The Big Third.

Until now we've had two source documents that are essential to arguing against the entertainment industry's anti-Internet FUD: Courtney Love's speech, and Janis Ian's essay.

Now we have a third: Tim O'Reilly's seven-lesson essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution.

Like Courtney and Janis, Tim speaks from his own success. Unlike the other two, Tim lives and works in the world of technology. He may make his money in a dead tree medium, but his habitat is the Net, which is under sustained attack by Hollywood.

I'd say more, but I'd rather you read the piece. It's important.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Thanks, Doc, for pulling all these pointers into one spot. We can only hope that reason will eventually prevail.

10:13:49 PM •  • comment  

Article : Building Horizontal Companies - The Job .... Article : Building Horizontal Companies - The Job KM has Come to Finish :
"… ‘Knowledge management’ may sound like a nebulous term, but it really refers to an attempt to make sense of a new order of business in which information needs to be organised, stored and transmitted in the right way to the right people, at the right time … What has KM really achieved through all the hype and expense? Have we really learnt how to 'manage knowledge'? Is there really anything new in all the KM literature? My view is that it’s not really important to know; rather to listen to KM’s true message of change. KM is actually just the culmination of a few important trends, a first clumsy attempt to make sense of a new order of business"
* Downloadable as a 4-page, 87 KB PDF
* Go to Building Horizontal Companies - The Job KM has Come to Finish, listed in the December 2002 News section of Sveiby Knowledge Management [SynapShots]

These well-intentioned folk really soothe the souls of everyone mentioned so far – a nicely isolated department that allows a company to feel that they are "doing something about KM" without having to embark upon the arduous journey of creating a truly horizontal organisation. These people, incidentally, believe that KM has its own ROI separate from the value the company creates from its knowledge assets.

This is a relatively short piece, but spot on in terms of seeing knowledge management as primarily the first signs of new organizations that live fully in an economy of services and ideas more than products.

Let me also put in a plug here for SynapShots, an excellent site done by Peter West that collects and organizes a seemingly endless supply of relevant and useful material about knowledge management.

7:14:26 PM •  • comment  

Tim O'Reilly Says Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Idmat writes "In Tim's latest opus, he reflects on the lessons of his experience as a publisher: (1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative ... [Slashdot]

A nice, balanced, perpective on the current debates about intellectual property and file-sharing from O'Reilly. A couple of excerpts:

Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for wholesale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is a disservice to honest discussion.

Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Piracy is an illegal commercial activity that is typically a substantial problem only in countries without strong enforcement of existing copyright law...

...

Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces. In fact, there is usually a rich ecology of middlemen....

...

The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.

Worth taking the time to read in full.

10:48:10 AM •  • comment