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‘Digital Personal Property’: A kinder, gentler DRM?
September 7, 2009 | 11:03 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a story about an idea for replacing DRM (Digital Rights Management) with DPP—“digital personal property”. Paul Sweazey, who is heading up an IEEE study group looking at the idea, thinks it would free consumers from having to authenticate with servers that may be unreachable if the Internet is down, or that may be taken down if the vendor decides to exit the business.
The idea is to make digital property mimic real property, in that you can lend the material to someone but lose access to it while it’s away—and the person to whom you’re lending it can choose not to give it back. This is accomplished through encryption using a “playkey”—an encryption key that resides in a “tamper-protected” circuit or on-line account. The file itself can be copied and e-mailed, but the playkey can only be “transferred”.
Anderson writes:
Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model; why not provide truly open files for download, perhaps reserving traditional tethered DRM for rentals and streaming? His answer is that such freely-copiable goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.
The problem with the idea, as Anderson himself points out, is that DPP is just another form of DRM. It will inevitably be cracked, leaving the digital product vendors no better off than when they started. In the end, Sweazey and his committee may only be fooling themselves.
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Comments:
It’s not a new idea – it’s just a “dongle” isn’t it?
It doesn’t surprise me that people with a propietary interest in information assets are are always to be found fighting this same rear-guard action, but I never cease to be amazed at how they manage again and again to fool themselves (or are they just pretending to believe?) that they have come up with a “new solution” which finally reconciles up-to-date information technology with their out-of-date form of property.
As Karl wrote, 150-odd years ago:
Anderson is right to question the whole idea. Software is not the same thing as hardware, and ideas aren’t the same as physical goods. Pretending they are the same is today a socially harmful practice. The most valuable aspect of ideas and of intellectual culture generally is that it can be freely shared, and to renounce this valuable property (and to mutilate it in practice) is in economic terms an enormous act of vandalism.
Con,
As idealistic as your viewpoint is, it would also relegate everyone creating intellectual property to do so for free… which would force most creators to abandon creation for a paying job, thereby depriving everyone of their creative works. How, exactly, do you propose to make sure people will continue to create if there is no compensation available for them?
The fact that IP is not the same as a toaster is clear, but that does not mean it doesn’t deserve some sort of protections. Until you can design and implement the “totally free society” for us all, demanding something ought to be free because no one has figured out the best way to charge for it yet isn’t helping the issue. And quoting someone who died before the object of your focus was even invented does not sway me overmuch.
Maybe DPP is just another type of dongle, but it might be a dongle that can be made to satisfy the overwhelming majority of IP users. At any rate, it’s more likely to solve the problem than wishing for a free society.
Copyright is an artifact of its time. Times have changed. Short of everyone being forced to use only government-sanctioned hardware that has surveillance built in at chip level, copyright can’t likely go on much longer. It just doesn’t fit the digital age. Still, three hundred years isn’t a bad run for an idea.
While expecting an ongoing revenue stream for what one has produced seems unlikely, getting paid up front might work. There are many book series I’d pay an author to produce another volume in, or TV series I’d pay a fee to see produced (and get the money refunded from escrow if the producers couldn’t get enough others to agree within six months, say).
Steve, there are plenty of ways (“business models” if you want to call them that) by which people can earn money producing ideas. Using the copyright regime to restrict access to your ideas to paying customers is just one way, and it’s a way which is technologically no longer feasible. My point is that the copyright already deprives most people access to most copyrighted works (causing a substantial economic loss to society as a whole). So that’s not an argument that counts in favour of copyright.
To replace the economically wasteful and technologically infeasible regime, I would suggest a combination of approaches.
Open Source software shows one way. Companies can make money through consultancy and support, and use their intellectual products (books, software, training materials, whatever) as hooks to acquire paying customers. Musicians can give away their music and make money through concerts or through selling merchandise. People are doing this already, and although not an easy fix, it has the advantage that it is at least a fix, unlike this latest dongle which I expect will be as successful as all the earlier dongles.
Philanthropic and tax-payer funded models are another way. Look at MIT’s Open CourseWare for instance. Or there are plenty of examples of prizes and grants and so on for writers and creative workers. These should be stepped up to replace the failing copyright model. In many countries, copyright agencies already receive revenue from taxes on blank digital media; revenue which they can disburse to the creative producers.
Note also that many creative people are already creative without economic reward. How many poets make money from writing and publishing their poetry? Yet poetry goes on all the same. People just do it in addition to their day jobs and feel lucky if their sales revenue covers their costs.
None of these approaches are perfect but they can all be improved and developed. Whereas copyright-restricted access has already hit a technological dead-end.
BTW, digital information technology did exist in Marx’s day, albeit in its infancy. The fact that he recognised that the growing economic value of ideas would pose a problem for capitalism “down the line” just shows what a bright spark he was. The fact that people nowadays can’t see the problem so clearly when they are already tripping over it in their day-to-day lives just shows how effectively people’s thinking is constrained by the “common-sense” traditional “business models” they have learned to live within, and which they have come to see as “human nature” (“the basic business model of human commerce” in the article).
Arguing that copyright is useless because technology defeats it is immaterial, and here’s why: Copyright was always defeatable. Designs could be stolen, products could be copied out of the box. The only thing that has kept it workable and relevant has been the same thing that will continue to keep it workable and relevant: Human social cooperation, in the form of law and order to prevent violations. That’s the same thing that makes civilization work. So if you can’t make copyright work anymore, it must be time to load up the shootin’ iron and lock up yer daughters, because the end of the world is nigh.
I have argued for many of those other payment models in the past… yes, many of them can work. Many of them used to be common, in fact, centuries ago. You know why they are not common now? Because capitalism and copyright proved to be more productive and efficient at promoting creation and invention. Stepping back a few hundred years to a philanthropic system will only succeed in setting back creation and invention a few hundred years.
And if you think that as many people will create, when they cannot earn a living off of their creation… you’re just plain insane. Creation and invention will decrease by a few orders of magnitude, and not all of what is left will be worth having. In short, you’ll see creation and invention slow to a trickle.
In an era when we need better power sources and batteries, more efficient transportation, methods to reverse global warming, and ways to feed and educate the almost 7 billion people on this planet… you want to slow invention?
So: It’s time to stop bringing up the good-old-anarchy of the pre-copyright pre-100 million-population sixteenth century and think of a system that will actually work in the twenty-first century.
Hint: Unachievable utopias isn’t it.
Steve: tell me how could I have “defeated copyright” in one of your novels in the past?
In the old days of book piracy, pirates would have to have their own printing press, stocks of paper and ink, and special skills, and they would have to invest enormous amounts of time setting type and operating their press. That’s the technological environment in which copyright laws sprang up. Pirates would then have to distribute and sell their pirated books to recover their costs.
Whereas today copying large amounts of information is cheap: it requires no special-purpose equipment, no effort or time or running costs. It’s so trivially easy that many people can breach copyright routinely without even knowing they’ve done so! This is the environment in which literally many millions of people around the world breach copyrights routinely.
This is a such huge and critical change that I can’t believe it’s escaped you! I can only assume that your own material interest is getting in the way of you thinking clearly, with all due respect.
So, yes, of course copyright-restricted publishing did come to dominate the older models of patronage etc, because it proved to be more compatible with the new information technology of the day (the printing press). But now we have a new information technology which makes it no longer suitable, so we should expect other publishing models will eventually predominate instead. Some of those will be like the “old days”, and some will be new. That’s the challenge for us today – to find new ways – not to cling timorously to the old ways.
In the old days, this is exactly what happened… only the perpetrators weren’t known as “pirates,” they were known as “countries.” Other countries (including the U.S.) regularly printed the copywritten works of other countries without due compensation to the authors or publishers. It was only later that international cooperation took effect and curtailed most of this copyright violation.
We find ourselves in pretty much the same situation right now. Most of the problems related to copyright violation can be solved by public and international cooperation. But because the issue is so new and different, and some of the technological and legal hurdles have yet to be defined, much less conquered, too many people are simply proclaiming “it can’t be done” at the top of their lungs, and using that browbeating tactic to justify an unsustainable practice.
Your argument that because it is possible, it’s obviously the only thing to do simply makes no sense. It is not historically accurate, it is not practical, it is not supportable, and it will not magically result in more or better creative works. In short… it’s dreaming.
I’m not saying copyright should not change. Of course it must change, to accommodate the 21st century. But the concept of copyright, whatever its future form, is still the best way to protect the interests of creators, and make sure we have an abundance of creations. Con, you have as yet not given us one model that has not been considered and used, and proven to be better than copyright. And you haven’t suggested anything new and untried yet. So enough about the old ideas… where are your new ideas?
This is where I disagree vehemently. The major part of the problem is not at all a question that can be resolved by politicians and lawyers – it’s a technological problem, or rather it’s an economic problem with a technological basis.
I assure you Steve that the most fundamental technological problem involved in implementing DRM is already well known to computer scientists. This is it: it can always be circumvented by an end-user (and potential “pirate”) who has control over their computing hardware. All DRM schemes (as a matter of scientific principle) must ultimately rely on restricting the user’s access to at least some part of their machine. A machine which they themselves own, and which they hold in their hands. The probability of some “international cooperation” in the legal sphere being able to remove people’s access to general-purpose computers is absolutely nil; what kind of global dictatorship would be needed?!
In the absence of global dictatorship, you have to get consumers to “buy into” your particular system, be it a dongle or whatever, in an environment in which there are equivalent products which aren’t encumbered with DRM. And in particular you will face competition from some “free” products (i.e. products funded other than from sales). This is the problem the news media are wrestling with now – how to make people pay to access new media websites – and their preferred solution appears to be a global cartel and a political campaign against publicly-funded news media such as the BBC.
I’m not arguing with this, actually, Steve. I don’t have a problem with copyright per se. What I’ve been claiming is outdated and harmful is the business model in which the copyright holders monopolise the right to reproduce the content, and use that to extract a “monopoly rent” from consumers. And I also argued against the belief that there was some technological “magic bullet” which would allow copyright holders a way to actually enforce their monopoly in practice.
But that’s just one way to use copyright. Actually copyright is also being used to support quite different (non-monopolistic) business models, in which information can be copied without payment, which is to say, it doesn’t take the form of a commodity for sale in a market. See the GNU Public Licence and other “Open Source” licences in the software world for example, or in the “creative industries” there’s the Creative Commons licences. If you want to see the “new ideas” in action, see what information is being published under CC licences, and find out how it’s being funded.
As I said before, the fact that copyright can be circumvented is, in fact, wholly immaterial. It has always been circumventable. Social cooperation, backed by community support of enforcing laws and entities, is the only thing that allows copyright of any kind to work at all.
In that light, there are technical methods of security that can achieve enough effectiveness, when combined with social cooperation, to do the job. At present, those technological methods have not yet been put in place for relatively new products like e-books, but are being developed now (think biometrics).
The first statement just sounds like sour grapes. What do you think copyright is for? If the creator doesn’t have control of his product, at least to the point of deciding how it will be used, copyright is absolutely pointless!
The second statement is simply short-sighted: No, the technology doesn’t exist today; however, history is replete with examples of technologies created to solve a new problem, and this arena will be no exception.
And a “global dictatorship” is not needed… only government and/or industry-supported regulations that would be applied to the hardware you’d need to access the product. Think of a television’s cable box… or, for that matter, the TV itself. Think of a telephone or cellphone. Both are examples of such closed systems, essentially DRM-managed and designed to allow limited access to their internal controls, that people use every day without a second thought.
And why, you might ask yourself, don’t people just hack their TVs, cable boxes and phones every day? Because of the incentives offered to leave them be (in the form of warranties, service agreements, exclusive content, or the threat of losing access to exclusive content). And if you’ve noticed, those industries are doing very well with their closed, DRM-managed systems.
The personal computers’ greatest liability is its unreliability, and that is caused by its open design. Over time, most people will willingly give up some measure of openness for more reliability… it is happening now, with people foregoing extensive “messing around” with their hardware in order to preserve warranties and product upgrade cycles. There is literally no reason why the control tactics mentioned above can’t eventually be applied to e-books, and probably will at some point in the future. Acting as if it is impossible is ignoring the lessons of history.