Copyright and Digital Music

• Copyright and Piracy
• Copyright and Digital Rights Management
• Darknet — the dark side of the net?
• Copyright and the Fear of Fair Use
• MGM vs Grokster — the beginning of the end for digital media innovation?
• The Future of Digital Music: what other than iPod/iTunes?
• Conclusion
• Web References
• Quotable quotes

I own an iPod and yet I buy CDs. Why?

So why would someone who owns an ipod (albeit an old 'thick' 10Gb model) buy CDs, go to the trouble of ripping tracks to MP3 and importing them into iTunes when he could just as easily and cheaply download the same songs from the online store?

To address this seeming lunacy we need to start with the activity that the music industry never fails to castigate its critics with, that of piracy.

Copyright and Piracy

One of the definitions that Merriam-Webster Online uses to define piracy is "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright". In a lighthearted Wired article¹ Lawrence Lessig asserts that this should be considered the norm for emerging technologies in media and that history shows that societal progress is the result. In what must have been a gleeful discovery he cites the case of the film industry fleeing to Hollywood on the west coast to escape from Edison's clutches in order to exploit his patented techniques without compensation. Piracy indeed. He cites early cable networks hijacking broadcast TV content and then selling their services to customers in a 'Napsterizing' move. Except that Napster didn't charge for the distributing pirated content while the cable companies did. Broadcasters took cable companies to court but despite Charlton Heston's labelling them as 'free-riders' the Supreme Court came down on the side of the cable companies and it took another 30 years to settle. Indeed:

"lawmakers set the price [to be paid for TV content] so that the broadcasters couldn't veto the emerging technologies of cable. The companies thus built their empire in part upon a piracy of the value created by broadcasters' content."

Lessig goes on to assert that "Like the original Hollywood, P2P sharing seeks to escape an overly controlling industry".

In Antitrust and Intellectual Property Policy Seminar¹⁹ a class given by Randall Picker and Timothy Wu there are some salient points²⁰:

"Professor Wu's diachronic review of the contentious history of copyright's communication policy² during the XX century and these first five years of the present century allows us to see the incessant struggle between incumbent disseminators (representing 'property rights' holders or actually acting as such) and threatening entrants."

"History has proved that the position assumed by entrants is ultimately reduced to piracy. The moral that can be drawn is that the judicial and political struggle sooner or later produces an outcome in which authors are compensated, generally through some type of transfer payment, be it monetary or in kind, that nevertheless allows the challenger to price according to his technological advantage thus increasing efficiency in the dissemination process"

Lessig's point is vindicated here by two high powered legal authorities in this field. Moreover they go on to point out:

"Beurskens: Need Abuse Initially"
"This approach is justified as unpredictable long-term benefits will often outweigh short-term social cost. Without some (initial) abuse innovation as such might be stifled (e.g. pornography on the Internet has lead to widespread emergence of broadband-lines)."
"Without widespread adoption of video-recorders there would be less sales and rentals of movies. Similarly, the original incentive for users to access Napster might have been to download music by famous artists, but the service might have eventually opened up the market for lesser known Garageband-style-groups (e.g. by providing a 'sounds-like'-service as offered early on by MP3.com). "

' empirical evidence suggests that such downloads have not substantially affected the retail sales of music, videos, and other forms of intellectual property.'¹⁵³³

Copyright and Digital Rights Management

Now a few comments on Cory Doctorow's seminal talk to the Microsoft Research Group in June 2004 on the subject of Digital Rights Management¹⁷. In this talk he asks the questions, what is DRM, what does it try to do and why is it a bad idea? He claims that DRM systems:

1. don't work
2. are bad for society
3. are bad for business
4. are bad for artists
5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

At first blush, the claim that DRM systems just don't work seems to stretch the point. But Doctorow shows that DRM is just an application of classic cryptography but with a crippling achilles heel. For when you purchase a DVD encoded 'for customer convenience' with the CSS algorithm which prevents you from playing the thing in Europe (or vice versa — wouldn't want the Frenchies getting their hands on our DVDs) you want to be able to play it on your own player. You need the movie or video object (the cyphertext in cryptography terms), the CSS unscrambler in the DVD player (the cipher), but you also need the key to unlock the CSS (on the disk) in order to play your DVD. So all the components to crack the 'secret' CSS code are available for every DVD disk in every player and the secret is no longer exists. This has to be the case for every DRM protected object whether it be music track, video or whatever because at the end of the day if the purchaser cannot play the media he won't buy it in the first place!

Next, Doctorow argues that DRM systems are bad for society. "Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall." He uses a homely example of a mother who was stumped by DRM when trying to make a backup of a DVD to tape for her three kids. His point is that the frustration engendered by this exercise will drive her to the 'darknet'[link], she'll discover Kazaa and next time she wants a movie for the kids she'll just download it with Kazaa and burn it for them. He goes on to talk about the noxious notion of anticircumvention:

"Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock — an access control — around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. It's illegal to tell someone where she can find out how to make that tool."

So here we have all the motivation for human nature to adopt:

Darknet — the dark side of the net?

In 2002 four Microsoft employees coined the term 'darknet' in a paper entitled "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution"²¹. A 'darknet' can be thought of as an essentially dodgy form of networking in its widest form. Thus CD & DVD copying and sharing person to person constitues a 'darknet' by their definition as does the more obvious peer-to-peer file sharing, but also sharing key or password 'cracks' via email or newsgroups. The authors take 3 basic assumptions as axiomatic, the first being that "Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying." An 'object' is their term for a software program, song, movie, etc and the corollary of this assumption is that "any content protection system will leak popular or interesting content into the darknet". Thus they concede right off the bat Cory Doctorow's point about DRM being ineffective. In the paper they describe the evolution of the darknet from origins in 'small worlds networks'(eg swapping tapes with friends) through central internet servers (FTP and Web sites hosting illegal MP3s) to peer-to-peer networks such as Napster and gnutella. It is instructive to note that much of the spur to innovation in peer-to-peer networking technology was a consequence of legal and technical assaults on higher education hosted central internet servers carrying ripped MP3s.
Their conclusions about the effect on business is worth quoting in full:

"There is evidence that the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers. This means that in many markets, the darknet will be a competitor to legal commerce. From the point of view of economic theory, this has profound implications for business strategy: for example, increased security (e.g. stronger DRM systems) may act as a disincentive to legal commerce. Consider an MP3 file sold on a web site: this costs money, but the purchased object is as useful as a version acquired from the darknet. However, a securely DRM-wrapped song is strictly less attractive: although the industry is striving for flexible licensing rules, customers will be restricted in their actions if the system is to provide meaningful security. This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects. In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security."

"Certain industries have faced this (to a greater or lesser extent) in the past. Dongle-protected computer programs lost sales to unprotected programs, or hacked versions of the program. Users have also refused to upgrade to newer software versions that are copy protected."

In See you on the darknet a Slate article by Paul Boutin he paints a picture of the darknet in teenage friendly terms:

'"Picture digital freedom fighters huddling in the electronic equivalent of caves, file-swapping and blogging under the radar of censors and copyright cops," Newsweek concluded. They might as well have added: Cooooooooooool.'

and

'The darknet! Jeez, are they trying to make piracy cool? Who'd want to hang out on the boring old Internet when the other kids are on the darknet?'

So now we come to:

Copyright and the Fear of Fair Use

"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art."
— US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

The above is from the hear your music anywhere, hymn site, and they go on to say:

"Despite what Justice O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court has said, DRM exists. The purpose of DRM is to bypass traditional copyright law. The result of DRM combined with laws that outlaw circumvention of DRM (such as the DMCA) is that there is no longer clear protection for fair use in some countries."

Talking about copyright in the context of anticircumvention, Doctorow asserts that "Even in the context of legitimate — excuse me, 'traditional' — copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news." He maintains that by purchasing the medium lawfully it then becomes the tangible property of the emptor and not some sort of lease on 'intellectual property', in other words "the kind of thing that courts have been managing through tort law for centuries". But, and this is a big 'but', "anticircumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves … that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor". He illustrates this by pointing out that there is no region control on books — I can purchase a book in the US and send it to a friend in the UK where it might cost twice as much and it'll still be readable. "Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."" Not so with a DVD — region coding sees to that. He goes on to point out that it's not illegal to play a European DVD in a US player; it's just that the studios have created a convenient and lucrative business model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up , and, one might add, badgered nieve lawmakers to enact the clearly anti-consumer law.

This theme of fair use is taken up by Ken "Caesar" Fisher in an Ars Technica article called Harvard Law project does legal case study of iTune's business model He summarises a paper (summary¹¹, full paper¹²) issued by the Digital Media Project at Harvard Law School and makes a number of important points:

• [in the digital media arena] Contract trumps copyright (his italics) — contracts are being used to restrict normal freedom given to users by copyright law. True in the US and Europe
• Right of second sale. If I purchase a CD and no longer want it I can sell it on ebay, right? But "DMCA"(Digital Media Copyright Act) and DRM trump this. First Sale Doctrine (exclusive right to distribute content, and therefore the buyer can sell it on) is implicitly not being applied to digital content because the business model demands even more exclusive rights to distribution and DRM technologies are by design inimical to portability and therefore selling on.
• Fair Use —

"Fair use is copyright law's attempt to codify reasonable exceptions and limitations to the exclusive rights normally granted to copyright holders."
"Fair use can also be seen as a work-around of the copyright".
"If a use is considered "fair" by the law, customers might expect it and are likely to make a decision whether or not to use a particular system based on to what extent that system allows the use. As the market for online music distribution grows, competition between distributors could result in an ever increasing set of allowed uses."

Fisher rightly terms the DMCA in the US and the EU Copyright Directive in Europe "a house of cards built upon the _fear of fair use_" and describes the links in the "insidious chain" of anticircumvention:

• copyright is trumped by contractual law — restricts fair use in legal terms,
• DRM technology enforces adherence to these rules and
• DRM itself is protected by laws such as DMCA in the US and EU Copyright Directive in Europe

Talk about DRM being bad for artists because it stifles the creativity engendered by new media and new devices.

MGM vs Grokster — the beginning of the end for digital media innovation?

When Napster was released in 2000 it unleased a tusnami of excitement about digital music. Suddenly everyone wanted to know how to get it, and then went about downloading some back caralogue and creating their own MP3s. I know I did! Then with the RIAA suit shutting down Napster it all cam to a screeching halt. The post-Napster story has not been well told; this involves normal music lovers who embraced the 'darknet'. Peer-to-peer filesharing took hold very quickly but early attempts such as Gnutella suffered badly from bottlenecks because every node was deemed to be equal whether it was on a slow dialup connection or fast broadband ¹³. As Gnutella choked, Kazaa using the Fastrack protocol with 'supernodes' proved more scaleable and gained in popularity ¹⁴. However, Kazaa quickly acquired the deserved reputation of installing spyware, adware and associated malware onto users' computers. Although using the same FastTrack protocol as Kazaa, Grokster proved more popular (link) and so was targeted by the RIAA and MPA in a federal lawsuit in April 2003¹⁵ . The decision went against the RIAA but was appealed and by December 2004 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case which was billed as 'the most important intellectual property case in decades'¹⁶.

Prior to Grokster, the scene had been set twenty years ago, where "in the famous case of Sony v. Universal the motion picture industry argued that Sony's sale of home video systems (the Betamax) constituted contributory copyright infringement. The Court ruled for Sony, holding that there was no contributory copyright infringement because "the Betamax is capable of commercially significant noninfringing uses."'³⁰. And this "'betamax principle' has been considered the Magna Carta of the technology industry"³¹ ever since. Thus with the Grokster case the High Court faced a "hard choice between innovation and copyright protection"³².

In amongst all the legal verbiage ²⁸³⁰ at the end of the day the crucial issue was "it has to be shown that the distributors of the program have advertised and/or otherwise induced its use for copyright infringement"¹⁶ and by this standard Grokster Loses – Unanimously – Inducement Test?

So, what effect could the 'Grokster' case have on technological innovation over the next 5−10 years? Firstly, it should be noted that western society is going through an unprecedented period of technological innovation. Who could have predicted in 2000 at the height of the Napster boom (which was a PC only platform) that 5 years later the iPod nano would be the hippest gadget and that iTunes would be the dominant player in the digital music world? Moreover, technological innovation is itself a poster child for the rule of unexpected consequences. For, had not Napster been closed down there would have been no incentive for peer-to-peer filesharing technology to mushroom. Why use P2P when Napster would have done the job just as well? And with the P2P FastTrack protocol came Kazaa and Grokster the brainchild of Niklas Zennstrum and Janus Friis. These two sold Kazaa to an Australian concern, Sharman Networks in 2002⁴ and 'moved on to develop new innovative software'⁴. This was no hocus pocus, for these swinging Scandinavians went on to found the voice-over-IP pioneer, Skype, which employs similar P2P techniques, and which now threatens to devastate the traditional business model of the telecoms industry⁵. However, there is evidence that the 'Grokster case' has already had somewhat of a chilling effect on technological innovation. In "Technology feels the chill"⁶ the Guardian Unlimited points to the increased risk to companies and investors and concludes that the advantage has now passed to foreign developers free from the US legal muzzle. But others believe that the sky is not falling and that there are many positive outcomes from the ruling. In fact, the Legal Theory blog considers that "The Grokster decision may have been a minor tactical victory for content providers, but it is a stupendous strategic loss." He goes on to justify this assertion:

"What are the implications of the Grokster decision for the future of P2P filesharing? Superficially, the fact that MGM prevailed in the Supreme Court might seem like a negative for P2P, I believe that quite the opposite is true. Why?

• The Supreme Court's decision in Grokster makes it clear that P2P companies are subject to liability if there is direct proof of intentional inducement of copyright violations. Good legal engineering of P2P communications and business models can easily insure that such proof will be unavailable. Therefore, the intentional inducement cause of action is likely to drop out of the picture from an ex ante perspective.

• Among the P2P services that are likely to flourish in a post-Grokster legal environment is BitTorrent. Of course, shifting users to BitTorrent is no victory for content providers— it is actually a defeat (my italics). It is not in the interest of content providers to encourage users to shift to more capable P2P engines.

• Of course, there is a certain air of unreality about all of this discussion, because, as we all know, the cat is out of the bag, the barn door is open, and the genie is out of the bottle!!! No change in the legal environment can possibly contain P2P, and even if it could, the fundamental architecture of the Internet is such that massively distributed file sharing cannot be subject to effective legal control. (In other words, Microsoft's 'darknet' prognostications overviewed above have come to fruition).

The Future of Digital Music: what other than iPod/iTunes?

In 1999 Steve Jobs was invited back to head up Apple as its saviour. Apple had created and personified the 'desktop publishing' market but that was long past. The task was to carve out something new. When the $399 5Mb iPod was first introduced in 2001 analysts questioned 'the company's ability to sell into a tight consumer market'²⁵. The price was high, iTunes only ran on the Mac platform and there seemed to be a lot of cheap competition. Although it was marketed as not using a digital-rights management scheme Jobs was keen to avoid being seen to promote piracy; "Piracy is not a technological issue. It's a behavior issue", he said²⁵. Then in spring '03, Apple introduced their online store with iTunes as the client and the DRMed MPEG-4 AAC as the music format rather than MP3²⁶. Since the service was still Mac only, with 3% market share, five major labels signed up � BMG (Bertelsmann), EMI Group, Universal Music Group (Vivendi Universal) and Warner Music Group (AOL Time Warner)²⁶ in what looked at the time to be "brilliant move on the part of the labels" with "the Apple�s customer base [being] a good place to experiment with business models." But by the fall of '03 Apple had launched iTunes on Windows²⁷ and hell had frozen over:

Suddenly the iPod market exploded with accessories and shiny new 'must have it' models; the iPod mini, iPod color and recently the iPod nano; and in the space of a mere two years Job's relentless drive for innovation has left his competitors floundering. Thus has Apple neatly mainstreamed public acceptance of DRM by stealth, clever marketing and innovative products.

But pricing of downloaded songs has been an issue. It's been a long two years since iTunes Music Store was launched and the music industry have been pressing Jobs for a shake up in pricing They have had some ammunition from unexpected source — The Long Tail: Could the labels actually be right? — who argues that price differentials might benefit the market, but Jobs has been holding the line against a price hike²² and has taunted the music industry with being greedy . A recent Ars Technica article²³ uncovers the probable motivation behind the music industry's demand for price risies. Piracy is not the issue, the author claims, since 'The "losses" tossed about are undeniably trumped up in the service of political aims (P2P war, the DMCA, etc.)', no, 'If the music industry is getting bullish on pricing, it's all the proof you need to see that they don't fear casual piracy.'. And then we get to the rub 'They've seen the online machine work, they've seen people drop $200 or more for portable music players, and now they want�nay, expect�more.'²³. So it is greed then. And, yes, not surprisingly, the music industry is bewailing the consumers desire to purchase only the songs they like :

'Instead of spending $15 for a CD, you buy two cuts for two bucks. That's a lot of money left on the table', said Joe Nordgaard, managing director of Spectral Advantage, a strategic consulting firm. 'The traditional model with premium pricing has been so lucrative for the music industry. When they cut the deal with Apple, they did not realize what they had done. Now they want out.'²⁴

and from the same source:

'We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue,' he said. 'We want to share in those revenue streams.'

Well, tough beans for your shareholders ….

Conclusion

So, at the end of the day, why not go with the flow and do what millions of other music consumers do and download from iTunes? Because I want control over the music I purchase. I want to be able to play whatever songs when I want, on any player I want, at any time I want without fear of running up against DRM limits. I want to backup my music collection knowing that if I migrate to a new machine my music won't suddenly expire. I want to use an open format which is efficient so I use MP3 and variable bitrate encoded by LAME. And since I don't buy the latest fashion in music I can purchase at a discount from online traders.

Web References

¹ Some Like It Hot

Wired — Dec 2003

² Copyright's Communications Policy by Tim Wu

Wu, Tim, "Copyright's Communications Policy" . Michigan Law Review, Vol. 103, p. 278, November 2004

³ Copyright as Entry Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution

Picker, Randal C., "Copyright as Entry Policy: The Case of Digital Distribution" (April 2002). The Antitrust Bulletin, forthcoming

⁴ KaZaA sold to Sharman Networks

⁵ The meaning of free speech. The Economist Sept 17 2005, Vol 376, # 8444 p69

⁶ Technology feels the chill

⁷ Chilling Resonance of Grokster Down-Under

⁸ Grokster Ruling: A 'Chilling Effect' On Innovation?

⁹ 'Ten Years of Chilled Innovation'

¹⁰ What Grokster Means on the Ground

¹¹ iTunes Green Paper — Summary of Conclusions

¹² iTunes — How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business of Digital Media : A Case Study

¹³ Wikipedia — P2P

¹⁴ Wikipedia — Kazaa

¹⁵ Wikipedia — Grokster

¹⁶ Wikipedia — MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.

¹⁷ Microsoft Research DRM talk

Microsoft Research DRM talk — original text by Cory Doctorow's

¹⁸ Harvard Law project does legal case study of iTune's business model

¹⁹ Antitrust and Intellectual Property Policy Seminar — online syllabus

²⁰ Antitrust and Intellectual Property Policy Seminar — powerpoint slides

²¹ The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution

by Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman
2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management
November 18, 2002
Originally published at http://www.crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/prog.html

²² Apple CEO Against ITunes Price Hike

²³ Jobs calls music industry greedy

²⁴ Bronfman Fires Back at Apple

²⁵ Apple's iPod spurs mixed reactions

²⁶ Apple to introduce Mac-only music service

²⁷ Apple launches iTunes for Windows

²⁸ Grokster roundup

²⁹ Music Industry guilty of price-fixing? But, but, of course not!

fn30."MGM v. Grokster: Background and Analysis":http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2005/03/mgm_v_grokster.html

³¹ speech by congressman Rich Boucher

to the INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND CREATIVITY CONFERENCE

³² Why The Grokster Case Matters

Quotable quotes

Grokster and the Scope of Judicial Power-BECKER

points out that 'I basically do not trust the ability of judges, even those with the best of intentions and competence, to decide the economic future of an industry.' and 'Experience and theory tells us that it is best to let markets rather than courts determine the evolution of industries-just remember the mess made of the telephone industry by Judge Greene.'

³³ Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales – BizReport

Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.

Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their "most pessimistic" statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.

The RIAA questioned the conclusions reached by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf.

"Countless well respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs," RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said.

Larry Rosin, the president of Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Media Research, said it was absurd to suggest that the Internet and file sharing have not had a profound effect on the music industry.

"Anybody who says that the Internet has not affected sales is just not paying attention to what is going on out there," he said. "It's had an effect on everything else in life, why wouldn't it have an effect on this?"

Playsforsure forsure

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » PlaysMaybe

[Ed’s assignment desk: Somebody with artistic talent (i.e., not me) should create a “playsmaybe� logo, perhaps depicting a square peg labled “playsmaybe� failing to fit into a round hole labeled “DRM in use�.]

definitely a project to consider …

Apple dominating the digital music scene

Apple share of MP3 player market to shrink… sort of [printer-friendly] | The Register

Published Thursday 15th September 2005 13:55 GMT

Interesting report from the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/15/apple_nano_analysis/

Notables:

• growth in market share of flash based MP3 players. “On 1 January, Apple had zero per cent share of the market for Flash-based players. By the end of June, according to the NPD Group, it had a 46.3 per cent share of the US Flash-player market.”
  
  “As the iPod Nano is entirely Flash-based, it’s going to skew those numbers way, way up,”
• Apple has corned a collosal 40% of Samsung’s entire output of Flash memory chips (NAND chips) and Samsung produces 60% of the world’s NAND flash memory. Even though Samsung is Apple nearest flash MP3 palyer competitor.
• sarcastic comparisons with competitors who indulge in wishful thinking.
• Apples DRM is less restrictive than any others:
  • play on up to 5 computers (PC or Mac)
  • playlist with downloaded songs can be burned to CD up to seven times
• Finally, “Apple announced this month that it has 80 per cent of the music download market in the UK. It’s got the majority of the MP3 player market. When even your rivals realise they’ll do better selling you parts than competing with your players, you can say you’re in charge.”

And they’re making a good profit on the nano too — 2GB iPod Nano costs $100 to make

But there’s concern about the scratchable screens:

• iPod Nano owners in screen scratch trauma and
• Apple’s iPod Nano screen woes deepen

Problems growing in wikipedia-sphere

Wired News: Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains

another nail in the coffin for fair use?

Mindjack - Will Digital Radio Be Napsterized? by J.D. Lasica

On April 15, the FCC bowed to the RIAA’s request and initiated
a notice
of inquiry, typically a step leading to formal rule-making.
The public may submit comments to the FCC between June 16 and July
16.

The future for broadcast TV

Mindjack - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV

Podscope -- search for podcasts

Podscope is an online service Podscope Blog » Podscope FAQ that let’s you search through podcasts for text strings. Very clever speech to text technology.

5 ways MP3 has changed the world

MP3 Insider: Top five ways MP3 has changed the world - CNET reviews

Online Music Services

Interesting review of all online music services :
Music Services: MP3.com. By all accounts iTunes /iPod has a 75% market share.

Jobs set on 99c course

Apple CEO Against ITunes Price Hike - BizReport

There’s abunch of other references to this.
See also The Long Tail: Could the labels actually be right?
I think Jobs is correct in sticking to a one price fits all philosophy. Unlike the author of ‘The Long Tail’ he doesn’t trust the record industry not to screw up. And he’s right!

File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales

Study: File-Sharing No Threat to Music Sales - BizReport

Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell more than 600,000 copies. For every 150 downloads of a song from those albums, sales increase by a copy, the researchers found.

Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina’s Koleman Strumpf, also said that their “most pessimistic” statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002.

The RIAA questioned the conclusions reached by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf.

“Countless well respected groups and analysts, including Edison Research, Forrester, the University of Texas, among others, have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs,” RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss said.

Larry Rosin, the president of Somerville, N.J.-based Edison Media Research, said it was absurd to suggest that the Internet and file sharing have not had a profound effect on the music industry.

“Anybody who says that the Internet has not affected sales is just not paying attention to what is going on out there,” he said. “It’s had an effect on everything else in life, why wouldn’t it have an effect on this?”

The Harvard-UNC study is not the first to take aim at the assertion that online music piracy is the leading factor hurting music sales. In two studies conducted in 1999 and 2002, Jupiter Research analyst Aram Sinnreich found that persons who downloaded music illegally from the Internet were also active purchasers of music from legitimate sources.

“While some people seemed to buy less after file sharing, more people seemed to buy more,” Sinnreich said. “It was more likely to increase somebody’s purchasing habits.”

The 2002 Jupiter study showed that people who traded files for more than six months were 75 percent more likely than average online music fans to spend more money on music.

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Guide Aims to Help Bloggers Beat Censors - BizReport

Reporters Without Borders’ “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents”
is partly financed by the French Foreign Ministry and includes
technical advice on how to remain anonymous online. It was launched at
the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday and can be downloaded
in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, English and French.

This is it:

Reporters sans frontières - Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Critique of Wikipedia

No Oil for Pacifists

The blogging downfall of Howard Dean

Clay Shirkey’s article Many-to-Many: Exiting Deanspace and some allied ones eg Infothought: Dean-ial are worth putting together for a Monday lecture.

More refs here

Outside person comments on student's blog

The author of LIVE from the Nuke Free Zone posted a comment in Kerri’s blog under the pseudonym of “zibblsnrt”. I dunno how he found Kerri’s blog but I did like the quote (which I must followup on) :

“the Internet views censorship or restriction as damage and routes around it”.

This is something which most legislators (Repubs & Demos) just don’t understand ….

Plus, his blog has rather interesting comments on Katrina. I thought this one to be very apposite: Live from the Nuke Free Zone: Scouring

Into the mind of the new breed: Project Phase II - Rough Draft

This is a good example of a draft

http://www.musically.com/theleadingquestion/news.htm

itunes was hacked¹

¹ iTunes DRM Hacked, Then Hacked Again

Source for SS blogs

The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com _

Take a look at all the blogroll:

• Clay Shirky
• danah boyd
• Dave Pollard
• Dina Mehta
• Elizabeth Lane Lawley
• Frank Paynter
• Jon Udell
• Lilia Efimova
• Many-to-Many
• Molly Wright Steenson
• Nancy White
• Ross Mayfield
• Sebastien Paquet
• Stowe Boyd
• Stuart Henshall
• Wikipedia - Social Networking
• Social Software News - Topix.net

Napster on campus

Three State University Systems Sign with Napster - The Digital Music Weblog - digitalmusic.weblogsinc.com _

This is disgraceful. I have seen several references to this.

Friendster & Facebook

Friendster vs Facebook - how fashion changes…

earlhamites: That’s right, I NOW HAVE FACEBOOK. As in

[info]usslollipop
2005-09-15 15:07 (link)
whatever. friendster kicks facebook’s FACE.

[info]phosphodae
2005-09-15 20:10 (link)
Bah, Friendster’s dead. It’s seen its glory days; they’re past. Anyway, the people I needed to reconnect with— i.e. my high school friends— are all on Facebook, and that’s all I need. I don’t need the random strangers Friendster will bring…

[info]usslollipop
2005-09-15 21:11 (link)
hm. I’ve never gotten any random strangers on Friendster. And I guess it’s an age thing, since most of my high school friends graduated from college at least 2 years ago now. So they never got on Facebook. They’re only on Friendster.

Interesting …

Slashdot policy on Moderation & Comments

Slashdot FAQ - Comments and Moderation

Slashdot

This makes instructive reading if only for the techniques they use to clean up conversations.
The goals of moderation are interesting:

• Promote quality, discourage crap.
• Make Slashdot as readable as possible for as many people as possible.
• Do not require a huge amount of time from any single moderator.
• Do not allow a single moderator a “reign of terror.”

“Of course it is flawed! It’s built upon the efforts of diverse human beings volunteering their time to help! Some humans are selfish and destructive. Others work hard and fair. It’s my opinion that the sum of all their efforts is pretty damn good.”

How did the moderation system develop? — very interesting to see how this was scaled up. Also ‘Karma’ is interesting.

Open Source conversation

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - Richard Epstein: Why open source is unsustainable

Give me liberty and give me death?

reasons to be cheerful -- part II, the ipod

bynkii.com’s Mac Matters: iDevelopers! iDevelopers! iDevelopers!

iDevelopers! iDevelopers! iDevelopers!

Yes, I read this before and of course, the guy’s right. But 80% of the UK market still leaves 20% in the hands of no-hopers. I’m kinda interested in what motivates someone to buy a non-ipod. And we haven’t even started on podcasting — what’ll Microsoft call it I wonder?

Podcasting adolescence

Podcasting Takes Off

The selection is stunning. Total views refers to podcast downloads, the ‘listings’ refers to podcasts indexed. Downloads > listings indicates an unmet demand…

Truth in blogtelling

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | When fake blogs attack

Quite apart from the comments on avian flu, this is a useful article :

• Can you trust the factual accuracy of events reported in blogs? Is it more trustworthy than certain national governments?
• The topic is really about how blogs have reported natural disasters with particular attention to Avian Flu and the Hurricane Katrina and the ‘blogservations’ that follow.

It’s a really good article which ties together repaortage from blog sources in a bloggy kind of way.

A blog on tagging

Seminal blog on the whys and wherefores of tagging : You’re It! » Blog Archive » Introduction: Clay Shirky

This has to be one of the, if not the, most imortant concepts currently bubbling in the blogosphere. Tagging and associated concepts promise to reshape how we deal with information on the web.

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too?

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too? (plasticbag.org). An interesting article with insightful comments which really engage the substance of the argument.

Digital Media and the Napster Revolution

• Digital Media, changing habits and the Napster revolution
• Setting the Scene
• The Napster Revolution
• possible Project Topics

Digital Media, changing habits and the Napster revolution

Setting the Scene

I have argued that popular music is closely tied to technology. Not only have musicians been in the vanguard of techo-progress (eg Rick Wakeman's use of the Moog, & the whole genre of techno-pop in the 80s) but the medium has often affected the way that we listen to popular music. The recording industry is a mature industry and as such is vulnerable to rapid change and resists it strongly. And consumer's adoption of new technology has often run ahead of the recording industry's ability to cope. SO it was with the cassette tape. Prior to this new medium consumers were obliged to purchase expensive LPs if they wanted to listen to anything 'progressive'. The music scene was stagnant, there was little play on the radio (apart from John Peel) and the only way to hear new music was to go to a live concert in a big city. The tape cassette and minituarized player allowed one to visit one' mates, plug the deck into their stereo and record their records. The recording was in real time and the quality ranged from awful to shocking but it was music and it was free (apart from the cost of tapes). Then one purchased one's own records and allowed your mates to tape them. Ultimately you bought more albums than you taped but the recording industry was still snotty enough to slap a tax on cassettes to make up for "lost sales" (and there were Government Health Warnings on every cassette tape — Do not tape copyrighted material..). Of course, other companies exploited the new medium to market new devices that allowed one to listen to music while jogging — the Sony Walkman (this in itself is a fascinating story of how Sony did not know how to market or rpice the Wlakman since it was a completely novel marketplace). But the cassette tape itself was of such low quality (even with such artifices as Dolby noise reduction) that it was not taken seriously by anyone who wanted to listen to decent quality music. Then in the late 70s along came the CD (invented by the same company that introduced the cassette tape, Phillips). This was nirvana for the REc Industry because not only could they charge more for the new high quality, robust, scratch proof medium but there wa a whole back catalogue they could resell in the new format! KaChing! But unfortunatly for the Recording Suits CD players were not only consumer electronic items, they were also included as a peripheral device in the ever expanding PC market. Together with the CD came quality sound cards and although the speakers were always tiny and tinny neverless one could now listen to music on one's PC using downloaded software application. Since the audio CD was merely a series of tracks of dips and non-dips which encoded the music as binary data the inevitable next step was software to interface directly to the CD player, read the disk surface and translate the binary code into a computer data rendition of the audio sound. This, in itself, was not too much of a threat. After all, the CD held up to an hour's worth of music which was equivalent to 640 Mb of binary sound data. Given that most PCs came with hard drives of less than 1,000 Mb you would be lucky to contain a single CD's worth of music on your hard drive. But two other threats emerged. Firstly came CD-R technology which allowed one to record on a blank CD, and then with improvements in hardware the interface speed of CD readers increased so that a 10X CD reader for example could read a whole CD in 6 minutes instead of 60 minutes. This meant that copying CDs was technically very possible for savvy PC owners. But the devices were still rather expensive and so this was not as widely popular as the Walkman. Also note that "Until Napster, the industry had an astonishingly successful run in producing digital music while preventing digital copying from taking place on a wide scale, managing to sideline DAT, Minidisc, and recordable CDs for years." ( Clay Shirkey )

Enter the MP3. Compression technology had been in use for some time — the Lempel-Ziv algorithm that characterises ZIP has been around for ages — but it was in the imaging world where it was first applied. The 'Joint Photographic Expert Group', or JPEG, came up with an algorithm and a reference implementation which showed the true genius of a innovative process. They figured that since the human eye is a fallible judge of image quality why not trade off quality for size before compressing. So, depending on the quality setting the JPEG process takes the original image maps it into discrete areas and then cleverly reduces the pixel density while retaining the image outline. Depending on the output quality desired great decreases in image size can be produced. This process is thus lossy — data is permanently lost — and one way — you cannot regenerate the original image from a JPEG processed image. Exactly the same logic was used with digital music. The goal was to produce a digital format which when played on a resonable stereo would sound similar enough to the original CD sound quality — "I can't believe it's not a CD!" The MP3 achieved this goal by a parallel method to the JPEG — the sound is analysed, quantised, quiet bits thrown out, loud parts reduced in quality more than soft parts and the whole compressed. A thorough explanation of the various audio 'codecs' is available at the All of MP3 site, albeit obviously translated from Russian.

The Napster Revolution

So we come to Napster. What is or was Napster and why was it so revolutionary — check out Content shifts to the edges by Clay Shirkey.

In Napster and Music Distribution written in April of 2000 at the height of the Napster boom Clay Shirkey compared the RIAA-Napster suit to the 55mph speed limit:

"The people arguing in favor of keeping the 55-MPH limit had almost everything on their side — facts and figures, commonsense concerns about safety and fuel efficiency, even the force of federal law. The only thing they lacked was the willingness of the people to go along. As with the speed limit, Napster shows us a case where millions of people are willing to see the law, understand the law, and violate it anyway on a daily basis."

Then in Napster and the Death of the Album Format written in July of 2000 when the RIAA was getting an injunction to shutdown Napster, Shirkey convincingly demonstrates that in the post-Napster world consumers would be exerting their newfound freedom — the freedom of choice. For, by linking music collections from one PC to another over the Internet — peer to peer — Napster allowed users to download individual songs irrespective of their originating CD and thereby turned the whole music medium on it's head. Packaging by CD was now irrelevant — what we wnat are individual 'songs'. The RIAA tried to slam the lid down on this Pandora's box but the genie was out of the bottle. At the end of that July the RIAA delivered the terminal blow and shut down Napster. But in a prescient commentary — The Music Industry Will Miss Napster — Clay Shirkey pointed out that the ability to create MP3 files from CDs still remained and that "it is the users' willingness to trade copyrighted material, not Napster's willingness to facilitate those trades, that the record industry should be worried about." Moreover, at least with Napster there was a central point to monitor consumer activity; driving it out of business would fragment the whole operation like a medusa.
good topic for project — music sharing post Napster¹
Then in October, Napster was 'bought out' by BMG (although it never made a profit) and converted to a subscription model. Clay Shirkey's take on this was that "Faced with the choice
between shelling out five bucks a month for high quality legal access or mastering gnutella, many music lovers will simply plump for the subscription."
[But was that the case? Did the resurrected Napster really work? Another project theme methinks]²
Shirkey's comment that "For a moment there, as Napster's usage went through the roof ... one could imagine that the collective will of 30 million people looking for free Britney Spears songs constituted some sort of grass roots uprising against The Man." sounds like a parody on Siva Vaidhyanathan does it not?

In Moving from Units to Eunuchs Clay argues that media post-Napster cannot be charged for on a per unit basis since the Napster phenomenon showed that on the Internet distribution costs are negligible and copying costs are zero. He argued that new business models would be used such as sponsorships, subscription fees or advertising. He robustly defended this position in Peak Performance Pricing
[But this now poses the question — although Shirkey's analysis may have been correct, all the subscription fee models for music downloading (including Napster) have either failed completely or have been so marginal as to be irrelevant. Why is this so? Itunes and Apple's dominance is the reason. Apple have made charges per unit work — how have they done this and why have they succeeded where new-Napster failed??]³

possible Project Topics

¹ Music sharing post Napster. Have Peer-to-Peer music sharing systems really taken over where Napster left off or has itunes defeated the pirates?

² Did the resurrected Napster ever work out? How has Napster been remarketed & will consumers fall for the deception of renting their music without ever owning it?

³ With itunes Apple has made unit charges work — how have they done this and why have they succeeded where new-Napster failed?

Anonymity on the Internet

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | Challenges of anonymous surfing

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | The cost of online anonymity

Freeloading and P2P

OpenP2P.com: In Praise of Freeloaders

Once again Clay Shirkey provides an insightful look at how Napster, and by extension post-napster P2P distributed applications are effective. He shows how the ‘tragedy of the commons’ does not apply to these digital transactions and how ‘freeloading’ in fact enhances the system. This is something which ‘The Archist in the Library’ does not mention. In fact, incredibly enough, Siva Vaidhyanathan does not cite Clay Shirkey at all.

Katrina hurls bloggers into the limelight

Katrina: A Defining Moment for Blogs

“
blogs have jumped to the fore in shaping the mainstream media’s coverage of the hurricane aftermath. Indeed, bloggers have served as a legion of fact checkers for political claims and spin efforts.”

“As such, the Hurricane Katrina disaster is the defining moment for the blogosphere — the first time it has truly become enmeshed in the media landscape, rather than relegated to curiosity status.”

“Blogs have taken the lead in providing comprehensive coverage of Katrina’s devastating aftermath in the Gulf Coast, and people are turning to blogs in huge numbers for their Katrina-related news.”

“The so-called ‘memory hole’ that many politicians of all stripes have relied upon is now closed,” says Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor of interactive telecommunications at NYU. “The blogosphere has become the institutional memory for the country.”

“Through the terrible aftermath of Katrina, we are witnessing the legitimization of a new medium, one that provides alternatives to or supplements what’s available through the MSM. Blogs have made a leap toward legitimacy: a story is now a story whether it originates on a blog or on CNN. The medium is no longer the message. The message, in fact, is now the message.”

Hell from Dell

BuzzMachine

writes about his hell from Dell. He certainly made an impact …

See here:
Jeff Jarvis vs. Dell: Blogger’s Complaint Becomes Viral Nightmare | MediaChannel.org

Anarchist in the Library

Here’s the problem with published books about Information Technology. A book takes over a year to write and then another year to publish. Thus a book published in 2004 will have been written in 2002 (at the latest) covering the I.T situation up to 2001. 3-4 years is a mighty long time in technology and a lot has changed…

Quotes and comments:

Ideology of Peer to Peer

“Let’s accept the fact that no company, no court, no technology is likely to shut down widespread peer-to-peer file sharing in the next few years. No new compression format is likely to supplant the remarkably attractive and convenient MP3 format, unless it is just as flexible and easy to use and thus just as threatening to the music industry. No one is likely to regulate bandwidth and access so effectively that Internet users can merely receive and not distribute information-unless most of the electronic media devices in our lives undergo radical changes in structure and function. “

All of these assertions are now demonstrably partially false:

• The recent ‘Grokster vs MGM’ case may shut down untrammelled peer-to-peer
• Apples proprietary AIC format and Microsoft’s format are undermining MP3 with compression format that are more efficient but also able to be tracked by ‘Digital rights’.
• Satellite & DSL connections place an asymmetrical speed limit on bandwidth — download is far faster than upload.

“the automoobile may have an ideology”
“Somebody must have (or predit) a demand for technology before building and sharing it”
“So ideology, that collection of toolmaking tools that guide us, can be thought of as ‘cultural software.’”
“how widespread use of distributive communicative technology generates … “habits of thought.” These “habits” among individuals build into “cultural habits,” or ideologies, through discussion, deliberation, and distribution.”
“What about file sharing or the Internet? What is the ideology of peer-to-peer technology? What is the “cultural software” effect of cultural software? Napster revealed the following embedded cultural assumptions:

* Culture is shared.
* Obscurity mimics anonymity.
* Private, individual transactions can’t harm large, powerful institutions.
* Local behaviors and actions seem justifiable even at a greater scale and greater distance.
* Large, widespread, uncoordinated actions can’t be policed easily, precisely, or moderately.”

Anarchy of Access Versus the Stability of Ownership

“Peer-to-peer technology spreads cultural anarchy when it encourages both
iences cultural “inconspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous production,” or, more accurately, conspicuous recombinant reproduction.”
“Participants are rewarded with cultural capital for donating their (or more often others’) contributions to the dynamic communicative process. “

Podcasting from the Beeb!

Pocasting storms on in different ways

• podcasting and guidebooks — Sunday Times¹
• will podcasting kill radio ads? — Sunday Times²
• podcasting & church . New York Times³

There’s also a good article in Weekly Telegraph which I need to scan.

¹ Podcasting: the beginning of the end for guidebooks? - Sunday Times - Times Online

² Will podcasts kill the radio ads? - Sunday Times - Times Online

³ Missed Church? Download It to Your IPod. - New York Times

PledgeBank

PledgeBank - Tell the world “I’ll do it, but only if you’ll help”

“We all know what it is like to feel powerless, that our own actions can’t really change the things that we want to change. PledgeBank is about beating that feeling…”

Fascinating UK social action initiative …

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