Musings of a VC in NYC

The Open Internet and the 2012 Election

Engine Advocacy and NY Tech Meetup are hosting a conversation next Thursday, Oct 25th, from 6pm to 7:30pm, at the NYU Stern School about The Open Internet and the 2012 Election.

They've asked me to participate in this conversation along with Clay Shirky and Susan Crawford. Clay should not be a new name to this community. But if you don't know who Clay is, you can read about him here. Susan was President Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy for the early part of his first term. You can read more about her here.

Tickets are $10/person and the event is roughly half sold as of 6:45am today. If you want to attend you can get a ticket here.

I am big fans of Clay and Susan, and equally thrilled to support Engine Advocacy and NY Tech Meetup. So I'm looking forward to this event. And of course the topic is timely and important. I hope to see you there next Thursday.

Video Of The Week

I was walking through Union Square this past week and I bumped into my friend Clay Shirky. We had a nice chat and I got to thinking that I ought to catch up on his talks and writing. So I did that over the past few days and came across this Ted Talk from this past summer.

It's called "How the Internet will (one day) transform government."

It's great. I hope you like it.

Free Speech

Our President gave an important speech yesterday at the UN. It was a speech about speech. Free speech. This is a topic that gets me going. I have been investing in the tools of self expression and free speech for close to twenty years now. I know how powerful they are and I also know that they can be used by haters and trouble makers just as easily as they can be used for good.

Here at AVC, I have tried to cultivate a forum where all opinions are welcome. Even those that are hateful or hurtful to me. I let them stand. Where everyone can judge them and opine on them. The President said this at the UN and I wholeheartedly agree with it:

As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day,” Mr. Obama said. “And I will defend their right to do so.

And he went on to say this:

the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.

These are important values to state, to live by, and to protect. I applaud the President for expressing his beliefs on this subject. If we can export anything to the parts of the world that are just beginning their relationship with democracy, it is these ideas and the tools that make self expression possible. We must do this.

Getting Out The Vote

The "net native" generation can be and should be an important political force. These young people grew up with the Internet and they understand how to leverage it in all aspects of their lives. And they understand the importance of protecting the Internet and the concept of Internet Freedom.

But we have to make sure they are registered to vote and that they do indeed go out and vote. That's where The Internet Votes comes in. Over the next week, the folks at Fight For The Future and Personal Democracy Media will be rolling out a series of tools that encourage everyone, but particularly the net natives, to register to vote and then in turn to get out and vote. This effort is non-partisan. There is nothing in this campaign that has anything to do with who you should vote for and why. It's all about voter activation.

The first of these tools, a voter registration widget, is available now (in beta). I am running it on the right sidebar of AVC, under the ad unit. You can get it for your blog here. Please feel free to use it as much as possible so the folks can fix the bugs and get it ready for prime time next week.

As more of these tools launch, I will blog about them, use them, and encourage all of you to do the same. Those who understand the power of the open internet, use it in their lives, and value it as a positive force for society must vote and make their voices heard if they want our elected officials to value these principles as well.

Fast, Fair, and Frictionless Content Licensing On The Internet (continued)

Last month I posted two back to back suggestions for industry self regulation on the issue of copyrights and the Internet. The first was a competitive market for third party whitelist and blacklists. The second was "fast, fair, and frictionless content licensing on the Internet."

I am seeing signs that both models are emerging, slowly, but surely.

In the case of frictionless content licensing, I wrote:

I think it will be even harder to get the content industry to build instantaneous real-time self service licensing systems for their content.

But happily, the photography industry is proving me wrong. Yesterday, Getty Images announced something they call PicScout Image IRC. Not the most memorable name. But it is "instantaneous real-time self service licensing on the Internet."

Here's how it works. When an image is posted to your service, you send the image to them via their API, they fingerprint it in real time, check the fingerprint against their database of rights managed photographs that are out there, and then tell you if the image is licensable, must be taken down because its not licensable for the Internet, or if they don't have it in their database, then you keep it up under DMCA. And they handle all the billing for the licensable content. If you don't want to pay licenses for images posted to your service, you can use their service just to take down all images that are under license.

It is a lot like what Audible Magic does for the music industry or what Content ID does for YouTube, in terms of rapidly identifying the content and determining if it is infringing on a license or not. But PicScout goes one step further and provides an instant license to the content if the application wants one. That's a big deal and is the very step I think the content industry needs to take to tackle copyright infringement on the Internet. It is not enough to say something is infringing. The right thing is to say, "that is infringing, but here is a license" and to do that in real-time.

Any developer can use this PicScout Image IRC API. No meetings required. No lawyers required. Fast frictionless licensing on the Internet. I really like it.

The Bain Capital Files

I've posted about this topic before. I wrote down my thoughts about the Obama campaign trying to make an issue of Mitt Romney's departure from Bain. And I've written about trying to keep stuff private in the Internet era. Well this past week we saw those two themes come together in a single story.

Gawker obtained "more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested" and published them on the Internet this past week.

I will stay out of the issue of whether this was legal, moral, or right. What's done is done. And it is apparently not too damaging to Mitt Romney according to this reporter who went through most of the material.

But there's a lesson this for me and my partners. Everything we publish to our investors should be written as if it will someday be published in Gawker. And every action we take in structuring our business, our relationships with our investors, and our relationships with the entrepreneurs we back should be conducted as if it will someday be published in Gawker.

I think this policy will be good for us and others who choose to adopt it.

Fast, Fair, and Frictionless Content Licensing On The Internet

Yesterday we talked about some industry self regulation that the tech/internet industry could put in place in respecting copyright on the Internet. Today I would like to talk about some industry self regulation that the content industry could do in support of the same issue.

If you think about what it would take for the "three engineers in a loft" to get the service they build from the greylist to the whitelist (you need to read the post I linked to above to understand this context), they would need to get fully licensed to distribute the content in their service. That requires getting deals done with all the content owners.

Today that is hard if not impossible. I have seen this first hand many times. The content owners don't make it easy for new services to get licensed and in many cases they simply refuse to provide the licenses. This does a number of things.

First and foremost it stifles innovation because the best user experiences and business models come from rapid fire iteration and hyper competitive market dynamics.

But it also means that users find it difficult to find the content they want to consume legally and so they head off to the black market.

And it also means that two way, highly interactive services where the users are curating, posting, and engaging with content are problematic because they are subject to copyright infringement claims that cannot be easily resolved with instantaneous real-time licensing of the content that users are posting.

A friend of mine who does a lot of business with the content industry sent me an complimentary email about yesterday's post. I replied with:

I like the term copyrespect that someone used in the thread

Two things we need on the net

1) a culture of copyrespect

2) a fast fair frictionless licensing system that isn't based on propagating artificial scarcity

I don't think you will get one without the other.

Let's take Game Of Thrones. If you want to watch it on your iPad, you basically have one choice. You get the HBO Go app, you authenticate with your cable provider, and then you can watch it to your heart's content. But what if you don't have a cable provider. Well then you are out of luck.

That's not ubiquity and that is not fast, free, frictionless licensing on the Internet. If HBO were to make Game Of Thrones available to Hulu, Netflix, and any application that "three engineers in a loft" build on a standard set of licensing terms with instant self serve licensing (like Soundexchange), then there would be no need to go to Google or Bit Torrent and look for a pirated copy of Game Of Thrones. It would be all over the Internet legally and at a fair price. I am certain that most users would respond positively to such progress.

As hard as it is going to be to get the tech/internet industry to self regulate by building in blacklists and whitelists into search, social media, and other web and mobile services, I think it will be even harder to get the content industry to build instantaneous real-time self service licensing systems for their content. But that is what is going to be needed to create a culture of copyrespect on the Internet and I encourage them to get on with it.

Copyright and The Internet

Google has announced they have made a change to their algorithms to include valid DMCA takedown requests as a negative signal in their search results. I believe this is a step in the right direction and I am pleased to see Google do this.

It's hard to argue that the Internet can regulate itself when content owners point to Google search results that show blatant copyright violators on the first page and fully licensed services buried four pages down. So Google is addressing that. That's a good thing.

But I think we can do more. In the world of spam and malware, there are third party services that provide whitelists and blacklists that are used by various services and platforms to help them keep their services clean. I would like to see this approach extended to copyright.

It would be best if a competitive marketplace developed for copyright whitelists and blacklists. The list providers would use signals like number of valid takedown notices and a host of other data points, ideally provided by the marketplace of services and platforms, to produce real time lists of what services are fully compliant (whitelist), what services are blatantly violating copyright (blacklist), and everyone else (greylist).

Being on the greylist would not hamper a new service from entering the market. All new services built by three engineers in a loft would start out on the greylists. But over time they could get onto the whitelists by properly respecting copyright in their service. Whitelisted content services would benefit in the same way that whitelisted services benefit in the word of email.

Google effectively runs their own whitelists and blacklists in their email business and in their search business. But if there were truly independent and competitive providers of whitelists and blacklists for copyright, the entire market could do this sort of thing. And ideally Google would participate by providing data to these third parties and using the third party lists in their algorithms.

When I think about solving thorny problems like copyright, I like to look at how the Internet has solved similar problems and think about how these approaches can be extended to solve new problems. Whitelists and blacklists have been very effective in areas like spam and malware and I think they would be a great approach to address the copyright issues as long as they are built and managed by independent competitive third parties.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012

The US Senate plans to vote on their version of a cybersecurity bill this coming week. This is the Senate's response to the CISPA bill in the House.

I have yet to hear a compelling reason why we need Cybersecurity legislation and am of the opinion that the perfect answer here is no legislation. However, I am also of the opinion that perfect is often the enemy of the good. And there may be a decent piece of legislation coming out of the Senate this week if, and this is a big if, the Franken and Wyden Amendments are added to the Senate's bill.

The Franken Amendment strikes section 701 from the Senate's bill. Section 701 provides companies with the explicit right to monitor private user communications and engage in countermeasures.

The Wyden Amendment require law enforcement officials to procure a warrant before obtaining location data from a person's cell phone, laptop or other gadgets.

This all may be much ado over nothing as I've been told that the House is not going to pass the Senate's bill and the Senate is not going to pass CISPA. So we may end up with nothing anyway. Which would be fine with me.

But, like PIPA/SOPA, my fear is we are ultimately going to get some legislation on this issue. And so figuring out how to get decent legislation instead of awful legislation seems to be a good idea. Adding the Franken and Wyden Amendments to the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is one way to achieve that.

There will be a bunch of places you can go to let your elected officials know how you feel about these bills. But most of them will launch tomorrow. As of today, this is the best place online to let yourself be heard on the cybersecurity bill. I will update this post tomorrow as more online advocacy unfolds.

The Problem Of Money In Politics

We have finally gotten videos up on the web from our Hacking Society event that happened in late April. A number of participants are going to blog this week about some of the specific topics and my contribution will be about our conversation about money and politics.

This 14min video clip starts with Larry Lessig outlining the issues around money and politics and then goes into some potential solutions. I advocated for a hack of the campaign finance system that starts with the internet industry contributing something like 5% of its combined ad inventory to a pool that is available to politicans who agree to certain conditions.

There was a debate about what those conditions should be. One group thought the candidates need to sign onto the Internet Freedom Pledge. Others thought that the candidates should renounce traditional campaign finance. Others thought candidates should do both.

Of course, this idea requires the Internet industry (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc, etc) to allocate 5% of its inventory to this kind of a pool. I have had a few conversations with the industry leaders about this idea but honestly it hasn't gone anywhere. It would be great if our industry could rally around this idea and make it happen. Hopefully this post and other actions we are taking this week might get this idea rolling.

Here's the video:

By the way, interested folks should check out the Hacking Society web page. In addition to videos, we now have a transcript of the event as well as audio recordings, photos, and lots of quotes. There's a lot there and its interesting and engaging stuff.