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Infinite Storage for Music

October 8, 2007 by

Last week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity.

This is a simple consequence of Moore’s Law which, in one of its variants, holds that the amount of data storage available at a fixed size and price roughly doubles every eighteen months. Extrapolate that trend and, depending on your precise assumptions, you’ll find the magic date falls somewhere between 2011 and 2019. From then on, storage capacity might as well be infinite, at least as far as music is concerned.

This has at least two important consequences. First, it strains even further the economics of the traditional music business. The gap between the number of songs you might want to listen to, and the number you’re willing and able to pay a dollar each to buy, is growing ever wider. In a world of infinite storage you’ll be able to keep around a huge amount of music that is potentially interesting but not worth a dollar (or even a dime) to you yet. So why not pay a flat fee to buy access to everything?

Second, infinite storage will enable new ways of building filesharing technologies, which will be much harder for copyright owners to fight. For example, today’s filesharing systems typically have users search for a desired song by contacting strangers who might have the song, or who might have information about where the song can be found. Copyright owners’ technical attacks against filesharing often target this search feature, trying to disrupt it or to exploit the fact that it involves communication with strangers.

But in a world of infinite storage, no searching is needed, and filesharers need only communicate with their friends. If a user has a new song, it will be passed on immediately to his friends, who will pass it on to their friends, and so on. Songs will “flood” through the population this way, reaching all of the P2P system’s participants within a few hours – with no search, and no communication with strangers. Copyright owners will be hard pressed to fight such a system.

Just as today, many people will refuse to use such technologies. But pressure on today’s copyright-based business models will continue to intensify. Will we see new legal structures? New business models? Or new public attitudes? Something has to change.

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Jury Finds User Liable for Downloading, Awards $9250 Per Song in Damages

October 5, 2007 by

The first Recording Industry v. End User lawsuit to go to trial just ended, and the industry won big. Jammie Thomas, a single mother in northern Minnesota, was found liable for illegally downloading 24 songs via Kazaa, and the jury awarded damages of $222,000, or $9250 per song. It’s always risky to extrapolate much from a single case – outsiders, schooled by TV courtroom dramas, often see cases as broad referenda on social issues, while in reality the specific circumstances of a case are often the decisive factor. But with that caution in mind, we can learn a few things from this verdict.

The industry had especially strong evidence that Thomas was the person who downloaded the songs in question. Thomas’s defense was that somebody else must have downloaded the songs. But the industry showed that the perpetrator used the same distinctive username that Thomas admitted to using on other services, and that the perpetrator downloaded songs by Thomas’s favorite performers. Based on press stories about the trial, the jury probably had an easy time concluding that Thomas downloaded the songs. (Remember that civil cases don’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, only that it was more likely than not that Thomas downloaded the songs illegally.)

People often argue that the industry has only weak evidence when they send their initial settle-or-else demand letters to users. That may well be true. But in this case, as the trial loomed, the industry bolstered its case by gathering more evidence. The lesson for future cases is clear. If the industry has to go to trial with only the initial evidence, they might not win. But what end user, knowing that they did download illegally, will want to take the chance that more evidence against them won’t turn up?

The most striking fact about the Thomas case is that the jury awarded damages of $9250 per song to faraway corporations.. That’s more than nine hundred times what the songs would have cost at retail, and the total of $222,000 is an astronomical amount to a person in Jammie Thomas’s circumstances. There is no way that Jammie Thomas caused $222,000 of harm to the record industry, so the jury’s purpose in awarding the damages has to be seen as punishment rather than compensation.

My guess is that the jury was turned off by Thomas’s implausible defense and her apparent refusal to take responsibility for her actions. Litigants disrespect the jury at their peril. It’s easy to imagine these jurors thinking, “She made us take off work and sit through a trial for this?” Observers who hoped for jury nullification – that a jury would conclude that the law was unjust and would therefore refuse to find even an obvious violator liable – must be sorely disappointed. It sure looks like juries will find violators liable, and more significantly, that they can be convinced to sympathize with the industry against obvious violators.

All of this, over songs that would have cost $23.76 from iTunes. At this point, Jammie Thomas must wish, desperately, that she had just paid the money.

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Greetings, and a Thought on Net Neutrality

October 3, 2007 by

Hello again, FTT readers. You may remember me as a guest blogger here at FTT, writing about anti-circumvention, the print media’s superiority (or lack thereof) to Wikipedia, and a variety of other topics.

I’m happy to report that I’ve moved to Princeton to join the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy as its new associate director. Working with Ed and others here on campus, I’ll be helping bring the Center into its own as a leading interdisciplinary venue for research and conversation about the social and political impact of information technology.

Over the next few months, I’ll be traveling the country to look at how other institutions approach this area, in order to develop a strategic plan for Princeton’s involvement in the field. As a first step toward understanding the world of tech policy, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.

One great source is The Creation of the Media by Princeton’s own Paul Starr. It’s carefully argued and highly readable, and I’ve found its content challenging. Conversations in tech policy often seem to stem from the premise that in the interaction between technology and society, the most important causal arrow points from the technologies into the social sphere. “Remix culture”, perhaps the leading example at the moment, is a major cultural shift that is argued to stem from inherent properties of digital media, such as the identity between a copy and an original of a digital work.

But Paul argues that politics usually dominates the effects of technology, not the other way around. For example, although cheap printing technologies helped make the early United States one of the most literate countries of its time, Paul argues that America’s real advantage was its postal system. Congress not only invested heavily in the postal service, but also gave a special discounted rate to printed material, effectively subsidizing publications of all kinds. As a result much more printed material was mailed in America than in, say, British Columbia at the same time.

One fascinating observation from Paul’s book (pages 180-181 in the hardcover edition, for those following along at home) concerns the telegraph. In Britain, the telegraph was nationalized in order to ensure that private network operators didn’t take advantage of the natural monopoly that they enjoyed (“natural” since once there was one set of telegraph wires leading to a place, it became hard to justify building a second set).

In the United States, there was a vociferous debate about whether or not to nationalize the telegraph system, which was controlled by Western Union, a private company:

[W]ithin the United States, Western Union continued to dominate the telegraph industry after its triumph in 1866 but faced two constraints that limited its ability to exploit its market power. First, the postal telegraph movement created a political environment that was, to some extent, a functional substitute for government regulation. Britain’s nationalization of the telegraph was widely discussed in America. Worried that the US government might follow suit, Western Union’s leaders at various times extended service or held rates in check to keep public opposition within manageable levels. (Concern about the postal telegraph movement also led the company to provide members of Congress with free telegraph service — in effect, making the private telegraph a post office for officeholders.) Public opinion was critical in confining Western Union to its core business. In 1866 and again in 1881, the company was on the verge of trying to muscle the Associated Press aside and take over the wire service business itself when it drew back, apparently out of concern that it could lose the battle over nationalization by alienating the most influential newspapers in the country. Western Union did, however, move into the distribution of commercial news and in 1871 acquired majority control of Gold and Stock, a pioneering financial information company that developed the stock ticker.

This situation–a dynamic equilibrium in which a private party polices its own behavior in order to stave off the threat of government intervention–strikes me as closely analogous to the net neutrality debate today. Network operators, although not subject to neutrality requirements, are more reluctant to exercise the options for traffic discrimination that are formally open to them, because they recognize that doing so might lead to regulation.

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Amazon’s MP3 Store Wisely Forgoes Watermarks

October 2, 2007 by

Last week Amazon.com launched a DRM-free music store. It sells tracks from two major labels and many independents in the unprotected MP3 file format. In addition to being DRM-free, Amazon’s songs are not individually watermarked. This is an important step forward for the music industry.

Some content companies see individualized watermarks as a consumer-friendly alternative to DRM. Instead of locking down files with restrictive technology, individualized watermarking places information in them that identifies the purchasers, who could conceivably face legal action if the files were publicly shared. Apple individually watermarks DRM-free tracks sold on iTunes, but every customer who purchases a particular track from Amazon receives the exact same file. The company has stated as much, and colleagues and I confirmed this by buying a small number of files with different Amazon accounts and verifying that they were bit-for-bit identical. (As Wired reports, some files on Amazon’s store have been watermarked by the record labels, but each copy sold contains the same mark. The labels could use these marks to determine that a pirated track originated from Amazon, but they can’t trace a file to a particular user.)

Individualized watermarks give purchasers an incentive not to share the files they buy, or so the theory goes, but, like DRM, even if watermarking does reduce copyright infringement, that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes business sense. Watermarks create legal risks even for customers who don’t engage in file sharing, because the files might still become publicly available due to software misconfigurations or other security breaches. These risks add to the effective cost of buying music for legitimate purchasers, who will buy less as a result.

The difference in risk between a customer who chooses to share purchased files and one who does not is ultimately determined by computer security issues that are outside the content industry’s control. Aside from users who are caught red-handed sharing the files, who can be sued even without watermarks, infringers and noninfringers will share a multitude of plausible defenses. Their songs might have been copied by spyware. (If watermarking becomes widespread, spyware authors will probably target watermarked files, uploading them to peer to peer networks without users’ knowledge.) They might have been leaked from a discarded hard drive or backup tape, or recovered from a stolen laptop or iPod. The industry will need to fight such claims in order to bring suit against actual infringers, leaving noninfringers to worry that they could face the same fate regardless of their good intentions.

With individualized watermarking, there’s no knob that the content industry can set that varies the disincentive for sharing purchased files independently of the disincentive for purchasing them at all. Inevitably, legitimate customers will be scared away. This makes individualized watermarking a blunt antipiracy tool and a bad bet for the content industry. Amazon was wise not to use it.

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One Laptop Per Child (New Version), Reviewed by 12-Year-Old

September 26, 2007 by

[Today we welcome back SG, a twelve-year-old who previously reviewed the B2 version of the One Laptop Per Child computer. SG had a chance to examine the latest (B4) version of the OLPC machine and write a new review. As before, the review is unedited, just as SG wrote it. – Ed]

After my first review, the administrators at OLPC were kind enough to send Mr. Felten the newer model of the computer, the B4, for me to review. The difference between the two models was quite dramatic. Between new games, new applications, design changes, and a few touch ups for the system, the B4 clearly outshines the B2. I didn’t even know about a bunch of problems in the B2 until they got fixed in the B4!

The minute I picked the new computer up, I saw the physical differences. There are bumps on the handle of the B4. The B2 has none. The flip- up antenna on the B2 was encased in hard plastic, and on the B4, it’s just thick rubber. The keyboards are pretty much the same, apart from a few minor differences along the top. Once I opened it up and started it, I noted how much quicker it booted up than the B2. Then I saw the icons. The B2 has less than half the icons than the B4, which has 13!

As for games, entertainment, and the internet, this computer has bountiful resources. There were many new and fun programs. One of them, called “Block party”, is just plain old tetris with a different name. As I am not really gifted in tetris, I had a lot of fun losing repeatedly. The internet was a lot better on this newer laptop. In my last review, I complained about how slow it was and how the connection was so-so. In the B4, both of those problems have been fixed. It is quick, always connects, and is really very nice. If you don’t want to go on the web to read the new Freedom to Tinker article, “News Reader” lets you subscribe to websites’ feeds. In the games category, “Connect” is a game which can only be played on two separate OLPC laptops . The game is a little like tick tack toe. If you’ve ever played “Connect 4”, that’s the same game. If you want to watch some video clip from the web, “watch and listen”, OLPC’s media player, has you covered. Want some music? Use “tamtam”. This application is similar to Garageband, but not quite the same. Last but not least is “Record”. On the B2, “record” just took pictures with an okay camera. On the B4, you can take pictures with a pretty good camera AND record video with no time limit (as far as I can tell). I was surprised and overjoyed to discover I could take video with the new one.

One of the coolest applications is called simply “Chat”. It is basically an IM-ish kind of thing that works between all OLPC laptops. Since I got two laptops from OLPC, I could test out the chat application with my friends and family. I spent a lot of time having silent conversations with the friend sitting across the room, so that was fun. Etoys is another cool application, and it is definitely the program of a genius technologist. Although it is difficult to understand and use, once you get into the swing of things, it’s awesome. To use Etoys you make a “sketch” on the computer, then save it, and that’s where the fun begins. You can write “scripts” that make the sketch move around the screen in the way that you want. You can put it in “books” that have multiple pages for a flip book or make animations with it (ie. a bouncing ball, flying bird, eating kid, etc.). In Turtle Art, you get a chance to write a simple program that makes the turtle in the middle of the screen move. It’s very cool.

Last review, I said that my main problem with the computer was its slow speed and its battery charge. And I am happy to say that both of those problems have been fixed in the new version. It has more applications, higher quality camera, more games, a few design changes for the better, and much more. I tested how long it would stay alive by opening it and leaving it open. Surprisingly, it stayed awake for more than four hours! And some other testing revealed that the B4 does, in fact, auto save your documents and stuff if it runs out of battery while an unsaved document is on it. I like that feature, because there were many times with the B2 that I was typing and it just died, leaving me rather stunned for a couple seconds until I came to my senses and wearily plugged it in. Then it would take hours to charge up again. But in the B4, it charges up really quickly. Another minor turn for the better is the plug. Now they are greener, more round, easier to hold, and they have the XO sign on them.

I thought that this version was way better than the last one. It was just easier to figure out, more fun to spend time on, just better. It’s going to be hard to send it back to OLPC, but I’m going to have to. It’s great that they’re going to start selling them to the public. (You have to buy two, and you send one to a needy kid in a third world country and keep one for yourself. Read about it in the New York Times… …) I hope I can get one!

For a regular laptop, this would be the paragraph about its problems, its deficiencies. But the thing is, there aren’t any problems with this computer! Congratulations, OLPC. You’ve done it. Or will you come out with yet better laptops? Is that even possible? We’ll have to see…

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