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Irdeto Intelligence: Monitoring Video Content Beyond Managed Networks September 11, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Conditional Access, Services, Video.
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Last week's big IBC conference in Amsterdam brought a raft of announcements from video content protection vendors, most of which were typical customer success stories and strategic partnerships. One product launch announcement, however, was particularly interesting: Irdeto Intelligence, which launched last Friday.
Irdeto Intelligence is the result of the company's acquisition of BayTSP in October 2011. The service is an extension of BayTSP's existing offering and had been under development before the acquisition. It crawls the Internet looking for infringing content and provides an interactive dashboard that enables customers to see data such as where infringing files were found (by ISP or other service provider) and the volume for each title.
Before Irdeto acquired BayTSP last year, it was one of a handful of independent companies that crawl the Internet looking for infringing content; others include Attributor, Civolution, MarkMonitor, and Peer Media Technologies. The company wanted to grow its business beyond its core piracy monitoring service. It found — like other companies of its type — that the mountains of data on so-called piracy that it was collecting had value beyond helping copyright owners generate cease-and-desist or takedown notices.
The big issue with piracy monitoring services is — as with so many other technologies we discuss here — who pays for them. Hollywood studios (and other types of media businesses) pay the companies mentioned above to find infringing copies of their content. Now that BayTSP is part of a leading video security business, its customers become managed network operators (cable, satellite, telco-TV) and broadcasters. As I mentioned last year when the acquisition was announced, a cynic could read the deal as Hollywood's attempt to push piracy monitoring costs downstream to operators, just as it does the cost of DRM and conditional access.
Irdeto confirmed that it is still offering BayTSP's existing services to copyright owners. Still, Irdeto's acquisition of BayTSP is something of a gamble. It's part of a theme that I see growing in importance over the next few years: competition from Internet-based "over the top" (OTT) services is forcing managed network operators to offer "TV Anywhere" type services for viewing their programming over Internet-connected devices such as PCs, tablets, and mobile handsets.
Hollywood has always had a strong relationship with managed network operators on content protection because their economic incentives were aligned: Hollywood wanted to mitigate infringement of its movies and TV shows; operators wanted to mitigate theft of access to their networks. This has led to set-top boxes that are fortresses of security compared, say, to e-book readers, portable music players, and (especially) PCs.
But once operator-licensed content leaves managed networks to go "over the top," just how much responsibility do operators have to protect content? This is a question that will loom larger and larger.
Other providers of conditional access (CA) technology for operators, such as NDS (now Cisco) and Nagra, offer piracy monitoring services. But those have typically been limited in scope to things like sharing of control words (content keys used in CA systems for the DVB standard), not illegal file-sharing. In acquiring BayTSP, Irdeto is betting that operators will want to pay more for this type of monitoring.
But why would, say, a cable operator care about content uploaded to file-sharing sites? Once they have this information, how would they use it if not to generate takedown notices or other legal means of getting infringing content removed?
Irdeto has two answers to this question. Most important is live event content, particularly sports. Hollywood has nothing to do with this type of content. Operators and terrestrial broadcasters suffer when users can view live events on illegal streaming sites with only slight time delays. Irdeto Intelligence updates its search results at five-minute intervals, so that operators can act to get illegal streams shut down very quickly.
The second reason has to do with the fact that more and more operators are offering so-called triple play services which include Internet service in addition to TV and telephony. A triple play provider will be seeking licenses to content from Hollywood, which will be more willing to grant licenses if provider actively addresses infringing content on its ISP service.
Irdeto says that it has signed two customers for Irdeto Intelligence so far, and that it received strong interest for the service on the show floor at IBC. It will be interesting to see how other video security vendors react as OTT and TV Anywhere continue to grow.
A Nail in Public Libraries' Coffins May 20, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Libraries, Publishing, Services, United States.
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There it was, on the entire back page of the A section of the New York Times a few days ago, at a likely cost of over US $100,000: a full-page ad from Amazon touting free "lending" of all of the Harry Potter e-books for members of Amazon's $79/year Amazon Prime program who own Kindle e-readers, starting next month.
I wrote last December about the challenges that public libraries face as e-reading becomes popular and major trade book publishers increase restrictions on public library e-lending of their titles. Copyright law allows publishers to set license terms for digital content, so instead of giving e-book buyers the standard "copyright bundle" of rights, publishers can dictate whatever terms they want — including refusal to license content at all. Currently five of the Big 6 trade publishers restrict library e-book lending in some way, including two of them that don't allow it at all. Libraries have little leverage against publishers to change this state of affairs.
I also discussed Amazon's Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL), which is one of the benefits of Amazon Prime membership (along with free shipping and access to streaming video content), as a step toward the private sector invading the turf of public libraries. In case anyone doesn't see this, Amazon makes it quite clear in its press release:
"With the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, there are no due dates, books can be borrowed as frequently as once a month, and there are no limits on how many people can simultaneously borrow the same title—so readers never have to wait in line for the book they want."
In other words, Amazon has implemented a model of "one e-book per user at a time, not more than one per month." It can configure any such model on its servers and enforce it through its DRM.
KOLL's selection had been limited to a few thousand titles from smaller publishers. Recently Amazon has been moving aggressively to increase the KOLL catalog, despite lack of permission from some publishers and authors; it now claims a catalog of over 145,000 titles. Amazon did make a deal with Pottermore, the organization that distributes J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter titles in digital form, to include those titles in KOLL. Pottermore admits that Amazon paid it "a large amount of money" to do so. Taken together, these steps take KOLL to the next level.
Of course, there are several reasons why the Harry Potter case is exceptional. The only way to purchase Harry Potter e-books is on the Pottermore site, and Amazon wanted to find some way of luring Potter fans back to its own site; Harry Potter is a series of seven books, and Pottermore believes that allowing users to borrow one title per month will lead to increased sales of other titles; The Amazon Prime and public library demographics may not overlap much.
But still, this deal is an example of Amazon using content to make its devices and seo services more valuable. The company is subsidizing a bestselling author's work to induce people to buy Kindles and Amazon Prime memberships. This kind of arrangement is likely to become more commonplace as authors, publishers, and retailers all get more information about the value of private-sector e-lending and learn how to make such deals strategically.
This is nice for already-famous authors, but it doesn't benefit the multitude of authors who haven't made it to J.K. Rowling's rarified level. It's not something that libraries are able to replicate — neither the subsidies nor the full-page ads in the New York Times.
Who's Subsidizin' Who? February 9, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Music, Publishing, Services, Uncategorized, United States.
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Barnes & Noble has just announced a deal offering a US $100 Nook e-reader for free with a $240/year subscription to the New York Times on Nook. Meanwhile, MuveMusic, the bundled-music service of the small US wireless carrier Cricket Wireless, passed the 500,000 subscriber mark last month. MuveMusic has vaulted past Rdio and MOG to be probably the third largest paid subscription music service in the United States, behind Rhapsody and (probably) Spotify at over a million each.
MuveMusic isn't quite a subsidized-music deal a la Nokia Ovi Music Unlimited, but it does offer unlimited music downloads bundled with wireless service at a price point that's lower than the major carriers. (The roaming charges you'd incur if you leave Cricket's rather spotty coverage area could add to the cost.) Cricket is apparently spending a fortune to market MuveMusic, and it's paying off.
It looks like the business of bundling content with devices is not dead; on the contrary, it's just beginning. The fact that both types of bundling models exist — pay for the device, get the content free; pay for the content, get the device free — means that we can expect much experimentation in the months and years ahead. Although it's hard to imagine a record label offering a free device with its music, we could follow a model like Airborne Music and think of things like, say, a deal between HTC and UMG offering everything Lady Gaga puts out for $20/year with a free HTC Android phone and/or (HTC-owned) Beats earbuds. Or how about free Disney content with a purchase of an Apple TV?
As long as someone is paying for the content, any of these models are good for content creators. device makers, ane consumers alike. Bring them on!
Creative Commons for Music: What's the Point? January 22, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Law, Music, Rights Licensing, Services, Standards.
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I recently came across a music startup called Airborne Music, which touts two features: a business model based on "subscribing to an artist" for US $1/month, and music distributed under Creative Commons licenses. Like other music services that use Creative Commons, Airborne Music appeals primarily to indie artists who are looking to get exposure for their work. This got me thinking about how — or whether — Creative Commons has any real economic value for creative artists.
I have been fascinated by a dichotomy of indie vs. major-label music: indie musicians value promotion over immediate revenue, while for major-label artists it's the other way around. (Same for book authors with respect to the Big 6 trade publishers, photographers with respect to Getty and Corbis, etc.) Back when the major labels were only allowing digital downloads with DRM — a technology intended to preserve revenue at the expense of promotion — I wondered if those few indie artists who landed major-label deals were getting the optimal promotion-versus-revenue tradeoffs, or if this issue even figured into major-label thinking about licensing terms and rights technologies.
When I looked at Airborne Music, it dawned on me that Creative Commons is interesting for indie artists who want to promote their works while preserving the right (if not the ability) to make money from them later. The Creative Commons website lists ten existing sites that enable musicians to distribute their music under CC, including big ones like the bulge-bracket-funded startup SoundCloud and the commercially-oriented BandCamp.
This is an eminently practical application of Creative Commons's motto: "Some rights reserved." Many CC-licensing services use the BY-SA (Attribution-Share-Alike) Creative Commons license, which gives you the right to copy and distribute the artist's music as long as you attribute it to the artist and redistribute (i.e. share) it under the same terms. That's exactly what indie artists want: to get their content distributed as widely as possible but to make sure that everyone knows it's their work. Some use BY-SA-NC (Attribution-Share-Alike-Noncommercial), which adds the condition that you can't sell the content, meaning that the artist is preserving her ability to make money from it.
It sounds great in theory. It's just too bad that there isn't a way to make sure that those rights are actually respected. There is a rights expression language for Creative Commons (CC REL), which makes it possible for content rendering or editing software to read the license (in XML RDFa) and act accordingly. As a technology, the REL concept originated with Mark Stefik at Xerox PARC in the mid-1990s; the eminent MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson created CC REL in 2008. Since then, the Creative Commons organization has maintained something of an arms-length relationship with CC REL: it describes the language and offers links to information about it, but it doesn't (for example) include CC REL code in the actual licenses it offers.
More to the point, while there are code libraries for generating CC REL code, I have yet to hear of a working system that actually reads CC REL license terms and acts on them. (Yes, this would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve with any completeness, e.g., taking Fair Use into account.)
Without a real enforcement mechanism, CC licenses are all little more than labels, like the garment care hieroglyphics mandated by the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. For example, some BY-SA-licensed music tracks may end up in mashups. How many of those mashups will attribute the sources' artists properly? Not many, I would guess. Conversely, what really prevents someone who gets music licensed under ND (No Derivative Works) terms from remixing or excerpting in ways that aren't considered Fair Use? Are these people really afraid of being sued? I hardly think so.
This trap door into the legal system, as I have called it, makes Creative Commons licensing of more theoretical than practical interest. The practical value of CC seems to be concentrated in business-to-business content licensing agreements, where corporations need to take more responsibility for observing licensing terms and CC's ready-made licenses make it easy for them to do so. The music site Jamendo is a good example of this: it licenses its members' music content for commercial sync rights to movie and TV producers while making it free to the public.
Free culture advocates like to tell content creators that they should give up control over their content in the digital age. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who claims to welcome the end of control and also supports Creative Commons is talking through both sides of his mouth. If you use a Creative Commons license, you express a desire for control, even if you don't actually get very much of it. What you really get is a badge that describes your intentions — a badge that a large and increasing number of web-savvy people recognize. Yet as a practical matter, a Creative Commons logo on your site is tantamount to a statement to the average user that the content is free for the taking.
The truth is that sometimes artists benefit most from lack of control over their content, while other times they benefit from more control. The copyright system is supposed to make sure that the public's and creators' benefits from creative works are balanced in order to optimize creative output. Creative Commons purports to provide simple means of redressing what its designers believe is a lack of balance in the current copyright law. But to be attractive to artists, CC needs to offer them ways to determine their levels of control in ways that the copyright system does not support.
In the end, Creative Commons is a burglar alarm sign on your lawn without the actual alarm system. You can easily buy fake alarm signs for a few dollars, whereas real alarm systems cost thousands. It's the same with digital content. At least Creative Commons, like almost all of the content licensed with it, is free.
(I should add that I wear the badge myself. My whitepapers and this blog are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) terms. I would at least rather have the copyright-savvy people who read this know my intentions.)
UltraViolet Gets Two Lifelines January 12, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Economics, Fingerprinting, Services, Standards, Video.
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A panel at this week's CES show in Las Vegas yielded two pieces of positive news for the DECE/UltraViolet standard, after a launch several months ago with Warner Bros. and its Flixster subsidiary that could charitably be called "premature." Of the two news items, one is a nice to have, but the other is a game-changer.
Let's get to the game-changer first: Amazon announced that a major Hollywood studio is licensing its content for UltraViolet distribution through the online retail giant. The Amazon executive didn't name the studio, though many assume it's Warner Bros. Even if it's a single studio, the importance of this announcement to the likelihood of UltraViolet's success in the market cannot be overstated.
Leaving aside UltraViolet's initial technical glitches and shortage of available titles, the problem with UltraViolet from a market perspective had always been a lukewarm interest from online retailers. As I'll explain, this hasn't been a surprise, but Amazon's new interest in UltraViolet could make all the difference.
UltraViolet is the "brand name" of a standard from a group called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), headed by Sony Pictures executive Mitch Singer. It implements a so-called rights locker for digital movies and other video content. Users can establish UltraViolet accounts for themselves and family members. Then they can obtain movies in one format (say, Blu-ray) and be entitled to get it in other formats for other devices (say, Windows Media file download for PCs). They can also stream the content to a web browser anywhere. The rights locker, managed by Neustar Inc., tracks each user's purchases.
In other words, UltraViolet promises users format independence and a hedge against format obsolescence, while providing some protection for the content by requiring it to be packaged in several approved DRM and stream encryption schemes. It includes a few limitations on the number of devices and family members that can be associated with a single UltraViolet account, but in general UltraViolet is designed to make video content more portable and interoperable than, say, DVDs or iTunes downloads.
Five of the six major Hollywood studios (all but Disney*), plus the "major indie" Lionsgate, are participating in UltraViolet.
One of the design goals of UltraViolet was to ensure that no single retailer could attain a market share large enough to be able to control downstream economics — in other words, to avoid a replay of Apple's dominance of digital music downloads (and possibly Amazon's dominance of e-books). To do this, the DECE studios pushed for ways to thwart consumer lock-in by online retailers that would sell UltraViolet content.
The most important example of this is rights locker portability: users can access their rights lockers from any participating retailer. UltraViolet retailers must compete with each other through value-added features.
Amazon's Kindle e-book scheme offers a good illustration of platform lock-in and how it differs from other features that a retailer can build or offer. If you buy an e-book on Amazon, you can download and read it on a wide variety of devices: not just Kindle e-readers but also iPads, iPhones, Android devices, BlackBerrys, PCs, and Macs — in other words, pretty much everything but other e-reader devices. You get e-book portability — it will even remember where you last left off if you resume reading an e-book on another device — but you are still tied to Amazon as a retailer. If you want to read the same e-book on a Nook, for example, you have to buy it separately from Barnes & Noble (and then you can read that e-book on your PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, etc.).
This lock-in gives Amazon power in the market as a retailer; it had 58% market share as of February 2011 (by comparison, Apple has over 70% of the music download market). UltraViolet wants to make it as difficult as possible for a single digital video retailer to assert such market power.
The downside of that policy has been a lack of enthusiasm among retailers to sell UltraViolet-licensed content — which entails significant development investment and operational expenses. A good shorthand way to evaluate the potential impact of a standards initiative is to look at the list of participants: what points in the value chain are represented, how many of the top companies in each category, and so on. In DECE's case, members have included most of the major movie studios, plenty of consumer device makers, lots of DRM and conditional access technology vendors, and so on, but few big-name retailers… one of which (Best Buy) already had a different system for delivering digital video content via Sonic Solutions.
Warner Bros. tried to jump-start the UltraViolet ecosystem by acquiring Flixster, a movie-oriented social networking startup, adding digital video e-commerce capability, and using it as an UltraViolet retailer for a handful of Warner titles. This has been little more than a proof-of-concept test, which was plagued by some technical glitches and suboptimal user experience — all of which, according to Singer, have been fixed.
It would be unworkable for Hollywood to pin its hopes for its next big digital format on a small unknown retailer owned by one of the studios. It has been vitally necessary to attract a big-name retailer to both validate the concept and provide the necessary marketing and infrastructure footprints. There had been talk of Wal-Mart entering the UltraViolet ecosystem, although it already has its own video delivery scheme through VUDU. But otherwise, the membership list had been short on major retailers.
Of course, Amazon is the major-est online retailer of them all. And it so happens that Amazon's digital video strategy is a good fit to UltraViolet in two ways. First, Amazon currently runs a streaming service (Amazon Instant Video), whereas UltraViolet is primarily focused on downloads, a/k/a Electronic Sell Through (EST): the idea of UltraViolet is to buy a download and only then be able to view it via streaming.
Second, Amazon Instant Video does not look particularly successful. Of course, Amazon does not reveal user numbers, but it is telling that Amazon included Instant Video Unlimited as a perk in its US $79/year Amazon Prime program… and that when people extol the virtues of Amazon Prime, they tend to emphasize the free overnight shipping but rarely the streaming video.
The biggest winner thus far in the paid online video sweepstakes is Netflix, with about 24 million subscribers as of mid-2011. Netflix's subscription-on-demand model is most likely far more popular than Amazon Instant Video's pay-per-view (except for Amazon Prime members) model. Thus Amazon may be looking for ways to improve its market position in video without having to hack away at the Netflix streaming juggernaut.
The video download market is in comparative infancy. It has no runaway market leader a la Netflix, or Apple in music. If this situation persists long enough, and if Amazon's trial run with UltraViolet is successful, then other retailers might see UltraViolet as a viable format as well… precisely because it will make them better able to compete with the Online Retailing Gorilla.
Yet the other dimension of UltraViolet that is currently lacking is availability of titles. And that's where the other CES announcement comes in. Samsung announced a "Disc to Digital" feature that it will incorporate into new Blu-ray players later this year. With this feature, users can slide in their Blu-ray discs or DVDs, and if the content is "eligible," they can choose to have that content available in their UltraViolet rights lockers for delivery in any UltraViolet-compliant format.
The Disc to Digital feature is a collaboration between Flixster (i.e. Warner Bros.) as online retailer and Rovi as technology supplier. It works in a manner that is analogous to "scan and match" services for music such as Apple iTunes Match: it scans your DVD or Blu-ray disc, identifies the movie, and if the movie is available in the UltraViolet library of licensed content, gives you an UltraViolet rights locker entry for that movie. Rovi's content identification technology and metadata library are undoubtedly at the heart of this scheme.
There are two catches: first, users will have to pay a "nominal" fee per disc for this service, which is even larger (and as yet unspecified) if they want it in high definition; second, it is limited to "eligible" content, and no one has offered a definition of "eligible" yet (beyond the fact that the content must come from one of the DECE participating studios). But surely the "eligible" catalog will exceed the current list (19 titles) by orders of magnitude, or the service will not be worth launching.
Nevertheless, these developments are very positive news for DECE/UltraViolet after months of embarrassments and bad press. DECE still has lots of work to do to make UltraViolet successful enough to be the major studios' designated successor to Blu-ray, but at last it's on track.
*Yes, I'm aware of the irony of using a tag line from "Who Wants to Be a Millionare" in the title of this article: Disney owns the home entertainment distribution rights to that hit TV game show.
Oblivion, But Not Beyond January 2, 2012Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Music, Services.
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Last week, the music startup Beyond Oblivion ceased operations. The shutdown happened after three years of development and shortly before the company's service was to go into public beta. The news was leaked to Engadget last Thursday and became "official" when it was reported in the Financial Times on Saturday.
First, the disclosure: I consulted to Beyond Oblivion throughout much of the company's existence. I'm proud of what we did, privileged to have worked with its top-notch management team, and sad about what happened last week.
I'll leave it to others to chew over the amount of cash that the company burned through or why the company shut down at this particular time. Instead I want to talk about the company's vision and business model, which — if it had seen the commercial light of day — did in fact have the potential to change the online music industry for the better. Although Beyond Oblivion did get some press coverage, its unique model was never fully explained.
At a basic level, Beyond's model was a hybrid between download services like iTunes and streaming services like Spotify. It was based on the concepts of licensed devices and play count reporting. Users could buy new Beyond-licensed devices or purchase licenses for their existing PCs or other devices. They could download tracks from the Beyond catalog to their licensed devices (a la iTunes) and listen to them as often as they wanted. The Beyond client software would securely count plays and report them for royalty purposes (a la Spotify).
Users could also add their own music files to their Beyond libraries using a process that is now called "scan and match"; Beyond would report plays of those files too, even if the original files were obtained illegally. We had also designed a way for users to add music to Beyond's music catalog (we called it "catalog crowdsourcing"), with permission of rights holders, which could have resulted in the world's largest legal online music catalog.
There would be no limit to the number of tracks a user could download to a licensed device. Furthermore, Beyond users could freely share their files with other Beyond users; a Beyond file could play on any Beyond-licensed device (within a given country).
Beyond Oblivion had two signed major-label deals with others in the works, and over seven million tracks in its catalog at last count.
Now here's the real differentiator: users would pay neither monthly subscription fees nor per-download charges for the service. Beyond's business model was to charge device makers or network operators the license fees, with the expectation that they would subsidize these fees or perhaps bundle part of them into users' monthly network charges. If users wanted to add Beyond to their own devices, they would pay a one-time charge, expected to be well under US $100, for unlimited downloads for as long as they owned the device.
Whenever anyone knowledgeable about digital music asked for a quick explanation of Beyond's model, I would answer, "It's like Comes With Music on steroids." (Comes With Music was Nokia's attempt to create a subsidized music model for a few of its own devices.)
The problem with device maker subsidized models is that they are limited to new devices from that maker. Instead, Beyond's intent was to build a large, global ecosystem of subsidized music that would work on a wide range of devices and networks. It would be an intermediary between device makers and network operators (license fee payers) on the one hand and music copyright owners (royalty recipients) on the other. Beyond's pitch to the former was simple: here is a chance to eat into Apple's market share for digital music by offering a service to users that "feels like free" but is completely legal.
The Beyond concept was based on a fundamental insight by founder Adam Kidron, a serial entrepreneur, former pop record producer, inveterate frequent flier, and spreadsheet Jedi Master. In fact, his business model began on a spreadsheet. He figured out that if he could count every play of a digital music file and pay a small royalty to the copyright owners for each one, he could make a profitable business by charging device licensing fees — essentially trading off device license fees against those "micro-royalties" — and still offer legal music for much less money than anyone else. His model took into account factors such as the expected ownership lifespans of certain device types such as PCs and mobile handsets.
Kidron determined that technology companies were the only remaining entities in the digital music value chain where revenue could come from: users are being led toward expecting to get music for free, and ad revenue has been disappointing. Thus, we tried to define a model and features with enough appeal to tech companies to get them to pay the licensing fees.
But Beyond would only have had industry-wide impact if it could sign up a critical mass of network operators and device makers at launch — a process that would require a lot of salesmanship, faith-building, and delicate discussions about exclusivity versus the power of the ecosystem. When Kidron first approached me three years ago about helping the company and explained the model, my initial thought was, "This might actually work if someone threw enough money at it." Then he proceeded to explain the funding plan. I was impressed; he had thought it through. He didn't just want to launch yet another music service, he wanted to move the music industry "beyond oblivion."
The company did raise large sums of money in order to seed the entire ecosystem. It was in advanced talks with companies worldwide. A few name-brand device makers were considering putting out new Beyond-enabled models of handsets, tablets, and other devices. Wireless carriers in several geographies were considering launching services for Beyond-enabled devices. Major record labels signed licensing deals. But even with cash in hand, the negotiations among the various constituencies proved to be a long, hard slog.
Yet Beyond's impact on the music industry was potentially much wider than mere profitability for one business. To understand this, it's useful to look at its economic model in light of various recent governmental attempts to get network service providers to assume more responsibility for curbing copyright infringement. These have boiled down to operators paying for three different things: technology to monitor activity for possible infringement; per-user levies for use of content, and "piracy fees" to cover copyright enforcement costs.
All of these models have serious drawbacks. Levies are inaccurate in paying copyright owners according to actual use of their content and unfair in that they charge all users the same amount regardless of their use. If network operators paid for their own piracy monitoring, they would do it in the same way that device makers have implemented DRM: at the lowest possible cost, with little regard for efficacy, and in ways that benefit them instead of copyright owners, such as customer lock-in. And "piracy fees" are the most inequitable idea of all.
A market-based solution that enables network operators to offer functionally rich access to legal content in a way that feels like free seems like a much better approach — a carrot rather than a stick. It can entice people away from copyright infringement while compensating rights holders fairly and accurately. Given the choice, a network operator ought to want to compete on offering the most attractive music service rather than be forced to pay a "copyright tax" as a cost of doing business. (By the way, this is not my retrospective view; it was all part of the original thinking.)
When Beyond was starting development, users had strong preferences for file ownership over streaming. We started with a download model and figured out a way to reconcile file ownership with usage reporting. We also designed a mechanism for determining (with reasonable accuracy) when a device changed owners, so that it would not be possible to sell a Beyond-licensed device on eBay (for example) and have the second owner inherit the music rights along with the device; "lifetime of device ownership" was key to making the numbers work.
Since then, streaming has become more popular. Yet on-demand streaming services like Spotify and Rhapsody have business models that were originally based on monthly subscription fees; they face the choice of living with a "freemium" model in which only a fraction of users pay subscription fees (Spotify, Rdio, MOG, Deezer) or persisting with an all-pay model against the rising tide of freemium (Rhapsody, Slacker Premium, Sony Music Unlimited). Either choice may be hard for those services to sustain financially over time.
In contrast, Beyond was designed to be a scalably profitable subsidized pay-per-use model from the beginning. As such, it could have had better long-term prospects than those other services.
However, three years is a very long time to be developing any kind of online business in today's world of iterative development-and-release a la Google. Many of Beyond's innovative features started making their way into the market through other services during the past three years. For example:
- Catch Media launched a service in the UK in 2010 that counts and monetizes users' plays of MP3 files regardless of their origins, although the service costs users £30 per year.
- Spotify, Deezer, and Rhapsody have gotten a few bundling deals with wireless carriers, though none of these are full subsidies.
- Spotify also recently introduced an API for app developers, another feature that Beyond included from the beginning.
- The small US mobile carrier Cricket Wireless launched MuveMusic a year ago; it is an unlimited-download package bundled with Cricket's wireless service. It has attracted over a quarter million users, although the service is limited to five handset models (mostly Android-based).
- Several services have introduced scan and match features that download files from servers to users' devices. Apple and Catch Media offer this, while others offer it through streaming instead of downloading.
Yet only Beyond put all these features — and more — into a single offering. Apart from the business model and concepts, I can attest that its user experience was terrific. Its interface, responsiveness and sound quality on mobile devices all beat Spotify. It's a real shame that this highly promising service did not get a chance to make the impact on the music industry that it could have.
European High Court Says No to ISP-Level Copyright Filtering November 28, 2011Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Fingerprinting, Law, Music, Services.
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Last Thursday the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that ISPs cannot be held responsible for filtering traffic on their networks in order to catch copyright infringements. This ruling was the final step in the journey of the litigation between the Belgian music rights collecting society SABAM and the ISP Scarlet, but it is a landmark decision for all of Europe.
This ruling overturned the Belgian Court of First Instance, which four years ago required Scarlet to install filtering technology such as acoustic fingerprinting to monitor Internet traffic and block uploads of copyrighted material to the network. Scarlet appealed this decision to the Brussels Court of Appeals, which sought guidance from the ECJ.
The ECJ's statement affirmed copyright holders' rights to seek injunctions from ISPs like Scarlet to prevent copyright infringement, but it said that the Belgian court's injunction requiring ISP-level copyright filtering went too far. It cited Article 3 of European Union Directive 2004/48, which states that "measures, procedures and remedies [for enforcing intellectual property rights] shall be fair and equitable, shall not be unnecessarily complicated or costly and not impose unreasonable time-limits or unwarranted delays." The ECJ decided that the mechanism defined in the appeals court's ruling did not meet these criteria.
The real issues here are the requirement that the ISP bear the cost and complexity of running the filtering technology, and the fact that running it would slow down the network for all ISP users. It's easy to see how this would not meet the requirements in the above EU Directive.
This decision has direct applicability in the European Union, but its implications could reach further afield. For example, the issue currently being argued between Viacom and Google at the appeals court level in the United States boils down to the same thing: whose bears the cost and responsibilty to police copyrights on the Internet?
Of course, EU law doesn't apply in the United States. In the Viacom/Google litigation, Google is relying on the "notice and takedown" portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a/k/a section 512 of the US copyright law. This says that if a copyright holder (e.g., Viacom) sees one of its works online without its authorization, it can issue a notice to the network service provider to take the work down, and if it does so, it won't be liable for infringement. Google's argument is that it follows section 512 assiduously and therefore should not be liable.
Viacom's task in this litigation is to convince the court that the DMCA doesn't go far enough. More specifically, its argument is that the legislative intent behind the DMCA is not served well enough by the notice-and-takedown provisions, that network service providers should be required to take more proactive responsibility for policing copyrights on their services instead of requiring copyright owners to play the Whack-a-Mole game of notice and takedown.
The ECJ's decsion in SABAM v. Scarlet has no precedential weight in Viacom v. Google. But it may help get the Third Circuit Appeals Court to focus on what Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School has called the "gravamen" (which is legalese for "MacGuffin") in this case: who should be paying for protecting copyrights.
ReDigi Gets RIAA Nastygram November 15, 2011Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Economics, Law, Music, Services, United States.
8 comments
Last week the RIAA issued a cease-and-desist letter to a music startup called ReDigi, which has been attempting to create a market for "used" digital music files. It allows users to sell their music files for prices below those of "new" files on iTunes or Amazon, and gives a portion of the proceeds to record labels. (It does not have licenses from the labels to do this.)
I had been paying attention to ReDigi since it had gotten some attention on the tech blogs when it issued a beta release a month ago, and I consulted a couple of copyright law experts about the legality of what they are doing. Based on the results of my research, the RIAA's actions towards ReDigi were about as surprising to me as an announcement that the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Who were the "legal experts" that ReDigi claims told it that what it does is within the law? What investors were credulous or rash enough to finance this venture? Or did everyone involved do this just to try to make a point? Regardless of the motivation, ReDigi's legally embattled state has been a foregone conclusion.
ReDigi purports to implement something called Digital First Sale. The First Sale Doctrine (a/k/a Section 109 of the U.S. copyright law, and known as Exhaustion in most other countries) says that if you obtain a copy of a copyrighted work legally, you can do as you wish with it – keep it, lend it, sell it, give it away, use it to line a birdcage – as long as you obtained it legally and you don't do anything with it that infringes copyright law, such as make unauthorized copies.
The issue is that this law was designed to apply to physical goods; no one is quite sure about its applicability to piles of bits. The U.S. Copyright Office was asked for an opinion on Digital First Sale a decade ago. The Office stated that Digital First Sale would require a complex technical mechanism that ensured that once you gave your copy of a file to someone else (whether for money or not; whether permanently or not), you had no further access to the file. The technical shorthand for such a mechanism is "forward and delete." The Office opined that such a mechanism might be feasible at some point in the future but wasn't then, so it declined to endorse the concept of Digital First Sale.
ReDigi claims to have implemented a robust forward-and-delete mechanism. It uses acoustic fingerprinting from Gracenote to ensure that once a user has sold a file, the same song no longer exists on the user's PC or iPod. There are ways to hack the system, but that's somewhat beside the point.
Digital First Sale remains very much unsettled law, even according to copyleft legal scholars, such as Jason Schultz of Berkeley (formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), who would generally like to see Digital First Sale become reality.
Even putting First Sale aside, there's another legal issue with ReDigi's model. ReDigi only lets users sell files that they bought on sites such as iTunes and Amazon, in order to ensure that users are only reselling legally-obtained files. (The source of a file can be determined by examining metadata or watermarks.) There's just one little problem with that: these sites have Terms of Use that expressly forbid resale of purchased digital files. (Here are Amazon's and iTunes's.) In other words, users who sell files on ReDigi may or may not be infringing copyrights, but they are certainly running afoul of iTunes or Amazon's Terms of Use, which are contracts between the retailer and the user.
But wait a minute: if the Terms of Service forbid users from doing something that copyright law allows, which one prevails? Apparently that's an unsettled question as well, according to both a senior legal authority at the Copyright Office and one of America's leading copyright litigators. The latter told me "the ink is not dry" on this area of copyright law.
Yet one thing is very clear: Digital First Sale scares the media industry to death. Think about it: if anyone could resell their digital content at any price, then ReDigi would only be the beginning. There would be many competing content-resale marketplaces. People could auction their "used" files on eBay. People could "donate" them to public libraries with virtually no cost or effort – and get a tax deduction for a charitable donation. All perfectly legal. The result of this would be a rapid acceleration of what I have called the race to the bottom: the price of legal content would drop to near its cost of coping and distribution, i.e., virtually nothing. Furthermore, the major copyright owners would lose a lot of control over distribution; for example, Hollywood studios' release windows would become virtually meaningless.
It's also evident that the media industry would much rather nip this trend in the bud than endure years of litigation with uncertain outcomes. Even attempting to negotiate a license with a service like ReDigi would imply some comfort with Digital First Sale at a conceptual level, which is something that the media industry would surely want to avoid. Thus the RIAA's actions against ReDigi come as no surprise.
The RIAA's "nastygram" points to file copying that must take place in order for ReDigi's system to work as evidence of copyright infringement, even though, of course, that's not the real issue here. Other litigation concerning Digital First Sale, such as Vernor v. Autodesk (commercial software), is working its way through the courts. Whatever happens with Digital First Sale, the law will take years to reach clarity — and until then, services like ReDigi will continue to be in limbo.
Incidentally, Digital First Sale is going to be a topic at our Copyright and Technology conference week after next (Wednesday November 30). We will have legal experts on this topic as well as Paul Sweazey of the IEEE 1817 standards initiative, which is another attempt to implement something approximating Digital First Sale. The discounted registration offer I made last week still stands.
Irdeto Acquires BayTSP October 24, 2011Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Fingerprinting, Publishing, Services, Video.
2 comments
Irdeto announced on Monday that it is acquiring the antipiracy services company BayTSP. Terms were not disclosed, but this is the culmination of a "strategic alternatives exploration" process that BayTSP had been engaging in for some time.
BayTSP monitors P2P networks, file-sharing services, and other places where unauthorized content might lurk and generates evidence that content owners can use to support legal action against infringers. It uses a range of technologies, including sophisticated network traffic analysis and fingerprinting. It has been one of a shrinking number of providers of such services as the industry has consolidated.
This is a good strategic fit for Irdeto in various ways. First, BayTSP will boost Irdeto's existing antipiracy services; this will strengthen the company's competitive positioning particularly against NDS, which is known to have robust antipiracy services to complement its content protection technologies. Second, BayTSP has made some recent forays into e-book antipiracy services, which will complement Irdeto's own new content protection technology for the e-publishing market.
Yet the consolidation of antipiracy services within a major content protection company has interesting implications for the economics of content protection. Typically, copyright owners pay for antipiracy services such as those of BayTSP, Peer Media, and Attributor, but downstream entities such as network operators, online retailers, and device makers pay for content protection technologies such as conditional access and DRM. At the same time, pay TV operators are starting to launch services in which the content can go beyond the customer's set top box, possibly onto their tablets, mobile handsets, and PCs. The question is: do pay TV operators believe it's their responsibility to protect the content beyond the STB?
Irdeto will have to decide the answer to this question. Specifically: will it continue to charge content owners for BayTSP's antipiracy services, or will it attempt to add to the fees it charges its operator customers? To put it more cynically, have Hollywood studios encouraged Irdeto to acquire BayTSP (as they encouraged Irdeto to buy BD+ Blu-ray content protection technology from Rovi just three months ago) so that they no longer have to pay for it?
Seen in this light, Irdeto's acquisition of BayTSP becomes part of the company's overall strategy to offer more comprehensive and higher-grade content protection services to pay TV operators, on the theory that they will pay more to get better protection. This is a risky strategy, but given the growing footprint that Irdeto has in the overall content protection market, it's a risk that Irdeto can probably afford to take.
C&T 2011 Conference: Registration Now Open October 4, 2011Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Events, Music, Services.
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(Re-running this for those who may have missed it over the Jewish New Year last week.)
Online registration for the Copyright and Technology 2011 conference, November 30 in New York, is now open!
Take a look at the program and you'll see that we have most of the panels filled out – though a few opportunities remain, particularly for moderators. Please contact me if you are interested.
I am also pleased to announced that the law firm of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz has become our latest sponsor.
We invite law firms with practices in the digital copyright area — like Frankfurt Kurnit — to sponsor the conference as well. We have an exciting lineup of panels in our legal track. We will attract a high-caliber audience of professionals from media and technology industries who are coming to grips with issues of intellectual property in the digital age. If you are interested in sponsorship materials, please contact me as well.
In other news, the long-expected consolidation of music subscription services has begun with Monday's announcement that Rhapsody will acquire the assets — mainly the subscriber base — of Napster.
Rhapsody is the first of the on-demand streaming subscription services to have gotten licenses from all of the major labels. They did this back in 2002, when there were five majors and Napster was still trying to recover from being shut down by a federal judge. Napster re-launched the following year… that is to say, the Napster brand was used to re-badge a service originally called Duet, then pressplay, which was a joint venture of two of the majors.
A first wave of subscription services appeared in the mid-2000s. Rhapsody and Napster were survivors of consolidation that took place around 2007, with other players like Virgin Digital disappearing. Now, with the launch of a second wave of subscription services, another cycle of consolidation has been inevitable.
Rhapsody only operates in the US, whereas Napster runs in a few other countries. Rhapsody will retain the Napster brand name outside of the US. Once the deal closes, Rhapsody will have 1.2 million paying subscribers, compared to 2 million for Spotify.
It's a two-horse race now: Spotify vs. Rhapsody. The value of press hype and the long buildup to its US launch have done wonders for Spotify, which — as many would argue, and notwithstanding its superior mobile client — has considerably less functionality than Rhapsody. As I've said before, the consolidation will continue over the coming months.


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Local celebrity judges and barbecue enthusiasts will determine who gets crowned in this invitational cook-off. In addition to mouthwatering treats, festival-goers will enjoy live music, a classic car show, pig races, motorcycle rally, art show and much more. Admission is free. All ages are welcome. For full line up, visit www.seminolecasinoevents.com.
Day 1
Friday, November 16 from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Six local celebrities will be paired with the championship ribbers to compete in a cook-off challenge. The celebrity cooks are radio personalities Big Mama (B103.9), Joe Winner (B103.9), Big D (95.3 The River and Y-100) and Leslie Lopez (Y-100). Food critic Sheila Mesulam (Naples Daily News) and TV reporter Danielle Koleniak (NBC-2) will also compete. Musical performances by Double Your Trouble and The Devonshires.
Send us your questions and comments: Email the Program Director | Email the Webmaster Copyright © 2008-2014 Renda Broadcasting All Rights Reserved.
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Bauquay is situated in the Calvados (Normandy region) in the north of France at 25 km from Caen, the department capital. (General information: Bauquay is 218 km from Paris).
Popular places to visit nearby include Bayeux at 28 km and Creully at 28 km. For more places to visit and local tourist attractions see the map and listings below.
Some places that we or our contributors have visited and reviewed and can recommend close to Bauquay. Note that all distances shown are 'direct' and real driving distances will be greater.
... or see ALL recommended places to visit in Calvados
Hover your mouse over photos for navigation buttons
Local markets
Below we show places with official tourist classifications and other places of interest to visit nearby that should provide inspiration if you are visiting Bauquay and wondering what to do next! Positions of each of these attractions is shown on the map below.
Most beautiful villages in France (see also beautiful French villages) Beuvron (45km)
Recommended detour towns (fr: plus beau détour) Argentan (54km)
Churches or other religious monuments Eglise de Saint Pierre (Rucqueville) (25km); Prieuré (Saint-Gabriel-Brecy) (25km); Abbaye de Caen (Caen) (25km); Prieuré de Saint Gabriel Brécy (Saint-Gabriel-Brecy) (27km); Cathédrale Notre Dame (Bayeux) (28km); Abbaye de Cerisy-la-Forêt (Cerisy-la-Foret) (29km)
Remarkable gardens Plantbessin (23km); Jardins du château de Brécy (28km); Jardins du château de Vendeuvre (40km)
Protected historical centre (fr: secteur sauvegardé) (see also historical French towns) Bayeux (28km)
Sites of natural beauty Rochers des Parcs (18km); Prairie (Caen) (24km); Jardin des plantes de Caen (25km); Forêt de Cerisy (26km); Roches de Ham (31km); Pegasus Bridge (34km); Forêt de Saint-Sever (39km); Baie des Veys (54km)
Listed as villages d'etape - (recommended place to break a long journey) Villers-Bocage (6km); Torigni-sur-Vire (27km); Villedieu-les-Poeles (49km)
Villages in bloom 4* (fr: ville fleurie) Domjean (31km); Cabourg (46km)
Zoo and/or wildlife park Parc zoologique de Jurques (11km)
Commune: Bauquay
Canton: Aunay-sur-Odon
Arrondissement: Vire
Department: Calvados
Region: Normandy
Postcode: 14260
from Caen (prefecture): 25 km
from Paris: 218 km
from Calais: 277 km
from Nice: 846 km
from Bordeaux: 467 km
from Strasbourg: 614 km
Bauquay is in the north of France. Most visitors arrive by car typically by ferry into Cherbourg or Caen on the Normandy coast For driving distances to Bauquay from anywhere in France see driving distances and route planner.
We have found 17 other places listed nearby (within 6 kilometres of Bauquay): Aunay-sur-Odon, Banneville-sur-Ajon, Bonnemaison, Courvaudon, Epinay-sur-Odon, Hamars, Landes-sur-Ajon, Le Mesnil-Au-Grain, Longvillers, Maisoncelles-Pelvey, Maisoncelles-sur-Ajon, Ondefontaine, Roucamps, Saint-Agnan-le-Malherbe, Saint-Georges-d'Aunay, Tracy-Bocage and Villers-Bocage.
This page in French: Visitez Bauquay
Not yet a member!? Make more of your visit with your own personal trip planner.
- Best price guarantee
- Pay on arrival


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Lessons from Literature: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Published on - March 8th, 2008 (by J.D. Roth)
This is the first of an irregular series. I love to read, especially the classics. From time-to-time I'll share nuggets of personal finance advice I find buried in the pages of the past.
This month, our book group is reading Betty Smith's 1943 classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The book describes what it's like to live in poverty, and how that mindset affects a person's choices. I love it.
In the following excerpt, it's December 1901 in Brooklyn, New York. Katie Nolan has just given birth to her first child, and is asking her mother for advice. Katie wants a better life for her daughter, Francie. "I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard," she says. "What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?"
"The secret lies in the reading and the writing," replies her mother, an Austrian immigrant. "Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child…There are two great books. Shakespeare is a great book." The other is the Protestant Bible.
"And then, what else?" asks Katie.
"Before you die, you must own a bit of land — maybe with a house on it that your children may inherit."
Katie laughed. "Me own land? A house? We're lucky if we can pay our rent."
"Even so." Mary spoke firmly. "Yet you must do that. For thousands of years, our people have been peasants working the land of others. This was in the old country. Here we do better working with our hands in the factory. There is a part of each day that does not belong to the master but which the worker owns himself. That is good. But to own a bit of land is better; a bit if land that we may hand down to our children…that will raise us up on the face of the earth."
"How can we ever get to own land? Johnny and I work and we earn so little. Sometimes after the rent is paid and the insurance there is hardly enough left for food. How could we save for land?"
"You must take an empty condensed-milk can and wash it well."
"A can…?"
"Cut off the top neatly. Cut strips down into the can the length of your finger. Let each strip be so wide." She measured two inches with her fingers. "Bend the strips backward. The can will look like a clumsy star. Make a slit in the top. Then nail the can, a nail in each strip, in the darkest corner of your closet. Each day put five cents in it. In three years there will be a small fortune, fifty dollars. Take the money and buy a lot in the country. Get the papers that say it is yours. Thus you become a landowner. Once one has owned land, there is no going back to being a serf."
"Five cents a day. It seems a little. But where is to to come from? We haven't enough now and with another mouth to feed…"
"You must do it thus: You go to the green grocer's and ask how much are carrots the bunch. The man will say three cents. Then look about until you see another bunch, not so fresh, not so large. You will say: May I have this damaged bunch for two cents? Speak strongly and it shall be yours for two cents. That is a saved penny that you put in the star bank.
"It is winter, say. You bought a bushel of coal for twenty-five cents. It is cold. You would start a fire in the stove. But wait! Wait one hour more. Suffer the cold for an hour. Put a shawl around you. Say, I am cold because I am saving to buy land. That hour will save you three cents' worth of coal. That is three cents for the bank.
"When you are alone at night, do not light the lamp. Sit in the darkness and dream a while. Reckon out how much oil you saved and put its value in pennies in the bank. The money will grow. Someday there will be fifty dollars and somewhere on this long island is a piece of land that you may buy for that money."
"Will it work, this saving?"
"I swear by the Holy Mother it will."
I'm only a quarter of the way through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn right now. It reminds me a lot of Willa Cather. I have high hopes that the rest of the book will be just as good.
Awesome, I hope you'll do this w/ movies, too.
I like the advice. I decided to scale it up a bit, by asking what would be the amount needed to afford a down payment on a small condo. Say, $10,000. In 3 years, you could have over $10,000 by putting away $10 a day, by doing little things like the mother said. (Maybe not coal and oil lamps, but the principle holds).
Very nice. Thanks for sharing.
People these days talk about owning a house being a part of the American Dream. But no one is willing to work for it like the mother told the daughter in this passage. Everyone thinks it is something that is owed them, not something that they need to earn. So we have this mortgage crisis with people who did not have the resources to buy a house owning a house and not being able to pay for it. They might have the resources if they trimmed their lifestyle, they might not. But bottom line – the American Dream of owning a home is an opportunity, not a right.
I love that book.
When I lived in California, I was impressed by how dedicated many immigrants were to "make it" in the United States and ensure that their children could have an easier life than they have had. I think that many immigrants have seen a much harder life that most of us will, and they are willing to make sacrifices that the average American would whine about. When you come from a place where there is no way for a poor person to own a business, get an education, or get a decent job, you understand that America really does provide opportunities for smart people who work hard and make personal sacrifices.
I grew up middle-class in the midwest with all the social pressures about what's done and what's "not done". So, when DH and I say we can't do something to reach financial independence, we step back and wonder whether an immigrant would be willing to do that to improve their financial security. Usually, the answer is yes, so we think about it a little harder. Sometimes, we think of a variation of the idea that works better for us; other times, we still just don't want to do it, but we reject a lot fewer workable ideas. I call it "the spoiled brat factor".
I have high hopes that the rest of the book will be just as good.
It absolutely is
So if owning a bit of land is so important, why does government prohibit ownership of tiny bits of land the poor can afford?
When you come from a place where there is no way for a poor person to own a business, get an education, or get a decent job, you understand that America really does provide opportunities for smart people who work hard and make personal sacrifices.
Where I work, we have many hard workers, some of whom are smart, but nobody is getting rich!
I think I'll be going to the library today. Thanks for the inspiration.
@Minimum Wage: what personal sacrifices are they making? Are they going back to school, moving to a better job market, living with extended family, pooling resources with friends and relatives and starting a small business? What are you all doing?
Nobody's talking about "rich" but you.
She does finally get her land. But I won't spoil it. I think the passage you quoted has been in the back of my mind, because it is very much how I think. Yet, I haven't read that book for years. Thanks for the memories! I too own a bit of land – just hope I don't need to use it soon!
One of my co-workers is an aspiring artist, he got some sort of award with some money a few years ago. Some of us have a second job.
I can't afford to go back to school as I have no money and cannot get financial aid.
I want to start a business selling stuff online. I actually have stuff to sell now, but it's sitting in a storage unit because my landlord thinks I don't have room for it here and he made me put it in a storage unit.
I loved that book so much as a kid, and reading this reminds me that I still do. My copy is tattered and torn and is missing a cover, but reminds me of the joy that reading brought me at that age. Thanks for the good memories.
I've been reading your blog religiously for months, but I never felt the need to comment until now. This is one of my favorite books of all time; reading and re-reading it has taught me quite a few life lessons. I am SO happy to see that you dedicated a whole entry to it
It's a wonderful, wonderful book. I discovered it in high school and always re-read it when I am doubtful about sticking to my financial plans. They had so much less than I do; it really puts things in perspective.
Thanks for the reminder; I hope you enjoy the rest of it.
This is my favorite book of all time, and I re-read it at least once a year. I actually just finished reading it again last week.
The rest of the book, if possible, is better than what you've read so far. I hope you revisit this issue when Katie does in the story.
How strange and wonderful that a "finance blog" posted about one of my favorite books of all time! Cool….Recently discovered this site through Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich and found the archived posts really practical.
Love this. There's so much about good decisions in literature. Not that I've got anyting against PF authors, but I frankly got more about money from Vanity Fair than from any ten books about investing and interest rates.
That's what I love about GRS, Christina; it's more like a "mad tea party," rather than just info on interests rates and credit scores, etc.
This book may actually be the first "financial" book I've read! It inspired me to pinch pennies and to be grateful for what I have. I always loved the idea of the star can, which I suppose in modern times is equivalent to the high-interest savings account
This is priceless advice.
I admit that I have never heard of the book, but the words and the setting of this conversation somehow combine well to etch the message deep in my mind.
Thanks for sharing
This is one of my favorite books! Glad that you highlighted it on your blog.
Timeless advice. My gas bill is almost 50% lower this month, and it's due in part to posts like this. The other half of the equation involves layers. LOTS of layers.
I look forward to more irregularity.
I have never had the pleasure of reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" but from your description, I think you would also like "The Glass Castle" which was very humbling for me. It is also about a poverty-stricken family whose children had to learn to survive with no food for a week at times and going to the bathroom in a hole in the ground. Ever since the read, I haven't wasted a single bit of what I am lucky to have.
I loved that book; my family were raised on it. Unfortunately, we have also been raised on the economic division of labor: the women pay for all essentials, and men, who after all, don't *have* to stick around, should be allowed to keep their money and do what they wish with it.
This system seems harder on the men than the women, oddly. But even after losing the love of my life to it, I feel like an extraordinarily manipulative, anti-feminist hussy when I think of one day asking a man to help out with the bills.
I had heard of the book years ago, there is an old WB cartoon (A Hare Grows in Brooklyn) which stole its title from the book.
Tbat wasn't the first time WB stole an idea: Sylvester was originally named Thomas!
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my favorite book and I read it once a year. Poverty is a theme in all of Betty Smith's books. Joy in the Morning takes place in Michigan and is about surviving the first year of marriage while having no money and going to college. The main character, Annie, gets excited when she learns that she can save a penny by buying two packs of smokes at a time instead of one. I also love her because she decides to rewrite War and Peace after reading it and finding it too complicated. If you like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, please read Joy in the Morning. It is only about 200 pages.
This was one of the few books I owned, so I probably read it 50 times. See if you can find the part where Francie gets her coffee every day and doesn't drink it–just uses it to keep her hands warm. Her mother says everyone needs something to waste.
Also the grocery scene–though I believe there's some anti-semitism in that one.
Forgive any wrong memories–I haven't read this book in more than 30 years.
Dear Minimum Wage, Beginning to think you're a jokester having fun with this site. Don't get that feeling about any other posters. WHY IS IT THAT EVERYONE ELSE CAN FIND WAYS TO IMPROVE THEIR FINANCIAL SITUATION BUT YOU CAN ONLY FIND MORE REASONS FOR FAILURE? No matter what the suggestion, you find a way to claim it won't work. If you're legitimate, you have a problem and it's not money, it's attitude. How is it that so many foreigners, legal and illegal, come here not speaking the language, with a history of poverty, psychological scars from horrible events, AND END UP SUCCESSFUL AND OWNING A HOME AND/OR A BUSINESS IN A MATTER OF YEARS? Yet you continue to fail. Get a grip kid! If you have things in storage YOU'RE PAYING STORAGE RENTAL FEES WHICH DO YOU NO FINANCIAL BENEFIT. Take a few of the things out of storage twice a week, sell them online and empty the storage area. Right away you're NOT PAYING RENT ON THE STORAGE AND HAVE MONEY FROM WHAT YOU'VE SOLD ONLINE. Or take pictures and measurements at the storage place and go home and list the things on ebay. YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE THEM AT HAND WHEN YOU LIST ON EBAY. I think you're having us all on and amusing yourself inventing all these pitifutl "why I've failed today" tales of woe. I have money. When I walk my dog (adopted from an animal shelter, not bought!) I pick up aluminum soda cans on the street. Also pick up the occasional stay change. The cans are collected, and every few months they are sold for scrap. The money goes into a savings account. When the amount reaches $500. it's used for a CD. IT'S FREE MONEY AND BENDING OVER TO PICK UP THE CANS OR COINS SAVES ME FROM HAVING TO PAY FOR A GYM MEMBERSHIP. Now either find a positive way to save / earn some money or fess up that you're a fraud! I say this as a person who sells on ebay regularly. If you don't have things to sell, you can sell on ebay on commission for others and earn money with no investment. LOADS OS PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO SELL THEIR THINGS ON EBAY. deRuiter
You know Ive heard about this book but never took the time to look through it, I'll take a looksee when Im done with the one I have right now. I think books like these often offer wise advice we don't see today.
It looks great so far!
@ DeRuiter–Word of advice-don't. Its best to let others who are so deeply steeped in their own negativity find their own way. It will be of much more value than to have the rest of us beat them over the head with all that we've learned. At some point you have to get tired of your situation enough to pull yourself up by your boot straps and make things happen.
MW and I have had this conversation on my site and dare I say he/she is committed their current way of life rather than making a concerted effort to get out of whatever situation they happen to be in…
ATGIB is a fantastic book that I cannot recommend more. I recommend it to my students (college freshmen) and I can't wait for your post where you declare how much you loved this book.
Pace yourself. When it's over, you're quite sad.
One of my favorite books — my book club also read it.
I think the lesson that you always set aside savings no matter how much or how little you make is an important one.
wow. I was just looking for a Sunday afternoon book and this certainly caught the imagination.
in the interest of application, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the actual star bank.(I have a dark closet; the story is sweet; I find at least 5 cents a day on the street…)
any one handy ever made one?
This is such a fantastic book. I had many of the same thoughts as you about the lessons in the book and the economic realities that the family faced. There are many more insights to be had throughout the book. Great post.
I read that book when I was about 10 and still feel myself drawn to it. I probably re-read it every year and get something new from it each time. Such an amazing, captivating story.
I'd love to take a few things out of the storage unit and sell them but the storage unit is located in a place I cannot get to.
More specifically, you have to go down a steep hill to get there and I have a balance problem and cannot negotiate steep downgrades.
I also pick up aluminum cans, pop cans are worth a 5-cent deposit here. There have been times when I lived on fumes and collecting returnables provided food money. (Boxed mac-and-cheese, but it was food.)
Now if I had the money I would hire someone with a truck and move everything from that storage unit to one I could get to. (It would take at least three trips with a pickup.)
I don't have a camera so I cannot take pictures.
Obviously I have a "startup capital" problem. If I had the money I could move the stuff to another place. If I had the money I could rent a normal-sized apartment where I could keep the stuff at home and avoid paying for the storage unit.
@Minimum Wage: Do you have any friends or trusted acquaintances who have a truck, or would invest a few dollars, or would take a share of the profits for helping you access your stuff on a regular basis? If you don't have any people you can turn to or hate to ask for help, your "personal sacrifice" in this situation might involve moving way out of your comfort zone to make some new personal connections.
One of the other qualities of successful immigrants (and other successful people I know) is the ability to work with other people to move toward a goal. I'm not great at this part either, but I'm working on it.
(If I'm feeding a troll, oh, well. Hey, I was happy to hear that s/he is trying to do something. It's a nice change from the passive whining. Obstacles happen. It's what happens after life craps on your plans that matters.)
What a great post idea for making a personal finance blog a tad bit more personal. I read this book a long time ago and loved it but wouldn't have ever thought about it in the personal finance sense. I'm sure your readers (myself included) are going to start noticing more and more mentions of finance topics in the things that they read now. Definitely keep this up! Hope you enjoy the rest of the book.
@Laura H.: In Islam, when a couple marries, the husband is obligated to pay a dowry directly to the wife. The amount is not set in stone; they agree on it in the marriage contract. That dowry is the wife's to do with what she wishes. Except possibly in the case of the wife's adultery, she can also keep it upon divorce.
Additionally, the wife is permitted to work outside the home as long as her primary wife-and-mother duties are met. Whatever she keeps is hers to do with whatever she wishes. The husband's income, however, must first go to support the family, including the wife. Sort of the opposite of what you've described.
Of course, there is compensation in the inheritance laws which state that if a parent dies, the sons get twice what the daughters get.
I'm not Muslim but I thought that was kind of interesting.
As for savings I was never a regular saver, but I did what I thought I could when I thought I could do it. For instance it was not unusual for me to arrange for a set amount of my paycheck to go into a savings account. The account was in another state (I'd had it since high school) where I could not touch it for frivolous reasons, but if we had an emergency, I could call home and ask for it to be sent to me.
I managed to amass over $2000 that way before my husband got mad and demanded that I put some of it towards our bills. I regret ever telling him about the account and IF I ever get married again I will not be giving my husband access to my bank accounts. I would be happy to open a joint account with him to pool money to make sure the bills were paid but he doesn't get a dime of what's mine otherwise. I learned my lesson.
Nowadays I'm starting over with not-a-lot and have worked out a budget that I think I'll be able to follow closely starting next month. It's going to involve savings in some form or fashion. I'm long past due to have some kind of emergency savings in place again. Like Minimum Wage I don't make a lot, but I'm willing to use the resources I do have.
to minimum wage, I think that you are entirely missing the point……. anyways everyone has a story, myself being a single mother making $9 an hour at the time was able to buy a house so I was able to shelter my daughter and I and also have food on the table. And guess what? I was new to the area and did not know a soul. Be kind and caring to people and good things will come in return, like friendships and people who will be willing to let you borrow thier vehicle etc……… As for my house it was perfect for my daughter and I ( very small, I live within my means ), also I had to sacrafice with not having cable televsion, not having access to the INTERNET ( I would go to the liabrary ), also lots of other things !!! And Guess what? Time went on and I am happily married living in a different house with my family and Renting out my first little house that I ever bought making a net profit on everymonth and hope to one day make a profit when I sell it. So that is part of my story.. This site is about learning from each other not being negative. Mayby you should start by canceling your internet to save money.
A lot of us are doing this very thing… whether it be for a house, for retirement, or whatever goals we have.
Piece by piece.
Step by step.
It isn't pretty, but we get there.
Excuse me? How do you think I find job and housing leads? I should give up that to save $9.95 a month?
I don't have cable or satellite or even a television, I don't have a VCR or DVD or an iPod or an XBOX or a Wii or air conditioning.
My cheap old PC doesn't even have sound. Sheesh.
[...] think the answer would be a little of living as a warrior, a little of living life as Katie and a little of back to the farm kind of [...]
To minimum wage, yes you should give up the $9.95 fee, buy a newspaper. Also I have 2 childeren and do not have an XBOX or Wii, I think mayby you are confusing wants from needs.
I think Minimum Wage is either a troll or the whiniest person, ever. No cable or satellite? Not even an XBOX or a Wii? Aw, that is the saddest thing I've ever heard!
If you are legit, why do you bother coming on these sites, when clearly nothing anyone can suggest will ever work for your situation? Sounds like there's no possible way to make any changes, so I guess you've got it all figured out. Sounds like most of us are tired of reading your posts, anyway.
And, to get on topic, this books sounds wonderful, and I'm going to Half Price to try to find a copy. I have a hard time denying myself things that I think I need. I try to stop, take a step back, and evaluate whether I really need something, but I don't always do this. I think I usually know the answer, and I don't like it, so I buy on impulse and feel guilty later, but I never feel guilty enough to return what I've bought. I'm trying to detach myself from material wants more. I try to think "Okay, so you buy these shoes you think you HAVE to have, and how has your life improved? Are you trying to impress someone or be someone else? Are they going to change your life somehow?"
I'm always going to love things I don't need, but I'd like to get a handle on it and set a budget and STICK to it. I think a shift in my own attitude will make me happier than if I just deny myself outright, without coming to terms with the root of it.
ATGIB is one of all time favorite books! The Nolans *do* get their land, but in it is in an unexpected way. I don't want to spoil it either. Let's just say they don't build a house on it. However, Francie learns how to strive for something and carries that lesson with her into (young) adulthood. It's a great book.
How appropriate! My book club is reading this book this month too. Okay– now I'm going to read your post, I was just struck by the coincidence.
i liked the title, and your review makes me want to read it now.


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Goaltender Erik Ersberg has played his last game with the Los Angeles Kings and possibly his last game in the NHL.
The 28-year old Swedish netminder has cleared waivers and the Kings have terminated his contract. The Los Angeles Times reports that Ersberg will likely be heading to the KHL. It is unclear which team Ersberg might join.
With starter Jonathan Quick and backup Jonathan Bernier both off to solid starts, Ersberg was recently demoted to Manchester of the AHL. However, he left the team without permission, allowing the Kings to cut ties with him.
In 11 games with the Kings last season, Ersberg posted a 4-3-2 record with a 2.40 goals against average and a .906 save percentage.


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By The Editors,
Hadyn Green has been writing about sport and leisure for PublicAddress.net since 2008 and is a big fan of sports uniforms and sneakers. He is also representing New Zealand in FullCodePress (an international website building competition) as part of the Code Blacks.
His first pair of sneakers were Converse All Stars purchased from Para Rubber for $10, and he has had numerous pairs since then. Hadyn wrote 'Sneakernomics' on page 40 while wearing Adidas Samba X-Wings from the 2010 Star Wars collection.
For the past six years, Stephen Goodenough has lived in and worked from a converted 1930s Christchurch central city building. With his wife and two young boys, he occupies the second-storey apartment and works—sometimes late into the night—in his studio at street level.
His work is varied, encompassing commercial, corporate, magazine, food, fashion and architecture, and his background in graphic design gives him an eye for shape, texture and structure.
Originally introduced to photography by his father, a keen amateur with a darkroom in the shed, Stephen most recently scored four silver awards at the 2010 Canon AIPP Australian Professional Photography Awards. See his work on page 56.
Born in Kuala Lumpur, Esther Goh graduated in Communications at AUT last year. She quickly gained a gig at the Herald and, more importantly, Idealog. Somehow she managed to snag two of the fun jobs here: putting together our Idealog Weekly newsletter and compiling IdealGear (page 32). "I spend a lot of time on the internet and come across lots of people who do cool stuff, so it's good to be able to do something with them."
As well as indulging her love of the written word, Esther likes cooking and baking, dabbles in photography and "kinda" plays guitar.
Writer Jacqui Gibson loves a good pie—almost as much as she loves a good yarn. And she found both when she trotted off to San Francisco to catch up with Kiwi pie-maker and entrepreneur Alka Patel. "Believe me when I say Alka's homemade pies trump all others," she says. "I definitely wanted to squeeze a couple in my suitcase for the long trip home." Instead, she got down to the business of capturing Patel's story. Jacqui has been storytelling her whole life, starting as a pint-size narrator of tall tales and eventually graduating to newspaper hack and freelancer.


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If it were time to go around in the circle, I'd have to say, "Hi, my name is Tracy, and I'm an energy drink-a-holic." The addiction began innocently enough back in college with the innocuous Red Bull to finish a paper, which then progressed to the several energy drinks to stay awake studying for finals, which then progressed to the full frontal energy drink inhalation for a night out involving booze and even more energy drinks. But here's the thing: I have no interest in reform. Insomnia? Blood sugar turbulence? These are what I call necessary evils.
All energy drinks are not created equal though. Jolt Cola? No thank you. Crunk? Go back to the hip-hop club. For every Guru there is a Taurine-d up impostor. Luckily, I've been around the energy drink block enough times to differentiate between the real deals and the ersatz. So if you're feeling like you need a little kick in the pants, give it a go with one of these riling, uplifting, nerve-jangling delights.
- Red Bull
Red Bull is energy drink royalty. A classic and maybe your introduction to sleepless nights, it will indeed give you wings, or at least a vodka mixer superior to soda gun cranberry juice.
- Monster
The beast of energy drinks, Monsters are sold in jumbo cans and are not for the faint of heart. These are for use when you really want to rage.
- Tab
Much better than its soda counterpart, Tab is admittedly a little sweet and a lot pink. If you're comfortable with your masculinity, however, it tastes pretty darn delicious.
- Rockstar
As many a musician knows, true rockstars (and R. Kelly) know that after the show is the after party– and it goes late. If you want to party like a rockstar, this is the drink for you.
- Full Throttle
Full Throttle will definitely turn all of your engines on, as it too is sold in a big can for those who need a big jolt.
- Guru
Though the name may seem a little hippie zen for an energy drink, Guru is anything but. Furthermore, since there's some juice in the mix, it is the best tasting of the bunch.
- Vitamin Water
I have my doubts about how healthy an energy drink can really be, but Vitamin Water claims to make a healthy-ish one. Regardless, each of its flavors (especially Dragonfruit) tastes damn fine.
- Arizona Iced Tea Energy Tonic
Arizona Iced Tea Energy Tonic is one of the best energy drink bargains. While most sell for two to four dollars, Arizona sells theirs often for as little as 99 cents.
- Sobe Adrenaline Rush
Sobe isn't kidding. You really do get an adrenaline rush from their drinks, and that's a lot easier than running laps or hopping on the Bowflex.
- Sparks
Admittedly, sparks is pretty gross. And yes, it will stain your mouth as though you'd just eaten a slushie. But any energy drink that includes alcohol in its brew at least deserves an honorable mention.
About the Author


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Via hot elven twinks
you rang?
This sailor moon scene is so funny, i just could imagine Riku running for Sora hahaha.
Via hot elven twinks
you rang?
This sailor moon scene is so funny, i just could imagine Riku running for Sora hahaha.
(Source: halleluyall)Via hot elven twinks
First of all, do not go swimming in the ocean to look for Momma.
Momma will be right here.
Momma suggests that at first sign of blood, take tylenol. If you are super in tune with your body, take it when you estimate it will start soon!
Momma knows EXACTLY what to do for cramps. Eating cranberries or drinking their juice is a wonderful way to get rid of cramps.
Another way to help with the pain is to rest on your bed like in the picture, butt in the air and head on the ground.
Also, if you do not like pads OR tampons, there are more solutions!
There is the softcup!
And the mooncup!
They are very similar to one another. They are basically soft, silicone cups that go up into your lady cave that collect the blood.The softcup is a bit more expensive.
Also, Momma says that if you want to have sex and not have gushing everywhere, you can use a softcup!
The mooncup is a lot like the softcup, but it is reusable. Momma will remind you that you MUST disinfect it in boiling water.
You can even use natural sea sponge like a tampon!
Momma says it's okay.
There are also cotton reusable pads!
Momma is also thinking of you men that have periods, too!
There is a special kind of boxers that you can buy with a special pocket for sanitary products! It also comes with a bulge.
The most important thing to do, menstruating or not, is to love and respect yourself. Do not feel ashamed, and get through it as well as you can!
Momma loves you!
Thank you momma.
I imagine Momma having a really typical haggard old smoker's voice
(Source: fairysharkmother)Via World's Number One Digital Idol
Via Too Much Yesterday
On the edge of extinction, humanity turned to those willing and ready to defend it. Those who stepped up and worked in teams to protect all that they know and hold dear. Inside the base (commonly referred to as "The Magic Kingdom") a living community thrives, Rangers, Engineers, Scientists, and civilians live out their lives not in fear, but defiance of the Kaiju threat. Each set of rangers has a different approach to battles. But one thing is true of all of them, they stand and fight for those they love.
First set of what will probably be many. As in the cockpit, the dominant pilot stands to the right (our left). Check out all their individual posts for more in-depth stories on each team.
Nani and Lilo || Jasmine and Aladdin
Merida and Elinor || Nakoma and Pocahontas
Tiana and Naveen || Ariel and Eric
Via In a world full of sin. . .
I dearly wish that people would view their bodies as they view flowers…
Veins everywhere?
Skin patches? Birthmarks?
hella rad~
Scars? Stretch marks?
Freckles? Moles? Acne scars?
heckie yeah~
Large? Curvy?
Small? Thin?
Missing a few pieces?
handsome as ever~
Feel like you just look weird?
you're fantastic looking~
Via Too Much Yesterday
Studio Ghibli films throughout the years
Via We Are Human After All
Drake and Josh shaped our generation like I'm 99.99% sure that this show is the reason I'm so sarcastic.
this show is literally my life


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Bee pollen has been called nature's most balanced food, and is a storehouse of naturally occurring vitamins, minerals, proteins, amino acids, hormones and enzymes.
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Servings Per Container 100
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Pukarta Chala Hun Mein
Lyrics & Chords
These are a set of my first attempts at singing, recording and getting published on the web. I usually play Guitar and Keyboards, just a humble attempt at singing. I have a few off notes and some modified to make things easy or at times modified believing to be more appropriate. These are my versions and I do not claim justice to the covers.
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uploaded almost 6 years ago
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Zandy Back Chain Dress
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