Unintended consequences are a bitch. Every once in a while, I find myself feeling sorry for the RIAA and their industry partners. Not only did they fail to anticipate the scope of online file-sharing, and refuse to look into it early for business opportunities, and then come down too hard on their own customers. But they went for, and continue to go for, DRM as a solution to their bleeding business model. (I don’t feel this way all that often.)
So, some bits of news from the DRM battlefield that I’ve been sitting on (cleverly digesting? or failing to get around to?), all of which point to not only the miserable failure of DRM, but the ways it has locked the music labels and retailers into a whole set of unexpected, additional obligations and liabilities.
* First, just to finally prove the point, The Guardianreported last month that removing DRM from iTunes downloads has had no discernable effect on music piracy. I’ve only got this secondhand (hey Guardian, where’s the link to the report that states this?) but I presume it means that the DRM-free tracks from EMI were not showing up any more quickly or in any greater numbers on p2p networks than other tracks from other labels. (Perhaps the EMI tracks, which are DRM-free only in the sense that they have no use restrictions, but are still in a closed AAC format that can carry metadata, had markers in it that could be tracked as music appeared on file-sharing networks — I don’t know.) There are a number of explanations for this, the primary being that all these tracks are also released on CD, which also has no copy-protection; also that many uploads come from inside the industry, before consumer-grade technical protections have been applied; also, as is pointed out here by a representative of Big Champagne, there may not be that much overlap between the population of users who buy from iTunes and the population who upload to p2p networks anyway. Still, it doesn’t speak well for the value of DRM. I have argued elsewhere that combating piracy is not the only or even the primary reason why the music labels like DRM; however, it is one aim, and the most public one, and the more it proves illusory, the worse off the music labels are. (Of course, this may also undercut the claim that DRM and other restrictions are actually driving people to p2p networks. If they were, the EMI tracks should be showing up less than the others, one might hypothesize; not having the data, I can’t speak to this.)
* Second, researchers at the University of Washington studied how music industry lawyers were tracking downloading via BitTorrent and sending out their DMCA “takedown” notices, and were able to spoof them into sending letters to users whose devices were not sharing copyright music, weren’t even connected to a p2p network — weren’t even computers. The report, called “Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks: or, Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice” raises questions about the legitimacy of this legal procedure, if it can so easily be exploited to implicate innocent users. The key, it seems, is that the RIAA is monitoring whether a user searches for a file, and not also checking if they followed up by downloading it. This is similar to a point that Steve Worona of Educause made at a recent talk, where he told of the RIAA admitting that universities who use the Audible Magic blocking software on their campus networks can still get DMCA notices, because students could still search for files, even though the block prevents them from downloading them. (And, it should be noted, merely searching for unauthorized copies of copyrighted music is not illegal.)
* Third, Microsoft announced, but later backpedaled when users went bonkers, that they were going to shut down their license servers. The quick and dirty is, if you buy music from MSN for your Zune (or from Apple for your iPod), that music is authorized to play on your particular computer only. Try to move it to another computer, or even reinstall your operating system after a crash, and you have to prove to MSN or Apple that its still you, by entering your password and reasserting your license to those tracks on a new device. (This is how Apple limits how many devices you can move your iTunes tunes to.) So Microsoft didn’t want to deal with this process anymore, and decided that as of August, users would simply be stuck with the device they’re using. They could never move their music again, because that authorization call to Microsoft would go unanswered. People flipped, and so Microsoft flipped. But it’s a little reminder of the business music sellers have gotten themselves into — overseeing authorization to users, to continue to use the music they’ve already purchased… forever.
* Finally, the cruel and ironic reality. Throughout the copyright wars, the persistent fear of the music industry was that their product, once something that reasonably carried a price tag, would evnetually seem free to the next generation of users, like water. They assumed that piracy would cause this change. Perhaps it has. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this may be their only viable business model in the future. This report from The Economist, after detailing the continuing decline of the music industry, notes the deal struck between Universal and Nokia, to create the “Comes With Music” plan. You buy the top-tier cell phone, it gives you a year of access to unlimited Universal downloads, which you even keep if you switch phones or cell provider; Universal takes a cut of the cost of the phone ($60, it is told). Or, yeesh, a “piracy tax” in your ISP bill, as apparently the RIAA has been begging Congress for recently. The Guardian article, noting the Nokia deal, predicts that Apple will look for a similar model to go with the iPod, and imagines a three-tiered future: some high-end music consumers pay a little for DRM-free downloads of superior sound quality; the bulk of us get our music “free” in the form of a flat fee bundled into our technology purchases, and the bottom tier will be free music with embedded ads, a la SpiralFrog.
By embracing what looked like a technological fix, and found themselves unwittingly beaten by a technology company who could play the game better, will the music industry find itself entirely beholden to, or swallowed up by, the technology industry? providers of mere data? When every digital technology “comes with music,” will music become the informational equivalent of cole slaw?
It was a disconcerting experience to scan the AP headlines this weekend, and amid the terse reports of this political move or that bus accident, was this:
The report is hinged on two polls, by ABC News and AP themselves, where Americans were asked some version of “is the country headed in the right direction?” and only 14% and 17% respectively agreed. But this dismal news of public despair was wrapped in a nearly poetic and deeply distressing tale of everything that’s going wrong in our world. Here’s just a taste:
Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
The report goes on the chronicle the severity of recent natural disasters, exploding food prices and riots, recurrent power outages in major cities, the weak dollar, steroid scandals in baseball, even the TV writers’ strike. The one bit of good news,at least in my eyes, is the observation that such periods of frustration are historically always “followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.” The saga ends with
Why the vulnerability? After all, this is the 21st century, not a more primitive past when little in life was assured. Surely people know how to fix problems now.Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.
I wonder, among all the apocalyptic signs they note, none is so indicative that all bets are off than the fact that AP feels compelled to drop its terse, neutral reporting style for it.
(Read the full article yourself — just so AP doesn’t blow a gasket at my extensive quoting.)
Hmm. I’m so trained to be skeptical of techno-utopian talk, that I have often wondered whether I’ll be fundamentally unable to appreciate when a substantive and consequential technological change actually occurs. Luckily, I still also have a rich supply of techno-fetishism, where new gewgaw gadgets thrill me in a way that wants me desperately to forget that technologies don’t, in fact, change the world.
So, with the caveat that this might be me getting intellectually gooey about what could just be a snazzy new toy, I have to say I’m pretty bowled over by this. Machinist at Salon has a sneak preview of a new gaming headset coming from Emotiv, that reads EEG brainwaves as input for the game experience. Apparently this device is going to be on the consumer market this year, for $299. I highly recommend reading the post, and watching the following video, which is Emotiv’s product demo.
There’s been a series of research successes recently where scientists have been able to train chimps to control a video game with their brains — but these have involved implanting chips to read brain activity more directly than an outside sensor can. But Machinist, who got to play with the headset and the game that comes with it swears that it works, and is great fun.
Of course, the implications I could dream up feel intriguing at the start, but wither a bit with analysis. Here, the things you can “pick up with your mind” are virtual objects, digital boulders and trees in a gamespace. But as this technology progresses, it would be easy to imagine the input going to a mechanical device that actually manipulates the physical world. Of course, we already seem pretty capable at moving physical objects with the kinds of technologies that don’t need brain input, that only need a “joystick” — i.e. the bulldozer, the shovel, the simple lever. OK, but the manipulation of digital information with such a means is intriguing, beyond the video game context, if the sensor can distinguish between increasingly complex and subtle commands: not just “move” or “run” but “file this under documents” or “email this to Jeff”. Still, we can do this quite well with our fingers, even with voices.
I’m not an expert in HCI, but it seems that the bottleneck that input devices typically represent (the computer / machine only knows what we want in terms of what we input, and the input device — keyboard, joystick, mouse, Wii-mote — only lets certain information in) only matters when (a) more subtle information can’t get through, or (b) the input mechanism itself is unwieldy or disruptive to the activity. So until a brainwave sensor can get more from us than the input mechanisms we currently have, it’s a novelty, except for those moments or users for which we can’t perform other kinds of input activities — which is why I imagine this innovation will very interesting to the disabled community.
So I can’t quite explain why this strikes me as important, beyond its novelty and its specific applications for entertainment and for the disabled. But I have often wondered what innovation will be the next means around which social and cultural relationships change, which thing our kids will do that really will finally just seem foreign to us. Maybe this is the remnants of my techno-fetishism hiding behind my intellectual commitment to question determinist fantasies.
Just a reminder, as the “DRM is dead” refrain echoes, that this isue is by no means gone. Netflix has been offering streaming movies to the PC for some time now, and just recently made news by offering a set-top box for watching your Netflix streams directly on a TV. But they still don’t have streaming for Mac, or for Firefox on Windows. Guess why:
A key issue for delivering movies online is that the studios require use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect titles. And that’s our holdup for the Mac - there’s not yet a studio-sanctioned, publicly-available Mac DRM solution (Apple doesn’t license theirs). I can promise you that, when an approved solution becomes available for the Mac, we’ll be there. I’ll also say that Silverlight 1.1 looks like a promising candidate - but that its DRM isn’t likely to be fully available until 2008.
That’s from Steve, a project manager for Netflix’s “instant watching” streaming project, on their community blog. In this matter-of-fact post you can see both the control impulse of DRM, the way it absolutely interferes with technical innovation, and the way it gets played in the intra-industry competition around platforms.
So… Silverlight. Here’s the promo for the new “cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device plug-in” for Microsoft. I love corporate-speak. Of course, you have to download the plug-in to see the promo for it. What it will show you is that Microsoft still loves Powerpoint, and maybe Minority Report. But it aspires to be a one-stop vehicle for high-def online video, streaming, interactive presentations, etc etc. While its free, it looks like Microsoft is aiming to offer streaming video in a “cloud computing” form, where small scale providers can let Microsoft host and stream their videos, for a fee or paired with advertising. Oh, and
Silverlight will support digital rights management (DRM) built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady content access technology on Windows-based computers and Macintosh computers.
So… PlayReady, Microsoft’s new DRM system. As I argued in Wired Shut, Microsoft makes little pretense about the fact that the “content protection” at work here is not protection from piracy, but protection of a commercial transaction:
Microsoft PlayReady technology provides the premier platform for applying business models to the distribution and use of digital content.
Microsoft PlayReady supports a wide range of business models for digital content providers, including:
• Subscription: Provide access to an entire catalog of content in exchange for a recurring fee.
• Purchase: Offer content for purchase and download.
• Pay Per View: Provide pay-per-view choices for all content types.
• Rental: Enable rental scenarios with time-based licenses.
• Gifting: Allows one person to pay another person’s fees for a service or its content.
Microsoft PlayReady supports many different options for distributing content:
• Basic and progressive downloads: Content can play while downloading.
• Streaming: Content can be streamed to devices.
• Sideloading: Sync content from a PC to a mobile device supporting Microsoft PlayReady.
• Direct License Acquistion Over-The-Air: Content and license can be provided direct to a mobile handset over wireless networks.
• Super-distribution: Content sent over user-to-user distribution channels such as e-mail, messaging service (MMS), ad hoc WiFi networks, Bluetooth, and so forth can be monetized by providers.
Oh, and just as a dead giveaway for the way Microsoft think copyright works — and so that I can instantly violate their legal demands with my own dead giveaway — the PlayReady White Paper[PDF], available online, includes this statement in its Legal Notice:
Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.
(Oops.)
I think this is exactly the kind of slipperiness between businesses and businesses models that is keeping up the demand for DRM, even when it seems increasingly unwieldy, is arguably too expensive for its own good, and disliked by users. Netflix wants to serve up streaming movies, partner with Windows (both because they want to first reach the bulk of users and because Microsoft wants to play chaperone to protected media content), can’t as easily serve Apple users because Apple has chosen to build its business model on linking its content delivery and its platform, and then finds itself turning to a plug-in format, developed by Microsoft, that has the heft to reach Mac and PC alike, but with its requisite host of DRM limits built in, to smooth a set of commercial transactions that all the businesses involved appreciate. Q.E.DRM.
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for June, 2008.
It was a disconcerting experience to scan the AP headlines this weekend, and amid the terse reports of this political move or that bus accident, was this:
Just a reminder, as the “DRM is dead” refrain echoes, that this isue is by no means gone. Netflix has been offering streaming movies to the PC for some time now, and just recently made news by offering a set-top box for watching your Netflix streams directly on a TV. But they still don’t have streaming for Mac, or for Firefox on Windows. Guess why: