Preoccupations

Steve Jobs: DRM

It's everywhere … very fast. And that's hardly surprising … Steve Jobs' statement on DRM needs to be read in its entirety, but it begins:

Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

And concludes:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music. 

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player. 

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system. 

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies. 

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries.  Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.  For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company.  Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Commentary/reaction/notable reports thus far: 

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs called on major music companies to stop requiring Apple and other companies to sell songs over the Internet with antipiracy software, calling the technology ineffective at deterring illicit copying of music. WSJ 

He calls it Thoughts on Music but it’s more like the Jobs Manifesto. I’ve never seen anything like this from him but Apple-ologists will know better. paidContent.org

Steve Jobs just shot a cannon ball across the music industry's bow.... Stunning! Somewhere Cory Doctorow is smiling! Jason Calacanis

(I'd love to have Cory's take on this.) 

In an open letter, the Apple CEO said his company is the wrong target for people who are concerned about DRM. "Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free", he writes. It is the record labels who insist on making Apple's iTunes store and other online stores resell their music encumbered with DRM - and yet ninety per cent of the music they sell themselves via CDs is free of restrictions, he notes. In recent weeks, Apple has come under fire from consumer groups and regulators in Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and France for its refusal to unlock the iTunes store so that its songs can be used on other MP3 players besides Apple's iPods. But Jobs thinks this is unfair: customers are served well in the current market, by competing manufacturers, each with their own "top-to-bottom" proprietary systems, he argues. As for consumer lock, the vast majority of songs on MP3 players are DRM-free. Only three per cent of songs on iPods have actually been purchased from iTunes, Jobs says. The Register

In effect (and Apple fans please don't get upset with this phrasing of words), this article is a piece of propaganda from Apple. The position is that Apple and Steve Jobs hate DRM just as much as you and I, so they will gladly support the abolition of DRM - if the big record companies choose to do so. Apple is positioning itself on our side, in the war against DRM. This is all very well, and a very commendable stance from Jobs and Apple. But I'm left feeling that surely there's more Apple can do to fight DRM than to simply give a hospital pass to the record companies? Apple is after all totally dominant in the online music industry, so it now has considerable power of its own. They are not totally at the mercy of record labels.... are they?! Because that's what this article from Steve Jobs makes it out to be. Read/Write Web 

The reason Jobs has taken this unusual step is, one assumes, because Apple is under increasing pressure from European and other governments to "open up" its iPod/iTunes system. There have even been threats to ban the system if it remains closed. Over the last few months, the stakes have gone up as antitrust lawsuits have been filed against the company in the US. For Apple, DRM's strategic costs have simply come to outweigh its benefits. So Jobs is formally whacking the ball into the record companies' court. It's their system, he's saying, not ours. One hopes that this may finally get them to realize that DRM is simply a millstone around the neck of their business. Nick Carr

Technorati tags: Steve Jobs, DRM, music industry, iTunes, iPod

From the horse's mouth: Google's Global Counsel

Busy week last week, culminating with a trip to Brixton Academy on the Thursday to hear Pete Doherty and Babyshambles. There is musicianship and lyrical skill in there (I'm convinced of it! Some of my friends who are musicians are … less certain, shall we say), but this populist, narcissistic evening obscured most of that. (I found myself thinking how strangely reminiscent of Blair he is: needing to be loved, yet coming over so much of the time as considering himself … special.) We move on.

Friday afternoon and a quick trip to the Oxford Internet Institute where Andrew McLaughlin, Google's worldwide policy counsel, was speaking on Google vs. ?: Challenges to Freedom of Information on a Global Network:

Andrew McLaughlin is Head of Global Public Policy for Google Inc. Central policy issues for Google include privacy and data protection, censorship and content regulation, intellectual property (including copyright, patent, and trademark), communications and media policy, antitrust/competition, and the regulation of Internet networks and technologies. The leading countries for Google's government affairs activities include the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Australia, Russia, Germany, France, the UK, Israel, Egypt, and Ireland. Andrew co-leads Google's Africa Strategy Group.

Now that was a well-spent hour+. Some notes: 

Google faces a number of challenges: 

1. Censorship: repressive regimes are what one immediately thinks of here and of these China is the only one to which Google has made any accommodation. User-generated content is highly sensitive to the powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia, China, Iran … (So that's blogs, then.) Less obvious forms of censorship include interpretations of what "has to go" because of concerns about child protection and issues to do with cultural protection. Pay close attention to the EC Audio-Visual Services Directive (formerly, TV Without Frontiers) — an effort to create content control — and the Online Content Directive (I think I got this down right, but I can't find anything about it online). 
2. Copyright: without Fair Use rights, Google would not exist. Copyright must be revised so as to seek a better balance between the rights of creators (to whose benefit copyright law is currently skewed) and the rights of users. Andrew showed three videos which, in different ways, re-mix copyright material: Shining, BSB-I want it that way and The Grey Video. (BSB was, he said, a huge phenomenon in China.) Currently, no meaningful Fair Use rights exist in Australia. 
3. Discrimination by carriers: network neutrality; quality of service. 
4. Security. For example, Google Earth maps the world and you can swoop in on … a Chinese nuclear facility. The UK's attitude is 'no security through obscurity', but China, Russia, India and others are not so happy. So far, Google hasn't blurred or blocked a single image at the request of a government. During the recent war in the Lebanon, there was no real time coverage of the action (within Google's technical ability to do) and served images are, on average and approximately, 18 months behind the present, except during national disasters when all the stops are pulled out and images are as current as possible. (This is all to avoid any unhelpful clash with governmental agencies and consequent, restrictive legislation.) Finally, out of concerns about privacy, image resolution will never go so low as to allow identification of individuals.

Google chooses not to geo-target users by ISP address and then use this to enforce a government's repressive/restrictive laws. So, google.de users can go to google.com to search for what Germany requires Google to block on Google Deutschland. (Yahoo! was forced to implement a ban in France on accessing yahoo.com, but this was in a specific case and established no generic principle.)

Chilling Effects maintains a database of Cease and Desist orders.

Some positive things to celebrate or look forward to:

1. Statistical machine translation: one day IM chat in two different languages will be possible. Saudi Arabia doesn't like the service (it was being used to translate English > English, generating an unblocked — new — URL in the process). 
2. Cloud computing. 
3. Ubiquitous connectivity: mobile telephony; spreading wireless access; increasing deployment of fiber connectivity. 
4. Other specific initiatives: eg, Google Literacy, US Government Search.

After the talk, I asked Andrew about Google Desktop and, specifically, Search Across Computers: 'The latest version of Google Desktop provides a Search Across Computers feature. This feature will allow you to search your home computer from your work computer, for example'. (To access this option in Google Desktop Beta Preferences, right click on the Google Desktop icon in the system tray > Preferences > Google Account Features.) I wasn't surprised to hear that the take-up of this has been limited. Many of us seem to be happy-ish with our email residing on Google's servers, but putting our documents there seems to cross some kind of psychological barrier. I suspect that this will change over the next few years as we slide into using more tools that work both online and off, but users haven't taken to this just yet.

By the way, I note that IWR reports: Microsoft and Google have joined forces with the British Library in calling on the government to radically overhaul the intellectual property (IP) law.

Technorati tags: Google, Andrew McLaughlin, censorship, network neutrality, security, Google Earth

SpiralFrog

My first thought when hearing of SpiralFrog? Same as Publishing 2.0:

You’ve got to pity the poor advertiser faced with figuring out how to allocate ad dollars across all these new media.

But I was also excited. Anything that appears to break the ridiculous status quo of the music industry is bound to set expectations going. However ... questions certainly remain.

BBC News reported:

'Vivendi Universal, the world's biggest music group, has signed a deal to make its music catalogue available on a free legal downloads service. Under the agreement, Spiralfrog will offer Universal's songs online in the US and Canada. New York-based Spiralfrog will launch its service in December and make its money by carrying adverts on the site. Spiralfrog aims to take on market leader Apple's iTunes service, which charges 99 cents per song in the US.'

And CNET:

The downloads could be played on the PC or transferred to a portable device, though notably not Apple Computer's iPod.

(The FT also has a piece.)

Nice to see Apple, iPod and iTunes under pressure, and it was easy to take Universal's move as heralding more of 'content … at no cost'. But there's cost and cost, and this does appear to cost — in DRM:

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker - you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads. TechCrunch

I'm also wondering how SpiralFrog will deal with payment to artists, but more than anything else I can only second what TechCrunch says: 'It will be an exciting day if the major labels come up with something truly more compelling than piracy on one hand or coercion on the other - but I don’t think this is it'.

Technorati tags: music industry, downloading, DRM

Women and children first

March of this year and Wendy Grossman reports in the Guardian on the fingerprinting of children in UK schools:

Last week, news emerged that Primrose Hill primary school in north London had been fingerprinting pupils without their parents' consent. It seemed shocking yet should not have come as such a surprise. Micro Librarian Systems' Junior Librarian has been marketed in the UK since 2002 and is estimated to have fingerprinted hundreds of thousands of British children.

That so many schools have been happy to install such systems, often without thinking it necessary to consult parents, is a reflection of how this technology is infiltrating society. We can expect more of the same, for children and adults, should the ID card, debated once more this week in parliament, become reality.

May, and here's the Yorkshire Post:

A Yorkshire school is taking fingerprints from pupils – to keep a check on payments for school trips. The system, which means pupils can be instantly identified when they touch a scanner attached to one of the school computers, is expected to recoup the £2,500 cost of its installation by saving time on form-filling. If the experiment in "biometrics" works, it might be extended.

… The organisation of trips at Ilkley Grammar involves a turnover of £250,000 a year, mostly collected in £10 or £15 instalments. It means close to 20,000 transactions a year. The fingerprint recognition system means that when a pupil takes a payment instalment to the school office, his or her account can be called up automatically, with no question of any confusion between names.

Head teacher Gillian James said in an explanatory letter to parents that the system would store a number based on a fingerprint reading. No fingerprint images would be stored. The Information Commissioner and the Department of Education and Skills had said they had no concerns.

… 42 of the 1,532 current pupils, aged 11 to 18, had been kept out of the fingerprint registration process for one reason or another. One of the objectors is Christian White, a journalist who reports on Westminster for the BBC but lives in North Parade, Ilkley, and has a 14-year-old step-daughter at the school. He said yesterday: "Mrs James has effectively admitted this is not just a trivial bit of bureaucracy. It is the thin end of a wedge, the start of a process which could eventually enable the school to track our children every minute of the day. And it is a matter of proportionality. You do not give any organisation more intimate information than it needs to do its job and if my bank can manage my salary without getting my fingerprints, I don't see why the school cannot manage a couple of £12.50 payments from a 14-year-old for a trip to Lightwater Valley."

The Ilkley system was installed by Pinecone Associates of Carrington, Greater Manchester. Its marketing manager, Martin Parsons, said yesterday: "It is misleading to talk about fingerprinting children. The fingerprint is just a convenient shape to read to create an identity profile."

That last bit is priceless.

3 July. The Daily Mirror — back to school libraries and Micro Librarian Systems:

FURY erupted yesterday after it emerged an estimated 700,000 children are being fingerprinted at school. Systems in 3,500 primary school libraries allow pupils to take out books by scanning their thumb prints instead of using a card.

But campaigners warn the technology is a massive invasion of privacy and a step towards a "database state". With an average primary school size of 200 pupils, pressure group No2ID says at least 700,000 pupils are regularly having their fingerprints scanned. And there are fears schools having children's fingerprints could lead to the information being stored on government computers with DNA records and personal details. It is also seen as "softening up" resistance before people are asked for biometric data such as eye-scans to put on compulsory identity cards. …

Andy O'Brien, managing director of Micro Librarian Systems which makes the fingerprint systems, insisted there was nothing sinister about the new scanning technology. He said: "Ultimately, this is completely optional. If parents object because they don't like the use of biometrics their children can still use a library card or pin number. But this can make libraries a really cool place to go for children."

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Another priceless moment in that last sentence.

Leave The Kinds Alone campaigns 'against schools fingerprinting our children'. ARCH supports 'equality, choice, respect and privacy for all children and young people'.  Thanks to ORG for some of the links here. No2ID is here.

I go back to the end of the Guardian article:

Stephen Groesz, a partner with the law firm Bindmans, has been consulted by parents from Charles Dickens school in Southwark, and believes the system is illegal on several grounds. "Absent a specific power allowing schools to fingerprint, I'd say they have no power to do it." Police legislation, for example, is specific about when, by whom and how fingerprints may be taken and what they may be used for. "The notion you can do it because it's a neat way of keeping track of books doesn't cut it as a justification."

Privacy advocates say these systems have a more subtle danger: habituation. Andre Bacard, the author of The Computer Privacy Handbook, said if he wanted to build the surveillance society, "I would start by creating dossiers on kindergarten children so the next generation couldn't comprehend a world without surveillance." But who needs dossiers when you have fingerprints?

Thank God for the news that it may be a while yet (not 2008!) before ID cards become reality — Sunday Times and BBC News.

Technorati tags: fingerprinting, schools, ID cards, children, rights, surveillance

BPI gets go-ahead to sue AllofMP3

BBC report here:

The British recording industry has been given permission to sue Russian music website allofmp3.com in the High Court. Members of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) want to prove the site, which offers downloads for as little as five pence, is illegal. They were given the go-ahead to sue the company last week, and say proceedings will be issued in Russia this week. The operators of allofmp3.com deny the recording industry's claims that their site is not licensed to sell music.

Slashdot doubts the likelihood of this action sticking. WiredFire has an interview with with Matt Phillips, Communications Manager of the BPI. (These links all via ORG-discuss, the discussion list of ORG.) AllofMP3's press statement about recent developments (statement dated 6 June, 2006) is currently here. Earlier (also 6 June) BBC report about the BPI and AllofMP3 here.

I've posted about AllofMP3 before: AllofMP3.com: bursting the mould? (4 January, 2006); Best on-line music site? (25 March, 2004).

Some thoughts from the WiredFire interview:

Whether the BPI action is likely to be that successful is open to widespread conjecture. On the surface they would appear to have quite a solid case under UK civil law, given that their site appears to be targeting English consumers. But enforcing any judgement overseas is going to be an altogether different issue – especially if AllofMP3.com can demonstrate that they have been complying with the laws of their own country and that their export market is incidental to their primary business model.

Perhaps the biggest clue as to their future intentions is detailed within their press release:

“On September 1, 2006 the changes to the Russian copyright legislation will come into force. Since January 2006 the site has been making direct agreements with rightholders and authors at the same time increasing the price of the music compositions and transferring the royalties directly to the artists and record companies. The aim of AllofMP3.com is to agree with all rightholders on the prices and royalties amounts by September 1, 2006.

We believe in the long term and civilized business based on respecting the law, considering the customers' demands as well as the interests of both national and international rightholders”.

… Whatever the outcome, we feel that it is about time that the true cost of digital music is properly reflected in the retail price. Ridiculous statements such as those made by Mark Richardson that “the cost of distribution for downloads is actually higher than for CDs” do nothing to attract any sympathy from those of us who have spent not inconsiderable fortunes in amassing our modest CD and DVD collections. Whilst the BPI are to be commended for their more realistic approach to digital file transfers than their US counterparts, the RIAA, their curious choice of allies in the form of Mark Richardson of Independiente Records is certainly doing them no favours.

Also in the WiredFire interview:

Jamieson went on to criticise iTunes for their use of non interoperable DRM, calling on Apple to open up its software in order that it is compatible with other players. "We would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability."

Technorati tags: AllofMP3, AllofMP3.com, BPI, RIAA, RIAA,  iTunes

AllofMP3.com

Every so often, there comes a wave of alarm that rolls its way across the web proclaiming that AllofMP3.com has gone down — for good. TechCrunch ran with the story yesterday, and I picked it up via Alex. The story had the appearance of this-time-this-could-be-true because of the news about the new lawsuit, and other sites weighed in.

As of tonight, the site is up but not accepting orders. I continue to think that AllofMP3 is a disruptive challenge to the music industry of great creative potential:

AllofMP3 is surely now so well-known and celebrated that it must represent a challenge to the RIAA, the BPI, the IFPI et al that can no longer be met just by drawn out legal actions across different countries. That's the dull reaction of retreating, defeated and dying armies. The more meaningful challenge is to the business model of the music industry and the blue ocean opportunity here is striking: 'We argue that beating the competition within the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create profitable growth' (with thanks to Tom Peters).

I was interested to read in the Register last Friday that:

According to XTN, Apple's iTunes Music Store accounted for 44 per cent of music download purchases in the UK last month. AllofMP3.com came in second, with a 14 per cent market share. That puts it ahead of Napster (eight per cent), Wippit (six per cent) and MSN (six per cent) among the nation's top-five digital music suppliers.

Technorati tags: AllofMP3, AllofMP3.com

UK copyright law and the right to copy

National Consumer Council:

Over half of British consumers are infringing copyright law by copying their CDs onto other players they own, according to a new survey for the National Consumer Council (NCC). The YouGov poll reveals that the practice is common across all ages and social classes, highlighting the absurdity of current copyright law. Three in five (59%) thought copying was perfectly legal, despite the fact that current UK law does not provide a right to reproduce copyrighted material for private use - including CDs, DVDs and downloads. The findings back up NCC’s recent submission to the Government’s Gowers Review that the law is out of step with modern life and discriminates unfairly against consumers -putting unrealistic limits on their private listening and viewing habits.

Technorati tags: NCC, Gowers Review

Meanwhile, in Paris …

… anti-DRM rally (yesterday):

Originals here. Posted by Frédéric de Villamil. Boing Boing'd here.

Technorati tag: DRM

CIO visionary: the four pillars of enterprise architecture

Confused of Calcutta:

Some time ago I started working on a four-pillar model for enterprise architecture, in the belief that everything we do will be classified into one of the following:

• Syndication: We will subscribe to stuff yanked out of humongous content publishers and consume them via a syndication, alert and aggregation facility. RSS gone ballistic. SAP and Oracle Financials meet Wall Street Journal Europe and Reuters. All stored somewhere both within the firewall as well as without. Text and voice and video.
• Search: We will do some ad-hoc yanking ourselves, getting used to a Google-meets-StumbleUpon world where collaborative filtering of role and context helps relevance go up, and there are simple yet powerful heuristic tools because we can tag things and vote on them for future reference. Again from storage within and without.
• Fulfilment: There’ll be a bunch of things where we need to discover what’s out there by syndication, search and learning. Refine what we discover to a set of things we’re interested in. Check out captive and brokered and otherwise made-accessible inventory. Discover price and select item. Provide shipping instructions or logistical information. Identify our right and authority to exchange value. Exchange that value via card or account or wampum. Be fulfilled. Flights, hotels, stocks, consultants, books, music, food. All fulfilled.
• Conversation: Another bunch of things gluing all this together. Voice. Video. E-mail (though it will decay into pretend-snail-mail and die, I hope). Blogs and wikis. IM. Texting. Whatever. Ways of discovering, co-creating and enriching the value in information. Information that you need to fulfil things you have to do.

None of this will work if the information we need to get pushed to us or get pulled down by us is hidden behind walled gardens. Walls made of weird DRM constructs like Region codes on DVDs. Walls that hold our information and make it harder for us to rip it and mash it and make something useful out of it.

Read the original post — for more about the above and for a wonderful story about Christopher Wren and … four pillars.

Via deal architect (via Ross). I've subscribed to Confused of Calcutta's feed, and not just because of this post. Here's what JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta), CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, says on his About Me page:

More and more my interests have moved towards education, I keep thinking of setting up a school from scratch. One day. I’m passionate about work (!) , particularly with reference to how work is changing: the paradigms created by globalisation, disintermediation and the web; the implications of virtualisation, service orientation and commoditisation; why publishing and search and fulfilment and conversation are the only “applications” we may need; how telephony becoming software and the wireless internet interact with mobile devices; the terrors of poorly thought out IPR and DRM; the need to avoid walled gardens of my own making; how children now teach me about work; the socialising of information, how it creates value by being shared, how it is enriched, how it is corrupted. How information behaves and what I can learn from it. Ever since I read The Cluetrain Manifesto I have believed in the “markets are conversations” theme, and have had the good fortune to meet and spend time with the Cluetrain gang discussing their views and values. Which naturally makes me passionate about opensource as well. In democratised innovation.

There are many reasons why I love the web, but meeting kindred spirits is at the top of the list.

Technorati tags: enterprise architecture, syndication, search, conversation, DRM, disintermediation, Cluetrain, open source

Intellectual Property: a Digital Rights Campaign

I'm grateful to James Governor for digging a bit further than me, visiting the National Consumer Council's website (as opposed to stopping with the BBC's report — see below). The NCC is dedicating time and energy to digital rights:

There is a new section to the website which summarises the NCC's work on innovation and intellectual property (IP). We argue that the view of consumers — as being at the end of the value chain, choosing from the products and services offered by providers — is outdated, and that this is reflected in IP law...

More information about the NCC's work on IP here:

Traditionally, businesses and policy-makers have tended to think of consumers as being at the end of the value chain, choosing from the range of products and services offered by providers. This does not describe how value is created in a modern economy and the role consumers can, and do, play in innovation and the co-creation of products and services.

This outdated view of the role of consumers is reflected in intellectual property (IP) law which gives rights to owners to control the use of innovations and ideas, and describes public and consumer fair access and use rights as exclusions and exceptions.

In addition, powerful business lobbies have been able to exert considerable influence on the development of IP law. This has increased the level of protection of IP rights and reduced public and consumer access and use rights.

This is not just bad for consumers, it is bad for society, as it constrains the ability of everyone to access important resources, and stifles the sorts of consumer creativity that can enhance economic growth.

The NCC has a page about the Digital Rights Campaign of the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs:

On 10 November 2005, BEUC, the European Consumer Organisation, launched a campaign for consumer rights in the digital environments calling for the following rights to be enshrined in EU law:

• the right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity
  
• the right to the principle of 'technical neutrality' — defend and maintain consumer rights to the digital environment
  
• the right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions
  
• the right to interoperability of content and devices
  
• the right to the protection of privacy
  
• the right not to be criminalised

In addition, the declaration calls for:

• industry to desist from legal action against P2P downloaders to allow the market to find solutions for the on-line development of audio/visual distribution
• action to ensure that DRM users respect consumer privacy and fair use rights

The set of six bulleted points constitutes the BEUC's proposed Consumers' Digital Rights.

James quotes the BEUC's position statement:

BEUC believes that the European publishing sector is crucial to the building of a knowledge-based economy. However, blindly ‘enhancing’, ‘supporting’ and ‘extending’ the copyright protection regime may confer unjustified monopoly privileges, impede competition, potentially impose unfair costs on consumers and risk to inhibit creativity. Do we want a society in which the free exchange of ideas - on which our society thrives - remains possible or do we want access to content curtailed by excessive copyright regulation and abusive use of DRMs? The report correctly states about copyright and DRMs that “widespread acceptance by consumers is still lacking”. The reason for this is (at least) twofold: Firstly, DRMs are restricting consumers legitimate use of copyrighted (and non-copyrighted) material. According to the Commission, publishers also regard DRM as a technology with increased control over content and more precise definitions of the rights associated to the assets they commercialise. These “rights” go beyond what is asserted by intellectual property law and we deplore the lack of discussion on potential adverse effects on consumers, and the eventual need to guarantee consumers rights in relation to the works they legally purchase.

He also found their online petition. To echo James: please go sign it.

As the BEUC puts it elsewhere (1/ here and 2/ here) on their website:

1/
Under the heading of Digital Rights Management (DRM) new technologies are being used to limit or prohibit perfectly legitimate practices. “Exemplary" legal cases are being prosecuted and users threatened with huge penalties for downloading music or films on the Internet. The industry hides behind the artists that it claims to defend, alienating their fans and supporters. We know that there is a serious global problem of piracy. Consumers should not buy counterfeit copies of CDs and DVDs; too often these products are made in large numbers by organised criminal, and probably also terrorist, gangs. On the other hand, private consumers are not criminals or terrorists and the industry must stop portraying them as such. The time has come to guarantee consumers certain basic rights in the digital world, and to tell them what they can do with their digital hardware/content. This is our message in this campaign.

2/
We urge policy makers to endorse the 6 Consumers Digital Rights, and demand:

• A legal framework that will encourage new means of exposure and distribution of digital content, while guaranteeing remuneration to artists, creators and performers and providing consumers and the public with new means of access, discovery and new uses;

• A new balance between exclusive rights in the exploitation of digital content and public interest objectives in using and sharing such content, taking into account the new possibilities of content usage enabled by technical progress;

• That industry desist from legal action against P2P downloaders to allow the market to find solutions for the on-line development of audio/visual distribution that takes due account of the public interest and the interest of artists, creators and performers;

• Action to find solutions on how consumers can effectively exercise their private use rights and to guarantee that users of DRMs respect the legitimate interest of consumers in their personal autonomy and private sphere;

• Mechanisms to ensure that TPMs or DRMs, which restrict uses legally exempted from copyright or not falling under copyright, do not benefit from legal protection;

• A review of the EU legal framework on consumer protection and intellectual property in view of the 6 consumers rights demands expressed in this Declaration.

Technorati tags: NCC, BEUC, IP, innovation, DRM, Copy Rights

Copy Rights

James Governor's MonkChips — What about My Copy Rights? Towards a declaration of digital independence:

If anyone out there likes the idea of a call for Copy Rights, then let me know or blog about it or whatever. If the snowball rolls downhill then we can perhaps formalise a declaration of some kind …

I like. Plus, as was said at the inaugural meeting of ORG, we've got to find the language that will catch the imagination of the music-loving public: 'the importance of language in making an argument. Rhetoric and framing require strong simple images to fall back on'.

More about working towards A Declaration of Copy Rights at James Governor's site … towards 'a positive framework for intellectual property protection, rather than a negative complaint'.

Update — from BBC News:

A UK consumer watchdog has called for new laws to protect users' rights to use digital music and movies. The National Consumer Council (NCC) said anti-piracy efforts were eroding established rights to digital media. …

It made its comments to a parliamentary inquiry into technologies that limit what people can do with CDs, DVDs and downloaded media. In its submission to the inquiry, the NCC said many consumers were regularly running up against the restrictions record companies and film makers put on their products. The consumer group said people were finding that they could not make compilations for their own use or easily move digital copies between different devices.

In its statement to the inquiry it said the digital locks put on content were "constraining the legitimate consumer use of digital content". Also being undermined were rights established by consumer protection and data protection laws, it said. "Consumers face security risks to their equipment, limitations on their use of products, poor information when purchasing products and unfair contract terms," said Jill Johnstone, the NCC's director of policy.

She added that the group had little faith that self-regulation by media makers would protect consumer rights.

Technorati tags: DRM, Copy Rights, NCC

DRM rumbles

Plenty of reverberations set off by Lloyd's post which I wrote about yesterday. The comments to his blog took off and there's a lot there worth reading. Lloyd's post began:

I just had lunch with someone who works for a broadcaster and is wrestling with the idea of distributing content online and we both agreed that what’s missing from the whole DRM debate is a strong case for “just enough DRM".

One of the comments I found most interesting was Tom Loosemore's:

I am the ’some[one] from a broadcaster’ to whom Lloyd refers above. I’m afraid I didn’t come away with the same conclusion wrt our DRM conversation. For me DRM remains a suite of technologies delivering negative consumer value, and as such I can only view it as a a short-term irritant.

In the long term, the near-magical ability of digital tech to make and share perfect copies at near-zero marginal cost will be embraced by successful media businesses - businesses which with probably employ wholly new business models. That said, those new business models are looking decidedly thin on the ground right now. Thus, many rights holders are acting logically in demanding their content is locked up by DRM, as is perceived to be required to support current business models.

This ‘use DRM or nothing goes online’ reality leaves me with a quandary:

1) I could retire to the sidelines and wave ‘DRM is Evil’ placards. Some people I respect hugely have taken this option.

2) Or I could conclude that it is my employer’s best interests to ensure we use the least-bad DRM solution as a necessary evil. That way we’ve at least got a stake in what will be a very messy game, and millions of people will be able to enjoy online access to content which would otherwise not be available to them.

So I would restate Lloyd’s question thus:

If you’ve got to use DRM as a precondition to allowing access to content online, what’s the least-bad flavour?

The hardest questions are often the ones you hate being asked.

BTW, I say that if you still answer ‘none’ to the above, I say you’re copping out of the debate. After all, placard-waving is much easier if you can still access stuff via darknets. Most people can’t or won’t, so in effect you’re denying the majority of people any online access to content which you remain free to enjoy. …

In his second comment to Lloyd's post, Lee says :

… a debate is needed for sure. … The almost total lack of consumer knowledge about the DRM debate (ORG: where are you by the way?) is why we must not trot out classical economic fallacies like ‘the market will decide’ or ‘consumers seem happy with it’. … On the one hand, we need a reasoned debate to involve the public in the story. On the other, those trying to fight DRM in its totality need to get their act together and think about how to bring about systemic change … Maybe part of the answer lies in not calling the least-bad implementations DRM, so we can differentiate between attempts to create mechanisms that open up new distribution channels and deliver value, and Hollywood’s drive to squeeze every last drop of profit out of an unsustainable business model and retain their position of economic power and cultural hegemony.

Doc Searls blogged about Lloyd's posting here. Shelley's posting, Debate on DRM, has some of the best quality comments I've seen in a while.

Required reading is Kevin Marks' 5 short arguments against DRM; his latest on DRM is here.

The UK Parliament's All Party Internet Group has a page dedicated to its Inquiry into Digital Rights Management. David Weinberger's submission to the latter, 'Fair but Wrong', is here and his short essay, 'Copy Protection is a Crime', is here.

In an update to his post, Lloyd notes:

… no-one - and I mean no-one - responded to the main question: is there an application of DRM (or at least something that looks like DRM) out there which actually works (and the implication in there, if you didn’t get it, was that every time I’ve encountered it it does not, OK?). The only sites referred to were emusic (which doesn’t use DRM at all), AllOfMP3 (which, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t send royalties to artists) and Wippit (which I believe does use DRM, just not everywhere, or at least with a light touch). It would appear that the answer to my original question is a resounding “no” from this little survey.

Technorati tags: DRM, copyfight, ORG

What DRM argument?

I enjoy both of Lloyd Shepherd's blogs. His work blog, given that he is Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, helps me see into the world of commercial publishing and follow the developments at his paper. His most recent post calls on Chris Anderson's question, 'how much DRM is too much?'. He goes on to say:

… let’s face it: we’re going to have to have some DRM. At some level, there has to be an appropriate level of control over content to make it economically feasible for people to produce it at anything like an industrial level. And on the other side of things, it’s clear that the people who make the consumer technology that ordinary people actually use - the Microsoft's and Apples of the world - have already accepted and embraced this. The argument has already moved on.

Hang on a moment! Who's had this argument? Did I blink and miss the great national and international debates? Lloyd asks:

… what are the best implementations of DRM out there, which balance the needs of the provider and the consumer without getting in the way of either? Does such a thing exist?

Ah, if only these kinds of questions were being asked by the DRM-generating industries in frank and open discussion with their customers and artists! That there have been more narrowly conceived commercial decisions and that these arguments have 'moved on' is evident almost everywhere one looks, and, as Lloyd acknowledges fulsomely, copyfighters and those who have a vision for the net (as something other than just another 'content distribution system') have been shouting about developments for a long while now. Here, DRM is of great concern, but it's the very nature of the net that is at the heart of the matter. Some recent examples … Julian Bond (yesterday, writing about Google's plan to open an online video store):

The fly in this ointment is indeed DRM. … Amazon, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Real and now Google have all jumped the fence and landed on the other side as content intermediaries no different from the old media businesses. So now they're part of the problem not a potential solution. And sitting in the middle of all this is Intel whose close ties with all these players mean that they're more than happy to build in the hardware controls to support it.

Doc Searls (November, '05):

All the big boys: the PC makers, the chip makers, the mobile equipment providers, the "consumer experience" deliverers (including Virgin, its many holdings and the rest of the entertainment industry), the patent, copyright and IP (Intellectual Property) absolutists, the parochial national interests, and — most of all — the carriers by the grace of whose fiber and wiring the Net is made available — all want to control you: what you can do with their services and devices, what you can buy, who you can buy it from, and how you can use it. The free and open Internet, a World of Ends built on an end-to-end, peer-to-peer architecture, is slowly being privatized and nationalized, one DRM file, one blocked port, one platform silo, one walled data garden, one legislative action, one regulatory decree, one Supreme Court decision and one national cyberwall after another.

This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will [be] a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.

Rafael Behr, editor, Observer online, concluding his article 'Access Denied' (Observer, September, '05):

Not everyone is pessimistic. In fact, a lot of long-term web users are utopian about the future. All the hyperbole that was first draped around the web has proved inadequate. In the way it transforms and accelerates the communication of ideas between individuals and societies, it is about as big as the invention of the alphabet. And it is free. But for how long? The machinery of government and big business is only just beginning to understand the scale of the web. The culture of common purpose that prevails today is a product of neglect as much as design. The real gold rush has barely begun. To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field. One day, the diggers will move in.

Ours is the last generation that will remember the analogue world and feel the difference between the two realms. For the next generation of digital natives, the web will be a slick, commercial machine. It will be just as big as the world we currently live in and it will be just as ruthless and as corrupt.

I hope I am wrong. I listen to today's web gurus, the people who preach freedom, and am fired with enthusiasm for the new digital society of the future. But I fear the odds are against them. An excess of idealism only seems to prove that the golden age of the web is, in fact, right now.

And, finally, David Weinberger at the OII last November: 'This could be the bright, shiny period of the internet, of openness'.

What's missing is precisely the public debate — about DRM, about the net. (See Lee's comment to Lloyd's post: 'People don’t actually know much about DRM and therefore cannot be expected to make a reasoned judgement about its side effects'.) ORG has been created to help address this here in the UK (further links via this posting), but the challenge ahead is huge.

Meantime, DRM is developing apace and the latest news I've come across concerning it again justifies the kinds of concerns being voiced — David Berlind (writing two days ago):

I've been warning about the unprecedented levarage that the DRM patent holders will be able to apply to content distribution channels such as the telecommunication networks. Having multiple incompatible DRM schemes out there is bad enough.  All these devices that are incompatible with each other (some from the same manufacturer like Motorola)? Being forced to match devices to content sources on the basis of DRM compatibility?  It's ridiculous.  But disabling MP3? If it's true, this crosses the line …

I don't know the answers to the questions Lloyd poses, but I know what I value in the net and I know that DRM absurdities (some choice ones from the walled garden of iTunes/iPod) are undermining the very customer bases they were created to protect. In that self-inflicted damage, there lies some hope, at least.

Technorati tags: DRM, copyfight, ORG

RIAA & Russia

I missed this from ars technica last month:

… certain regions remain outside the RIAA's and IFPI's sphere of influence. One of those is Russia. A number of music download services operate out of that country, including the well-known allofmp3.com. … Now the RIAA is attempting to gain the support of the US government in its fight against the Russian music download services. A resolution passed shortly before the Senate recessed for the holidays mirrors an earlier House resolution calling for the Russian Federation to "provide adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights, or it risks losing its eligibility to participate in the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program." The GSP allows products from favored countries to be imported into the US duty-free.

In a statement, RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol hailed the resolution, which lacks the force of law: 

The U.S.-Russia relationship must be built upon a mutual understanding of shared obligations and the application of the rule of law. The effective protection of American intellectual property has been sorely lacking in Russia. This resolution is significant because it expresses the will of the U.S. Congress that Russia must take effective action against those who would steal America’s knowledge-intensive intellectual property-based goods and services. We must not enter into political arrangements with countries ill-prepared to adequately protect our greatest economic assets. 

… While it's true that Russian services such as Allofmp3.com operate without the approval of the RIAA and IFPI, the fact that they are apparently thriving should be telling the recording industry something about the market. Allofmp3.com offers consumers an almost endless array of inexpensive choices when it comes to buying music. Customers can choose their preferred file format, bit rate, and a very extensive catalog of artists and recordings, all without DRM restrictions. Imagine that ... giving consumers what they want instead of forcing low bitrates and restrictions on where and how the music can be played back. If US and Western European music stores offered the same amount of flexibility on bitrates and formats, chances are good that consumers wouldn't bother with Russian services, even if it cost a bit more.

Technorati tags: AllofMP3, AllofMP3.com, RIAA

AllofMP3.com: bursting the mould?

AllofMP3 doesn't officially support the distribution of files downloaded from its site, but one of its great attractions is that, because it leaves this decision to the end-user, no DRM is imposed. Its encoding possibilities are another excellent feature of its catering to the customer (if you don't know the site, check this page). And, of course, it has the great merit of making music buying so cheap that for the individual user it has some of the economic merits of sharing. But hang on! If I'm not sharing, but instead buying music — more music (because it's so cheap) — then there must be a business model here that the music industry should be interested in. Surely?

You would have thought so. Instead, everyone is a-buzz with the question of AllofMP3's legality (here's a current discussion at Digg), because that's how the music industry has shaped the debate. I want to look at the legal issue (it's undeniably important), but I also want to remember what AllofMP3 represents. Whatever else you might think about it, it's a very well-delivered facility for the online music lover that sells music at such a price, and with such a full quiver of DRM-free encoding choices, it must be doing a phenomenal trade.

First, the legal status. On the Russian site you can read:

All the materials in MediaServices projects are available for distribution through the Internet in accordance with license # LS-3М-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting. The user bears sole responsibility for any use and distribution of all materials received from AllofMP3.com. This responsibility is dependent on the national legislation in each user's country of residence. The Administration of AllofMP3.com does not possess information on the laws of each particular country and is not responsible for the actions of foreign users.

Museekster has an interview with AllofMP3<