Cory Doctorow takes the management of TiVo to task for not being willing to die for his principles . . . .
What’s funny about this is that it’s the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn’t upset the music publishers, Marconi didn’t cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players — hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.
Where does this bizarre idea — that the dinosaur industry that’s being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it — come from?
Well, this may be driven by the fact that the TiVo guys are the dogs, erm, mammals in the fight: they run the risk of being trampled by the dinos, or more precisely, their attorneys. The system, as currently defined, may stink, but I don’t know that sacrificing a beachhead of “reasonable compromise” makes sense.
Cory’s email reply to me bears that out (an excerpt follows):
Every single successful new media tech got successful by answering a market demand, then getting the courts and the govt to change the law to legalize what they did. Appeasement never succeeds. Standing strong sometimes does. It’s the difference between a zero percent chance of success and a non-zero chance. Most companies fail, period. The risk of failure is not, in and of itself, sufficient justification for not delivering the products the markets demand.
This sounds a lot like sacrificing someone else’s business to death on the altar of principle: I don’t agree that’s anyone else’s call to make. The TiVo guys have to make the decisions they’re comfortable with. If they want to bet they can preserve their business in the face of Open Source competition and the risk of litigation from the media companies, that’s up to them.
It may work out in the end that this is a solid toehold that can be built into something else. I would rather have seen this message couched as a challenge or encouragement than as name-calling . . . .
And far as I can tell, there isn’t exactly a lot of competition in this space: there are two commercial players and one home-brew project, that I’m aware if. Given there’s no monopoly, perhaps that tells us all we need to know . . . .