A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 4 - the Future

The future of the internet is not at all clear at this time. If the publishers and some governments have their way it will become merely another set of "airwaves" to be heavily regulated, taxed and bureaucratized. If you don't believe me, you might take a look at this story from Italy about their Communications Ministry wanting any/all who upload video to the internet to get a license. Absurd! The various proposals (and implementations) of a "3 strikes" law removing access to the internet is also absurd.

In Part 1 we dealt with basic copyright laws both in place and in the works to help prop up the publishing industry as it has been for hundreds of years.

In Part 2 we dealt with how your rights as the owner of hardware or purchaser of services have been and continue to be eroded.

In Part 3 we dealt with privacy and how it is being eroded.

In this part we'll sum the series up and deal with some insights into what might happen in the future - and what you can do to forestall the erosion of your rights under copyright and the extension of intrusive behavior into your lives at every point.

Your digital life as you've come to know it, whether you're a first-grader with a game machine at home and maybe a OLPC with the wonderful Sugar desktop, a "tweenager" with your cell-phone/PDA, a Gen-Y with your laptop and cellphone, or a Gen-X just getting comfortable with such a connected world, may take a change for the worse over the next few months and years.

You've grown up with or discovered a world of connections, connections that are part of your daily life now. You share moments and thoughts and activities with people at a distance, no longer tied to the back fence or local coffee shop to have such friendly moments.

In the coming months various governments are poised to do the bidding of the publishing establishment in clamping down on the freewheeling aspects of the internet. They'll put in place trade agreements, laws and regulations that will make the recent actions of China look tame.

Here in Canada, the CRTC (Canadian Radio Television Commission) has so far taken a hands off attitude to the internet in general. This may be about to change. They're certainly getting lots of push to do so from some sectors.

The fact that the CRTC thinks it even has jurisdiction over this "New Media" is of great concern since its original mandate was more in line with regulation of a scarce resource, the radio waves, which the internet isn't. There is no limit to the "channels" on the internet - you can have one or more personally (I have several myself) and so can anyone else. In contrast there is a limit on the number of radio and TV broadcast stations in any geographic area due to the limitations of the radio spectrum allocated to it. Even that limitation is almost a non-issue with the added resources available with multi-gigahertz radio these days. Witness the fact that cell phones can handle video for any/everyone in a cell area, all watching different things.

What the heck is going on here?

What is going on is that those with money and secure jobs are lobbying to keep the money and the secure jobs. They're misusing statistics and economic information to paint a picture that governments all over the world are being told to see as looming disaster. They're using every political trick in the book to hornswaggle the public and continue buggy-whip technologies in the face of technological innovation.

The publishers

• "Rampant copying is costing us billions in lost sales" - no, rampant copying by individuals is acting in somewhat the same manner as you giving away free promotional copies of your works to radio stations or TV stations - people are purchasing music, videos and books - they're just tasting them a lot before they decide to buy. You're not losing sales to private copying so stop shouting about the amounts you're "losing". If you could really collect all those billions you claim you're owed you'd ruin the economy and the businesses of selling junk food, hot cars, chocolate bars, cell phones and every other non essential product on the market.
• "Our sales are down because of copying" - no, your sales are down because people have other things than music and videos and books to spend their money on, like cell phones and text messaging and games.
• "Only Digital Rights Management will save us from copying and piracy" - no, DRM won't save you from piracy at all - the pirates copy your DRM'd product exactly. The effects of DRM on your customers however is to annoy them enough that they look elsewhere for entertainment. On balance, DRM is not cost effective and mostly ineffective.
• "When we force the manufacturers to treat the customer as enemy all our troubles will be over" - no, the customer will do something else - they'll spend their money on things that don't annoy them or they'll find ways around your locks. They'll always be able to find artists who don't subscribe to your ways of doing things too.
• "If we control the player(s) technologies you view the content on completely, we'll be able to stop illegal copying" - maybe - but probably not. And if you do control the players (including my computer) 100% then I'll lose my fair use/fair dealing rights and I'll be upset. You must play by ALL the rules and you're not allowed to make them up as you go along. 

Publishers of all kinds, video, music, book, all are seeing their sales of their traditional products drop. Their authors, musicians and performers are finding other ways to make money from their creations - and cutting out the middle man. Customers are finding ways of avoiding the "tied sales" of albums and are purchasing only the tracks they like. 

But even if the publishers were not lobbying the government for changes, the government bureaucracy itself might still screw up your digital life on its own.

The Governments

Government bureaucracy is not benevolent to the governed (aka you and me) - it tends to be self-sustaining and ever more invasive. Recent studies have shown the amount of "red tape" involved in running a small business in Canada is sucking literally billions of dollars from the economy and providing little in compensation. The CRTC in Canada and similar bureaucracies throughout the world want to impose similar red tape burdens on those who use and create content for the internet. The managers benefit by "justifying" increased staff and budgets - and by making their jobs more secure.

• Regulation of "Canadian (aka domestic) Content" - how in heck can you regulate something like that? Canadians all over the world, not just in Canada, post information and media all the time. Those from other countries do the same. They post it to computers that are not even in their own country in many cases, and they share their content with friends as well as people they've never met. This is not like trying to enforce Canadian content on a handful of stations whose signals are picked up by Canadian cable companies. Even that model is breaking down in the face of the fully wired cable world compared to the TV antenna-on-the-roof world. Content is being brought in from different timezones, why can't it be brought in from different countries too?
  My friend David Ingram and I create a video program most Wednesday evenings, stream it live and put the archives up on YouTube (which is what I'm doing as I write this). At this point we're not making much money at it - not enough to cover costs - but we're doing it. If we had to jump through the kinds of regulatory hoops that Italy is proposing or that Canadian TV/Radio broadcasters have to jump through there's simply no way we'd even contemplate such a show.
• Imposition of content regulation including advertising % etc. I have no problem with after-the-fact regulation of such things as fraudulent claims and exploitation of children (aka kiddy porn) but these are already dealt with through existing laws. If anything, I'd say that they justify governments working more closely together across borders, or assigning the cross-border enforcement to some international body, but nothing justifies the pre-registration of any content creator on the internet above such content creation by artists in their own basements, lofts and studios. If/when someone justifies to me the licensing of a child prodigy sitting at their own piano composing the next masterpiece, then I might just consent to the licensing of the parent who took the video of this act prior to it being uploaded to YouTube, but probably not.
  The concept of Hancock Wildlife Foundation's advertising supported eagle video cameras and their subsequent "broadcast" to thousands of people throughout the world simply could not have happened under governmental control of internet broadcast.

Different ways we use and view copyright materials

The publishers think that everyone is simply copying each others' video, music and book libraries. Yes, some are - and here in Canada the fact is that copying music in such a way is currently legal - and compensated for by a "Blank Media Levy" - but this does not apply to video or books. 

The publishers look at their supposedly declining sales and cry foul. What is really happening here? They're actually looking at their so called "lost sales" figures - the "value" of the copies that people have made via use of their computers that has not put anything directly into the coffers of the publisher. The problem is these are phantom sales the publishers are counting. There is no way they represent a real market for the product the publishers are offering. What appears to be happening is that peer to peer file sharing and other copying methods are acting like the free samples used in other industries and by the music/video industry themselves when they give copies of new works to the radio stations for promotion.

The consumer is now able to generate their own free samples, sample a work, and decide whether they want to support the artist by purchasing a copy.

If this were not true then the sales of theater tickets, music, video disks and books would continue to decline when in fact we're seeing flat, if not rising sales overall. The problem from the publishers' point of view is that many of these sales are bypassing their coffers and going directly to artists. "There aught to be a law!" - and so the publishers use their size and economic might to lobby governments to enshrine the publishers' piece of the pie.

Of course the publishers no longer control the printing presses - any computer is the digital equivalent. What the publishers want to control is the keys to the locks they want to install on your computer and the internet - Digital Rights Management (DRM). It takes a bureaucracy to create and keep such keys in place and get the locks built in to your computer at the factory. A single artist can't do this, only a publisher has the incentive and resources to try and do it. That's what they're doing.

OK - now you know that much of the political rhetoric and posturing is all about money. What else did you think it was about?

What can you do about this?

The first thing is to inform your local federal politician that you're concerned about the potential restraint of technology advancement and loss of rights that may come about with the imposition of regulation and censorship on the internet in general and the imposition of laws against circumvention of Digital Rights Management where it interferes with personal use of purchased equipment and media.

Then get more education about the concerns in your particular jurisdiction.

Here in Canada you should keep up with Michael Geist's blog and at least watch this video, "Why Copyright"

You should guard yourself from being locked out of things you purchase - if this means not purchasing products that have electronic locks then so be it. Vote with your dollars. There are growing numbers of creators who are not interested in locking up their works behind DRM - patronize them and purchase from them.

If you get locked out of something - complain - loudly - to your friends and peers and the world. Tell your part of the story in public. Publicity about problems is one of the best ways of getting things changed.

What happens if you do nothing?

If nothing is done, we all lose.

We lose the right to control our own computers and media players.

We lose privacy as DRM schemes suck information about our viewing and listening habits into corporate coffers.

We lose the balance of copyright law that allows (encourages) us to create new content based on things learned from prior art.

We lose the ability to report and comment on copyright works

We may lose the ability to record things around our lives if the circumstances include something "locked" under copyright.

We may lose the ability to learn from the past or even know what happened because accounts of the happenings are locked and can't be unlocked.

We lose the public domain

Please don't let them win

richard

Tag: drm copyright music video books publishing law canada