meta-roj

just because we need to continue to emphasize the futility of the drm thing…. i saw this:

Media Appearence: Kudlow & Cramer

The funny thing is that I wrote the piece in question in all of 7 minutes in my head on the train. I got to the office and punched it out pretty quickly.

obviously barry created a derivative work of something he had in his mind, and i don’t think he got it properly licensed.

so, we need to get to work on a series of mind-drm technologies. obviously the first places to start are the input side of the mind – surgically implanted electronically-controlled blinders and ear plugs (and eventually, of course, the rest of the senses). if you haven’t purchased a license to see and/or hear something, you won’t.

after that, we need to work on restricting output to keep barry from making the same mistake.

this is going to be funny to a very limited audience, but… why not….

the business model of the hour is “polysocial software” which is the natural evolution of th big rush into “social software.” guaranteed to rake in the big investors, we’re going to leverage it by calling the compny “six together.”

headquarters in salt lake city, of course. send in your resumes now to be part of the core team….

presented, for your consideration, a business mode of the hour…

i just heard a segment on cnn about researchers using mri scans of volunteers for political ads. basically, come sit in our machine and watch bush and/or kerry and/or nader, and let us see how your brain lights up.

ok, research is all good and such, but there’s an opportunity here….

you see, there are thousands of people in this country either waiting for backlogged access to mri facilities or who can’t afford the tests. so the model is… ad-research-sponsored-medical care.

come sit in our machine, and we’ll scan your brain tumor, but first let us show you a half hour of advertisements….

it’s been too long since i gave you wonderful people a quick-and-dirty business model to play with….

today, we marry (ahem) reality tv with unreality computer gaming, and we get…

the sims, queer eye edition (with interior design bonus pack)

it’s been a while since i felt inspired to share a business model of the hour with my good readers, but this came up in a conversation, and i just have to share…

starting with the observation that the “riaa sues 12-year-old girl” meme got a lot of traction, i think there’s an opportunity to take this to the logical extreme with a combination of technical and legal hacks. if you think suing kids is newsworthy, wait’ll you see the riaa suing rocks.

here’s the general theory:

1) find someone who is a) dying and b) sympathetic.
2) set up the most voluminous file-sharing copyright-violating server possible in the name of the dying person, but keep it off-line.
3) code the server so that it has a “dead-mans switch” and doesn’t go “live” until the dying person’s estate is settled.
4) arrange in the will of the dying person to leave the server, which should be prepaid, maintenance-free and fully automatic, to a pet rock.
5) wait for the dying person to die.
6) wait for the server to go live.
7) wait for the riaa to find it and start filing lawsuits.
8) run to the media with the headline: “riaa sues rock.”

why would you do this? i dunno. just to score a great headline, i guess. as with most business-models-of-the-hour, there are huge gaps in this plan. i leave that to a crack team of technogeeks and legal geeks to make it work.

of course, there’s another approach, and that has to do with the crazy googejuice around here. the “riaa sues rock” meme might just get traction without ever happening. i guess we’ll know… in the future….

why hasn’t anyone done “imdb for music videos” yet?

or rather, why hasn’t anyone done it in such a way that it’s findable and usable?

it’s not quite the model described, but thanks to a tip from joi i stumbled into a “phase 1” implementation on livejournal, described here.

who’s got the pharma connections to finish this up?

it’s been a while since i gave you fine people a business model of the hour to play with, so, with a nod to my last post, i give you today’s business model of the hour: plastic thumb jackets.

here’s the problem: with biometrics taking off, and an established (cheap, and easy) mode of faking fingerprints, it’s going to be more and more important to keep your fingerprints secure. that means keeping them off things where they aren’t supposed to be, which is everything except the fingerprint scanners.

as a fan of least-complicated solutions to well-defined problems, the solution is, i think, fairly simple. finger condoms. keep your thumbs (or whatever fingers you’re using as ids) wrapped up in plastic jackets all the time, unless you’re actually using them for an important identification or authorization function.

i’m thinking a kit. plastic finger jackets, which should be a bit more durable than latex and hypoallergenic, plus a small “wipe up your own prints” widget that includes a little squeegee/brush and some solvent so you can clean up the scanner after you’ve used it.

remember: you only have one set of fingers.

there are sure to be objections – the first one i can think of is that once everyone’s got all their fingers wrapped in plastic jackets, there won’t be any fingerprints left at crime scenes anymore. but, there’s always an upside, and this means that all those hours wasted by police looking for and preserving fingerprints can be used for something more productive.

update: patent application: “method and system for securing the fingerprint from accidental deposition on surfaces which might compromise the identity of the user”

i haven’t done a “business model of the hour” for some time now, but with the directv, riaa and red-light ticket camera examples to build on, there’s an obvious successor to explore.

the premise that supports this business is that the law has become so unweildy and complicated, with so many fine points of violation, that all of us violate some law, contract, terms-of-use agreement, acceptable use policy, tax code, or something all the time, usually without realizing it. with hundreds of millions of americans (and why stop at americans?) violating tens of thousands of legal terms every day, there is a vast opportunity to commercialize law and contract enforcement.

red-light cameras are a great starting point. the law is the law. running a red light is a bad thing. it’s an illegal thing. companies sprung up to monetize the crime – the fines are set by the legislators, but a good chunk of those fines are kept as a sort of bounty by the company operating the camera. everyone wins. the law is enforced, the public is safer, the government gets new revenue, and the operating company gets piles of cash. who can argue with that kind of success?

the approach is spreading, so it’s critical to move on this quickly. why should the riaa have to track down and sue its own customers? why should directv have to track down people who buy smartcard programming gear?

start a company that does thorough economic analysis of every fine point of every law and contract ever written. cherry-pick the most monetizable ones – the ones with the most potential violators – and pursue them with all the resources available on a purely contingent, bounty-like basis. to get started, use the dmca subpoena provisions to slap together copyright-violator hit-lists and score fast revenue.

the plan is to hire hundreds – no, thousands – of new, fresh lawyers and form them into “industry strike teams.” these teams will pick industries and industrial segments where a number of average citizens are violating some legal or contractual provision, create a mailing list with tens or hundreds of thousands of potential violators, and send threatening letters. offer an amnesty in exchange for a check and a signature promising to never, ever do whatever it was again.

and that opens up a second revenue stream – data-mining to ensure compliance with all those new promises.

there are a lot of smart people in law school these days, and they are all going to need jobs….what’s wrong with helping out a few poor, needy, debt-ridden lawyers at the expense of everyone?

i guess this company would need a good number of really good spin doctors too. and probably a bomb-proof headquarters.

long ago, i came to the conclusion that the only solution to spam was to increase the cost of doing business with spam. to that end, i’ve set a nice, reasonable price point for the time it should take me to clean out the blog spam.

those of you posting comments here on the meta-roj blog will notice that i’ve included new terms of service.

there’s been a lot of talk lately about blog spam, and i’ve been mostly unaffected, with one notable (and one not so notable) exception.

for the rest of you, that actually have something useful to contribute to the material here, don’t be intimidated (any more than you already were intimidated, anyway!)…

in the meantime, as a bit of an experiment, and before i get so much that it becomes unmanagable, i’ve decided to give this a shot.