The Stagnation Of eBooks Due To Closed Platforms And DRM

from the open-it-all-up dept

Craig Mod has a fascinating article for Aeon, talking about the unfortunate stagnation in digital books. He spent years reading books almost exclusively in ebook form, but has gradually moved back to physical books, and the article is a long and detailed exploration into the limits of ebooks today -- nearly all of which are not due to actual limitations of the medium, but deliberate choices by the platform providers (mainly Amazon, obviously) to create closed, limited, DRM-laden platforms for ebooks.

When new platform innovations come along, the standard progression is that they take the old thing -- whatever it is they're "replacing" -- and create a new version of it in the new media. Early TV was just radio plays where you could see the people, for example. The true innovation starts to show up when people realize that you can do something new with the new media that simply wasn't possible before. But, with ebooks, it seems like we've never really reached that stage. It's just replicated books... and that's it. The innovations on top of that are fairly small. Yes, you can suddenly get any book you want, from just about anywhere and start reading it almost immediately. And, yes, you can take notes that are backed up. Those are nice. But it still just feels like a book moved from paper to digital. It takes almost no advantage of both the ability to expand and change the canvas, or the fact that you're now a part of a world-connected network where information can be shared.

While I don't think (as some have argued) that Amazon has some sort of dangerous "monopoly" on ebooks, Mod is correct that there's been very little pressure on Amazon to continue to innovate and improve the platform. And, he argues (quite reasonably), if Amazon were to open up its platform and let others innovate on top of it, the whole thing could become much more valuable:

It seems as though Amazon has been disincentivised to stake out bold explorations by effectively winning a monopoly (deservedly, in many ways) on the market. And worse still, the digital book ‘stack’ – the collection of technology upon which our digital book ecosystems are built – is mostly closed, keeping external innovators away.

To understand how the closed nature of digital book ecosystems hurts designers and readers, it’s useful to look at how the open nature of print ecosystems stimulates us. ‘Open’ means that publishers and designers are bound to no single option at most steps of the production process. Nobody owns any single piece of a ‘book’. For example, a basic physical book stack might include TextEdit for writing; InDesign for layout; OpenType for fonts; the printers; the paper‑makers; the distribution centres; and, finally, the bookstores that stock and sell the hardcopy books.

And, on top of this, people creating "ebooks" are limited to the options given to them by Amazon and Apple and Google. And then it all gets locked down:

Designers working within this closed ecosystem are, most critically, limited in typographic and layout options. Amazon and Apple are the paper‑makers, the typographers, the printers, the binders and the distributors: if they don’t make a style of paper you like, too bad. The boundaries of digital book design are beholden to their whim.

The fact that all of these platforms rely on DRM -- often at the demands of short-sighted publishers -- only makes the problem worse:

The potential power of digital is that it can take the ponderous and isolated nature of physical things and make them light and movable. Physical things are difficult to copy at scale, while digital things in open environments can replicate effortlessly. Physical is largely immutable, digital can be malleable. Physical is isolated, digital is networked. This is where digital rights management (DRM) – a closed, proprietary layer of many digital reading stacks – hurts books most and undermines almost all that latent value proposition in digital. It artificially imposes the heaviness and isolation of physical books on their digital counterparts, which should be loose, networked objects. DRM constraints over our rights as readers make it feel like we’re renting our digital books, not owning them.

If ebook platforms and technology were more open, it's quite conceivable that we'd be experiencing a different kind of ebook revolution right now. People could be much more creative in taking the best of what books provide and leveraging the best of what a giant, connected digital network provides -- creating wonderful new works of powerful art that go beyond the standard paper book. But we don't have that. We have a few different walled gardens, locked tight, and a weak recreation of the paper book in digital form.

It's difficult to mourn for lost culture that we never actually had, but it's not difficult to recognize that we've probably lost a tremendous amount of culture and creativity by not allowing such things to thrive.

Filed Under: books, closed, drm, ebooks, innovation, open, platforms
Companies: amazon, apple

Twitter Just Cut Off Politwoops In Another Effort To Keep The Platform Closed

from the twits dept

Mike recently made the case that in the information age, platforms would do better to be open rather than closed. Being open means allowing that thing you started to branch off in many directions making you more useful to more people. Being closed means you get control. Yay. One of the examples of a platform that had initially been open and has since been becoming more closed is Twitter. What once began as a platform that was built up by users and outside groups all making even better use of Twitter than Twitter had managed for itself, has since devolved into stories of staunch refusal to allow the evolution to continue.

The most recent example of this is, sadly, that Twitter appears to have eighty-sixed Politwoops, the wonderful project for preserving the tweets deleted by government officials and public officials.

Twitter’s decision to pull the plug on Politwoops is a reminder of how the Internet isn’t truly a public square. Our shared conversations are increasingly taking place in privately owned and managed walled gardens, which means that the politics that occur in such conversations are subject to private rules. (In this case, Twitter’s terms of service for usage of its API.) Days after Politwoops launched in 2012, Twitter contacted the Sunlight Foundation and told us, "Your service violates our API Terms of Service on a fundamental level." We explained the goals of the project and agreed to create a human curation workflow to ensure that the site screened out corrected low-value tweets like typos, links and Twitter handles. We implemented this layer of journalistic judgment with blessings from Twitter and the site continued.

We are truly mystified as to what prompted the change of heart, and it's deeply disappointing to see Twitter kill a project they had supported since 2012. It is also disturbing to us that our feed was cut almost three weeks ago and our only direct communication came from Twitter last night, when we were told that their decision was not something that we could appeal, and, most surprisingly, they were not interested in reviewing any of the email conversation from 2012. Clearly, something changed — and we’re not likely to ever know what it was.

You can sense the boiling anger and pure confusion beneath the surface of the text. Twitter, which had been fully aware of what Politwoops was, did, and why, had allowed the service to operate for years and then suddenly pulled the plug for the same reason it gave initially before dismissing that reason. This would be enough to infuriate any developer, nevermind one focused solely on creating more openness and accountability. It must feel like a slap in the face to the Sunlight Foundation to have the opposite of their aims be utilized in the shuttering of their service.

That said, why did Twitter do this? Well, in a statement to Gawker, who had reported on the topic, Twitter indicated this was all about user privacy.

Earlier today we spoke to the Sunlight Foundation, to tell them we will not restore Twitter API access for their Politwoops site. We strongly support Sunlight’s mission of increasing transparency in politics and using civic tech and open data to hold government accountable to constituents, but preserving deleted Tweets violates our developer agreement. Honoring the expectation of user privacy for all accounts is a priority for us, whether the user is anonymous or a member of Congress.

Which tells us nothing, exactly as I'm sure Twitter intended. This is simply a recitation of the excuse, not the reason why the decision made in 2012 suddenly got reversed with very little communication to the Sunlight Foundation. So what's the answer?

Control, of course. The doors that close on once-open platforms operate on greased hinges, it seems, where the smallest thrust on those doors causes them to slam shut. Twitter is allowed to do this, of course, but closing the platform that still uses the "@" symbol and retweets, both conceived of by people outside of Twitter, isn't a recipe for continued relevance.

Filed Under: api, closed, information, open, politwoops, transparency
Companies: sunlight foundation, twitter

Ford Pretends To Open Up Its Patents Like Tesla, But Doesn't; Media Falls For It

from the bad-reporting-people dept

As you probably know by now, last summer, Elon Musk announced that he was freeing up all of Tesla's patents. He pointed out that he didn't believe patents made any sense, and they especially didn't make sense in the electric vehicle space where they were clearly holding innovation back. Because some investors still couldn't comprehend this -- and assumed (for months!) that there must be some sort of catch, earlier this year Musk clarified that, yes, he really, really meant it, and Tesla's patents were totally free. No need to obtain a license. No need to pay a fee. No need to talk to or tell Tesla about it -- just go and innovate.

Earlier this week, Ford made an announcement claiming that it, too, was opening up its patents -- but the details show that this is a lot more hype and PR than substance. First, unlike Tesla, it's not all of its patents, but rather a specific portfolio of electric vehicle patents. Second, and much more importantly, it's not open. At all. You still have to license them and you still have to pay. This is just Ford announcing "Hey, we have patents, come pay us to use them." That's not opening up those patents. It's marketing the fact that you need to license them. This is the opposite of what Musk did with Tesla's patents.

To access Ford’s patents and published patent applications, interested parties can contact the company’s technology commercialization and licensing office, or work through AutoHarvest – an automaker collaborative innovation and licensing marketplace. AutoHarvest allows members to showcase capabilities and technologies, then privately connect with fellow inventors to explore technology and business development opportunities of mutual interest. The patents would be available for a fee.

And yet, nearly all of the press coverage worked exactly the way Ford intended: claiming that Ford was doing the same thing as Tesla. Here's just a sampling:

• Engadget: Ford joins Tesla in opening up its electric car patents
• Detroit Free Press/USA Today: Ford joins Tesla in opening up electric car patents
• Digital Trends: MOVE OVER, TESLA: FORD OPENING UP PORTFOLIO OF ELECTRIC-VEHICLE PATENTS
• Automobile Mag: Ford Follows Tesla's Lead in Sharing Electric-Car Patents
• Christian Science Monitor: Ford shares electric car technology with rival automakers. Why? (and then the article claims: "Ford is following suit" with Tesla)
• DCInno: Ford Follows Tesla: Makes Electric Car Patents Open Source
• Transport Evolved: FORD PULLS A TESLA, MAKES ELECTRIFIED, ELECTRIC VEHICLE PATENTS OPEN
• Industry Leaders Magazine: After Tesla, Ford is opening up its electric vehicle patents for free to competitors (except it's not even free...)
• Electrek: Ford follows Tesla’s lead and opens all their electric vehicle patents
• Investor's Business Daily: Ford Follows Tesla By Opening EV Patents To Rivals
• Globe & Mail: Why electric vehicle intellectual property is worthless

That last one is particularly hilarious. The title doesn't reference Tesla, but early in the article it does -- and again falsely claims that Ford's program is free:

If, as basic economic theory teaches, something is worth only what someone or group of people is willing to pay for it, then it seems the intellectual property associated with electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells is worthless.

Ford Motor is the latest car company to make this case. Today Ford joined Toyota Motor and Tesla Motors in making a vast range of patented electrification technologies available to its competitors. All free for serious EV developers.

Second, that's not what basic economic theory teaches at all. It's what ignorant armchair economists think it teaches. I know we have to go through this every few years, but price is not a measure of value. Price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand, and can be influenced by a number of different factors unrelated to value. The value to the buyer plays a role in determining the demand curve. Because if the price is less than the value derived, then that's when the buyer is likely to buy. But giving something away does not, in any way, mean that something is worthless.

And, again, this article misses the basic fact that Ford is not giving these away for free.

And people wonder why news publications are struggling to hold onto readers.

Filed Under: electric vehicles, free, innovation, journalism, media, open, open source, patents
Companies: ford, tesla

In The Information Age, It's More Important To Expand The Pie Than Eat The Whole Damn Pie

from the open-v.-closed dept

Mathew Ingram recently wrote a fantastic post about Twitter's big mistake a few years back, basically killing off its openness for developers. He builds his argument off of an interesting post from Ben Thompson, arguing that Twitter has lost its strategic focus. Both articles are great, and I recommend them both. In the early days, Twitter was almost completely open. Many of its most useful features and services came from others building on top of it. The very idea of the "@" symbol was the invention of a user. Same with the retweet. Now both are core to Twitter's identity. And, of course, third-party services were what made Twitter usable in the first place. The service didn't really ever take off for me until I used Tweetdeck -- which was a third party service until Twitter bought it. Thankfully, I can still use Tweetdeck (though not on mobile) because Twitter's actions killed off most competitors (and, because of this, Tweetdeck still lags in fixing some basic things -- like an autoscroll problem I've complained about for years). As Ingram notes, Twitter made a big strategic shift, as it started to fear its own openness and worry that it may have resulted in the dreaded "someone else profiting" off of Twitter's foundation:

Namely, a crucial turning point in Twitter’s evolution that arguably helped put it where it is today, both in a positive sense (it is a publicly-traded $25-billion company) and a negative one (its growth potential is in question and its strategy doesn’t seem to be working). And that turning point happened about five years ago, when Twitter decided to turn its back on the third-party ecosystem that helped make it successful in the first place.

This process began gradually, with the acquisition of Tweetie — which became Twitter’s official iOS client — and restrictions on what third parties could do with tweets, including selling advertising related to them. But it escalated quickly, and arguably became an all-out war with Twitter’s moves against Bill Gross, the Idealab founder and inventor of search-related advertising, who was busy acquiring Twitter clients and trying to build an ad model around the public Twitter stream. The idea that someone could monetize Twitter before Twitter itself got around to doing so was what one investor called a “holy shit moment” for the company.

We see this sort of thing in all sorts of areas -- especially around "intellectual property." People have a very emotional "holy shit moment" pretty frequently when they see "someone else" making money by leveraging something that they feel some sort of ownership attachment to, whether or not there's any legitimate basis for that attachment. So many of the intellectual property fights we see stem from that general feeling of "Hey, that's ripping me off!" even if the actions of those third parties may not have any real impact on the originating content, service or idea.

In the internet era, however, this is almost always the wrong decision. The internet thrives based on the flow of information. You want information to flow more broadly, rather than to hoard it. Historical economics is based on worlds of scarcity, and in worlds of scarcity it makes sense to hoard resources, as they are valuable by themselves. Yet, in worlds of abundance you want the opposite. You want abundant or infinite resources to flow freely because they do something special: they increase the value of everything else around them. You want openness, not closed systems. You want sharing, not hoarding. You want copying, not restrictions. Because all of those things increase the overall pie massively, even if some of that pie (or even large portions) are captured by others.

As Ingram notes, at least some at Twitter recognized this at the time. An early influential employee at Twitter, its chief engineer Alex Payne, wrote about how he tried to persuade the company to go in that direction:

Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down. Predating Twitter, there were the wars against the centralized IM providers that ultimately yielded Jabber, the breakup of Ma Bell, etc. etc. This isn’t to say that one can’t make quite a staggeringly lot of money with a walled garden or centralized communications utility, and the investment community’s salivation over the prospect of IPOs from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter itself suggests that those companies will probably do quite well with a closed-but-for-our-API approach.

The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice. Done right, a decentralized one-to-many communications mechanism could boast a resilience and efficiency that the current centralized Twitter does not. Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing. At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email. Now that would be a triumph of humanity.

But he lost that argument to those who wanted to keep the pie smaller, but to capture more of it for themselves. That may have helped the company go public, but it has put the company in a serious bind today. One in which Wall Street is profoundly disappointed that what Twitter is capturing for itself "isn't enough" and the innovations that the company needs to keep growing and innovating are much harder to come by. Sure, it does things like Vine and Periscope -- both of which it bought out in infancy -- but to do so it's had to hamstring other third-party developers like Meerkat.

Ingram also highlights another Ben Thompson post on what Twitter might have been had it gone down this more open path (he wrote this after the whole Meerkat thing):

I would argue that what makes Twitter the company valuable is not Twitter the app or 140 characters or @names or anything else having to do with the product: rather, it’s the interest graph that is nearly priceless. More specifically, it is Twitter identities and the understanding that can be gleaned from how those identities are used and how they interact that matters.

If one starts with that sort of understanding — that Twitter the company is about the graph, not the app — one would make very different decisions. For one, the clear priority would not be increasing ad inventory on the Twitter timeline (which in this understanding is but one manifestation of an interest graph) but rather ensuring as many people as possible have and use a Twitter identity. And what would be the best way to do that? Through 3rd-parties, of course! And by no means should those 3rd-parties be limited to recreating the Twitter timeline: they should build all kinds of apps that have a need to connect people with common interests: publishers would be an obvious candidate, and maybe even an app that streams live video. Heck, why not a social network that requires a minimum of 140 characters, or a killer messaging app? Try it all, anything to get more people using the Twitter identity and the interest graph.

There's a more fundamental premise at work here. In the information era, spreading more information increases the pie massively and opens up many more opportunities. The challenge is that many others can also take advantage of many of those opportunities, but as the core player in the space, a company like Twitter has a clear and natural advantage, even if it did what Payne had wanted to do many years ago and give up the underlying control altogether.

This is, unfortunately, a profoundly difficult concept for many to grasp -- especially when they're in the midst of it. Hell, even as someone who regularly talks about this very idea, I still get the initial emotional pang of being upset when I see someone else get success with an idea that I had first (whether or not they got it from me). It's only natural to have that visceral reaction. The real question is what do you do about it. Do you fret? Do you try to control? Or do you realize that in broadening these ideas and sharing them more widely, it creates greater opportunities across the board?

It's impossible to know what would have happened had Twitter taken a different path. But it seems clear that remaining a more open platform (or even moving to a fully distributed one), would have resulted in a tool that was much more useful today, with a much larger audience and much greater innovation. It's too bad we didn't get to live in that world.

Filed Under: closed, developers, distributed, increasing the pie, infrastructure, non-zero sum game, open, ownership, platform
Companies: twitter

Open Licenses And Freedom Of Panorama Recognized In Russian Law

from the good-news-for-a-change dept

Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of dismal news coming out of Russia, chronicling its increasing clampdown on the Internet, so it's great to hear about something extremely positive happening there. The Wikimedia blog reports on some important changes to Russia's Civil Code, including the following:

Open licenses introduced.

The new law directly recognizes free licenses (which are fundamental for projects like Wikipedia or Linux). The authors of free content will be able to have legal protection from misuse of their works.

Freedom of panorama introduced.

Now it is allowed to take photos in any public territory. The photographers are no more formally offenders, as before when nobody was allowed to sell postcards with modern buildings without the permission of the architect or his successors (despite the fact that such situation was quite usual in practice). Unfortunately, monuments are still not covered by the introduced amendments.

As the Wikimedia blog post points out, the first of these is crucially important for Wikipedia and free software projects, both of which have existed in a kind of legal limbo until this latest move. That's probably meant that some Russian software companies have been unwilling to embrace licenses like the GNU GPL for their code for fear that it would be unprotected under local law. According to Wikimedia's Russian director, Vladimir Medeyko, the new provisions even go beyond what is found elsewhere:

The direct inclusion of the stipulations on the free licenses into the law is a progressive step not only for Russia, but worldwide. There are no specific articles on free licenses in other countries' laws, and hence these licenses are still in a grey area there. Actually, free licenses exploit the archaic tercentenary system of copyright, that always limited the readers' freedoms in order to allow the authors and the publishers to earn money, for the opposite goal -- to protect the readers' right to free access. Therefore, without direct regulation, there is too vast judicial discretion, and free licenses users are not protected perfectly. In the Russian law there are no uncertainties like that anymore.

Freedom of panorama refers to the right to take photos or videos of public spaces. As an interesting Wikipedia page indicates, this right is by no means universal, and so Russia is a welcome addition to the group of nations that do offer freedom of panorama in at least some form. The move is also a reminder that steady work by dedicated experts can achieve important results even against a retrogressive legal background.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: copyright, freedom of panorama, internet, licenses, open, open access, russia

Law Professors Ask President Obama To Open Up TPP Process

from the stop-the-secrecy dept

A group of over 80 law professors, including many prominent and well-known ones, have now called on President Obama to open up the secretive TPP process. They point out that, especially after the recent leak of the TPP's IP chapter, it's shown that the closed, secretive, non-transparent process leads to bad results. Instead, they argue for an open process, like the recent Marrakesh Treaty concerning copyright issues related to the blind. In that negotiation, proposals were made publicly and shared, so that there was widespread public comment and discussion. There is simply no good reason for the US government to continue negotiating this massive, and tremendously important treaty in secret. The lawyers are clear that they're not against the overall TPP agreement -- in fact, many support it. But they cannot accept the backroom process by which it has been negotiated.

We, the undersigned intellectual property law academics and scholars, write to you to ask you to support immediately changing the secretive TPP negotiation process in law and in practice, and follow instead the example set by the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled, as explained below.

Intellectual property law is incredibly far reaching in its impact – implicating everything from the price of medicines and textbooks to the ability to exercise free expression and create new business models on the Internet. The TPP’s intellectual property chapter would restrict Congress’s ability to legislate on these key issues, and would do so without public input. Indeed, reported proposals in the TPP would foreclose many policy proposals currently under consideration, including proposals to reform copyright law proposed by the Library of Congress, proposals to reform “data exclusivity” periods for biologic medicines included in the President’s budget, and proposals to amend exceptions for the circumvention of technological protection measures to promote interoperability of cell phones proposed by the Administration itself.

They also point out (nicely), that the administration should know better by now. Not only was the Marrakesh Treaty a success, but ACTA failed because of the USTR's insistence on doing everything in backrooms, and avoiding any and all transparency. So far, it looks like they haven't learned their lesson yet, but pushing the load of crap that is the current IP chapter on TPP seems likely to only give the USTR yet another refresher course in what happens when they decide to make deals like this in backrooms to favor Hollywood and Big Pharma, rather than having an open review in public.

Filed Under: barack obama, law professors, marrakesh treaty, open, scholars, tpp, ustr

Australian Government Announces Rare Public Consultation On TPP -- Then Bans All Journalists From Attending

from the something-to-hide? dept

As Techdirt has noted many times, the TPP negotiations -- like ACTA before them and now TAFTA/TTIP -- are distinguished by an almost complete lack of transparency. That makes the rare opportunities offered by governments participating in TPP to find out more, particularly valuable and important. Here's one announced recently by the Australian government:

Dear TPP Stakeholders,

As part of the Australian Government's ongoing public consultation process on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) negotiations, the TPP negotiating team will be visiting Sydney on 30 October 2013 to meet with interested members of the public, and business and civil society stakeholders. The meeting will provide an update on the negotiations and an opportunity for further stakeholder input.

As far as it goes, that sounds good. But then something strange happened, as the Pirate Party Australia explained:

Pirate Party Australia has received confirmation that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has rescinded confirmations of attendance for journalists to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement briefing to be held in Sydney at 4pm on 30 October, stating that the meeting is "off-the-record", and that journalists are not welcome.

Not only did the Australian government rescind invitations to journalists, but it also "disappeared" the whole event from its Web site. And it gets even better. Brendan Molloy, Councillor of Pirate Party Australia, is quoted as saying:

"I've already had a freedom of information request have a fee levied with the justification that the TPP isn't in the public interest because there have been few articles written about it. It's pretty hard to write an article about something when you're barred from attending the briefings, and instead offered an arrangement where you're spoonfed Government spin and prevented from hearing the important, unanswered questions being asked by the stakeholders that shine a harsher light on this secretive agreement," concluded Mr Molloy.

In other words, the Australian government refuses to release information about TPP freely, because it says that too few articles have been written about it. And then it bans journalists from attending public meetings, thus making it harder for them to write articles on the subject. Classy.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: australia, journalism, open, tpp, transparency

DRM In HTML5: What Is Tim Berners-Lee Thinking?

from the what-about-the-users? dept

Back in January, we reported on a truly stupid idea: making DRM an official aspect of HTML5. Things then went quiet, until a couple of weeks ago a post on a W3C mailing announced that the work was "in scope". An excellent post on the EFF's blog explains:

This means the controversial Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal will continue to be part of that group's work product, and may be included in the W3C's HTML5.1 standard. If EME goes through to become part of a W3C recommendation, you can expect to hear DRM vendors, DRM-locked content providers like Netflix, and browser makers like Microsoft, Opera, and Google stating that they can now offer W3C standards compliant "content protection" for Web video.

The same post offers a chilling glimpse of where EME could take us:

A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents – browsers -- must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable.

Rather ironically, given the fact that EME may well lead to the official closing-down of much of the open Web, Tim Berners-Lee has recently written an article entitled "The many meanings of Open", which included the following section:

The W3C community is currently exploring Web technology that will strike a balance between the rights of creators and the rights of consumers. In this space in particular, W3C seeks to lower the overall proprietary footprint and increase overall interoperability, currently lacking in this area.

Techdirt readers will immediately recognize the framing here: people who use the Web are either active "creators" or passive "consumers". Since the needs and desires of those groups are in opposition, somehow they have to be "balanced". It's exactly how the copyright industry tries to present the online world as it demands rights there that can be used against the public as part of that "balance". It's curious to see Berners-Lee adopt this formulation to justify putting DRM into HTML5. The same thinking came up in a W3C blog post that Berners-Lee wrote around the same time:

So we put the user first, but different users have different preferences. Putting the user first doesn't help us to satisfy users' possibly incompatible wants: some Web users like to watch big-budget movies at home, some Web users like to experiment with code. The best solution will be one that satisfies all of them, and we're still looking for that. If we can't find that, we're looking for the solutions that do least harm to these and other expressed wants from users, authors, implementers, and others in the ecosystem.

Again, there is the idea that the desires of people who want an open Web -- the ones that want to "experiment", by examining the underlying HTML code, say -- and those who want to watch "big-budget movies at home", are somehow in opposition, and have to be "balanced". That's nonsense. The standards currently underlying the Web are open, with no direct support for DRM -- although companies can and do add it in various non-standard ways. And people are already able to watch films at home, so there is no need to destroy the open Web in order to make the latter possible. Elsewhere in the same post we learn perhaps the real reason why the Berners-Lee and the W3C want to take this step:

if content protection of some kind has to be used for videos, it is better for it to be discussed in the open at W3C, better for everyone to use an interoperable open standard as much as possible, and better for it to be framed in a browser which can be open source, and available on a general purpose computer rather than a special purpose box. Those are key arguments for the decision that this topic is in scope.

Leaving aside the dubious initial premise -- there is no evidence that DRM is necessary, and Apple's decision to drop it for music indicates quite the contrary -- this suggests that going along with demands for adding DRM to HTML5 is about the W3C's fear of becoming marginalized by Hollywood studios as they make more of their films available online.

Perhaps the W3C should worry less about its own position and more about the users it claims to put first. After all, the net effect of creating an official standard for interoperable DRM will be to make it easier for copyright companies to adopt it -- there won't even be the present barriers and friction caused by incompatible ad-hoc systems that might make them think twice about adding it. Instead, it is likely to become the default on most online products, placing more obstacles in the way of fair-use rights of users, particularly those who are visually-impaired, who will find it harder to access these materials at all if such DRM becomes commonplace.

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Filed Under: drm, html5, open, openness, tim berners-lee
Companies: w3c

Irony Alert: Obama Opposes Amash Amendment Because It's A 'Blunt Approach' And Not A Product Of 'Open' Process

from the now-they're-just-fucking-with-us,-right? dept

Okay, someone in the White House just feels like giving people who believe in protecting civil liberties a giant middle finger today. As a quick review, the President and the administration have been hiding behind secret court orders with secret interpretations of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act to use a very blunt instrument: collecting pretty much all digital data around, and keeping the whole thing totally quiet for years. In response, Rep. Justin Amash is seeking to pull funding from one of the key NSA programs -- the one that involved a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act by a secret court to pretend that language that clearly applied to only limited data now meant the NSA could order AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others to hand over every call record on every phone call. And, this is a program that no one knew about until Ed Snowden leaked it to the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Okay, having reinforced those basic points, check out the giant "screw you guys" the White House just pushed out in the form of a "statement" in response to the Amash Amendment. I'll bold the key guffaw-inducing lines:

In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens. The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.

However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.

Let me repeat that again: This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process. As opposed to the blunt process of collecting all data on everyone which was arrived at via an "informed, open and deliberative process -- known as totally secretly interpreting the plain language of a law in a secret ruling from a secret court to mean something almost entirely different than what the language itself said?

This is a joke, right?

Only someone who really has a sick sense of humor would try to argue that a bill looking to slow down the rampant spying on pretty much all Americans comes from a lack of an "informed, open, or deliberative process" when the process to create that massive surveillance infrastructure was all done in complete darkness.

Filed Under: appropriations, barack obama, debate, irony, justin amash, nsa, nsa surveillance, open, surveillance

Yes, You Can Have An Open And Transparent Treaty Negotiation For Intellectual Property

from the proof-is-in-the-pudding dept

We had mentioned along with the news that the WIPO treaty for the blind had been signed in Marrakech that it proved that -- contrary to the claims of the USTR -- that you don't need to keep negotiations of an intellectual property treaty secret. Sean Flynn has now expanded on this to debunk the USTR's clearly untrue assertion.

The elements of WIPO’s transparency processes are varied. they start with ongoing releases of draft negotiating documents dating back to the beginning of the process.  ACTA was marked by releases of negotiating texts only through leaks, until the EU parliament demanded increased transparency – after which point negotiators released four public texts in the final 12 months. The TPP negotiators claim they will complete their treaty this October (which no one believes). There has not been a single public release of text, thus failing to live up to even the meager standard for public releases that defined ACTA. The leaked texts of TPP that we have show a secret agreement to keep the texts of the proposals being considered until four years AFTER the conclusion of the agreement. Thus, even subsequent interpreters of the TPP may be prevented from seeing its legislative history.

WIPO webcasted negotiations, and even established listening rooms where stakeholders could hear (but not be physically present in) break rooms where negotiators were working on specific issues. ACTA was not subject to any observation of negotiating rooms by non-parties. TPP negotiators even rejected a request by a U.S. Congressman to observe a negotiation.

WIPO set up a system of open and transparent structured stakeholder input, including published reports and summaries of stakeholder working groups composed of commercial and non-commercial interests alike. ACTA was, and TPP is, informed by structured input from multinational corporations who receive secret drafts of texts and submit reports to the United States Trade Representative.  There are no consumer representatives among these advisers and none of their reports are public.

Transparency in WIPO continued through the final days of intense, often all night, negotiations in the final diplomatic conference. When negotiators reached a new breakthrough on the language concerning the controversial “3-step test” limiting uses of limitations and exceptions in national laws, that news was released to the public (enabling public news stories on it), along with the draft text of the agreement. There are now reports that a majority of the chapters of the TPP are concluded, and perhaps a majority of the articles in the IP section – but the public has no public text to see what those agreements might be.

The list goes on and on and the contrast is incredibly clear. The USTR is being misleading to downright dishonest in suggesting that it couldn't possibly have the same level of transparency in the negotiations around agreements like the TPP or ACTA (or the upcoming TAFTA).

Filed Under: acta, blind, closed, negotiations, open, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, treaties, treaty for the blind, ttip, wipo