Sony CEO Michael Lynton: Douchebag

Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony's Hollywood studios, really stepped into a pile of you-know-what when he was quoted as saying, "I'm a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period." Ouch! He was rightly ridiculed for the statement.

He then tried to *ahem "clarify" his statement by writing an article at the Huffington Post. (For those who don't know, the Huffington Post is where the rich and famous go to blog, because, apparently, there is no other way for the rich and famous to get out their message.)

The premise of the whole article is how piracy is so bad and the mean ol' internet is hurting his profits er... ah... hurting the artists that make him rich... I mean, hurting the creative people that work for him.

my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.

Now, to his credit, Mr. Lynton does pay some lip service to what is great about the internet:

my concern about piracy does not obscure my understanding that the Internet has had a transformative impact on our culture and holds enormous potential to improve the prospects of humanity, and in many instances already has.
*snip*
And yes, new talents have emerged thanks to the democratic and viral impact of the web. Yes, the rise of new distribution platforms for existing content is exciting and rich with promise.

At this point we come to his giant, "but": And that is that the internet has doomed DOOMED! everything that we enjoy reading\watching\listening. He tries to make his point by using several dishonest arguments. First, by using a strawman argument:

But at the same time, I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I "just don't get it," and claim the world has so fundamentally changed because of the web that conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply; that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.

Nobody is suggesting that the internet be completely "unfettered" and "unregulated". Anyone who has seen an episode of "to catch a predator" knows that law enforcement has a place on the internet. What people are arguing for is that law abiding users have their privacy maintained. Also, people want to make sure that there is an even playing field so that the best service wins, not the richest. His next bad argument is pure hyperbola:

In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.

Really? How about the massive growth and subsequent increase of train accidents in the 1870s that lead to hundreds of deaths because there wasn't enough rules and regulations to guide them?

How about the terrible air pollution caused by rampant industrialization in London 150 years ago, or any of the other hundreds of ecological disasters in history caused by "unfettered and unregulated" growth of new industries?

Need something more recent? How about our current financial crises caused by over leveraged derivatives in the financial industry? No... no... no. All those other things pale in comparison to the "great content theft of the 21st century". Mr. Lynton also stoops to really bad analogies:

Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.

With this argument, I think we're starting to inch towards what is really bothering Mr. Lynton and his fellow studios. He reasons that people will steal content when they can't get it how they want it. In his crap analogy he says people "smash the window" and grab what they want. That is a poor analogy. What is really happening is that people are finding the store closed, but some street vendor says , "I see you really want that DVD... I sell it to you now, and for less". Now some are honest enough to say no, while others are not. Consumers are trying to get what they want, when the studios won't give it to them, other, less honest brokers, will.

It is so interesting the way Michael phrases his "point". Because I can't disagree with him. Read what he says is his point. He's not saying all artists are hurt, he's also not implying that the quality of the content is being hurt, just the artists that work for him and the other big content distributors. Now, he probably didn't mean to word it like that, but it's still the truth. The major content businesses have been harmed by the Internet, but it is not piracy that's hurting content distributors.

So what is it about the internet that terrifies the major content distributors? The internet means that they are no longer the gatekeepers between the people making the content, and the people who consume it. This is the fight that is playing itself out over and over again for each major content business.

The first industry to realize the danger of the internet was the music industry. The RIAA's grip on the industry was perhaps the most extreme and was the first to start to slip away. The music industry controlled everything from what you heard on radio stations to what CDs were mass produced and sold to big box stores. Now, here comes the internet. Artists no longer have to "sign" with studios. Just upload your music and people can preview and pay for it. Sure, it all started with fighting piracy and they rightfully beat Napster. Since then, they have done everything to keep control - to remain the gatekeepers. They even bought out mp3.com, the most popular music site for independent artists, and let it atrophy into nothingness.

Other commercial products came along. The most famous is itunes. But even then the industry tried to keep control. They only sold "DRM" music. That meant you could only play on certain compturs, certain devices, and could "expire" at any moment. People said, "no thank you" and piracy continued on underground networks like Gnutella.

Now the music industry has just about given up. Some of them are actually letting apple sell their songs with no DRM. It has been a tough slog getting here. The major music distributors are finally selling what Napster was giving away for free a full 10 years ago. And they wonder why people keep calling their industry a dinosaur.

The fight with the RIAA isn't over yet. I bought a new CD last week. It had 18 tracks on it. It cost me 14$. That same amount of music on itues would've cost me 18$. The music industry is still charging consumers more for the same product even though the distribution costs of itunes is less than that of a CD.

The movie and TV industry are having the same fight, it's just a few years behind the music industry. In response to YouTube and other video sites, their first instinct was to sue them all into oblivion in response to "piracy". The biggest sites complied and do their best to take down copyrighted material. The smaller ones disappeared, and were replaced with new ones. Just like the music industry, the MPAA and Television studios were playing legal whack-a-mole - a very expensive game. Worse still, in the absence of their "high quality" content, consumers started finding independent artists that were uploading movies that were just as entertaining as their own crap.

Eventually, the industry decided to start making their content available on demand just like the consumers wanted.(to their credit, this decision came about much quicker than the RIAA's decision) This has given rise to sites like hulu which kick ass and provide a revenue stream to the content creators.

Now let's take a look at the newspaper industry. Newspapers are facing declining circulation. Why? Because bloggers and websites are giving away for free what newspapers are trying to sell. Sound familiar? Their first instinct was to sue away their competitors into oblivion. (just like the RIAA and MPAA tried) The AP started threatening bloggers who Linked to them. They have also talked about threatening news aggregators like Google. This newspaper fight isn't over and I'm not sure how it'll turn out. Although, I'm willing to bet that whatever happens, successful businesses will make money online and stop suing.

The book publishing industry seems to be facing the same thing. There seems to be a huge worry about pirated eBooks. This fight will play out just like the other ones. It is also a fight that I will have a vested interest in as an "independent" content creator. Just like the other fights, the big publishers will try to maintain an iron grip, and they will lose it.

Piracy, even on the internet, is bad. But that's not why people like Michael Lynton try to demonize and belittle the internet. It's a red herring. They use it as an excuse for not giving people what they want at a price that's fair. Mr. Lynton pays lip service to the democratizing effect of the internet, but at the same time he doesn't want to compete on that fair field.

So, whenever the head of a major industry bemoans about how their industry is doomed DOOMED! by the internet, remember why. They might talk piracy, like Michael Lynton, but that's not what keeps them up at night. It's the idea that they no longer have control that keeps them up at night.

70%? Is Amazon Crazy?

When I first heard that Amazon was setting up to stream any blog's rss feed to the new kindle, My initial reaction was ecstatic. I though that this would be perfect for Blog Fiction, or any online fiction. Then I read the fine print.

• Amazon sets the price.
• Amazon takes 70% of the revenue and only 30% goes to the blogger.
• Amazon will not allow any blogger placed ads.
  

I can't make the decision for other writers, however, as far as I'm concerned, Amazon can go jump in a river.

Write first, market later

It never ceases to amuse me when I find a fiction site that has done everything right with one exception, it has almost no fiction. When I first started this blog I did a post, Blog Fiction That Never Had a Chance. Consider this a sequel. Here are a few more examples of people giving up before they really even started.

Neocommon Era, purported to be a news blog from the future, started last September. It got listed at both Web Fiction Guide and Muses Success. Unfortunately, it seems that censorship is live and well in the future because it only lasted 3 posts.

Wren & Marnie’s Guide to World Domination was supposed to be 2 high school friends staying in touch after going to different colleges. They put together a very beautiful word press site and went to great trouble setting up categories for each person. Unfortunately, after less than 2 months later, the 'friends' quite talking to each other. I guess it was a rough freshman year.

The El'zup Prison is a story based "on a Prison where the architect has deliberately left hints for the convicts on how to escape. He believes that the one who is worthy of completing this maze deserves to live a free life". Unfortunately, the writer must have escaped because 2 posts later we haven't had any new updates.

The World Emperor was supposed to be a blog about the secret Emperor of the world. Unfortunately, he must have been deposed because less than a month later no one has heard from him.

This is great. The Voyage of an Intergalactic Space Pirate. It sounded like a fun idea. Unfortunately, it only lasted ONE post!

Here is one that is just plain puzzling. SPACECOM. This is a website where all but one link leads to a "restricted" section. I get that a website could still be under construction, but then why are ads for it showing up on my website? For goodness sakes, get your site complete before you buy adwords.

The Writer's Stand was another great idea. It was short stories, but not a full story like flash fiction. More like an important part of a story. The author spent time in my forums as well as putting ads on his site. Unfortunately, it seems that this writer could only stand for 4 posts before sitting.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I never mock people for trying to write... as long as they are trying, or at least committed to trying. These bloggers however, I don't think they were trying very hard. Now I get that there is an initial high when putting together your blog, and advertising it, but come on!

Authors, please, write first. If you write it, they will come. If you market it, they will come too, but they won't stay if you haven't written first.

TwitterFic, yeah...

I have to admit, I'm kinda glad that this didn't catch on. I barely understand twitter as it is. I don't know what I'd do if people started using it to publish flash fiction on twitter and call it TwitterFic.

Death's Blog counter-point

After I published my Review of Death's Blog, the author wrote me to explain a couple of my criticisms. The explanations seemed relevant so I got his permission to publish the email here for everyone to read.

Once again, thanks so much for reading, featuring, and reviewing my blog. Although I was hoping for perhaps a slightly more enthusiastic endorsement, I found your review to be thoughtful and reasonable. I just wanted to write a response to you, letting you know a little about the history of the blog.
"Death's Blog" was originally started as a bit of an inside joke. It wasn't intended to be true "web fiction," follow a true narrative path, or garner a big audience outside of a small circle of friends. When I was fortunate enough to attract a bit of press and a following, I began expanding the blog into a more fully realized, serialized format. I did leave the original entries up, but as you clearly saw, there are actually two very different "Death's Blog"s on the site. Even when the format expanded into something more substantial, the narrative or serialized thread running throughout it remains, quite intentionally, very loose. My primary intention is really to give people a good laugh, as would be provided by a humor column in a newspaper.
A number of sites have found the blog and (not unreasonably) categorized it as "web fiction," which has led people to read it beginning to end like a novel would read. If you note the review you quoted from (on a different blog fiction web site) that reviewer actually did not read past the first ten entries or so, and based her review solely on those beginning posts. I prefer to think of the current blog entries more of like self-contained episodes of a sitcom, where one's appreciation of the current writing is not diminished by the earliest "episodes." Reading the entries chronologically, like chapters in a book, would place it more in the category of true "web fiction," and those very early pieces probably do diminish what the blog has since evolved into. Also, I do think that most of the humor can be appreciated without going back to the very beginning.
Again, if you look on the web fiction site you quoted from, there was a user who nailed it in her review by saying that she got the feeling the blog was started "on a bit of a lark," which was exactly the case.
On a separate note, I very much appreciated your comments regarding the look of the blog. I am in the process of reworking the format, so it will have an entirely new look when it resumes.
Keep up the great work Dustin. I think you're providing a wonderful portal for people to expose themselves to some great writing that's taking place on the internet. Take care and all the best.

Review: Death's Blog

Death's Blog is a humor blog fiction written by a fictionalized Grim Reaper. The blog picks up right after Death retires. He blogs about dating, his mother, and reminisces about memorable killings. When it started it had new postings 3 to 5 times a week, but posting slowed down through and eventually stopped. Fortunately, the blog is scheduled to come back at the end of this month.

Plot
This is a humor blog. It does not pretend to be anything else. You're not going to find a lot of deep soul searching(figuratively speaking, there IS literal soul searching!) nor are there epic quests. It is simply the story of Death going into retirement, dating, and eventually being pulled into semi-retirement. Every post is quite funny and as the blog goes on the situations only get more ridiculous.

Format
The story is presented as a standard blog fiction, that is, a single fictional character writing a blog. The blog makes good use of it's formats. There are usually humorous pictures to go along with the topic of each post. It will also provides backlinks to past events so you can dive into the blog at any point. Best of all, Death responds to comments regularly.

When starting out, posts were only about 250 - 300 words. However, as the blog went on posts gradually became longer. 500 - 600 words quickly became the Norm.

There isn't any graphic sex or violence. However, the blog still isn't for any kids who might still believe in the "boogeyman". Flesh eating demons tend to get a PG-13 rating.

Pros
It's funny. The cast of Characters are hilarious. The Devil as an umpteen times married pervert, an alcoholic reaper, a clinically depressed reaper, egotistical philosophers, and a never ending cast of Death's victims(well, he uses the word "clients"). All that before we even get into Death's disastrous dating life.

There's also a lot of satire built into the blog. For instance death often speaks like an annoying corporate boss when talking about managing his reapers. Another favorite example of satire is his recounting of when he was delayed bringing a busload of victims to heaven because of heavy "traffic", because it's a hilarious parody of airline delays. Sometimes satire just comes from Death explaining certain how certain rules in the afterlife came about, like the one grocery bag rule.

There's often also a surreal feeling to some of the posts. Like the way Death nonchalantly describes a restaurant in hell where you can hear the screams from the kitchen and human flesh is served. It's just funny reading a description of this the way one would describe eating at Applebees. It's made to seem perfectly normal.

Once you combine all 3 of these aspects you get posts that have you in stiches as you read about Death having to tell the devil not to eat the flesh of a bunch of nuns that were dropped off in purgatory instead of heaven because the alcoholic death wanted to make Happy Hour!

There are other good things I like about Death's blog. He makes full use of the blog format. He uses pictures, responds to people's comments "in character", and links back to past events (usually).

Cons
As funny as most of it is, there are still some problems that plague Death's blog. The first one you will probably notice is the color scheme of the site. White on Black background, as appropriate as hard on the eyes to read. The second thing you'll notice is an even worse problem. The text of published comments are black so you can't read other people's comments without somehow highlighting them.

Another strike against the site is that it starts so slow. You have to slog through about the first 15 or 20 entries to get to the funny stuff. Don't get me wrong, humor is attempted, but it gets old fast. The editor, Donna Sirianni, at Web Fiction Guide, explains it perfectly in her review of the site.

I kept thinking of Norm MacDonald’s Death in The Family Guy when I was reading this and there’s a stark difference between the two. Family Guy’s Death isn’t seen very often so when we do see him, it’s with something new and the laughs at what he does maintain their freshness. With Death’s Blog, it was cute and quirky for the first few entries (I actually read the first ten since they were so short) but I think the schtick got old quick. The constant reiteration that he was once Death and is searching for a new life just dampened the humor that could have been there.

Unfortunately, you can't just skip the posts, otherwise you probably won't get future jokes.

My last criticism are 2 cheesy running jokes in the story. The words "Scythe and "Reaper" being constantly substituted into other common words or phrases. Like "Scythemore University" or "Reapernecking". I know that comedy is subjective, but in my subjective opinion it quits being funny after about the second time you do it.

Conclusion
If you can get over the bad color scheme and slog through the beginning posts you will find a very funny story. As I said in the beginning, the blog will be coming back at the end of this month. So if you hurry, you should have time to read the archives just as your rss feed starts loading up new humorous posts for your enjoyment. Overall Death's Blog does come squeek by with a recommendation. I give it a:
6 out of 10
(rating scale)

Back from the Brink

Two Blog Fiction sites that I had written off as abandoned are once again showing signs of life. Thanks to the Blog Fiction Widget I was able to notice that both The Time Traveler Blog and Trish Tales are posting again.

The Time Traveler Blog had been dormant since Febuary, and before that there hadn't been an update since December. Apparently, however, it seems that it is back to posting weekly.

Trish Tales is also back. Unfortunately, it's been limping along with only 1 post a month. Once it missed April I figured that it was finally over. Fortunately, the writer's wrote into the story an explanation of their absence.

Rating Scale

I already did one review. I have another review coming up. Before releasing it, I thought that I would clarify my numerical rating scale. I wanted to be clear that 6,7, and 8 are very solid ratings. So, if you are looking for a good blog fiction, you should know that a '6' is worth your time, even though it may only translate to a B-\C+

10. Masterpiece - No way to improve it without ruining it.
9. Near Masterpiece - Room for only the most minor of minor improvements
8. Solid, Professional, and entertaining - Better than most writing
7. Recommend taking a look, guaranteed you won't be disappointed.
6. Worth taking a look.
5. Average writing that's Worth a look if you've already read everything else
4. Below Average - Suffers from either bad writing, bad story, bad characterization, or terrible site layout
3. Bad, suffers from several of the following: Simplistic plot or severe plot holes, flat writing, too much "telling", 2 dimensional characters, bad site layout
2. Nearly Incomprehensible story, characters, and\or writing
1. Dan Brown