Copy Protection

David Pogue has an interesting article about copy protection on the Kindle and other eBook readers. He relates the current state of digital books to what the music industry went through a couple of years ago.  When music first went main-stream digital, it was locked down with DRM.  Then, as consumers complained, DRM went away.  Well, now we’re on the same ride with eBooks; the Kindle has these books locked down with DRM.  Not only does that restrict how you work with the file, Amazon can even remove your book from your library.  In all, same story, smaller market.  And this got me thinking about copy protection in general.
I work for a copy that makes digital stuff. All we do is code and edit little text files, compile them into an “application” and sell it on the web. So, there are 200 people that work and live by bytes of data being sold.  Nothing we make or do exists in the “real world”.  Do we have piracy issues? You bet! Doesn’t take a genius to find a copy of our product available on the web. Yet, we make money. In fact, you could argue we make more money than most successful musicians (it just takes a little more overhead for each release).
So, if piracy is real and our company still flourishes and grows and David Progue still sells books and Taylor Swift still sells CDs and MP3 downloads… what harm is piracy doing?
I think it would be interesting to do a psychological analysis on people that buy a digital product versus pirating it. And then, I’d like to see what happens to people as they use this digital copy over the next week, month, year. I have a hunch that there is a very real difference in how people interact with digital goods that have been purchased versus those that have been “acquired”. And, I think it all has to do with how people value objects.  This is a very meta-physical/philosophical/Kantian way of looking at piracy, but I am curious what people think of things that have been pirated.  Do they still have value?  They must have enough value you that people “want them”.  But, after you get something for free, does is still have the value assigned to it before you pirated it (e.g. $0.99 for music, $1000.00 for some software, etc.)?

Become a Fan

Facebook started pushing a new feature a little while ago that let’s you share “you’re a fan” of something on a personal blog or website.  I think Facebook is doing a good job at trying to connect what you have in Facebook to what you might have outside of Facebook (i.e. a blog).

That’s not to say that I think that Facebook couldn’t do better, but I think the more that companies can connect their Facebook presence with the rest of the internet the greater their influence will be in social media.

And, speaking of benefiting, I think that SurveyGizmo is now one of my most favorite tools.  I’m excited to highlight what I’m doing with their tool in a later post (it’s kind of hush-hush right now).

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Emily McQueen Breaks Records, Wins Races, and Takes Care of Business

I really have an amazing wife.  Today we ran the St. George Marathon.  She started at 6:40 in her racing wheelchair and I started somewhere around 6:50 am.  I finished the race, but this isn’t about me, it’s about Emily.  She set a new course record for this marathon in the wheelchair division and qualified for the Boston marathon.  To qualify for Boston she had to finish in 2 hours and 25 minutes, she smoked that time by coming in at 1 hour and 57 minutes.  Do realize how fast that is?  A marathon is 26.2 miles; she kept an overall pace of 4 minutes and 28 seconds a mile!  I’ll say it for you, “holy crap!”

So, like I said, I have an amazing wife.  Pictures will come soon and there’s more to tell, but feel free to email Emily and tell her how great she is.  Her emails is emcqueen at gmail dot com.

Sounds of Saturday

Boys are crazy.  It’s a constant stream of noise and hustling.  The truth is, the poor things are probably bored, but I can’t keep up with them or keep them entertained.  So, sometimes I resort to just letting them go crazy.  And, this is what it usually looks like:

Clean Slate

There really isn’t anything as stressful as changing blog platforms.  I thought I wouldn’t have a problem taking my last blog (built on BlogEngine.Net) and pulling the contents into this new WordPress blog, because there seemed to be enough information about using BlogML to make the switch.  But, it didn’t work.  So, I’m left with a completely clean slate.

So, I’ve decided to embrace this clean slate with a new clean theme.  (I love this design!)

If there is a post that you’re looking for and haven’t found yet, let me know.  I can probably resurrect individual posts from a backup I made of the site, but doing a complete transfer of all the old site’s content seems like a long and painful process.

So, with this clean slate, is there anything else you’d like changed in this blog?  More video?  More pictures?  More dramatic prose?  I know there’s only like three people that have ever ‘regularly’ comment (you know who you are Jethro, Gail, and Tom), so I don’t expect a lot of direction, but every little thing helps.