"A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

[SteveRiley]

I offer the following for your consideration.


Disintermediation: an Amazon parable

by Kim Cameron, IdentityBlog

New York TImes Technology ran a story yesterday about the publishing industry that is brimming with implications for almost everyone in the Internet economy. It is about Amazon and what marketing people call “disintermediation”. Not the simple kind that was the currency of the dot.com boom; we are looking here at a much more advanced case...

SEATTLE — Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

We could call the elimination of bookstores “first degree disintermediation” - the much-seen phenomenon of replacement of the existing distribution channel. But it seems intuitively right to call the elimination of publishers “second degree disintermediation” - replacement of the mechanisms of production, including everything from product development through physical manufacturing and marketing, by the entities now predominating in distribution.

In my view, one of the main problems of reusable identities is that...the “identity provider” has astonishing visibility onto the user’s relationship with the relying parties (e.g. the services who reuse the identity information they provide). Not only does the identity provider know what consumers are visiting what services; it knows the frequency and patterns of those visits.

Let me fabricate an example so I can be more concrete. Suppose we arrive at a point where some retailer decides to advise consumers to use their Facebook credentials to log in to its web site. And let’s suppose the retailer is super successful. With Facebook’s redirection-based single sign-on system, Facebook would be able to compile a complete profile of the retailer’s customers and their log-on patterns. Combine this with the intelligence from “Like” buttons or advertising beacons and Facebook (or equivalent) could actually mine the profiles of users almost as effectively as the retailer itself. This knowledge represents significant leakage of the retailer’s core intellectual property - its relationships with its customers. [emphasis added]

All of this is a recipe for disintermediation of the exact kind being practiced by Amazon, and at some point in the process, I predict it will give rise to cases of spine-tingling that extend much more broadly than to a single industry like publishing... This will, in my view, bring about considerable rethinking of some current paradigms about the self-evident value of unlimited integration into social networks...

[woodsmoke]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

VERY INTERESTING he saidddd...... lol.

No, really SR it is interesting.

And it kind of seques into some stuff that I have been thinking about .....that "a lot of the people of the world" live in systems in which there are no property rights.

In other words, it is not just that they do not "have" a house. They do not have the legal system that allows them to "have" a house.

And the same extends to "contracts for goods". One can sue someone for not paying or goods purchased "under a contract" because the "contract" is really a form of "property" and it is included in the whole system of "property rights".

The information being clicked is tied up in the whole idea of property rights.

An opposite, and rather stunning example of how the giving of property rights to people is what happened to the size of the herds in Zimbabwe and Botswana, where the countries strongmen gave the ownership of elephants in the local area to the local people and said, eat them, or save them but they are yours and the herds have swelled in size where in Kenya the elephants are a "public good" and the herds have been destroyed by a variety of means.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/06/...buy-ivory.html

That is certainly an "unexpected" result of the long standing discussion about how to maintain elephant herds.

The thing about the "giving" of property rights with the elephants is rather the opposite of the article's discussion which is more about the "change of property rights" but the big point, to me, is that the time honored definitions of what property rights are and what "is" "a property" are being changed in sometimes obvious and sometimes very subtle ways and it is going to be very interesting to watch.

Thanks for the great, and thought provoking, link.

woodsmoke

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

Let me fabricate an example so I can be more concrete. Suppose we arrive at a point where some retailer decides to advise consumers to use their Facebook credentials to log in to its web site. And let’s suppose the retailer is super successful. With Facebook’s redirection-based single sign-on system, Facebook would be able to compile a complete profile of the retailer’s customers and their log-on patterns. Combine this with the intelligence from “Like” buttons or advertising beacons and Facebook (or equivalent) could actually mine the profiles of users almost as effectively as the retailer itself. This knowledge represents significant leakage of the retailer’s core intellectual property - its relationships with its customers. [emphasis added]

Speaking of Facebook...I hate it. I deleted my account some time ago. And I'm glad I did. Once I started finding out how really devious it is in terms of violating its users' privacy, I couldn't be done with it fast enough. I wrote a rant about the moronic decision by the LA Times to force its users to log in with Facebook accounts in order to post comments, and what's eye-opening--and truly ironic--about it is that the LA Times itself published article after article referenced in my blog post all about how Facebook invades its users' privacy. Go figure.

[GreyGeek]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

Excellent post, SR!

Amazon is trying to create a relationship between it and the authors in the book publishing industry the same kind that the music industry set up between the record labels and the artists, to the same end: exploitation. Courtney Love wrote an open letter to the entertainment industry explaining how it works:
http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy2.html

RECORDING ARTISTS DON'T GET PAID

Record companies have a 5% success rate. That means that 5% of all records released by major labels go gold or platinum. How do record companies get away with a 95% failure rate that would be totally unacceptable in any other business? Record companies keep almost all the profits. Recording artists get paid a tiny fraction of the money earned by their music. That allows record executives to be incredibly sloppy in running their companies and still create enormous amounts of cash for the corporations that own them.

The royalty rates granted in every recording contract are very low to start with and then companies charge back every conceivable cost to an artist's royalty account. Artists pay for recording costs, video production costs, tour support, radio promotion, sales and marketing costs, packaging costs and any other cost the record company can subtract from their royalties. Record companies also reduce royalties by "forgetting" to report sales figure, miscalculating royalties and by preventing artists from auditing record company books.

Recording contracts are unfair and a single artist negotiating an individual deal doesn't have the leverage to change the system. Artists will finally get paid what they deserve when they band together and force the recording industry to negotiate with them AS A GROUP.

Thousands of successful artists who sold hundreds of millions of records and generated billions of dollars in profits for record companies find themselves broke and forgotten by the industry they made wealthy.

Here a just a few examples of what we're talking about:

and she lists a few.

In the age of the Internet music artists can create their own web pages and post samples of their music on YouTube. If they are as good as they think they are they can generate their own sales off of their web page and keep more of the money their music earns than if they depended on the labels to pay them. But, not many music artists are savvy enough or have enough business sense to do so.

This summer I read a trilogy of scifi books by Robert J Sawyer, "Wake", "Watch" and "Wonder". Good stuff. Found him on the web, but at a corporate website, eating his own dog food (see #10 below). In an article on his blog he described the problems of a Sci Fi writer:
http://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=2709

...
2) Fewer than one percent of those who want to be science-fiction writers ever publish even a single story. This is a tough, tough game to get into, and there are thousands of aspirant writers just like you. Almost all will fail, and 90% of those who manage to sell a first novel or a few short stories will also fail after that, never selling anything again.

3) Almost nobody gets rich writing SF, and hardly anyone gets to do it full-time. If you’re going into this for the money, you are making a mistake. Most SF magazines pay between three and eight cents US a word for stories, and most first novels in this field get advances of between US$2,500 and US$7,500 — and never earn a penny beyond that in royalties. Flipping burgers at McDonald’s will make you more on an hourly basis.
...
9) When you get an offer from a book publisher, find yourself an agent to negotiate the contract. Literary agents aren’t regulated by law, and anyone can claim to be one. A list of reputable agents specializing in science fiction can be found here.

10) Do not self-publish. Seriously. Don’t.
...

So, how does one stop Amazon from doing to the publishing industry what the record labels did/do to the music industry?

[de_koraco]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

Well, a comparison of Amazon vs publishing-industry to musicians vs record industry isn't quite fair. Amazon is in fact offering nothing more than middle-man services to authors, pretty much staying out of the way and letting them take in most of the revenue. Stories like this one are not uncommon - http://articles.businessinsider.com/...les-publishing

It's not that other publishers are hampered in any way, they're just not quick enough to respond to new trends. I don't see authors getting off any worse with Amazon's publishing medium as opposed to traditional deals, which are good for celebrities, bad for emerging authors.

[woodsmoke]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

Since I don't do the facebook thing much, and my second lab assistant uses an Ipad and purchases books from a variety of sources I asked and she confirmed the logging in on a variety of sites using Facebook.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

http://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=2709

9) When you get an offer from a book publisher, find yourself an agent to negotiate the contract. Literary agents aren’t regulated by law, and anyone can claim to be one. A list of reputable agents specializing in science fiction can be found here.

10) Do not self-publish. Seriously. Don’t.

Must admit that having a publisher definitely helped me get my book to market. They did a fair amount of marketing, and it was a textbook for a while at a couple universities. I have trouble imagining that publishing via Amazon is going to do anything to raise the profile of new writers. They'll be much less willing to take risk.

I didn't use an agent. One thing I'm glad I remembered to do was include joint copyright in the negotiations -- I didn't want to have to get permission to reuse my own material.

[de_koraco]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

My bad, the poor publishers have found ways to polish the turd after all: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ok-pricing.ars

[GreyGeek]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

.....
Speaking of Facebook...I hate it. I deleted my account some time ago. And I'm glad I did. Once I started finding out how really devious it is in terms of violating its users' privacy,......

In case readers aren't aware of what you are recounting, I offer this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...GmImD7sQ#t=16s

[SteveRiley]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

In case readers aren't aware of what you are recounting, I offer this video:

Hm...something about that one is triggering my hyperbole detectors...

[GreyGeek]

Re: "A spine tingling story with a sequel about reusable identities"

At least!

Especially when you follow that rabbit hole down into the "CIA spy tells all" speeches.