Category: DRM and IPR

Musing lazily about catch-and-release and its application in the digital world

Some time ago I had the opportunity to go fly fishing for the first time, in the Provo, near Salt Lake City in Utah. It was an exhilarating experience, just what I needed at that particular time in my life. I hope to repeat the experience soon.

Beginner’s luck meant that I caught quite a few fish that day. Something far more important happened to me that day, though. I learnt about the joy of catch-and-release firsthand. There was something immensely satisfying about the process of making sure you took the hook out carefully, then let the fish go and watched it disappear at speed. There was a real sense of stewardship when you did it. In fact the whole experience was about stewardship. You had to be licensed before you fished, which meant there was some modicum of accountability and responsibility for the environment even before you began. It made sense that the money collected for the licence would go towards the upkeep of the environment. When you entered the water, you could see just how pure and clear it was, an eye-opening experience for someone like me, brought up with the Hooghly as the river of reference.

More recently, I was checking out how BookCrossing was doing. 735,000 members in 130 countries. Not bad. If you don’t know what BookCrossing is, here’s what they say on the site:

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

Join hundreds of thousands of active BookCrossers daily in our many forums to discuss your favorite authors, characters and books in every genre throughout history right up through current releases.

Join BookCrossing Join BookCrossing. Help make the whole world a library and share the joy of literacy. Reading becomes an adventure when you BookCross!

Then, a day or two ago, I was browsing the Good Magazine site, and I saw this article. And in it BookCrossing was mentioned, using the phrase “read and release”.

And that made me think. I can only listen to only one thing at a time; I can only read one thing at a time; I can only watch one thing at a time; I can only mash up a small number of things at the same time.

Maybe I could buy the right to hold m songs and n books and p films “in the cloud” concurrently at any given time, as a bundle. Maybe, separately, I could buy the right to fiddle around with q digital objects at any given time, on an “if you change it you must pay for it” basis.

Maybe I can check these digital objects in and out as I please, constrained only by the total I can have, which in turn is related to the bundle I signed up for.

I’m still free to buy the physical disks as normal, this is just about cloud libraries. Maybe there’s room for a small number of players to be the safety deposit vaults for these digital objects, to collect the rents for their usage and to disburse it amongst the long tail of creators, much like a library would do. Maybe the Cloud gives us opportunities to do something about new business models for digital “content” by connecting price to capacity and metering usage simply as a result. [Yes I still believe there is a long tail, despite everything I have read. People are not measuring unfulfilled intentions properly, so the exercise often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for those that do not want the long tail to be true].

All this is amorphous, poorly formed, still inchoate. There’s just something about the catch-and-release model I like, something which I feel is applicable to digital objects. Something that resonates with the “extreme nonrival good” nature of information, particularly digital information.

So why am I sharing it here and now? Precisely because it is amorphous and poorly formed and inchoate. So that people like you can comment on it, criticise it, negate it, improve on it, make it your own, do something with it. Ideas are free. So steal this book.

As I said, musing lazily.

Dancing to Leonard Cohen and related pursuits

There are many ludicrous things about DRM: the belief that the internet was designed to be a distribution mechanism for film and music and nothing else; the belief that it is okay to treat everyone as a criminal; the willingness to chisel artists through patently unfair contracts, while making out that those self-same artists are victims of the general public, the “criminals”; the belief that the creation of artificial scarcities will not be met by artificial abundances. But that’s not what this post is about.

One of the most ludicrous things about DRM, however, is the benighted attempt to sustain a historical distribution model by time-separating geographies. In the past, both for films as well as for music, it was defensible while remaining unpalatable.

Let’s take film. In order to keep production costs down, each film would have a finite number of prints made, and these prints would have to be sent around the world. So, while I was growing up, by the time a new film made it to India, it was marked by scratches and cuts and noughts and crosses. The condition was not really germane, the real problem was the time. Films arrived in India a long time after they were released in the US or UK.

When it came to music, something similar happened. LPs and singles were stamped locally from masters, and there must have been a finite number of masters made. And as usual India had to wait for the masters to arrive before the records could be stamped and released. As a result, “western” music arrived in India some time after the US or UK release.

We had the Sixties, yes, but not at the same time as everyone else. With the advent of digital media, there is no reason to time-separate markets, no reason for India to see a film later than the US. The primary reason, the protection of historical distribution models, is an outrage. The oft-quoted primary reason, the need to stamp out piracy, is inane: piracy would drop substantially if release was same-time worldwide.

But that’s not the point of this post either.

The point of the post is this: In the Sixties and early Seventies, for all the reasons quoted above, western music arrived late to India. Which meant that, for example, someone like Leonard Cohen was very popular for most of the 1970s.

I was thirteen when the Seventies began. Now I like Leonard Cohen. A lot. I have a signed first edition of Beautiful Losers, I have every album he’s ever made, I count Famous Blue Raincoat as one of my top 25 songs ever. [There’s something haunting, something deeply satisfying, about the lilting cadence of and-then-Jane.Came.By-with-a-lock-of-your-hair. She-said.That-you-gave-it-to-her. The-night. That-you-planned-to-go-clear. Did you ever go clear?]

Yes, I like Leonard Cohen.

It feels strange to think that tonight, as the UK gears itself for that momentous occasion, the X Factor Finals, children born after Cohen’s children were born are going to sing along to songs written by him. Hallelujah has been chosen as the debut song for the contest’s winner.

Actually, this generation has it easy. My generation, we had to dance to Leonard Cohen, whisper sweet nothings to the girls we were courting while trying to figure out how to look “cool” while “dancing” to Cohen.

IP city twinning and habitual patterns and stuff like that

I just love this video clip. NYTE, the New York Talk Exchange, “illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualising volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.”

What fascinates me is the grouping, the concentration. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, New York is twinned, in IP terms, with a bunch of cities in the rest of the world. And the grouping is different for different cities. The top ten cities that New York twins with will be different from the top ten cities that Boston twins with. And it is in that difference that we learn new things.

I remember reading a study some time ago on the use of mobile phones, and finding out just how habitual, how predictable, how localised we really were. The study, by Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo of Northeastern, along with Albert-Lazslo Barabasi (of Linked fame) looked at understanding individual human mobility patterns, proving that there is a “high degree of temporal and spatial regularity” in “human trajectories”.

We may have conquered time and space, so to say: we can Tivo-ise anything, record for later playback, and the web allows us to assume the death of distance. We’re heading towards ubiquitous affordable always-on connectivity, in a device-agnostic open-platform world. But. There’s always a but.

But we still assume people will use these devices in specific ways, based on models deeply ingrained with “hit culture” notions of “content usage”, ways that themselves pave the way for draconian DRM and content management solutions and regulation and even legislation.

It’s as if Hollywood and the music industry are the only reasons people would ever want to be connected, anywhere, anytime. It’s as if everyone will only use their ubiquity and affordability of access to consume entertainment. [Heavy accent on the word “consume”.] It’s as if it’s okay to seek to criminalise everyone as a result of the models. Intriguing.

Soon, we’re going to take these debates more into the open. Base them on data. Data that will suggest human beings are creatures of habit, they move around in predictable loci, they talk to the same people at the same time, they belong to a number of overlapping networks, they rely on trusted relationships, they exercise long-tail taste in their entertainment choices once they have that choice, and they are actually qualified to create and share “content”, not just consume it. And they’re not criminals.

Soon.

In the meantime, studies like the Gonzalez paper and the NYTE simulation help me feel good about the future.

Applying judo techniques to piracy

These are historic times, and the events of this particular “first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in a leap year” overshadowed everything else. There is change afoot, and powerful change. Despite all the hype, and despite the predicted sheer scale of the victory, I was amazed. And Obama’s acceptance speech was something else.

I was so taken up with the election that I missed this story:

MySpace and MTV plan to make money from pirates

Simply put, MySpace and MTV will convert the pirated material into vehicles for ads and into ads for the original material.

The logic appears to be something like this. Analyse material to confirm what it is and whether it has been pirated. If it has been pirated, then inject relevant ads into it along with links that connect to the original material.

In effect, use the power of the pirate to spread your business. And thereby fight piracy.

And that made me think. Why get so convoluted? Instead of doing away with pirates, why not do away with piracy? Digital material is intrinsically abundant; to do away with piracy, all that is needed is the removal of artificial scarcity. Then nothing is considered piracy. And everyone who wants to can become a distributor of ads or other services.

There is often some digital material at the heart of every social object. Social objects circulate, they pass from hand to hand. They can pass freely and without encumbrance, without let or hindrance. If they are allowed to.

Social objects get enriched as they move around, enriched with new information. This includes recommendations, the things that ads become when they grow up. If they grow up.

Maybe it is time to stop doing away with pirates and to start doing away with piracy. And to understand the power of social objects in that process.

More musings about IPR

If you haven’t seen it already, do take a look at this letter to the Times last week, from Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston.

Here are a few excerpts:

The question of “Who owns science?” is therefore a crucial one, the answer to which will have broad-reaching implications for scientific progress and for the way in which the benefits of science are distributed, fairly or otherwise. Two of the most pressing issues concern equity of access to scientific knowledge and the useful products that arise from that knowledge.

The current system of managing research and innovation incorporates a complex body of law governing the ownership of “intellectual property” — copyright and patents being the most familiar. Intellectual property rights are intended to provide incentives that encourage the advancement of science, enhance the pace of innovation, increase the derived economic benefits and provide a fair way of regulating access to these benefits. But does it really achieve these purposes? There is increasing concern that, to the contrary, it may, under some circumstances, impede innovation, lead to monopolisation, and unduly restrict access to the benefits of knowledge.

We believe it is time to reassess the effect of the present regime of intellectual property rights, especially with respect to the area of patent law, on science, innovation and access to technologies and determine whether it is liberating — or crushing; whether it operates to promote scientific progress and human welfare – or to frustrate it.

Every time the discussion is about patents, trademarks or copyright, people go all polarised. As if the debate is about pinko lefty tree-huggers on the one side and honest sweat-of-brow geniuses on the other.

This is not what the debate is about.

The debate is about old laws no longer being fit for purpose and needing changing. Changing radically. Changing in ways that do not treat everyone (yes, everyone!) as a criminal; in ways that pollute paths of communication unnecessarily; in ways that throw away the value represented by the web when coupled with ubiquitous communications.

The debate is about health, education and welfare.

Not cinema, as some people would have it.

The debate is about innovation.

Not stifling it, as some companies would have it.

So let us continue to have the debate.