Another Reason Why DRM Is Bad -- For Publishers

As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is particularly stupid. It not only doesn't work -- DRM is always broken, and DRM-less versions quickly produced -- it also makes the official versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry eventually decided to drop it. 

On Techdirt.

Submission to Consultation on Copyright: Exceptions

In my previous post about submitting a reply to the UK government consultation on copyright, I concentrated on one area, that of orphan works. That's arguably the second most-important topic that the report discusses, not least because of the huge potential liberating orphan works has. But without doubt, the most important area is that of exceptions to copyright.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Foreworld as Foretaste

I'm am currently staggering to the end of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, loving every minute of this impossible, wandering, hyperbolic, anachronistic, shaggy-dog story. So I was naturally delighted to see that he (along with a band of fellow creators) is not only working on yet another huge, outrageously-ambitious epic, The Mongoliad, but one that pushes story-telling in new directions by using technology:

Our story unfolds in weekly installments over the course of a year. We've planned out a true epic—the last great epic of the middle ages, in fact--and written a fine chunk of the tale, but much depends on you. We’re hoping you’ll ultimately interact with our artists and writers and share in the story’s creation.

When we can, we'll include extra tidbits of art, video, music and history. Those extras will be made available to premium subscribers, an excellent value--less than the price of a hardback book for a year's worth of story and mixed-media entertainment. We’ll soon be taking subscriptions for app delivery to some of the most popular mobile devices and are working hard to add more.

The user-editable Foreworld 'Pedia is the ultimate repository of all information about our world. Some of it coincides with the world you know. Some does not. We welcome your additions.

I was particularly heartened to find the following intelligent approach to DRM - or lack of it:

We put in a lot of effort on an ongoing basis to ensure that the best value our fans can get out of our stuff is by participating interactively with us and each other, and enjoying our interwoven content in context, in the way it was meant to be enjoyed. So, we think that if people take our content without our permission, their experience will be suboptimal, and given our modest prices, we think most people will be happy to pay us, thereby enabling this experiment to keep evolving. That said, the bits that can be copied and pasted and put into a torrent are still going to be fun, and people are going to end up redistributing those bits without our permission and against our wishes. However, we still don't use DRM.

The reasoning is absolutely spot-on:

The biggest reason is that DRM is futile, and we don't like to waste our time doing things that aren't going to be effective, and which are just going to annoy our legit supporters. Our concentration is on providing great experiences and great customer service to our customers, and we trust that those people who really appreciate what we are doing will become our customers. Because it's part of our ethos to be constantly producing and expanding and improving our work, the pirated content people may find elsewhere online will be static and out-of-date copies; we think that when people find this stuff it may give them a taste of what the full experience is like; hopefully, that taste will be enough that they'll want more, and in seeking out more, will become happy (and paying) customers of ours. We like that.

That is, piracy isn't a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text - again, something that pirates can't offer.

But I think this is slightly off the mark:

However, we don't believe that pirates are doing us any favors, and our not using DRM is not an invitation to cadge our stuff. Because of the way intellectual property law in this country (and most other jurisdictions) works, we are obligated to defend our copyrights, trademarks, and other IP--otherwise we lose them: if we find piracy we will try to stop it; if we find unauthorized use of our IP at commercial scale and/or commercial intent, we will come after it with vigor, because we have to.

That may be true for trademarks, but not, I think, for copyright: it's not something you have to "defend". Still, quibbles, aside, I'm looking forward to seeing what Stephenson and his fellow creators get up to here. I also hope that this new Foreworld proves something of a foretaste of future extended novels - not least in terms of dropping DRM.

As for reading it, well, I have the small matter of The Baroque Cycle to finish first: I may be gone some time...

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Shame on Ofcom, Double Shame on the BBC

Readers with good memories may recall a little kerfuffle over an Ofcom consultation to slap DRM on the BBC's HD service:

if this scheme is adopted it is highly unlikely free software projects will be able to obtain the appropriate keys, for the simple reason that they are not structured in a way that allows them to enter into the appropriate legal agreements (not least because they couldn't keep them). Of course, it will probably be pretty trivial for people to crack the encryption scheme, thus ensuring that the law-abiding free software users are penalised, while those prepared to break the law are hardly bothered at all.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The DRM of Government Policy

One area that I have been covering increasingly is that of open government. The parallels with the other opens are not immediate, but there are some suggestive similarities. Here's a great interview that has these illuminating thoughts on the subject:

if lobbyists are the spammers of policy making, then closed doors are the DRM of good policy. Obstacles to creativity, inspiration, and just sort of generally an affront to the most creative people in that field. Being open to a social network of contributors helps solve a lot of those problems, and that gets a sigh of relief from a lot of policy makers.

BTW, the rest of the interview is well-worth reading. (Via @mlsif.)

Last Chance to Save BBC from DRM

Six months ago, I wrote about a shabby attempt to slip through a major change at the BBC that would entail adding DRM to its HDTV output. Thanks in no small part of the prompt letter-writing of Computerworld UK readers, Ofcom extended the consultation period on this; subsequently, it also held meetings with the Open Rights Group, which I attended.

Despite all those representations, the BBC is still hell-bent on throwing over decades of public broadcasting and becoming in thrall to commercial interests through ineffective DRM:

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Modest Proposal: "How to Fix Capitalism"

"How to Fix Capitalism" is an insanely ambitious post that ranges over, well, just about everything concerned with business and all it touches. The following proposals give some hint of its deep wisdom:

# Abolish patents. They have not been proven to speed progress: the evidence seems to be to the contrary. They definitely increase costs, are an inefficient way of funding R & D and allow oligopolists to block competition.

# Reduce the copyright term to the optimal length suggested by research of about 15 years. It ought to be obvious that works produced in the reign of Queen Victoria should not be in copyright in the 21st century.

# Exclude works distributed with DRM from copyright to ensure that copyright works do fall into the public domain when the copyright expires.

# Reduce the copyright term on computer software to two years, and make copyright contingent on disclosing source code (so others can alter the software when it comes out of copyright).

This section also warmed the cockles of my collaborative heart:

by telling people that they are expected to be selfish, they become more selfish. Economics students become more selfish because they are repeatedly taught to expect that people are rational and selfish: the association between the two can only strengthen the effect.

Society is permeated, especially in business, politics and economics, with the idea that is people pursue their own interests, this will automatically lead to the best outcome, and that, therefore, people should be selfish. This cannot be fixed by endless incentives to align interests: life and business is too complex for that to work. A free market is not a substitute for integrity.

Just share it...

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ACTA's All-out Assault on the Internet

Michael Geist has some deeply disturbing details about what may well be in the Internet section of ACTA:

1. Baseline obligations inspired by Article 41 of the TRIPs which focuses on the enforcement of intellectual property.

2. A requirement to establish third-party liability for copyright infringement.

3. Restrictions on limitations to 3rd party liability (ie. limited safe harbour rules for ISPs). For example, in order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbour, they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content. Provisions are modeled under the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, namely Article 18.10.30. They include policies to terminate subscribers in appropriate circumstances. Notice-and-takedown, which is not currently the law in Canada nor a requirement under WIPO, would also be an ACTA requirement.

4. Anti-circumvention legislation that establishes a WIPO+ model by adopting both the WIPO Internet Treaties and the language currently found in U.S. free trade agreements that go beyond the WIPO treaty requirements. For example, the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement specifies the permitted exceptions to anti-circumvention rules. These follow the DMCA model (reverse engineering, computer testing, privacy, etc.) and do not include a fair use/fair dealing exception. Moreover, the free trade agreement clauses also include a requirement to ban the distribution of circumvention devices. The current draft does not include any obligation to ensure interoperability of DRM.

5. Rights Management provisions, also modeled on U.S. free trade treaty language.

This is nothing less than the copyright cartel's last stand against the Internet - a desperate attempt to lock down everything. As Geist observes:

it provides firm confirmation that the treaty is not a counterfeiting trade, but a copyright treaty. These provisions involve copyright policy as no reasonable definition of counterfeiting would include these kinds of provisions.

That is, the Powers-that-Be *lied* to us, as usual. We must fight this, or we will be paying the consequences for years to come.

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Marriage Made in Hell: FOI+DRM

This is not as it's supposed to be:

Secretive management at Southampton University are undermining the spirit of Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, if not necessarily contravening the letter.

Reg reader and founder of website publicwhip, Francis Irving, draws our attention to a fairly innocuous request to the University requesting details of the "total amount received by the purchase of printer credit at the University of Southampton for the academic years 2006/7, 2007/08 and 2008/09".

Hardly earth-shattering information. The author of the request, Adam Richardson, was therefore very surprised to receive back from the University – about a month later than the law suggests – a copy-protected PDF document, which requires the recipient to swear that they are indeed the person who made the FOI request before viewing the rest of the document.

...

In addition to these technological barriers, the University also adds an "Intellectual Property Rights Notice" which would appear to be a direct contravention of the law in this area. They claim to "reserve all intellectual property rights" in respect of material provided under the FOI request. The material may not be further used without the "written permission of the University".

They're claiming what? - intellectual monopolies on the facts? Talk about being true to the spirit of the law....

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Is this Cool-er than Amazon's Kindle?

Amazon's Kindle runs GNU/Linux, which is no surprise given its suitability for these kind of consumer systems. The Kindle is fast establishing itself as the leading ebook platform, so, at first blush, that might seem unalloyed good news for free software.

Sadly, though, Amazon has also proved that it is no great friend of freedom - first, by embracing DRM for its books, and secondly, by cravenly disabling the text-to-speech capability because The Authors' Guild has eighteenth-century ideas of what copyright is about.

Against that background, new entrants to the e-reader market that run GNU/Linux are particularly welcome, since they offer hope that not all ebooks will be viewed on locked-down devices.

Here's one, with the rather hubristic name of Cool-er, which has the bonus of being British (although it doesn't seem available here yet). It's too early to say how hackable it will be, and whether it will be able offer features like text-to-voice, but it's likely to be the first of many such alternatives to the Kindle, and that's got to be cool.

Update: @codepope has reminded me that the FAQ seems to suggest that the Cool-er reader isn't compatible with GNU/Linux. In fact, I checked, and this only refers to anyone benighted enough to want to use Adobe's DRM; for texts that don't have manacles, GNU/Linux works fine, I am assured.

Is RMS Entering the Fray Again?

The influence of RMS on the world of free software and beyond is, of course, immense. But sometimes his presence is more symbolic than real, as he seems to disappear off the map for weeks at a time, with little in the way of public statements or comments. Maybe this can be put down to the frequent travelling that he undertakes, as he continues tirelessly to spread the word about freedom. Whatever the reason for those intermittent silences, it's interesting to note something of a flurry of comments from him recently, and in quite surprising contexts.

The first was the on Amazon's Kindle, which I wrote about yesterday. That was about DRM, a long-standing concern of RMS. Now here's another rather unexpected intervention, this time concerning Second Life of all things, where a group of virtual users are getting some real-world grief from a bunch of lawyers:

When I read about how the heirs of the Dune fortune attacked Second Life users, my first thought was about how nasty and foolish they were being. My second thought was that the article serves its readers poorly, when it uses the vague term "intellectual property" to describe the legal issue at stake here.

The term "intellectual property" is an incoherent muddle: it lumps together various unrelated laws that do different things. (See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.) A few of those that use the term know this, and use it to to spread confusion. The rest think the term has a concrete meaning, and are just passing along their own confusion.

This is not a statement of anything new - Stallman's been pointing out how misleading the term "intellectual property" is for some time. But what's interesting is that (a) he somehow came across this rather obscure instance of the term being abused and (b) decided to post his comments.

Let's hope it's a sign of a more general engagement with these and related matters: his rigorous approach remains an important yardstick against which everyone else is measured.

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I'm Sorry, Joi, I Can't Do That

Is Joi Ito barking?

In the future according to Ito: "Every object on the Internet will have a licence and copyright information and the author and the owner attached to the object, and if it's a derivative work, where it's a derivative work of." The licence Ito has in mind will be a Creative Commons one, but there seems no reason why other classes of licence couldn't use similar mechanisms.

And, "what will happen is, once we start building it into all the tools, into your camera, into Adobe Acrobat, into Google, you don't need DRM and watermarks. As long as it's built into the HTML, most of the people who matter will follow it."

In what way will they do this? "You downloaded some music, and say, 'I want to use this in my YouTube video,' it [the software] will say, 'Bap-bap! You can't do that because the copyright says you can't.'" Which does kind of look and feel like DRM, but as Ito says, it's not, it's a way to get away from DRM.

Great: we do away with DRM and end up with an even more intrusive and repressive system of total digital control for everything on- and off-line. That's what the Creative Commons is working towards? Where's Larry Lessig when you need him?

Update: Confused of Calcutta takes these ideas further in his great post "A simple desultory philippic about copyright".

Defining the Limits of Digital Britain

“Digital Britain” sounds like one of those embarrassingly feeble attempts to make dull things trendy, like “Cool Britannia” a few years ago. Alas, that impression is not dispelled by the contents of the interim report of the same name, released yesterday. It's got lots of the right words, but doesn't really seem to have grasped what they really mean to a digital native.

On Open Enterprise blog.

DRM's Deathmarch

Nice post from Ed Felten summarising the slow but unstoppable death of DRM. Telling tidbit:

it's interesting to see traditional DRM supporters back away from it. RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol now says that the RIAA is agnostic on DRM. And DRM cheerleader Bill Rosenblatt has relaunched his "DRM Watch" blog under the new title "Copyright and Technology". The new blog's first entry: iTunes going DRM-free.

If your best friends don't even want to know you, you know you're in trouble....

Microsoft's Cunning Plan: DRM Costs More

You've got to give it to Microsoft: they really think outside the box. After all, who else would have come up with the brilliant wheeze of justifying prices that were over the odds for mobile downloads by adding that super-useful, super-popular feature of DRM?

The paid-for MSN Mobile Music service, launched in partnership with London-based VidZone Digital Media, offers tracks for £1.50, ringtones for £3 and videos for £2 from http://www.msn.co.uk

...

The prices seem steep in comparison with other paid download sites around: market leader iTunes, which will soon allow 3G iPhone users to buy songs, commonly offers single tracks for £0.79, while Amazon.co.uk goes as low as £0.59 for recently released singles. And Musically.com points out that unlike those download services, MSN Mobile tracks are not DRM-free. A message on the help section of the site reads: "When you purchase the music, you get unlimited plays for the content whilst it remains on the device. At this stage, you cannot transfer your music to another device or PC."

Sounds like a winner to me.

DRM as Freedom-Eating Infection

I've often written about DRM, and how it is antithetical to free software. But here's an interview with Amazon's CTO, which provides disturbing evidence that it actively *reduces* the amount of free software in use:

InformationWeek: Amazon is known as an open source shop. Is that still true?

Vogels: Where in the past we could say this was a pure Linux shop, now in terms of the large pieces of the e-commerce platform, we're a pure Amazon EC2 shop. There's an easier choice of different operating systems. Linux is still very popular, but, for example, Windows Server is often a requirement, especially if you need to transcode video and things that have to be delivered through Windows DRM [digital rights management], so there is a variety of operating systems available for internal developers.

Another reason to fight the spread of DRM. (Via @storming.)

The Outlook for Vista Gets Even Worse

As someone who has been following Microsoft for over 25 years, I remain staggered by the completeness of the Vista fiasco. Microsoft's constant backtracking on the phasing out of Windows XP is perhaps the most evident proof of the fact that people do not want to be forced to “upgrade” to something that has been memorably described as DRM masquerading as an operating system. But this story suggests an even greater aversion....

On Open Enterprise blog.

BBC: No Comment is Good Comment

Graham Steel has asked me what I think about this:

BBC shows including EastEnders, Heroes and Never Mind The Buzzcocks will be available to watch live online from next week, the BBC has announced.

BBC One and BBC Two will be streamed live - just as BBC Three, BBC Four, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC News are already broadcast on their channel websites.

And the answer is: nothing. I have zero to say on the subject.

And that's good, because it means that despite my deep concerns about the BBC in general, there doesn't seem to be a problem with live streaming (assuming it works on GNU/Linux like the stuff currently available.) Since there are no DRM issues here, there aren't any issues about the BBC not fully supporting free software.

Of course, they are still one or two *other* problemettes with the scheme, but at least they are platform-agnostic problemettes....

Blu-ray's DRM Pixie Dust Defeated

Why do people persist in believing that DRM can ever be effective for long?

A small group of dedicated researchers over on the Doom9 forum have successfully defeated BD+, the Blu-ray copy-protection system. This was the copy-protection mechanism that Richard Doherty, a media analyst with Envisioneering Group, claimed wouldn’t likely be broken for 10 years.

Not that any cares about Blu-ray, of course.

Maybe Erik *Will* Deliver...

I have been gently reminding Erik Huggers about his confidence that there would be a GNU/Linux version of iPlayer that included the time-limited stuff by the end of the year. Now here's the first sign that he might deliver:

Today, we are announcing that in partnership with Adobe we are building a platform-neutral download client.

Using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), we intend to make BBC iPlayer download functionality available on Mac, Linux and Windows for the first time later this year. Whatever platform you use, you'll now be able to download TV programmes from the BBC to watch later - on the train, in the garden, or wherever you like.

Given our obligations to rights-holders and the BBC Trust, these programmes are protected with DRM, but in a way that shouldn't affect your enjoyment of our programmes, whatever platform you've chosen.

I must confess the idea of using the cross-platform AIR crossed my mind too. Given the licensing constraints that the BBC operates under, this is probably the best we can hope for in the circumstances.

Now, if the BBC could please start working on getting rid of DRM when it licenses content in the future....