post note added 12 04 11: I leave all my posts up for both me and anyone following. As a breadcrumb trail they mark developments over time that are harder to see at any one moment. Looking back the development of today's successful social media models was a fast moving series of events business-wise. It was only well after these events I discuss below that the "facing"issue became aparent. That is not a reference to any one company, rather the issue of identifying primary customers and acting accordingly. This took years for me to see clearly. I begin to clearly define it in the two posts of October and November 2011 titled About-Face and About Face Part II (a basic structural change). I hope you will read them as, together, they are much shorter than this one post.
Update: Copyright battles heat up on Web Washington Post today 8 02 08
...""People are moving online and there are going to be more questions raised about how moving things online subjects people to copyright," he said. "The Internet works through copying things, that's just how digital technology works."
As a result, copyright law is coming into play much more than it once did. "Copyright law used to be this obscure thing that only publishers were interested in," Siy said. "It's something that now affects everyone. When you change copyright law now, it affects everybody who owns a PC." ...
These issues today seem different from Google Viacom but as the quote suggests, they are not really. How we share anew in the digital environment and create new levels of productive social experience is what this is all about. In order to do this we'll need to re-write the social contracts forged by the previous two generations and start over digitally speaking. The Boomers and the Millenials will clash hard as this generational rift prepares us for what is next. This is not theory. This is a secular pattern of generational change playing out one more time. See the category of posts The (industrial) (r)evolution of media for lots more factors in this process. Dave 8 02 08
I was sure there would be more complaints like this and suspect many more will follow. In a Bloomberg blurb this AM the Italian company headed by Italy's former leader (no less), the technological blame game was intensified. Why does this matter to all media executives? It does. (short read follows)
Mediaset Says It's Suing Google, YouTube, Seeking EU500 Million
"Google and YouTube allegedly carried out the ``illegal distribution and commercial use of audio and video files'' owned by Mediaset, the Milan-based company said in an e-mailed statement today."...
The recent post about Viacom's Google You Tube suit (a year later) and what it tells us about where media is going is growing in terms of relevance. What are the big issues? Choice, directed by the consumer, is the overarching trend. Following that are technology and how it gets used is shaped by the developing social mood. That is very long term stuff and what this site is about at its core. More immediate term issues are related to how musicians and labels will either adapt of die? Everyone writing about this seems to be engaged in a gold rush mentality. Be the first to say how the record-radio business will get past these new concerns and you can sell your gold in town for lots and lots of money. That's not how it going to go, sorry.
The key to seeing media right now is in seeing why people are changing. It sounds like that first social science class I took in college...kinda soft (science) right? The root trend borrows insights from how market technicians use math to define behavioral implications of trends and then that is extended for marketers to use in the form of socionomics. I try not to use the academic sounding phrases in this media discussion but they are there to be used. The point is that this social science is hard science in the world of markets. The study and understanding of markets are behavioral science. Why not share the riches? The problem is that each speak two different languages. This blog is a translation of those languages. It matters to marketers and in the case of this story, media execs should dial in to the big picture of what the market's increasingly are demanding. The weekly short term demands will never go away but, until you see the big picture and make sure your efforts are in tune with larger trending forces, then all that frantic day to day stuff may not mean much. If your media enterprise is not in tune with the big picture trends it will die off slowly or quickly. An enterprise serves it market whether it is a paper stand or a content company.
As for this suit? If Tiffany's was told to police their own brand to keep counterfeiters in check on the web, I do not see why Google should have to police it users for using bits of Viacom's or any other content company's product. What do you think? Forget the past and remember technology has already changed us. There is no going back. Content, most of it anyway, is perishable. If something is broadcast to all for free using advertising as the initial source of funding, what is the responsibility of the content company for their own product? What is the responsibility of the distributor of that content. This is why these two endeavors will soon split and both be specialized in order to make them even more efficient. Here are a few links to this subject recently.
What the Google-YouTube suits by Viacom are telling us (a year later) about where media is going
Social media is about Choice, small groups, and eventually, specialization -- Why Does this matter to marketers?
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