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.