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Tim O'Reilly Interview
s4 news machine writes "The UK webcaster stage4 has published a lengthy interview with Tim O'Reilly in which he talks about why DRM will fail, Macromedia Central and the rise of webservices, and that Microsoft should have been broken up."
I thought Microsoft was broken up? Or did they somehow manage to get out of it using their pecuniary might?
Bash script for FP whores
That should be http://www.stage4.co.uk/ - three Ws, not two.
Tim O'Reilly interview: Digital Rights Management is a Non-starter
First posted on 27/07/03
By mrspin
At last year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference (2002) I was lucky enough to attend a very informative talk by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Publishing) in which he spelt out his theory of watching 'alpha geeks' in order to spot future trends and how web services, open standards and always on connectivity mean that the internet is replacing the desktop operating system. Just over a year on from that talk, Tim was kind enough to answer a few of our questions here on stage4.
We are going through a major paradigm shift in terms of the distribution of music and other digital content. What is your view on the future relevance of DRM technologies, Peer2Peer networks, and traditional media companies?
In the end, I think that DRM is a non-starter, at least as currently conceived. It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers. As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services.
And it's just foolish, because we have many counter examples of free services being replaced by higher quality paid services. A good example is the ISP industry. In the late 80's, many of us in the computer industry got our email and usenet news via a cooperative dialup network called UUCP. Users agreed to have their computers call each other at specified times to exchange mail and news; it took about 3 days for a message to propagate from one end of the network to another. But as soon as Uunet, the best connected site on the usenet, started to offer higher quality commercial connectivity, the free uucpnet vanished in a matter of months. And of course, once Uunet switched to offering TCP/IP networking, the commercial internet was born.
This isn't to say that some mild access controls might not be appropriate. For example, ISPs require you to have a subscription account, and to identify yourself by logging in. But there are no cumbersome controls on what you can do after that point.
For this reason, I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce! And we're already seeing this with Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable. As soon as Apple rolls it out on Windows (or as soon as competing vendors learn the lessons Apple is teaching), we're going to see a whole new ballgame.
And as the content industries are discovering, existing copyright law is quite enough legal protection for them to put a stop to the most serious of copyright infringers. This is much the same lesson learned by software vendors.
I'm also quite clear that the question isn't whether P2P networks will spell the end of media companies. The question is whether the companies that succeed on the new medium will be upstarts or existing players. We saw this same dynamic on the web, where folks like Yahoo! and Gooogle and MSN, and even AOL despite its troubles, built substantial businesses because they learned the rules of the new medium rather than trying to force users into their old business models.
I strongly believe that publishing, as a role, is driven by the sheer math involved in millions of potential producers reaching hundreds of mi
The breakup of AT&T in the 80s was not so much of a failure as much as an imperfect success. Certainly in the long-distance markets, competition from MCI and Sprint, and since the late 90s any generic startup, brought insanely low prices for long distance calls. I would argue that it is still unknown how there can be healthy competition in the local phone access markets, although perhaps the rise of VoIP and broadband access will lead to alternatives. I guess this is obvious, but if Microsoft were not a monopoly, then one thing that might happen is Linux support for Office and Outlook. It may also lead them to provide more open format programs so that the MS OS company would want to foster more competition and better quality programs running on top of it, and the MS Office company would want to do the same on the OS side.
Haven't been to Wal-Mart lately? They sell 'em everywhere. Pretty much every modem under $40 is still a software driven winmodem. They just don't suck as much now because processors are actually fast enough to not boot you off when you scroll on webpages (brings back memories...)
See the CD Bookshelves which are in open formats but don't use DRM. That doesn't mean they're not copyrighted, though. You're expected to do the right thing but you're not forced to do it.
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Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.
Honestly, part of the problem is the browsers. A lot of the magic of Flash involves being able to connect it to the HTML page using JavaScript. Unfortunately, Mozilla (and, I believe, Opera) are either unable or unwilling to support the JS-Flash bridge that Netscape 4 and IE handle seamlessly.
Hmmm. Modded at 5, insightful? Well, even though I agree with the basic premise, that MS is effectively a monopoly, I will still disagree with your specific assertion. Let me give a little anecdotal evidence, and since I'm not giving out sensitive information, I will name names =)
In the last three years I have worked primarily for two large companies. At Raytheon's (enormous defense/aerospace contractor) Mt Laurel New Jersey facility everyone used Solaris desktops. A Windows terminal server was maintained for up to 5 simaltaneous users, but was rarely used.
At Thomson Scientific/ISI in Philadephia, Windows is required to be on employees' machines, however employees may install whatever other OS they want on the machine, although User Services will of course no longer support the machine. In my year and a half there, I never had to boot into Windows to do anything.
So while I grant you that the majority of businesses require you to tolerate Windows, you can find places where Windows is not run if you know where/how to look. I have hit 2 for 2 so far. I have not used Windows in any significant way in more than 2 years, and I am happier for it!
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Why push macromedia into opening flash when we already have a better, more capable, fully open, w3c recommended substitute?
One word: ActionScript. SVG interactivity has a long way to go before it can touch the kind of interactions Flash can have.
Warning
Unless you're the kind of person who would like to see someone else's posterior in great detail (and have related nightmares and flashbacks for years to follow), do not click on that goat link.
I was once a victim of an apparently friendly "the stuff you want is here"-type message that went straight to that site. Boy, was I glad that nobody else was in the room at the time (and wasn't I disappointed that I wasn't elsewhere too). The whole incident taught me one important lesson - look at the address before you click that link - especially on Slashdot.
Don't click on the link. Especially if you've got your girlfriend, friends and/or family around. Or if you're at work. Especially if you like your job. Don't say I didn't warn you.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
For more info on O'Reilly's far-out views on technology, be sure to catch him at the upcoming Accelerating Change Conference 2003 in September at Stanford. Other speakers will include Ray Kurzweil, John Koza, Howard Bloom, Eric Drexler, Robert Wright, and many, many others. There aren't many conferences that can manage this kind of big-picture analysis of trends in accelerating change.