If we are to believe the Wikipedia crowd, the word gimmick has roots that are … somewhat less than noble. “According to the OED,” writes, uh, someone, “the word … first [appeared] in 1926, defined in the Wise-Crack Dictionary by Main and Grant as ‘a device used for making a fair game crooked.’” And if we trust team Wiki, then it seems that the term has made very little progress: “In marketing,” it continues, “product gimmicks are sometimes considered mere novelties, and not really that relevant to the product’s functioning, sometimes even earning negative connotations.”

Indeed.

So, as gimmicks go, the one recently announced by Motormouth Media on behalf of the band HEALTH is relatively harmless. For those not willing to click, it goes something like this: Band makes colored tickets. Band distributes CDs with the colored tickets hidden in a select few jewel cases. Lucky buyers of said CDs get neat-o prizes. It’s all so very wholesome. ‘Course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something sinister lurking behind the giveaway — at least if you’re a band or a label or anyone else in the CD-buying food chain. For these lucky chumps, the HEALTH “CD Sweepstakes” signals a dark turn indeed, one which has been coming in the object of slumping CD sales for quite some time but needed something of an announcement before it got here. And this sort of incentivized buying would be it. This, finally, is the formal end of the age of CDs.

Way back in 2006, blogger Jabari Zakiya had what he calls an “epiphany.” “It became clear,” he writes, while he was contemplating the usefulness of flash drives. “[T]he end of CDs is near … And when I say CD I don’t just mean regular old 700 MB compact disks, I also mean DVDs, and the new Blue-ray and HD DVDs optical disks too. In fact, I see a world in the near future (5 years?) where, like the floppy, optical disks will take their place in the trash bin of yesterdays technology.”

His reasoning is relatively sound: “[F]or all the benefits optical disk storage brought,” he writes “there was an Achilles heel inherent in their use — they require a mechanical optical drive to play them with. And being mechanical beasts, by nature, they are subject to all the inherent negative aspects of such things (size, weight, fragility, etc).” Basically, the things were bound to be made unwieldy by future technologies, and they would, eventually, as he terms it, go the way of the floppy disc.

Zakiya’s post is something of a well-duh — at least in terms of technical advancement; innovation happens, popular modes of … well, everything, are replaced by more effective means. But for the music industry, where CDs represented the major means of product distribution, the technical trump didn’t just signal some kind of evolution. Nope, the end of CDs was, instead, brought on by a total re-wiring of the media acquisition process — an effort which was a giant work around of the exchange of money for music.  Not only would the CD become obsolete, but the whole industry that relied on it for delivery of their product was also threatened with extinction.

Cue the law suits.

Thanks to another innovation, the music industry averted crisis and has started to right the ship — without CDs. And that brings us back to the HEALTH gimmick: Faced with the prospect of having to sling a product that no one really wants, someone came up with the brilliant idea of making the things into sweepstakes entry tickets. Whether or not anyone really wants to win an “LP test pressing autographed in [members of the band's own] blood” is something of a crapshoot. But at least it’s not selling CDs.

As part of the software that keeps us running here at Unfit, Wordpress offers us an extension that can make our copy un-cut-and-pasteable. In addition to making life miserable for the millions of folks who probably want to plagiarize the impressive work that we Unfitees do, this feature illustrates just how far behind the rest of the Internet such newspapers as the Washington Post and the New York Times really are: As of this writing (which is happening at 10:36 p.m. CST on August 13, 2009), any ole surfer could simply digitally cut any ole content at www.washingtonpost.com or www.nytimes.com and put it any ole place that they choose. ‘Course, even if the editors at those publications saw fit to employ this technology, the only thing keeping copy-artists from snagging their reporters’ work is the daunting prospect of having to word-for-word their intellectual theft. Still, if undertaken, such an anti-copy effort would serve the dual purpose of signaling that a) the two most influential newspapers in the country realize that the Internet is a wholly different form of media than print and b) that they give a shit about said fact.

For it’s part, the AP is doing it’s darndest to prove that it is adapting to life after print death. As blogger Zachary M. Seward of Harvard University’s Nieman Lab has reported, the venerable wire service is planning to “[i]n a break with tradition … prevent members and customers from publishing some AP content on their websites.” Instead, writes Seward, “those news organizations would link to the content on a central AP website.” All this is in the name of content control, which — as of this past week, when an internal document detailing the organization’s future internet-y plans leaked — has become the publicly acknowledged focus of the honchos at the AP. That these folks are concerned with how and where their material ends up is nothing new. That they’ve actually got a plan — one that includes tracking features and some sort of policing search engine — to do something about it is.

At first, the thing reads like something ripped straight from the RIAA playbook: The AP will use beacons embedded in their stories to “help identify, record and track every piece of content the AP makes available to its members and other paying customers.” And, because they know just how sinister Internet pirates can be, they will also be employing a passive search engine to search for AP content that’s had the beacon ripped out of it. Presumably, if they find someone misusing their stories, they’ll get all Lars Ulrich and bring out the lawyers.

And responses from Internet denizens have been predictably flustered. Quoth one, “I especially liked the document’s description of how an allegedly ‘passive’ tracking service will ‘crawl the Web searching for AP content and identify the publishing Web page, an image of use, and the time of discovery.’ Just wait until an AP reporter quotes from a blog and the ‘passive’ tracking service encounters the original blog post.” But whether or not the coming dragnet is the most effective (or efficient) way for the AP to do business isn’t the point. Nope: What’s important here is the fact that the AP, after however-(too-)many-years, seems to recognize that the Internet has completely changed the game — and that they’ve taken steps to better play with the current times.

Perhaps the most obvious sign of all of that is the leaked document’s treatment of Wikipedia. That much-vilified resource has long been seen as something of a factual disaster — a place to avoid, as a reporter or scholar, if you wanted to stick close to the facts. This may or may not have changed, but as of this past week, the AP found itself publicly acknowledging Wikipedia as not only a “comprehensive” tool but a worthy competitor.

And that may be the most convincing sign that someone over there knows what’s going on.