Michael Wolff's speech

Professional media gadfly Michael Wolff delivered the opening keynote address at the 2005 SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York at the beginning of February. Hundreds of digital content professionals heard his speech; it caused a bit of a stir at the time, largely because he said that the Wall Street Journal "kind of disappeared" in the mid-90s:

I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal's activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don't think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle.

The speech was recorded by the SIIA, and then given by the SIIA's flack, David Williams, to IWantMedia.com. IWM then sent it off to be transcribed, and published the full transcript on their website.

Michael Wolff was not happy about this.

I don't know why Michael Wolff wasn't happy. I suspect that he wasn't happy because the speech was a little bit informal, and a little bit embarrassing. When people get paid money to give speeches, as I'm sure Wolff was, they often drop in little juicy bits of gossip to make their audience feel that much more insidery. In print, however, those bits of gossip can look more like self-aggrandising name-dropping:

I have a good story. I mean, this is a really good story never before told. At least never before told in public.
A little less than a year ago I was out at a conference on the West Coast. And there was a guy at this conference who in New York we refer to as the mysterious billionaire. We have no idea what he does, but he lives in the largest private residence in Manhattan. That's what everybody always says, that specific phrase: "He lives in the largest private residence in Manhattan." He also travels in a private plane, which I had once been on. I went out to Kennedy and there were all these G5s parked there. And I started to kind of move over to them, and the guy taking it out said no and shifted my attention to a 767.
I got on this plane first with some other people. And then the mysterious billionaire came on, followed by three teenage girls (not his daughters). At any rate, we're at this conference and it finishes and he's going to L.A. and offers me a ride on the plane. As a matter of fact, he says, you can sit up front if you want. So we go out. I follow him out to his car and then we're quickly followed by two other guys. It's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whom I've met before...

In any case, it turns out that Michael Wolff had either failed or refused to sign the SIIA's standard release form, which allows them to disseminate and/or republish the speeches of their speakers. Williams didn't know this when he sent the speech to IWM, but he certainly knew it when a furious Wolff phoned him up demanding that the speech be taken down. "No one realised Michael Wolff didn't sign the release," Williams told me when he called me earlier today. "And nobody reckoned that IWantMedia would get it up so quickly. And nobody realised what Michael Wolff's reaction would be."

Willliams also told me, per Wolff's statement to FishbowlNY, that IWM had sent the recording out to be transcribed, and that the quality of transcription was, indeed, pretty poor.

When Williams asked IWM to take down the transcription, explaining that he shouldn't ever have sent them the recording in the first place, they complied. But I happened to have a copy of the IWM page open in my own web browser, and I couldn't help but notice the irony in the situation. In the speech, Wolff congratulates himself on being right that "information wants to be free"; then, after his speech becomes public, he tries to unpublish that information. But in the age of the internet, as Wolff himself should know better than anyone, that's simply impossible. I proved that myself, by putting a copy of the IWM page up on felixsalmon.com.

That was a week and a half ago. Today, I got that phone call from David Williams at the SIIA, asking me to take down the page, and telling me that if I didn't, I would probably get something called a "takedown notice". Williams made it clear that if he had his druthers, he would have left me alone: after all, virtually no one was reading that particular page any more, and asking me to take it down, a la Puma, could simply rekindle interest in a story which everybody had already moved on from. When I asked Williams whether he was explicitly or implicitly threatening any kind of legal action against me, he said that "I've felt and argued from the very beginning that that would do more harm than good."

Williams, in other words, gets it. Wolff, on the other hand, doesn't. I left Williams with a choice: we could either let sleeping dogs lie, or he could ask me to take down the page – which I would, on the understanding that in doing so, I would certainly explain why I was doing what I was doing.

Today, I am taking down the page – something I always refused to do when Puma was after me. I'm doing so because, in this case, I think I'm actually breaking copyright law. The speech is Michael Wolff's intellectual property, and me reprinting the transcript in toto does not, I think, count as fair use. Williams phoned me back shortly after our first conversation, this time conferencing me in with Keith Kupferschmid, the SIIA's Vice-President for Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement. "Michael Wolff clearly has intellectual property rights," Kupferschmid said: "he owns the copyright rights in the transcript". My reprinting that transcript, I was told, plausibly enough, was a violation of copyright law.

That said, I'm perfectly happy to link to anybody else who might want to host that particular webpage; if you want to read what it said, Google Cache still has it. Kupferschmid told me that "I'm hopeful nobody would take a complete copy of the transcript and put it up" on the internet. If anybody does, they can certainly expect me to link to them, but they can also expect a phone call from either Williams or Kupferschmid in short order.

Williams and Kupferschmid, I think, are likely to have something of a thankless task ahead of them. Every time somebody mirrors the page, they're going to have to get on the phone and try persuade that person to take that mirror down – something which won't be easy, especially if it's hosted abroad. They don't even particularly want to make all those phone calls, but they're thankful to Wolff for speaking at their conference, and they have promised him that since they caused the problem in the first place, they'll try to clear up the subsequent mess. On the other hand, maybe no one cares very much about Michael Wolff and information wanting to be free – maybe once I take my copy of the page down, it will disappear from the internet forever. That's certainly what Wolff is hoping will happen.

UPDATE: The page has magically appeared at cryptome.org.

Posted by Felix at 18:43 EST

Comments

Felix: perhaps you should email a copy to John Young at Cryptome (http://www.cryptome.org). This is the sort of thing he relishes.

Posted by: Miss Representation at 23:47 EST, February 28, 2005

Felix,

Michael Wolff's comments [if they are accurately transcribed...."poorly transcribed" is oxymoronic and therefore something which needs to either cleared up or discarded]are the most honest and accurate about Media that I have so far read. It would be a shame if they were to be hidden. He knows what he is talking about.

And is the Wall Street Journal for sale or just in need of someone to steer IT and who knows New Media Methodologies?

In the interview, these comments caused me some interest...." A profound change has happened. The ecology of information has altered, and virtually nobody (at least nobody who has a job) has been willing to really examine the implications of information flowing not from it's usual source but from so many other sources. The implications of one person having this remarkable control. I mean, that's the reversal. It used to be that if you were an information provider you had control. Now you have no control. Control has absolutely passed to the consumer."...........If the information provider provides for the consumer, he/she STILL has Control. So do we have an admission that Big Business is providing a Selfish Service and has lost Control? Rhetorical questions, of course.

"They go to these companies, which are large advertisers, and say you need cash for growth, here is cash. You can have an advertising contract with us over a seven-year period. This is what you guarantee us in advertising revenue.

WOLFF: So, the media companies are buying the consumer product companies?"............ Or, a company working for consumers is being bought into Media to help Media. That would be a company ur2die4, meThinks. It would certainly be one worth Living for.

Have a nice day Felix while I see what I must do to link to Mr Wolff's comments.

Posted by: Graham Campbell at 1:56 EST, March 02, 2005

Cryptome has taken it down, after DMCA threats. Google's cache isn't permanent, the next time they spider a site they update it, so all those links are dead too.

For the moment at least, it has been unpublished.

Posted by: Alan at 4:38 EST, April 01, 2005

I do believe that it has indeed been unpublished. Just out of curiousity however, I was simply wondering if you might e-mail me the transcript?

-Alice, whom you don't know.

Posted by: Alice at 20:56 EST, April 02, 2005

[punchline at end] Just got through learning about jux2 and how it can be used to find links in Yahoo and Ask Jeeves which are not in Google. Just got through linking all the links I could find in Google, and thinking Eurasia has always been at war. Tried jux2 and found a link--very entertaining--make yourself a copy and publish it elsewhere ere it be taken down.

http://www.peak.org/mailing-list/archive/grc/msg06101.html

Posted by: Aaa Nonny Mouse at 17:08 EST, April 07, 2005

Is this Michael Wolff? If it is is Nat Wolff and Alex ur sons? If so what are their email address and have them email me at moosey55555@yahoo.com or if they don't have one email me back and tell me.

jessie

Posted by: Jessie Shook at 20:50 EST, January 29, 2007