It turns out that Netflix is thinking along the same lines — see Netflix’s Risky Bet on Original Programming, at GigaOm: “Netflix is reportedly in talks to score its first original programming, bidding against cable networks like HBO for the rights to a new project called House of Cards that would star Kevin Spacey and be directed by David Fincher.”

GigaOm is skeptical that this fits with Netflix’ core values, but notes the import:

One of the arguments cable networks and distributors like to make about the effect that Netflix — and online video in general — has on the broader TV ecosystem is that by disrupting current business models, Netflix is essentially destroying the engine through which high-quality content is created. That is, by drawing eyeballs elsewhere, Netflix and others could cripple the broadcast and cable networks’ ability to fund production of future shows. But Netflix’s bid shows that high-quality content will continue to find funding, even if it’s not through existing or traditional channels.

Atlantic econ blogger Megan McArdle comments:

This makes total sense to me–both as a strategic threat, and an actual strategy.  It is obviously in the interest of Netflix, and probably in the interests of consumers, for it to be a one-stop-shop for all the content you might want to download.  The way to do that is either to be so big that they can’t afford not to deal with you–or to make the content yourself.

She also discusses the move here.

Netflix image from ASurroca’s Photostream.

When Hulu CEO Jason Kilar blogged his “thoughts about the future of TV” on the Hulu website, the reaction was strong:  “Is Jason Kilar Trying to Get Fired?” headlined a piece the next day on the WSJ’s All Things Digital site, noting that “some . . . believe Kilar wrote it so that his bosses–executives at News Corp.’s Fox, Disney’s ABC, and Comcast’s NBCU–will give him the hook.”

They same “some” also thought the piece “smart and well-written,” as indeed it is, so there seems to be a disconnect here – if he had written something stupid and turgid, there would be no problem? (The answer, probably, is “yes,” I fear, based on my long experience with organizations.)  Hollywood Reporter said he “just might be right about the industry’s future,” but placed no bets on his survival.

So what did Kilar say that aroused the furies? His message had two parts, an appraisal of the business, and a pitch for Hulu.

His appraisal made the point that three basic forces will shape the future of TV:

• TV has too many ads, and consumers will go to great lengths to avoid them, by moving to DVRs and on-demand viewing;
• Consumer want to view TV on their own schedules and on a variety of devices, so the idea of show-it-once is dead;
• Consumers react quickly to shows and movies and can tank them immediately.

Whether the industry likes these developments is irrelevant; they are facts, and “History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Hulu is not burdened by that legacy.”

Kilar added two more factors to the stew:

• Advertisers are increasingly restive. For 60 years, they had to rely on a show’s projected audience as a “blunt proxy for a certain target audience,” which resulted in “wasted impressions and an often irrelevant experience for consumers.” They are very interested in better targeting.
• Content providers want to make a fair return, and they will give their product to “those distributors that pay the most on a per-user, per-month basis.”  It is going to be a dog eat dog world of in which “rapid innovation, low margins, and customer obsession will define the winners in pay TV distribution.”

From these premises he went on to discuss Hulu’s plans and business models, arguing that it is doing fine on ad revenue, averaging more per viewer per half hour than cable or broadcast/DVR, and not far behind bare broadcast. Add in the subscription payments, and Kilar likes his chances. “Hulu will pay content owners and creators more per-user per-month than anyone else. At the same time, we will be able to price our services for consumers lower than anyone else offering the same body of content, given our market-leading ad service and our tolerance for low margins.”

The predictions of Kilar’s departure centered on the truth of his basic observations – for example, imagine telling executives that their business model of stuffing ads is broken! Lese Majeste! My initial reaction to this was “don’t the execs already know that TV is utterly unwatchable? 20 minutes of ads in every hour, capped by five solid minutes before a show’s three minute climactic scene?” My sample of viewers (which is moi) will not watch anything when it is broadcast. It is all DVR or online. Nor will I risk watching a show that is not reasonably available on line for fear I might like it.

The answer is that the execs might well not know. I would bet heavily that they see programs in screening rooms so they don’t have to sit through the commercials. One cause of the downfall of Detroit was that the auto-owning experience of the executives was entirely different from that of their customers. The execs had new cars, perfectly maintained  at no inconvenience to them. They had no idea of the fury of their consumers, waiting for tow trucks while sitting in their shoddy, overpriced products.  (I once bought a new GM car that broke down on its way home from the dealer and had to be towed back – that was only the beginning of my travail,  so 30 years and I still hold a grudge, and buy Japanese.)

The TV execs may well be unaware of how irritating their product has become, and the other points may be equally valid but equally unpleasant to hear. An old business aphorism says that the larger an organization the higher the probabilities that its top management lives in a totally imaginary world, and Kilar’s owners are pretty big.  So Kilar may well have told them some things they need to know, and did not know, always a risky proposition.

However, the Kilar-is-toast meme died quickly, and he remains in charge, six weeks later. The latest news is that Hulu may reduce the size of its Board, “which would give the chief executive of the popular online video website, Jason Kilar, more latitude to run the business.”  The Board at present has nine members – three each from Disney, Fox, and Providence Equity.  (The government required NBC to drop off the Board as part of the Comcast merger.)  In the cut, Disney and Fox would each give up a seat. The corporate power dynamic of this tidy-up is not large. It is hard to imagine the representatives of any company splitting their votes, so the entertainment directors as a body remain in control, as before.  Of course, there may be internal disputes within companies, so one or another faction may have won out in this change; it is hard to tell from the outside.

But the question that is not getting asked is “who is threatening to fire whom?”  Kilar’s memo could be read as saying, “Hulu has a viable business model that will appeal to both content creators and customers. What have you got, and do I really need you? Why shouldn’t content creators start dealing directly with Hulu? Go read your Clayton Christensen on disruptive innovation, and think hard.”

Kilar photo from rsepulvedas photostream.

The leader wrote that “it is unethical to expect trained and qualified professionals to contribute quality content for nothing,” and proposed a system of collective bargaining over pay. The writers also want a clearer demarcation between “paid promotional content and writers’ work.”

“Unethical” is an odd characterization, when the pay is the result of a free bargain among consenting adults. If someone offers to put up your scribbling on a particular platform, but offers no money, you are free to accept or decline. If you accept, it is for your own reasons of ego or self-promotion, and because the deal seems better to you than the alternatives.

From the standpoint of a contracts lawyer, the writers were just dumb. Before devoting their sweat equity to building up the enterprise, they should have bargained for shares of stock. After all, many start ups every year use precisely this model whereby the contributors of intellectual capital and the contributors of financial capital agree in advance on the division of any ultimate pay-out.

So what is really going on is not the “unethical” nature of free work, but an outraged sense of betrayal of community.

The HuffPo writers apparently thought they were engaged in some sort of joint political enterprise to serve as a major source for communicating Progressive political ideas to the American public. In this perception, it is like a galley in which the officers on the quarterdeck and the serfs at the oars are all contributing to the common enterprise.

This assumption turns out to have been mistaken, in that the galley was actually a trading vessel, and now the officers are keeping all the profits of the voyage, appropriating the output of the rowers.

The contracts lawyer might have some fun with this, examining the archives of emails to see just how the officers represented the whole deal. It might turn out that the writers were told this was a non-profit community organization – all for one and one for all and all that — and they might actually have a good legal claim that they were misled into working for free.

But the bigger problem is with the basic concept that vague free standing communities provide an alternative organizational form to the hard-nosed deals produced by contract and employment law.

It is perfectly possible for people of like mind to get together and donate skills and time to a cause; it happens all the time, and it is one of the great strengths of civil society. But the “community” form also lends itself to abuse, such as inducing the kid in the third world to write free software to increase the value of U.S.-branded computers. (The head of Sun Microsystems once characterized a major open source software license as imposing on its users a “predatory obligation to disgorge IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world.”)

Now, if I were one of the people who regularly reads and believes the HuffPo, I would probably call for government regulation – the “Truth in Communities Act” maybe. But it is not really necessary. The old saying says that experience is a hard school, but people will learn at no other, but they do learn, and the next entrepreneur who wants to leverage free content into a fortune will meet with a more skeptical reception, and with demands for greater specificity in organizational form.

As for the projected writers’ union – not a chance. Writers are a dime a gross, and the reserve army of the unemployed is huge. If a writer can establish his/her power as a traffic builder, then he/she will be able to command payment.  If not, not. And there is nothing unethical about it; it is called The World.

Kumbaya image from Clint Gardner’s Photostream.

A serious source of current woe over production of content is the difference between pay-to-experience and advertising-supported business models. In ad-supported, the product is the viewers’ eyeballs, which are sold to the marketer. Thus the amount of money available for content production is limited to the value the eyeballs have to advertiser, which may be less than the value which the viewer as a consumer would be willing to pay for the experience.

Pay-to-experience is limited by the problems of free-riding (a.k.a. piracy) plus the standard tricky problems of assessing the market for a product, especially when success will automatically make it a prime target for free riding.

Another possible model, of course, is patronage, in which groups of art lovers get together to subsidize the content. This involves many issues of coordination, in that A is willing to commit only if B, C, and D do so, and they might agree only if A and E are already on board, and so on. (This is why salespeople and entrepreneurs get the big bucks, and are worth it.)

GroupOn addresses the commitment problem by the mechanism of contingency; a deal is offered, but it is contingent on having a specified number of takers sign up. You commit, and if the specified number of others do likewise, the deal is on. If not, not. So the offeror is guaranteed the necessary scale and the customer runs no risk.

Now, fans of the 2002 sci-fi series Firefly are adapting this collective action approach to bringing back their show. It started when the Science channel announced a showing of the 12-episode series, starting in March, and escalated when leading actor Nathan Fillion opined that he would love to pick up the role of Captain Malcolm Reynolds again and that if he had the money he would buy the rights and put the on the Internet. Others involved in the show chimed in with their support.

That triggered the fans, who started a website HelpNathanBuyFirely, plus a Facebook page, which in a few days has collected 65,000+ “Likes”, including me. No money is yet changing hands, or even being promised, and no real commitments from the participants has been obtained. (One problem – Fillion currently stars in the current successful show Castle.)  However, the anonymous promoters hope to generate interest, and perhaps move things forward.

The movement presents both opportunities and problems for Fox, which owns the rights.  One approach would be to partner with the enterprise, and tell the entrepreneurs that if they get a sufficient level of fan commitment, then Fox will make the series. Another would be to assume that the level of support is impressive enough to demonstrate the existence of a viable market and just go ahead. Hollywood is famous for its complicated and innovative dealmaking, so surely something is possible.

But there are two things that Fox cannot do – block the whole thing or do nothing.

If there is serious fan interest in a property, and the owner does not pick it up, then the possibility that some other entrepreneur in some far off place such as China will take advantage becomes acute. And at that point, Fox’s property rights claims begin to shred – how does a studio say “yes, fans want it and are willing to commit money, and we don’t care; we will neither do it nor let anyone else to it.”  Its legal right to do this clear, but at that point even a property-rights hawk such as moi jumps the ship and buys the Chinese DVD.  It was the record companies failure to respond to the increased efficiencies of the Internet that opened up the space for Napster and P2P, and the continuing difficulty of getting old material via legitimate channels is a problem for defenders of property rights.

Property law profs are fond of confounding us hawks with a hypothetical in which some billionaire buys a Van Gogh for $100 million and then declares his intention to have it cremated with him. In the hypo, the student is the State AG – what, if any, action does he/she take? The point is that property rights are embedded in a set of assumptions about the productive use of the property and that the owner does get to be a total dog in the manger. (This issue will come up eventually in the context of all the environmental easements that have taken property out of use, largely for tax scam reasons, but that is tomorrow’s legal question rather than today’s.)

From the standpoint of defending intellectual property rights, there is a good side, though. It seems fair to guess that the people who sign on with Captain Mal and his crew (“Browncoats”) are largely techie types who are prone to support such anti-IP organizations as the Free Press and EFF. But the chance the Fox will do nothing is virtually zero, unless Fox simply sees no way to get a return on the investment because of the impossibility of monetizing the result.  (And if that is the case, the Chinese entrepreneurs will give it a pass, too.)  So it is good for the techies to have some skin in the game, for them to see that a system in which the property rights in Firefly cannot be protected is one in which they, personally, will lose something they value. That will drive home the point that we are all in this together, and that protecting IP is in everyone’s interest.

As for me – as soon as HelpNathanBuyFirely opens its books I will commit to buy any resulting DVD. And I will throw in a bit extra if they promise to add Castle’s Detective Kate Beckett to the cast.

Image from Wikipedia.

As is tradition whenever I discuss these subjects I like to make it clear that the discussion within is academic in nature.  Neither I nor DS support the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.  But neither is this an indictment of torrenting, as there are countless examples of legal and successful uses of the technology.

Some quick points to mention from the data within the paper:

• A publisher is the original individual to seed (make available online) a file and upload the .torrent file, a tracker which via a torrent program is able to locate the desired file to be downloaded.
• Via means described within the paper the researchers were able to determine the original publishers IP address in 40% of all cases.
• Top publishers are responsible for 75% of the total downloads and 67% of the content.

Of the 67% of content that is placed on various torrent websites, which are generally databases similar to The Pirate Bay which allow a user to search for content and then download a .torrent tracker file, the scholars who published the paper in question believe that 30% is fake, 30% is profit driven, and only 7% is altruistic.  Now if you are unfamiliar with altruism, it is defined as “the unselfish regard for the welfare of others.”  I must confess that when I typically think of torrenting, I have generally assumed that all of it is an altruistic, “Everyone deserves everything for free,” “Stick it to the man” type of attitude that perpetuates the ecosystem.  This is apparently not true based on the research at hand which shows that only 7% of the content is a part of the free culture movement.

When broken down to this level we start to get a sense of the reality of the players involved in torrenting operations and their motives.  At the macro level are three groups already mentioned:

• Altruists;
• Profiteers; and,
  
• Fakers.

The Make Up of the “Torrent Free Market”

Altruists: These individuals are made up of people that are mad at “the man”, those that are possibly frustrated with available systems or models of content exchange, and those who are true ideologues for the free culture movement.  They of course could be any mixture of the possibilities as well.

Profiteers: This group of people use torrenting as a profit making mechanism.  Several business models for publishers exist in this group, including:

• Content owners releasing demo’s or partial products to draw users to the full payed version of the product;
• Content owners releasing content while feigning ignorance of the released torrent to draw individuals to payed content;
• The illegal distribution of content (typically movies) that requires some type of container in order for the content to work or play.  The content typically includes documentation of a website or websites that offer the key (a program or security code) at a cost that allows the content to work;
• The supposed illegal distribution of content, though the download contains only links to websites who benefit off ad hits, product placement, or are pay sites to illegally distributed content; and,
• Finally, viruses that allow for data collection that can be sold or that take over a computer to use it for fake email delivery, etc for profit outside of the torrent sphere.

Fakers: The group known as the Fakers mainly consist of three sets of users:

• The first set are those that while similar to the group of Profiteers whose torrent files contain viruses, also include viruses, trojans, worms, and irritating software scripts all for the sole purpose of ruthlessness.  These individuals do not have a rhyme or reason other than that they basically find it humorous to damage other individuals computers, and would site that it is the downloaders own fault and punishment for trying to get illegally distributed content for free.  These individuals are not profit driven.
• Another set of Fakers are those that also advertise content, but the downloaded file contains only links to sites that are ad based, or selling a product.  These downloads do not include content, and so do not provide solutions to view content unless the links are aimed at underground websites offering illegal content downloads or viewing at a cost.
• The final set of Fakers are those in the security business.  Security firms, often hired by content owners, are directed to publish fake .torrent trackers to files of popular new content (movies, music, video games).  The result of the downloaded file often results in some sort of anti-piracy message.  These agencies continually place new and more fake .torrent trackers on the most popular public torrent databases in order to “poison the well”.

The results of all these different players with varying motives is that they in combination with those trying (and statistically failing a good bit of the time based on the research at hand) to download legally and illegally distributed content have created a sort of self-sustaining “Torrent Free Market” or the free market of torrenting, if you will.  Based on the research by the scholars of Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven, these players exist, and if they exist, then it can be deduced that the polar opposite goals of many of the players as well as the goals of simply beating out the other guy is driving competition of causes, profits, motives, and connivers within the torrent ecosystem.  The out come is a free market within a free market within a free market.  Especially if one assumes that the Internet is a free market, and that the majority of torrenting is coming from out of countries with at least self-described free markets.

What are the results of this Torrent Free Market?  I would assume that many an economist could take the information found in the white paper research along with my own analysis and additions and run with it in many other directions.  But I personally take two conclusions away from the information presented:

1. The total percentage of torrents, the actual working, usable, legitimate illegally distributed content is smaller than many would think.  Which ultimately is a good thing for content producers, and ultimately a bad thing for those desiring to use scare tactics toward the free culture movement as a prevention method.
2. This free market competition that has occurred in the torrent ecosystem is a positive thing for content producers, because it appears that the competitive forces have kept altruistic legitimate publishers at a minimum, and the resulting frustration for those desiring to download illegally distributed content will at least arguably cause them to quit trying to download content illegally if they are having little to no success.  In a larger sense, this competition and frustration may hold the legitimate content being illegally distributed to a minimum for the foreseeable future while newer and better business models and models of distribution are put into play that will have a positive affect on reducing the amount of illegally distributed content even further.

In terms of revenue per capita, the recorded music business has gone down from $71 in 2000 to $26 in 2009 (2011 dollars).  In terms of raw revenue, the take fell from about $15 billion in 1999 [corrected] to $8 billion in 2009, divided as in this chart:

There are more charts, looking at singles vs albums, digital versus physical, and other splits.

DeGusta is presenting facts, not preaching so he stays low-key – here are some interesting facts; make of them what you will. The overall focus is the point we try to hit here at DigSoc, which is that this is a societal problem of how to set up an institutional structure that can overcome the centripetal forces of digital copying and allow the creation of the vibrant music industry that we all want.

One comment noted that article addresses only a segment of the industry, recordings, to which DeGusta responded:  “I completely agree it’d be interesting to see the whole music ecosystem (& globally as well). I would also be very curious to be able to get good data on the non-financial state of music: are people listening to more music, more artists, et cetera via whatever means, even if they’re paying a lot less in aggregate.”

The comments are good, too. My favorite might be bb:

There’s something here that the average person doesn’t understand; it takes a lot of money to make some music.

People keep talking about the cost of physical media like that’s the overhead for record companies. The overhead is spending 10’s of thousands of dollars on recordings that may or may not sell. And these days they don’t, so they’re not spending the money.

What you may not realize is that in addition to the revolution of digital music, there was a revolution in recording as well. You used to have to have a recording studio to make a record, now you can do it at home. That is a blessing and a curse. The problem? Because of the decline in budgets and sales most people have to do it at home. It’s impressive when someone makes a movie at home in the computer (which is also possible now) but would you want all movies to be made at home by one guy with a computer? It’s not really the level of quality that we want in movies, but that’s where we’re headed with music. I don’t mean that like theoretically, I mean that’s what happening right now. There’s no money.

All those great records from your past were not made by one person at home, even the ones with one guy and guitar. But these days they are. Recording studios are closing (most of them gone from even 10 years ago) and producers and engineers are leaving to do something else. There’s no money.

In the days of Sinatra you had a guy that could sing and entertain, someone else wrote the song, someone else arranged it, someone else produced the record, another person recorded it, etc. After that you had people who wrote their own songs and and soon everyone was expected to do that (the Beatles didn’t start out writing their own songs). Nowadays an artist is expected to perform, write, and even produce and record their own music much of the time, and every thing else that goes into an album. Because there’s no money.

The point is that there are very few people that are talented enough to do all that, or have the inclination. Like I said before, it would be like if most of the movies you saw had to be directed, filmed, edited, written and acted by the people in it with home equipment. How good do you think those movies would be?

You can make a decent sounding record at home these days. You cannot make a record of the quality of you can in a good studio, with good producers and engineers, etc. But soon people won’t know that because it’s all going away. And everyone will say “why don’t songs sound as good as they used to?”. Oh wait, that’s now.

You don’t want to pay taxes, you get to live in a crappy country. You don’t want to pay for music, you get crappy music.

And there is also this cry from musician Chris Gates:

I am a musician, and I am here to tell you that the revenue lost in CD sales is not being made back in live performance fees. The truth is that, for the most part, the live music concert/club going audience is getting older and not going out as much. I live in Austin TX, where there are tons of musicians and music venues, and there are NONE with a core audience in their 20′s. None… When my teenage kids want to escape from their world for a while they play computer games instead of listening to music. They like music, and they even buy music, but it isn’t the defining element that it was for older generations. Grunge sucked all the fun out of rock music, and gangster rap sucked the fun out of black music, so the kids went elsewhere.

Another factor to consider is that according to some admittedly rough research I did a while back in 1981 (the year my first record was released) there were something like 7200 records released world-wide. In 2004 there were something like 104,000 released, and this is only the number of CDs that Soundscan reported on. There were probably another 50,000 being sold only at gigs, ect… that didn’t ever get a bar code. So not only are sales going down, but the pie is being divided into ever smaller slices. And forget about getting paid for your back catalog… bittorrent will see to that.

30 years ago it took a bit of a creative leap to even consider being a musician, and now it’s just another option available to every middle school kid, There is 4-5 times as much great music now as there has ever been, but there’s 200 times as much music, which means we are being buried in an avalanche of mediocre music. Happily, we have reached a point where being in a band no longer makes you cool, and the field is so crowded that there’s no ego stroke from playing live cause no one is in the audience. Hopefully this will result in a thinning of the herd over the next 10 years so that only the truly dedicated stick with it, and the quality of music will get better and the money will go into fewer hands. Or it will all come crashing down and the only music available will be the mass market Lady Gaga crap and music made by people who can somehow afford to do it for free.

Tough time to be a musician, but like many others, I’ve tried to quit and can’t manage it. so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out.

(I love that ending – “I’ve tried to quit . . . .”)

Fine piece. RTWT.

By the time Shakespeare turned to writing, . . . “cultural paywalls” were abundant in London: workers holding moneyboxes (bearing the distinctive knobs found by the archaeologists) stood at the entrances of a growing number of outdoor playhouses, collecting a penny for admission.

They add:

The rise of the Internet has led to a view among many users and Web companies that copyright is a relic, suited only to the needs of out-of-step corporate behemoths. Just consider the dedicated “file-sharers” — actually, traffickers in stolen music movies and, increasingly, books — who transmit and receive copyrighted material without the slightest guilt.

They are abetted by a handful of law professors and other experts who have made careers of fashioning counterintuitive arguments holding that copyright impedes creativity and progress. Their theory is that if we severely weaken copyright protections, innovation will truly flourish. It’s a seductive thought, but it ignores centuries of scientific and technological progress based on the principle that a creative person should have some assurance of being rewarded for his innovative work.

On Volokh Conspiracy, David Post (one of said law professors) takes issue with the reference to copyright:

In a copyright-free world — not that I’m advocating such a thing, but hey, you brought it up — we’ll get the next Shakespeare the way we got the last Shakespeare, in a copyright-free world. The first copyright statute, the Statute of Anne, wasn’t passed until 1709, long after Shakespeare was a-moulderin’ in the grave. [That’s what we need a name for — this kind of absurdly misplaced historical argument]

Post misses the main point of the article, I think, which is that the ability to monetize was crucial to the blossoming of creativity. Charging for admission to the theater was one way. Copyright is a newer and more sophisticated way. My understanding is that Shakespeare did not usually publish his plays during his lifetime because that would have made it possible for others to take them, which is a reason why some of his work may have been lost.

Had he had a copyright law available to him, his genius could have been spread to the provinces at the same time it was available in London, and definitive printed versions, vetted by the author, would be available.

So I find the insulting comments about Turow and his colleagues misplaced. Post’s post is also very certain in some rather superficial views of COICA.

Image of Globe Theater from Cyberslayers photostream.

I could not go, unfortunately, so I will have to await the transcript to read the discussion, but the prepared statements are fine. Witnesses included the content side – the CEO of an innovative content company (Rosetta Stone) and of the Authors Guild — and executives from companies that deal with payments (Visa), domain names (GoDaddy), and telecom (Verizon).

The striking feature of the statements is that they are all free of abstractions and superficial talking points. They represent the thoughts of knowledgeable people talking about a serious problem, and grappling with its relationship to the workings of their businesses.

No sensible person says this is an easy issue, so material such as this is very welcome.

Witnesses:

• Tom Adams – President and CEO, Rosetta Stone Inc.
• Scott Turow  – President, Authors Guild
• Christine N. Jones – EVP/General Counsel/Corporate Secretary, The Go Daddy Group, Inc.
• Thomas M Dailey – VP/Dep. GC, Verizon
• Denise Yee – Senior Trademark Counsel, Visa, Inc.

Image from The American.

(However, this post is not completely an exercise in futility because Broadband Breakfast routinely makes webcasts of its events available quickly, so this one should be up before the end of the week.)

He will be introduced by Rep John Conyers (D-MI), and followed by a discussion among a panel of experts on international IP issues.

BB’s blurb:

Long a manufacturing powerhouse, China has only recently emerged as a competitor in the realm of ideas and intellectual property. Intellectual Property Breakfast Club panelists will discuss how China is presently handling copyrights, patents, and trademarks through words and deeds, and then move into China’s plans for the future. How does China envision engaging and competing with international companies and governments on IP issues? What implications will China’s projected IP laws, policies and actions have on other countries’ abilities to do business in the Chinese marketplace? On China doing business in other countries?

The session is from 8:00 to 10:00 – register for the waiting list here.