What Lessig Doesn't Point Out.
on
Lessig @ OSCON
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· Score: 4, Insightful
One of the pictures Lessig uses in the presentation (the Flash version) is this Venn diagram with a white background representing "unregulated use", a red circle representing "copyright", and a grey border around the red circle representing "fair use". He then points out that the red circle (copyright) has essentially expanded to completely cover the white background (unregulated use), leaving us to fight over the scraps of the grey border (fair use).
What Lessig doesn't point out is that technology has completely blurred the boundary that used to exist between the red circle and the white background. In the absence of DRM, there is no meaningful distinction between publishing an e-book (red circle) and making a purchased version available to a few of your 'friends' on a p2p network (white background). Or, if you prefer, there's no meaningful distinction between purchasing an e-book from a publisher, and downloading it from your p2p 'friend'.
In other words, the world is going to be all white or all red, not because Valenti, Rosen, and their ilk are trying to actively expand the red circle, but because technology has made the circle meaningless. The content distributors understand that they're fighting a 0-1 war, and know that their days are numbered unless they make the whole world 'red'.
I don't think I'm being unfair to Lessig by saying he misses this particular point. One of the examples he uses was that sales of CDs only went down 5% last year, so the content distributors are presumably over-reacting. But that's too myopic. Within a few years, with unregulated technology, John Q. Public will be able to fire up their p2p client, type in the name of the album they want, stick a CDR in their burner, then go away for 15 minutes while the software queries freedb, downloads the songs on the album at CD quality, burns them to the CD-R, downloads the cover art and lyrics and sends them to the color laser printer. It could possibly even schedule a micropayment to the artist's account and put a shortcut on John Q. Public's desktop in case he decides the album was worth it.
Who in their right mind would bother to buy a CD then?!
" And probably an even larger number of happier customers who suddenly notice that they have bandwidth again."
I thought this was no longer an issue with the new bandwidth-capped DOCSIS modems everyone uses nowadays. And of course this has never been an issue with DSL.
I can't get to the first two links on dslreports, but did anyone notice that the third link was to a discussion thread dating back to February?! (The big clue was that they're referring to Morpheus being part of fasttrack, which it hasn't been for a while). The fourth link seems mostly about a guy who's suffering dl/ul speed problems, hardly symptoms of port blocking.
Oh well, at least it's an interesting hypothetical...
Well, not the lawsuits, but the lawsuit threats, which are just as effective. See this link to a Gnucleus Forum post regarding an incident of this taking place over a month ago.
Just to clarify how it works (straight from the DMCA rules), the copyright holder hires a company like Ranger which has custom-made software that spiders all the major P2P networks. They will index the copyrighted work to a list of IPs, then generate form letters which are sent to the ISP threatening a lawsuit. The ISP then forwards the letter to the user, who has the opportunity to dispute the claim or comply with the 'request' to remove the copyrighted material from the network. Needless to say, if you want to keep your internet access, you must comply.
The latest version of Gnucleus already comes with a list of known spidering site IPs blocked, but this is clearly not a solution. IMO, nothing short of the capabilities of Freenet will succeed against this.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the pictures Lessig uses in the presentation (the Flash version) is this Venn diagram with a white background representing "unregulated use", a red circle representing "copyright", and a grey border around the red circle representing "fair use". He then points out that the red circle (copyright) has essentially expanded to completely cover the white background (unregulated use), leaving us to fight over the scraps of the grey border (fair use).
What Lessig doesn't point out is that technology has completely blurred the boundary that used to exist between the red circle and the white background. In the absence of DRM, there is no meaningful distinction between publishing an e-book (red circle) and making a purchased version available to a few of your 'friends' on a p2p network (white background). Or, if you prefer, there's no meaningful distinction between purchasing an e-book from a publisher, and downloading it from your p2p 'friend'.
In other words, the world is going to be all white or all red, not because Valenti, Rosen, and their ilk are trying to actively expand the red circle, but because technology has made the circle meaningless. The content distributors understand that they're fighting a 0-1 war, and know that their days are numbered unless they make the whole world 'red'.
I don't think I'm being unfair to Lessig by saying he misses this particular point. One of the examples he uses was that sales of CDs only went down 5% last year, so the content distributors are presumably over-reacting. But that's too myopic. Within a few years, with unregulated technology, John Q. Public will be able to fire up their p2p client, type in the name of the album they want, stick a CDR in their burner, then go away for 15 minutes while the software queries freedb, downloads the songs on the album at CD quality, burns them to the CD-R, downloads the cover art and lyrics and sends them to the color laser printer. It could possibly even schedule a micropayment to the artist's account and put a shortcut on John Q. Public's desktop in case he decides the album was worth it.
Who in their right mind would bother to buy a CD then?!
I thought this was no longer an issue with the new bandwidth-capped DOCSIS modems everyone uses nowadays. And of course this has never been an issue with DSL.
I can't get to the first two links on dslreports, but did anyone notice that the third link was to a discussion thread dating back to February?! (The big clue was that they're referring to Morpheus being part of fasttrack, which it hasn't been for a while). The fourth link seems mostly about a guy who's suffering dl/ul speed problems, hardly symptoms of port blocking. Oh well, at least it's an interesting hypothetical ...
Well, not the lawsuits, but the lawsuit threats, which are just as effective. See this link to a Gnucleus Forum post regarding an incident of this taking place over a month ago. Just to clarify how it works (straight from the DMCA rules), the copyright holder hires a company like Ranger which has custom-made software that spiders all the major P2P networks. They will index the copyrighted work to a list of IPs, then generate form letters which are sent to the ISP threatening a lawsuit. The ISP then forwards the letter to the user, who has the opportunity to dispute the claim or comply with the 'request' to remove the copyrighted material from the network. Needless to say, if you want to keep your internet access, you must comply. The latest version of Gnucleus already comes with a list of known spidering site IPs blocked, but this is clearly not a solution. IMO, nothing short of the capabilities of Freenet will succeed against this.