German Chancellor Says Only Print Media Can Teach You 'Real' Reading

from the smelly-logic dept

Angela Merkel may be Germany's Chancellor, and therefore a busy woman, but since she trained as a chemist, you might expect her to have a more positive view about new technology than this statement from a recent interview (original video in German), reported by the Netzpolitik blog, would suggest:

I regard the print media as very important. Being able to read is quite another thing from being on the Internet -- something that naturally will grow, and increase in importance. Nonetheless, the ability to read is something very, very important. And therefore I hope that, alongside the strong development of all the new media, all the well-known newspapers, the print media, the magazines, have a good future.

What's strange here is that the vast majority of those newspapers and magazines publish all or most of their articles online as well as in printed versions. The words are identical, so what magic ingredient does Frau Merkel think is missing online? It can't be the readability, since digital versions are arguably more legible, thanks to the ability to change the print size for those whose eyesight is not what it was.

The only real difference is that online versions are insubstantial, simply an image on a screen, while printed versions consist of ink on paper. Maybe her comment does, in fact, reflect her past as a chemist, and what she secretly misses is that characteristic odor of printing inks. Perhaps she just needs a iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer device or equivalent.

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Filed Under: angela merkel, digital, germany, reading

Spotting Counterfeit Chips Is Hard; Spotting Digital Piracy Is Even Harder

from the harder-than-it-looks dept

One of the favorite techniques of those pushing for ever-more severe penalties for copyright infringement is to blur the distinction between analog counterfeits and digital copies. The argument then becomes: "counterfeit drugs can kill people, therefore we must come down hard on online filesharing." This trick can be seen most clearly in ACTA, which stands for "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement", but where the most problematic sections concern digital piracy, not counterfeits.

That false equivalence between counterfeits and digital copies is also employed to give the impression that since cheap knock-offs are pretty obvious, it's easy to tell the difference between a legal digital file, and one that is unauthorised. However, unauthorised digital files are generally exact copies of authorised ones, making it impossible to tell them apart. What counts is whether the distribution is authorized, and there are all kinds of legal considerations like fair use or Creative Commons licensing that can make it very hard to tell without detailed legal scrutiny in a court.

Even the assumption that physical copies are relatively easy to spot is dubious, as this fascinating essay from Andrew 'bunnie' Huang about counterfeit chips in military hardware explains. Here's the background:

Amendment 1092 to the Defense Authorization Act of 2012 is a well-intentioned but misguided provision outlining measures designed to reduce the prevalance of counterfeit chips in the US military supply chain.

< ...>

Under the proposed anti-counterfeit amendment, first-time offenders can receive a $5 million fine and 20 years prison for individuals, or $15 million for corporations; a penalty comparable to that of trafficking cocaine.

Huang then runs through the myriad ways in which counterfeits can be produced – and why spotting them is hard.

Alongside "trivial external mimicry" – authentic-looking but empty packages – he mentions the following: refurbished parts (authentic parts recovered from e-waste); rebinned parts (authentic but with markings changed to a higher specification); ghost-shift parts (produced in the official factory by employees, but unofficially); factory scrap (rejects and pilot runs recovered from the scrap heap); and second-sourcing gone bad (pin-compatible replacements produced by competitors remarked as superior brands.)

As Huang points out:

It’s one thing to inspect fruits and vegetables as they enter the country for pests and other problems; but it is misguided to require Customs officers to become experts in detecting fakes, and/or to burden vendors with the onus of determining whether parts are authentic, particularly with such high penalties involved and the relative ease that forgers can create high-quality counterfeit parts.

Indeed; and much the same could be said about asking local enforcement authorities or ISPs to detect whether digital copies are legal or not. It's yet another reason why ACTA is likely to have a chilling effect on the legitimate use of copyright materials online, and to throttle the next generation of digital innovation as a result.

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Filed Under: acta, conflation, counterfeits, digital, piracy

Pete Townshend Calls iTunes A Digital Vampire; Talkin' 'Bout His Generation...

from the talkin'-bout-my-generation dept

When he was 20 years old, Pete Townshend of The Who wrote the classic line "hope I die before I get old," as part of the anthem Talkin' 'bout my generation. As a Townshend fan, I'm certainly happy to know that he didn't die before he got old... but it does seem rather ironic that he's now acting just like the "old folks" that he once mocked. At an event earlier this week, he claimed that the internet is destroying copyright, and declared that iTunes is a "digital vampire." His complaint there is that it takes an "enormous commission." Um. Ok. So, according to most reports, iTunes' commission on music is approximately $0.30 on the dollar. While some may claim that's high, compare that to how much a record label takes on each sale, where artists often get perhaps 10 to 15% royalties, with the label taking the rest. Which one seems more like a vampire?

He says that iTunes should employ A&R people, but why is that Apple's business? That's like saying Tower Records should have had A&R people to guide musicians a decade ago. It appears his complaint is that new musicians are allowed into iTunes even if they suck. But that's an issue for filters and mentors to deal with, and the internet seems to be taking care of that. Is there bad music on iTunes? Sure, but you can get around that by not listening to it, and those musicians can get guidance from all sorts of people. He also talks about why Apple should give away computers to 500 musicians they like. But... why? What is focusing on just a few musicians going to do? The power of the internet is that it empowers tons of new musicians. Having Apple give free computers to the musician it likes kinda misses the point of the democratization of the market. It will leave out all sorts of wonderful artists that niche groups in the public might like.

He then goes on to complain that Apple won't stream full albums. Why is that Apple's job? Has no one shown Pete Spotify or any of the many other streaming players out there these days?

Of course, he won't listen to me on this, because he talks about the "vilest" parts of "blogland" where people are "drunk, or just nuts."

And, of course, he goes on a bit of a rant about file sharing. Beyond just the internet "destroying copyright," he compares someone downloading one of his songs to someone coming into his house and stealing his kid's bike (interesting comparison). Of course, as anyone who's ever thought about this for more than a second knows, making a copy doesn't remove anything. Making comparisons to stolen physical goods just makes it look like you're... well... not talking about our generation. So, as a retort, I'll just "infringe" on Mr. Townshend's own words:

People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don't you all f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to dig what we all s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)

Filed Under: a&r, copyright, digital, internet, itunes, pete towhshend
Companies: apple

Toughest Job In All Of Showbiz? Trying To Teach Major Record Labels How To Adapt

from the great-way-to-get-fired dept

Want to know what the toughest gig in show business might be? Perhaps it's teaching the major record labels how to adapt to new technologies from within. Digital Music News has a list of 34 former execs at the various major labels, whose role it was to help get those companies up to speed on new technologies and new media -- all of which were "pushed, fired, or otherwise jumped ship over just the past few years." While the stories behind what happened to the different individuals may be different, from those on the list who I'm familiar with, there's a common refrain: the label they worked for had no real interest in embracing what the technology allowed. They hired these execs because they thought that just hiring such people would fix their problems, but then they generally didn't like what they were hearing... which is why they all ended up moving on.

Filed Under: adapt, digital, execs, music, new media, record labels

EMI Dumps ASCAP For Digital Licensing

from the ouch dept

Well, this is interesting. When Guy Hands had bought EMI years back, there was hope that, as an outsider, he might come in and shake things up in a good way. That didn't happen, and after a massive flop, Hands lost EMI to Citigroup earlier this year. And, yet, now it appears that EMI is finally making some interesting moves. First up: it's pulling back its digital rights from ASCAP and is going to license them directly. That's a huge hit to ASCAP (who will undoubtedly downplay the significance, though it really is huge). This also should ease the licensing of EMI's catalog, since it's all going through a single company, rather than having to involve multiple companies. I wouldn't be surprised to see others go in this direction as well. Of course, some musicians might not like it, as ASCAP tends to be a bit clearer in its royalty statements than many of the labels, but this is a big potential issue for ASCAP.

Filed Under: digital, licensing, music, publishing, rights
Companies: ascap, emi

Key Economics Lessons For The Digital Era

from the things-to-remember dept

Jeff Jarvis has a series of short notes that he's put together on "hard economic lessons" for the news business, but many of them apply to pretty much any industry -- and it seems worth pointing some of them out for discussion:

• Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.
• "Should" is not a business model. You can say that people "should" pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.
• Virtue is not a business model. Just because you do good does not mean you deserve to be paid for it.
• Business models are not made of entitlements and emotions. They are made of hard economics. Money has no heart.
• Begging is not a business model. It's lazy to think that foundations and contributions can solve news' problems. There isn't enough money there.
• No one cares what you spent. Arguing that news costs a lot is irrelevant to the market.

There's a lot more at the link, much of which I agree with (a few I think are slightly misleading or wrong, but those are outweighed by the ones I do think are dead on). However, these were the key points that resonated the most with me and which I think are good pointers that many in traditional businesses have trouble with. Many of the arguments we hear against the new business models we talk about (or the bad decisions by those legacy businesses) stem from not understanding the six points above.

Filed Under: digital, economics, journalism, tradition

Focusing On The Copy Part Of Copyright Doesn't Make Much Sense In Today's World

from the we're-all-infringers-otherwise dept

Julian Sanchez has put up a fascinating post discussing how copyright is really a misnomer in the digital age. He's building off the various discussions about the Google book scanning project and whether or not it's fair use. The key point he makes is that thinking about a "copy" in this situation can be misleading, because you can achieve the same results without a "copy," though perhaps more awkwardly:

Suppose I tweet that I'm trying to remember which Borges story has that line about how "mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men." Some of my diligent friends hurry to their libraries, flip through their Borges collections, and tweet back the answer--along with a few sentences of the surrounding context. Clearly there's nothing intrinsically objectionable about the search function, and a quotation of a sufficiently limited portion of the whole work in reply would normally be protected by fair use. The problem is just that Google's search--and indeed, any computer search--technically requires that a copy be made. But to my mind, this just underscores how increasingly maladaptive it is to make "copying" the primary locus of regulation in our system of intellectual property.

Technology even complicates the question of just what constitutes a "copy"--an intriguing issue I explored in a few articles back in my days at Ars Technica. Imagine, for instance, that Google took a different approach to indexing in hopes of avoiding thorny copyright questions. Instead of storing "copies" of each book, suppose they created a huge database called Google Concordance, consisting of an enormous catalog of every word or short phrase someone might want to look up, followed by a long list, like a kind of super-index, specifying the location on every page of every book in which that word or phrase appears. ("Aardvark: Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Page 221, Line 17, word 3...") Obviously, the Google Concordance would be a very valuable and useful reference text, and nowhere in the database would you find anything resembling a "copy" of any of the cataloged works. But just as obviously, it would contain all the information a clever programmer would need to reconstruct an arbitrary portion of the original text on the fly, assuming the database could be queried fast enough. You can imagine someone creating certain kinds of “derivative works” in a similar way: If you don't want the RIAA taking down your mashup, you might try to offer it as an algortithm specifying time segments of component tracks to be combined in a particular manner... an algorithm that might produce gibberish or Girl Talk depending on what files you feed it.

In a sense, it's always the processing algorithm that determines whether a particular binary string is a "copy" of a work or not. Open an MP3 of a Lady Gaga track in a text editor and you'll get a wholly original work of experimental literature--though not one anybody (except possibly Lady Gaga) is likely to be interested in reading. For that matter, Google's database is just an enormous collection of ones and zeroes until some program processes it to generate human-readable output. I distinguished my hypothetical Google Concordance database from a collection of copied books, but if you point to a particular file and ask whether it contains the Concordance or copies of the books, there's a very literal sense in which there just is no fact of the matter until you know what algorithm will be used to render it as alphanumeric text. This may sound like airy metaphysical hairsplitting, but the power of computers to rapidly aggregate and process dispersed information on a global network is likely to create genuine practical complications for a legal framework that takes discrete, physically contiguous chunks called "copies" as its fundamental unit of analysis. Legally speaking, it would seem to make an enormous difference whether books are scanned and stored as books, or as a comprehensive concordance database maintained by Google, or as a series of hundreds or thousands of complementary partial concordances dispersed across many servers (or even individual hard-drives linked by a p2p network). Given sufficient bandwidth and processing speed, it might make no difference at all in practice. Maybe we should take that as a hint to reexamine our categories.

Those three paragraphs do such an amazingly beautiful job showing why copyright is often the wrong tool for the job it's trying to do. It's focused on the wrong thing. And while the examples above are taking things to an extreme (though, one not out of the near-future realm of possibility), it's really the same problem that we face today all the time. For example, we've discussed the whole question of what "copy" is made when someone links to a site. If you're actually reading what copyright law says, there's nothing infringing in linking. But, at the same time, every time you visit a website, you're technically making a copy -- which could be considered infringement. More or less we sort of make up the rules as we go along with technology, because applying the letter of the law just doesn't make sense. Julian's description above is just taking that basic concept and taking it out slightly further.

He goes on to point this out, while also discussing how copyright law was really designed back in an age when making copies was expensive, and likely limited to those with commercial intent of some sort, as opposed to what we have today, where you make copies just to do almost anything on a computer. The focus on the "copy" aspect really just doesn't make sense, and Sanchez argues that perhaps it should be removed from the debate entirely, since it's really just not applicable any more:

Instead of ginning up exceptions to a general prohibition on copying just to permit publicly valuable use of content, maybe we should just admit that "copying" no longer makes sense as a primary locus of intellectual property regulation. Fair use analysis typically employs a four factor test, but the upshot is usually to see how a particular type of copying would affect the market for the original work--which makes sense, given that the purpose of copyright is to give creators a financial incentive to produce and distribute new works. If that's fundamentally what we care about, though, a default property-like right of control over copying, which now has to be riddled with exceptions to allow almost any ordinary use of content, looks like an increasingly circuitous Rube Goldberg mechanism for achieving that goal. I'm not sure what the alternative would be--or even whether rejiggering the basic categories would alter the the underlying analysis much. But--just off the top of my head--you could imagine a system where the core offense was not "copyright infringement" but some kind of tort of unfair competition with an original work. In many cases it would yield the same practical result, but at least we'd reorient the public discourse around "copyright" to focus on measurable harms to creators' earnings--and ideally get away from the confused notion that copying without permission is somehow equivalent to "stealing" by default unless it fits some pre-established exception.

Filed Under: copies, copyright, digital

State Department, Once Again, Asks Wikileaks To 'Return' Leaked Cables

from the that's-not-how-digital-works dept

Earlier this year, we all had a good laugh over the demand from the Pentagon that Wikileaks "return" the leaked documents it held. Lots of people pointed out that they were digital copies. You don't "return" stuff that's digital. All this demand did was make the Pentagon look totally clueless about how digital information works. It looks like the PR geniuses at the State Department have decided to do the same thing. They've put out a demand that Wikileaks "return" the remaining diplomatic cables in its possession.

Once again, this just makes the State Department look clueless, out of date and confused about the internet. First of all, you don't "return" digital documents. But, more importantly, Wikileaks has already shown that it has no intention of doing any such thing -- and making such a request just looks silly by the State Department. It's foot stamping rather than doing anything productive. Given the State Department's ridiculous PR over this whole Wikileaks thing, is it really any wonder why those old attempts by the US government to hire PR people to convince the people we were invading that it was for their own good turned out so disastrously bad?

Filed Under: digital, documents, state department, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks