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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."
So when will we see /. Hacks ???
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
What would work is to LIMIT !!! their share of the MARKET as a penalty and allow competition to unfold. If you need evidence of breaking up a monopoly failures , look at the baby bells.
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
He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.
Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
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.
I can see it now....
Clippy: "I see you are trying to play that new Brittany Spears CD! Please turn to page 12 of the CD insert, 3rd paragraph down, and tell me what the 3rd word is before I'll let you play it"
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Well, I've just joined the Macromedia board of directors, so that may tell you something about the importance I place on Macromedia. It's important for Flash to become more open and more standard
Try getting to the dreamweaver exchange with opera or without flash installed on IE. Just because I bought dreamweaver doesn't mean I'm with the flash program. Seems Macromedia are going that Microsoft route trying to jam flash down my throat as a requirement for support. Macromedia seems more and more willing to play proprietary.
P.S. Dreamweaver improved much more as a cold fusion target, than any of the other languages.
... in his field of vision
From the interview:
"That being said, the net does lead to a breakdown of national boundaries and legal systems, and there's going to be some interesting adaptation over the years, as we move inexorably to a global cyberculture."
a "one ring to rule them all" OS
My guess is we have a fair number of people around here cut from the same cloth.
But then he suggests Air Guitar by Dave Hickey and Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
Maybe he was just trying to help the interview reader relate?
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Mr. O'Reilly, what do you see in the future of technical publishing? I know a lot of hackers swear by traditional "dead tree" volumes, but it also seems like your company's competitively priced electronic publishing program is off to a rearing start. Do you foresee an end to paper technical books? How do WiFi and tablets fit into the future of technology publishing?
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
It's so plainly correct.
The moment the music industry(and even Hollywood) realize that _YES_ they should provide a legitime way to gather entertaiment content from the web, but _NO_, DRM should not be a part of it(at least not in the way they intend to do it at the moment) the next step will be made.
I'm a poor student, but I *will* pay some fee(consider that it should be significantly lower than the price of a DVD for example) as long as there's no even a slightest notion of DRM protection in what I get.
Anyway, I also think that he IS right, but to conclude: NEVER gonna happen. He forgets that in his example both: corporations and consumers have had the same interest, and DRM looks like the first time when that's not the case....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
the worst thing they could do to microsoft is make it a regulated public utility. Of course that would cause so much fear in the business world we would have an even worse economy.
No, you're thinking of AT&T. Microsoft's punishment was that they weren't allowed to break the law anymore.
Not that it stopped them, unfortunately.
The guy could publish a volume on his slashdot interviews alone.
Reading that article was like going to the oracle and partaking of pure knowledge. Tim O'Reilly has the brains to shape the future. I'd vote for him for just about any public office. He has a global-centric, practical approach to business, economics and his words make a lot of sense.
I'm suprised that he's not on the Microsoft board of directors to help them see what's coming down the pike.
He mentions SETI-like applications that do not depend on a single piece of hardware, but do depend on connectivity to other devices. The idea of an Internet OS is very interesting. In a few years we won't be booting up to an os, we'll be booting up to Slashdot to get the posting fix.
Huzzah!
DRM will fail eventually, it's up to the Big vendors to get it in quickly so that anti-DRM groups won't have time to involve the consumers.
We can counter DRM by lobbying our governments, but we also deaden it's affect when we decide that we will only use software when we can:
0. look into it's workings
1. recompile it to make sure we're being shown the real code
2. alter it if we don't like what it does, and
3. distribute altered versions so that these freedoms benefit everyone, not just programmers.
We must behave as a community. We will win, but the sooner we start working on it, the less we'll have to fight.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
In my opinion, as good as (or even better than) the interview itself was an article by Tim O'Reilly that he linked to in one of his answers: Piracy is Progressive Taxation". He has some excellent insights into piracy, and makes several very good points and some interesting comparisons. One of his main points is that free services have been historically replaced by higher quality paid services (ISPs being a prime example). Well worth the read.
Sola Scriptura * Sola Gratia * Sola Fide * Solus Christus * Soli Deo Gloria
I'm interested in seeing what O'reilly can do with running Sun (and others!?) developer community sites. Imagine an MSDN or TechNet that's organized enough to find what you need on! Of course, MS would never swallow its pride and let O'reilly do that.
... Cookbook series. I'm a big fan of learning from well-developed samples. O hwell, maybe he can make Flash scripting something more fun and worth playing with.
I was also hoping to hear that there would be more in the
Seastead this.
We haven't seen them yet, but I bet pretty soon we'll see PC's for sale that can only run Windows (this will be enforced by hardware) - don't know how that will affect the music business, but I am sure this is a card that Microsoft is waiting to play at the right time to make even more money.
P.S. In one of the questions in the article it says "should of" - isn't that, like, really bad English...?
grisha.org
Stick with the PC and it will all be good in the 'hood. Help the marketplace decide by not investing in stupid-ass closed architectures.
sulli
RTFJ.
I work at a company which is extraordinarily pro-linux for a commercial enterprise; and yet all of our developers (100%) run Windows at their desk; because it's fundamentally impossible (STILL) to run a business any other way. Not even the most linux-loving among us can practically use it for his desktop O/S.
We use linux on the servers every chance we get; but there is No Reasonable Alternative To Windows On The Desktop.
Look outside the echo chamber, and Microsoft is still very much a monopoly.
There's some revisionist history happening in that article. UUNET didn't cause UUCPnet to disappear. It was around for a looooong time after UUNET got started.
I hope the content companies don't thrive online. I look forward to seeing them die off. Four years ago I thought that if they switched to something like what iTunes is now that they would make wads more cash, and music fans would be far better off. But they've done too much wrong for there to be any way out.
However, the end of the content companies will not be the end of art or music. There will always be art and music as long as people want to create and be entertained. But instead of content companies that own you the artist body and soul, they will be publicists and advertisement companies that work for you. They will also be much smaller with no monopoly power.
Artists will eventually realize that through a system like iTunes they can cut out the RIAA and take the lion's share of the price of a download themselves. Services like Kazaa will help fans who are too risk averse find out about new music for free, and a number of them will probably opt to spend the money they would once have spent on CDs on concert tickets and merchandise instead. So that too will benefit artists.
And without a cartel brainwashing the public into thinking Britney Spears is good music, there will be a lot more diversity and a lot more creativity out there. I believe that if we can beat back the RIAA and their employees in Congress there's a new cultural golden age out there waiting for us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If you offered them a vhs tape which when inserted set the clock, then their vcr wouldn't flash 12:00. Can't be done with vhs tapes, but can with software.
If script kiddies have taught us anything, it is that a bunch of technically clueless people can wield technically savvy tools.
Excuse me, are you saying that 12:00 doohickey does something?
Join the Free Software Foundation
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.
how to invest, a novice's guide
No matter what Tim O'Reilly says, ive always had a soft spot for him. In 1993 I was sitting in a train going from London to Heathrow and I was wearing a Legion of Doom T-shirt.
:)
This is 1993, so your mom wasn't on Internet yet.
This guy starts talking to me, asking me if Im involved in Internet pointing at my shirt. So I say I am, co-founder of a dutch ISP (XS4ALL) and involved with Hacktic, a dutch hacker crew. He says he's Tim O'Reilly. _THE_? Yeah..
He was quite cool to talk to, and he gave me a sendmail shirt. Later he mailed me saying his kids loved it that someone recognised their dad
Ok, enough about the good old days,
Cor
This is a good point. I remember a game in the 1980s for the Atari 800 that I cracked by changing a couple of bytes on the floppy (replaced with 6502 machine-language NOP instructions) that made it skip the copy-protection mechanism. I needed to do that so I could have a fair use floppy disk backup of the game that I purchased. I don't think copy protection will ever work. Better to try to market your product in a way that makes it hard to resist buying, like value-added features that you can only get by purchasing the product.
It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of
But it does, or else it won't keep consumer behavior in check. It is enough for one Chinese hacker or one Bulgarian hobbist to break the protection once, the networks do the rest: in the wonderful digital world we live in, once broken, forever broken, everywhere. I can't replicate a shoplifting, but I can program a code-breaking software that will break a given protection everytime.The whole point is that Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec" that will play everything again. And Joe C. Consumer will...
What would that prove? That his sales would increase? I, and I imagine most of his target customers, would just use that to preview books that otherwise we wouldn't want to risk buying and not like. Most people with the money to afford books they need prefer physical copies and don't want to be bothered using up toner/ink & paper to end up with poorly bound imitations of a professionally done volume. Look at the success of Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java & Thinking in C++, both available free on his website. I can't remember how many people I've told to go to the site to read the volumes online to see if they like them. I don't know a single person who uses the website/downloads as their primary copy and I do know other people who have purchased the published versions based on his online content.
I wish all booksellers would have content online. Even if it's just every other chapter. I'd buy a lot more books then.
I will create an add-in box that captures audio output from a PC or a DRM enabled device, and redirect it back to my pc's audio encoding system as
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
a lengthy interview
It was short to medium length. The submitter must have a short attention span. Damn kids these days.
When I was a kids we had to read "War & Peace" in 3 hours, uphill, both ways!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
...God kills a kitten.
:)
Er, no, that's not it.
Every time you buy an XBox, Microsoft loses money. They make it back on game licenses. So if you buy one, stick Linux on it, and don't buy any games, you're actually doing them (Microsoft) a disservice, as well as getting a PC at below wholesale price.
Of course, this requires a certain amount of restraint in not purchasing games.
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.
So everybody else is allowed to break the law ?
Everyone else with $40 Billion is allowed to break the law. There are standards, you know -- can't have just any old riffraff admitted to the club.
It's not at all clear which is the case in the case of XBox. Can you point to evidence showing that the direct hardware cost to Microsoft (not the equivalent retail price of white box parts!) is greater than the wholesale price?
sulli
RTFJ.