“There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp.”

– Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com

After leaving their customers’ personal information wide open to attack on unsecured servers running ancient software, Sony’s lawyers decided to simply make their customers sign away the right to make claims for damage done by Sony’s negligence. If you don’t want to do so, you must send a “clear statement” about it via postal mail.

So that’s what I’m doing.

September 16, 2011
Sony Network Entertainment, Inc.
6080 Center Drive, 10th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90045
ATTN: Legal Department/Arbitration

To those who protect themselves far more than they do their customers:

I do not yield, capitulate, surrender, or otherwise stupidly waive my legal right to resolve disputes with any Sony entity through individual or class action litigation. I make no agreement or commitment to needlessly subject myself to the inferior system of arbitration.

Earlier this year, your failure to protect your customers’ personally identifiable information through the most basic of information technology security processes resulted in direct harm to us. You should be working to make sure this never happens again, rather than avoiding legal accountability to your customers for future misdeeds.

Keep your incompetent practices off my fucking legal rights,

Zeke Weeks

Very strange to see the “who’s-who” list of tech – Apple, HP, Google, Nokia, Yahoo! – shaking up their leadership in the same short period.

…But then again, I’d probably rather be a fired CEO than one of the heads of state or government who either resigned or lost their posts amidst human rights outcries and widespread economic instability in 2010-11:  

Trademark and copyright holders frequently characterize piracy as a legal failure, arguing that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem infringing activity. But a new global study on piracy, backed by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, comes to a different conclusion. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one.

Read more about the 400-page report commissioned by the Canadian government at thestar.com .

John Gruber has written a very thorough analysis of the popular arguments against this new policy, and attempts to divine Apple’s reasoning for implementing it:

Apple doesn’t give a damn about companies with business models that can’t afford a 70/30 split. Apple’s running a competitive business; competition is cold and hard. And who exactly can’t afford a 70/30 split? Middlemen. It’s not that Apple is opposed to middlemen — it’s that Apple wants to be the middleman. It’s difficult to expect them to be sympathetic to the plights of other middlemen…

This is what galls some: Apple is doing this because they can, and no other company is in a position to do it. This is not a fear that in-app subscriptions will fail because Apple’s 30 percent slice is too high, but rather that in-app subscriptions will succeed despite Apple’s (in their minds) egregious profiteering. I.e. that charging what the market will bear is somehow unscrupulous. To the charge that Apple Inc. is a for-profit corporation run by staunch capitalists, I say, “Duh”.

Gruber has scored a direct hit on Apple’s strategy, and his explanation makes it seem very solid for Apple, its customers, and content creators. The biggest losers are Apple’s competitor middle-men. I think Apple’s main interest is being the best damned middle man in the business. The only problem is that some of those middle-men make products I really like, and Apple will only play ball with them if Apple gets to make the rules.

Daring Fireball: Dirty Percent

The best way to read a book is the one you have with you.

I find myself reading more because my books are always accessible- the new technology is really improving my life. But the eBooks I store on e-Reader devices still fall short of the books I store on physical bookshelves in in several aspects:

• Availability. In an identical manner to the music industry switching from physical to digital formats, you can only find material available online. I can put any book on my bookshelf at home, regardless of whether I bought it online or locally; from a big corporation or independent store; new or used; or even checked it out from a library or borrowed it from a friend. eBooks promote a monopolistic model where the only convenient way to get your content is to get it all from the same for-profit provider. (Some devices offer a much more confusing way to shoe-horn a couple of extra formats in, but it’s inconvenient by design.)
• Compatibility. Physical books have become completely universal worldwide, regardless of the way they were bound or the kind of paper used. There is no characteristic of a book that makes it unusable. But the world of eBooks is still encumbered by the DRM that exists to prevent this very thing. Once you go with a Kindle or Nook or iBooks, good luck getting your book out to a competitor’s device.
• Freedom to distribute. Physical books are distributed in many ways:
  • Lent to friends
  • Given as gifts
  • Distributed to classes
  • Lent to library patrons
  • Placed for public reference in phone booths, school registrars’ offices, and churches
  • Smuggled into countries that repress free speech

  Right now it’s clear that the eBook industry wants to turn each reader into a directly paying customer. This isn’t wrong, but it fails to address each of the many ways physical books have come to be distributed.

The eBook economy has undeniably created a great experience for the primary use case: buying and reading a book. Which makes sense, since that’s the most profitable one. And the convenience that presents makes me willing to change my previous buying behaviors- I’ll buy more from one big company and be irked by publishers that don’t sell through those channels. But I’m disturbed by the near-total lack of a free-as-in-speech alternative for digital books as there are for other kinds of online publishing and distribution. Even the Free Software Foundation, which puts its ideals first even when extremely inconvenient, doesn’t seem to have a digital alternative to the current monopolistic model.

When we’re talking about something as essential to civilization as books, I’m surprised there isn’t as free of a digital equivalent yet. How can it be done now, or how might it be done in the future?

I wrote this post as a reflection on my own experiences. Then I read The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) and was stunned by how well it proves the same issues through quotes on physical and electronic books, sometimes from the same people.

Man, Apple really means business about that whole freedom from porn on the App Store thing.

Serious business.

From paper to pixels: The Times and other media have yet to find an economically sustainable replacement for their paper-based products.

The Internet has shaken up the status quo for many incumbent economic leaders – and newspapers have seen this effect more so than any other industry. Since the Web hit the American household in the 1990s, print media has been experimenting with strategies for digital distribution and revenue streams, with few conclusive results after well over a decade. The Web has moved the audience’s attention from monolithic news outlets controlled by publishers in favor of social links (Facebook and Twitter) and aggregators (The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Drudge Report.)

This year’s announcement of the iPad seemed to change the publishing industry’s outlook on doing business over the Web. Instead of the hyperlinked, non-linear, short-attention-span, copy/paste-friendly nature of a desktop Web browser, the iPad offers a publishing platform similar to their paper product – with an iPad app, the publisher has verticalized control of available content, its layout, navigation experience, and – most importantly – revenue generation methods.

On October 15, the Times released “NYTimes for iPad,” (iTunes Link) labeling it “free until early 2011.” In testing it, I’ve decided it’s an excellent application in its own right, and could potentially be a great sign for the future of print journalism, but it could be yet another business fumble if the company doesn’t execute the proper balance between advertising, consumer pricing and usability.

Articles appear much as they do in a physical newspaper: article layouts feature columnized text accompanied by graphics and advertisements.

The reading experience on NYTimes 2.0 is the best I’ve ever seen on any screen. The app fully takes advantage of the iPad’s form factor, removing all but the most critical interface elements from the reading experience. The app revolves around two basic views: Article headlines and for a given newspaper section, and the individual article view. It results in a very natural flow for short or extended reading. (I was perfectly comfortable reading the 8,300-word cover article from this week’s New York Times Magazine, which by the way is a thorough political analysis of the Obama Administration’s first two years.) The app remembers where a reader left off (at least on my multitasking-enabled iPad running iOS 4.2, scheduled for release in November) and provides access to the entire paper. Typefaces are elegant and crisp. Additional features include push notifications for breaking news headlines, basic small/large text size selection (which could have provided more options), and the obligatory social network sharing feature. The only thing I felt lacking was any kind of search functionality.

The worst kind of advertising: pre-roll ads. I won't tolerate these in any app, much less a paid one.

In terms of what I can access for free from now through “early 2011,” it’s great. But the Times has also included a wide range of advertisements peppered throughout the app, which are mostly unobtrusive, with one exception: the pre-roll ad. Occasionally, clicking an article link will first force you to a full-screen advertisement, with a very subtle “skip this ad” button below. This is barely acceptable of a free application, and if it makes it into a paid version of the app, I will ditch the entire thing. Also, some of the ads presented on the side of an article view are a little too “sensitive,” sometime misinterpreting my “page turn” swipe as an ad click. The ads themselves, which I believe are using Apple’s new iAd service, are of good quality and don’t slow the app down.

In terms of the app as it exists today, it’s superb. Whether or not it turns out to be a business success, or of continued utility to readers, depends on several factors:

1. Pricing & advertising balance. The Times must find an effective balance of advertising and consumer pricing that sacrifices neither product quality nor revenue potential.
2. The vitality of Apple’s new iAd product. iAd exhibits Apple’s tendency to exert a high amount of control over its customers’ products. More than one company has abandoned iAd campaigns due to difficulties working with Apple’s demands. By partnering with Apple, newspapers are tying their financial fate to that of an unproven service, as well as conceding a sizable cut to Apple.
3. The overall market penetration of the iPad and similar devices supported in the future. With a starting price of $500, the iPad is solidly in the “luxury device” category. They’re selling quite well despite this fact, but a publication of the New York Times’ scale has to see serious adoption before it has a significant effect on their bottom line.

The New York Times is a source of excellent journalism, and have been patiently waiting for old-style reporting to find its way into the digital age. I really hope they don’t screw up the ads and pricing model for this app, because if they get this right, it could mean very good things for the future of the press.

The debate and confusion is really about the licensing status of custom WordPress themes. WordPress is covered by a copyleft license which requires that works derived from the software be covered by the same free, open source license (specifically, GPL v2.) But “derivative works” is a pretty vague concept, and can be interpreted in many different ways. That’s why WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote the Software Freedom Law Center, some of the most experienced legal experts on libre software issues. They provided a rather comprehensive interpretation of the issue:

“In conclusion, the WordPress themes supplied contain elements that are derivative of WordPress’s copyrighted code. These themes, being collections of distinct works (images, CSS files, PHP files), need not be GPL-licensed as a whole. Rather, the PHP files are subject to the requirements of the GPL while the images and CSS are not. Third-party developers of such themes may apply restrictive copyrights to these elements if they wish.”

This falls in between WordPress developers’ wish that the whole community support libre software and Thesis’ completely closed license. Theme PHP must be GPL-compliant, but the graphics and CSS may be licensed otherwise.

As someone who makes custom themes for clients, I am familiar with the feelings of apprehension about open sourcing some of your work – often done for a client who neither knows nor cares about the finer points of free software principles. The common fear is that by giving away your code, you also give away your business model. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. (Unless your business model depends on every customer abiding by your copyright – a foolish strategy in light of how easy it is to pirate web app source code, not to mention an overvaluation of the originality of your source code) (UPDATE: WordPress’ own Jane Wells points out that it’s even less complicated than this for custom theme work, as you only must publish your source under GPL if the theme itself is publicly distributed.)

The truth is that many companies comply with the GPL, retain their trademarks and licensing rights (including WordPress theme graphics and CSS), and do so to great profits. Google, Apple, Facebook, Red Hat, Novell, and countless others make their GPL source available – as do many other WordPress premium theme makers. You can sell themes as long as your PHP complies with the GPL. Pirates can easily copy the rest of your theme regardless, but embracing the GPL not only complies with copyright law and the license terms, but it supports the ideals that made WordPress possible, and makes the whole community project stronger for everyone. And you don’t have to go out of your way to be financially sustainable while doing so, either. Novell and Red Hat sell their entire OS open source under the GPL, the Mac OS X kernel and UNIX userland is open source, so there is no reason why a WordPress theme can’t be both GPL-compliant and profitable.

In short:

1. Know the license before you use any software
2. REALLY know the license if you plan to make any money by reselling/extending/developing on top of that software
3. Comply with copyright law and license terms
4. Have a business model that relies on your ingenuity and competitive advantages, not on often-disrespected intellectual property laws. If it works for so many on the Fortune 500, it probably can work for your small business.