Much has been made of the fact that E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic novel about a wealthy industrialist into BDSM and the young college graduate who falls for him, started out as Twilight fan fiction, and became a phenomenon once James changed the names. But she was hardly the first writer to hone her chops in fan fiction: Cassandra Clare, who started out in various fandoms, had a young adult fiction hit with her Mortal Instruments series, which has now spawned a movie adaptation with a $60 million budget. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is a professionalized version of fan fiction, giving authors space, within specific guidelines, to build out new stories and characters within a preexisting world. And given how many people have spent so many hours laboring over their keyboards for so many years, maybe the really surprising thing is that someone hasn’t figured out a way to monetize their work without changing the names or making them invent new stories before.

That changed yesterday, when Amazon announced its Kindle Worlds program, which is cleverly set up to benefit both the creators of original content and the people who write original stories set in the worlds invented by those creators and makes use of their characters. Authors of fan fiction published and sold through the Kindle Worlds program will be paid a royalty rate of 35 percent for works longer than 10,000 words, and 20 percent for short stories between 5,000 and 10,000 words. It’s not quite clear what percentage or flat fee the original creators of that licensed content will receive. But Amazon suggests that most of the pieces sold through the program will be priced in between $.99 and $3.99, though I can see those figures getting higher if Amazon gets its hands on some of the popular, book-length projects that have circulated in various fandoms for years.

Works can get rejected from the program–Amazon’s reserving the right to kick out submissions that provide a “poor customer experience,” and the guidelines for the program say it won’t accept pornographic material, which constitutes a significant percentage of fan fiction, work that uses racial slurs, employs excessive violence, or relies on heavily profane speech. And perhaps the biggest constraint right now is what fictional universes it’s possible for writers to work in. Kindle Worlds debuted with the rights to some of the content from Warner Bros. Television Group’s Alloy Entertainment, a notorious content factory, including Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries.

It makes sense that Kindle Worlds starts with content from Alloy, a publishing house with a highly-defined style where authors have been known to be assigned to projects cooked up because they seem likely to sell well, and to adapt well for film and television, as proved to be true for the three properties that are kicking off the Kindle Worlds universe. And while Amazon’s announcement of the program said that they’d be announcing many new licenses for fan fiction writers to work in, I would bet that it’ll be difficult for the program to get access to some of the properties that have inspired particularly lively fan fiction communities, like Harry Potter or the West Wing. It might make sense that Alloy’s authors, who are part of a profit-oriented program, don’t have much anxiety about other people playing in the universes that they built out. But authors who are more proprietary about their characters might be more twitchy about the prospect of other people getting paid to play in the worlds that they created. I can see someone like Charlaine Harris, who is ending her Southern Vampire series because she feels the universe is wrung out, and is under enormous and irrational pressure from fans to continue, wanting to definitively close off the world they created.

The question, then, will be whether standard author contracts make it easy for publishing houses to sign the works they publish over to Kindle Worlds, or whether this is a provision they’re going to have to negotiate as an addendum, and find standard language for in the future. And it’ll be interesting to see which authors decide they’re interested in participating and which hold out, in part as an indication of how proprietary authors feel about their creations. It could be very strange to see authors of original works get eclipsed by writers playing in the worlds other people have created as has, to a certain extent, been true with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Reading through Forbes’ list of the 71 most powerful people in the world this afternoon, I was struck by something interesting. For all that we talk about the influence of culture on both society and individuals, there only two people involved in the production or distribution of culture or the arts on the list.

There are a lot of figures from tech companies, many of which are made more valuable by cultural content, on the list. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied for 20th on the list. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes in at 27th. Apple CEO Tim Cook is 35. Robin Li, who founded and runs Baidu, China’s largest search engine ranks 64th.

But in comparison to all of those tech titans, there are just two people involved in the production of entertainment or cultural content. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes it at 27th on the list. Joseph Blattner, who runs the International Federation of Association Football, is the 69th most powerful person according to the list, on the grounds that he “runs the world’s most popular sport–and unofficial religion.”

It’s notable both that neither of them are artists—they’re both on the business and distribution side of content. The people who have power, apparently, are not the ones who come up with the ideas, images, and sounds that reach wide audiences, but those who come up with the paradigm-shifting means of distributing them, whether it’s the broadcast deals for FIFA matches, or the Kindle. And while content is an important part of Amazon’s business, the company’s come a long way from being a book retailer. Instead of just eliminating local bookstores, it’s now going after big box stores.

Similarly, it’s telling that the only head of a an organization that’s primarily a content creation enterprise is Blattner, and that he’s involved with sports, rather than with movies, music, or television production. Obviously FIFA games reach an enormous number of people, and anyone who’s thought about the cable package in the United States knows how critically important sports, particularly football, are to maintaining the viability of cable as a subscription service. But that it’s sports and Kindle sales in the mix rather than a television network head or a movie director says a lot about what it takes to get on the Forbes list in the first place. Numbers, it seem, matter more than ideas.

Politico reported yesterday that Alpha House, the Garry Trudeau-created pilot about a group of Congressmen living together in a townhouse in Washington, DC that’s based on a 2007 New York Times story about real-life legislators who are roommates when they’re in the District of Columbia, has become one of the first shows to be picked up by Amazon as part of its attempts to expand into original content development. It doesn’t shock me that Amazon pulled the trigger on Alpha House, which, if nothing else, let the company lock down John Goodman for a show, a move that follows the playbook laid out by Netflix in its splashy signing of Kevin Spacey to star in its remake of the British series House of Cards. But Alpha House was far from the strongest of Amazon’s adult-oriented pilots (it’s also testing shows aimed at children). And even if Amazon isn’t doing a traditional development process like its competitors in broadcast television, it would be wise for the service to consider taking a page from the networks’ playbooks and consider revamping the show a little bit before its full launch. Here are five suggestions for how to make Alpha House shine.

1. Make The House Bipartisan: One of the dullest decisions in the original pilot of Alpha House was to make all members of the house Republicans, and to make them all risible. Goodman’s Gil Joh Biggs, a do-nothing incumbent from a rural district who teaches Louis Laffer (Matt Malloy), an obviously closeted social conservative, to shoot in the basement, and signs them both up for a trip to Afghanistan when they attract Tea Party challengers and need to look tough. Clark Johnson plays Robert Bettencourt, an African-American Congressman who’s mostly in in for the donations from defense contractors—in one scene, he gives Gil John his notes from a filibuster speech so they can both go on the record saying nice things about the same giant corporations. And Mark Consuelos plays andy Guzman, a recently-divorced freshman who’s schtupping the founder of a Super PAC. All in all, it’s nothing we’ve seen before. But if Alpha House can sharpen the characterizations and give us a fresh take on what bipartisanship actually looks like, it could be refreshing and funny.
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As Washington Post tech blogger Tim Lee reported this morning, the federal government has moved to shut down—or at least restrict—the online currency Bitcoin. The Department of Homeland Security and US District Court for the District ordered a seizure of the funds in Dwolla account owned by the currency exchange Mt. Gox, and Dwolla has stopped processing payments into and out of the account, making it impossible to buy and sell Bitcoins. As Lee explained:

For years, Bitcoin supporters have touted the currency’s potential to resist government surveillance and censorship. They point to the example of Wikileaks, the whistleblower Web site whose access to funds dried up after the federal government applied informal pressure to intermediaries such as PayPal to cut off payments. The Bitcoin network is fully decentralized, so there is no one with the ability to monitor the network and block illicit transactions. If Wikileaks had funded itself through the Bitcoin network, the government wouldn’t have had such an easy time freezing its funds.

That’s a feature for people concerned with press freedom, but it looks more like a bug for government officials charged with enforcing the nation’s drug, gambling, counter-terrorism, and money laundering laws. The government relies heavily on financial institutions to help them monitor their customers’ financial activities and flag or block potentially illegal transactions. The lack of intermediaries makes Bitcoin an attractive technology for those who want to evade government scrutiny. It was only a matter of time before authorities started to give the technology some unwelcome attention.

I was struck by this not because, as Lee says, the news is surprising, but because by coincidence, Amazon’s just launched Amazon Coins, a currency that’s specific to the Kindle Fire. The Coins are currently selling at 100 for $1, though buying Coins in bulk will get you a discount. And once you’ve purchased them, you can use them to buy apps and items in Kindle Fire games, though not books, or any other products in the wider Amazon ecosystem. As ABC News explains, they’re essentially a scheme by Amazon to get users to give them money up front, and then download apps because they might as well, having already paid up, rather than paying only when users are moved to purchase a specific app.
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It’s television upfronts this week, the time every year when the broadcast networks announce which lucky shows have earned subsequent seasons, which unfortunates are getting cancelled, and most importantly, which of the many new projects in development will be going forward—and then try to convince advertisers that they should be excited to buy ad spots in these new and returning shows, and to be part of a new, rearranged schedule.

The enthusiasm the network executives will display at their presentations to advertisers, and the amusing site of actors like Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman dressing up as their dueling liberal and libertarian characters from Parks and Recreation to do schedule announcements, is deceptive. Many of the shows that are being presented as the next great thing will prove to be creative or commercial failures: NBC, for example, cancelled almost all of the shiny new shows it offered up to advertisers and to viewers with such great hope last fall, and is starting over with shows like a sitcom from Michael J. Fox and a drama starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. And the fancy presentations and celebratory air at the upfronts disguises that the process by which the networks select which new shows they’re moving forward with is hugely expensive and exhausting. The networks may put as many as 100 shows into development, going through the process of writing the pilots, casting actors for them, pulling together sets and wardrobes for those actors to work with (or investing in special effects), shooting said pilots, testing them extensively in front of audiences, and then making their choices. It costs an awful lot of money, and leaves a lot of people waiting a long time to learn if they’ll have jobs.

Last week, when I spoke with Kevin Spacey, who stars as villainous Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood in Netflix’s adaptation of the British series House of Cards, one of the reasons he mentioned for wanting to work with Netflix rather than another outlet was the way Netflix approached the development process.

“What was great that they were the only network that said ‘You don’t have to do a pilot,’” he said. “Because David Fincher and I really didn’t want to do a pilot, because when you do a pilot, you’re kind of obligated to spend 45 minutes establishing all of the characters. And we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to get on with telling a story, and tell a story over a long period of time. And they said ‘We believe in you, we believe in David, we love this series from Britain. How many do you want to do?’ And we were like, ‘Um, two seasons?’ And they were like ‘Okay!’ It was a risk on their part, but they’ve been great partners.”
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As Netflix has launched its big original series House of Cards and Hemlock Grove over the past few months, their choices of genres and styles has indicated a great deal about what that company thinks is worth emulating on broadcast television. House of Cards is a clear attempt to enter the anti-hero genre that’s done so well for networks like HBO, while Hemlock Grove is a nod to the emergence of horror on television, mostly thanks to FX’s wildly inventive American Horror Story.

But when Amazon put out eight original comedy pilots last week as part of a process by which viewership and viewer reviews will help the company decide which projects to turn into full-fledged shows, their choice of material actually suggested more about the holes that Amazon sees in the television ecosystem and is trying to fill. The eight pilots currently under consideration have a great deal in common, and for good and for ill, they do differ with broadcast television in ways ranging from use of language to genre. Given that Netflix is ramping up its original content offerings more slowly, it may take some time for that company to develop a brand that’s anything like HBO’s or CBS’s. But Amazon’s selections give us a much clearer sense of who Amazon thinks its core consumers are, and what kind of identity Amazon wants its original content to have. Here are four throughlines that were most striking:

1. “Adult” content: All of Amazon’s originals come with warnings about adult language and content. And all of them make use of the leeway apparently granted them by the warning, from the cussing Congressmen who live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse on Garry Trudeau’s Alpha House, to Moby telling an app developer in Silicon Valley start-up comedy Betas “You ever fuck an octopus? I fucked an octopus. It’s why I’m a vegan now,” to Zombieland’s introduction of a character who explains that her name is “Regina. Kind of like vagina, but with an R,” and then counts how many times another character can’t resist joking about it. It’s no question that the show that uses its license to be naughty most judiciously, musical web journalism intern sitcom Browsers, gets the most mileage out of it in a number in which Bebe Neuwirth, playing a riff on Arianna Huffington, explains in song that ” I’m smart but I’m hardly a genius / And I can’t say I’m good with a buck / But throughout my career / I’ve made perfectly clear / I’m someone with whom not to fuck.”

But permission to use the F-word is not the same thing as having genuinely grown-up ideas, or using explicit content to get at the reality of adult experience. And the ability to swear and to be sexual and somewhat gross on television is hardly new. FX has made use of its ability to go there so successfully in shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The League that it’s spinning off a second network so it has more room to develop and to air original comedies and dramas. Nothing in Amazon’s pilots is nearly as explicit as the sex scene in the first episode of Girls. If Amazon wants to beat its competitors by expanding the realm of what its characters can say and do, it’s not enough to let them cuss. The company’s going to think about what its shows do with the leeway it’s granting them, and what ideas and experiences aren’t making it onto other networks.
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For those of you who were hoping that we might figure out a sane way to resell digital content in the same way there’s a thriving secondary market for used books, CDs, and movies, seem about to be disappointed after a New York judge, in a sweeping decision, rejected the idea that files are objects in the same way that other means of delivering content are:

The company believed that the lawsuit that followed was one of “first impression” insofar as the plaintiff — Capitol Records — might wish to have it declared that the first-sale doctrine didn’t apply to digital goods. Supporting ReDigi’s side was Google, which unsuccessfully attempted to file an amicus brief. Other tech companies also had a stake; Amazon, for instance, has gained a patent on a market for “used” digital music and movie files.

The record industry wasn’t seeking a big declaration. In its own papers, the plaintiff only said that letting users buy and sell previously purchased tracks on iTunes amounted to a “clearinghouse for copyright infringement.”
Nevertheless, on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan went swinging for the fences; unfortunately for ReDigi and those hoping for a vibrant e-market of used song files, the judge wound up completely rejecting the company’s position. He did so not only by turning to the law of copyright but also the law of physics, declaring the “impossibility” of what ReDigi was touting. “The first-sale defense,” he wrote, “does not cover this any more than it covered the sale of cassette recordings of vinyl records in a bygone era.”

This strikes me as a decision that goes against the interest of both consumers and content providers. If content providers want individuals to get on board with the idea that files are property, and that the transfer of them without compensation causes damage to creators, an important part of that idea is that files are distinct objects, rather than ephemera that can be copied at no loss to them from a production standpoint, or loss of their ability to sell other downloads. I also am not sure how Judge Sullivan’s understanding of physics transfer to cyberspace, but perhaps he’s never bumped up against the memory limits of an iPhone before. From a business standpoint, it would obviously be preferable to content companies if they were the only people who retained the right to sell those objects. But that’s an idea they had to surrender on with physical objects a long time ago, learning that it creates a more stable market and preserves product standards to let people resell objects they’ve purchased than to block the first sale doctrine and see illicit copies of textbooks, burned CDs, or bootlegged VHS and DVD copies of movies begin circulating among people who aren’t actually a market for those products in their new, unused form.

Digital resale, I’d think, actually represents an opportunity for content companies to get more of their money back from resale than the resale of physical objects. If resale can be brokered through the original venues that sold the tracks, movies, or books, those venues could write contracts with publishers, studios, and record labels that let artists and content companies get some money back from those resales, along with both the sellers and the venues. A stable and brokered secondary market is probably the only way to guarantee that people who sell files will really get them off their computers—I imagine iTunes could write its code such that if you resell a track through the service, then try to upload it to iTunes without paying for it again, the file would be disabled and you’d get a warning, in the same way Amazon could probably scrub all versions of a track you’ve resold from its cloud storage. Having both sides in the digital content debate acknowledge that files are objects could produce a kind of detente, in which content companies grant consumers some more rights to do what they want with the objects they’ve purchased in exchange for consumers’ acknowledging that if they’re getting money off resale, there is in fact value in individual copies of files.