a convenient truth

The Government wants ISPs to stop illegal downloads.

This is so wrong headed it’s hard to see what on earth they’re thinking of. Presumably they envisage a technology solution, which is pretty typical amongst people like government ministers - hey well my computer can tell when I’m writing a letter and show me a paperclip, so surely it must be able to stop copyright infringement!

Here’s a few issues that I think are pretty much insoluble:

How can you tell what content infringes copyright?

There’s a couple of options here. Blacklisting known infringers sounds like a good idea, but it’s got problems.

Sites such as The PirateBay don’t themselves distribute copyright material. They host only the (non-copyright) torrent tracker, and the downloaders all share the content amongst themselves.  These downloaders are on moving IP addresses and come and go pretty randomly, and are all over the world and the UK.

So who do you blacklist?

A team of people inspecting torrent sites for suspicious material, and then tracking the torrents, finding the IP addresses of all peers and then adding them to a rolling blacklist that’s used by all IPs might work.  Well work as in generate an actual list of blacklistable IP addresses.  This is the sort of technique the Chinese use, with quite a lot of success.  There will be a lot of collatoral damage though, and in a free society that’s very difficult to justify.  And justify it, in court, they are going to have to do.

Blacklisting The PirateBay sounds good, and is much easier, but new torrent sites will pop up all the time. Again the judiciary will have a very dim view of arbitrary censorship of people who have been convicted of no crime.  I don’t see this method working beyond the first few lawsuits.

Alternatively they might imagine some sort of fingerprinting. Every stream will be examined on the fly, perhaps for the evil bit. With a bit of work it’s possible to probably identify some copyright work using fingerprinting, with quite a few mistakes. Of course, this is defeated utterly by encryption. Right now torrents aren’t encrypted, but I think it will take approximately 1.2 nanoseconds for everyone to move to encrypted torrents if something like this comes in.

Some ISPs might go as far as blocking bittorrent. This is relatively easy to do, and much harder to avoid, however loads of services use bittorrent now that are perfectly legal. Even the BBC’s own iPlayer uses the same sort of technology, and I can see how popular banning that would be.

How do you know it’s working?

They are threatening to punish ISPs unless they “do something”. Precisely how are they going to decide who to punish? Is there going to be some sort of quota - “you have banned 50 users this week, you have unlocked an achievement!”. Sorry, that should be “50 customers”.

There just isn’t a reasonable success metric, and ISPs are not going to voluntarily ban their own customers.  They’ll kick and scream and resist wherever they can, so whatever .gov.uk comes up with is going to have to be enforceable in court.  That means metrics that are clear, fair and measurable.  I just don’t believe such a thing exists.

Ultimately this is just the content exploitation industries failing to address the fact that their business model was temporary. It relied on a particular coincidence of technological limitations and market opportunities. This has changed and now they are about as useful as a bicycle to the proverbial fish.

I just can’t see this happening without a huge amount of damage to the government, and the whole idea being binned in the end.  I just hope they aren’t dumb enough to do it.

Last.FM have announced that they will be providing a huge amount of their catalogue available for free, streamed from their site, with artists paid from advertising and possibly some sort of subscription model.

This is part of a worldwide trend anticipated by many of us for a very long time. Several mobile phone networks are in the process of releasing “music plus” packages, where you get pretty much any music you like, for free, at any time. Again, artists are paid from the phone subscription package.

Obviously streamed music can be copied. Over at Rogue Amoeba, who produce Audio Hijack Pro, they’re an interesting post on this, wondering if this is going to be a problem for the free-streamed model Last.FM have developed.

I don’t think it matters. You won’t bother keeping a copy for yourself for much longer in any case. Why have copies of all those CDs, or MP3s, when it’s all available from the Internet, all the time, at zero cost and effort? The only reason to keep a copy yourself was an artifact of the primitive method of packaging and distribution - not because there being millions of individual copies of a piece of music is inherently useful.

So, in ten year’s time, I reckon the kids won’t have a single copy of mainstream music themselves. Their record collection will consist of a set of bookmarks only - and the whole “music business” as it currently stands will just be a brief “blip” in the history of music, from it’s origins in live-only performance to it’s future as a ubiquitous cultural service in the cloud.

Remember the AACS business last week, where they are threatening anyone who mentions a certain big number with prison. Well, you too can own an integer! That’s right, under the auspices of the well-thought-out DMCA, you too can sue anyone who mentions your number, and just imagine - if every number becomes owned by someone we could end in a world without numbers! Utopia! The DMCA will have finally achieved it’s aims.

Incidentally, E4 DE 37 A0 C7 1F 8B 5A DC F4 F2 C3 6D A4 D8 33 is mine, ALL MINE!  bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

[Microsoft dropping DRM from Zune Music Store](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_devices&articleId=9015898&taxonomyId=75). Microsoft have seen the writing on the wall for music DRM much faster than expected, and are [following Apple](http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-6172398.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-5&subj=news) into providing music files without DRM restrictions.

This probably really is the end for music DRM, something that is in the best interests of most music lovers and artists. The revolution that’s finally going to happen in music is going to change the shape of it, and is certainly going to make [some forms of music](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears) uneconomic, but it will also make other forms feasible that once were not. It’s a whole new world out there and if I was an unsigned artist I would be very excited about the possibilities.

What this isn’t is the death of DRM. The impulse that made the music industry commit [such]( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050204-4587.html) [public](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3140160.stm) [hara-kiri](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060424-6662.html) wasn’t irrational, it was just very poorly judged against their market. In video and television I think we can expect the same behaviour, but with a lot more ferocity. The vast investments in the business models, not least the business models of their suppliers (think Windows Vista), will mean DRM hangs around for some while yet.

Transient content will probably always be advertising supported, since it’s easy and gives access to the most eyeballs. There’s a whole new arms race in there for advertising avoidance software, so the advertising will probably end up pretty subtle. It’ll be just as offensive as TV is now — but hey, go read a book or something.

The DVD market is the one that’s really going to hurt a lot of people. This stuff is being traded big-time on the P2P networks now, and it has become a vital market for a lot of media companies. A lot of series would not be produced without the DVD aftermarket, and the economics of video are, for the moment, different from a lot of music. It will be a few decades before you can make *The West Wing*, from scratch, on your own, in your bedroom, using only a computer. If there isn’t a business model that can support large scale drama with high production values, that would be a real shame.

Video is far less accessible on the move than music too, so being restricted to play your DVDs only on your home player is less of a restriction. I can see a lot of technological battles coming up to try to lock down every single digital and analogue hole in video reproduction. The recent [AACS Crack](http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/27/aacs-drm-cracked-by-backuphddvd-tool/) is only the beginning. Expect a few attempts, some successful, to change the law too.

It looks like [Cricinfo](http://www.cricinfo.com/)’s Cricinfo 3D product probably [stays on the right side of the law](http://www.out-law.com/page-7883). Which is nice. Cricinfo 3D is basically a [machinma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinma) rendition of a live, in-progress, cricket match, based on their own textual commentary. Sky claim that, because the person writing the commentary is watching the TV, therefore the 3D rendition (and presumably the commentary) is in fact a derivative work of their TV broadcast.

What constitutes a derivative work in copyright law is often a pretty hairy question. The concept was designed back when works of creation were pretty simple, but has been constantly tested by the weird and wonderful things people want to make. Certainly the framers of the original concept of “Intellectual Property” would not have considered a machina film application taking an XML internet feed based on text commentary keyed by someone watching satellite television of a cricket match on the other side of the world.

Cricinfo 3D is reminiscent in many ways of [Fanfic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanfic), with the notable exception of the ownership of Cricket itself — which seems to be why Sky are unlikely to win their case against Wisden (publishers of Cricinfo).