Selling digital media: someone else's problem
Some mis-communication of my views on Suelette Dreyfus' recent Conversation article about the effect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Internet server providers drew my attention to a false dichotomy that seems to exist in apportioning responsibility for combatting on-line copyright infringement. Dreyfus fears that the Trans-Pacific Partnership might make Internet service providers more or less completely responsible for the enforcement of copyright on-line. The proposed methods being draconian, she suggests that "the motion picture and music publishing industries should pay for and manage their own security." If Dreyfus' characterisation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is correct, I suppose there are at least a few in the media industries who hold the view that the computer industry should pay for and manage the same security. As I discovered, an attempt to explore a middle view is prone being interpreted as a view from one of the poles.
Dreyfus goes on to trot out the hoary old suggestion that media industries "simply trial new models for making money." I suppose that the media industries could point out that monitoring network traffic for commercial material and charging for it is a new model for making money. But whatever merits such a model may or may not have, insisting on a dichotomy shuts down any innovation that requires the participation of both the computer and media insdustries.
I'm reminded of an interview in the film The Corporation (2003) in which the interviewee describes corporations as "externalising machines" that will take any opportunity to transfer the costs of their activity to someone else. (Economists call such costs "externalities"). In the context of on-line copyright enforcement, the computer industry would like to sell the Internet and have the media industries provide the wares that make the Internet desirable, while the media industries would like to distribute their wares across the Internet and have the computer industry pay for upholding the law that makes this financially rewarding. Bill Rosenblatt argues that some of the problems with digital rights management systems stem from the media industry's pursuit of exactly this kind of externalising, leading the computer industry to develop the cheapest protection technology that it can get away with.
Rosenblatt may have a point, but of course funding the development of copyright protection technology is only part of the process. Even if the media industries meet all the costs of developing and managing copyright protection technology, the computer industry controls the environment in which this technology must be deployed. Whoever funds the technology itself, it won't be of any use if the computer industry can't be convinced to deploy it in the appropriate places.
Anti-DRM commentators play to this dichotomy when they claim that they respect content creators' interests, but go on to reject any attempt to protect those interests because it interferes with users' sovereignty over their computers. Extreme proposals from the media industries are the other way around. Yet playing media on a computer necessarily intermingles media and computer, and on what basis could the media become owned by the computer, or the computer owned by the media?
