hyalineskies

Two months ago, hundreds protested in front of the developers and executives of Linden Lab, a small San Francisco startup. The Second Life virtual world, known to its regular users as “The Grid,” had previously lived in a virtual intellectual property utopia, with full control over their in-game created objects. Lives became made around Second Life; some users made full-time jobs out of virtual realty, consulting, or content creation. Such a system was made possible by Linden Lab’s “you made it, it’s yours” philosophy toward IP: they specifically configured the system such that in-game objects modelled real-life objects, disabling the ability to copy objects outright. With the biggest facilitator of digital piracy out of the way - the ability to copy at near-zero marginal cost - the Second Life economy could operate much like any traditional one.

When an open-source library called libsecondlife hit the scene, few seemed to have taken notice. The library, reverse-engineered from Linden Lab’s proprietary client, seemed little more than a programmer’s novelty: incapable of rendering the complete SL world at first, libsecondlife was simply a hassle to anyone who wasn’t an alpha-geek. This perception soon changed; due to the freely-available source code, a developer’s utility called CopyBot made its way online in a modified form, leading to the mass protests against the libsecondlife team and Linden Lab.

CopyBot was originally a tool allowing Second Life developers to make local copies of any constructed in-game object, more for backup purposes than anything else, as most content created resides permanently on the Grid. A rather dubious developer, however, modified CopyBot to literally copy any and all Second Life objects without permission, regardless of protection status in the official client. With CopyBot, Second Life lost its primary intellectual property protection, forcing the Second Life digital content into the easily-traded sphere normally witnessed online.

User backlash was surprisingly fierce. Moopf Murray, an in-game vendor of, well, vending machines, sold his machines to a few profiteers who stacked the machines with links to download the cracked CopyBot. Although the Second Life interface distinguishes an object’s creator and owner, much as the distinction is made in real life, Murray was flooded with threats and angry IMs. One angry user had him reported to Linden Lab’s abuse department. When Linden Lab developers eventually congregated to make an official statement in-game, they were met with avatars wielding virtual pickets and floating billboard protesting the company. Linden Lab developers eventually banned many using the tool. The lead development team of libsecondlife also became a casualty of CopyBot, voluntarily resigning from their positions.

Shortly after the CopyBot scandal, I met Aimee Weber, known to her real-life colleagues as Alyssa LaRoche. Weber, a 26-year-old web consultant from the New York City area, left her day job at an undisclosed, large web consultancy to focus full-time on content creation. Now, as director of Aimee Weber Virtual Content Creation, which employs texture developers and SL script developers, Weber travels from corporation to corporation, helping trendy companies – or those who want to be trendy – in Second Life.

Weber is exactly the type of person that CopyBot threatened to hurt the most: with a company and livelihood resting upon the ability to sell goods (Weber’s *PREEN* clothing line is wildly popular with Second Life’s digital denizens,) an application that broke the copy protection rules could bring a real-world company into an equally real bankruptcy.

A winged avatar that looks like she’d belong more in a 90’s Manhattan nightclub dancing to DJ Keoki than an office, Weber is surprisingly professional. Weber toured me around her latest project for the NOAA (yes, a federal agency,) weeks before its actual release. As I stood on her interactive weather map, which displays polygonal clouds and rain over a picture of North America in real-time, Weber seemed less than scared about the dangers of CopyBot. “I am a little excited right now because in the New York [City] area, where I live, there is a tornado warning,” Weber said. “and I have scripted this map to make tornados!”

A little while later, after a trip to a tsunami exhibit and a ride on a virtual hurricane survey plane, I confronted Aimee on issues of IP and copy protection. What if someone could clone the NOAA’s expensive island elsewhere on the grid (which, although an impossibility with the original CopyBot version, could be eventually implemented?) What if all of her work could be instantly devalued by an open-source script?

“I think that is sure to happen,” Weber said. “It changes the way we do business.”

The viral time scale

Malcolm Gladwell’s 1997 essay The Coolhunt sparked a new wave of branding and research in the marketing world, turning the customer into creator, shotgunning products to people on the street rather than maintaining a statistical approach to doing business. In his essay, Gladwell follows two industry “coolhunters” — both inaccessibly cool in their own right — through the streets of Los Angeles and The Bronx in search of what they called innovators, those so far out of the trend landscape that they were setting the trends for everyone else. Underneath the innovators was a hierarchy of trend adoption: the early adopters, who caught on fast, the late adopters, who were only doing it after some considered it “uncool,” well into the mainstream. Meanwhile, some groups also lie outside of the trend structure: namely, the refuseniks, who absolutely refuse to join a trend even though they know of its existence, as well as the clueless, who, well, really don’t get it.

Since the beginning of our accelerated, social information age, many have questioned whether or not this trend structure can really hold true in any visible state. How can such a hierarchy be so obvious when information becomes more niche, more peer-to-peer? Is it even possible to find the innovators anymore as the Web’s signal-to-noise ratio plummets in the face of more content creators? Is it possible to discern early and late adopters from one another when adoption cycles can span hours or days instead of weeks or months?

When trend hierarchy is examined at such a level, the mathematics of defining the social strata of cool are expansive and uncertain. However complex, the hierarchy does hold on the macroscale: one just needs to look at the RIAA and MPAA’s refusenik policy toward single downloads, DRM, and Internet-as-viable-sales-medium issues from the original Napster to iTunes, or, on the other side of the trend spectrum, the innovation Jesse James Garrett called AJAX which took the web development world by storm.

While the coolhunt may seem to hold weight in these specific cases, the criticism of a viral trend’s inability to be accurately traced holds true. The YouTube, IM- and blog-backboned viral economy only highlights the innovator, be it Tom Dickson or Lasse Gjertsen, while video views and replies - in this case, the adoption of the content - skyrocket with broadband connectivity and cultural popularity. In 1997’s coolhunt, adoption happened at easily traceable rates, with fairly marked early/late adoption; in the case of an Internet-based meme, we only see the few stragglers showing up to the trend a few months (and few million views) late.

The viral qualities of online media are not responsible for destroying trend hierarchy; rather, the quick-publish, quick-access format makes older corporate bodies seem like refuseniks or the clueless. RIAA executives, ever fighting the trends of digital piracy and even digital music sales, seem like those just not in on this futuristic form of media distribution. The “they just don’t get it” philosophy - that is, labelling big business as the clueless - is an easy argument for the independent writers and developers used to thought at the speed of fibre optic cables. The piracy model has been common to all of us for years (anyone remember Scour Media Agent or Hotline?) The RIAA and huge mainstream media creators of all types, where trend analysis is relegated to the marketing division, have had much greater issues with adaptation due to bureaucracy and traditionalism than the innovators and early adopters have had. We call them the clueless, and refuseniks they certainly seem to be, but the seemingly stupid actions of big business have more to do with enterprise-level time scale disparities rather than any refusenik philosophy.

David versus Goliath

“It IS the way it is,” Weber emphasised as we stood on the digital tarmac of her NOAA plane. Weber, unlike the CEOs of yesteryear, worked in a vertical market where the time scale worked on production cycles of days, not months or years. Weber is, for our purposes, an innovator. Her understanding of the cutting edge digital industry has little to do with the technicalities of Second Life or even the Internet in general; instead, Weber is, at little more than an hour’s notice, ready to change absolutely everything her and her studio does as a small business — from operational systems all the way to culture — in the wake of an intellectual property disaster. It comes without excessive research and reports, investigation and refusenik philosophies to protect existing capital; Weber knows that the end result of failing to adapt fast enough will bring down the whole operation. The time scale of technology does not allow her to think for years in the event of a crisis; instead, all corporate inertia must be forced in another direction, the risk hopefully being hedged by immediate action in the short term. What could be a corporate doomsday is diverted by decisive (if not 100 percent profitable) action.

With the RIAA, for example, the problem lies less in their stubbornness to adapt to the nightmare they are presented with; rather, the problem lies in their inability to adapt fast enough. The RIAA is little more than an abstraction of already mammoth organisations into a larger organisation within itself, a representative, cartel-like group of megacorporations, an oligopoly where every corporation works with their own competitive strategies both with and against one another simultaneously. The RIAA has witnessed its doomsday with the rise of Napster in 2000, and their own doomsday clock is now some seven years past midnight.

What, however, could the RIAA possibly do? Being an organisation of organisations, the RIAA has little effective power over its sovereign members who view the association as a way to establish some, but not all, industry standards, of which the standards do not include DRM policies or legal frameworks for Internet music markets. From the perspective of big, bureaucratic music operations such as Bertelsmann Music Group or Warner Music Group, the costs of fighting online piracy and locking digital rights down into an increasingly user-oppressive format are drastically lower than the retooling of their industry philosophy to accept piracy as a fact of life. Because of this, losses to piracy be damned, it’s profitable for the music industry to lobby and litigate. In the trend hierarchy, it’s the big media companies that are pushing the RIAA in its current legal direction, the major players of the industry actively choosing the refusenik role as it is the best course of action that they can see financially. It has very little to do with this blogger-conceived notion that the RIAA and its member groups are somehow clueless.

Aimee Weber, on the other hand, the small content creator who caters to big corporations (and, ironically, has Warner Music Group as a customer,) has a much different tactic since choosing to refuse is financial suicide. The market, too vertical to withstand a serious intellectual property disaster, would utterly fail under the big-business model. Because of this, Weber, bloggers, and other indie developers — all the e-critics of big music business — are forced into adaptation if profitability means anything. It’s a way of life; it just makes sense to adapt and adapt quickly.

While the big four labels happily play refusenik, trying to retard the online distribution sphere with heavy DRM and lawsuits, independent labels have quickly changed their models to suit the industry force. eMusic, a subscription-based online music store, allows unrestricted MP3 downloads; nearly all of their content comes from independent labels as the big four actively refusing to do business with the company. eMusic’s figures are responding as well: they’re currently second in the digital sales hierarchy, beating out major-label-approved offerings such as Napster, which uses the same subscription model plus restrictive DRM. eMusic, with its array of independent labels, switched to a revolutionary business model to gain profitability and a competitive advantage, a power that their small business systems have over larger media institutions. eMusic is simply another living example that an independent production association, with time scales short and management systems lean, has a gigantic competitive leverage in the Internet market.

Turning back the doomsday clock

Big media corporations, be it the big four in music or a journalism conglomerate such as McClatchy, know that the small creator is succeeding. The corporate inertia held within the mass of an enterprise-class business takes too long to bleed off into the atmosphere as the nimble independents change direction.

Some of the big companies have already reached this goal. A fresh web team at NYTimes.com has changed the grey lady into one of the best news sources on the Web, leveraging the institutions traditional strengths of solid reporting, great writing, and reader trust/loyalty into a Web-savvy digital version backed by social media tools such as NYT blogs and RSS feeds. On a much larger scale, the massive NBC Universal signed a deal with YouTube after spending the beginning of 2006 slapping the video site with copyright infringement notices. Now, NBC’s content, reinforced with SNL hilarity and celebrity chic, has rocketed a video posted in late December to YouTube’s Most Viewed of All Time, taking back the eyes of viewers from restless amateurs. Mainstream media of all sorts is proving that its core deliverable content is far from obsolete in the Information Age.

Once the big media corporation can stop their bureaucratic freight train of suit-and-tie traditionalism (a period that takes months, if not years,) it seems that their doomsday can quickly be diverted. Their adaptability, although slow on the independent’s time scale, can put them into the Internet’s cultural influence and content innovation. Of course, once the mainstream gets involved in the activities of the independent, a social content free-for-all occurs as the mainstream swats at the fast-reacting independents while simultaneously competing against other big media corporations. This positive feedback loop of competition can, in the end, improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the social media site: most likely, the best content — as well as most of the upper part of the content distribution tail — will be from popular sources committed to good content due to competition. Yes, having the big corporations in the mix may actually help social media.

For a few of the media giants, it’s five minutes to midnight again. For everyone else, maybe it’s time that corporate shareholders and boards of directors start taking a cue from the independent: it’s time to “lean out” that bureaucracy and build a quicker, faster conglomerate. Currently, the big four (as well as many movie houses) are still barreling into refusenik territory to defend profitability instead of capturing what may be possible online, some 122,000 revolutions of the doomsday clock ahead. Maybe, in the case of these corporations, an entirely different sort of revolution is necessary.