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

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.

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

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur, led the discussion which included Richard Bennett (research fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation), Larry Downes (fellow of the Stanford Law School Center For Internet & Society), Michael Masnick (CEO and Founder of Techdirt) and Gigi Sohn (CEO and Founder of Public Knowledge, who came in on Skype).

Arts + Labs advisor Andrew Keen writes about copyrights and profit on the web:

Even in the digital world, standards are still necessary and some old rules deserve respect. Creators should still be fairly compensated for their work, and we shouldn't tolerate stealing as the road to profit. And, as much as we love YouTube, we shouldn't countenance the way its founders muscled their way to riches by enabling the online trafficking of stolen videos.

From garage entrepreneurs to mega-millionaires sounds like the quintessential American success story, except that e-mails released recently by a federal judge plainly show that YouTube's magic elixir was theft, not creativity.

Consider the "business strategy" discussions in which the YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, concede that drew the original traffic to their website largely through offering stolen property which, they well knew, radically inflated the value of their site before they flipped it to Google for $1.65 billion.

As Chen wrote in one e-mail: "if you remove the potential copyright infringements "... site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20 percent of what it is."

Read the entire article here.

Rick Carnes opines on the National Broadband Plan:

"The new National Broadband Plan just rolled out by the Federal Communications Commission paints a stunning picture of future opportunities to be delivered by broadband. From education to health care, for environmental sustainability and smarter consumption of energy, and for the opportunity for creative artists to reach audiences around the world, the plan lays out a future of breathtaking possibility.

Faster connections to every American home? I'm all for it. What could be more exciting to songwriters in Nashville than the idea of 100-megabit networks piping music directly into every home in America?

A recent study by the Country Music Association revealed that fully half of country music fans live in areas without broadband access. We applaud the effort to get faster connections for digital music to our fans. Except there's a gaping hole in the FCC plan. I can't find any meaningful ideas for shutting down the digital theft of music and other artistic content that has become a routine and damaging part of life in the Internet age."

Read the entire article here

Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America defends his record as an advocate of artist's rights.

"In a recent article in The Hill Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn questioned why I have taken a position on Net Neutrality "so at odds with individual artists and so in line with Big Media".

I would simply reply that my record in fighting for songwriters and artists is, pardon the expression, public knowledge. I have fought in every major battle for creators' rights since joining the board of the Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) back in 1985.

As SGA vice president I fought alongside the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the American Federation of Musicians to get the Bono Copyright extension passed. Public Knowledge opposed us"

Read the entire article at The Huffington Post.

Songwriters Guild of America president Rock Carnes speaks out against digital theft at The Hill.

Those who devalue intellectual property seem to want a world in which all online content is "free" - even if you have to steal it.   As consumers, we all like a bargain.  But one wonders where the content will come from or who will pay the creator when everything is free.   Even 1970s revolutionary Abbie Hoffman charged $1.95 for his best seller "Steal This Book," and if you took it from a bookstore without paying we called it shoplifting."

Read the entire Op-Ed here.

Keen on Media - Andrew Keen interviews Richard Bennett on Net Neutrality

Who isn't confused by the byzantine complexities of the network neutrality debate? Richard Bennett (bennett.com/), long time network maven and fellow of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), is one of the few experts able to cut through confusion and present the net neutrality debate both accurately and simply. So we caught up with Bennett in Washington DC this week to get his take on where we are and where we are going with net neutrality.

 

Richard Bennett from andrewkeen on Vimeo.