“Hello from Nine Inch Nails.

“We’re very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV. Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

“Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

Get the full skinny here.

Been slammed the last three days, but lots of cool stuff is happening. Normal blogging will resume shortly. In the meantime, check out this podcast I did for the Principled Innovation blog, and check out this great review on Bloomberg by Jamie Pressly.

2008 is already looking like a year in which the debate over pirates of all kinds will get even louder:

After resigning as Def Jam Recordings president, Jay-Z maybe about to “pull a Madonna” and compete with piracy by embracing a different business model.

The debate over piracy and IP protections between the West and China will likely be affected by the news that China’s economy is 40% smaller than previously estimated.

The luxury goods business will go on the offensive in a major way as pirates continue to threaten profits.

The wonders of the world will take their first step towards unworkable DRM encryption as Egypt seeks royalties for sphinx knock-offs.

Microsoft will get softer on piracy, worried by the fact that people aren’t even bothering to pirate Vista.

Comic book fans brandished as pirates may find they need another hero.

Like terrorism, piracy will be used as an excuse to stifle free speech but piracy will also continue to be used as a potent form of civil disobedience.

Big media will continue to turn to the government for help with the losing battle that is and always has been the “war on piracy.”

If information really is the “oil of the 21st Century”, then some think next year could be the start of the first all-out war against pirates (and that the pirates will win). Good times!

And of course, the book is out in eight days.

Happy New Year!

w00t!

There’s a great post by Guinevere Orvis over at Last 100.com on how TV executives are looking with interest at how new TV shows get pirated and downloaded. She reports that unofficially, the networks are even starting to leak television shows themselves on BitTorrent sites to get a better idea of how well they will be received on television. She writes:

“Broadcasters aren’t posting their shows directly on PirateBay yet, but they are talking informally and giving copies of shows to a friend of a friend who is unaffiliated with the company to make a torrent. Why? Well, it’s partially an experiment, but the hope is that distribution of content this way will lead to new viewers that wouldn’t have been reached through traditional marketing means. Early signs indicate that these experiments are working.”

Link.

Publisher’s Weekly had this to say about The Pirate’s Dilemma:

“Music journalist Mason, a former pirate radio and club DJ in London, explores how open source culture is changing the distribution and control of information and harnessing the “old” system of “punk capitalism” to new market conditions governing society. According to Mason, this movement’s creators operate according to piratical tactics and are changing the very nature of our economy. He charts the rise of the ideas and social experiments behind these latter-day pirates, citing the work of academics, historians and innovators across a multitude of fields. He also explores contributions by visionaries like Andy Warhol, 50 Cent and Dr. Yuref Hamied, who was called a “pirate and a thief” after producing anti-HIV drugs for Third World countries that cost as little as $1 a day to produce. Pirates, Mason states, sail uncharted waters where traditional rules don’t apply. As a result, they offer great ways to service the public’s best interests. According to Mason, how people, corporations and governments react to these changes is one of the most important economic and cultural questions of the 21st century. Well-written, entertaining and highly original, Mason offers a fascinating view of the revolutionary forces shaping the world as we know it. (Jan. 8)”

We need more spies and first responders like Tux, because open networks have one huge advantage: They are one of our best defenses against terrorists and natural disasters.

The debate over open and closed systems is one of the main themes of The Pirate’s Dilemma, and all over the place this question is coming up. Is open source better than proprietary? Is software property, or information? Is our DNA property, or information? It’s a big question, with a lot of different answers.

In the fight against terrorism, citizens are being told they need to reveal all sorts of private information, which is proving more than a little controversial. But the industries and organizations whose job it is to protect intelligence and secrets could benefit greatly from opening up to the right communities. The New York Times ran an article in December 2006 suggesting spying need to go open source, claiming US intelligence agencies were relying on search engines that were “a pale shadow of Google.” The CIA, NSA and FBI lacked the ability to share information with each other instantly, because the agencies, as The New York Times reported, “had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks.”

After 9/11, emergency workers and businesses trying to get back on their feet in lower Manhattan found themselves relying on an invisible cloud of free Wi-Fi networks while broadband internet connections and phone lines were down. Within the first two weeks of Hurricane Katrina hitting in 2005, community Wi-Fi systems were set up so that relatives could find each other with sites like peoplefinder.com, or find temporary accommodation through katrinahousing.org, which connected refugees to people with spare beds and couches. As Steven Johnson observed in Discover magazine, “The people at the forefront of these efforts had no professional disaster experience. All they had was technical expertise and access to a vast network of people willing to volunteer time, provide shelter, or donate equipment… In the war on error, they are the true first responders.”

Just received the final cover design from Simon & Schuster for the US edition, which will be out in January. Simon & Schuster Art Director Eric Fuentecilla, and Droga5 Art Director Ji Lee both put a great deal of time into getting this right, and Seth Godin was very kind to give the book such a fantastic blurb. Hold tight for the UK version too. I’m liking the orange, Let me know what you think.

Image via Malls of America

The Dead Malls story generated a lot of discussion, partly because the story got stuck on the front page of Reddit for an entire day, (earning me millions of dollars from google ads in the process, I’m sure), but also because it seems that a Dead Mall can tell us a lot about ourselves.

Some think they illustrate how wasteful we are, willing to discard old buildings, preferring to simply put up new ones somewhere else. Others think it’s because the concept of a department store is becoming redundant, or a sign that the middle class in America is shrinking and inequality is rising (as Joe said in the comments, the death of the mall illustrates that “there is demand for goods and services for the very affluent…and Wal Mart.”), or that peak oil and peak suburbia are slowly creeping up on us, and we’re all abandoning malls and heading back to the cities. It seems a Dead Mall is like a mirror, we can see whatever we want in them.

I see the death of the shopping mall is testament to the fact that our values are slowly changing. While material things are important to us, there are easier ways to get them than hitting the mall. It’s really the experience that drives desire, one of the reasons the only malls that survive today have to include everything from roller-coasters to ski slopes. Experience is still delivered to us through goods and services, but what we are really buying is experience and access.

When the value of a product is derived from how it makes us feel, this often means the service is improved. As Jeremy Rifkin points out in The Age of Access, movies are now sold as experiences, but they used to be sold by the foot in the 1920s. Value was based on the physical product, the film strip itself, not the quality of the audience’s experience. In the 1940s and 1950s, major antitrust suits said the Hollywood studios couldn’t own theaters too, (the way Apple today owns the record shop, iTunes, and the only record player you can play those records on, an iPod). Then the advent of television caused a 50% drop in film industry profits. The result of this more competitive environment and a free substitute in the form of TV was that studios were forced away from a manufactured, mass-produced perception of film, and began to think more about the quality of the product in terms of the service it provided the end user. As Rifkin observes; “When virtually everything becomes a service, capitalism is transformed from a system based on exchanging goods to one based on accessing experiences.” In a system based on experience like a mall, delivering a better day out is more important than selling better stuff.