As part of the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival there will be a panel on Saturday September 24 titled "Digital Distribution: Technology and the Entertainment Industry". Along with Fading Ways Music musician Johnny Charmer, I will be participating in this panel. While this panel will not allow for speeches, the following is what I would like to say and I will try to bring different aspects of it into the discussion whenever possible.
I do not believe that people downloading and sharing music or movies without authorization is a sign of some type of moral decay in otherwise law-abiding Canadians. While there are a small few that may want something for nothing, the vast majority are expressing some unfulfilled need that they would pay for if what they wanted was available commercially.
Recently Graham Henderson, current president of the "Canadian" Recording Industry Association (CRIA), was quoted as suggesting that he believed that anyone who opposed him did so because they wanted music to be "free".
I believe he is nearly correct. As an opponent to his lobbying efforts I want music and other creative works to be "free" as in "free trade", "free market", and "free speech".
Free Trade
Globalization is a fact of life which all businesses must come to grips with. For the entertainment industries this means that they can no longer separate markets into separate geographical regions, releasing titles in some markets and not others, or releasing at different times. If music or a movie is available in one place in the world, it is available in all places. If a potential customer can not go to an authorized domestic source for the movie and pay for it, they will go internationally and get it anyway.
This should not be seen as a threat, but an opportunity to make more money. While advertising can be focused on specific lucrative markets, authorized standards-based digital downloads can be made available worldwide to fulfil the commercial need for those who may be in less lucrative geographic regions.
There must also be easy access to the back-catalogue, something that the television and movie industies have handled far better than the recording industry. It is possible to buy entire seasons on DVD of older (and fairly recent) television shows, and there are stations such as DejaView and TV Land which are dedicated to rebroadcasting past television.
Free Market
Free market competition must exist for both the creative community and their audiences. This means that a full spectrum of production, distribution and funding models must be supported, and not only the legacy methods used by the current "superstars".
Digital media storage and communications formats are an area where this is breaking down. What is needed is to have vendor-neutral formats which allow creators and audiences to make independant technology choices. Never should a technology or brand choice made by one to be imposed on the other.
As a software creator and technical consultant I focus on Free/Libre and Open Source Software, and vendor-neutral standards. This means that I am not a customer or supplier of vendor-dependant solutions such as Microsoft Media or Apple's iTunes. Current so-called "legal" digital download sites for music are tied to the products of these companies, meaning that as a non-consumer of Microsoft or Apple I am forced to also be a non-consumer of major label music download sites.
This is a market that must be understood to be price sensitive, whether there are legal alternatives or not. As reported by Reuters on September 20:
Apple boss Steve Jobs, the man behind the popular iPod digital music player, called the music industry greedy for considering a hike in the price of digital downloads, warning such a move would drive users back to piracy.
For music we have a small number of primarily American and European major labels that in Canada control 95% of the market for recorded music, but have far less than 5% of Canadian musicians signed to them. This indicates a need for a market correction, and for better market access for independants.
Free Speech
The greatest threat to the motion picture and recording industry is one that the movie companies should recognize from their birth a hundred years ago in the United States. At that time there was a series of patent holders on motion picture technology, the majority held by Thomas Edison, who came together in 1909 to create the Motion Picture Patents Company . This company created the General Film Company whose purpose was to block the entry of non-licensed independents, and to fully control the movie making, distribution and projection process.
The independents of the day, including William Fox, fled west to hide from the enforcement arms of these technology companies. These independents, who would today be called "pirates" for wilfully infringing the motion picture patents, founded the now famous studios in Hollywood.
Forgetting their own past, these studios are now lobbying to recreate the same type of centralized technological control that they went west to get away from. In the name of stopping unauthorized digital copying of movies they are lobbying to have technological controls put into the tools used for the production, distribution and access of content.
The problem is far worse today than a hundred years ago. The monopolies being created by "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) companies will have a level of control built into the tools that go far beyond the wildest dreams of the patent companies of the past. The studios have also been lobbying to change the laws everywhere on the planet. There will be nowhere for the next generation of independent creators to go to get away from the technology monopolies created on behalf of the older generation of independents.
The cost/benefit analysis for DRM
I will try to bring up the cost/benefit analysis for DRM. The most misunderstood aspect is the lack of benefit to the entertainment industries. As I've written in other articles, DRM technologies do not affect the activities of those who already wish to violate copyright, and can not stop them. DRM technologies only negatively affect law abiding citizens.
Computer security professor Edward Felten described the political insanity we are observing in a recent article:
Imagine that you somehow convinced policymakers that the auto industry could make cars that operated with no energy source at all. You could then demand that the auto industry make all sorts of concessions in energy policy, and you could continue to criticize them for foot-dragging no matter how much they did.
Trying to create digital technologies that can stop people from unauthorized copying is about as realistic as a car that needs no energy source. While this technology is snake-oil and can provide no benefits, there are still considerable costs. The most prominent type of DRM is Access Controls, which ties the access to content to a specific brand of technology. It will also impose brands onto creators who wish access to audiences who are already customers of specific brands.
Another controversial technology is the use of watermarks and the embedding of watermark detection technology in digital cameras. The fact is that while watermarks can disable a camera when an episode of "The Simpsons" is on a television in view of the camera, it can also be used by governments or criminals that can broadcast watermarks to hide activities which they do not wish to be recorded. The extreme cost to photojournalism alone fully outweighs the theoretical benefit to copyright holders of the false promise of this technology.
