t.rolled » Copyright

Entertainment Consortium Destined to be the Next DRM Failure

johnlange — Tue, 11 May 2010 04:39:40 +0000

It seems the lessons of the past are not so easily learned. Time and time again DRM encumbered content has tried and failed to catch on with consumers. Yet, the megalomaniacs in the entertainment industry just can’t get their head around the concept that people would rather own the things they pay for.

So, according to this story on the BBC, once again they have formed a consortium to develop, yes you guessed it, yet another DRM scheme.

Here is my “bold” prediction; while they waste time arguing about how to deliver content online, the entire Internet will “solve” that problem for them in much the same way Napster “solved” online music delivery.

Can you believe it’s 2010 and the entertainment industry is just now starting to talk about how to deliver content online? Seriously?!? Where have these people been for the last 10 years?

I thought the music industry was a bunch of arrogant ignoramuses but at least in 1998 the music execs could make the excuse “hey, we’re baby boomers! We know nothing about this interweb thingy.”

No excuse for that now.

Who Owns Ideas?

johnlange — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:06:59 +0000

A recent episode of the CBC radio program “Ideas” (which is often excellent) has an interesting examination of copyright titled “Who Owns Ideas?” I strongly recommend you give it a listen even if you think you don’t care about copyright. You may be surprised at what the government has in store.

A practical example of how Bill C-61 will screw consumers

johnlange — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:53:20 +0000

Yahoo recently announced that its “Yahoo Music” service will be shutting down. Sony Connect and MSN Music have previously done the same. What all of these services have in common is that they sold DRM “protected” music. The quotes around “protected” are intentional.

This means that consumers who bought music through these online stores are now at risk of loosing all the music they purchased. After the music store’s sites are shutdown the music will no longer be playable because the music players will no longer be able to access the digital keys that unlock the music.

Consumers are relatively fortunate in these specific cases because all three of these companies are not actually going out of business but are just shutting down their music services. Consumers may actually get a refund or some other compensation. If the companies went fully out of business and shutdown consumers would be up the creek.

In Canada this currently wouldn’t be as big of a deal since we can just break the digital locks on the content and play the music. But not if Bill C-61 passes. Circumventing the locks to access content you legally purchase will be illegal. All that in a bill that Jim Prentice claims is for the benefit of consumers.

Sorry Jim, we are not buying it. DRM is bad, legally protecting it is worse.

Canada Gets its own DMCA

johnlange — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:14:53 +0000

Last week Jim Prentice finally did what he has been threatening to do since last fall, he introduced the Canadian version of the DMCA. As usual Michael Geist has been doing a good job publicizing details of the legislation and so has CBC’s Search Engine, who conducted an interview with Jim Prentice.

Poor Jim didn’t do so well appearing downright confused about the bill stating the issues are “arcane” and that the “bill is very large”. Jim, it doesn’t matter how large the bill is. If you are going to impose it on us, you better know it inside and out!

Jim also tried to dismiss the impact of the law by saying enforcement wasn’t likely because the statutory damages wouldn’t be enough of a motivating factor to sue consumers and that digital locks on content won’t impact consumers because “market forces” will prevent media companies from using them.

If this bill is such a good idea, why is the minister spending all his time downplaying its impact? Can you imagine any other anti-crime bill where the minister goes out of his way to “reassure” the public that it won’t be effective?

The fact is, once this law is passed, the “digital locks” provision of the bill ensures that Canadians will have lost all rights to their own content and devices! Just transferring a “digitally locked” CD to an iPod, or recording a TV show that has the broadcast flag set will be illegal.

The minister likes to blab on about how the law allows for time shifting, and other “user rights” provisions while conveniently ignoring the fact that if the content is digitally locked, all of those rights are irrelevant.

With some luck perhaps we will have another election before the bill passes and Prentice will be defeated.

No one likes to pay for music – or much else

johnlange — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:46:01 +0000

In a recent MacLean’s magazine opinion piece, Andrew Potter advocated that the only way to save music was to tax Internet providers. I’d like to link you to the article but the MacLean’s web site is among the worst on the net and apparently does not contain any actual content. (Update: I finally found the article online (thanks Google) here)

Anyhow, here is my reply to this kind of backward thinking…

As someone who has followed copyright issues with a great deal of interest since the government first devised the ridiculous idea that it should create taxes and hand them over to specific industries (like the blank media levy), I couldn’t help but cringe as I read the endorsement of an ISP tax.

The article simply spreads the same old dogma from the various recording industry groups and completely misses the bigger picture.

The existing recording industry built upon distribution of music on media is a business model that is dead. Because the internet is an infinetly more efficient and effective way to distribute music, any business model built on distribution can not be saved. And good riddance.

Having completely failed to adapt to new technology and distribution methods, the industry is desperate for a government bailout in the form of a tax on their competition (the internet). This just postpones the inevitable and in the interim, hands millions of dollars over to primarily American owned recording labels while penalizing perfectly legitimate activities such as burning data to CDs, or browsing the web.

In the article, Andrew chastises the National Post for not putting forth solutions stating that the “status quo must be fine.” In fact it is!

The status quo is called “capitalism”. Market forces deal nicely with unworkable business models, except when governments intervene to prop-up the broken ones as he is advocating.

In the short term nobody is disputing that artists who bet on record labels for their income are hurting. What you overlook is that the longer we prop-up the old models, the longer it will take for the new models to grab hold. And even worse, an ISP levy taxes the new models to prop-up the old, a double-disincentive!

At the invention of the television set, should we have taxed television programming to prop up radio dramas?

The industry also likes to perpetuate the myth that the death of the recording industry means the death of music. It does not. In fact, the monolithic recording industry has always existed as hindrance to the diversity of music.

Now that the industry has begun to collapse, advocates of the old system of music distribution have conveniently overlooked the explosion of small independent record labels now beginning to thrive on the Internet.

Will one of these small labels emerge as the future of music? Or perhaps Apple? It’s too early to say but one thing I can say with certainty; an ISP tax handed over to record labels is NOT a path to the future.