Category: DRM and IPR

EU Study on impact of opensource

I’ve spent some time reading a recent study titled Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU. Don’t worry, you won’t think the title is too long when you see the document, all 287 pages of it. And no, I haven’t finished reading it yet. I’ve given it a quick skim, am now on pass 2, which is where I take notes and doodle; it looks like I will stay on pass 2 for a week or more.

doubling every
18-24 monthsIn the meantime, any of you who’s vaguely interested in the impact of opensource should take a look at it. I know it’s big and cumbersome, but you don’t have to print it. I know it’s detailed and tedious, but life is not always about soundbites. I know it’s full of figures and charts, some of them dating back to 2002, but a lot of it is largely new and interesting.

You can find the study via this link, which also takes you to the press release announcing the publication of the study earlier this week.

By the way, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is one of the authors. I first came across Rishab when I started reading First Monday, and he quickly became a must-read for me. One of the books he edited, called CODE, or the Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, is for sure one of my top ten business books of the decade. I think everyone who has even a modicum of interest in the DRM and IPR discussions should read the book, even before they read Lessig or Fisher.

Here’s a sample of the things I learnt in the skim

  • There appears to be a Moore’s Law of sorts operating upon the FLOSS codebase, with a doubling every 18-24 months
  • The FLOSS codebase today represents over 130,000 person-years of effort
  • FLOSS-related services will represent 32% of all IT services within the next 3 years

Also, you may find these three diagrams of interest, showing the FLOSS committer population in the context of overall population, connected people and the rich. I’ve never seen this sort of information, so I think we owe the authors something.

200701181326200701181325200701181326-1

One of the more intriguing observations in the study, which comes across in the summary as well as in the body of the document, is the following:

  • That the current battles about DRM and IPR are having an undesired effect, and that is to deflect creatives resources towards “defensive” innovation.
  • That FLOSS activities give us an opportunity to correct this blemish

Read it for yourself. Let me know what you think.

The democratisation of creativity

One of the key points made by Larry Lessig in his 23C3 speech is how code, once used solely to make things work, is now being used to make culture; as he says “the tools of creativity have become the tool of speech”.

When we hear statements like this, it’s important to experience them, not just read them. Take a look at the image on the right. It’s part of a wonderful set of creative digital works by someone called Chema Madoz. You can find it, as well as many more, at haha.nu.

How did I find out about Chema Madoz? Via StumbleUpon. Why did I do something about it? Because I spoke to my 15-year old son about it, and realised that for him, Chema, and for that matter haha.nu, were as familiar, almost old hat, as Line Rider. As the saying goes, I should stay in more often.

If we do the wrong thing about DRM and IPR:

  • the wood in Chema’s background will have its own exclusive image rights
  • the matchstick will be copyrighted
  • Chema would have no tools to use
  • and even if there were tools to use, it would depend on the compatibility with someone’s particular content provider/connect provider/device manufacturer walled garden

So let’s keep on trying to do the right thing.

6174 time for content: there’s a train crash a-coming

the omens
are not goodWhy 6174? Read this article. I love the symmetry and chaos of numbers, and have been entranced by Kaprekar’s constant ever since I heard about it, too many decades ago. You could say that for four-digit numbers, when you apply Kaprekar’s operation, all roads lead to 6174. Which is the way I feel about “content” right now; we appear to be on a major collision course, and the omens are not good.

Why do I say this?

Humour me.

I’ve finally finished watching Larry Lessig speak at 23C3, the preferred abbreviation for the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress. Here’s a link to the video. Exhilarating. If you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to watch the clip; but make time for it, he speaks for about 45 minutes, and then there’s nearly half an hour worth of questions, including a very interesting discussion with someone I’ve assumed is John Perry Barlow.

Outside InnovationSeparately, I’ve finally finished reading Patricia Seybold’s latest book, Outside Innovation. I’d considered buying it, but something held me back. Then Gordon Cook reminded me, and so I looked again. Gordon knows what makes me tick, so I listen. And when I looked again, and saw that John Seely Brown recommended it, I had to read it. I’d read a telephone directory cover to cover if it came recommended by JSB. Seriously. The power of recommendations held by people you trust….

Seybold’s book is excellent, a good and honest structured look at what companies are doing to co-create value with their customers. Real companies, real customers, real takeaways. Maybe it was the effect of having watched Larry’s talk prior to reading the book, but the word “content” kept bouncing off the page and hitting me. I don’t particularly like that word.

And then it made me think.

So there’s a bunch of people who are building fortresses around “content”, using DRM and IPR and whatever other flag of convenience they want to fly under. For the sake of argument, let’s say they are all clustered around the slogan:

Content is King

Now I abhor most of the attempts by people to implement bad DRM and legislate for bad IPR, but I am always happy to pay for value received from someone who creates something. The basis and method of payment cannot be what it has been, but fundamentally I agree with “creativity is king” so I accept, grudgingly, that “content” has some power. I still don’t like the word though.

There’s another bunch of people who are walking around with a different mantra. Maybe some of them have even read Cluetrain. One way or the other, they’re into post-Nader consumerism, and they walk around saying:

The Customer is King

Now I’ve read Cluetrain, just once or twice :-) — and even without reading it, I would have no hesitation in agreeing that “the customer is king”.

So.

We have group A marching to Content is King.

We have group B marching to Customer is King.

So far so good.

Content is King.

Customer is King.

Content is King.

Customer is King.

Look carefully, and you will notice something weird about groups A and B.

Many people belong to both groups.

God’s in His Heaven, and All’s Well with the World.

Along comes group C, and they march to the sound of a different drummer. Syncopation? Their mantra is:

Consumer-Generated Creativity is King

Or, to use the words I detest, Consumer-Generated Content is King.

train wreckCustomer Content is King

Whoops again. That’s not the tune that Content is King is played to. That’s not the tune that DRM is played to. That’s what ASCAP didn’t figure out; that’s how BMI walked in, so eloquently described by Larry.

There’s a train crash a-coming.

Whoops.

Only the customer can make content king. We must all remember that.

Be careful what you wish for

from DVDs
to cigarettesThanks to Doc, I came across Mark Pilgrim’s post on A History of DVD Copy Protection. I have always found DVD Region Coding to be laughable, almost tantamount to fraud, so I loved the article. Read it and decide for yourself.

What I particularly enjoyed was how Mark moved from DVDs to cigarettes:

On a side note, this turn of phrase reminds me of a similar one told of the Liggett Group, formerly known as Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, the company that formerly manufactured Chesterfields, which I formerly smoked, before selling the brand to Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris. In fact, the last time I smoked Chesterfields was right around the time the brand was sold to Philip Morris. At one point, I had a pack of Liggett-branded Chesterfields that bore the history-making label, “Smoking is addictive.” Then the brand was sold to Philip Morris, and suddenly Chesterfields were no longer addictive. Or if they were, their packaging no longer admitted it. ;-)

All of which is a roundabout way of quoting an article I once read about Liggett — or rather paraphrasing, since I have long since lost track of the original in the infinite sands of time and bookmarks — which stated that Liggett had managed to lose an enormous amount of money, despite the overwhelming business advantage of having an addictive product.

The analogy to copy protection, if indeed there is an analogy to be made, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I followed Mark’s advice and did his reader exercise. And what I found was instructive (at least for me).

Let us assume that both cigarettes as well as DVDs are addictive products.

Let us also assume, for the sake of argument, that Smoking Kills labels on cigarettes are broadly analogous to Copy Protection on DVDs (whether in Region Coding form, RCE form or vanilla copy protection. Analogous because both devices serve to protect.

The analogy breaks from then on. Protect whom? At least in the cigarette case I can see the consumer being protected. But in the DVD case there’s no way of understanding just how the customer is protected.

There’s also the question about the agency that requires the protection to be implemented. In one case it is a regulator of sorts, in the other it is “self-governing”.

But it doesn’t matter. It all comes back at the end, just like Mark says.

Someone with an addictive product manages somehow to achieve two aims:

  1. make no money
  2. damage the customer

You know how I think. (b) will always lead to (a). It’s just a matter of time.

Alienated by Hollywood

I’m still trying to settle into a rhythm of doing as little as possible, something I’m not quite used to. I’m getting better at it, though.

One of the things I’ve decided to do is “desk research” into a murky area. That dark and gloomy space where copyright meets “content” and chains the strangest bedfellows together.

I want to do this by researching an event I know very little about. When I was around ten years old, one of the more esoteric topics in “cocktail party” conversations in Calcutta was a particular Satyajit Ray Hollywood episode. Definitely not something a schoolboy would get deeply into, but it stuck somewhere in my head anyway.
Apparently he went to Hollywood in 1967 on a mission, to sell a particular project. He wanted to direct a film called The Alien, based on a script he’d written. By the time he got to Hollywood, he found that his script had already (a) done the rounds (b) been copyrighted by someone else and (c) already been acquired by the studio he was dealing with.

a saga of calamity
happenstance
and hard luckHe found all this hard to believe. He left Hollywood, naturally, in very high dudgeon. That particular Calcuttan’s first experience of creativity meeting copyright was, shall we say, less than good.

Here’s an extract from his wikipedia entry, touching on this subject:

In 1967, Ray wrote a script for a movie to be entitled The Alien, based on his short story Bankubabur Bandhu (‘Banku Babu’s Friend’) which he wrote in 1962 for Sandesh, the Ray family magazine. The Alien had Columbia Pictures as producer for this planned US-India co-production, and Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando as the leading actors. However Ray was surprised to find that the script he had written had already been copyrighted and the fee appropriated. Marlon Brando later dropped out of the project and though an attempt was made to bring James Coburn in his place, Ray became disillusioned and returned to Kolkata.[27] [28] Columbia expressed interest in reviving the project several times in the 70s and 80s but nothing came of it. When E.T. was released in 1982, many saw striking similarities in the movie to Ray’s earlier script – Ray discussed the collapse of the project in a 1980 Sight & Sound feature, with further details revealed by Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson (in The Inner Eye, 1989). Ray believed that Spielberg‘s movie would not have been possible without his script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies.

If he were alive today, his views on Hollywood and copyright may have been interesting to hear. Who knows, he may even have made a film about it. Opensource.

Notwithstanding his experiences of Hollywood, he may have had more positive views about the digital world we live in. The state of the Satyajit Ray film archives seems deplorable despite the best efforts of a bunch of people, a saga of calamity and happenstance and hard luck. Just stuff that I found while digging around for the Alien script story.

The World Is FlatSuch tales of person A claiming person B’s copyright, and being paid for it in good faith by person C, still continue. The most recent I can remember is that of the cover illustration for Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. The publishers did their bit, found the copyright holder and paid their dues. Wrong copyright holder, apparently. So the books were recalled and new covers issued.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere for all of us. When we finally figure out who gains from all this DRM guff. It’s not the creative guys. It’s not the consumers.