This little piece of news hasn’t yet got much coverage in the popular press, but it should. It shows why Canadians (and everyone, really) must be concerned about digital locks. Librarians and lawyers are the ones taking note of it right now, but it’s an issue we should all worry about:
Michael Geist - Napster Drops Out of Canada, Warns Users Of Lost Purchases Due to Digital Locks http://t.co/lO3hLRvB
Yes, that’s right – as Michael Geist reports, if you are Canadian and have ever purchased music through Napster Canada, then you run the risk of losing access to content you have paid for:
These downloads are DRM-encoded WMA files and can be backed up by burning them to audio CDs. Doing this will allow you access to your music on any CD player and generally have a maintenance free permanent copy. If you do not back up your purchased Napster music downloads by burning them to CD and you later change or reinstall your computer’s operating system, have a system failure or experience DRM corruption, then the downloads will stop playing and you will permanently lose access to them.
Customers have purchased items (music, objects, widgets, whatever) from a company with the assurance that these items can be accessed. But the use of these music files are limited by a lock that the company will no longer support now that it has pulled out of the market and been bought by a competitor.
Customers have been advised by the company to effectively circumvent their digital locks if they want to continue listening to their music.
I suppose that Napster Canada/Rhapsody is acting in good faith when they explain to Canadian customers how to ensure that the content they have already purchased will always be accessible. Napster/Rhapsody has informed customers that all they need to do is copy the data to audio CDs to ensure that the music can be played even if the digital lock on the file is ever corrupted. But does anyone else find it a tiny bit illogical that a company that normally espouses the use of digital locks is now effectively telling its customers to break the law and circumvent the lock in order to make sure they will always be able to access this music?
Digital Rights Management is something we must be wary of. DRM limits the consumer’s rights to the content he or she has purchased; it “manages” rights by taking them away from the consumer. This is of particular concern in Canada, when so many organizations are subsidiaries of larger companies located elsewhere. If Napster pulls out of the Canadian market, will the digital locks that limit access to the content you purchased still be supported? It seems not. If Amazon were ever to pull out of the Canadian market (which is an unlikely scenario, but a worthy point to make), would its digital locks that limit access to the content you purchased still be supported? That would be up to Amazon to decide. Digital locks keep your purchases at the mercy of the vendor, which is reason enough to oppose them.
Copyright is a mess, especially in Canada. The law is antiquated and it does need an overhaul to actually work in our digital landscape. But DRM and digital locks place an undue burden and risk on consumers (be they individuals, families, or libraries), most of whom are law-abiding citizens, respect intellectually property and rights, and do not copy content.
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Post script: Am I suggesting we back out of all e-content on account of DRM? No, I’m not. What I’m trying to show, like so many others, is that the system is out of balance right now and will remain so in the future. Advocacy is required to fix this.
Stop the press – the world is about to fall in love with Facebook Messenger! Wait a second, there’s something horribly wrong with this, and it’s not just about giving your phone number potentially to 750 million different FB accounts.
Facebook Messenger: How to stifle consumer choice
Do you like to text? Do you like to SMS? MMS? You love it, you really do. Well, guess what: If you shift all of your texting over to FB Messenger, then the way you text is going to be beholden to Facebook Inc. If Facebook decides that changes are needed to FB Messenger and you don’t like that, it will still change them. If Facebook decides to open up your privacy controls on FB Messenger, then hopefully you’ll get that memo before your creepy internet stalker figures you out. If Facebook decides it doesn’t like the way FB Messenger is working, even though you, do, it will still make those changes. Facebook owns the Facebook Messenger pipes, so the traffic you put on it is dependent on Facebook.
Look. Right now, you are texting from your mobile or smartphone on a long-established open standard that is used by every mobile/cell carrier around. That’s why I can text from my Canadian provider, Telus, to my father-in-law in California who is on Verizon, and to a good friend in the UK who is on Virgin. SMS is a standard that’s been agreed to and used for years by the entire industry. If you decide to go with FB Messenger, then you’re giving the keys of the castle to ONE COMPANY, who will make their own policies and decisions as it suits them instead of the consumer.
Don’t do that. Don’t give up on an open standard because FB Messenger seems like the greatest thing since Kanye and Jay-Z laid down a track together. Don’t switch over to FB Messenger, which conveniently went live one month before the start of a new school year everywhere in the west. Stick with your open texting SMS/MMS standard. Texting developed, works, and thrives because EVERYONE agrees to use it. Choosing FB Messenger will shut out out all the major players in the industry who built your smartphone, let alone the hundreds of millions of people in the world who actually depend on a mobile phone and texting for real communication.
I am not saying that Facebook is an evil empire. Facebook is as good (or as bad) at privacy as Google, Microsoft, or any other large web company. But Facebook’s products are very much closed and proprietary and built to improve their bottom line. This is bad news for the consumer. You are giving up your ability to choose between products and you are stifling innovation when you choose closed products. FB Messenger is not good for anyone but Facebook. So stick with SMS. Why? Because it’s something you all have already, and it’s still face better than what FB Messenger can offer.
(P.S. It shouldn’t matter AT ALL that FB Messenger is a “free app.” SMS texting is a standard feature on your phone already. Oh look – a green texting button: it came with my iPhone already…)
Lawrence Lessig will tell you what copyright does to culture
My summer reading this year includes Lawrence Lessig‘s Remix, and it’s so far been refreshing to read about how copyright drives and hampers our culture. Tonight, though, I’m hung up on a dark, sour fact about copyright, especially as it exists in America, which is that an act that was meant to control professional duplications (i.e., piracy) now regulates the lives of everyday citizens.
Lessig explains that American copyright legislation, as it was originally crafted in the 1790s, regulated the ‘printing, reprinting, publishing, and vending’ of works (2008, p. 100), i.e., it meant to prevent the professional reproduction and sale of texts; it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the law was redrafted to refer to the general copying of a text by a variety of means and for a variety of reasons. As Lessig explains, “as the range of technologies that enabled people to ‘copy’ increased, so too did the effective scope of regulation increase” (p. 101).
On the surface, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with this increased regulation – it should be well and proper that an individual’s creative works be protected, right? To an incredible degree, the answer is yes. A problem lies, however, in the fact that “every poet is a thief,” especially in a post-modern technoculture. So much of art is inspired by one’s encounters with people, places, and texts (in a broad sense), and so many of these texts are today developed and then reserved under license by various copyright holders. Art today, and our responses to art, are a pastiche of other objects (Lessig would call it a collage), which means that our ability to communicate freely is hampered by a law that has inadvertently grown out of control:
More and more people use technology to say things, and not simply with words. Music is remixed; video mash-ups proliferate; blogs begin to build a culture around the idea of talking back . . .
. . . Digital technology also changes how RW [remix] culture and copyright interact. Because every use of creative work technically produces a copy, every use of creative work technically triggers copyright law. And while many of these uses might be fair use . . . the critical point to recognize is that this is still a vast change to the history of American copyright law. For the first time, the law regulates ordinary citizens generally . . . For the first time, the law reaches and regulates this culture. Not because Congress deliberated and decided that this form of creativity needed regulation, but simply because the architecture of copyright law interacted with the architecture of digital technology to produce a massive expansion in the reach of the law.
(Lessig, p. 103.)
The point to take home is this: Copyright as we know it is an old law. So many recent changes to it (e.g., the DMCA) have maligned the original law’s intention and are encoding into law the regulation of culture. This isn’t to suggest that we should run back to 1790 or 1909 and interpret the act as lawmakers would have then, but it is to state that our current interpretation of Copyright doesn’t account for the effects that modern technology has on our culture’s relationship with an old statute. The maligned interaction between copyright law and digital technology was not deliberate, so we have no reason to assume that any modernization should enshrine this faulty status quo.
I’m reading Lawrence Lessig‘s Remix for the first time and it’s a thrill. Frankly, it makes me want to pursue doctoral work in information culture and the information society – a thought I’ve flirted with for a number of years.
Something that struck me about fifty pages into Remix is Lessig’s contemplation on the nature of fair use and citation with books versus the nature of copyright infringement with other media. Lessig notes that in literature, academics, and to a certain extent, law, people are expected to borrow and acknowledge other people’s works; the citation serves to create a thread that connect similar ideas to one another. The example he uses is the production of an English essay on Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, where:
citation is required. But the cite is always sufficient payment. And no one who writes for a living actually believes that any permission beyond that simple payment should ever be required. Had Ben [Lessig's friend, a former English major and now an attorney] written the estate of Ernest Hemingway to ask for permission to quote For Whom the Bell Tolls in his college essays, lawyers at the estate would have been annoyed more than anything else. What weirdo, they would have wondered, thinks you need permission to quote in an essay?
Lessig, L. (2008). Remix. New York: Penguin. p. 53
But on the following page, Lessig asks us to consider how the act of citing the text of For Whom the Bell Tolls differs from citing, quoting, or referring to Sam Wood’s filmed adaptation of Hemingway’s book: in today’s DMCA culture, permission would have to be sought from a film company for anyone to “use” a clip. This entire passage struck me because just last week I had written commentary about labor rights in a personal blog after reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I included in the post a quotation from the book – Tom’s famous “I’ll be everywhere” speech, followed by YouTube clips to the Ford filmed adaptation, and to Bruce Springsteen‘s and Woody Guthrie‘s songs about Steinbeck’s character, Tom Joad. I knew I was likely violating some sort of DMCA regulation even though my post could probably be considered Fair Use (it certainly would be considered Fair Dealing in Canada). I was aware of this while I wrote a proper citation for each work. And I was aware of the fact I might be DMCA’ed not only for the film clip (a “remix” Ford probably secured rights to), but also for the Guthrie and Springsteen clips (where it’s questionble if either performer ever asked Steinbeck or his estate for permission to use the text). In short, I can cite Steinbeck’s book with ease, but my ability to use these clips might be trumped by corporate rights-holders through the DMCA, even though my reasons for doing so – academic, critical, and commentary – would be considered fair use, even though the content in these clips is not necessarily “original”, and perhaps most important, even though the artists who produced this now-protect content did not not always seek permission to create their own adaptations, derivations, or remixes.
Lawrence Lessig, a different sort of culture warrior
Lessig’s friend’s essay on Hemingway and my compilation of clips inspired by Steinbeck are great examples of what Lessig would call “remix culture”. The legal manouvres made by the producers of these clips to ensure copyright protection, meanwhile, are great examples of everything that’s wrong with copyright law today. Fair Use deems it okay to cite from a text, but the MPAA and the RIAA, through the DMCA, would trump Fair Use and demand that I take down these YouTube clips because I never secured permission – even though they are excerpts of cultural products that are remixes or adaptations of a wholy different and antecent cultural product. The MPAA and the RIAA might claim that I am infringing on their copyright to Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad” even though Springsteen was inspired by (or to use the rhetoric of the day: pirated) the works of another.
Why is our relationship with books difference than with all other media? By studying Lessig’s quotation above, we can see that some of it lies in two areas, value and purpose, and they are closely related to one another:
On Value – Lessig frames this as “payment”. The citation his friend Ben makes to Hemingway’s text is not only an acknowledgement but a transaction of cultural or intellectual value. Ben saw enough importance in Hemingway’s work to tell his readers that his own ideas were inspired by it. It also creates a cultural and informational chain that links the consumers of Ben’s work to Hemingway’s book, which in this case is the “original” text. But as Lessig later writes, since the value transaction Ben makes is not financial, his fair use of the work, his essay, and the citation is generally a non-issue to DMCA rights-holders.
On Purpose – Lessig makes clear in this paragraph that no lawyer would care about a silly permission when Ben wants to cite Hemingway’s work for an essay. Things are different, however, when the object of the remix / cultural adaption / reproduction has discernable commercial purposes. In my Steinbeck example, John Ford ostensibly secured the rights to adapting The Grapes of Wrath because his art’s mode of transmission (i.e., film) created a financial model that would benefit many others. Perhaps Bruce Springsteen should have sought permission because his “remix” of elements of Grapes, “The Ghost of Tom Joad“, might have commercial value (see above), but I imagine The Boss didn’t bother because his song is written and performed in a folk tradition that often eschews the merits of capitalism.
Before I get ahead of myself, let me state that Lessig isn’t foolish enough to propose that the production of art should be divorced from the economic engines that drive it. After all, there are fundamental differences between the economic value of an undergraduate essay or scholarly article and that of a motion picture or song. Lessig’s anecdote reminds me, however, that copyright law and copyright enforcement as it exists today not only protects the interests of the copyright holder (instead of the creator). And furthermore, copyright law is the de facto piece of legislation that regulates society’s relationship with culture (Lessig, 2008). Something is wrong when I can’t talk online about how a book, its filmed adaptation, and songs derived from its main character, affect me without first securing the permission of rightsholders, especially since the Internet has become the dominant form of communication in western society. There is something wrong because regardless of the cultural work’s mode of transmission:
my consumption of it affects me so that my discussion is not wholly about the cultural product but about how I have interpreted the cultural product, and,
any ecomomic model that demands constant permission from consumers to so much as talk about a product is rotten at the core.
Imagine having to call Atlanta every time you want to talk about Coca-Cola, Santa Claus, Polar Bears, and the business’s beautifully produced Christmas commercials. That is not a recipe to control the the Coca-Cola brand and product – it’s a method to destroy any good will the company has with its consumers. Although my first point is more important to me, I honestly have never been able to figure out why members of the MPAA or RIAA would carry on their ridiculous DMCA business on account of the second point, which is directly related to their ability to remain a going concern. Creating barriers between the consumer’s ability to interact with your product is a sure-fire way to drive the consumer away from what you’ve got to sell.
For whatever reason, I can quote from Steinbeck’s book without any threat of litigation, but the moment I quote visually from Ford’s adaptation, I better be prepared to deal with a DMCA violation warning. This may be one of the reasons why Lessig wants the world to open its eyes to the control that culture producers have over the consumer’s ability to interact with a cultural product. It’s moved well beyond the point of restricting some people (i.e., culture pirates) from intentionally stealing cultural products. At this point it about controlling the way that all consumers actually consume a work, right down to watching it, reading it, listening to it, and then talking about it. It’s no longer about the regulation, protection and control of the cultural product. Now, it’s an unfair regulation of our lives.
I’m not going to speak much about the Long-Form StatCan fiasco that the Tories have created this summer because so many other people and news organizations are covering it so well. David Eaves and Datalibre.ca have strong commentary and lists of organizations against it. The Globe and Mail and The National Post have both kept their attention on the issue, too. Aside from the fact that great resources already exist on this file, I haven’t offered my thoughts on it yet because so much of the issue lies in rhetoric, ideology, and politics.
Munir Sheikh, speaking truth to power. Click for details.
The Conservative Party of Canada, in its role as government, can if it so desires tell Statistics Canada to ditch the long form. And Munir Sheikh, as the former director of StatCan, protests the only way he could by tendering his resignation. Sheikh, like a proper civil servant, spoke truth to power and should be commended for it. On these points, most people will agree.
If the Conservatives really do believe that the Long Form issue is about compelling citizens to offer information to the government under threat of a prison term (as PMO spokesman Dmitri Soudas keeps saying, as wannabe PM Maxime Bernier keeps suggesting, and as Tony Clement, I suspect, has been ordered to continually argued), then all the government must do to rectify this is change the StatCan Act so that individuals would be rewarded instead of punished for filing the long form. I won’t take credit for this idea, since I’ve heard it several times in the media in the past week: Offer a $20 tax credit upon completion and submission of the long form. Anyone who has filed income taxes will appreciate the idea of a tax credit, and anyone who has filed income taxes also knows that a $20 credit does not equal $20 in tax savings, either. This incentive could be a win-win for all parties.
As for the second-most argued point of contention about the long-form – whether or not the government should collect what might be privileged, personal data, e.g., what time you go to work in the morning, how many bedrooms are in the house, I think the CPC is making political hay. What’s important is not how many bedrooms I, Michael Steeleworthy, possess (2), whether I rent or own (rent), or what time I go to work in the morning (between 8 and 830, depending on the time I wake up). What matters is the aggregate data that comes of it. No one is ever going to look at my own data to compromise my privacy – the government has not enough time on its hands to snoop into such arcane matters and has more important things to do. And frankly, StatCan data is closely guarde Its data is not freely available to the public, and its original files are kept under lock and key; not even Misters Harper, Soudas, Clement or Bernier could access my census form. Really, if the government is keen on turning themselves into libertarian ideologues instead being the administrators of representative governance when it comes to the issue of data collection, then it should also stop collecting income taxes at CRA, and as Dan Gardner noted in the Ottawa Citizen, it better bow out of FINTRAC as soon as possible, since if there was ever an Orwellian “spy-on-your-neighbour organization out there”, this is the one.
What’s more, if the CPC is bothered by the collection of information, it may as well shred its own database of party members, which is a storehouse of information that their grassroots base would presumably disagree with (if the current CPC rhetoric about data collection is to be believed) in the first place. Dear Stephen Harper, I’ve heard that teaching by example is the best way to give a lesson, so let’s start this Data Collection Disruption at home and send the CPC’s own files to the great Shredder in the sky.
Former Ontario Minister Snobelin, famous for wanting to create a "useful crisis" to promote political aims. Click for details.
Snarky comments aside, the long form issue is a political issue, and I don’t see the CPC moving back from it. I may be wrong – I’m not a seasoned political observer, I’m only a fairly bright fellow living on the east coast. But one thing is clear: in the tradition of one-time Ontario PC Minister of Education John Snobelin (cf. Mike Harris and the Common Sense Revolution; Snobelin served alongside Ministers Clement and Flaherty, I might note), the best way to create change in government is to create a crisis. And that’s what’s happened with the Long Form. The CPC has created a crisis. Even if Stephen Harper, through Tony Clement, were to suddenly make peace and reach for consensus, they will have shifted the status quo closer toward their own political ideology.
