The ArtLab

Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen will be the closing luncheon speaker at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum, scheduled for August 22nd - August 24th.  Keen will offer remarks on "The Creative Economy or a Tragedy of the Creative Commons?" focusing on the importance of intellectual property rights for the Internet and the possible consequences if we lack systems to enforce such rights.  He will join other influential industry leaders and policy experts at the event to discuss key issues affecting innovation in the technology and communications sectors. 

The Aspen Forum will be held at the St. Regis Aspen Resort, August 22nd - 24th.  To register, please visit www.techpolicyinstitute.org/aspen2010. For additional information, please contact Jane Creel at jcreel@techpolicyinstitute.org. Members of the press can contact Amy Smorodin at asmorodin@techpolicyinstitute.org

Arts + Labs Advisor Rick Carnes speaks before the House Small Business Committee.

By Mike McCurry and Mark McKinnon

Amazon's Paul Misener has interrupted the hottest of Washington summers with a cool breeze of rationality in the net neutrality debate.  Writing today on CNet, Mr. Misener mapped out what he calls a "a win-win-win" solution that will make consumers, net operators, and content providers alike better off.  While we don't agree with every particular, it suggests to us agreement is possible.

Mr. Misener notes that the current impasse discourages investment and innovation to everybody's detriment especially at a time of general economic weakness:

"The legal/regulatory uncertainties have, understandably, dissuaded network operators from making investments in new technologies and services that might subsequently be found to violate Net neutrality. Unfortunately, some observers seem to think that this uncertainty hurts only the network operators and their suppliers, but consumers and content providers also are suffering, albeit unwittingly, from the lack of new services that might otherwise be available."

We also are pleased that Mr. Misener parallels our own suggestions that the goal of any anti-discrimination rule is to protect the user experience, and that the best test of any proposed new services is whether or not they harm other users.  As he explains:

"If paid performance enhancement for some content is equally available and does not degrade the performance of other content, then it should be permissible."

Arts+Labs hopes Mr. Misener's commentary stimulates others to find a peace settlement in this long debate.  It seems to us that opening the door to new investment and innovation that improves online performance is a pretty good idea that will help enable content providers to access new services and test new business models for delivering high quality and legal content to consumers.

Ending this fight also would put the focus back on such fundamental issues as universal connectivity and the continued development of safe, legal and innovative online content and applications.

by Andrew Keen

The best investors are learners rather than teachers. Micro venture capitalist Chris Sacca is one of Silicon Valley's most thoughtful learners - a former lawyer and failed entrepreneur, once Head of Special Initiatives at Google, an early investor in Twitter with his own 1.3 million person following, a 2009 TechCrunch Crunchie Award nomination for Best Angel Investor, an Obama insider and activist, a keen bicyclist and skier, and the owner of the most colorful collection of cowboy shirts in the Valley.

I first met Chris a couple of years ago at the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford, an event in which the best minds of the Valley educate Oxford students about technology innovation and business creativity. What I liked about him then, as now, was his pugnacious humility, his very vivid memories of failure and poverty, his uniquely American optimism, and his unashamed commitment to global social justice.

The Wall Street Journal cited Sacca as "possibly the most influential businessman in America". But what they forgot to add was that he's also amongst the most provocative businessman in this country - a perennial start-up guy who can cram more ideas into a five minute interview than most corporate execs can come up with in a lifetime.

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by Andrew Keen

Even for Silicon Valley, Andy Kessler is a sickeningly accomplished guy. Moving out to San Francisco in 1993, Kessler co-founded Velocity Capital where, between 1996 and 2001, he transformed $100 million into $1 billion. Not satisfied with being filthy rich, Kessler then went onto becoming famous - publishing four non-fiction books between 2003 ad 2006, including his highly entertaining short history of digital technology, the personal computer and the Internet: How We Got Here: A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer. And now Kessler has just come out with his first published fiction, an irreverent novel about artificial intelligence called Grumby which Michael Lewis called "deliciously naughty".

So who better to talk about productivity, technology and investment than Kessler, a guy who knows better than most how we got to where we are in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Main Street. In coming into our Techcrunch studios, Andy Kessler not only proved that he existed, but also confirmed that he has a highly controversial take on technological innovation, smart investment, job destruction and how entrepreneurs really create of wealth.

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by Andrew Keen

If the Web 2.0 age of the first decade of the 21^st century was about user-generated-content, the Social Media age of the second decade of the century is about the way in which technology is changing our lives. Yesterday's Web 2.0 was all about data; today's social media is all about people.

An increasingly collaborative and social Internet appears - at least to those who believe in its efficacy - to be becoming the vehicle with both society and business can be radically transformed.

Two important books published last month, Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Charlene Li's Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead both make this point eloquently.  In his Cognitive Surplus, Shirky - who teaches at New York University and is the author of the 2007 hit Here Comes Everybody - argues that the collapse of a centralized mass media ecosystem frees us up from watching television and allows us to become more creative and generous citizens. Li - the Founder of the Altimeter Group and the coauthor of the 2008 bestselling Groundswell - argues that social media technology is enabling business leaders to make their companies more effective, decisive and thus profitable.

So is social media really revolutionizing the world? I invited both Li and Shirky onto the second episode of my show to learn more about these two new books and get each of their visions of about how, exactly, the Internet is radically transforming business, society and culture.

Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen talks with Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and author of You Are Not a Gadget, about the purpose, and potential problems, of life in an increasingly digital world.

Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen chats with Nicholas Carr about the Internet and it's impact on our minds.

Vice President Joe Biden recently had some strong words for file sharers:

We used to have a problem in this town saying this,"But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It's smash and grab. It ain't no different than smashing a window at Tiffany's and grabbing [merchandise]."

The statement comes in the wake of the Obama administration's introduction of its plan to protect intellectual property.  The plan is outlined in a report by Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator.  The report contains more than 33 recommendations.

Biden continued:

;"This is not just about the new 'Robin Hood' movie, it's not just about creative talent...It's about whether a Kevlar [bulletproof] vest we are putting on some guy and whether it works or not."

Read more about it at C-Net.

Arts + Labs applauds The Obama administration's active position in the protection of intellectual property.

Arts + labs advisor Andrew Keen discusses media innovation:

I had dinner last month in San Francisco with a cultural rebel, a young Internet activist friend of mine with fashionably subversive views about media. We dined South of Market, and after we'd polished off a bottle of Burgundy, I could tell he wanted to shock me.

"You know, I'm against intellectual property. My generation is never going to pay for content again," he said, raising his empty wine glass and smiling at me. "Big media is bad media. Your world is finished."

Whereas in the '60s, the divisive generational issues were free love and marijuana and Vietnam, today the great culture war between the young (him) and the old (me) is the economic and cultural value of traditional intellectual content. Members of my analog generation remain comfortable paying for their newspapers, books, movies and music. But many of his digital generation, having grown up on the cornucopian commons of free online content and semi-legal piracy, have been unwilling to spend money subsidizing what they consider to be obsolete large media companies.

"So how should journalists or creative artists be paid?" I asked.

And that, of course, is the crux of the problem. If hardly anyone younger than 50 has been paying for content on the Internet, and online advertising is failing to subsidize content (even YouTube is still struggling to make money), how does any media company - big or small, good or evil - survive?

But here is where he really surprised me. Rather than dance around my question, he actually had an answer, a solution that really shocked me and would, no doubt, shock most Americans with faith in the efficacy of the free market.

"The government is the solution," he said. "Media must be nationalized. We need the government to invest in high-quality journalism and in online culture."

Unfortunately, the young activist isn't alone in turning to Washington, D.C., to subsidize free media. More and more Internet radicals now see a government takeover as the solution to the economic crisis of traditional media. Take, for example, Free Press, a Washington group that promotes network neutrality and recently has come out in favor of large-scale government subsidization of online journalism. Indeed, at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City two weeks ago, I debated Josh Silver, president of Free Press, who called for an enormous government investment in a BBC-style American public broadcasting company.

Read the entire article here