Not Johann 1.0

This is one of a series of posts; the last post was here.

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But while Gutenberg created the copy, we should also note what he didn’t create: Johann 1.0, the Gutenberg Reading System™. There was no device interposed between the content and the reader, no distinctive system to carry the information to those who wanted to access it. That was also true of the dominant method for creating music: home-brewed using instruments and sheet music. Any piece of sheet music would work with any piano.

But as technology intervened, we lost our simple world of access and universal interoperability. Other than printed materials—sheet music, books, newspapers and magazines—most of the content that we encounter is mediated by a device or delivery system or both. Our first content technologies were the phonograph and the player piano. Both required a marriage of playing device and content object and that meant we had entered the world of platform competition with devices that worked together or perhaps not at all. Would a Welte-Mignon roll play on an Ampico player piano? These playing devices were usually patented, too, so we needed to figure out how patent law for devices should work with copyright law for content. We needed to determine whether content should simply be available for any device, without the consent of the copyright holder, and whether the device creator could somehow limit what content could be played on a particular player.

Platform competition is usually tricky. We have faced these issues with each technology and still do so today. The issues faced by the early phonograph companies and Aeolian, the dominant maker of player pianos, match up well with clash over how much Apple should be forced to open up the iPod to outsiders. Do we think that we encourage player creation if we allow the player maker to specify who can make content for its machines? If the player and the content are linked together—if the system is closed—the player maker can choose to sell the player for less knowing full well that more money will be coming from content. If anyone can sell content for the player, the device maker may decide to charge a higher price than it otherwise would for the player and that may slow adoption of the new technology.

Comments

[Doug Lay]

Your description of playing devices and content objects seems a little outdated. Nowadays, pretty much every content object is a stream of bits, and pretty much every playing device is just another stream of bits hooked up to general-purpose audio/video playback equipment. In such an environment, keeping a system closed seems like a fools' errand.

[Ben Foster]

I think it is unfair to say that his description is outdated, at least in any particularly important way. While it is true that most content is just a stream of bits, and hypothetically it is convertible into a stream of bits a particular play-back mechanism can understand, in practice, encoding schemes continue to result in essentially closed systems. Conversion is difficult and outside the technical skill of most end users, just try playing a song you downloaded from iTunes (.acc) on your new Microsoft Zune.

[Doug Lay]

Ben:

I don't own a Zune, but I convert all the AAC files my wife buys into MP3 (an open format), and it's trivially easy. The average user doesn't need to have the skill to do the conversion themselves - they just need access to a conversion utility of some sort. In a networked digital environment these are usually pretty easy to come by, even in regimes where the law attempts to retard technogical progress by imposing anti-circumvention provisions.

[Ben Foster]

I overstated things. However, I think you give people a bit too much credit by referring to the process as trivially easy. Conversion requires a knowledge of what format your music is in, and what format you need to covert it to. It also requires enough searching skill to locate a conversation utility for your operating system. I think that there are plenty of users out there who would have trouble putting these pieces together without guidance, additionally there are other people who are completely unaware that such conversation is possible.

As long as a company erects barriers "closing", if only temporarily their system they can potentially reap huge economic rewards. This formula seems uncertain at best, it doesn't seem to be working out for Toshiba's HD DVD, or really for anyone besides apple in the online music business. Still this creation of barriers does seem to concentrate users to a particular system which can be very advantageous for that system's company.

You are right that the network breaks down digitally closed systems, but that doesn't seem to eliminate the potential benefit a company can gain from constructing the system in the first place.