Peter Cox’s Blog

Somebody released this damn thing onto the internet. All I can say is: I didn’t know I was being recorded. It was Sting’s fault, curse him.

Louis Vuitton are suing Danish art student Nadia Plesner for copyright infringement. Not for making the usual knock-off copies of their bags that can be seen on most high streets, but for something much more disturbing.

Plesner created the artwork for fund-raising t-shirts after reading the book ”Not On Our Watch” by Don Cheadle and John Prendergast. “I felt horrified”, she says, “by the fact that even with the genocide and other ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Paris Hilton was the one getting all the attention. Is it possible that show business have outruled common sense?”

Louis Vuitton are demanding 5,000 euros damages for each day she continues to sell the t-shirts (about $7,700).

Apart from depicting Louis Vuitton as a bunch of voraciously greedy wraithlords, more interested in their obscene profits than in the fate of human beings (or indeed, art) – there is another aspect to this case, too.

Imagine what would have happened if Campbells had sued Andy Warhol for copyright infringement.

What was unthinkinable in those days is now very much on the corporate IP agenda.

Today, multinationals want to own, and perpetually exploit, rights in everything. “Fair use” is being squeezed, sidelined and salamied.

This is a huge issue. We agents – who have to be white knights fighting for the rights of the creative individual against the corporate monolith – have never been more desperately needed.

I hope my colleagues are paying close attention.

I never knew what a halligan was before this – but damn, I want one now.

Improbably large-breasted prostitute Natalie Springer complains in today’s News of the World that celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke treated her “just like a piece of meat to be paid for his pleasure”.

That is the whole point of prostitution, Ms. Springer, and I’m rather surprised no-one has pointed that out to you before.

Podshow was one of the worst things to happen to podcasting as a new medium. Divisive, ego-driven, contractually dodgy and hyped to the gills, it has been clear for some time that their style of doing things wasn’t good for the medium – and maybe not even good for their shareholders, too.

Their rebranding to Mevio has been taken as an indication, by some inattentive observers, that podcasting as a medium is dead. And that is patent rubbish. Podcasting is merely a particular application of a technology – specifically, a means to enable the syndicated delivery of electronic files (RSS). What Podshow wants to leave behind (apart from a rather tarnished start-up reputation) is a lot of the junk podcasts they picked up, and then realised no-one in their right mind would ever want to hear or watch.

It remains to be seen if their attempted “flight to quality” pays dividends. Myself, I would never had advised a start-up to change their name like this – it simply reeks of second-guessing, which in itself smacks of incompetence. Had their original business strategy been different – for example, if they had seriously seeded the wider podcast community, promulgated some basic quality threshold standards, and acted far more inclusively from the get-go, then both Podshow, its shareholders and indeed the medium as a whole might have benefitted more than they yet have.

Very perceptive “lessons learned” piece by Danuta Kean following the collapse of The Friday Project. While I don’t like to say “I told you so”, (OK, I do…) it was crashingly obvious, as blogged in these pages for many months, that their business model simply was not viable. Some of the comments following Danuta’s piece are rather sad - I didn’t know TFP was quite so anti-agent as it appears to have been. Why on earth was The Bookseller holding such a bright, uncritical candle for this minor publisher for such a long time, I wonder?

Podwatch has gone straight into my “must listen” category of podcasts. Full disclosure – Podwatch was kind enough to give LITOPIA AFTER DARK a near-perfect 9.5 marks out of 10 in their recent review – so I suppose I’m not totally disinterested! However, since first learning about this review site/podcast (our podcast officer, Ruby Tuesday, first alerted me that they’d mentioned us) I’ve subscribed to their feed in iTunes, and now find it absolutely essential listening.

Podwatch is based around a very simple premise. It rates and reviews significant podcasts. That’s it. Sounds an obvious idea, but if you’ve ever trawled fruitlessly through iTunes trying to find something that’s both original and worth listening to, you’ll understand just how useful a review site /’cast like this is, and how badly it’s needed, too.

The host, Tom Longo, is droll, intelligent and perceptive, and his taste is always on the money. He highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each show very clearly, in a way that helps you decide whether it’s worth investing your own time and effort in subscribing to the feed. He plays representative extracts from each show, then gives you a succinct summary of the pluses and minuses. It’s just what this new medium needs. My only complaint is that it’s currently weekly, not daily – I’d happily sign up for a daily cast if Tom could keep this standard up.

This Friday’s LITOPIA AFTER DARK is going to be another good one – we have another special guest booked in the form of Darren E. Laws, who’s done what many authors have fantasized about, and set up his own publishing company, Caffeine Nights Publishing. “Caffeine Nights Publishing wants to be at the forefront of a new publishing revolution” he says. Good for him – let’s find out how close he is to realising his dream. Join us live in the UStream chatroom at 7:30pm London time, or get the podcast from iTunes.

And out of the blue, they came… to Tottenham Court Rd, London, this afternoon, and probably most other places worldwide where the Xenu-philes are located. Impressive demo.

Thinking about a book proposal I’m helping to final-polish…

Publishers increasingly want authors with built in platforms, but authors with built-in platforms need publishers less and less…

Here’s are interesting idea that I’ve been predicting for decades.  I don’t think cultured meat is for me - I’ve done pretty well all my life without it - but it could well be a saner and kinder use of our food resources.  Be interesting to see if the epidemiology shows any health advantages over the very bad record “animal” meat currently has.

As an experiment, we’ve started to stream the LITOPIA AFTER DARK pre-show planning sessions live on UStream every Friday. The first one was streamed by mistake, then we realized we’d got people watching… so we’re going to continue. You can access it on our UStream page here, from (approximately) the following times:

• 12:30pm London
• 7:30am New York / EST
• 4:30am Los Angeles PST

“Since trying Michael Menkin’s Helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society.”

$35, and cheap at the price.

I’m getting an unreasonable amount of pleasure from Kiva, previously mentioned. For less than the price of a cheap meal, you can positively and directly affect someone’s life in the third world.

In the current Western economic climate, with obscenely-rewarded bankers demonstrating that their spectacular incompetence is rivaled only by their rapacious greed, it is quite extraordinary to look at Kiva’s own impressive financial performance.  They have currently made $25,891,585 worth of loans.  The delinquency rate is a mere 3.69%, and the default rate is a microscopic 0.10%.  Loans to women entrepreneurs are 76.02%, and the average loan size is $533 (this is comprised of numerous smaller lenders, such as myself).

If the titans of our banking industry weren’t so full of hubris, maybe they could learn something.

Why does every BBC radio drama production sound like “The Archers”?

If you’ve been following the trade press, you’ll know that I’ve had a few thoughts on this subject recently. 

Now comes news, via The Guardian, that the reformed agency PFD is to offer a  POD (print-on-demand) publishing programme, aiming to make their clients’ forgotten books available once more.  Although this is likely to produce next to nothing in terms revenue, and matter not one jot to the client concerned (who is most likely to be dead), the move has provoked ire in the just the quarter where I thought it would.

“An agency sitting back and saying you can find this book listed on a website is very different from trying to find a publisher who’ll take these titles on and bring them back into print,” says the Society of Authors deputy general secretary, Kate Pool. “The agents’ role is to go out and get the best deal they can. [PFD] seems to be taking 90% of the money for no work.”

In other words, a good old-fashioned conflict of interest looms.

Trying not to repetitively mention the e-book / the Kindle / digital stuff every week on Litopia After Dark… it can get awfully tedious, and people soon run out of interesting things to say.  Here’s a note from Silicon Alley Insider about the continuing, and to my mind, rather monotonous line from Amazon about their self-vaunted sales success… Why do they never give any hard sales numbers?  An awful lot of publishers are spending an awful  lot of money on digitising their content, all ready for the Kindle et al… and they going to be awfully upset if the figures eventually fall rather short of the hype…  If I were a publisher, I’d be asking Jeff some very hard numerical questions pretty soon.

After a few seconds of watching this nightmarish new bot, you just know it’s going to be used for ineffably evil purposes… just look who funded it… I don’t relish coming up against this bastard when it’s fully tricked out with all its hardware…

Flashback to August 2007 - we was warned, folks.  Happy Holidays.

The Dalai Lama is a theocrat, with much the same claim to authority as any other ruler who asserts leadership through birth and/or presumed special connection to God. However, we in the West prefer him over other theocrats (Khomeini, for example, or even Pat Robertson) because he is absolutely unthreatening and, like us, he is preoccupied with self -development and all things New Age. He’s a lama the Liberals can live with.

Merry, mediagenic and marketing-savvy, his commercial profile (didn’t I just hear about a new range of Dalai Lama clothing?) has always been high. I have no objection to his commercial enterprises - writing best-sellers, appearances in advertisements, etc. In fact, I think they rather help his cause.

But now the moment of his lifetime has come. His people are being murdered in their hundreds, perhaps even thousands. His latest pronouncement - that he will resign if the violence continues - seems sadly irrelevant - and I’m sorry to say - almost cowardly in the face of the most appalling Chinese repression now taking place in his homeland.

Today, he condemned the burning of Chinese flags and attacks on Chinese property and called violence “suicidal” for the Tibetan cause. Why? His supporters need to burn flags - outside every Chinese embassy in the world.

I can certainly understand his desire to avoid further bloodshed. The Chinese are, I am certain, prepared to go to any brutal lengths to enforce their illegal occupation.

But now is the time - if ever it will come - to make a stand. Now is the time to call in the many favours he’s owed by fawning world leaders. After 35 years in relatively complacent exile, he must make his mark - now.

To do this, he must:

• Retain and listen to the advice of politically-astute advisers. There is currently no indication whatever that he has any.
• Get an amazing spokesperson to deal with the media (especially soundbites) on his behalf. Judged on tonight’s TV performance, the DL isn’t up to this job himself. He needs to admit this and rectify it- quickly. Call for Richard Gere - or any one of many other high-profile and media-friendly supporters. They exist - get ‘em now.
• Start calling his “friends” - those political leaders around the world who have always been happy to bask in some of the shared good karma. It’s past time for payback.
• Retain a killer PR consultancy. Most of the majors wouldn’t touch this account - alienating China is business suicide to them. But to a smaller, hungrier bunch of characters - it could be a career-defining account. Reach for the stars.

Will he do these things?

I’m not optimistic.

Paul Krugman makes some good points writing in today’s NYT:

He goes on to say:

Rough times ahead.

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?”

Less is more…

All the current Valleywag trash talk about Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales, 41, who dumped his girlfriend with an announcement on the encyclopaedia’s website (girlfriend then sells Wales’ laundry on E-Bay… how very Web 2.0) misses the more important point.

There is serious talk in certain quarters concerning the possible private sale of Wikipedia.  Impossible?  With a sale price rumoured to be well into the billions, few things are truly impossible.

Private equity firm Elevation Partners would be my best bet as the people who could make it happen.