then, in a moment of madness, I decided to quit my job and work on Flathunt full-time.

I had an exit interview with the senior partner at the firm I was working at, and in as many words he told me that he thought I was throwing my career away.

In a way you could say he was right, because since then I’ve never worn a suit and tie again!

Anyway, I just put my head down and tried to make Flathunt as good as I could make it.

I called every property manager and real estate agent I could find, and asked them to list on the site.

And, surprisingly a few of them said “yes” and the site slowly started growing.

Soon after it launched, we actually found a flat for ourselves through the site – it was listed at 2pm and we went and saw it at 4pm and signed the lease that evening. Which was great, except that our new landlord straight away took the listing down, and at that stage I was a bit desperate for all of the listings I could get. So, that was a bit annoying!

After about 3 months my girlfriend (now my lovely wife) got a bit sick of paying all of the bills.

Flathunt was making enough to cover costs, but not enough to pay me a salary, so I had to go out and find some paid work.

Around that time I had lunch with Sam, who was an old friend from school, and with Phil McCaw who along with his colleagues from AMR had just invested, and they told me what they were doing with Trade Me.

I’d seen the “Only Turkeys Pay For Classifieds” billboard.

I thought it sounded exciting.

So we did a deal around Flathunt and they hired me as a developer.

I became the first employee who wasn’t a Morgan, and got to work.

And, there was no shortage of things to do.

Within the first year we completely redesigned the site: we put in place a new design – coming up with the yellow sidebar and tabs and the “Kevin the Kiwi” logo etc which are still more-or-less in place today, we introduced charging, and usernames (rather than just showing everybody’s email address on the site) and built photo uploading, and autobidding, and the first incarnation of text bidding (which nobody really used apart from us)… and a whole bunch of other stuff.

It’s hard to imagine today that the site would have worked at all without all of those things, but somehow it did.

We even built a Japanese version of SafeTrader, of all things, but that’s a story for another day.

We were just making it up as we went.

Sometimes we’d have an idea while we were out at lunch and rush back and try and build it and deploy it before we went home. It was incredible that the site didn’t break a lot more than it did.

All the while the business was growing at a ridiculous rate.

But we were still impatient.

One day Sam decided to try and get on Fair Go … as you do. So he called the producers and said “I really want you to come and film a story about Trade Me”. They didn’t really know what to say, I don’t think, because the people they were used to dealing with would normally try and lock the doors or punch the cameraman.

But they came in anyway and filmed some interviews.

Then we panicked.

We were not really prepared for the sort of traffic that a top-rating prime time television show might generate. I think the site was running on a single server at that point. So we quickly rushed out and hired a bigger server and then braced ourselves.

We invited some family and friends into the office the evening it aired for some drinks, and we setup a projector showing the number of people online.

And, if I’m correct, that was the first time we ever had more than 1000 people on the site at once, which was an exciting milestone.

Anyway, it was a crazy time.

I’ve never worked so hard or had so much fun.

We got to experience a business growing at an astonishing rate, although what we didn’t realise at the time was that this was just the beginning.

It was a privilege to be part of it.

Trade Me Home Page Retrospective

(click for full-size screen shots)

1999:

2000:

2001:

2002:

2003:

2004:

2005:

2006:

2007:

2008:

Elmo Love You

Mar18

Talking with an American recently I referred to a third-person as: “a bit of a Muppet”.

They were obviously a bit confused about what I meant, and when I dug into it I realised that we didn’t have the same interpretation at all.

To me it was derogatory (i.e. a little gormless, unable to think for themselves).

To them it was something else entirely (i.e. cute, uber-friendly, anxious to teach you things … like counting and co-operation).

I had to admit they had a point.

I wonder how this came about? Why are we so negative about Muppets?

And, is it just a kiwi thing? Or, are there other places in the world that disrespect the Muppets like this too? (I’d be interested to hear from readers from abroad on this issue!)

Either way, be warned. If you intend to offend pick your words carefully!

There is no depression in NZ (yet)

Mar8

I wonder: how far into what we now call the Great Depression did they start to call it a Great Depression as opposed to a regular old recession?

The US stock markets just recorded their worst month since 1933. The amount of money that has been wiped off the value of listed companies around the world is staggering.

As this chart from Financial Graph & Art shows, this is now the second worst bear market when measured by the percentage decline in values, but we still have some way to go to match both the length and severity of the market drop between 1929 and 1932.

20090306_3

This is clearly somewhat uncharted waters. And, it’s interesting to see what different countries around the world are doing to try and address this situation.

Having spent a few weeks in the US recently, it feels like we’re much less optimistic here in NZ. Obviously the recession/depression is dominating the news over there too, but the mood is still “yes we can!” rather than “gulp, we’re stuffed!”.

For example this (from the New York Times)

“Wrapped inside the economic stimulus package is about $80 billion in spending, loan guarantees and tax incentives aimed at promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, higher-mileage cars and coal that is truly clean. As a stand-alone measure, these investments would amount to the biggest energy bill in history.”

Not sure about the “truly clean coal” part, but that does seem positive.

And, it makes the 9-day-fortnight proposal seem pretty modest.

On the other hand, I’m not necessarily sure much of the optimism is warranted.

What are they going to do about their auto industry? More bail outs? Or let them fail? Neither seem like especially attractive options.

While I was there Hyundai were running a series of positive TV ads highlighting their assembly plants based in Alabama, employing lots of Americans, etc, etc (and without saying as much noting that this was all without government bail outs). As Fred Wilson pointed out: “the auto sector has the potential to be the ‘Vietnam’ of his energy plan” and “when a portfolio company acts like [GM] in our business, they are dead on arrival”.

Whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, it’s difficult to disagree that this is a horrible mess.

So, what are we going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

Do you feel like there is anything you can do, or is this something that they have to solve? And, if so, who is “they“?

Think about the things you have already personally done: do you think they have made things better or worse? For example, if you have stopped spending so much on stuff you can do without, what’s the impact on the companies that used to make and sell that stuff, and the people who work for those businesses?

Amongst this carnage, where are the opportunities? Remember: Trade Me was launched in 1999, just as the first tech bubble burst spectacularly.

And, is anybody else worried that we’ve all started to feel that things are inevitably going to get worse?

If you want to understand how this whole mess has come about, here is an excellent animated overview: