On the Front Lines in Las Vegas
January 6th, 2006 by Doc Searls in
In 1987, after a Spring Break week of camping and exploring in Arizona and Utah, my teenage son and I were driving down the I-15 from St. George to Las Vegas. It was dusk when the City of Sin appeared in the valley, sparkling against purple mountains in the distance.
"Wow", my son said, as the lights grew brighter. "Think of all the money people have made here." It was the perfect set-up line.
"Dude, everything you see was paid for by losers."
Almost two decades later, I'm thinking about losers again. Only this time the losers I'm worried about aren't gamblers. They're everybody. Starting with us.
I'm writing this on the eve of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, a trade event of monstrous dimensions. I enjoy coming to CES. It's always fun to see where Linux pops up and where this large and often wacky industry is going.
But this time, I'm concerned about signs that the computer industry--which at least to some degree values openness, interoperability and freedom--is turning into a category of consumer electronics, which has never been friendly to those virtues.
A few days ago I asked, "Is Intel Going Hollywood?". Of particular concern is Intel's new Viiv chip, which reportedly will allow DRM (digital rights management) at the hardware level. In Hardware Analysis, Sander Sassen describes a creepy scenario:
Intel's Viiv is the proverbial icing on the cake, a home entertainment concept adding the needed hardware support to supplement the features as found in Windows Vista. And unlike the concept platform Intel has shown us in the past, Viiv Fork will start shipping in the first quarter of 2006, quite in time for the release of Windows Vista. The combination of the two will mean that you, the end-user, will be royally screwed in every way, shape and form. That's right, once Viiv Fork and Vista ship you can forget about exercising your fair-use rights, no more converting songs to MP3, no more music downloads to and from friends and family, no more DivX movies, and the list goes on. But more disturbing is the fact that new content will only be able to playback on the new platform, there, for example, will be no (legal) Linux support or support in other operating systems. Simply because any such media player, able to playback this content, will circumvent the protection scheme that is DRM, which is illegal. Basically fair use and your rights as a consumer are out of the window when Viiv Fork and Vista arrive.
He adds:
With Viiv Intel has given the music and movie industry the tools to force the consumer to give up its rights and abide by their rules and has handed the keys to unlock the protection scheme to Microsoft. Looking at the track record of the music and movie industry and their watchdogs the RIAA and MPAA you can rest assured that when this platform is introduced they'll use any possible legal avenue to further limit how you can use their content. And more importantly they'll also make sure you pay a substantial amount of money for any use of their content that before was labeled as fair use, such as converting songs to MP3 for example.
I left out the more hyperbolic stuff. But you get the picture. Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, was not encouraging in an interview with BusinessWeek, timed precisely to coincide with both CES and Macworld, where Apple will be talking up new Intel-based gear. When asked, "Which technologies, platforms, most excite you personally?", Otellini replied:
I actually think Viiv is a world changer. Independent of the hardware as it evolves, it's DRM-agnostic, but it protects everything. It allows you to move things in a free fashion, but still maintain the desire of the content owners to get paid for what they do. It will change the business models of entertainment and theaters and Hollywood, and it will be for the benefit of consumers.
Kinda gives me the cold scuzzies.
Speaking of consumers, the Consumer Project on Technology has sent an open letter to Yahoo, asking that company--which could hardly be more Net-native--to stop siding with WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization), which is pushing a Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty. The treaty is designed to give content producers the rights and abilities to control everything that happens to "content", all the way to the playback, display and (yes) production technologies being vetted these next four days at CES.
A year earlier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a similar letter, signed by 19 leading voices in technology, starting with Mark Cuban, owner of HDNet, the Dallas Mavericks and over a half-billion dollars' worth of copyrighted video works. Other letters opposing the treaty can be found in the link pile below.
James Love wrote A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet in the Huffington Post recently. The headline says it all. But here's one excerpt, just to put you in a fighting mood:
The European Commission is also not trying to impose current European legal traditions on the rest of the world. Both the US and the EC negotiators are trying to create a brand new and untested regime of Internet regulation that they have never even attempted to adopt in their own Congress or parliaments.
Many other voices are chiming in. James Boyle, who teaches intellectual property law at the Duke Law School and is co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, recently wrote More rights are wrong for Webcasters, in which he said:
In the funhouse world that is intellectual property policy, WIPO is considering a proposal to expand the length of the right by 30 years and a US-backed initiative to apply it to webcasts as well. After all, we know that the internet is growing so slowly. Clearly what is needed is an entirely new legal monopoly, on top of copyright, so that there are even more middlemen, even deeper thickets of rights.
What is the rationale for this proposal? Parity: "If the broadcasters have the right, we should too." But wait. There was never any evidence that even broadcasters needed the right. And the capital requirements and business models of the two industries are entirely different. And the reach of the webcasts would in effect be global. And there is no evidence at all that webcasters need any kind of protection. And, and...
But to make these arguments is to be naive. WIPO is in the grip of the belief that more rights are better. Yahoo and a few other webcasting entities have very slick lobbying operations. The US representatives have, shamefully, caved in to them. To their credit, not many countries have yet accepted the need for a webcaster's right, but it is unclear if their resistance will last. The "affected industries" have loud voices.
What's especially creepy about the WIPO mess is that Yahoo is in on it. Is Intel, too? A lot of us like Apple's gear, me included--it's hard not to. But on the DRM issue, Apple is no friend of openness and freedom. Who else do we have? IBM? Dell? Hellooooo?
"Saving the Net", which I wrote two months ago, expressed similar freedom-threatening concerns about what the carriers want to do to the Net. One of the best pieces of push-back I got afterwards was from Chris Nolan, who has forgotten more about politics than most of us will ever know. She wrote:
The tech community's approach to legislative initiatives is--to be polite--inconsistent. So far, most of the talk has been a bitter, faux-knowing resignation that of course the big corporations will triumph and the poor, farsighted Geeks of the tech world will--sigh--once again be seen as kooks who are trampled by greedy corporations. And as necessary and timely as Doc Searls' call to action on this issue is right now, his attitude toward what will happen and how is based, I am sorry to say, in unrealistic thinking about how Washington operates. It is a reflection of how tech has historically fared, not a contemplation of how things have changed since 1996.
Searls calls on EFF and Larry Lessig, not on TechNet or John Doerr. He ignores the role that campaign contributions...(Shedding their civics book aversion to political reality, Doerr and TechNet have given often in recent years)...
Her point: play harder, and better, ball.
We need to borrow some muscle here. Some organizations outside of tech. Who? How about the AARP? How about the NRA? Let's think creatively here.
Let's also think about what we're saving. I believe it's two things, basically. One is the right to make and do what we want with whatever we want, respecting laws that already exist. (And without which we wouldn't have Linux.) The other is to save the environment where our freedom to produce is far more important than is our ability to consume. That environment isn't just the wide open frontier we call the Net. It's the open marketplace growing on that Net and on which countless economies depend.
Keeping markets open isn't a left vs. right issue. It's a rights vs. wrongs issue.
We need to make these issues as clear as we can. And we need to go to battle with whatever allies we can find.
I'll let you know what--and who--I find here at CES and then at Macworld next week.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal
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AMD?
On January 6th, 2006 MiguelPiresDaRosa (not verified) says:
Seems like buying AMD from now on is a reasonable choice.
Doesn't this really come down to the "Content Creators"?
On January 6th, 2006 Anonymous (not verified) says:
If I create a new song, I'm the creator - it's mine.
I can choose to keep it all to myself, considering it too wonderful to be shared by "ordinary" people. Or, I can make private copies and just spread my talent among trusted friends. Or, I can try to sell it in some exclusive fashion to trusted friends. Or, I can sell it to some music company who will protect it with this DRM technology and give me some of the money. Or, I can choose to have it offered by another music company that doesn't use the DRM technology.
The point is, if the upcoming DRM technology is as restrictive and oppresive as this article describes and it takes all the enjoyment out of purchasing music, movies, etc., then people will just stop buying the products. This will create a new market for new content creators who aren't so stingy with their creations and choose to sell their content products (new music, movies, etc.) without the hated DRM protection in order to reach a wider audience and make even MORE MONEY than the assholes who believe in screwing their customers.
Of course, this is all dependent on the continuation of free and open markets - which is something many people would also like to eliminate.
Damn straight
On January 8th, 2006 Anonymous (not verified) says:
Damn straight
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