Digital Copyright Canada

> I dislike intensely the DRM activity of various "media" companies that
> try to control where and how material may be accessed. However, I think
> it may be appropriate for those of us opposed to them and who want new
> business models to suggest alternatives that foster acknowledgement of
> the real creators of works.

Sorry for this brief reply, as I have been out of touch with the mailing 
list for a while. I just want to quickly touch on this business side of 
things by giving a historical example that I found quite interesting.

Back when the media distributors were starting to get very worried indeed 
about copying of VIDEO over the internet they briefly investigated the 
feasibility of say delivering on demand video streams over the internet. I 
remember this very clearly, the IEEE publications in 2000/2001 discussed 
delivering live video and determined it just wasn't feasible to deliver 
gigabytes of DVD content over consumer internet lines. At the time the 
algorithms just were not efficient enough.

So that line of business was abandoned and capital resources went instead 
into legal efforts. However, now four years later, developments in audio 
and video compression as well as advancement in residential bandwidth have 
made it entirely feasible to deliver high quality video over the internet 
to subscribers, on a pay per use basis.

It is done regularly in an ad-hoc way by a lot of little guys. It is 
totally feasible, and a media giant could have only done it more 
efficiently, reliably, and more profitably if they had just been willing to 
embrace new technology rather than try to break it.

If the large media companies had invested the capital into this kind of 
research, they might have been able to bring the technologies required to 
market quicker than hobbyists/academia ... and at the same time have set up  
the required infrastructure and market dominance to guarantee a reliable 
revenue stream, without fear of movie pirates.

But they missed the opportunity to capture this new market because they did 
not experiment, they did not invest in research, and they decided that 
legal harassment was a better line of business than adapting to the 
internet.

My point here is that there are many potential solutions even for companies 
(like the media giants) who think that they have been made extinct by the 
internet. But they have to jump on these avenues instead of investing all 
their resources in lobbying and legal action. DRM is technologically 
senseless in the long term and they probably know it. I do not know what 
the answer is for the big guys and frankly I don't care. They can innovate 
and adapt, or they can die.

For other artists, the solution is probably for artists big and small 
across the country to unite, centralize their small record labels into one 
coordinated marketing and distribution effort. They won't have the huge 
overhead of dealing with the big labels that rip them off and consumers 
will still be able to find them. Such a coordinated effort that cuts out 
the big labels, which really just steal most of the money, means more 
profits can go to artists while also lowering the cost of the product to 
the consumer. When the product cost gets low enough and convenient enough, 
a consumer is going to prefer paying for high quality media plus some 
(intangible?) benefits rather than copying from a friend.

My belief is that once the business side is implemented properly, the 
problem of "illegal copying" will turn out to not be an issue at all, just 
side noise. I think these efforts to control and restrict digital copying 
are a very poor solution to the wrong problem.

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Digital Copyright Canada

Re: [d@DCC] Query: do fans object to digital watermarks?

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