Blockbuster Adopts Try and Buy Policy

Well it would appear someone was listening.

Back in September, I'd offered three suggestions to Blockbuster on how they can compete with companies such as Netflix under their current bricks & mortar model.

It would appear that my third recommendation - roll the cost of the rental into the cost of purchasing - has been adopted and is to be implemented in all Blockbuster stores across America as of the first of January.

This is part and parcel of their new 'No Late Fees' policy. Also an excellent strategic move on Blockbuster's part as it slams a mighty blow to the pillar of Netflix and kin's marketing thrust.

From the press release (emphasis mine):

Under the "no late fees" program, Blockbuster still has due dates -- one week for games and two days or one week for movies. However, if customers need to keep the product an extra day or two, they can, stress-free. Blockbuster now gives customers a one-week grace period at no additional charge. At that point, if customers want to keep the movie or game longer, they can. Blockbuster will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If customers decide they don't want to own the movie or game, they simply return the product within 30 days for a full credit to their account, less a minimal restocking fee.

The ultimate online music store

Offer me everything.
And I mean absolutely everything. From the best of the best to the kid plonking away on his guitar in the basement. If there's a recording of it, I want to find it. The theme song from the Beachcombers. The 'let's go out to the lobby' song from theatre intermission, an old time radio broadcast of Jack Benny or a cover of Hey Jude by some Japanese pop group.

In a digital environment we just need gates – not gatekeepers. Give us everything that can be given.

Price it so that I don't even think about it
The cost of a song should be a product of the cost to distribute the song. Whatever the cost to distribute a song is – quadruple it. 25% of the cost to cover overhead. The remaining 75% to be split however between the store, the publisher and the artist. Everyone makes a profit. At this pricing, a typical song should cost 5 – 10 cents.

I know what I like when I hear it – help me hear it
With a giant selection should come means and ways of sifting through the selections. Give me multiple means of finding songs and multiple ways to browse through what I like. Let me search by 'lyrics' instead of just by 'artist' or 'title'. Group selections by genre, or give me 'if you like this artist, you may also like...' suggestions.

Improve the quality of the AI behind suggestions. If I buy a few Beatles tracks – don't suggest more Beatles to me. I obviously already know about them and can find what I want pretty well. Individual tracks from John or Paul's later careers would be a start, but I would be more interested in being offered some new band that has a similar sound, style or quality of music. Someone I'd never heard of and likely wouldn't of heard of had it not offered up the suggestion.

Provide full and complete previews – and not just of songs, but entire albums. 10-30 seconds is hardly enough time to appraise a great many songs. Okay - give it to me in a degraded format (24kbps or AM radio quality) - but stop being a gatekeeper. Get out of the way and let me find and buy the music I want.

Give me streaming audio of preselected songs with a quick and easy way to link to an album purchase page when that song plays. Better yet – let me or any other user put together our own selection of music tracks and allow any other user to listen to it.

Provide a forum for people to talk about the music they like and the artists they prefer. Better still – get these artists online and let them speak directly to us about the music they create and the music they like and the artists that they prefer. Which leads me to...

Create a Community
Give me a soapbox to stand on and proclaim my love or hate of certain things. Give everyone a soapbox. Give the artists a place to talk about what they do and give us the opportunity to give these artists feedback. Give us all the ability to share the stuff we like and evangelize the artists we adore.

Trust your audience
Stop worrying about controlling how I enjoy my music and instead help enable me to enjoy my music. There are lots of entertainment choices vying for my dollar – do you want that dollar? Then make things as easy and enjoyable for me as humanly possible. Let me choose what file format I want the music to be in and what quality/bitrate it will be. Instead of wasting your R&D on trying to limit how I listen to my music through DRM – focus on improving the delivery and playback of the music.

Tie it into the RealWorld^(tm)
Let me buy CDs of the actual albums. Better yet – give me the option to create my own CD tracklist and have it professionally stamped and labeled with pre-fab or self-generated liner notes. Give me access to buy t-shirts, posters and other memorabilia.

If I've purchased a number of tracks from a certain band and they're playing in my area – provide a means of selling me a ticket to the event. If there's a band playing in my area that I might like – based on my music tastes – give me a quick link to some samples of theirs and again, sell me a ticket.

Keep me appraised of upcoming public appearances of the groups I like. Are they going to be the band on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Let me know. Will they be signing autographs at the local music store? Tell me about it.

So where is this store?
The store I've described would undoubtebly be one of the most profitable online ventures and likely would become the face of the industry for the coming century. A great bazzar from which all sounds have a fairly even chance to vie for the ears of the audience, and all levels of the industry have a chance to profit. An engine of fandom generation and perpetuation.

But the music industry has chosen to grip on to the old models with both fists. Rather than work together to create a model that would prove beneficial to all – they'd rather try to monopolize the audience. Instead of making music audiences partners in marketing and spreading the buzz surrounding a particular group, they've chosen to attempt monetizing every usage of the song and by extension label their audiences as criminals. They would rather control the conversation rather than facilitate it.

The result of the music industry's direction has been a stifled conversation, less choice and billions of songs moving with not a chance for profit.

The movie industry is on the verge of where the music industry was five years ago. Let's hope they can learn from the mistakes made and that we will soon have the ultimate online movie store.

How do we sell it? - part deux

My email to the aforementioned tech firm found it's way to their IT Head who corrects my initial calculation that every extra bit doubles the strength of the encryption. There are other factors involved in determining a comparison between two ciphers. A straight doubling per bit, as I mention in my previous post is not an accurate comparison. The strength of the company's encryption is still more powerful on a magnitude in the thousands or millions or billions but as he states, "Unfortunately, this sort of information is lost to the vast majority - as would representing DSS's strength as a huge exponent. Anyone who fundamentally understands encryption would know the jist of what is being said - that DSS is at LEAST 32 times stronger."

Okay - fair enough. In my opinion it's vastly underselling the product and its benefits. Kind of like describing the Empire State Building as being at LEAST five stories high. Not incorrect - but not the most accurate description either.

But what really got me was how the IT Head ended off his message, "[you need] to be aware that the papers we have are basically marketing material, not technical specifications."

Maybe it's just me - but I think that marketing material shouldn't be inherintly less accurate than technical specifications. I'm likely an idealist in this regards, but I don't feel that the job of marketing professional is to misrepresent, exadgurate or dumb down. Rather, a marketer should act as a translator. Someone who can take the message delivered to them in the language of an engineer or software developer and accurately translate that into something that the intended clientel can relate to or care about.

Stating anything other than the full and honest truth to make a sale is a short-sighted and poor approach to business. I don't want to sell to the person who has no use for what I have to offer. The person who has no use for what I offer is going to tell everyone they know that what I offer is useless.

Find out who your product appeals to. Speak to these people directly and truthfully in terms they can relate to. That's what marketing should be about.

But how do we sell it?

I had a brief discussion today with a tech firm about their overall marketing message. This company offers highly secure net connections through encryption. Whereas typical secure connections offer 128bit encryption, this company offers 4092bit encryption. Their website and sales materials tout, 'our method is 32 times greater than standard encryption'.

Great. Except that number is wrong.

With encryption, every extra bit doubles the strength. 129bit is twice as strong as 128bit. 130bit is four times as strong as 128bit. 131bit is eight times as strong as 128bit. 256bit encryption is 300 million, million, million, million times stronger than 128bit encryption. And 257bit encryption is double that. At this rate, you can see how staggeringly more powerful 4096bit encryption is. You also see how ridiculous the company looks claiming their product to be only a mere 32 times stronger.

What's more - they know how incredibly strong their product is and purposefully chose to list it as being only 32 times stronger. Why would they purposefully short sell their product?

Their reasoning was that it was too tough a sale to those who didn't understand the technology. I can see that. Offer to make a system 32 times better and it sounds like you're a miracle worker. Offer to make a system a billion, billion, billion, billion times better and you look like a damn, dirty liar.

Dumb down your marketing and you get your foot in more doors. The flip side, however, is that anyone with the technical know-how will percieve the company as not understanding their own product. Not something that instills trust if you're going to use their product to safegaurd your money and personal records. Learn that they purposefully dumbed things down and you're apt to feel duped. Again, not a feeling you want to have from a company that wants you to watch over your private information.

So we're left with a product that's too amazing. Describe it accurately and people will consider you a raving lunatic or a liar. Describe it inaccurately and people will consider you a fool and a liar. What to do? How do they sell it?

The answer is truthfully and accurately - but in a way that matters to the audience. My recommendation to this company was to reframe the discussion. Move the talk away from a technical, numerical comparison of 128bit vs. 4096bit. Give us something concrete to sink our teeth into, like how long would it take an evil hacker to crack the code? Or what would the computer that could crack the code cost?

"Cracking our system's codes would require the complete computer resources of a major corporation working non-stop for over 150 years."

See. Now that statement inspires confidence. It acknowledges that codes can be cracked, but reassures us that it won't be happening on our watch. That's what really matters to the consumer. Not numbers in the billions and quadrillions or diatrabe on cypher strength. Just tell us we'll be safe, it's all that matters.

Remember, unless you are saying the things that matter to your audience, you won't be able to catch their attention, let alone persuade them.

Google News Reports - Dangerous Felon Nabbed

Google News is a search algorithm that combs the net for headlines and news stories - and then groups them based upon subject and apparent importance of a story. The system is fully computer automated - which keeps the system free of bias, but sometimes has humorous results.

Take the story which led at the beginning of the month 'Canadians Authorities Arrest U.S. President Bush On War Charges'.



Man oh man oh man. Could you see the proverbial excrement hitting the equally proverbial fan if that ever happened. I guess the reason I didn't see tanks rolling down the QEW is that the story originated from a political satire site. Bush is still walking about, a free man (although Rumsfeld may have to avoid Germany for a while). Google News, however, didn't quite get the satire.

Now there's a few editorials and articles flying about how Google's dropped the ball and how this is just plain sloppy, etc. etc. But you know, if I'm still getting emails about the Neiman Marcus Cookie from people who should have sense enough to check their facts, then I think I can forgive Google's computer the occasional flub in distinguishing satire from news.

nerdgasm

With the last Star Wars film coming out next year, one can expect to see the appropriate video game tie-ins. An Episode III game. Maybe something with podracing or starfighter related. Some sort of duelling game I would imagine. But who would have thought something so amazingly geeky would be coming out to trump them all.

LEGO is releasing a Star Wars video game that follows the storyline of the prequel trilogy but is based on the LEGO Star Wars sets. That's right - all the ships, parts of the environment and the characters are all LEGO based. Head on over to the write-up on Gamespot and take a gander.

Now if we can just get a game that let's our Transformers and GI Joes battle it out with one another, then my childhood nostalgia will be complete...

Puretracks - an excersise in futility

Last week, I got a song stuck in my head. Stuck in such a way that the only way I was going to get it out was to plop a copy of it onto Winamp and play it a few times in a row. Only problem is that I don't have that song.

It being two in the morning, going down to HMV was out of the question, so I decided that I'd try and download a legal copy off of the internet from Canada's premier online music store, Puretracks.

Now when I go to their site the first thing I'm confronted with is a message thanking me for visiting but informing me that while they value their Mac audience, the Windows Media player for Mac is not currently compatible with Microsoft protected audio content. Therefore I may not enter the site.

Oh. Okay. Fine. But I'm not on a Mac.

I'm running WinXP Professional and surfing the net with FireFox. Leaving aside their alienation of the Mac users, do these people also want to alienate the 10-20% of net users who are not using Internet Explorer? Apparently. What seems even stranger is that the site works fine in FireFox, provided you don't link in from the front page. The front page and checkout of the site are designed to throw any browser that isn't Internet Explorer on Windows to the Mac apology page. Just plain sloppy coding, imho.

Whatever - I've got to get this song out of my head. I pop into Internet Explorer and revisit the site. And here all my troubles began.

See, I knew a bit of the tune and a snatchet of the chorus, but had no idea what the song's actual name is or who the artist may be. Taking a bet that the song is titled the same as the words from the chorus, I type into the search field, 'it don't mean a thing'. Before I can say, 'crappy search engine' I'm deluged with hundreds of songs, 20 per page, 25 pages worth. Page one is entirely songs titled 'Don't'. Page two leads into songs titled 'Don't Cry' or 'Don't Stop', etc. etc.

It seems that instead of looking for just the phrase I wrote, it found each song that contains at least one of those words in the title. I try putting quotes around my search - same problem. I try plus signs in between the words - no luck. Whoever it is at Puretracks that decided to use 'OR' instead of 'AND' for searches should be fired on the spot for gross incompetance. That one decision probably cost this company several thousand sales. I can tell you, I'd of abandoned the site long before if I weren't suffering insomnia with an old swing tune stuck in my head.

Now, unless I can figure out who the artist of the song is, I'm going to have to sift through 25 pages, so I pop open Google in another browser and type in 'it don't mean a thing'. Bingo - first entry gives me the name I need, Duke Ellington. So it's back to Puretracks to do a search on 'Duke Ellington' and I see there's another employee or two who need to be shown the door.

Duke Ellington is in the database not once, but ten seperate times. He's entered in as 'Duke Ellington & His Orchastra' and again as 'The Duke Ellington Orchastra'. There's an entry for 'Ellington, Duke' and another for 'Duke Ellington' and a third for 'Edward "Duke" Ellington (1899 - 1974)'. Is there no one at this organization that knows how to upkeep a database? Are none of the data entry clerks taught to avoid duplicating entries? Each one of these entries has a handful of albums associated with it, so I have to click on each name and then each album to see a track list.

At long last, I think I've located the song - or at least I think it's the song. I need to click on the preview to verify that this is what I actually want. The preview launches Windows Media Player into a seperate window and I hear a couple seconds of nothing, then there's a drum, a little bit of piano, and then.... nothing. My ten second preview has ended. I have no clue, whatsoever, if this is what I'm actually after.

At this point I'm getting to be in a foul mood, so I say 'krunk it' and drop the thing into my cart. Time to checkout. Oh - but I can't just pay and go. No. I've got to register. Fine. Whatever. Give me the registration page. Suddenly I'm realizing why the site looks familiar.

Back in the summer, McDonalds was giving out free music downloads with the purchase of a Big Mac. Back then I'd gotten a page into the registration to collect my free song when I was suddenly hit with questions asking me my profession, interests and annual income - a little more personal info than a free song is worth, imho. I'd surfed away and tossed the free song coupons.

Well, here I am again. Fortunately it looks like they've downgraded their nosiness, asking only for my full mailing address and asking me to volunteer my age and gender. Can anyone give me a good reason that a company delivering a download needs my home address? I finish the registration process and again get ready to checkout. My song comes to a total of $2.12 after taxes. A 50 year old recording and they want two bucks for a digital copy. In my mind, that's a bit steep, even if I was sure it was the right song. What's more, there's something that's been nagging at me all along. I don't use Windows Media Player to listen to music, I use WinAmp. Will I be able to listen to this song?

I look around the site for an FAQ. No such luck - but there is something entitled 'Accessing your Music' on the front page. Clicking on it loads up a Flash file with a short animation showing how to download. There's no fastforward - no pause - no rewind. I just have to sit, pay attention and hope they address my question. They don't.

I finally find the FAQ burried in the 'help' section but it offers no answers and raises even more questions. Their help document in one place states flat out that registration is not required to buy - in another instance states that you have to register to checkout. Jinkies - enough of this.

I tried some other Canadian music sites, Futureshop's and Sympatico's. Maybe they would offer a better site - one that was actually usable. No such luck. It would seem that both sites are simply co-brandings with Puretracks. A different style sheet and a logo and budda bing, budda boom, a useless Puretracks site becomes a useless Futureshop music download site. The Sympatico site, at first wouldn't let me in, claiming I wasn't in Canada. After I shut my firewall down, it let me in, but it wouldn't recognize Sympatico as being my ISP - so no access to any of the offers I should be able to buy from.

My final verdict: Puretracks sucks cold, runny eggs.

(c)

I want to clarify my own stand in terms of copyright.

When I create a work - that work is my own. It doesn't belong to my readers, it doesn't belong to the government and it doesn't belong to the people. It is my own and I have the right to say how it is to be used, to charge money for it and to treat it like any other property of mine. I would expect to have the weight of the law on my side to help defend my property. I believe I should have the right to sell or transfer my rights of ownership of a work, and that I should have the right to receive or purchase ownership rights from other artists.

That being said - the weight of the law should be tightly focused on commercial copying infringements. While use of my work without my permission in a noncriminal manner is certainly unwelcome and rude, it should by no means be considered criminal. Here's how I see it:

• Someone prints off a hundred copies of Bunny & the Cantelope and sells them - that's a clear infringement.
• Someone prints a copy to give to a friend who isn't online - that's ok.
• Somebody really likes my concept but hates my execution and redraws my first chapter - provided they're acknowledging my original creation and not commercially competing with me, I see no infringement.
• Somebody really likes the concept and begins selling t-shirts with their own renditions of the characters - infringement.

When the law intervenes in the noncommercial copying or transformation of a work, I believe it is harmful to society - even moreso to the artists and creators. When copyright law becomes overreaching, it ceases to be used to protect the rightful property of its owners and is, instead, used to eliminate competition.

I believe that the current administrations of the world are adopting a disproportionate response to copyright infringement and that the spirit of copyright is being corrupted to serve, not the creator, but the purveyor of the creator's work. That the result is going to be a stifling and homogonizing of creativity, the loss of thousands of works from our cultural history and the throttling of innovation.

What About the Artists?

Aside from that stuntperson who's up before the trailers at every movie theatre, preaching about the woes of piracy, what do artists really think about filesharing? After all, the shrill cry we hear from the music and film industry again and again is "the artists! what about the artists!!!"

PEW Internet & American Life Project seeks to answer that question in a survey entitled "Artists, Musicians and the Internet". Here's a couple of quick highlights...

• 43% of artists agree that, “file-sharing services aren’t really bad for artists, since they help to
• promote and distribute an artist’s work to a broad audience.”
• 60% of musicians believe that the Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuits agains individuals accused of sharing files online will not benefit the artists
• Only 28% of artists believe file-sharing is a major threat
• Half of all artists say that copyright regulations generally benefit purveyors of art work more than the original creators.

So the next time you hear the cry "piracy is destroying the industry - what about the artists?" remember that it's really a cry of "what about the producers, the middlemen and the industry bloat?"

Participatory news

Mark Glaser's column, The Media Company I Want to Work For, is spoken out of frustration at the current structure of media companies, but I believe it gives us a glance at what's to come in the world of journalism.

Open Source Journalism, Citizen's Journalism, Participatory News are buzzphrases that are starting to be bandied about, and there's some interesting early steps to formally organize, but the concept is very simple. When everyone has a digital camera, a wireless net connection, a platform from which to speak and to be heard - then everyone becomes 'the media'.

The next Woodward & Bernstein are not working in the copy room at the Daily Bugle - they're working beside you in your place of business, writing about what they know, pulling together and piecing facts from the thousands of sources available to them from a Google search and from the journals of millions who also write what they know and piece together what they find.

Primer - a movie review

Primer is the story of a group of engineer friends who tinker in their off hours. The primary members of the group, Abe and Aaron discover that their latest project has some very unexpected capabilities. I hesitate to describe the plot any further, as part of the joy of this film is watching the characters in the process of discovery.

Primer is an exceptional movie on a number of fronts.

This film is good, ol fashion speculative fiction like we haven't seen in the cinemas for some time. Brought me in mind of the short stories of Asimov, Bradbury and the like. There's no talking down to the audience. You either follow along or you're going to be scratching your head. And bravo for that. I'm tired of cinema for the lowest common denomenator.

Where the film stands above it's hollywood bretheren is that it doesn't take the subject matter as an excuse for a special effects tour de force, but rather an opportunity to explore the process of discovery, the ethics of the application of that discovery and the consequences it all has on Abe and Aaron's friendship.

The style is very realistic. You'd almost think you were watching a documentary of the events. The sound is a bit murky and some of the cuts are roughly edited, but I tell you not in a thousand years would you guess that the film's entire budget was $7000.

Let me repeat that. Seven thousand dollars was the entire budget for this film.

Jinkies, most films blow that much in a single day on bottled water for cast and crew, yet director Shane Carruth's pulled together what is easily one of my favourite films of the year. It's the sheer talent and drive of the director that and his crew that made this film come together. Shane's obviously a guy with a passion for storytelling - it comes across in the various interviews he's done and his posts to the movie's forum.

Primer is in extremely limited release - I believe there's only 35 prints of it floating around. If it's playing in a city near you, go - grab a bunch of friends - and see this film.

FireFox, ThunderBird and RSS

Earlier this year, I adopted FireFox as my browser of choice. Having enjoyed my experience with FireFox, I decided to also make the switch from my previous email client to the Mozilla email client, Thunderbird. I highly recommend both programs, but feel free to download them and see for yourself. Both are free of charge.

FireFox and Thunderbird have opened my eyes to is the wonderful world of RSS. If you're like me, you've heard the term bandied about and you've had people extolling at great length how it's the 'wave of the future' and 'RSS is the next big thing'. However, no one really explains, at least to my satisfaction, just what the heck it is and why it's a big deal.

So, using my newly adopted browser and email client as examples, I shall try to give a half decent explanation of why RSS is, in fact, the next big thing.

Using FireFox
Yesterday, I'm surfing through the internet and I came across a really interesting blog on Science Education and Evolution. In the old days, I would bookmark the site and I would return every day or two to see if there'd been an update. For newssites like CNN or slashdot, I could visit a dozen times a day, just checking to see what's new. More often than not, nothing since my last visit.

Nowadays, if the site has an RSS feed, a little icon appears at the bottom of my screen. If I click on this, I subscribe to the site's RSS feed. The site is added as a 'live' bookmark. Whenever there's a new entry to the blog, this bookmark is highlighted. No wasting time going from site to site to site checking for content. Now I just look at my bookmarks and see at a glance where the new stuff is.


Using Thunderbird
If you're like me, your email client is up and running every second your computer is. There are some things that you want, nay things that you need to know as they happen. News events, industry gossip, what your boss has to say in his online journal. Thunderbird allows you to receive RSS feeds much like you would receive emails. Whenever there's a new post on Slashdot or Seth Godin opines about something or my friend Debbie writes something new, the post ends up in a folder in my email client. I can see at a glance that there are two posts at Kuro5hin that I haven't read and that there's something up at BrandMantra.

When I visit a site and see the little orange button that says 'rss' or 'xml' or 'atom', I click on it, copy the URL, click the 'feeds' button on my ThunderBird toolbar and paste the URL. Budda-bing, budda-boom, instant access to all that site has to offer from the comfort of my email program

For those of you who are still scratching your heads and wondering what good any of that is... it's about organizing the information you need better and saving yourself time.

Just so everyone knows, currently I have a feed for the blog, but the next time I do a site redesign, I'll look into adding a feed for announcing the addition of new comics and art. The feed for this blog is at www.theelusivefish.com/blog/atom.xml or you can scroll down to the bottom and hit the big orange button.

Music Levy

Here in Canada, the music industry lobbied hard to get a levy enforced on all blank media. For every CD-R and CD-RW that's sold, there's an extra $0.21 that's tacked on. Buy yourself an MP3 player and you're looking to pay anywhere from $2 - $25 dependent on the amount of on board memory.

Since 1999 this money has been pooling in the coffers of the CPCC. To date, the organization has collected over $87 million dollars. That should be quite a boon to Canada's 4,500 performers, composers and lyricists, coming to about $20,000 per artist.

Wow. Seems like a good time to be a performing artist in Canada... or so you'd think.

First, CPCC has their operating expenses. After all, they have to continually lobby the government to increase those levies, investigate and take to court anyone who may have avoided the levy. Oh - and don't forget the salaries of the CPCC staff and PR firm. That's $9 million. Oh - and up until this past year, CPCC didn't really know how it was going to distribute all this money that it's been holding on to. So of the cash collected, only $28 million has actually been paid out.

But still. That's like, $6000 per artist. Not bad. Not bad at all. Except...

CPCC doesn't actually pay the money to artists directly, but instead routes the money through about a dozen artist collectives. Now, of course, each of these organizations have their own costs and expenditures. SOCAN - just one of the organizations involved - lists their overhead as being about 18%. So of the $28 million that actually has made it out into the hands of these collectives, you can say farewell to another $5 million.

Okay - so $5000 will still reach our plucky little Musician. However...

The music publishers and record companies, being listed as the copyright owners of much of the music get their cut first. Their take amounts to about 75% - or another $17 million.

And before you say 'ah, but that leaves $1,000 in the hands of our Musician', I should point out that the way these organizations distribute royalties is based, not upon actual performances but on a survey of radio and television stations. Because, what people are burning to CDs and copying to their MP3 players is -of course- directly reflected by what's playing on the radio. In all likelihood, the majority of the funds are going to

So of the $87 million that's been paid in levies for media, about $14 million has gone to bureaucrats, lawyers and office workers, $17 million to Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner and BMG. The majority of the remaining $5 million will be split between a dozen or so big names, like Alanis Morissette, the Barenaked Ladies, and Celine Dion, leaving our plucky Musician with a princely sum of $112 ... but more likely than not, less than that. Probably nothing at all.

Wow. Seems like a great time to be a bureaucratic or music exec in Canada.

A letter to my MP

An open letter which I've just fired off to my Member of Parliment, the Privacy Commissioner and to Equifax...

Last year in the United States, an act was passed which ensured US citizens may have access to a free summary once a year of all credit information on file for that person. As of yesterday, consumers in 13 Western states have free online access to their credit reports, soon to be available to all citizens of the US.

It is my understanding that under PIPEDA, Canadian citizens have the right to access information in their files at minimal or no cost. If an organization, such as Equifax, has my information documented electronically in a database, and this information is already accessible online, shouldn't there be no cost involved in my accessing that information?

I understand there are hard costs to providing such a service (hardware, software, bandwidth and technicians), but surely this is nowhere near the cost to process these orders by hand when providing a report via the mail - a service which Equifax does provide free of charge. If Equifax is reporting a $25 million dollar profit for their Canadian operations in the first quarter of 2004, then I would think the $14.95 they are currently charging for an online report covers far more than just the base costs involved.

Shouldn't Canadian citizens have the same right to free online access of our personal information held by credit reporting agencies as our neighbours to the South are now granted? In a time where identity theft is a real and growing concern, isn't timely access to this information important to the privacy of Canadians?

What really kills me is that the reports are free via mail. The info is all in electronic format to begin with, likely the staff members at Equifax use the same web based interface to access the reports. So why, why, why - someone please tell me - is it that you charge for a service that requires no human interaction and is fully automated, but provide free a service that requires about $5 (in terms of staff time required to verify your request and mail your report back) and almost a dollar in postage?