The End of Copyright's Social Contract

Copyright is based on a social contract. In return for a government-enforced, time-limited monopoly, artists create - the idea being that without that monopoly, it would not be worth their while to produce works because copies could be made that would undermine their value and hence the artists' livelihood.

Of course, this flies in the face of the fact that Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Bach and all the rest enjoyed no copyright in their works, and yet, demonstrably, produced rather a lot of rather good stuff.

Ah, yes, but, the content industry will retort: things are different now, etc. etc. The trouble is, we have no way of testing whether things really are different now - in other words, whether, in the absence of copyright, people would carry on creating.

Well, actually we do, because the almost universal sharing of music and other content is effectively creating a copyright-free world for digital artefacts. For recorded music, which is now overwhelmingly digital, that means what is more or less a copyright-free world. And so, following the logic of the industry, music creativity should be falling through the floor as musicians everywhere throw up their hands in despair, crying: "oh, where is my old quid pro quo?"

Given this interesting situation, it would of course be fascinating to know whether that is the case or not. That's a non-trivial piece of research for a number of reasons, but Joel Waldfogel at The Carlson School and Department of Economics, University of Minnesota has made a valiant effort to deal with the problems, and published his results [.pdf]:

In the decade since Napster, most observers have concluded that file-sharing undermines the protection that copyright affords recorded music. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’ revenue but whether the diminished appropriability will reduce the availability of new recorded works. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale experiment allowing us to check whether diminished appropriability stems the supply of new works. Using a novel dataset on the supply of new recorded music derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists, we compare post-Napster album supply to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, new song supply following the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that recent changes in appropriability have affected the quantity of new, acclaimed recorded music or new artists coming to market. We reconcile a stable flow of new works in the face of decreased demand with evidence on reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of independent labels.

Looks like the social contract can now be torn up: even without that copyright monopoly - and remember, monopolies are bad things - artists are still creating.

Now, one study is hardly definitive proof, but it's suggestive to say the least. In particular, taken together with all the other evidence that sharing really doesn't hurt the music industry overall, it provides another shiny nail for the copryight maximalists' coffin. (Via Michael Geist.)

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Sharing the Credit for Sharing

Time magazine has one of those tiresome list thingies: "10 Ideas That Will Change the World" (pretentious, moi?). To its credit, it does correctly identify one of the key ideas that is already re-shaping our world:

it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.

So, where do they think this all started?

Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us.

Well, Napster was an important moment when the idea of sharing spread to content, but it was definitely following in the footsteps of the Internet and free software, particularly the latter. When Napster arrived, RMS had been articulating the moral imperative to share for a decade and a half, and his followers had been doing it for nearly as long.

So although it's good to see the idea of sharing singled out in this way, it's sad to see poor old Richard Stallman and the free software crowd once more written out of history.

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Finally Calling Time on Piracy FUD

One of the striking features of reports purporting to estimate the “damage” caused by piracy - both of software and content - is that without exception, as far as I can tell, their numbers and methodology simply do not withstand close scrutiny.

The trouble is, when it's a question of lone voices like mine or even that of Techdirt's Mike Masnick, probably the most dogged debunker of piracy FUD, the content industries can ignore such posts, presumably in the belief that our quick analyses somehow don't count.

But that's not possible when the same points comes from a respected organisation like the Social Science research Council, “an independent, nonprofit international organization founded in 1923”, especially when they appear in a meticulously-researched 400-page report:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies: the Video

I was pleased to discover last night that the video of my talk at FSCONS last November is now available:

Glyn Moody - Keynote: Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies from FSCONS on Vimeo.

Real masochists may wish to sing along using my presentation slides:

Glyn moody: ethics of intellectual monopolies - fscons 2010

View more presentations from glynmoody

Which just goes to show that you can have too much of a good thing...

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Open Source's Kith and Kindred

One of the things that interests me is the way that the ideas underlying open source are being applied in other fields. That's something that I normally cover in my other blog, but sometimes things happen in those other domains that have ramifications back in the world of open source, and so may be of interest here.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Nokia: What's Missing from this Picture?

One of the reasons why I find the whole Nokia saga so fascinating is that the reasoning behind what is clearly a move of huge importance for many groups is not being communicated at all convincingly.

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Can Open Source Survive in a Post-PC World?

We are entering a post-PC world – or so we are told. But is that good or bad for open source?

The open source world has been fixated so long on the “Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop” that it runs the risk of failing to notice that the desktop is no longer the key platform. That's been evident for some time in the developing world, where cost and power constraints mean that big, expensive PCs are simply impractical for most people. But with the rise of smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices, many people in western countries are also ditching their desk-bound systems in favour of powerful, more pocketable ones.

On The H Open.

Berlin Declaration: More Than They Think

So the publishing dinosaurs have got together and produced an egg: The Berlin Declaration on the Future of the Digital Press.

Unfortunately, as you probably guessed, this is backward- rather than forward-looking. Try this, for example:

It is recognition of copyright which fundamentally underpins investment in editorial content. It enables publishers to make quality works available, whilst providing a framework to secure remuneration for their investment and the sustainable delivery of creative content. Providing new exceptions in this field would therefore represent a direct threat to publishers’ economic sustainability and their ability to respond adequately to digital challenges. Digitization has not reduced but increased the need for the protection of copyright.

Do you detect a sense of desperation here? The idea that there might be the teensiest rolling back of the copyright ratchet through "new exceptions"? Because, of course, the current copyright framework is working so well online, as is the increasingly deranged enforcement legislation designed to "support" it, that we shouldn't dare tinker with it. The idea that it is precisely because copyright is dysfunctional online that publishers are finding themselves in trouble obviously never entered their minds.

The next bit is fun, too:

The different possibilities to utilize content on the internet and via tablets make it very easy for third parties, like aggregators, search engines and pirate sites, to use publishing houses’ creative content for free, without authorization and remuneration of the publisher. It is thereby one of the most important tasks of copyright to draw the line between the widely permitted reference to content of third parties and the unauthorized re-use of such content, which is prohibited.

It's interesting to see the flip-side of publishers' ridiculous obsession with tablets. Alongside the hope that they will be the salvation of the industry (newsflash: they won't) there is also a fear that somehow they will make things worse (well, no, not really.) Again, this is indicative of the fact that the publishers don't really have a clue when it comes to the digital world, and over-emphasise surface details like the tablet while overlooking key trends like the arrival of digital abundance.

To be fair, there is one point in their declaration that is absolutely right:

The future of the European press strongly depends on the ability of publishers to monetize their digital editions. Therefore the EU should allow Member States to extend their reduced - including the possibility of zero % - VAT rates to the digital press.

One of the things that I learned when I went along to a roundtable discussion of the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth was that ebooks are subject to VAT, whereas physical books aren't. That's partly - but only partly - why ebooks are more expensive than you would expect.

I think the publishing industry is spot on here: VAT rates should match those for physical books, and ideally be set at zero. As for the other points of the declaration, they certainly do declare the publishers' positions, but probably not in the way that was intended.

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Copyright Bullying is in the DNA

Craig Venter is a bit tiresome at times, but indubitably clever. And to prove his cleverness (again) when he was creating artificial life, he thought he'd throw into the DNA a quotation or two:

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Rather witty, no? Sadly, the humourless Joyce Estate didn't see it that way:

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

Yeah, we really need Draconian copyright laws to protect (dead) artists from this kind of evil infringement.

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Why We Should Care about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

When I first started writing about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in 2007, practically no one had heard of it. That wasn't an accident, but a consequence of the attempt to keep the ACTA negotiations hidden behind tightly-closed doors.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Time to Break Out the Digital Quills Again...

A couple of weeks ago I posted in full the near-final version of my submission to the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth (sorry, the deadline's passed if you felt a sudden urge to follow suit...). Arguably, it was the most important review that we've had for a long time in this area, but that doesn't mean there aren't others worthy of your attention.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla Moves On

Back in August last year, I wrote the following:

we no longer live in a simple binary world of Internet Explorer as the dominant player and Firefox as the doughty but distant challenger. We are entering a new situation with three powerful players all striving to impress users with their respective strengths and capabilities, each sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a little market share.

In this sense, Mozilla has won, because this kind of healthy competition was precisely what it was trying to achieve when it launched its open source browser project over a decade ago. It has also won in the sense that Internet Explorer is now much more compliant with open Web standards, and seems unlikely to try to lock down the Internet again with its own proprietary add-ons as it did successfully during the dotcom boom. As a result, it's probably fair to say that with its relatively static market share, what we are seeing is not so much the beginning of the end for Firefox, just the end of the beginning where it was the plucky underdog able to ride an easy wave of browser rebellion.

But if this is the end of the beginning, what comes next?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Nokia's Not-so-cute Qt Move

When I was reviewing the fall-out from Nokia's decision to stake its future on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 system, I mentioned parenthetically that I thought it likely the Qt division would be sold. It turns out I was right, although Nokia has chosen to do this in an unusual way:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Moving beyond the Microsoft Monoculture

For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.

On The H Open.

More Fun with Anti-Open Source FUD

One of the oddest aspects of open source is that unlike any comparable computing field that I am aware of, it has been stalked for years by a strange, insubstantial beast going by the name of FUD. Back in 2006, I wrote a short history of the topic, but in the five years since then we've seen plenty more.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Malware at the Heart of the BBC's Decline

Anyone who has been following me on Twitter or identi.ca will have noticed that I have a bee in my bonnet - actually, make that a Beeb in my bonnet - about the BBC.

In fact, I have several - including the fact that I really want it to be the best broadcasting organisation in the world, as it once was. But my other bee/Beeb is that its journalistic standards in the few areas where I can claim some knowledge are pretty woeful.

This is seen nowhere more clearly than in its coverage of malware.

To read the reports on the BBC website (I don't watch UK television, so I've no idea what happens there, but suspect it's just as bad), you'd think that malware were some universal affliction, an unavoidable ill like death and taxes. Rarely does the BBC trouble its readers' pretty little heads with the tiresome fact that the overwhelming majority of viruses and trojans affect one operating system, and one operating system only: Microsoft Windows.

To see this, try the following experiment. Search on the BBC news site for "microsoft windows virus" or "microsoft windows trojan" or "microsoft windows malware", and you'll get a few dozen hits, not all of which refer to Microsoft malware.

But try the same searches without the words "microsoft windows", and you will get many more hits every year (try "computer malware", for example), very few of which mention that such malware is almost exclusively for Microsoft's platform.

That sin of omission has now been matched by an equally telling sin of commission. For hot on the heels of the first serious Android viruses, we have a report on BBC news spelling out the terrible facts:

More than 50 applications available via the official Android Marketplace have been found to contain a virus.

Analysis suggests that the booby-trapped apps may have been downloaded up to 200,000 times.

The malicious apps were copies of existing applications, such as games, that had been repackaged to include the virus code.

Fifty applications, can you believe it? Terrifying stuff. And downloaded no less than 200,000 times...shocking.

Of course, the fact that back in 2007

Symantec detected more than 711,912 novel threats which brings the total number of malicious [Microsoft Windows] programs that the security firm's anti-virus programs detect to 1,122,311.

as reported by the BBC in one of its rare balanced pieces on the subject, rather puts those 50 Android programs in context. Similarly, if you consider how many *billions* of times all those Windows viruses have been downloaded over the years, the 200,000 Android downloads pale into insignificance. And yet the BBC chooses not to provide any of that background information.

And it hasn't finished there. Not content with reporting on the Android virus without providing any context, the BBC article then goes on to trash - guess what? - yes, Android's open approach, via this quotation:

"This greater openness of the developer environment has been argued to foster an atmosphere of creativity," he wrote, "but as Facebook have already discovered it is also a very attractive criminal playground."

Again, the missing context is that the *closed* world of Windows has not only provided a rather larger and more attractive "criminal playground", but has caused tens of billions of dollars of economic damage every year according to one estimate. Rather more than just a playground for criminals, one might say - an entire global industry.

All-in-all, this is extraordinarily poor journalism from the BBC, and something that would never have been tolerated when it was at the height of its reputation. What's really sad is that the latest one-sided reporting of the Android viruses suggests that far from getting better, things are getting even worse in this particular area. That is truly a great loss for not just the BBC but for all of its long-time supporters (like me) who would like to see it flourish in the digital age, not shrivel into irrelevance.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Putting China on the Innovation Map

Rather patronisingly, the West has tended to regard China as little better than a copy-cat in advanced technologies, not least on the Web. That's been fuelled in part by the tendency of Chinese companies to create clones of Western Net companies without even changing the design.

But there's definitely a new wave of innovation coming through, although it's hard for those who don't read Chinese to follow this. But one example that is accessible to everyone is the site O.cn.

That's because it's a mapping site - here's Beijing - and hence highly visual, but rather different to Google Maps because it uses an axonometric projection, which makes it look a little bit like SimCity. Paradoxically, this makes it easier to grasp the lay of the land. Moreover, many individual buildings are named (in Chinese, of course), provided a handy level of detail, and you can also pull out categories like food or entertainment.

All-in-all, its an impressive site, and one that really puts Western rivals in the shade. Expect to see this happening more and more.

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Open Source by Any Other Name...

As I noted on Tuesday, the UK government has been pretty much a total disaster when it comes to using open source. Indeed, it has arguably been a total disaster when it comes to using computers of any kind, spending far more on this area than any comparable European government. Moreover, the stuff is almost always late, and rarely works properly.

On Open Enterprise blog.

True Open Standards; Open Source Next?

One of the ironies of this column, which appears in a UK title, and is about the use of open source software in large enterprises, is that the biggest UK enterprise of all - the UK government - is singularly backward when it comes to using open source.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Submission to UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth

As promised in my previous post, I include below my submission to the UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth.

Submission to Independent Review of “IP” and Growth

In this submission I will restrict my comments to two areas: software patents and digital copyright.

On Open Enterprise blog.

UK Independent Review of "IP" and Growth

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the UK's ”Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth”, which is currently soliciting submissions from interested parties. The corresponding Web site is very helpful, providing background information and an entire section that seeks to explain what exactly the review is looking for.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Economic Consequences of Piracy

I've noted elsewhere that there is a major piece of FUD being put about by content producers: that piracy causes massive damage to a country's economy. But as that post explained with regard to the BSA's claims about the harm of software piracy, here's the reality:

Reducing software piracy will not magically conjure up those hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth that the BSA invokes, or create huge numbers of new jobs: it will simply move the money around - in fact, it will send more of it outside local economies to the US, and reduce the local employment.

The basic idea is really pretty simple to understand. When people make unauthorised copies of content or software, they save money. But that doesn't mean they put it in a bank: human nature being what it is, that money is generally spent elsewhere in the local economy.

And yet despite the simplicity of this crucial idea, report after report seems to have difficulty grasping it. Here's another [.pdf], this time on film piracy, put together by UK Ipsos MediaCT and Oxford Economics for AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft). The top-line "results":

6,100 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) jobs were forgone across the entire economy (equivalent to more than six times the number of job cuts announced by Telstra in October 2010) including nearly 2,300 forgone directly by the movie industry and retailers. These impacts of piracy on employment persist as long as piracy persists.

Allowing for effects on other industries, some A$1,370m in Gross Output (Sales) was lost across the entire Australian economy.

This was equivalent to a loss of GDP of A$551m across the Australian economy – reducing national economic growth and Australia’s ability to invest in its future.

Tax losses are A$193m, representing money that government could employ for other social uses in areas such as education and healthcare.

What's sad is that the report does try to make reasonable assumptions about piracy:

We do not assume that every pirate version equates to a lost sale.

We do allow for ‘sampling’ - those who see an authorised version subsequent to the pirate version are not treated as contributing to lost revenue. In fact, we make the very cautious assumption that no lost revenue results from piracy if any authorised version is seen subsequently.

We do allow for ‘over-claim’ – we apply a ‘downweight’ to those claiming they would have paid for an authorised version (had the pirate version not been available).

But this laudable attempt at rigour is completely undermined by the fact that nowhere in the report is there any recognition that all this "lost" money does *not* disappear, but is simply channelled elsewhere in the Australian economy, where it might actually create more jobs than it would if spent on films (because of revenue outflows to the US, and the fact that local money would be spent on more labour-intensive industries like retailing or catering.) Similarly, it *does* produce tax revenue for the Australian government, just from different sources.

It would be far more conducive to producing an honest debate about the *real* effects of unauthorised copies on national economies if these key facts were included for a change; by continuing to ignore them, these misleading and one-sided reports amount to little more than industry propaganda.

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Nokiasoft: Who are the Open Source Winners and Losers?

The dust has barely settled on the announcement of the major deal between Nokia and Microsoft, weird possibilities have been and gone, and we are all still pondering the implications. One of the key concerns for readers of this blog will be: what are the effects on free software? And: who will be the open source losers - and winners? What follows is just a first sketch of what the eventual answers may be: expect them to be refined and possibly reversed as more details and reactions emerge.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Death of (Analogue) Patents

In a post last week, I wrote about the current obsession with “IP”, and noted some moves to make it more suitable for the digital age. In this post, I want to look at the other main class of “IP”, patents. Surprisingly, perhaps, I won't be talking about software patents, not least because I've written plenty on the topic. Instead, I want to consider patents on analogue - that is, purely physical - objects.

On Open Enterprise blog.

AllJoyn Open Source

One of the sure signs that open source has entered the mainstream is when companies not normally associated with this approach starting getting involved. A case in point is Qualcomm, not someone that I've come across in this area before apart from this kind of half-hearted toe-dipping (but maybe I missed earlier work: anyone know of anything previously?) Here's a very interesting project they are supporting:

On Open Enterprise blog.