economy

From Torrentfreak.com

In an attempt to connect filmmakers with the distribution power of the file-sharing community, Steal This Film director Jamie King has launched VODO. The project includes partners well known to the file-sharing community like Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, Miro, Vuze and Frostwire, who have pledged to promote the works of VODO films.

Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf (Harvard Business School) have a paper out in which they examine whether file sharing (and thus a weaker copyright) does negatively impact on incentives to create, release and market cultural works. Their answer is no (to the extent that data is available). Both for empirical reasons (considerably more music, books, and films have been released in 2007 and in 2000) and theoretical reasons (substitutes vs complements; artistic motivations vs financial motivations).

The NYT has an article that the Taliban's financial resources have been diversifying. Most interestingly, their number one source of money is no longer drug-related (though that is still important) but stems from donations.

NYT has an article on the fears of the book industry about e-book piracy. There are numerous parallels to the music industry, including that the business model is under pressure even without piracy. The music industry remains dismal.

NYT has a short note that a deal between Google/YouTube and Warner Brothers has been reached. Terms are not disclosed, but it ends the row that had forced Youtube to remove all WB contents from its site last December. According to Business Week:

NYT has an interesting article on the multi-year competition to come up with better recommendation algorithm, where the winner won one million $. Two things are worth mentioning. Netflix CEO summed it up as this: "You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour." Not only that, they are also motivated, because self-selected.

But, for companies taking part in the challenge may be worth it, even without winning.

CNet has this story, highlighting the two way processes of digitization and materlialization

An attempt to implement a street-performer protocol type platform for music.
http://sellyourrights.com/. Still in closed beta, but I'm not overly optimististic that this will work.
See also futurezone article.

The register has a story on an analyst's estimate (whatever that's worth these days) that youtube will be losing close to half a billion $ this year. They take this as an indication that the ad model is not working. After discussing two reasons why this might be the case -- either Google doesn't know how to do it (unlikely) or the model is fundamentally broken (more likely) -- they come up with an option for Google to make money out of youtube.