1. Rearguard and Vanguard
Joseph J. Esposito
ALPLS Conference
April 11, 2014

2. Fraud and Piracy
If those are the only two
choices, which side am I on?

3. Topics
• Personal testimonial
• Rearguard: hire more lawyers
• Why we got into this business in the first place
• The specter of start-ups nibbling at the
margins
• The Internet as medium
• McLuhan 101
• Vanguard: hire more editors

4. The View from Here
• Copyright is among the great human
inventions
• Investors in IP understandably want strong
copyright protection
• We need stronger incentives to invest in IP,
not fewer
• The problem is that this is a rearguard
strategy, whereas “the future lies ahead”
(Mayor Richard Daley)

5. The Medium is the Message
• The print medium invites us to create works
designed for print
• Among those properties is the fixed text—
since the print medium is itself fixed
• A web of externalities arise around the fixed
medium: the definitive text, the version of
record, the urge to “get it right”
• A copy of a fixed text will be identical to the
original text—a core problem of piracy

6. The Medium is the Message--II
• The Internet is a digital network
• As digital, it permits easy copying
• As a network, it permits easy sharing
• It lends itself to changing texts—more like
conversations than a version of record
• It can enable collaboration
• Many negatives: Wild West component
• Of course, it continues to evolve

7. Internet piracy is the inevitable
outcome when you take content
created for one medium, that of the
fixed text, and insert it into another
medium, that of the dynamic Internet.
There is no meaningful solution to this
problem that does not change the
nature of the content itself.

8. What’s a Publisher to Do? Strategy #1:
The Rearguard Defense
• Try to take the conversation out of Internet
publishing
• Use DRM where applicable
• Create restrictive licenses
• Empower the legal department
• Support anti-piracy trade associations
• Lobby governments
• This makes perfect sense, but it is a rearguard
strategy

9. Implications of the Rearguard Strategy
• Vigilance regarding infringement
• Strain on management bandwidth
• Meanwhile, we try to create and publish the
very same things that were being infringed in
the first place

10. Strategy #II: The Vanguard Initiative
• Change the nature of the content
• Create content that is like the Internet itself:
dynamic and conversation-like
• Learn from and adapt consumer social media,
but don’t sink to the level of mere chatter
• Seek dynamic texts, real-time data feeds,
content that is dependent on multiple nodes
of a network (of people or data sources)

11. Consider this: I became a publisher
because . . .
• I like spending my time with lawyers
• Stopping unauthorized use has higher priority
than stimulating authorized use
• Publishing has always been the same since the
invention of the written word
• I doubt that anyone listening to this Webinar
subscribes to any of the 3 points above

12. Vanguard Content Strategy
• Very difficult to implement
• Puts premium on editorial strategy rather than
business or marketing (or legal) strategies
• More than changing workflow; involves
changing the content itself
• Not an adaptation of current model but a
wholly new model
• Not all current players will be able to
participate

13. Some Elements of the Vanguard
• Real-time data feeds: impossible to copy
because they keep changing
• Dynamic data based on sensors placed in
mobile phones (each user participates in the
collection of data)
• A narrowly-focused wiki, where collaborators
continuously add new information to a
growing text

14. Have I Just Described Waze?
• Mapping software/mapping data
• Users provide information on traffic,
accidents, potholes, etc.
• Directions are changed when the data
changes
• How can you copy/pirate this?
• And yet Waze is a publication
• Wouldn’t you know it? Just acquired by
Google

15. Is Waze out of Reach?
• How about a community of biologists working
around the globe
• How about having them build a common
database for all to use
• How about real-time adjustments to the
database
• Subscription model, selling memberships
• (For an early version of this, see MIT’s Cognet)

16. Problems with the Vanguard
• Mostly lacks tangible examples; must be
invented
• Costly: hire new editors, invest in R&D
• Current authors may not be interested or
capable in working in this way
• Lacks all of secondary benefits of traditional
publications, e.g., journal reputation and use
as currency for tenure committees
• What’s the business model?

17. Different Choices for Different
Publishers
• Established companies necessarily need a
rearguard strategy
• Start-ups almost certainly will have a vanguard
strategy
• But a rearguard strategy is less valuable over
time; rearguard must be complemented by
vanguard
• Vanguard alone is highly risky, but some start-
ups will thrive

18. Piracy is not only about bad guys
and weak tools for enforcement. It
is also about a failure of editorial
imagination.

19. Some Relevant Links
• “The Processed Book”:
http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/
view/1038/959
• “The Face-down Publishing Paradigm”:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/11/10/t
he-face-down-publishing-paradigm/
• “The Ambient Authorship and Subtle Potential of
Sensor Publishing”:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/12/10/s
ensor-publishing/

20. Contact Information
• Joseph J. Esposito
• Processed Media
• espositoj@gmail.com
• @josephjesposito