When do people prefer unauthorized copies? (a few hypotheses)

T. Cowen points out that the people downloaded more unauthorized copies* of Resident Evil: Extinction than any other movie, making "most illicitly copied" a dubious proxy for actual popularity.

Here are several hypotheses on what media people are likely to copy without authorization (I'm sure that others have suggested these same hypotheses before):

Guilty pleasures

If you would feel ashamed to admit paying for something, you're more likely to download a free copy of it. Also, most legitimately purchased media have a visible footprint in either the physical or virtual world: anyone who looks can see the DVD box on your shelf or the movie download in your iTunes collection. But for unauthorized copies, the only footprint is a movie file tucked away in some corner of your hard drive. Normally, the signaling aspect of a media purchase is a feature, but for guilty pleasures, it's the opposite.

Low-quality media

Media companies sell basically all media of a certain type for a similar price (e.g., about $17 for a new film on DVD). Possibly this is due to fundamental fixed costs of production (a DVD costs $X to digitally master and $Y per unit to manufacture, transport, and warehouse); possibly it's because of social processes (the studio exec managing film X projected $Y margin per unit at retail, and cannot release it at a lower margin without losing status within the company). Regardless, when a product is of exceptionally low quality, more people will see the dollar price as unwarranted, and they will be more willing to spend time seeking out unauthorized copies (see the next point).

Youth culture

Young people have more time than money, and a large appetite for media (more time to watch movies when you don't have a full-time job, children, or other responsibilities). Obtaining an unauthorized copy of something requires a trade of time for money.

Low-availability media

If a media product is difficult to obtain via authorized channels --- for example, if a product is not available for sale in your country, but is available overseas --- then you are more likely to seek out an unauthorized copy.

Improperly bundled products

If a media product is an aggregation of many separable parts, some of which are much more desirable than the others, then people are more likely to seek out an unauthorized copy of the parts they like.

I've never seen Resident Evil: Extinction, but I'm pretty sure that it falls squarely at the intersection of the first three of the above categories. Anecdotally, I think that many people know someone who would never pay for a Britney Spears album but has some kind of lame excuse for having a few tracks on their iPod.

The above hypotheses have several corollaries.

First, if unauthorized copying truly reduces returns to creators so much that it discourages creative output, then overpriced crap aimed at adolescents and young adults will be the first to go.

Second, media companies can reduce the amount of unauthorized copying by a variety of straightforward means, including:

• Reduce the price of crappy products. (Duh.)
• Offer very low-cost versions of media that require a time investment. For example, offer a low-cost subscription service where you must play a game for a certain amount of time (think World of Moviecraft) in order to obtain a download of a media product. Consumers who value time over money will still buy the DVD. Consumers who value money over time will play the game.
• Sell "brown sleeve" versions of guilty pleasures. Sell junky movies and music in a disposable cardboard sleeve instead of a DVD keep case or CD jewel case with album art. Or even sell them in deceptive packaging: reverse the cover insert for your Resident Evil DVD, and it can look like some depressing and obscure Swedish existentialist art film that nobody will ever want to pull off the shelf.

* I refuse to use the term "pirated", as it trivializes actual piracy (the sailing-ships kind), and blurs the important distinctions between different forms of intellectual property infringement.

Pandora: awesome

I've been using the web since Netscape 1.0, and I've grown pretty jaded about new Internet technology. I got sick of beta testing the latest timewasting Internet fad sometime around 2001. As much as I write and think about technology (real and imagined), I've grown pretty reluctant even to try new technologies myself. And unless an application's reasonably polished and somehow delivers concrete value into my life, I won't give it a second glance.

I say all this as a preface to remarking that I tried the Pandora Internet music service today, and it delivers the goods. Its music recommendation technology is very impressive: type in a band name that you like, and it dynamically constructs a playlist of songs resembling the songs by that band. I was in the mood for some sunny pop music, so I typed in Saint Etienne, and instantly got a playlist of tracks I'd never heard (from artists both familiar and not), and that really sound like music that a Saint Etienne fan would like: Club 8, Stars, Magnetic Fields, Kanda, Brazilian Girls, etc.

I'm really curious about the guts of the so-called "music genome project" technology behind Pandora. Whatever it is, it works. If you're puttering around at home and just want to put on some background music for a particular mood, there's no need to construct playlists manually anymore.

Of course, as a hacker, I find the arbitrary restrictions --- you can only skip forward, and only skip a fixed number of times per hour --- mildly annoying. But if you view Pandora as a replacement for musical radio stations, then it's a huge, quantum leap forward.

My friend MS tried out Pandora some time ago. Being the music geek he is, he mentioned the potential for fiddling around with playlists to optimize your experience. But I didn't want another technology that I spend my time fiddling around with; I want technologies that give me maximum value for minimum time investment. Tragically, therefore, I didn't try it out until today. Rest assured that Pandora will repay the most minimal effort with a large payoff.

Semi-synchronous telephony with call invitations

Consider the relative advantages of text messages and phone calls:

• For activities requiring actual dialogue rather than notification, text messaging is incredibly inefficient: the interface is terrible and an exchange requiring N round trips requires 2N text messages, each of which requires that a human being fiddle with a phone and compose a new message. On the other hand, text messages do not require that the person on the other end be instantly available in order for the message to be received.
• Conversely, phone calls are excellent for negotiation: an exchange requiring N round trips can be conducted within the space of 1 phone call. However, if the person on the other end isn't instantly available, then you are stuck either leaving voice mail (leading to the possibility of phone tag) or calling repeatedly, which is also incredibly annoying.

What's needed is a technology that merges the best of both worlds: the ability to do rapid synchronous dialogue, and the ability to initiate that dialogue without the human having to play phone tag or to call repeatedly.

As it happens, voice mail and calling repeatedly correspond exactly to the two usual mechanisms that computer communication protocols use when one process wants to receive a communication from another process but doesn't know when that communication will be ready. For the nerdy people who care, voice mail is registering a callback, and calling repeatedly is polling. But never mind the jargon: the important observation here is that computers already know how to do this sort of thing, and do it all the time, so it's stupid to make human beings do it.

Therefore I propose the semi-synchronous phone call, or "call invitation" for short. Here is how it works:

1. Alice wants to talk to Bob. She sends him a call invitation.
2. The invitation goes into both Alice and Bob's invitation inboxes. An invitation has two possible states for each user: "available" and "busy". By default, all invitations are initially available for the caller and busy for the callee.
3. Bob now has three choices:
   • Bob can do nothing, which leaves it in his invitation inbox.
   • Bob can refuse the invitation, which deletes it from the system.
   • Bob can mark himself "available" for that invitation.
4. Alice has the same three choices, except that she's initially available for the invitation. She will have to mark herself "busy" if she starts doing something that would stop her from talking on the phone.
5. At any time, either Alice or Bob can toggle their status (available or busy) for the invitation. Talking on the phone implicitly toggles you busy for the duration of the call.
6. If, at any time, both Alice and Bob have marked the invitation available, they receive a phone call connecting them.

Now, no doubt many similar proposals have been made in the past. I'm specifically aware of proposals in the ubiquitous computing community for communication devices that act differently when you're available than when you're busy. Some of the fancier proposals involve the device or the environment sensing (via sound, motion, or whatever) when you're doing an "interruptible" activity, and automatically marking you available or busy.

However, I am not familiar with any proposal that works exactly the way I propose, and I claim that even small deviations from exactly the above design would result in a system that people would hate.

To begin with, in my proposal, people explicitly mark their availability information. I believe that availability must be volitional. Imagine if your phone decided on its own whether to ring, and whether to vibrate or ring audibly. Or imagine if your front door decided when to open in response to a knock based on your past behavior towards that person. On a deep, primate level, humans do not feel emotionally secure when their social approachability is outside their control. Implicit signals like body language work for controlling approachability in face-to-face interaction only because humans can volitionally and unambiguously broadcast these signals, and because other humans react instinctively with extremely high fidelity.

Furthermore, in my proposal, availability is relative to each message. It is not a universal property of the user: there's no such thing as "your" availability, only your availability reacting to a given message. This is important for several reasons. First, you never have to think about your availability when no invitations are pending in your inbox, which means you're not constantly toggling your phone into "available" or "busy" mode. Second, you're never broadcasting any information about your availability, which preserves your privacy.

Some proposals make a user's availability relative to a priority: you can say you're available for "high priority" calls, but not "regular priority" or "low priority" calls. Other proposals make availability relative to a user and a caller: you can put someone on your whitelist, which means that you always accept calls from them.

Such priority schemes sound like a good idea, but they would fail to solve the problem for two reasons. First, no code-based priority scheme could deal with the complexities of actual human interaction. Second, such priority schemes actually force the recipient to expose more information, with the putative aim of increasing privacy; this gets the problem fundamentally backwards. Consider the problem of setting your availability for calls from your in-laws, or someone you just started dating.

Every successful interpersonal communication technology leaves room for ambiguity in social interactions. Why didn't you answer the phone the other day? Maybe you were busy, or maybe you didn't want to talk to that person, or maybe you wanted to take the call but you're playing hard to get. Why didn't you respond to my text message/email/Facebook note? Maybe you haven't logged on lately, or maybe you can't stand me. Like it or not, human beings prefer the ability to deceive each other socially. My proposal preserves social deception in a way that priority schemes do not.

In fact, if there's any flaw in my proposal, it's this: I seriously think that many people choose media like text messaging, instant messaging, email, and social networking sites precisely because they do not want to talk, even when it would be more efficient. Talking on the phone forces you to interact even more instantly than instant messaging. It also exposes the vast amount of sub-verbal information that carries through your human voice whether you want it to or not, including, first and foremost, your emotional state. In the end, voice communication may be growing rarer precisely because it's not good enough at helping us conceal our true selves from each other.

What's your encore? Do you, like, anally rape my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?

...the illuminating aspect of the source of this expostulation being that Dante, after suffering nonstop abuse from Randal up to the point of the outburst, remains his steadfast buddy for the remainder of the film.

The relationship to the conversation related in this post of Ezra Klein's is left an exercise for the reader.

Sullivan, Malkin, and justified belief

Henry at CT dares Andrew Sullivan to engage in substantive debate with Cosma Shalizi about statistics, which literally caused me to laugh out loud. Of course, the idea is ridiculous. Andrew Sullivan's a journalist with a Ph.D. in political philosophy, and I doubt he's done any math beyond basic arithmetic in decades. Like most elite journalists, he probably considers mathematics --- which is merely the language of the universe, after all --- unworthy of the hard work it would take to relearn it. Much easier to weave a bunch of tangentially related sophistry and hope your listeners get too distracted to notice you've simply evaded the main point.

On a similar note, Ezra Klein recently dared Michelle Malkin to debate him about health care. She ran away, of course. Ezra Klein is a huge policy nerd who spends his days reading white papers about health care. Malkin is a shrieking demagogue who spends her days copying and pasting Republican talking points and minimally digested links into her offal-trough of a blog. Nobody with half a brain earnestly believes that Malkin knows anything about health care policy. And Malkin has a enough of a vestigial sense of dignity (even after doing this) to fear being completely humiliated by Klein. Her refusal was a foregone conclusion.

A common thread unites these two stories. Shalizi and Klein have made conscious life choices that narrow their respective subjects of expertise (with sometimes steep costs), and as a consequence they can speak about those subjects with authority. People who make such sacrifices do so because they care about the subject, which is to say that they care about the truth of the matter. They want to get things right, and to behave in a way that causes their audiences to become strictly better-informed than before.

Sullivan and Malkin are playing a fundamentally different game. Their mission is to attract attention and notoriety. They do not care whether their actions further the cause of knowledge, by which I mean justified and true belief. In fact, in their own ways, Sullivan and Malkin behave professionally in ways that directly inhibit the propagation of knowledge. Not coincidentally, this behavior has salutary effects on their careers.

Sullivan does not care whether a belief is justified and true; or, at least, he does not care enough to approach any given subject with the humility and patience to learn about it. He earnestly believes that there's value to stirring up the waters, even if the primary effect is to splash mud into people's eyes. This belief is convenient for him in two ways. First, it gives him permission to write about anything without understanding its substance; and being prolific is good for a pundit's career. Second, it places him at the center of controversies; and being part of a controversy --- regardless of the correctness of one's positions --- is also good for a pundit's career.

Malkin, for her part, understands that (like Jonah Goldberg) her job is not to investigate the truth of anything, but to spew a great volume of noise that echoes the prevailing Republican talking points. I don't doubt that, on some level, Malkin believes whatever she's saying at any given moment. However, the distinction between knowledge and faith is that knowledge is justified --- that there exists some combination of evidence and inference that logically leads one to the conclusion. Malkin has chosen to base her career instead on faith --- and not even faith in a stable set of fundamental principles, which might be admirable, but faith in the official Party truth of the moment. (Eastasia? We have always been at war with Eastasia.) As a propagandist, Malkin's mission is faith through noise --- produce enough noise, and you can reinforce people's beliefs in the Party without ever justifying those beliefs. Obviously, this behavior is good for her career. The more noise you produce, and the more closely you adhere to the Party line, the more likely that people in the market for such noise will choose to pay attention to you.

Sadly, Sullivan and Malkin are well-rewarded for doing what they do. In politics, the market for knowledge is much weaker than the market for noise. Knowledge is expensive and serves only itself, but noise is cheap and can be turned to the purposes of any buyer. We can heap contempt on Sullivan and Malkin, but I don't know how to change the underlying dynamics that elevate them to prominence.