Maybe it comes from being born and raised in Calcutta, where anonymity is rare and privacy rarer still. During my youth I often felt that Cal was the world’s biggest village. Lots of overlapping gossip circles and nosy neighbours and all that. But it was all in-your-face, so it didn’t feel like how it feels in the West.

Before you can have the curtain-twitching gossiping narrow-minded neighbour, you need to have curtains.

Curtains.

Things that prevent light from coming in, that create places of darkness. Things that people hide behind in order to disguise or conceal their snooping. Things that people draw closed in order to prevent others from seeing what they are doing.

Curtains.

I’ve heard many people make strong cases for anonymity, often in the context of democracy and dissent. [Maybe I need to revisit Cass Sunstein, I will do so this weekend]. We have to be careful about this, because we can hold up the development and enrichment of many things while we argue about anonymity.

There’s a lot to be said for onymity. When we look at the right to vote, we need to bear in mind that the voter is not anonymous. Even the dead of Cook County had names.  It is the vote that is anonymous, not the voter.

Onymity could help us solve many problems, from chat room predators to spam originators and everything in between. As we get better at onymity we may get better at preventing identity theft and all its consequences.

Every time we build systems to enshrine anonymity we pay a price. Sometimes it is worth stepping back and checking that the price is worth paying.

I’ve yet to see what CNN aired. But in the meantime. Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke have published some “coordinated statements” which are worth reading. We have to get these things right, rather than wallow in mass hysteria and McCarthyism.

I referred to The Freedom Premium in my last post, covering the recent announcement by EMI and Apple. I’m still thinking things through. There’s a sense of unease about the principle. It may not matter with the EMI digital inventory, but I have this nagging worry.

The problem with the Freedom Premium is simple. The people who need it the most can’t afford it. As I said, it may not matter in this particular instance, but it will matter. When it comes to medical matters it will matter. When it comes to educational matters it will matter. When it comes to independent news sources it will matter.

So now the announcement has been made. EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire.

I guess it’s safe to predict that the story will make No 1 at Technorati, so there are a zillion places for you to go to if you want the details. Instead of adding to that list, I want to concentrate on one key issue. The Freedom Premium.
SIMfree phones. Advertising-free digital content. DRM-free music and video. Device-independent anythings. Pollution-free anythings. They’re all the same thing. Either you put up with some corruption provided “free of charge”, or you pay for the freedom. A redemption price.

It’s not new. Today, if I want to buy a dishwasher that I can integrate into my kitchen cabinets, I have to pay more for that than I have to pay for the stand-alone device. Far more than is defensible in the context of shipping and packing costs. If I  want to unlist my phone number I have to pay for it, in most geographies. If I want an air ticket that can be transferred between airlines (or for that matter modified in any way) I have to pay.

The idea that freedom of movement (of digital goods) and freedom to change (digital contracts) are made available, but at a price, I find this idea reasonably appealing. Because this choice is more real than much of the snake oil we get offered today in the name of customer choice. I wonder how long it will be before someone gives me this equivalent for films, at least partially doing away with the nonsense that is Region Coding. Would I pay a premium for a Region Free DVD? Probably, as long as it’s a reasonable one.

Freedom at a price. Ironic, two hundred years after the abolition of the slave trade.

A coda. One of the things we have to watch out for is alluded to amongst the small print in the EMI news release:

EMI Music will continue to employ DRM as appropriate to enable innovative digital models such as subscription services (where users pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to music), super-distribution (allowing fans to share music with their friends) and time-limited downloads (such as those offered by ad-supported services).

The problem with that sort of statement is that it provides an opportunity for lock-in specialists to Trojan Horse their way back in, often without people realising the implied price.  So we have to be careful.

More later.

Everyone’s waiting to see what the Apple and EMI joint announcement is going to be about. Rumours abound. To the extent that people are even talking about the Death of DRM. So for once I will be commenting on news, primarily because of the importance of getting DRM right. More later.