Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

From a Macrumors.com post called Apple iTunes Still #1, but Amazon Gaining - Mac Rumors:

Amazon, however, saw a rise in ranking from #5 to #4, which NPD attributes to both strong CD sales as well as Amazon's introduction of their MP3 music store. The digital rights management (DRM) free solution provides iPod users a convenient and compatible alternative to Apple's iTunes.

Apple's still #1 when it comes to selling digital music (ie, CDs + downloads), Wal-Mart's two, and Best Buy's three, but Amazon is 4, apparently passing Target.

Several months ago I mentioned that "Keeping DRM free 'not Apple' is the only bargaining chip the music companies have," and that I thought it was a smart move by Universal to hedge their bets by going DRM at the iTunes Music Store and DRM-free at Amazon.

I'm pretty sure that's not the only thing -- or even the primary thing -- going on with Amazon's move from 5 to 4 (even if Amazon's online store stole 10% of iTunes' customers). Instead, what we're likely seeing is that CD sales and music download sales are relatively unrelated markets, and adding an online store was a gain for Amazon all the way around. Even if Amazon only sells a quarter as many online downloads as they have CDs in the past, that's a 25% gain [minus a small number of CD buyers moving to online downloads]. If anything, Amazon's online music store is probably helping them sell more CDs, especially if the NRD counts used sales from 3rd party vendors. The CDs are just a link away from the mp3s. I imagine anyone on the chart could move a bit with that sort of change.

I was interested to see that a company in the UK offering the following music subscription service for ISPs to install:

Scant days since UK music labels reached a deal with six of the country's leading ISPs to begin turning the screws on the nation's estimated six million file-sharers, 7Digital has entered the fray, offering ISPs a range of services designed to let them offer music to their customers as part of their subscription.

This is Web 2.0, as the corporations want to see it. The UK ISPs are already throttling back on people who use p2p.

The deal - which has been agreed to by BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse - also means file-sharers could see their broadband connections slowed, or removed altogether.

And then we see something like 7Digital's suggestion, above, that these same ISPs could license what essentially becomes a free or easily controlled subscription music service on what amounts to their own intranets. This is exactly the kind of control net neutrality seeks to remove.

I have to think universities would start doing something similar. I mean, if you don't want 18-22 year olds trading music illegally, what can you do? Give on-campus students all that music for free, using a plan just like the 7Digital one for UK ISPs. Except that it ain't free; the licensing fee is going to be thrown in with tuition. And what's great? Once you leave school (or, more generally, your ISP or what-have-you), all that music you once could listen to drops right back into the virtual rare book room. You graduate, and your music is gone. Want to listen again? Pay again.

Personally, I don't want tax dollars going to license pop music for teenagers, much less tax dollars earmarked for "education" going to only temporarily license that pop music, but I'm not real optimistic that it won't happen.

This also has some real repercussions for the possibilities for smaller ISP start-ups. If Web 2.0 style controls like this one become popular, how are they going to be able to make the same deals with ~~record~~ music companies? They probably won't, at least not for the same prices per client.

Okay, as always, buy used books, trade for all your digital music, and if you're out tonight, don't forget, if you're on your bike, always, always, always wear white. (I was doing this before TK, thanks very much. Well, at least independent of.)

Labels: amazon, DRM, iTunes, online distribution, wal marts, web 2.0 shiite

The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right.

A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange.

That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

(Matt)

Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment.

The Rare Book Room

What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain.

How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you.

More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel.

How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.)

Rare Books and Software

So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.)

Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means.

Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not.

This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms.

Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out.

The Obsolescence of Copyright

I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books.

(Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.)

The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates.

Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens.

Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0

Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it.

So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way.

As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers.

Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console