Post Intellectual Protectionism

The future of “music technology” and the “music industry”

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

A few weeks ago I moderated a panel on DRM at a “music technology” conference. I wrote it up on the Creative Commons blog. Short version is a consensus from non-activists that music DRM is on its way out.

But what I want to complain about here is the use of “music industry” understood to mean the recording distribution industry and “music technology” understood to refer to use of the net by the same industry. Similarly, “future of music” understood to refer to the development or protection of recording distribution industry business models in the face of digital networks. Each of these gets under my skin.

My contention is that the future of music is determined by changes in music making technology and culture. The recording distribution industry has just about nothing to do with it. It seems that every new genre from ancient history to present has sprung from the latest in music making technology and cultural antecedents, and developed its essential forms before the recording distribution industry got a clue (or recently, started to sue).

I may be overstating my case, especially with regards to rock, but fuck rock stars.

If you’re interested in the actual future of music and want to look for it in an industry more narrow than “information technology”, it’s the musical instruments industry that you want.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves | 12 Comments »

Copyright is always government intervention

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Like the acknowledgement of copyright as censorship on the Google Policy Blog a few months ago, William Patry’s Copyright is always Government Intervention is too nice to pass up, though Patry is only criticizing copyright maximalists’ selective accusation of government intervention and the Google Policy Blog said that copyright is a justifiable reason for censorship.

Speaking of copyright as a tool for censorship, Techdirt points out that the Russian government is cracking down on software piracy — by dissidents.

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 5 Comments »

Copyright as censorship

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Google Public Policy Blog on Censorship as trade barrier:

Some forms of censorship are entirely justifiable: the worldwide prohibitions on child pornography and copyright infringement, for example.

Yes it is called justified here, but copyright is too seldom called censorship, regardless of how obvious that is.

Others, however, are overbroad and unwarranted. When a government blocks the entire YouTube service due to a handful of user-generated videos that violate local sensibilities –- despite our willingness to IP-block illegal videos from that country –- it affects us as a non-tariff trade barrier.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, adding classes of trade barriers simply provides an excuse for “retaliatory” protectionism. Autonomous liberalization does the most good, and I suspect that’s as true of free speech as any other area. On the other hand, this is great to the extent free speech is actually promoted, either as intended or by crowding out pro-censorship (strong copyright) from the U.S. trade negotiation agenda.

Posted in Economics, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Politics | 1 Comment »

LimeWire more popular than Firefox?

Saturday, May 5th, 2007

is supposedly installed on nearly one in five PCs. “Current installation share” for filesharing programs according to BigChampagne and PC Pitstop:

1. LimeWire (18.63%)
2. Azureus (3.43%)
3. uTorrent (3.07%)
4. BitTorrent (2.58%)
5. Opera (2.15%)
6. Ares (2.15%)
7. BitComet (1.99%)
8. eMule (1.98% )
9. BearShare (1.64%)
10. BitLord (1.38%)

It’s a little odd to include all those BitTorrent clients, given their very different nature. All but LimeWire, Ares, eMule, and BearShare are BT-only (their P2P download component — Opera is mainly a web browser, with built in BT support). Recent versions of LimeWire and Ares also support BT, so another provocative headline would be “LimeWire the most popular BitTorrent client?”

(for surveys publishing numbers in 2007) usage share for Firefox ranges from 11.69% to 14.32%. Of course usage share is very different from installation share (compare Opera installation share above at 2.15% and recent usage share between 0.58% and 0.77%) and P2P filesharing and download clients have different usage patterns, so any comparison is apples to oranges. However, if one could extrapolate from the Opera numbers for installation and usage, LimeWire is not more popular than Firefox.

LimeWire is still impressively popular. This probably is mostly due to open source being less susceptible to censorship than proprietary software (which has a half-life shortened by legal attack in the case of P2P). Still, I’d like to see LimeWire gain more recognition as an open source success story than it typically gets.

The really interesting speculation concerns how computing (and ok, what may or may not have been called Web 2.0) would have been different had P2P not been under legal threat for seven or so years. Subject for another post. We can’t go back, but I think it’s very much worth trying to get to a different version of there.

Yes, I know about significant digits. I’m just repeating what the surveys say.

Posted in Computers, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Open Source, P2P | 1 Comment »

SXSW: Blogging Where Speech Isn’t Free

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

On Blogging Where Speech Isn’t Free, moderated by Jon Lebkowsky…

Robert Faris of the showed a worldwide filtering map and a Venn diagram grouping jurisdictions according to whether they filter for political, security, or social content. Most that filter do so for all three. Filtering is very hard, so excepting a few jurisdictions that disallow net connectivity period, most attempt to induce a climate of self-censorship.

Ethan Zuckerman showed the map of press freedom and pointed out that blogging takes off in moderately repressive jurisdictions that restrict the formal press, sending journalists to the net.

Shahed Amanullah said there are many Muslims in the US who want to debate radicals on their websites but are afraid to because merely visiting those sites will catch the eye of US security. He also said that among other things we can do is to highlight the persecution of bloggers in the Muslim world.

Shava Nerad took on a number of FAQs about .

Jasmina Tesanovic mentioned the popularity of , which has a very impressive Alexa rank (1,376) considering its small and relatively poor potential audience (Serbia). The site is hosted in the Netherlands.

A questioner gave examples of the importance of expatriate media about repressive jurisdictions, which Zuckerman reiterated, using the term “” to describe expatriates and the stateless.

I completely forgot to ask a question about the overlap between filtering for political and economic protectionist (i.e., copyright) purposes.

Update 20070313: Read Zuckerman’s in-depth panel writeup.

Posted in Blogs, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Politics, SXSW | No Comments »

SXSW: Web hacks copyright

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

Sergio Villarreal and Kent Brewster gave an interesting, if mostly offtopic talk on Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666). Many web technologies started off as “hacks”, notoriously <img> and .

The rest of the presentation followed loosely from the premise that “content” is, will be (via services like Dapper) and needs to be “everywhere”, largely via feeds and now . From this came three observations:

  • JSON everywhere as an alternative to feeds
  • “IP” is a questionable concept
  • Suddenly, everything is hackable (e.g., via a service like

And three recommendations:

  • Don’t wait for pipes to drain your feed (publish JSON)
  • Don’t stop writing!
  • The web hates authors and loves writers (continue to create, as opposed to selling previous creations)

The last seems like an observation, or a repeat of the previous recommendation, but is a really nice soundbite.

The presenters struck me as being far too optimistic (or pessimistic if you want) about the impact of their technologies (Brewster is a technology evangelist for Yahoo!) — closing slide “Copyright is dead” and imagining a copyright-ignoring YouTube appearing in Kazakhstan, and having an impact.

Factoid: Brewster said Yahoo! has about two dozen full time people reviewing content flagged as porn, mostly moms, with higher than standard cubicle walls.

Posted in Blogs, Intellectual Protectionism, SXSW | No Comments »

Gratis unencumbered MP3 download is not news

Monday, February 26th, 2007

, a moderately successful band with one top 40 hit in 1997, has released their latest (2005) album as an unencumbered MP3 download with an essay explaining “why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet,” covered by Cory Doctorow, Tim O’Reilly and many others.

Big deal. In 2007 re-releasing an old album as a DRM-free gratis download with no explicit rights granted to share or remix, should not be news, unless a major label is involved.

Jamendo is my current favorite example of 2,500 reasons (albums) why this is not news, but there are thousands of others.

If you need an essay to go with your music, teleport back to 1998 or earlier (I recall reading a version of Ram Samudrala’s essay in 1995).

Update 20070227: The Harvey Danger album has been available for download since September 2005 (when Doctorow wrote about it in Boing Boing, link above). It shouldn’t have been newsworthy then either, but I’m a fool for not noticing that now it is old non-news. A commenter at Techdirt pointed this out.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves | 1 Comment »

Commercial use outrage!

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Seth Godin and those who worry about republishing of (freely licensed) bloggy material, please watch this video by Lucas Gonze.

Republishers, if they add only noise or worse (in the case of sploggers) are primarily a problem for aggregators (Amazon can be thought of one, as can search engines), not creators.

That said, if Godin really hates the idea of a republisher using the license granted by Godin, that license does allow the licensor to request the removal of attribution from derivative or collective works. If this was requested eventually one couldn’t find the commercial outrage version of Godin’s book by searching for Godin’s name on Amazon. (But I have no idea if that provision could apply in this case, am not a lawyer, generally don’t know what I’m talking about, etc.).

Posted in Blogs, Books, Creative Commons, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves | 4 Comments »

Disingenuous Rhetorical Manipulation

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

Copyright (DRM in particular) turns us into technology idots and makes us disingenuous too. Consider Leonardo Chiariglione’s reply (“A simple way to skin the DRM cat”) to Steve Jobs’ DRM bashing.

Chiariglione goes out of his way to muddy the waters by

  • Including rights expression or rights description (including Creative Commons) under the rubric of DRM. This is not what anyone, including Jobs, is talking about when they dismiss DRM.
  • Conflating standards generally and standards with security components in particular, with DRM.
  • Pretending there is a non-zero chance of any “interoperable DRM” (where we’re talking about , not mere description or expression) scheme gaining any traction.

Clue: a skinned cat is dead.

Via Slashdot.

Addendum: Some never learn, see Chiariglione’s , spawned late 1998, dead since early 2001.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves | 8 Comments »

Digital Rights Managements

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Even I have to admit Steve Jobs’ DRM-bashing letter is pretty good:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

But what’s up with DRMs?

Via Tim Lee.

Addendum: Lots of people want to sell their music DRM-free at the iTunes store.

Posted in DRM, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves | 2 Comments »

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