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Sony CEO Proposes "Guardrails For the Internet"
testadicazzo writes "Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: 'Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
This is the equivalent of a shock statement followed by "Now that I have your attention ..." and is only appropriate when trying to address an auditorium full of teenagers.
I respect you no more than I would respect someone saying
The entire world is burning. Everyone is going to die soon. Period.
Now that I have your attention, I would like to discuss the occasional forest fires that threaten many homes in my state.
Piracy is a problem but it's your problem, not mine. And it's not on the scale you make of it. I am in no way a party to it so I don't want to hear you bashing the greatest communications tool to date nor do I want to hear suggestions of curbing the freedom I enjoy daily on said communications tool.
... yeah, I think we've been down this road.
You had to pack up your home DVD stores in South Korea? Do you think that your supposed "guard rails" will be readily implemented world wide and embraced? I'm sorry, go ahead and sue the whole country or pressure the government to crack down on it or stop releasing Korean dubbed movies or--horrors of all horrors--lower your prices to something people are willing to pay? You effectively prevent me from owning any of your DVDs when the technology to digitally duplicate them is readily available and dirt cheap. That's your choice and you're free to opt for that.
Your comparison to the Interstate Highway System is laughable. Please, do me one favor. In the future, when you draw comparisons of physical theft and huge undertakings like the Interstate Highway System to file sharing and "the Internet" do not confuse physical materials with information! There are major differences--for example: information can be freely replicated with no transfer of resources between the two parties involved! You draw a poor analogy and then *wave of the hands* we need protections like this. What "guard rails" do you suggest for the internet? I mean specifically, what do you have in mind? Have you thought this out at all? I'm sure you don't know but your engineers could suggest a small program from Sony that every internet user has to install on their computer to access the internet that has access to kernel space and
My work here is dung.
Isn't this the company that is losing billions of dollars, that is notorious for cheating their customers, installing rootkits, running their MMORPG's in an unethical manner? This is a company that for 15 years has been living off their name and the fact that it used to make rock solid quality products.
Yeah, I as a consumer SO need to be lectured on ethics by a stuffed shirt from Sony.
Corporatism != Free Market
[...] if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
Except on a web page it never need be "beyond store hours!"
I legally buy my Torchwood episodes off iTunes (despite the repugnant DRM) because it is available and the right thing to do. I cannot buy (AFAICT) old Dr. Who episodes (William Hartnell era), so I torrent them. If the BBC doesn't like it, put 'em on iTunes and I'll pay for 'em!
In the very clever book "Virus of the Mind", the author defines an "association meme" as a social idea about how one thing goes with another. Examples of association memes include: "Cereal is for breakfast", "Muffins are for breakfast", and "Chocolate cake is not for breakfast". Merchants wishing to sell chocolate cake for breakfast (including Starbucks) must work within these memes, which is why they bake their product into a muffin shape. Quite a clever little manipulation.
Turning now to the summary:
To extend "Virus of the Mind"'s ideas, guardrails are an association meme. We associate them with benevolence, with keeping us safe, and with an obvious danger. Lynton is invoking that meme, muffin style, to manipulate us into accepting something we otherwise would reject. The chocolate cake he is selling for breakfast should properly invoke the meme of a school principle, but if it did, nobody would accept it.
I will contribute a dollar to any charity raising money to put Lynton onto a ship and dump him onto a deserted island, never to return. Let's see how he, a professional influencer who, in influencing the movements of billions of dollars, has never produced so much as a grain of wheat, fares alone.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Sure? Why not buy a sony walkman 4 gig MP3 player. 40 hrs of high quality audio, ripped from your own personal CD collection of course *wink*.
Actually, buy a Sansa Clip or something. Better quality for the price. My point is that it's not like Sony isn't profiting off of piracy.
The guy does have a point.
However, I have seen precious little from the entertainment business to meet this demand. Shopping for music online has become somewhat better, with reasonable prices, good selection and less DRM. But online movies? There's few choices there, if any. And the focus is still very much on DRM and/or streaming (the Pay-per-view model that they love so much), as evidenced by recently emerged standards such as HDMI and Bluray.
Many consumers are willing to pay for content. Especially if they get a better product by paying: encoding and compression rate to order, and no DRM. I want to select the quality, easily download the file, and then be able to play it on any of my PCs, my iPhone, and on my TV using a media streaming device. Guess what? Pirates are offering the better product, as things stand today. AllofMP3 let me select encoding and compression, and movies are generally available in various levels of quality, if you take the time to look for them. The movies provided by pirates can be played anywhere, anytime. Pirated movie downloads offer more convenience even than physical Blurays; perhaps Michael should start to understand why that is, and think about ways to offer a competitive product.
My advice: open an online store for movies, offer various download types (for starters: DVD, 720p and 1080p HD, perhaps also lowres files for PSP or iPhone), encode in formats that are generally accepted as the standard (just use what the pirates use), do not require any special players or software (so that the files can be viewed on any device), and do not add any DRM.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I just don't buy that the CEO of Sony has altruistic motives for protecting artists. This is all about the losses that continually climb from their Entertainment branches due to box office flops. They need a place to put blame, and since piracy is the big boogey man in the closet, it's become the reason for falling earnings.
Yes, we did. Yes, we got used to instant delivery of digital content to our PCs. We got used to being able to use the content to display on multi purpose machines (like, say, PCs) instead of having to buy a few dozen different boxes to achive the same results. We got used to ease of storage, being able to put hundreds if not thousands of songs, movies, books and other content on a single hard drive, taking up the room a single book or two CDs in jewel cases would.
Now some bozo comes in and says you can't have that. My only response is "why?". Why not? Because you don't want me to have it? You can't always get what you want, I, for one, would want people to have a clue before they're allowed to open their mouth.
But then we wouldn't ever have heard that gem from the Sony CEO. Which would be a shame. I dare say it has the potential to become about as powerful as the 'internet tubes' meme.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Based on what Sony has shipped in the past (e.g., CD rootkit), Sony's business model is to attach a ball-and-chain to every product after it is purchased and before it goes out the door, and the ball-and-chain has a monitoring camera attached that will turn on a siren and flashing red light if it thinks the user is doing something with the product that they shouldn't, or if you merely tilt the product the wrong way.
"Guardrails" aren't what this guy wants. He wants shackles.
Here's a free clue: legitimate purchasers of your product don't want to be unnecessarily restricted in the use of that product. Stop treating consumers like they are all criminals.
With that kind of inconsiderate treatment at a store front, the honest consumers will step in the door, take what they want, and toss the money behind them as they leave. You'll get your money from the honest ones, but the moment a store opens with a better experience your customers will leave to buy elsewhere. They'll also recommend "anything but that store" for equivalent prices and features.
"Anything but Sony" has certainly been my recommendation ever since the rootkit fiasco (it's not solely based on that, but the long-term pattern of always favoring Sony lock-in schemes over generic ones and always having over-the-top DRM schemes on hardware and media). If I'm not the only one doing that, perhaps this could have something to do with Sony's long-term financials?
More that I've been out of the consumer loop a while; I lived frugally and worked less for a couple of years so choosing which greedy corporation to buy electronics and media from.
Having a bit more money is a burden in many ways; so many of the things I end up spending it on are from corporations so overtly nasty they make me feel dirty associating with them.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
If one, for the sake of discussion, were to accept the bad analogies in this message: don't forget that Sony are the ones who shipped CDs with that caused "severe tire damage" to people who didn't even touch them... without so much as a warning that they were going to install a rootkit on your computer. If Sony's proposing guard rails, be sure they'll be electrified to 270 kVA with spinning tungsten-carbide blades and proximity-fused claymores.
... are the unethical profit margins of the mob of middlemen who thrive at the direct expense of both creative people and the people who would be consumers of that creativity. Those middlemen are the true "useless eaters" that early Twentieth Century eugenicists should have been targeting with forced sterilization. Nobody likes parasites, least of all the intended hosts of them. Just as the Italian Mafia were parasites on the economy, so too is the RIAA and its clientele parasitic. They themselves produce NOTHING of tangible value to the world, yet those corporations harbor some of the wealthiest people in the world. Useless eaters all, deserving of sterilization....
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
I guess he never heard of the Betamax decision. Now what company was involved in that, again?
Not to mention the crises created by the invention of piano rolls, radio, and the cassette tape.
Speaking of which, why do you suppose the Sony Walkman was a roaring success, but Sony completely failed to come up with a credible competitor for the iPod? If Sony had run the "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign instead of trying to put guardrails on their music players, do you suppose history might have been a little different?
You know (bear with me on this), one thing that really annoys me on the internet is when someone spends considerable time and effort putting together a humorous photoshop/blog post/top 10, and the next day I see it, completely uncredited in a national newspaper. Some journalist has stolen it...just because it's on the internet...and stuff on the internet is like, free, right?
Much as I hate to admit it, I think on this occasion Michael Lyton has a point (dammit, I don't like what he says but I have to defend his right to say it). In the real world, no one would seriously contemplate reprinting the contents of a book they borrowed from the library and passing it off as their own, and no one would seriously contemplate walking into their local record store and walking out with anything that caught their eye just because they 'wouldn't have bought it anyway if they'd had to pay full price'.
Thing is, I also buy into the argument that illegal copying actually promotes music sales. Hell, I copied enough albums from my friends when I was a kid to know that I still bought a lot of albums. But don't try to con me that what I wasn't doing wasn't stealing (i.e. taking without permission). It's stealing when a journalist tries to pass off my website as his own work, it's stealing when I copy an album that I never wanted to listen to but my friend says I might quite like, and it's stealing when I download the latest star trek movie because I can't be bothered to pay for it at the cinema and after all, it's bound to be shown on free television at some point anyway.
So let's reboot this discussion. All illegal downloading is theft. Full stop. The more interesting question, is it theft like stealing a pen from work, or is it theft like stealing a car. And if it's theft like stealing a pen, then why is so much more like stealing a car when somebody does it to me.
Yet he posts his views ... on the Internet. Period.
He then refers to the "blogosphere", trying to reduce all criticism to a single entity: "Now, the blogosphere does not take so kindly to provocations like that"
Lynton may have been privileged to have been offered a publication in a traditional news site, on account of him being CEO of some company, but his words written on the Internet are no different to any kind of blogger. Period.
On what basis does he claim that newspapers have been harmed? Even if we accept that Internet piracy is causing harm, where is all the newspaper-piracy? Are people distributing copies of the Huffington Post on bittorrent? Is there a Napster for Broadsheets?
Period.
I'm not going to make any /. friends today, but he's got a valid point.
1. When there's a show on British TV that I want to see, I don't wait for it to show up on BBC America with extra commercials a year later. I don't wait for it to come out on a region 2 DVD and then order the DVD through amazon.co.uk and have it shipped to my friend's parents' house in England so they can include it in his next care package from home and then buy a special non-region-coded DVD player so I can watch it. I just grab a torrent within an hour of the show airing in the UK and watch it on my big TV that connects directly to my computer.
2. When I DVR something (that I paid for the right to save and watch at my convenience) and it's sitting on my cable box in the living room and I want to watch it in the bedroom, or on my Blackberry, I don't just go without. I grab a torrent and watch that wherever I want.
3. When I want a copy of a worn-out cassette that I bought back in college (or a vinyl album I left in the sun...), I don't pay $18 for a new CD. I pay $8 for a DRM-free MP3 album from Amazon. If it's not available as an MP3 I grab a torrent. If I can't grab a torrent I'll try a used CD store and the RIAA gets no money at all.
4. When I want a collection of -- say -- all the songs that charted on the Billboard Modern Rock chart in the 90's (even the ones that never took off), I look for legal versions. You can't even get the *charts* for free; much less a convenient collection of the singles. (And if it was available they'd try to charge $5,000 even though we all know that half the stuff would be unlistenable.) They don't even want me to listen to their music in this case. How much more music would I want to buy if I could have dozens of "I remember that song!" moments?
In all of these cases I demand immediate access to DRM-free digital versions of my favorite media. And in most of those cases it's not that the store is closed, it's that the store either doesn't offer what I want to buy, they want one of my kidneys in exchange, or they think that making me jump through hoops and skirting US law is an acceptable substitute for just selling what I'm trying to PAY THEM FOR. When you get right down to it, I'm no different than an anarchist at a WTO meeting.
Oh man, If i had downloaded Wolverine and watched it, I would have saved my self $10 by wasting my money on it. I really was unimpressed with it. Its also the problem with CDs, DVDs, Games. Im supposed to buy it with out knowing if it is worth my time and money. Then it is too late, and I hate my self a little more for buying their crap, when my gut said not to. Why do I keep doing that? I love the internet so I dont have to waste my money on crap I dont want, like 90% of the songs on CDs.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
Excellent comment.
He reminds me of the Catholic church shortly after the invention of the printing press. Life was going to end once the unwashed masses got their fingers into the realm of the intellectual & financial elite.
And as for his "nothing good" comment, maybe Sony should just give back all the money it has made from online games since nothing good came of it...
I'm fairly sure there are limits to what crap you can find on bittorrent. Things that don't even warrant the abuse of electrons to transmit them.
Or, as I like to put it, my traffic is too good for that crap.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I look at that horrific list, and when he says that output will be reduced all I can think is, "Good!" Maybe people will go outside instead of watching this dreck.
Better yet, maybe they'll be inspired and actually create something worthwhile.
My blog
Oh how I wish that this could be read by Mr. Lynton, but unfortunately even if he read it, he JUST WOULDN'T GET IT anyway.
.Lynton, sold an inferior product to your customers around the world and in your paranoia over piracy made sure that they could not buy a superior product from region 1 and watch it on their TVs at home. And to top it all off, while you and your Hollywood buddies have slit your own throats you are convinced that someone else has done you wrong. What's really sad is that doing things like having region codes to begin with and convincing Samsung and others to stop making consumer friendly DVD players has caused those customers to look for alternatives - "free" copies of your DVDs that don't have region codes in them so they can play them at home. So no, I don't feel sorry for you because you did this to yourself and what you and your buddies in Hollywood think that consumers want is not what they want at all. If you want to fix this, put out better product overseas and start encouraging those same DVD player manufacturers to make region free DVD players because until you give up on region coding and finally understand how much we, your potential consumers, hate it, you're basically grasping at sand and not understanding why it's running through your fingers.
Lynton refers to how Sony has essentially closed shop in South Korea because those sneaky Koreans can download his DVDs too fast, so they have no incentive to buy them. Well, I'll tell you why people in South Korea and elsewhere are bypassing Sony. It's your fault. And I'm going to explain why it's your fault and I'm not even going to go down the path of telling you that American movies mostly suck. While that's certainly true, that's not why South Koreans and others aren't buying from your stores.
Hollywood, which includes you Mr. Lynton, is its own worst enemy. Let's take a look at what you release to foreign markets. There's a huge demand for region 1 (USA/Canada) DVDs around the world. Know why? It's because region 1 DVDs mean quality. Region 1 DVDs typically use progressive video and high quality audio (DTS for example). Region 1 DVDs often have extras and while personally I'm not real fond of extras most of the time, the marketplace here seems to want it. Let's look at what you give to people in South Korea, which is region 3 for those keeping score. Well, you often release a film with zero extras. You sometimes give them interlaced video and lower quality audio choices (AC3 only and at low bit rates). I have no idea if the subtitles you give them are any good or are as bad as some of those bad English subtitles we used to get on Hong Kong movies in the past. And here's the best part of all - you and your cabal have "persuaded" almost every single DVD manufacturer to stop making DVD players that can have the region settings changed. So now Samsung, a very large company in, hmmm, South Korea, simply does not make a DVD player anywhere in the world now that can be made region free. They are not alone in this. I participate in a large video forum and you know what one of our most popular questions from new members is? How can I make my DVD player region free? You know what the answer is? Often it is "You can't". So you, Mr.
Not to defend window-smashers, but if people are lining up and begging you to take their money, and your response is "no thank you, we're not interested in money," then I don't know why you're complaining about the windows. Replacing them only costs money, and money is obviously something you don't care about anyway.
If you were a for-profit business, then you would open the store.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
...that it's got nothing to do with his store. On his property he can have almost what surveilance and security he wants - guards, alarms, cctv, rfid tags, locked cabinets, security wires and whatnot, because it's his store. After I've paid and walked out the door I can do pretty much what I want, but nobody cares because he got paid. But what he's talking about now is not on his property nor in his possession, it's in the hands of all his customers.
What he's looking for is akin to my grocery store trying to spy on me after buying tomatoes because they suspect I plant them and grow my own instead of eating them, and I only have a license to eat them. Or a pet shop trying to sell dogs with chastity belts because you only got a license for having the dog, not to have puppies. The post office opening every letter to see what's inside. Except they don't because that would be absurd, but the entertainment industry doesn't see the absurdity.
We don't need the Pirate Bay and public file sharing. If I hook up to all my friends, and they all hook to their friends and so on I with 1000% certainty have someone in my network of friends that somewhere got a pirated version. There's no possible way you could make a serious dent in file sharing without infringing on private property and private communication. Our rights have not changed, it's digtial media, reproduction and communitcation that has turned a trickle into a flood. A flood between people, not between thieves and some imagined store.
Between me and every other person on the Internet there's a now a pipe capable of sending pretty much anything - it's the essence of Internet and many-to-many communication. We're never going to change that, never going to turn Internet into cable TV, never going to submit to disclosing everything we send or be incriminated by lack of disclosure or volume. This death march battle you are fighting can not be won.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So my question is, what is everyone prepared to do to stop this sort of thing should people like this asshat start to get what they want?
I think if any of these people or organizations that want filtering (or watever this guy proposes as being "guardrails") or a "drivers license"real ID type thing required to use the internet (which is something else I see coming) can get their wish for any kind of abridgement of our freedom online in America then that's pretty much the game, for the reason that:
1. The majority of Americans seem to have become too complacently comfortable to be angry enough with their government to do things like strike en masse or force change when the government gets so out of line that it's protecting the interests of corporations over citizens - They seem to be able to still force the government to negotiate in places like France - kind of sad with our history.
2. While the internet is certainly global and decentralized to a degree, root DNS control and related issues, as well as the fact that so much of the high tech infrastructure and corporations are based in the US makes it a little more problematic for the entire world should the US govt decide to unilaterally impose their will.
I am not saying there wouldn't be any hope and it would completely ruin the internet in every way worldwide, but that certainly would almost be the case IMO - with a lot of the traditionally "free" western "democracies" sliding deeper into corporatism/fascism by the day and the heavily controlled corporate media the internet really does seem to be the last bastion of freedom, free information and communication and source of worldwide unfiltered news. I think it's so important, and those in power who don't have the best interest of the people at heart are keely aware of this.
So, my question is - what can we do, and what are you willing to do if this self-entitled asshole and others like him start getting what they want?
I know I am willing to do whatever it takes.
His analogy is to for the 'getting what they want, when they want it, how they want it'... In this case, the users want it the songs digital and now. Prior to the 'release' of the album, they can only get it through BitTorrent, so they 'smash the windows and take it'. Or if he only offers it on CD, and not digital, same thing.
In other words, he's trying to restrict what users can get, and they're reacting by just taking it, since it's not worth anything to them the way he offers it.
I'm not saying the users are right, legal or ethical. But you can't just ignore their message simply because they do something illegal or unethical. In fact, it should be a HUGE RED FLAG saying that you're not satisfying demand and they're willing to break the law/their own ethics to satisfy that demand. (Keep in mind I'm only talking about the people who -would- otherwise buy, and not the ones that would steal anyhow. They don't count.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
First, we checked if torrents were available. They were, up to the mid-point of Season 3. But torrents can be a pain, and we'd rather watch on our 42" TV in the media room than a 17" monitor in the office. So we added the first two seasons on DVD to our Blockbuster queue and watched them that way. It was easy and worked well.
But we hit a problem: we were behind on season 3! Rather than wait months and months for the next DVD to come out, we downloaded the torrents for the first 17 episodes, got caught up to where our DVR had started recording, then switched to watching on the DVR. Next season, we'll watch them as they show (at least, within a day or so).
The point of all this is, if it hadn't been for those torrents, we probably never would've watched the series at all. We would've lost interest in it long before the DVDs for this season came out. So yeah, NBC lost some money by us getting caught up the way we did. But now that we are caught up, they've gained another viewing household for their show. In the long run, I think they came out ahead.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I love XKCD as much as the next bloke, but let's at least be fair in our hypotheticals. Would Calvin & Hobbes* exist if Bill Watterson had been born twenty or thirty years later? I'm doubtful.
* Watterson was vehemently opposed to commercializing the art that he saw his comics to be -- hence the lack of any official C&H merchandise, as opposed to Randall's business model.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
> In the meantime, you're being completely disingenuous yourself. If you really believed that piracy
> was no worse with sneakernet than it is now, you'd be too stupid to have learned to type.
Yes the Internet has made things a little easier, but not as much as you seem to believe. I'm guessing you are too young to remember 'user groups'. All you needed was a couple of systems setup with two floppy drives and you were off to the races. A floppy could be copied in a minute flat on the better systems, a bit longer on the slow crappy serial based systems like the C64 and Atari. And copy they did, for hours while the users talked and talked. It was typical for everyone who attended semi-regular to have several shoe boxes of copied software.
Now it would be less practical because media capacity has outstripped transfer speed a little, but it is still pretty darned fast to dupe DVDs, especially if you cache the read and settle into stamping out multiple copies. CDs can even get pretty close to that one minute per copy speed of yore.
But what would totally reimagine sneakernet would be a new file sharing protocol that would allow two people to connect their disparate devices (laptop, mp3 player, smartphone, etc) on a local (wired or wireless) link and basically smartly sync everything between them. Smart in the sense that each user could set rules to decide what they want to receive so they don't fill up their device with a bunch of stuff they don't want. Have it remember you refused that pile of every episode of (insert name of series you don't particularly like) on your co-workers stash and never grab it even if it disappears and later shows back up on their laptop. Let the **AA clamp down on the Internet and watch how fast what I just described gets invented and popularized.
Give storage a few more doublings in capacity and music becomes a 'Pokemon' exercise. The top level packrats 'have em all' as in first every song that ever charted, then to every album commercially released and finally just every audio recording one could ever want. All available for sharing (via Internet or sneakernet) and spread around the world in so many locations no **AA effort could ever stamp it out. A few years later the same happens to movies and then TV shows. Children will be given a copy of 'everything' by their parents, supplemented by the cool new stuff by their friends.
How does the **AA continue to exist when that world appears? I believe the idea of copyright has merit even if the current eternal copyright is taking things way too far. But what I believe doesn't matter, the tech is coming and nothing I say or do, nothing you say or do, nothing the **AA says or does, nor even what government says, does or legislates is going to do more than hasten or delay that change a year or so.
Democrat delenda est