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September 25, 2004
Content is King/Content in Chains
This week brought a bumper selection of articles clustered at the intersection between Digital Rights Management, the plight of the major record labels, and Microsoft's strategy for owning the digital media space. Two pessimistic, one mildly optimistic.
- Writing in LA Weekly, Alec Hanley Bemis sketches a possible outline of A Small New Future:
[...] With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that 1999 is the year that set the stage for the changes in the biz. 1999 was the year Goldenvoice founded Coachella and the year British concert promoters Barry Hogan and Helen Cottage inaugurated All Tomorrow’s Parties as an alternative to corporate music events like the Sprite Liquid Mix tour, the Vans Warped tour and, yes, various Tommy Hilfiger productions. It was the year the RIAA invented the Diamond, a term for albums that sell over 10 million copies. And 1999 was Year Zero for the file-sharing phenomenon, otherwise known as the birth of Napster.
These are snapshots anyone might note when reviewing that year in music. Together, they form a larger picture. The Diamond offers a window into the corporate record industry’s hubristic faith in endless growth. All Tomorrow’s Parties was an early indicator of the underground’s more modest vision of music as a curatorial exercise. And Napster was the catalyst with the power to set corporate America’s overzealous hopes and indie rock’s half-baked dreams on the odd collision course playing out today. [...]
- David Weinberger recounts a talk he delivered to a group of entertainment and media industry executives at a World Economic Forum meeting in New York last week:
Weinberger's conclusion is deeply depressing: "These are smart people and I liked talking with them. They were willing to listen. Some, in fact, even agree to varying degrees. But they are riding beasts that are in agony, and the Internet will be a sticky stain on the bottom of their massive hooves."[...] The conversation doesn't lend itself to detailed retelling. But it sure was fascinating for me. I came away with four overall impressions:
First, these people are thrashing. They're floundering. They're desperate to find a way in which their organizations still add value. They are in denial but, it seemed to me, they know that there's just about nothing that the market wants from them. For example, at one point someone said, "Content is king." I replied that judging from the content they're producing, marketing is king; that's where their real value is. Further, I said, on the Internet, connection is king. But then they want to know how to "monetize" connection. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as you understand how monetizing it can kill it. The most convincing case I heard for real value was that only Hollywood can afford to make blockbusters. But beyond that...? [...]
- Looking at the problem from the hardware end, Robert X Cringely follows up an earlier column about Microsoft's attempt to bend the specification of next generation of USB devices to meet their needs with an explanation of why it's not enough to comfort yourself with the thought that some clever Linux programmer will find a way to defeat Microsoft's little tricks:
And yes, I know Microsoft aren't the only ones trying to push DRM-enabled media files. But they're the company most likely to engineer a situation where it's almost impossible to view digital mass media unless you're using their software. (In case you're wondering why consumers should care so long as they can play their music and video if they buy 'industry standard' hardware and software, it's worth keeping in mind that apart from anything else Microsoft simply don't write very reliable software. They've even turned the old "If you open this image you'll break your computer" joke into a reality. Do we really want to trust these folks with the future of digital media?)[...] So what if it takes a weekend to reverse engineer the spec and get those new USB ports running on your Linux box? Well, reverse engineering isn't what it used to be, and this USB gambit is only part of a far grander plan. Yes, a clever programmer or two could probably crack the voodoo inside Microsoft's new USB in no time at all, but doing so would be in violation of the anti-circumvent clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which effectively prohibits reverse engineering "security" features. So the guy who wrote to me from Brazil has nothing to worry about, but any American who either accomplishes the circumvention OR MAKES USE OF IT "shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense."
If that sounds both draconian and stupid, well, it is. Probably the best response the little guys and gals of Open Source could come up with is to violate en masse and thereby attempt to take down the DMCA as unenforceable. It's a great idea, though I'm pretty sure I'll be sleeping in that day and will probably miss the event, myself. The downside of such civil disobedience is that there is no specified minimum penalty, so if Microsoft could come up with the names and addresses of a million violators (don't think for a moment they don't have that kind of data-gathering capability) and asked the court to fine each of us $1,000, well, we'd be screwed, and Microsoft would be $1 billion richer.
But all this fails to look at the big picture from Microsoft's perspective. [...]
[LA Weekly article via MetaFilter, David Weinberger post via Dan Gillmor]
Posted by John at September 25, 2004 11:32 PM
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