Radar Waves

Great Current.tv documentary on Thai landfill "gleaners"

Friend-of-Radar Joel Gershon shot and co-produced a really incredible mini-documentary (13 minutes) called "Wasteland," about "gleaners" who mine for recyclables and other cultural detritus at the Nonthaburi Landfill in Thailand.

It's amazing to see how many recognizable brands end up there. And yet not amazing at all. The gleaner culture is also very interesting; even though it's all about eking a living from other people's garbage, there's an ethic of sharing; if you find something valuable first, no one else can redeem it. And, despite the stink, the dirt, and the disease involved in the job, they seem to have about as much job satisfaction as your average big city office proles.

Current.tv (possible presidential contender, eco-warrior, and erstwhile Internet inventor Al Gore is the chairman and founder) has an interesting model; videos uploaded to the site can be "greenlighted" ("greenlit"?) for distribution on cable by viewers. Thus far, this video has been greenlighted by everyone who's voted.

Congratulations, Joel. Keep up the good work.

Happy Wiretap Day

According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), today is the deadline by which network operators -- everyone who provides Internet service to businesses and consumers -- have to install "back doors" making it easier for the FBI to spy on American citizens. This is yet another nail in the coffin of American civil liberties, and a very dangerous check on free expression, not to mention the security and commercial viability of the Internet. As Wired succinctly explains:

Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

Of course, we still have the right to encrypt our communications. We suggest using tools such as the TorPark browsing anonymizer (a small but effective add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser), and GnuPG, a free and easy-to-use encryption tool that works on documents, emails, IMs, or just about anything.

Imposible es nada: Castro wears Adidas

Under-the-weather Cuban dictator Fidel Castro wears Adidas. Karl Marx must be turning in his bargain-brand coffin.

I'll let Marissa weigh in on whether this is good or bad branding -- for either party.

No love for Sony/BMG JV from EU courts

Very bad news for Sony/BMG: two years and countless millions into its joint venture, an EU court nixed the agreement, arguing that the EU regulators who allowed the deal to go forward in the first place were guilty of giving it "an extremely cursory examination," and failing to adequately consider the market dominance of the merged operations.

It's also bad news for EMI and Warner, which have been doing the mating dance in recent months, making bids for each other like a couple of lovestruck teenagers.

All in all, though, it's good news for everybody else. We're already down from six majors to four in the last decade, and the further reduction to three might just put the nail in the coffin for independent music distributors -- not to mention guaranteeing that the songs on commercial radio and TV would sound even more identical than they do today. You can pretty much spot the golden eras of music over the last century or so by measuring how diversified the market infrastructure has been.

If you're interested in hearing some soundbitey snippets from me on this story, check out today's Marketplace on NPR.

Sony finally gets sensitive

Sony seems to have learned two valuable lessons.One, while sexually suggestive or Catholic-baiting advertising is generally acceptable, racist ads are not, particularly ones that use skin color to introduce a new PSP console. (Although Sony does seem to be taking a page from Calvin Klein and Benetton, long known for their controversial - but effective - advertising. Courting controversy as a marketing ploy isn't exactly new).

Second lesson: the Internet makes all advertising global advertising (and not just digital advertising). So an ad campaign running in the Netherlands is sparking condemnation from activists in California. An ad that runs in a country that may not generate much of an outcry within its borders suddenly has far reaching implications:

"In future, we will apply greater sensitivity in our selection of campaign imagery, and will take due account of the increasingly global reach of such local adverts, and their potential impact in other countries," said Nick Sharples, Sony's Director of Corporate Communications in Europe, according to GamePolitics.com.

Suddenly, marketers have to consider not only how best to communicate with local audiences, but also consider how global audiences will perceive their messages. Cultural context starts to become much more fuzzy. We predict there will be many many more stories like this as marketers struggle to come to terms with their advertising finding global audiences, as well as watchdogs. Unless, of course, controversy is the goal - in which case, well played, Sony.

PirateBay Torpedoed

Slyck is reporting that Swedish IP tongue-waggers The Pirate Bay, perhaps the world's largest and best-known torrent tracker, has been raided by Swedish police. The raid was likely conducted at least in part on behalf of the MPAA, which has called the site "one of our No. 1 targets."

According to a message posted on the site, the charges are breach of copyright law, and contributory infringement. Given the site's long history of transparency and more or less officially sanctioned operations, it will be interesting to watch the case play out in the EU courts. To what extent will international IP treaties trump local laws? How much authority will American business interests continue to exert abroad, as cultural power shifts to Europe and Asia? We will no doubt be revisiting these questions as developments unfold.

I have to say, I'm a little surprised at this turn of events. After BitTorrent's recent distro deal with Warner, you'd think the join-em-rather-than-lick-em mentality was on the upswing here in Hollywood. The potential synergies between PirateBay and Disney's upcoming mega-smashbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest should be -- arrrrhhhh! -- obvious.

Monday media: free IPTV, the adventures of Orkut in Brazil, and Google's ostensible metamorphosis into Big Brother

Busy day -- Marissa and I are both in the middle of a bunch of consulting projects. But there are a couple news blips worth pointing out:

1)    ABC announces it's gonna make some of its most popular shows (e.g. Lost Housewives, Desperado in Chief) available for free viewing on the Web. It's an ad-supported model -- the shows will be broadcast-only, embedded in a proprietary viewer and punctuated by interstitial video ads (let's just call them commercials, shall we?) by advertisers including AT&T, Ford and P&G. Inevitable hacks aside, the streams can't be downloaded, so it won't bite too hard into the small but hype-heavy iTunes TV download market. I'm all for it -- Disney owns much of the content as well as distribution, so there aren't a lot of palms to grease or hurdles to jump (local broadcasters are going to be pretty pissed, though -- but that's a much bigger story). It gives them an opportunity to do a little revenue-bearing market research, and to develop alternative marketing models for the TiVo age. Thumbs up.

2)    The NY Times discovers Orkut, alive and kicking in Brazil. While they do play up the kiddie porn angle, they fail to mention the venue's apparent popularity among drug dealers. So many threats to our security, so little time. Of course, it's a truism that as soon as the NYT discovers something, it's by definition on the way out (even my own NYT article about Smalls jazz bar in NY foreshadowed its imminent demise).

3)    Big concerns among net libertarians that the Google/Earthlink WiFi plan in San Francisco doesn't sufficiently address privacy concerns. This concern is somewhat legit -- according to someone we know on the inside, the G/E plan was the least privacy-friendly of any that the city reviewed. On the other hand, I just don't get it -- everyone in the universe is now toting around a mobile phone, taking and sending pics, downloading ringtones, texting and being texted. How does adding a mobile laptop to the mix really expose us to further scrutiny by either commercial or governmental forces? We're already about as transparent as possible. Truth be told, I'd rather have Google mining my GeoWeb metadata than SprintPCSNextel -- at least they know what to do with it, for crying out loud.

Memes revisited

Edge is hosting the transcript and MP3 of a panel discussion hosted at LSE last week, featuring Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and other fascinating books about the genetics, information, and human society.

In this book, published 30 years ago, Dawkins introduced the notion of the "meme" -- a discrete piece of information that competes, mutates and thrives in the environment of human culture, much as genes do in their biological environment:

“Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”

You don't have to be an Internet guru to see how this idea is infintely more provocative in an age of global networked media than it was 30 years ago. What's amazing is the degree to which the concept of the "meme" has become a powerful meme in its own right, especially in the blogosphere.