Pretty full room this morning! We're starting out discussing Music, Television and New Media today. How much relevance will this have for this audience, I wonder. The description indicates that it will focus on current uncertainties and future trends in the digital delivery of media and entertainment. Redistribution of power throughout the channels of delivery should be driving new approaches in the content industries and I can't help but wonder if any of these gentlemen can demonstrate success with any of the approaches in place in the entertainment content sector. (Sorry, that was my own little editorial snark. We return you now to formal journalistic practices....)

Jim Griffin of OneHouse LLC is the first speaker. He suggests that we should learn from all of their mistakes in the music industry (for example, "don't sue your customers" would be a good beginning.). There is no one business model; you have to choose what's best for your particular clientele or customer basis. He is referencing Gutenberg as a starting point and notes a story that Gutenburg was a pirate who was ripping off the Pope (now, there's a story I want to verify for later use and/or reference).

It is now voluntary to pay for music, according to Griffin, perhaps not morally or legally but technology has changed the economics for those in this industry. Scholarly publishing may not be quite in the same boat but he suggests that it's only a matter of time. Not only is it voluntary to pay now, but it will be even more of a voluntary act next year and even more in ten years. It's just the consequence of the progress in computing.

He uses the word - bionomic -- the rising tide of change in distribution means that the flow naturally finds the shortest route through which to flow. Depending on a deus ex machina is a really bad business model. And yet the music industry is learning that there is no such device on the verge of saving them. It's an untenable situation - if payment is voluntary, there will be a detrimental impact on the creative industries. Copyright is at best what we wish were true. If you depend on copyright to save your business, you're screwed (those were his precise words). Copyright has become the concept of copy-risk; we can't empower you to stop that copying that is a running part of our world of networks. Not surprisingly the licensing segment of the music industry is growing, whereas the revenue from sales of specific discrete artifacts is shrinking.

(1) He counsels moving to service models for distribution, maximizing the size of the crowd that can hear your music but not trying to control who can hear your your music.

(2) Do not look to the government to solve your problems

(3) You'll do better to address the motivation behind piracy as opposed to trying to attach the mechanism for piracy.

(there was something else but I missed it).

He was actually quite lively and entertaining.

Next speaker up is Peter Kaufman of Intelligent Television. (1) Everyone here is a producer of screen based media, based on every computer act we perform. (2) We are all involved in peer production. We draw upon the behaviors and talents of those who have gone before. (3) The cult of the amateur is actually a sum benefit to scholarship. Everyone can contribute and should do so to the assemblage of knowledge through Wikipedia, etc. (4) TV and video statistics; 20% of all Internet users watch or download a video online everyday. This statistic will grow and the demand for video in the educational sector alone will be exploding in size. Online video is also where the money is, a ten billion dollar business in 2010. This is growing in the STM sector. (5) The most important article anywhere in the past five years was Michael Jenson's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the new metrics of scholarly authority. It's a demand for new business models. We can succeed by competing on computability, making our content feedable into and findable via the online environment. This viewpoint is confirmed by various Wall Street gurus and consulting research firms. Publishers should be spreading their content across multiple partner platforms, he references CBS as a good example of how this is done. His organization has been funded to spend the next three years in creating an educational video studio; there will be commercial stakeholders, government support, and others working to develop this. Video producers and scholarly publishers have much to learn from each other. He references a report,"Reinventing scholarly communication", from USC published last month -- track this down and see what is said. References the success of students retention of content in experiement where they had to read a paper in 8 minutes vs. watching a video cast of the same content for 8 minutes. The latter group outperformed the former in terms of retential and this has long term significance.

Next up is Charles Nesson, Harvard Law professor and founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He's discussing an experiment in Second Life, and the use of avatars by students on a Harvard Law School like island in that environment. He taught a course in a regular classroom which was taped and then subsequently streamed as a video to the students in Second Life. Had some significant advantages -- he notes that the visual judgements that get erased by the self selected avatars impacted on the group dynamics. He suggests that this is a signficant point in the creation of education communities, facilitating greater comfort levels in discussion and other exchanges. He suggests that the Second Life experience can enhance and supplement what goes on in a face to face classroom. Feedback on projects, mock trial jperformances are improved through the use of Second Life. He considers this is just a suggestion for the future. Second Life isn't scaleable in many respects at present, but the vision is there that could vastly enhance distance learning.

He now turns to online Poker games. He advises his students to learn Poker because understanding a problem from your adversary's point of view is key to mastering courtroom evidentiary skills. He has become an addict of Poker as a development and educational tool on the basis of how it drives growth on the Web. Tying the two together, he points out that learning skills employed in online poker by a widely diverse population is a way of developing strategic skills. Subtlety and perception are honed by the activity.

Abruptly he reverts to the first gentleman's presention (Jim Griffin) and calls for scholarly publishers to essentially step up to the plate and figure out a new business model. He says that the current environment of the open Web isn't suitable to real scholarship because it is so frequently ephemeral; can't rely on it, can't cite it, etc. He isn't pounding the table but I do get a sense that he feels strongly about this.

He believes that the ways in which players interact in an online game of poker may hold the keys for publishers trying to migrate their content into environments that exist in the interests of education and research.

We're over to Q&A. How does Griffin think about DRM; he says it's not about locks and keys. The players should focus on how you get paid for the cotnent; you manage rights well when you get paid for your intellectual goods. If you want to make money, start a relationship that goes on forever. (He used a very colorful presentation that is inappropriate to a written account here just on the basis of language alone. Griffin is wonderfully pungent in his delivery. But clearly he's a fairly hard-headed business man.) Granularity is the enemy of creativity and artistic content; bundling is better for the copyright industries. He suggests that the ideal is that content should not be free but it should feel free at the moment of use. Google feels free but they are pulling down bundles of money.

Professor Nesson backs Griffin up by suggesting that MIT courseware is of tremendous value even as it is given away. The courses have become better, it's a great recruiting tool, and other universities are keeping a close watch on it in order to see how they can replicate it for their own institutions.