About Me 0116: internet marketing

From jokes about Brett Favre to South Park stealing lines, we're in a crisis of originality thanks to easy searching on the internet, writes Ben Greenman. Whatever happened to getting credit for an idea?

Recently, Brett Favre met with NFL Commissioner Roger Gooddell to discuss whether or not he took pictures of his penis and texted them to Jenn Sterger, a former New York Jets game hostess. Favre, an egomaniac, became the subject of yet another round of mockery as a result of this scandal. Saturday Night Live ran a skit about Wrangler, the jeans company for whom Favre serves as a spokesman, marketing pants that let the offending organ hang loose. Concerns were raised about the skit, not on the basis of taste, but because it was relevantly similar to a Modern Humorist sketch that had run a week earlier.

SNL ran a skit about Wrangler, for whom Favre is a spokesman, marketing pants that let the offending organ hang loose. South Park creators apologized for a show that stole jokes from a College Humor feature. (Photo: Nam Y. Huh / AP Photo; Comedy Central)

This has happened to plenty of people, in one way or another. Almost 10 years ago, I published a musical about the Elian Gonzalez controversy on McSweeneys. Less than a week later, Saturday Night Live ran a similar parody. The similarities were indisputable, but as I told a reporter at the time, that’s no proof of plagiarism, even of the subconscious variety (paging Robin Williams). The same is true of the SNL/Modern Humorist case. Sometimes similar ideas spring up in two places at once, or in two places in different times without any connection between them. And even when there are connections, what of it? Take Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” the huge disco hit from 1978. Now listen to Bobby Womack’s “Put Something Down on It,” from 1975. Sounds like a straightforward case of thievery, doesn’t it? But now listen to Jorge Ben’s “Taj Mahal,” from 1972. There are enough points of contact to raise more than eyebrows, but that doesn’t affect the quality (good or bad) of any of the work. Everything comes from somewhere. Most seeds are hybrids. The human brain, while complex, is not infinite, and all creativity is a mix of innovation and imitation.

Thanks to places like Google, the Internet is now the equivalent of an instant patent search that allows you to search for recurrences of phrases, puns, neologisms.

With that said, though, there’s a problem, and it isn’t about Saturday Night Live or Brett Favre’s naked bootleg. It’s about the Internet, and how quickly it lets us track cases of alleged borrowing and appropriation. When Juan Williams was fired by NPR last month for what the radio network considered intemperate remarks regarding Muslims, the Internet erupted. That’s what it does. People accused Williams of racism at the same time that other people accused NPR of overreaction and knee-jerk political correctness. I didn’t want to weigh in until I had seen the actual interview—which now, thanks to that same Internet, is efficiently archived. Williams said that he’s nervous when he sees people in “Muslim garb.” I understood his point, at some level. He was saying that his perception of Muslims was permanently changed by the 9/11 attacks.

But there was a flaw in his reasoning. Leaving aside that Williams seemed to have a monolithic, almost cartoonish idea of “Muslim garb,” it occurred to me that Islamic terrorists are the least likely to dress traditionally. Their strategy, were they to try to board a plane with a weapon, would be to dress as inconspicuously as possible. I was thinking about it, so I sent something out via Twitter.

About 10 minutes later, I got an email from someone I didn’t know. It accused me of stealing the insight. I don’t know why he didn’t just tweet back or even send me a direct message. Twitter has all those features built into it, for maximum annoyance. But he chose to email.

He told me that other people online had already thought of that argument, and had even said so online. One of them, he said, was Jeffrey Goldberg, who used to work at The New Yorker, where I work: The implication, I guess, was that I had somehow shadowed Jeff, taken his idea, and then claimed it as my own.

This is idiotic in many ways. First of all, it’s not true. I didn’t see anything that Jeff wrote, and while I agree with him on this point, it’s only because he agrees with me. Second of all, how have we reached the point where the standard for a thought is chronological primacy? There are, of course, still cases where ideas move from one brain to another by way without authorization. Last week, the creators of South Park apologized for a show that satirized the Christopher Nolan film Inception after it became clear that they had pilfered a few of the jokes from a College Humor feature. South Park co-creator Matt Stone told Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times that they had run across the piece online and assumed that College Humor was using dialogue from the actual film: “It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid and we just threw it together. But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.” The South Park case demonstrates how easy it is to accidentally run across an idea online, and claim it as your own, even without malicious intent. There’s no question that the Internet, which distributes an unprecedented amount of content to an unprecedented number of destinations, enables theft of intellectual property. But if the Internet can enable theft, it can also detect it. If your original content—your ideas, your jokes—gets redistributed without proper credit, it’s easier than ever to track down the culprits. Thanks to places like Google, the Internet is now the equivalent of an instant patent search that allows you to search for recurrences of phrases, puns, neologisms. Here, though, is the root of a larger issue: The cure is far worse than the disease. The Internet’s search capabilities, which permit easy detection of unoriginality, also have a chilling effect on originality.

An example: There’s a guy in my neighborhood who dresses exactly like Bruce Springsteen, circa 1975. He has the jeans. He has the cap. He has the beard. After seeing him a handful of times on the street, I nicknamed him “Born to Rerun.” It made me laugh, for a second. It was a pointless little joke, no more than that. Out of curiosity, I searched for the phrase, which I thought I had invented—or rather, which I had invented, at least for my purposes. I discovered, predictably, that the phrase has been used before, frequently: in 2003 by Entertainment Weekly, last year by a fan posting a review of “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” and on and on. I’d like to report that I don’t care about those earlier occurrences, that I brushed them off and moved on, but the fact is that I do care. It’s deflating to learn that your original idea, no matter how trivial, has already made an appearance. Before the Internet, I might have kept that pointless little joke alive in my head. It might have ripened into something or it might have died on the vine. But it would have been my tomato. Now, the process works differently. The incontrovertible proof that the phrase was already circulating made it difficult, if not impossible, for me to claim it as my own. It acquired the feel of something shoddy and second-hand, and I jettisoned it.

This is an exceedingly trivial case. I readily, happily, heartily admit that. But originality can be an extremely serious issue (the last few weeks have seen claims of appropriation or plagiarism against the poet Raymond McDaniel and the fiction writer Jonathan Safran Foer) so maybe it’s easier to illuminate it without the interference of significance. The first spark of an idea—whether a short story, a song lyric, a newspaper headline, a movie title, or a joke about an oddly dressed neighbor—is tenuous at best, and conditions need to be perfect not to douse it before it can kindle something more substantive. If the Internet moves us toward a get-there-first-or-not-at-all world (that phrase, by the way, seems all new, at least according to Google), then hundreds of thousands of newly born “proto-ideas” (1180 results) will end before they have a chance to “flower into genuine articles of faith” (9 results). And that means fewer “moronic skits” (151 results) about “Brett Favre’s organ” (4 results).

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and the new What He's Poised to Do. He lives in Brooklyn.

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After all the shouting has died down, after the House elects its Republican leaders and after the Senate sorts itself out, the reality is that policy in the telecom sector will likely remain where it has been for the past two years -- in state of suspended animation. That's a shame, because the people who can most benefit by some reasonable and common-sense changes may not have the opportunity to do so.

The two issues at the top of the list are Net Neutrality and the wonky-sounding "reclassification" of broadband services. Net Neutrality is the simple concept that those who control the telecommunications networks shouldn't be able to play favorites with the content that is transmitted over those networks. It's an old concept, as Prof. Tim Wu pointed out in his book, Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. The simple, fair idea is that everyone online should have the same ability to make his or her voice or service known to the rest of the world.

President Obama campaigned in part on restoring an Open Internet. Julius Genachowski, his chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hasn't delivered, and probably won't. As his pattern of activity has developed, Genachowski has ducked the major issues to which the big telecommunications companies, aided by the congressional Democratic Blue Bells and by all congressional Republicans, have objected. He has the votes of the other two Democratic FCC commissioners, but that's not enough for him.

As a result, Genachowski has taken the pressure off of Congress to do anything to ensure an Open Internet, in which everyone, not simply the big phone and cable companies, can benefit. (The fact that 95 Democrats who signed a Net Neutrality pledge lost on Tuesday is irrelevant. They would have lost anyway in the GOP landslide.)

As with any issue when the battles are controlled by big companies, it's the small ones who get overlooked and/or crushed. In a recent blog post, Kevin Warhus, marketing manager for the Scottsdale, Ariz., digital marketing company StringCan Interactive, wrote about the link between a neutral Internet and what he sees as Web 3.0, which seeks to personalize the Web experience for consumers. Warhus is particularly concerned about telecom control over the mobile Web and the effect on small businesses his company helps to support. He wrote:

As we evolve into the age Web 3.0 in which our information, likes and dislikes, and online habits help create a personalized web experience, Net Neutrality stands as an important stepping stone to ensure the proper development of Internet interaction and the protections of our freedoms.

"Allowing a handful of powerful corporations to decide what websites and information we should be able to access defeats the purpose of this open source frontier. The Internet has always stood as an environment where anyone can make a website or blog and receive equal opportunities to be heard and to grow. By taking away those rights we are essentially handing over our freedoms and going against the foundational values that make The Internet what it is today and what it may or may not be tomorrow.

Congressional Self-Interest Should Be A Factor

But the larger issue, and the one in which the enlightened self-interest of all members of Congress should kick in, is the reclassification of broadband services. Again, the concept is fairly simple. Until 2005, the FCC had jurisdiction over the telecommunications connection that connected people to the Internet. The Bush-era FCC "reclassified" that service from one with explicit authority to gray areas -- without any outside huffing and puffing that it should be a congressional decision that such a thing be done.

Since then, the FCC has deregulated all but the most basic voice-line services and removed any requirements that may help consumers. This shaky structure survived until April 6 this year, when the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC did not have authority over broadband services in the way the agency claimed it did.

After typically dithering around for a couple of months, the Commission proposed a compromise that would allow some regulatory authority but not the full slate of regulations. Typically, the industry and their congressional allies overreacted, starting the meme that the FCC wanted to "regulate the Internet" and that Congress had given the Commission no such authority.

That argument is total nonsense. No one is regulating the Internet. The FCC wants its jurisdiction back over broadband access. Members of Congress, particularly from rural districts, should want the FCC to have that authority. By denying the Commission that jurisdiction, representatives, particularly those from rural areas, are working against the interest of their constituents.

The Universal Service Fund, which provides financial support to rural phone companies, only is directed to help plain old dial-up service. If those members of Congress want their constituents to have the benefit of support for broadband, and to allow their constituents to participate in the broadband economy, then the FCC has to be able to make some changes, switching the support to broadband services. It can't do that unless it has the authority and jurisdiction.

Big telecom and cable companies and their ideological allies oppose reclassification. Interestingly, however, the Communications Workers of America, which sided with the industry opposing Net Neutrality, signed a letter endorsing reclassification.

If we needed any more evidence of how important broadband is to rural areas, a new study by the Strategic Networks Group for the e-North Carolina authority (e-NC) has some fascinating new statistics that show how crucial broadband is to the economy in general and to job-generating small business in particular. Some of the study's findings:

• Nearly one in five (18%) of new jobs were created as a direct result of Broadband Internet. Small businesses (less than 20 employees) are especially dependent on Broadband Internet as 28 percent of new jobs in that sector are attributed to using the Internet.
• More than half of all businesses (54%) said that they would not be in business if they did not have broadband while two in five (41%) would have to relocate if broadband was not available in their community;
• The number of households either currently running (31%) or planning to run a business from their home in the next twelve months (14%) is nearly half (45%) of North Carolina's broadband households;
• Even more broadband households are either now using (41%) or planning to use (24%) broadband to sell items online. That's nearly two-thirds (65%) of broadband households using it to at least supplement their income;
• Most (85%) of home-based businesses said that broadband was essential to their business.

The study also went into some detail about the problem of pockets of areas generally served with broadband that don't have it; how areas served with inferior broadband are at a competitive disadvantage, and lots of broadband service is really very slow and unhelpful.

The Authority the FCC Should Cede

Over the past few months, Genachowski has shown a willingness to cede his agency's authority to Congress. He wouldn't act on Net Neutrality or reclassification, wishing instead that a last-ditch effort by current House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) to negotiate a Net Neutrality bill might come to fruition. It was a gallant effort, but the House Republicans killed it.

Genachowski sat out the blackouts of millions of TV viewers from favorite channels, including the most recent fight between Fox and Cablevision, which blacked out three million people in the New York City area and Philadelphia. He said the FCC doesn't have the tools to intervene. He declined to take any action on a petition for rulemaking filed by Public Knowledge and others to reform the retrans system, based on the part of the law that gives the FCC authority to "enact regulations as necessary" to carry out the law that gave broadcasters the right to exact payments from cable companies. Instead, he wants Congress to work out the problem.

So far, the one area in which Genachowski has not conceded congressional authority is the one he should -- universal service reform. Holding up USF reform until the agency's authority over broadband is clear will force those members of Congress who care more about their constituents' welfare than silly Tea Party talking points to take the Commission's authority seriously. If members of Congress don't give the FCC the authority it needs, the areas they represent suffer.

We shall wait for Congress to act (or for the FCC to act, for that matter) on these crucial issues as we wait for Godot.

Friday, November 19, 2010

internet marketing

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