Not quite free
I noticed that both Wikipedia and Firefox have been asking for donations recently. They're welcome to do this, but I couldn't help wonder if a few curmudgeons might be thinking: I told you so. Having wowed folks like Chris Anderson with their part in destroying any incentive for people to pay for encyclopaedias and web browsers, they've now discovered that they do, in fact, need money to provide the services that they do.
In The Logic of Collective Action (1971), Mancur Olson observes that most citizens say that tax-supported services are a good thing, and yet no government ever got by on donations. Had he been writing today, he might have said the same about encyclopaedias and web browsers. The problem for governments is that, without compulsory taxation, individual citizens are far too tempted to leave the paying to someone else.
Of course I noticed this because I myself launched Firefox and visited Wikipedia. It's hard not to when Wikipedia enjoys special billing on both Bing and Google, and, while I bought Opera once upon a time, I now couldn't buy a web browser even if I wanted to. (Of course I could donate to Firefox but why would I while Opera and Chrome aren't even asking for donations, and all three of them seem to have become clones these days?)
Both Wikipedia and Mozilla make pleas that illustrate the depths of their users' unwillingness to pay. According to Wikipedia, "if everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour". Put another way, Wikipedia has been reduced to this sort of begging by users' unwillingness to pay even a measly $3 for access to an encyclopaedia. But who led them to expect that the price of an encyclopaedia is $0?
Chris Anderson and others correctly observe that the marginal cost of electronic goods like web sites and software is very low, perhaps even "too cheap to meter" in the sense that setting up a metering and payment infrastructure for it might cost more than the good itself. But it isn't zero, and the fixed costs can be very high. "Free" can therefore only ever be part of a financially viable strategy for producing such goods.
What Wikipedia, Mozilla and others have achieved for very little money is nonetheless impressive in many respects. What we don't know is: how much more could have been achieved had some more funding been available? And how could such funding ever be raised while everyone expects these services to be provided free of charge?
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.
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.
Proving claims of greed and gluttony in digital media
ABC Arts recently produced a short documentary The Golden Age of Piracy examining illegal downloads of films and television programmes Australia. As I've seen on The Conversation and elsewhere, those seeking to explain or defend copyright infringement in Australia emphasise the high prices and late releases of film and television programmes in Australia compared to the rest of the world.
Of course there's not much for film-goers to like about high prices and late releases, and those who think prices are too high or releases too late are free to express this opinion. In resorting to copyright infringement to cure this perceived ill, however, I wondered if the infringers and their apologists might actually be undermining the complainants' campaign for lower prices and earlier releases.
In resorting copyright infringement to satisfy their desires, infringers allow copyright owners to make a plausible claim that copyright owners are suffering from the lawlessness of copyright users, to which the logical remedy is to enforce the law. In order to prove that the real problem is unreasonable pricing and poor service, the complainants need to both refuse to pay the price and refuse to take the product, just as they would if they believed that the price of a cake, say, was too high, and the cake stale.
I suppose that infringement apologists could also challenge copyright owners to lower their prices. Critics of copyright enforcement assert that such an action would stop or at least significantly reduce infringement, as Mark Pesce does in another recent ABC article. If infringement were to continue under these conditions, therefore, copyright owners could disprove the apologists' case (except insofar as apologists could simply insist on even lower prices — but establishing such a moving target would render their claim unprovable).
I'm not holding my breath for either side to take up such a challenge. For their part, the media industry seems content to back its claims with absurd exaggerations of how much revenue is lost to infringement. Meanwhile, infringement apologists seem content to assert their claim without any evidence whatsoever. (Mark Pesce even goes so far as to cite a study arguing that infringement does reduce cinema revenues, just not enough for Pesce to care about.) And even if a few brave infringers gave up downloading in order to prove their point, could they convince other infringers to do the same?
Jane C. Ginsburg identified the problem in a single word: greed. Neither side wants a functioning market by which they might come to a reasonable price for the exchange of artistics works. Each side instead wants a system in which it can dictate prices to the other side, thereby accumulating all of the benefits to itself at everyone else's expense.
