Amazon has unveiled its long-rumored video download service. I share Randy Picker’s skepticism about the service’s potential for success:
You get content through the Amazon unbox video player, which is the control center for managing downloads and control over the content. Once the show or movie is downloaded, you can watch it on your computer or on an approved video device (but no iPods or Macintoshes and nary a word about Linux). And if you know how to do it, you can hook your computer up to your television and watch the TV show there.
All of that is reasonably straightforward, until you start to break it down. Although this is video on demand, you need to plan your demand a day in advance. Amazon estimates that it will take more than seven hours to download a two hour movie over a 750 kbps line. The system does implement progressive download, meaning that you can start watching immediately as the content comes, but at these download rates, you’ll run out of content quite quickly.
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MySpace is getting into the music market. And to help set them apart from the pack, they’ve opted for a decentralized approach: anyone can offer their music via MySpace, and pricing is controlled by the artist. Moreover, MySpace has opted to offer the music in MP3 format, unencumbered by DRM.
Joe at TechDirt gets the implications of this exactly right:
while many of these music stores are simply iTunes clones, MySpace is trying something different. It’s going to offer a way for bands to sell music directly to fans from their MySpace pages. Furthermore, the songs aren’t DRM’d so they’re not tied to a particular device, and the band controls the price at which they’re sold. Bands are already building up followings on MySpace, but have lacked a way to turn popularity into commercial success. This store will try to solve this problem. Predictably, there’s already talk of whether MySpace can unseat the dominance of Apple in the digital music space, but that misses the point. It’s the record labels themselves that should feel threatened. Not only has MySpace already given young bands an avenue to reach the masses, without a label to pay for their promotional campaigns, but now it’s giving them more control over their distribution as well. The value added by signing with a label is clearly diminishing, and their fortunes are likely to follow.
The labels’ traditional strengths were in distribution and marketing. Their distribution advantage is effectively gone, at least among the under-40 crowd that mostly listens to music on their iPods. And their promotional advantage is fading as more young people find new music on the Internet rather than traditional broadcast media.
As a result, the labels are largely coasting on inertia. Because they’ve got contracts with the vast majority of popular artists, people are in the habit of looking to them for new music. That, in turn, makes their artists more likely to succeed, which in turn makes the best artists more likely to seek contracts from them. It’s a virtuous cycle that’s allowed them to continue to dominate the music charts even as their distribution and promotional network is rapidly rendered obsolete.
But the momentum won’t continue forever. Sites like MySpace will make it ever easier for bands to find fans without the help of the labels. And once a substantial fraction of rock stars aren’t beholden to the labels, the labels’ remaining advantages will evaporate. At that point, their high overhead and history of hostility toward their customers will come back to haunt them. Consumer are likely to find getting music on MySpace to be cheaper, more convenient, and more interactive. And once bands can reach their fans directly, why bother with the middleman?
Check out this ad I saw earlier today on Freedom to Tinker:
Do the doctrines of contributory and vicarious liability apply to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions? If so, I bet the RIAA and MPAA’s lawyers are drafting up the lawsuit as we speak!
Ed Felten points to a Boing Boing post giving details about Microsoft’s decision to drop HD video support from the 32-bit version of Vista. An anonymous Microsoft employee says:
Media Player won’t play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but you’ll still be able to play them (on XP, even) with third-party programs like WinDVD and PowerDVD, in full HD.
Why? Because the media companies are willing to certify WinDVD and PowerDVD, but they won’t certify Windows, basically for the reasons described. The other problem is indemnity – Microsoft has much deeper pockets and the risks of someone hacking Windows and getting the Microsoft keys is too high; Microsoft’s payouts to the studios would be enormous. The DRM contracts essentially say that you forfeit all money lost to the studios if your key is hacked. The money “lost” to the studios is of course calculated using the estimate most favorable to the studios – i.e. every copy downloaded off LimeWire is a full-price loss. Intervideo (WinDVD) and Cyberlink (PowerDVD) are small companies and figure they’re not the largest targets, or they’ll just go bankrupt and start again as a new company. Cyberlink is based in Asia, and suing them would be pricey.
The screwball thing about all this is that essentially the same risks of hacked drivers and whatnot exist with PowerDVD and WinDVD; there’s no good reason for the studios to certify them if they really are worried about people using the PC to copy movies.
This guy and Felten both speculate on why the policy is so confused, but I don’t actually think it’s that mysterious. What we’re seeing here is a case study in what happens when you create a large bureaucracy and charge it with performing an impossible task. In this case, Hollywood executives are trying to accomplish two fundamentally incompatible goals: (1) Make their products widely available and (2) make sure no illicit copies get release to peer-to-peer networks. When you charge a bureaucracy with performing an impossible task, it’s inevitable that the resulting policy will be incoherent. The best the bureaucracy can do is make various token decisions in the directions of accomplishing the stated goal–some of which will inevitably be inconsistent or flatly contradictory to others.
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Cory Doctorow points to an article (that’s currently slashdotted) about Microsoft’s plan to disable high-def video playback in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. It seems that there are too many ways to hack around Microsoft’s copy protection scheme in the 32-bit version, so Microsoft has simply thrown in the towel and told a substantial fraction of its customers that they’re out of luck.
As Doctorow notes, this creates an interesting perverse incentive, since movies downloaded from illegal file-sharing sites will work just fine. Is Hollywood trying to drive its customers into the arms of pirates?
I missed this blog post a couple of weeks ago:
Intel released open-source drivers for its graphics cards on Wednesday, a bid to win Linux allies and give the operating better support, but graphics rival ATI Technologies has indicated it won’t follow suit when it comes to the software that lets operating systems communicate with its workstation and PC graphics cards.
“Proprietary, patented optimizations are part of the value we provide to our customers and we have no plans to release these drivers to open source,” the company said in a statement. “In addition, multimedia elements such as content protection must not, by their very nature, be allowed to go open source.”
It’s possible that position could change if Advanced Micro Devices’ acquisition of ATI goes through, but so far AMD hasn’t committed one way or the other.
This sums up in one succinct sound byte why fans of open source software hate software patents and digital rights management technology. Note that this has nothing to do with being stingy or anti-capitalist. Many open source hackers make a good living and would gladly pay extra for the right to use an open source ATI driver. What they’re focused on is the freedom to tinker, and the positive externalities generated when other programmers are given the freedom to tinker.
Unfortunately, as the ATI guy says, software patents and DRM are fundamentally hostile to the freedom to tinker. By nature, open source software projects lack the infrastructure required to collect patent royalties or to restrict modifications on DRM to prevent circumvention. As a result, the antagonism of open source programmers to software patents and DRM isn’t going to go away.
Hat tip: EFF
Adam’s right that OK Go’s music videos are awesome. You can check out other music videos here. “Invincible” is particularly good.
So I clicked over to OK Go’s blog and I saw this post urging readers to jump over to VH1’s site to vote for “Here it Goes Again” (the video Adam linked to yesterday) on VH1’s Top 20 music countdown. I did as I was told, and clicked on the link on VH1’s site to watch the video on “VSpot,” VH1’s free music video site. Instead of treadmill-video goodness, I was confronted with this helpful message:
We are sorry! Vspot does not currently have Digital Rights Management (DRM) support for Macintosh. Please see our FAQ for system requirements to view on demand and free video on Vspot.
The FAQ says:
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The DVD CCA is set to remove hurdles to burning of legally-downloaded movie content to ordinary DVDs:
The impending technical and policy changes involve the copy group’s proprietary technology known as the Content Scramble System, or CSS. The association, an arm of Hollywood studios, licenses the encryption technology to makers of DVD players and other electronics companies and applies it widely to movies on DVDs to restrict illegal copying.
The association said it will soon expand licensing to movies that are digitally distributed on demand or a la carte–and not just for movies that are mass produced on DVDs.
The group also is working with disc makers to produce CSS-compatible blank DVDs.
It’s unfortunate that the reporter doesn’t go into any more detail about what, exactly, a “CSS-compatible” DVD is, or what the previous licensing obstacles were. My guess is that the primary change is that the CCA has green-lighted the creation of “Type A” media, which is required to encode CSS encryption keys in a format that commercial DVD players will be able to use them. I wonder if the widespread availability of “Type A” media will also make it possible for consumers to create exact digital copies of mass-produced DVDs with their home DVD burners?
Derek Slater and Tim Armstrong have been having a debate over the merits of agitating for better digital rights management technologies rather than agitating for outright repeal of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules. I think Derek’s take on the question is dead on:
I am not a lawyer, but last time I checked, Title 17 is the Copyright Act–it’s meant to encouarge creation and distribution of artistic (and related) works insomuch as it benefits the public. Title 17 is not the Medical Privacy Act, nor the Privacy in Embarassing Pictures And Emotional Distress Act, nor the Confidentiality Agreement Enforcement Act. It’s the Copyright Act, and it shouldn’t be turned into a Christmas tree on which everyone hangs a pet project that they think technical restrictions might achieve.
Tim already knows this, and when he teaches his students about the Lexmark and Skylink cases, I suspect this is roughly his sentiment will be. Why this insight doesn’t apply in Tim’s cited examples, I don’t know.
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Prof. Picker has a post analyzing the copyright issues involved in last year’s BNetD case. In a nutshell, Blizzard makes popular games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. They have an online matchmaking service called Battle.net for those games. One of the benefits of Battle.net (from Blizzard’s perspective) is that it checks your CD key and verifies that it’s (1) legitimate and (2) not already in use on Battle.net. This prevents someone from giving a single copy of the CD to 7 friends and then having an 8-way game on Battle.net.
But along comes the BNetD team, which creates server software that mimicks the functionality of Battle.net. BNetD fails to perform the CD key check that Battle.net performs, meaning that those without valid CD keys and those sharing CD keys can log on to a BNetD server. Blizzard sued the creators of the game, arguing that the program was an illegal circumvention device under the DMCA, as well as a violation of the software’s license agreement. Last year, Blizzard prevailed before the Eighth Circuit.
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