Aviary Blog

Until technology makes it just as easy to track artists’ rights, royalties and attributions (RRA), as it is for a mashup artist to Google and save, a lot more DMCA fights are going to be appearing on the news.


Image courtesy of Tc7

Recently, photographer Lane Hartwell noticed that one of her images was used in a video by the Richter Scales that went viral on YouTube. Lane was upset that it was being distributed without her permission, so she had her lawyer file a DMCA request to have the video taken down.

Until an easier way for artists to track their content, more conflicts like this are going to spring up. Here at Aviary, we are trying to provide exactly this type of capability to all kinds of artists. Whether you are a photographer or a videographer you should be able to work together, easily tracking RRA forever.

If it’s On the Internet, it’s Free!

The problem lies in the process itself. It is currently much easier to download images than it is to attribute and get permission to use them. Most people will retrieve content via a simple web search, click and Save, not thinking twice about whether the owner reserves any rights in how it’s reused. They assume if it is online, it’s free to use.



Sure, you can manually credit your sources in the notes of your Youtube videos or Flickr images , but that takes too much time and effort… especially if you are only producing a 5 minute video. People are inherently lazy and unless they fully understand and care about copyright they wont make the extra effort.

Creative Commons is Not Enough

Creative Commons is doing a great job addressing part of this problem by making it easier for artists to license out their work, but it’s not enough on its own. What if a photographer decides to change their license once a mashup artist already (legally) used it? In retrospect it looks like the mashup artist used the work illegally!

That’s great in theory. But in practice it’s a different story. There is no visible permanence to a revocable license. For example, on Flickr, Creative Commons licenses are not permanent. A photographer can change his or her license at any time on Flickr does not keep track of the changes. If you already used their image you could get in trouble unless you took a snapshots of the license at the time you used the image.

That’s really asking people to do a lot of work and also assumes that people would have the foresight to realize that the license is publicly revocable. Most people simply won’t think about that possibility and there will eventually be a conflict.

The Solution is Relying on Technology

I propose that we develop a system that inherently tracks where files come from and stores that information directly in the file itself. We need to store meta data about the file’s origins, along with the actual file itself.

An example of this in action would be Photoshop tracking where new files are coming from as you do a web search and paste in the copy data. The final jpg could contain a layer of metadata from which any future user could see where elements of it originated from, be it web urls or other forms of contact information. The technology would also need to warn users (but not prevent them), when they are using a file in a way that goes against what’s been instructed by the original owners.

We are actually trying to build a system that does exactly that.

One of Aviary’s main focuses has been to make sure that all RRAs are automatically tracked throughout the creative process using our suite of tools. We deal with copyright issues all the time at Worth1000.com, (a site that hosts “photoshopped” images) so we are pretty sensitive to finding the balance between ownership rights and encouraging creativity through remixing. While it is important to educate the masses to care about the content rights of others, there’s no way to educate enough people to make self-government effective. An infrastructure for tracking creative content will be very helpful in protecting rights where education can’t. It also needs to be easy as pie.

Aviary will help artists track their content forever by letting our servers do all the grunt work, so they don’t have to worry about it and others can remix work legally. Everyone wins.

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Almost everything I’ve learned and love about design stems from my background in drawing comics and cartoons. Trying to establish character, mood, and still convey my message all within the limited space of a comic panel (and with a split second of a reader’s attention span to do so) is a daunting challenge.

So as a cartoonist, you tend to find yourself resorting to thinking in basic shapes a lot. I know that if I design a character that’s instantly recognizable as a silhouette, that character will work once we go in and add the facial features, attire, etc… Everything within this basic skeleton are accessories, but the base is paramount.

For example, I don’t need to tell you who any these characters are for you to recognize them.



Our eyes strip down everything we see into its most basic elements on a daily basis without even thinking about it. Mickey Mouse isn’t a mouse who wears red shorts. Our mind remembers him as a circle with two smaller circles on top. Just to visualize, we can dress him up in any colors or attire we desire and nobody would ever mistake him for anyone else.



But if we were to alter the base of his foundation even slightly…

Like magic, he is no longer Mickey Mouse.



Human beings are extremely lazy creatures when it comes to visual association. We have difficulty consciously remembering details and ultimately recollect most of our visuals through basic shapes.

To put this theory to the test, look at the following images and ask yourself a couple questions:

a) What’s wrong with Yosemite Sam?

b) To which popular cartoon character does this eye belong to?



Answers:

a) I’ve changed the color of Sam’s handkerchief from the usual yellow to green.

b) Woody Woodpecker.

Okay, some of you may have gotten the first one and a few may have even gotten both. But out of context and had I not asked, you probably wouldn’t have given either images a passing glance even if we’ve all seen these characters a million times before.

So, what has all this got to do with anything?

Well, the very same principles in cartoons relates directly to the world of design. Any good design, like cartoons, reduced to its most basic framework will remain a good design. A prospective customer is fickle. They are not going to stick around to look at the great little flower incorporated into the background of an advertisement if they’re not immediately hooked. And even if they do, chances are they may not remember it tomorrow. They care as much about minute details labored over in a design as you care about the color of Yosemite Sam’s handkerchief.

Although a solid foundation can be enhanced with flashy details, flashy details cannot save a poorly designed foundation. Spending that extra time in the initial compositional stages of a design is of utmost importance. It’s the “Mickey Mouse ears” from which all other elements of a design will work off of.

So a lot of those very same principles mentioned above, we tried incorporating into the Aviary branding and design.

We know that if our fine feathered friends you see here work in their most basic form, they’ll still read once we add the details:



As a comparison, would the toucan have worked had he looked like this?



Why not? We used the exact same colors and general idea of the other toucan. But one look at his silhouette gives us the answer. It just does not read.

So, the next time you come across a great logo or a beautiful design, ask yourself what made that design appealing to you. Chances are it’s not the beautiful flower in the background or your love of a particular color they used. Ask yourself how the design read compositionally. You just might find your answer there.

Now, I’m sure there are plenty of designs and logos out there that break this general “rule.” Funny enough, I just can’t recall any of them off the top of my head.

Well, that’s my belief anyways. Or maybe I just wanted to draw Mickey Mouse today.]]>

That’s foolish, but it’s also largely unavoidable, since you can never really know what problems exist with your prototype until their has been mass adoption of it. The Catch 22 is that if your prototype does get properly adopted, it’s already too late to rebuild it from scratch.

There’s a line at your door and they want immediate attention.



People don’t wait around for you to change. Copycats spring up. Investors see revenue potential, customers attention spans are short. Your direction becomes one of patching the prototype and playing catch up with your scale requirements. Redesigning is impossible.

Initial design flaws seem obvious to us in hindsight, but they rarely are at the beginning. People don’t think of a prototype as a prototype until they have to patch a new bug.

Take the Y2K bug: Why wouldn’t computer programmers have thought about dates after the year 2000 when designing the first computer languages? It wasn’t even that far off!

The truth is that most creators simply don’t expect wide adoption and it is a lot easier to build a product without worrying about scalability. That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t just apply to programmers writing applications.

There are so many real world examples of hacking being the only way to address a design flaw because mass adoption prevents re-addressing the underlying issue.

New Orleans



Why would original developers choose to build a city on lower ground than sea-level in an area prone to hurricanes? Why not import more land to raise the city above sea level?

The answer is that they probably didn’t intend to build a city as big as it became and levies seemed a more realistic, economical solution in dealing with a smaller city. They never considered problems of scaling, because it’s impossible to predict population growth.

A city grows around a current need (i.e. access to maritime trade) and remains standing once that need fades away. Then it is up to the new residents to continue developing on an infrastructure that was never intended to support continuous growth.

The design flaw becomes an inherent, unchangeable limitation based on mass adoption. You can’t rebuild or move the city itself once it becomes obvious that it simply can’t scale.

So New Orleans planners hacked their inherent design flaw by building a levy system instead of raising the city up higher in the first place. Woops.

English on the Internet



English has become the global language of the Internet.

Why? Because English-speaking people invented the prototype and didn’t consider the global potential for it.

Because of this lack of foresight we are stuck with browsers that do not readily accept foreign language characters for URLs. Imagine how that limits countries where English isn’t a first language. Take a look at the URLs for Wikipedia articles in non-English languages. Talk about non-intuitive usability!

And how wonderful for Google and other search engines that are the Hack to this terrible design flaw.

QWERTY Keyboards



The common layout of keyboards that almost all computers come with, known as QWERTY, causes problems of inefficiency and fatigue as people type. A more ideal layout is known as the Dvorak layout. It places keys in positions to improve efficiency in typing to almost double the current speed, but it’s hardly been adopted at all.



So why did we even use a QWERTY layout in the first place? Because the concept of typing originated on a now extinct need (manual typewriters), and mass adoption of that character set has persisted a limitation.

The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would slow down typing and alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams in typewriters.



And now we’re stuck with a mass adoption of a way of doing things that can’t be redesigned. The Dvorak keyboard is a redesign instead of a hack and therefore it will never be adopted by the masses.

Others

Can you point out other real world design flaws where mass adoption limits us to hacking instead of redesigning?

I’d love to hear them.]]>

In every industry there is a steep slope that represents market share and an important strategy decision has to be at which point on the slope do you enter?



Target too high and you’re catering an to important niche user base, but won’t hit the broader consumer base for a while. Too low and gravity will keep you from ever making it higher up the slope.

In picking where to enter the market, most businesses base their decision on immediate return. It comes down to which portion of the market will give them the largest base for the lowest cost. Therefore most companies will take the bottom-up approach, targeting the bunny slopes first with a product that has broad consumer reach and lower costs to develop, before moving on to (or possibly choosing to pass up on) a more targeted and expensive market.

I think that can be short-sighted.

With Aviary we are taking the more unconventional top-down approach: Targeting a niche of semi-professionals with our tools first and then streamlining versions of our tools down for the masses, once advanced users are happy with them.

Why? It boils down to long-term branding effects and better software design. When your brand takes on elite connotations because it caters to the elite it becomes desirable to the masses. Sure, out of the gate you become the underdog as far as overall market share goes, but as time goes on and you begin to diversify you are left with an extremely strong brand, one that can be easily adapted for markets with broader, less-targeted ranges because of the branding strength and inherent software power. It’s a matter of removing and simplifying features, not hacking onto a design that is not intended to be scalable.

The added benefit to a top-down approach is that you have nowhere to go revenue-wise but up, since your market base gets larger as you go further down the slope. Your market share only broadens as your products target range does.

The flip side is that companies that took the bottoms-up approach to grab as much overall market-share as possible often have nowhere to go but down. Professionals are bored by bunny slopes.

Case in point, recent news that Apple is finally worth more than IBM.]]>

– Mocking up a presentation? Enter Designer mode.
– Crunching figures on a spreadsheet? Enter Accountant mode.
– Tweaking your code base? Enter Programmer mode.

It’s not the physical adoption of an identity that is exhausting. When I’m in a certain role, I am in a zone, focused on my specific task and nothing can distract me. But ask me to switch identities and my brain goes into shut down mode and I want nothing more than to procrastinate, anything but to don a new identity. The act of switching identities is simply exhausting.

I imagine that it’s very much the dilemma Bruce Wayne faces every time he changes into Batman.

Actually being just Batman? Or even billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne? That’s simply kick-ass. It’s the changing process that’s time consuming.

Think of the amount of work involved in slipping into your private study, finding the right book to trigger the secret entrance to the Bat Cave, removing your tuxedo, donning 100 pounds of protective gear and armor, ripping nylon tights on over your hairy legs, remembering to stop hitting on the ladies, remembering to start hitting on Robin…

It’s not like Bruce Wayne can just slide down a pole and instantly turn into Batman, right?

<a href='http://youtube.com/watch?v=D12ynaqjMwA' class='author' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'><b>flash video</b></a>

On second thought… strike that.

So how does a small business operator cope? I think the best thing you can do is to force yourself into a majority role-a-day mode. Don’t try to change your identity too many times in one day, unless you absolutely have to. If you designate specific days for specific tasks instead of chunking your day into smaller pieces spent on multi-tasking, you begin to spend more time in the zone and less in mental transitioning.

Friday for me is the day I pay my bills and do accounting; Weekends are for thought process and planning; Monday’s are for networking follow-up; Tuesdays and Thursdays are wild cards, usually used for programming, UI testing or design.

And Wednesdays? On Wednesdays it’s business time.]]>

We’ve been wanting to share our thoughts as a team for a while and decided that rather than keep everything on our own personal blogs, we’d share them directly on Aviary.

We’re mostly visual thinkers here, (in case you couldn’t tell by all the imagery on our website), so when time permits, we’ll include some visuals to accompany our thinking as well.

Our RSS feed will be split up into two – business ideas and products. The product blog will keep it’s URL:

http://a.viary.com/blog

Our new business ideas blog will be located at:

http://a.viary.com/bizblog

You can access the RSS feed for both blogs on the right hand side of the column.

We hope you enjoy the read!]]>