Archive for October, 2006

The politics of DRM

October 29, 2006 at 7:29 am · Filed under Political economy of the information society, Uncategorized

The BBC has an excellent report on the digital rights dispute concerning DRM technology and user generated content. The debate revolves around the future of the internet as an open platform for all to use as a medium for creative expression, and the extent to which content owners should use technology to extend copyright control. Locking down our digital future presents both sides of an argument that probably still has a long way to play out.

Lawrence Lessig has been a long-term advocate of the right of ordinary people to adopt up-to-date digital technology to do what they’ve always done with creative content. His original book Code, and other laws of cyberspace, published in 1999, consolidated the intellectual framework for the current debate and made an appeal for a policy that balanced market imperatives with public benefit. He also practices what he preaches and this book is now being rewritten in wiki form. Check Lessig’s blog for contemporary opinion on this issue.

The Institute of Public Policy Research has a new report on intellectual property laws arguing that “When it comes to protecting the interests of copyright holders, the emphasis the music industry has put on tackling illegal distribution and not prosecuting for personal copying, is right. But it is not the music industry’s job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of Government.” The BBC reports the IPPR calls for the government to stop the content industry preventing people from legally copying CDs and DVDs they have purchased for their own use.

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Intellectual property in a digital world

October 17, 2006 at 2:51 pm · Filed under Political economy of the information society, Uncategorized

How disputes over control and access to IP are resolved over the next few years will probably shape the nature of the information society in the 21st century, as well as being a key structural influence in economic development.

There are many excellent resources on the web considering the digital IP issue. For starters try one or two of the following:

In the meantime, many big players are busy shaping the information infrastructure for us. Why should Google fork out $1.65 billion in shares for YouTube when it already had its own video sharing site Google Video? Youtube, like most video-sharing sites, makes losses, incurs large costs from storing and delivering all those videos, and has no revenues to speak of. It is also hopelessly exposed to legal action because many clips violate copyright.

However, a recent Economist report, “Two kings get together” suggests Google has its eye on the long term prize of becoming the steward of the worlds’ information. It knows that much information is in video form, and as a search company it knows how difficult it is to search and index video. The answer to this problem lies in YouTube’s approach: tagging and using social networks. Moreover, Google knows that network effects gained through buying into the communities supported by YouTube matter more than anything else on the web. The purchase of YouTube therefore invites the possibility of seeing off competitors such as Yahoo or Microsoft, while establishing such a presence in online video, that Google could strike independent deals with content owners in a way that in now happening with music. Moreover, the company would probably have the clout to see off the sort of predatory lawyers that did for Napster.

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Differing perspectives on technology

October 10, 2006 at 5:09 pm · Filed under Social informatics, Uncategorized

Nardi’s metaphors of tool and system appear relatively familiar and unproblematic, and relate reasonably well to the utopian and dystopian concepts as well as the categories of technological determinism and social determinism. However, Matt Maunder directed me to a new proposal to tag air passengers. At first sight this seems to fall under the tool or system metaphor, but clearly text or ecology will surface different perspectives.

The metaphors of text and ecology are complex and interesting. The text metaphor can have a very modern interpretation and relates well to Web 2.0 particularly its read/write/remix aspects and the growth of social software.
Andrew Chadwick has made the excellent point that technologies as ‘complex ecosystems’ have parasitical elements that contribute to their vibrance. He uses Cory Doctorow’s argument is that relatively ‘open’ technologies attract innovation, continuous improvement and development because they encourage parasitism. People pick up a technology, twist it, borrow elements from it, and hack together something different, better and newer. If technologies are relatively closed, they are resitant to this form of parasitism. Thus, it’s better for all of us to have open technologies.

Doctorow gives the example of the DVD format, which
is very tightly restricted compared with the CD. Thus, one of the
reasons we have lots of innovation around the digitization of music is
that the CD is an open format; it’s easy to extract the data, compress
it, move it, mix it, and republish it. Compare this with DVD, which has digital rights management and has not encouraged parasitism. Doctorow writes:

CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites — entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels
and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs toring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music — and on and on.

DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in abottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars’ worth often-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten yearsago: watching. You can’t put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can’t downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can’t lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.

The text version is “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites”, or listen to the podcast from the excellent IT Conversations site.

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