Kate's Comment
Thoughts on British ICT, energy & environment, cloud computing and security from Memset's MD
Copyright’s death throes?
To give the guys a break I had been doing the Christmas on-call. Keeping a weather-eye on our plethora of monitoring systems I noticed a spike in bandwidth usage from one of our customer’s servers. A few moments later the cause is obvious; some script kiddie has hacked in and started up a bit torrent site serving various illegal rips and wares. The proliferation of copyright infringement is enormous – are we witnessing the death of copyright?
It was a moment’s work to kill off the torrent site, and I sent a gentle email to the customer in question suggesting that they might like to take advantage of our Perimeter Patrol™ security services. He was a lucky one – many of our customers only decide to get us to manage their server’s security for them after a major, and damaging intrusion, but in their case no harm was done. There are plenty of commercially-run sites as well; it is not all just hackers stealing others’ bandwidth, and peer-to-peer file sharing is constantly growing especially as home broadband connections become ever-faster.
There is an on-going battle on the encryption and encoding front too. Just recently in The Register I heard that someone has already cracked the new HD DVD’s anti-rip system; embarrassing in the extreme for the HD DVD format’s supporters. The problem is, at a simplistic level, if you can play it then you can copy it. There are simply no two ways about it, and I for one think the music and movie industries are fighting a battle they cannot win, and should be taking a different approach entirely.
I am hardly innocent myself; I am quite a fan of allofmp3.com (a Russian mp3 site that purports pseudo-legality), but in my defense I primarily use it for getting good quality rips of CD’s and tapes I already own and therein, I think, lies a potential savior of the music industry. People like me do not want to be criminals, and we are also quite happy to pay a modest fee for a convenient service. I could have just ripped my CD’s for free, but I preferred to pay a few dollars and not faff about with disks etc.
Traditionally, a major cost for the media industries has been distribution, but the Internet renders that tiny. I am no expert, but I am pretty sure the music industry could make good money even at a small fraction of the current prices, say 10-20p per track. If combined with a really good interface most people would be quite happy to pay rather than mess about trying to download dodgy mp3′s.
In fact, it might even allow the music industry to sell a lot more thanks to being able to make “smart suggestions” based on what other users with similar tastes also like – there are already examples of such systems out there. Equally, such a model would be a great boon to small-time artists who currently have a nightmare getting their material heard since there would be minimal costs associated with getting your music listed, and if it was good then the “smart suggestions” system would auto-promote it. Everyone wins. Hmm, why am I giving out potentially-killer business ideas to the world? 
However, this all powerfully reminds me of a sub-text to an excellent book I read last year by Peter F. Hamilton, Misspent youth. It portrays a world where ubiquitous high-speed connectivity and massive personal storage capacities have rendered copyright impotent, and the professional production of new novels, music and movies ends. Such a future seems, at times, chilling near.
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Still, I do agree that novelists are less threatened, and also perhaps more likely to be happy to embrace new technologies since for them distribution/printing really is a big cost!
Nevertheless, I don't like the attitude that music, or films or books or whatever, should be free. These works take time and money to produce, as well as a great deal of skill and talent. To enable the artists to continue they need to be paid just as everyone else needs to be paid for their work. The traditional method of doing this is for people to pay for a reproduction of their work. Whether this can be improved upon, I don't know.
I don't like that attitude that just because someone wouldn't buy the work in the first place that they can get it for free. That's selfish thinking. If you wouldn't buy the work you have no right to appreciate it in the commercial form it's been made available in. There are other ways to achieve this, if you don't want to buy something. There are libraries and public radio. There are definitely limitations to both of these methods, but that's why many people pay to get a copy of the work, so that they are not restricted in how they get to enjoy it. And that gets us back to restrictions, and should highlight why restricting what people can do what they want with what they buy is not a good thing.
This is what we are seeing with music. In the past, copying a tape or CD still required physical media, and there was a cost involved. Now it's just a case of copying a file, using up a tiny amount of space on a hard drive, we see that music files are being freely copied, anonymously and wantonly, via P2P networks and the like.
And don't be misled: there are books and comics being copied over the same networks (and films). What is stopping it from being more widespread and threatening the book industry as much is the reproduction values. To appreciate music, you need some equipment to reproduce the sounds. There are many ways of doing this, from nice hi-fi systems at home, to portable players for personal use, or players in cars. And all that we need to do is listen, passively for the most part. Music can even be streamed over networks to hi-fi systems, so the files don't have to be moved from the computer.
Books, on the other hand, require a lot more dedicated attention, and nothing yet has come close to the quality of paper for ease of browsing or reading. Sure, electronic paper looks like it could be an adequate replacement, but it still may not beat riffling through a book. We simply haven't found a way to reproduce a book in the same way that we can reproduce audio, where we can shift the contents to be appropriate to the situation. Even so, some people download books to their PDAs, and read the content on them. And these people will and do download books as freely as others do music.
Novelists are less threatened only because, in my view, their works are not being made available in digitial form by and large, are not easy to digitise by ordinary people who buy the books, and the reproduction of written works in digital format is still vastly inferior. I would imagine novelists are just as likely to embrace the technology that will allow free copying as musicians. That is to say, there are some, but by no means all of them think that way.
As for some other points: it's not that the music can be sold for less leading to greater sales, it's that if the music is sold for less then more music will have to be sold to retain the profit margins. The music industry, because of the cost of studios, advertising, and distributing, have built a profitable business around keeping the executives rich and the musicians poor, because most musicians simply don't have the resources to create and market their own records. The executives, understandably, would like to keep this status quo, and so would rather charge more and have to sell less to keep themselves wealthy.
I agree, however, that there may be a huge cultural shift were music tracks reduced to pennies to buy, and available as high-quality, DRM- and licence-free downloads from reliable and fast sources. Who would bother burning a disc and giving that to someone when a full download of a whole disc would cost 50 p and take the same amount of time as it would to rip? It is quite possible we would see music being distributed completely legally, if only it were as trivial to get as it is on P2P networks. It will take a major change before that happens.
On-line purchases are probably still far too encumbered for this to happen. DRM that doesn't allow burning, or transferring tracks, and licences that don't allow for computer crashes or hardware failures that lead to having to buy the music again, makes buying the CDs a better bet for the most part. You have the highest quality of music, can choose which format and quality to rip it to, and have repeat access to the source should something happen to the files.
The issues involved are complex, presently we have the recording industry and the music publishing industry at each others' throats over ringtones. 'Hang On!', you might say, 'aren't most of the publishers owned by the recording companies?' no shit, Sherlock, you are right! So its difficult, complicated and in the too hard bucket. In the US, the DMCA was driven by very sectarian interests and had several unsought for side effects, nearly all of which require an attention span of more than 7 seconds to explain, so they aren't going to get fixed any time soon. The EU equivalent, the EUCD is similarly flawed.
Until fairly recently, I used to travel regularly between the US and Europe. I bought DVDs in both continents which I played on my laptop. I can hear you saying, 'had to get the player unlocked'. That wasn't the problem, the hardware CAN be switched. Microfrost Windows Media Edition can't. This so insensed me that I actually got onto them and got right to the very top, to the geek in chief and pointed out that this was a ridiculous situation, and that lots of people must be in the same boat. I was told that the studios were not comfortable with the idea of computers able to play multiple zones and broadcast standards (NTSC & PAL), and that I should travel with two computers, one for Zone 1 and the other for Zone 2. This is the problem with people who travel by charter jet, they don't get to carry their own luggage!
At some stage, somebody will come up with an acceptable digital book reading device, it doesn't feel like any time soon, however. And probably just as well, the act of going into a bookshop is an adventure that online booksellers have not yet managed to emulate. Incidentally, when I was visiting UCB a few years ago, the Librarian told me that it would be cheaper to hand out photocopies of books as opposed to physically handling individual issues and returns, once copied, the original need never see the light of day again, and an end to custodial problems. An interesting insight into the economics of one of the world's largest academic libraries.
A developement which is likely to have some traction in the copyright and royalty area is the subscription. In an uncertain world, we do not like committing ourselves to uncapped expenses, so the all you can consume for a fixed price that we are about to see from the Venice Project ( http://theveniceproject.com/ ) or DVD rental companies, is likely to become more widespread, did I hear Sky is moving to video on demand, for a fixed sub?
So, all the music you can download for 10 pounds a month - any takers?