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Pressure points for change

Thursday, October 18, 2007

"Formerly known as", or "known again as" … whatever his correct nomenclature might be these days, the artist I will simply call Prince may well have started something.

He recently made a move we might normally associate with corporations and their lawyers. He threatened those all-pervasive web entities, YouTube, eBay and other big sites, with copyright infringement lawsuits, on the grounds that they offer allegedly pirated videos of him performing.

 

He demanded that YouTube alone take down more than 2,000 such clips that were available at the video-sharing venue. His spokespeople claimed with strong rhetoric (if weaker command of the technicalities) that since YouTube can effectively filter out  pornographers from its site, it should surely be able to filter out non-copyright-holders. Prince also hired his own enforcer - the anti-piracy policing service Web Sheriff, which despite its possibly Arizonan-sounding name is actually based in Britain.

 

Web Sheriff’s managing director, John Giacobbi, has naturally taken the opportunity to tout his business, saying the extent of online piracy has become "ridiculous", encompassing as it does videos, music downloads, bootleg merchandise and unlicensed ringtones.

 

"Someone has to start somewhere,” says Giacobbi, “and we know this will make a serious impact - a hell of a lot of artists are going to follow suit". Giacobbi also represents Moby, the White Stripes band and other music stars, in his cyberspace range-riding.

 

The actions of angry artists may have played their part in yesterday's announcement from Google (owners now of YouTube, of course) that it has a plan to weed out copyrighted videoclips, one that we’ll probably get to know as the Video ID system. It will ask copyright owners to submit their material to a Google database, which will employ embedded content-identifying tags. The owners will tell the web company what they want done whenever the system recognises copyrighted material being uploaded. They can choose to have Google “monetize” the clips and share the revenue, promote the clips or block them altogether.

 

Activist performers like Prince may claim credit for achieving this commercial concession, but the signs were already in the wind over the summer, generated during a real giants’ confrontation – the $1 billion lawsuit suit brought against Google by Viacom (acting for all its content creators, from MTV and VH1 to Paramount Pictures and more).  

 

It was back in July, in an ostensible sideshow to that case (a mere scheduling conference, in fact) that Google’s lawyer Philp Beck outlined a broad blueprint for exactly this new plan.

 

So now, will Viacom drop its case? Probably, in the end. Will Prince? Can’t always tell with him.

 

 

 

TODAY’S A GRIM DAY FOR THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION’S 23,000 employees, as they listen to their Director General Mark Thompson officially tell them that 2,800 of their number – that’s about one in eight - will have their jobs cut.

 

It’s hardly a surprise, since the perplexing and rather arcane matter of funding the BBC has been publicly debated for a long time. And one simple truth lies at the heart of the Corporation’s “vision” (if that’s the right word – “nightmare” is the favored description among many long-established BBC staff).

 

Thompson’s main selling phrase is "fewer, bigger, better" and - without buying into the quality judgment so optimistically tacked on there - I’d say it sums up the way ahead. The BBC will make less programming but attempt more impact across more, and more varied, forms of media. That, like it or not, is the future.

 

 

 

PICTURE THE FOLLOWING SCENE. IT MAY BE HARD to believe, but this really happened, just five days ago …

 

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meets with a delegation of bold, outspoken critics of the President, and afterwards she briefs a select group of reporters. She expresses to the reporters her understanding and support for the President’s critics, going on to say with emphasis:

 

“In any country if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development”.

 

Yes, she said that. But where? Actually, in Moscow.

 

And yes, the “any one president” she was talking about was Vladimir Putin. But her phrasing (as usual, careful and gingerish) certainly got my attention – and she did say “in any country”, didn’t she?