Today’s blogs are all afire writing about the latest twist in the AP’s comical and borderline pathetic attempts to shore up its broken and obsolete business model: charging outrageous fees to anyone looking to quote FIVE WORDS OR MORE from an AP article.
Should you read an AP article and want to quote it in a blog post you are asked to click on a “copyright use” link that leads you to this:
Now, I don’t want to guess what the AP thinks it can charge me for using this image. The fact is, just because they charge doesn’t change the principle of “fair use” and this image is being used so that I can critique it’s absurdity.
The bigger problem, if you are the AP, is that everything about this policy is counter to the way information is consumed and shared in the modern, digital age. The AP can bitch and moan all they want to about the “good old days” but that doesn’t make time move backwards.
As the ability for people to both gather and distribute news around the globe grows, the question is not what will the AP do in some misguided attempt to protect its work from being shared but why do we really need the AP at all. If the AP disappeared tomorrow news would continue to be reported and most people wouldn’t notice anything had happened.
That’s not a good sign for the AP.
In what I am betting is one of the AP’s final death throes, the organization has come up with a far-ranging plan that they claim will stop the rampant theft and plagiarism of their content and will finally force us freeloaders to make micropayments to read the news.
PaidContent parsed their FAQ:
—The registry will use a microformat platform AP developed; it was endorsed by the London-based Media Standards Trust earlier this month.
—The “microformat” puts content in content in a “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework “that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.”
—The registry will provide metrics on content consumption, payment services and enforcement support.
—AP says the registry could support its previous idea of building search pages as “authoritative sources” by requiring links “to search optimized news pages that guide users to timely, authoritative coverage. AP continues to research the concept.”
Is it just me or does this sound an awful lot like the awful DRM that plagued the music business until only extremely recently. While the music labels have all but completely abandoned DRM, realizing it did nothing to curb policy and a lot to piss off customers, it looks like the AP is going to give the same failed effort a spin.
It’s sad to see how little the various major content industries have been able to learn from each others’ mounting failures.
In the simple days before the internet and digital technology the concept of buying a book was pretty simple. You went to a bookstore and you gave the bookseller money and he or she gave you a stack of bound paper with words (and sometimes pictures) printed on the pages – a book, if you will. Once the transaction was complete that book was yours forever. You could resell it any price the market supported. You could trade it or loan it or use it as toilet paper. It didn’t matter. The book was yours.
Unfortunately, as ArsTech points points out, in the current time of eBooks, the idea of buying a book is not quite so simple:
Amid the general love-fest over the Amazon Kindle, its DRM is beginning to bite some users in the butt as they are getting locked out of their accounts and, subsequently, their e-book purchases. The incidents highlight once again that the customer doesn’t really own the content when it comes to DRM; even when it’s so loose that it’s not apparent day to day, it can still hurt you in the long run.
Whether due to a change in “terms of service” or due to violating exisiting agreements, Kindle-owners have found themselves actually locked out of accessing books they had already purchased. I like ArsTech’s metaphore:
A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn’t take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf, after all.
There is a reason that even iTunes has given up on most DRM for music and it won’t be all that long before book publishers will have to follow suit or find themselves fighting a similar losing battle against “pirates” who think it is unfair for a company to control access to content once the customer has completed their purchase of said content.
LINK
Here is what makes the whole DRM issue so absurd. All these companies claim that, for one weak reason or another, they “need” DRM to protect their property. The problem is that DRM simply doesn’t do anything to stop people from copying the content and moving it to other formats.
In addition, it seems that nobody minds breaking the terms of service, and maybe even the law, to remove the DRM from products that they have bought. Case in point is this recent article in Wired magazine that details how to make DVD from movies you’ve bought via iTunes. Just remember:
Because movies and TV shows purchased from iTunes store have DRM copy-protection, you have to remove the DRM protection before burning them to DVDs for playback on your home DVD player.
Now, here’s the kicker. Nowhere in this well-written and easy-to-follow how-to article is there any mention that there is anything wrong with stripping off the DRM that was included, one assumes, as a way to stop users from doing exactly what this article demonstrates.
Is this an case of Wired giving out detailed information on how to break the law or is it simply more proof that DRM is a broken system that should be retired poste-haste?
I love this story via BoingBoing’s resident awesome guy Cory Doctrow about a publisher who locked up their ebooks with DRM, limiting how their customers could interact with the book they thought they had bought.
Unfortunately, the company that handeld the DRM has gone out of business and taken the license keys with them. This has led to the following F*ck-You from the publisher to their customers:
However, as noted above, other formats are delivered through third party aggregators. We do not have legal control of those third party servers. If those third party servers “go dark” for one reason or another, we have no way to continue delivering those files.
Yup, once again proving why any company who uses DRM cares less about their customers than they do about over-protecting their market-share.
These are the sorts of stories that must scare the hell out of big media corporations. According to TechDirt, Spore, the hugely anticipated and horribly DRM‘d game for Electronic Arts, is now the number one most pirated videogame in the world.
Yup. As TechDirt puts it:
“In other words, EA’s “antipiracy strategy” backfired almost completely. The company got a huge PR blackeye which probably only encouraged more people to download the game via file sharing. Can someone explain, again, why any company thinks DRM works?”
I think of this as a rhetorical question, but, honestly, can anyone explain it?
Little piece in the NYT is pretty much the clearest example of the canary in the coal mines for DVDs.
Warner Brothers is changing the way they do business in South Korea.
“It will now start renting moves over the Internet two weeks before they are released on DVDs, making South Korea the first market in the world where movies will appear online before they hit the store shelves.”
Since technology rarely moves backward, it would be tough to make an argument that the same thing won’t be happening here in the States sooner than later.
I wonder what the DRM situation is in S. Korea…
Tags: Asia, Coal, Coal mining, drm, dvd, EBay, Energy, environment, japan, pirate, South Korea, warner bros.
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November 14, 2008 9:58 pm | 
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I just love this post from TechDirt that explores how various members of Old Media – music, Hollywood, newpapers – have responded to the impending changes forced upon them by New Media:
“One of the interesting people I met at last week’s Princeton workshop was Douglas Dixon, who points out that almost all 20th-century media companies are going through the five stages of grief, but different media industries are going through the stages at different rates. Back in 2006, we noted that the music recording industry was still in the denial stage. Now, Dixon says that it seems to be “stuck cycling between Anger, Bargaining, and Depression — as it still lashes out by suing its own customers, and grabs on to each next new copy protection scheme while simultaneously going DRM-free in other venues.” And indeed, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood is still firmly in the denial phase, insisting that effective DRM is just around the corner.”
This is a clever and useful metaphor that could very well hold up. I was at a New Media panel at the Tribeca Film Fest a few weeks ago and one of the head lawyers for a major distributor was speaking and he actually said that “that effective DRM is just around the corner.” Literally. He said that.
Last night I was at a great birthday dinner downstairs at the “chefs table” at Blue Ribbon. Lots of cool people there and I got into a chat with a guy who works for an eBooks publisher.
Our conversation started with the Kindle – an eReader that is promoted by Amazon and the first one to make a bit of a splash. He was a fan of the device but agreed it looked a bit lame. He loves that it has wifi and allows users to download new content basically anywhere.
We both ended up feeling that it was tough to convince people to carry around another device. Eventually, something like the iPhone will be all we carry. Screen-size is an issue and maybe the coming of the flexible screen will do something about that. I really think recent advances in circuits on contact lenses will lead to a fulltime “heads-up display” but I am kind of a futuristic optimist.
Where things got a bit contentious was on the subject of DRM (Digital Rights Management) – the piece of code that, in theory, stops those who “purchase” an eBook from copying and disseminating it throughout the universe. He literally couldn’t imagine how the digital publishing industry could survive without DRM. He admitted that he no longer pays for any music because he can find it for free (illegally) on torrent sites largely thanks to the lack of (or cracked) DRM on music files. He couldn’t imagine why the same wouldn’t happen to the eBook world if DRM was removed from the equation.
I asked if there were circumstances under which he would pay for the music he found online. Turned out there was. He wanted to be able to be able to sample it first, in its entirety, not 30 second clips, and then decide if he wanted to pay for it. Not unreasonable. He also felt the price-point was high and wanted to know his money was going to the artists. I agreed. I asked him if the same might not be true for eBooks. He thought they might.
So, the real issue turned out not to be that nobody would pay for books if they were free on pirated sites but that the publishers of eBooks were not providing their potential customers with a system that was better. Imagine a site where DRM-free eBooks were available to be read for free. After you owned the book for a certain amount of time you would be asked if you’d like to pay the author for their book. If you decide not to pay maybe the file gets locked, maybe not. Maybe you decide how much to pay.
By the end of the chat I think I might have at least convinced him that fighting for better DRM was never going to be the way to beat the pirates.
Two separate stories highlight the difficult, and I would argue pointless, attempts by various companies to impose either DRM or other locks that make it impossible for end-users to have complete control over the date or hardware they’ve gotten.
First, DownloadSquad has the story on the BBC:
“The release of BBC’s new iPlayer brought with it the typical suffocating DRM restrictions, with the typical amount of outrage in the blogosphere.
However, when the BBC released the new beta iPlayer software that allowed users to view BBC streams on their iPhone, the streams made for the iPhone didn’t didn’t include any DRM. Certain intrepid programmers and users were quick to jump on the fact that the iPhone streams were unencrypted. One user was able to use a PC to watch the unencrypted streams by using the Firefox plugin Fast Agent Switcher to convince the iPlayer that it was an iPhone. Developer Paul Battleyreleased a Ruby script to download the iPhone formatted files to your PC.
In response, the BBC iPlayer took countermeasures to block the streams from non-iPhone devices. Just yesterday, in fact.
In response to the response, and after a mere 24 hours, users again figured out a few ways to watch the iPlayer iPhone streams without an iPhone.”
Next, BoingBoing has news on the the now completely cracked WII:
“The locks on the Nintendo Wii have been comprehensively broken. Now, just by loading some code onto an SD card and sticking it into your Wii, you can unlock your console so that it will play homebrew games written by anyone, not just big companies that have paid big license fees to Nintendo!”
It’s amazing how much money these corporations are spending to stop these actions and how quickly and completely they are failing. How much longer will they keep it up? And what will happen when they finally admit defeat?
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