An opportunity to test a theory of copyright infringement
The Australian this week reported that Village Roadshow would "distribute all major films before, simultaneously or close to the US release" in Australia in an attempt to eliminate copyright infringement attributed to delayed releases of films (Wait times slashed to beat film pirates, 24 September 2014, p. 3). For a moment it was almost like Village Roadshow had read my thoughts on proving claims of greed and gluttony in digital media. Village Roadshow's Graham Burke, however, gives a more likely explanation that the move was prompted by widespread piracy of The Lego Movie, which earned special notoriety for its delayed Australian release despite its being animated in the same country. The ABC adopted a similar strategy for the most recent series of Dr. Who, so that patience-challenged fans could watch the first episode at the same time as BBC watchers in the UK even though this was an absurd time of the morning in Australia and the same episode could be had for free on the same evening at its ordinary time.
Village Roadshow's and the ABC's moves suggest some success for a "civil disobedience" defence of copyright infringement, by which infringers justify their actions as a protest against unreasonable terms being offered by the distributors.
Of course the success of a protest campaign doesn't, in and of itself, prove that the protestors are right. However, the original reason for delayed cinema releases given in The Australian — re-use of physical film reels shipped from the US — is no longer relevant and I'm not aware of any other reason to delay releases. (The Australian makes a vague reference to other reasons including "allowing time for heat from the US to spread" but I don't know why whatever is meant by "heat" should be generated in the US any better than anywhere else.)
So critics of delayed releases have got their wish, at least from Village Roadshow and the ABC. We can now wonder what affect these moves will have on the level of copyright infringement. If infringers' main reason for infringing really is to combat delayed releases, as some commentators claim, we can expect infringement to taper off. Probably not to zero; copyright infringement happens even in the US itself, which infringement apologists seem to take as the gold standard of release dates and pricing. But here we have an opportunity to see whether or not Australians really are willing to pay for digital media when it is released alongside the US.
What if the future of computing power is finite?
In the Soapbox column of the July 2014 issue of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, Craig Hillman suggests "it is thought-provoking to speculate on how the electronics industry will eventually take the form of the automotive industry, a market based on a relatively stagnant technology. Because it will." (Leave No Technology Behind, p. 30). This was prompted by a blog post from Zvi Or-Bach proclaiming the end of Moore's law with an argument that the cost of manufacturing transistors ceased to drop once feature sizes hit 28nm.
That electronics and computer systems will ever reach a plateau from which we can't expect amazing advances in power and price from year to year, I thought, is surely some sort of heresy. Yet physics tells us that there is a lower limit to the physical size of an electronic circuit (the size of a charge carrier), and CPU clock speeds have already plateaued for a decade or so.
I suppose that technological optimists might argue — or at least confidently assert — that we'll find ways around these apparent limits, just as free market economists argue that the market will provide solutions to other apparent limits without any need for said economists to understand or provide any actual solutions. CPU clock speeds may have plateaued, the optimist might say, but multi-core technology allowed computing power to continue to increase.
To which a pessimist might say: none of cars nor aeroplanes nor ships increased infinitely in speed and capacity, so why should electronics be any different? No one doubts that electronics technology is rapidly increasing in power at the present moment — but so did cars and aeroplanes in the first half of the twentieth century, yet they now travel at much the same speed and carry much the same number of people as they did when I was child thirty years ago.
Any end of increases in computing power might seem depressing or unthinkable for those captured by the bigger-better-faster vision. I happened to read just today that "industry experts agree that fifth-generation (5G) cellular technology needs to arrive by the end of this decade" in the September 2014 issue of IEEE Spectrum (Mobile's Millimeter-Wave Makeover, p. 32) — but what happens to such alleged "needs" if and when computer technology reaches the plateau that Hillman and Or-Bach foresee?
The relatively static state of the internal combustion engine and its accoutrements doesn't seem to prevent millions of car enthusiasts slavering over stuff like Top Gear. Mechanical engineers still have employment and many in Australia are bitterly disappointed about the imminent departure of our car factories (not because we don't care about cars anymore, but because it's cheaper to import them from elsewhere). Maybe one day computer enthusiasts and engineers will likewise have to learn to live with a boring old industry.
On fighting discrimination with secrecy
Mark Rix opens a recent Conversation article on Australia's proposed metadata retention laws with a couple of paragraphs asserting that "privacy and individuals' ability to remain anonymous are important protections against persecution, bullying, intimidation and retaliation." As I understand it, the idea here is that privacy and anonymity provide a kind of first line of defence against unfair discrimination by depriving would-be discriminators of the knowledge on which their discrimination is based. Such an approach seems superficially appealling, and I'm sure I've used it myself when don't-ask don't-tell seems like the easiest way of avoiding an unpleasant confrontation.
When I think it through more carefully, however, I see a number of problems with this view. For a start, there are many situations in which it seems hopelessly impractical: is anyone likely to suggest, for example, that we defeat racial discrimination by donning ninja costumes or applying make-up that obscures the colour of our skin?
Supposing that secrecy is feasible, however, is hiding beneath it really the ideal outcome in the long run? Many years ago, I read a newspaper article (whose citation I sadly forget) making the point that many of our modern freedoms have been won by people who stood up against being driven underground. Would homosexuality, say, be as widely accepted as it is in liberal democracies today if the homosexuals of yesteryear had simply remained out of sight? I'm sure it wasn't easy for those people who did speak out — but the secrecy solution would have them even now cowering in anonymity instead of finding social acceptance.
Words like "discrimination" and others used in Rix's assertion are often used in a pejorative sense to refer to unjust discrimination on the basis of race, gender, etc., but a broader interpretation shows that secrecy in fact cuts both ways. Law enforcement agencies want access to metadata among other things precisely because our law "discriminates" against drugs, violence, money laundering and other activities deemed harmful by lawmakers and the people who vote for them. To law enforcement agencies, secrecy is just an impediment to carrying out the discrimination delineated by the law. The real question is not whether or not to discriminate, but what ought to be discriminated against.
The main reason that I don't feel threatened by my government or anyone else isn't that I'm secure in the knowledge that the police can never find me — they probably can — it's that I'm fortunate enough to live in a country that respects a broad range of views amongst its citizens, and will punish anyone who refuses to respect them likewise. If the government decides to start rounding up computer scientists, mediaeval re-enactors, or bearded men, well, I'll have a problem — not because I don't have a ninja costume and batcave in which to hide, but because my government has ceased to respect my personal choices. And if the government ever decided to do such a thing, would I be best served by going into hiding, or by standing up for my choices?
Responses to the history of copyright protection technology, part 2
Two of the more interesting comments on my recent history of copyright protection technology, one from Fred Smith on The Conversation and another from "Graham" on Technology Spectator, refer to copyright protection technologies in the computer software industry. Copyright protection for computer software does not seem to attract nearly so much attention as it does for music and video, and seemed to be an entirely separate stream of research and development when I worked in the area. But there may nonetheless be something here to learn.
Fred Smith says that "the digital distribution platforms [specifically, Steam] have introduced DRM in such a way as to make piracy harder than legitimately buying games (which is how it should be)". Not being a gamer, I haven't tried these platforms myself. Smith, however, seems to think these systems are working fairly well, and his description of Steam sounds something like what rights management researchers were trying to achieve for music and video between 2000-2010.
I can see at least two advantages that the developers of Steam might have had compared to the developers of earlier rights management systems. Most obviously, they've been able to learn from the experience of those researchers of the past decade; if so, I suppose we can feel some pride that our efforts finally amounted to a working system.
The second advantage, illustrated by Graham's comment, is that the developers of computer software are responsible for both the product and its protection. This eliminates cost-shifting between content providers and technology providers, which is arguably one of the contributors to the poor state of rights management technology for media products.
I suppose that Graham and others who argue that media providers should bear the full cost of copyright protection imagine a similar circumstance coming into being for the media industry. However, arranging this might not be so straightforward as it is in the case for computer software since media companies don't manufacture player devices.
One solution I've heard would be for the computer industry to simply buy out the music industry (I think Andrew Odlyzko mentioned it at the ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management 2007, for one). Proponents of this idea say that the computer industry is big enough to do this, though it's not clear that it could also buy out the film industry. But do we really want music and film to be controlled by companies whose core business is to make and sell computers? In any case, I'm not aware of any computer company wanting to do this, and the nearest approximation to it of which I'm aware — Nokia's Comes with Music — appears to have been a failure.
Some rights management consortia do include both technology and media companies. The consortium behind Ultraviolet, which was one of the more promising-sounding technologies in my review, is an example. I don't know what financial arrangements these consortia have, and I don't yet know how successful they might be. But it seems reasonable to hope that more might be achieved by co-operation than by having computer companies in one trench, music companies in another, each insisting that the other make our computers fit for entertainment.
Responses to the history of copyright protection technology, part 1
I published my first Conversation article last week, giving a brief history of copyright protection technology and its deficiencies. Thanks to my editor at The Conversation and Victoria University's Public Affairs Department, the article also appeared in Technology Spectator, Mumbrella, Phys.org and SBS.
I wrote the article in response to what I saw as some incompletely-thought-out criticism of the Australian Government's recent Online Copyright Infringement Discussion Paper. The paper floats the idea of giving Internet service providers a legal incentive to assist with the enforcement of copyright. Critics of this notion typically insist that the media industry should do its own policing — but, in previous rounds of the debate, copyright activists cried foul at attempts to restrict or sue individual users. So what to do?
The comments on the article fall into four broad categories. Firstly, there are the re-statements of classic anti-DRM anti-copyright positions that don't address any specific point in the article. I won't address them here any more than they addressed anything I said there.
Secondly, there are those who insist that the solution is new business models or lower prices. The discussion paper itself recognises that pricing may have an influence on the level of copyright infringement in Australia, though I think I could just as easily have written a history detailing the failure of new business models to produce any change. Whatever the case, all this does not actually answer the question of how best to enforce copyright law, and no business model or price point seems likely to work without a law that gives creators something to sell.
Thirdly, there are those who insist that ISPs should have no role in enforcing copyright law. This is exactly the view that I set out to examine, and I think the comments illustrate why. Critics of the discussion paper seem certain that any regime will be funded by ISPs, who will pass on the costs to their customers. But the discussion paper says no such thing; its second question actually asks "How should the costs of any 'reasonable steps' be shared between industry participants?". In constructing a false dichotomy in responsibility for the enforcement of copyright law, critics are blind to any solution in which the media industry funds technology or otherwise collaborates with the computer industry, both of whom have an interest in having good stuff to do with our computers.
Lastly, there are a few who interpreted the article as demonstrating that copyright protection technology is futile. While I guess they don't appreciate it, this group actually supports the article's thesis insofar as governments came to involve Internet service providers precisely because everyone rejected previous copyright protection technologies.
Reading government reports like the discussion paper in question, I sometimes reflect that their authors seem to be quite a bit more thoughtful and better-informed than their critics give them credit for. For critics with little knowledge of history and an interest only in consuming media as cheaply as possible, I guess it seems "obvious" that the media industry is the only party with an interest in enforcing copyright law and the authors of government reports are stupid for not seeing it. Of course the media industry is a lobby group trying to push its own interests — but so are critics who are only interested in how they can get cheap entertainment. A good government report knows this, and poses questions that lobby groups don't ask because they've already assumed the answer.
