This will be a fascinating case--right of resale with digital music.

Nice quantitative breakdown of movie industry patterns.

Graveyard of DRM: compilation of all the abandoned formats.

Legal shenanigans around the public domain. My understanding of the law here is that companies are under no obligation to provide public domain works that they have copies of, but that anyone who obtains such a copy can redistribute it. I don't know how the law works with "intent to distribute" as in the original case, but in this case I suspect he'd be ok since he was careful to take only public domain works. Unless he violated a hacking law somehow (unlikely, given the fairly trivial things that were required in the first attack), or ran afoul of the contract (very likely, given the all-encompassing nature of most click-through agreements these days).

It would be interesting to try to quantify quite how many public domain works are locked up inside paywalls. Easier to come up with a number of works than with a valuation on their economic value.

Conspiracy-theoryesque report of movie industry not releasing a report stating that "pirates" purchase more than non-pirates.

The interesting point here for me is not the smoking gun or the conspiracy theory or somesuch. Rather, I've assumed for a while that such evidence has made it into the hands of executives, either via the public domain or via commissioned reports. What's clear is that the decision-making process has simply ignored the evidence over and over again. It's not a phenomenon unique to one industry (or government, or even sometimes academia), sadly. For all the rise in "data scientist" positions at corporations, for all Netflix and Google's success, evidence is still a second class citizen.

New Pandora/Last.fm competitor: Spotify.

Electronics giant Ericsson takes a boldly moderate stand on piracy and anti-piracy.

Nice to see someone studying IPhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif issues quantitatively.

A Generation of Software Patents

James E. Bessen

This report examines changes in the patenting behavior of the software industry since the 1990s. It finds that most software firms still do not patent, most software patents are obtained by a few large firms in the software industry or in other industries, and the risk of litigation from software patents continues to increase dramatically. Given these findings, it is hard to conclude that software patents have provided a net social benefit in the software industry.

The cloud

You know that the "media cloud" has made it when copyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-cat clouds like Best Buy's new one start popping up.

On the other hand, being in Paris for the summer, I have discovered a huge downside: because you don't actually own your media, artificial restrictions get put in place. Not only do subscription services like Netflix stop working, but even movies that you ostensibly paid for with Amazon's video-on-demand service stop working. If you're going to charge the same price that the physical media costs, at least make it just as useful.

An interesting illustration of how copyright law is not just about profits but speech.

P2P on the decline?

"According to research group NPD Group, the shuttering of Limewire's music file sharing service has led to a similar decline in the usage of such services throughout the U.S. The number has gone from a high of 16 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to just nine percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, right after Limewire shut down its file-sharing services due to a court order, when a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)."

Taxonomy of Conference Questions

Some of the more "interesting" questions at a recent conference inspired me to conduct the following detailed analysis of secondary data.

Japanese econometrics study: Filesharing boosts DVD sales

http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/11010021.html

"Whether or not illegal copies circulating on the internet reduce the sales of legal products has been a hot issue in the entertainment industries. Though much empirical research has been conducted on the music industry, research on the movie industry has been very limited. This paper examines the effects of the movie sharing site Youtube and file sharing program Winny on DVD sales and rentals of Japanese TV animation programs. Estimated equations of 105 anime episodes show that (1) Youtube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales. Youtube’s effect of boosting DVD sales can be seen after the TV’s broadcasting of the series has concluded, which suggests that not just a few people learned about the program via a Youtube viewing. In other words YouTube can be interpreted as a promotion tool for DVD sales."

I wish there were an English translation, now that I've spent all this time learning econometrics....

Free can be lucrative.

Free geographical FCC data.

In the final push to finish the semester and in need of something other than Pandora or last.fm. Found this list, which seems to be working out well. They're right about AccuRadio being of particularly high audio quality.

Huge news: Ed Felten to be Chief Technologist.

The Economist on eBook DRM: "If you own a physical book, in much of the world you may sell it, lend it—even burn or bury it. You may also keep the book forever. Each of those characteristics is littered with footnotes and exceptions for e-books. We are granted an illusion of ownership, but may read only within the ecosystem of hardware and software supported by the bookseller with sometimes additional limitations imposed by publishers. Witness Amazon's remote deletion—since abjured—of improperly sold copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" in 2009."

Kind of awesome: Peer-to-peer in bricks-and-mortar (literally).

Mint (Quicken-like online personal finance program) has released anonymized user data. Might make for some fun studies.

I vaguely remember reading about Songbird a few years ago when it came out, but it looks like it has matured into something that would be quite fun to play around with.

Seminar Series: Law and Economics
http://www.law.upenn.edu/currently/seminars/lawandeconomics/
Hal R. Varian, Chief Economist, Google
“Copyright Term Extension and Orphan Works”
4:30-6:00 pm in Tanenbaum 145 at the Law School
Contact for more information: David Abrams dabrams@law.upenn.edu

http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/sig-use-2010-proposal-award-for-tracking-data-reuse/

"I propose to follow one thousand datasets from data repositories into the published literature. Studying the reuse patterns of 100 datasets from 10 repositories will facilitate analysis across domains, datatypes, and repository structures. Analysis will focus on the relative levels and timing of data reuse, attributes of investigators who reuse data compared to those who deposit data, and topics studied through data reuse."

Wow. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this in a few years, hopefully with some well-done poster-size visualizations to make sense of it all.

In related news, I've finally got Sweave set up and so my research is finally reproducible. Between that and being committed to entirely avoiding Excel even for graphs after an embarrassing copy-paste error, I'm quite happy with my research setup going into this whole PhD shindig. Now if only R did symbolic manipulation ad I could avoid Matlab/Maxima entirely!

Blu-Ray DRM appears to be dead. I've said many times before that DRM will be broken at some point. It therefore likely exists not to prevent piracy (which almost always is feasible even without breaking DRM), but to prevent otherwise-legitimate use by those who have purchased the content. For instance, DVD DRM served to impede format shifting to iPods for some time, opening up a market for the same content to be sold to the same consumers in a new format.

Open peer review, in the NYT.

More cheap computing power to come?

Movie futures exchange to open:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/business/media/11futures.html

Cool.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/01/what_can_search.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StatisticalModelingCausalInferenceAndSocialScience+%28Statistical+Modeling%2C+Causal+Inference%2C+and+Social+Science%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Not entirely dissimilar to using P2P search or availability data to predict sales.

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/01/bittorrent-census-about-99-of-files-copyright-infringing.ars
The full study description:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/census-files-available-bittorrent

"this section [movies/shows] was heavily biased towards recent movies, instead of being spread out evenly over a number of years."

The Ars conclusion, that "the more DRM there is on the legit versions of the content, the more popular it is on P2P" is confounded by the overwhelming greater desirability of content produced by the major labels, of course, but it does mean that small artists have little to lose from going DRM-free, or even freely-downloadable if what they want is traffic driven to their website.

Obvious limitations:
1. Small sample size
2. Not weighted by volume shared
3. Not an unbiased sample of the universe of pirated content

I wish the major health surveys would release small-area data so that we could do things like this. County is about the smallest we can get on a national scale, and only with mortality data.

In other news, just started clinics. Have no time for anything, but it's a lot of fun.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/what-is-drm-doing-in-my-garage.ars
<>