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Happy Birthday, Ted
 
We have a great future behind us
 
DRM as Destroyer of Markets
 
Must DRM Go Away?
 
Public Education: The Excluded Middle
 
Microsoft to Small Business: Your Potential, Our Passion
 
Help Stamp Out Telephone Surveys
 
Global Social Identity
 
Friday Slap Your Head Day
 
Looking for "Ahah!" -- When Did You Get Programming?

Must DRM Go Away?

IPcentral Weblog: FOSS & the Content Industry.  I have been quite taken with some of the recent posts by the folks at the PFF Center for the Study of Digital Property.  I don’t accept all of the rationales and positioning, and there are recent analyses, including around patent-system concerns and events, that I find carefully-reasoned and thought-provoking.  The articles have me think outside of my automatic mind set, as do the observations of Gary Becker and Richard Posner (and Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics duo also).  Truman Capote described himself as a courtroom junkie, and I must confess to being that way on the subject of Intellectual Property, going back to the run-up to the 1976 revision of the U.S. Copyright Code.

The angst over Digital Rights Management (DRM), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and related extrapolations about trusted-computing platforms leave me mainly at a loss.  I see little light but much heat and thunder.  Then a post by James DeLong got me thinking about the different unexperienced hazards that the parties in the DRM debate blame each other for.

{tags: intellectual property economics DRM DMCA open source Richard Stallman PFF orcmid}

Commenting on an interview of Richard Stallman in Forbes, where Stallman is quoted as declaring that the DMCA is unjust and that DRM should be banned, DeLong considers that

“The obvious consequence of this view is that mechanisms of payment for content would be disabled, which would mean the abolition of markets, which would mean a reliance on government funding. So Stallman's view of funding is that your taste in music and movies would be (like your hope for drug treatment) at the mercy of bureaucratic whim.”

I first thought that the comment was addressed to Stallman’s creation of a DRM-free GPL v3 enclave as the Free Software Foundation response to DRM.  Maybe Stallman does see GPL v3 as fostering such a successful and popular DRM-free zone that DRM will fail. 

If Stallman is saying that no software that prevents circumvention of a DRM-conveyed license can touch the lips of a GPLv3–licensed platform, so be it.  The market will indeed determine whether people will prefer systems where they can legally use DRM-licensed content of their choosing and whether there will be market segregation between DRM-using and DRM-rejecting software users.

I also don’t see how non-circumvention protection of DRM-honoring software is a threat to the free-software movement unless they consider themselves to have failed if not all software is free, something that Stallman appears to claim as the “only ethical course for software developers.”  (In that case, I do not want any of Stallman’s crowd working on my car or my phone system.)   Perhaps the fear is that all/most software will be arbitrarily distributed in DRM-mediated wrappers, creating a moat that FOSS software cannot cross.  I don’t see that as particularly likely either.  Perhaps we simply need more light on the way technical DRM solutions work and what they have nothing to do with.

With regard to the legal or socially-successful banning of DRM, I don’t find DeLong’s extrapolation of consequences to be compelling.  I think the enforcement of a limited license and any payment mechanisms (e.g., rents) are more separable than that.  I don’t see how markets are abolished, though I can see producers unwilling to deliver into a situation with 0–priced substitutes (including pirated replicas of their own product).  But then, producers are as capable of finding substitute products as consumers are in a free-market situation.  Something tells me that it is self-correcting either way.

There are government chartered/mediated mechanisms already in place that do not involve recourse to government funding (and it seems to me that only government purchase of creative work makes it free, depending on where the government puts it or maybe how they publish/distribute it).  I am thinking of mechanisms like

• mandatory licensing (and fees) for on-air performance, juke-box plays, etc.
• systems like ASCAP, BMI, and others for collecting royalties
• the Copyright Clearinghouse mechanism for licensing copies of published works

These all seem to rely on centralized authority/mediation and are chartered in various ways.  I thought the Copyright Clearinghouse was an interesting idea when it started, but I now see that extraordinary payments are demanded for licensed copies of many articles in journals.  I presume that those amounts are rarely paid and that institutional “site licenses” and “master agreements” now provide for most of the stream into (or around) the Copyright Clearinghouse.  (These weird price settings remind me of medical bills that have startling prices shown next to the amount actually settled for from an insurer, i.e., the real price.)

While some of these schemes tend to be bothersome, I don’t think they have been all that terrible when they work.  Whether there are effective alternatives to DRM in the case of digitally-carried content is not so clear.  But I think both sides of the debate, with their concern for extreme consequences, are not yet listening close enough to important and legitimate concerns.  There is great room for creativity as well as creation of new market approaches.

I am not adverse to DRM, and I think I’ll let the GPLv3 jousting be carried on by others.  I do create and use open-source software (none of which imposes any barrier against DRM that I can see).   I avoid GLPv2 already, so I have little personal stake in how GPLv3 plays out.

Public Education: The Excluded Middle

The Microsoft folks who brought us Channel 9 have spawned on10.  It took me a while to figure out that this is not a quarterback’s in-huddle play call.  Every weekday morning at 10:00 pst (gmt-0800, adjusted as needed for summer time I suppose) there’s a new short video, a kind of MTV-does-technology moment.  It’s light, gushy, enthusiastic and I like it.  I even began listening to KEXP in Media Player though I’ll soon revert to my TV-less detachment from spectator culture, with an occasional burst of Radio L’Olgiata for my kind of spice.  In addition, and the point of this post, on10 is introducing in-house columnist blogs on popular topics.  MD Bill Crounse has begun the Health Blog On 10 with a focus on how “technology can improve healthcare delivery and services around the world.”   Microsoft Research blogger Kevin Schofield has begun the Education Blog On 10.  That focus: Using technology to advance individual learning.  Since On10 blogs limit comments to 1000 bytes, I came over here to comment on Kevin’s theme and now my post is even longer!  Let’s see if I can find out how to ping back over there.

{tags: education learning instruction technology computer-science education schooling Ivan Illich on10 orcmid}

[update: I messed up the tags so I also repaired a word choice that was bothering me.]

Although Kevin Schofield’s inaugural on10 post is about the crisis in computer-science education, that is, the decline in students and the connected fear for our national technological capability, his second post emphasizes that the blog, contrary to the mast head, intends to take a wide-open approach “education.”

I am nervous about the topic of "Education" at its broadest.  I now feel incompetent to even pontificate! 

The “excluded middle” in this post’s subject is about some silliness on a discussion list about philosophical logic.  I don't know why it seems perfect here, perhaps because I am among the great unwashed that are not stakeholders in the institutionalization of “education” but I am expected to have an enlightened interest as a matter of good citizenship and democratic participation.  I think my views on education (and democracy) are decidedly Jeffersonian.  (I also don’t subscribe to the social-logicalism law-of-excluded-middle that has “If you’re not for it, you’re against it” as a principle of social civil discourse.)

In terms of public education, all I see around me (being almost 50 years distant from my own experience and having no school-age children) is divisiveness in school-board elections, scorn for teachers/administrators/parents/pupils, etc., and concern for the cost and the payoff and the role of government at all levels.  So if we go off on the institutionalization of "education" broadly, I worry that we will go down a rat-hole where everyone has an opinion and none of us know what we are talking about.

Then I suppose there is the question of how people learn and develop, what has that be a life-long practice, and how being educated figures in having a satisfying and productive life.  I am keen about that.  I am also keen about technology as an instrument for our own, self-directed education.  (Side note: In Italy, the English “education” is understood as “la istruzione” and not “la educazione” which mostly refers to civil and mannered upbringing.  Since the Italians seem to have our number on this one, I settled on “la erudizione” for my, uh, educational interests.)

Now, even though I am not a stakeholder and maybe not a qualified participant (except there are always these education-focused ballots to deal with), I want to add Ivan Illich to the mix of readings that are being suggested on10.  Illich’s 1970 book, Deschooling Society is intentionally provocative, I'm sure, and I am unwilling to accept his attribution of base motives behind the system of public education as established in the United States and elsewhere.  What I do find interesting is his observation that institutions often end up being the problem they were created to solve, to put a Zen spin on it.  I also find his challenge to the coupling of instruction and certification/qualification as very worthy of discussion. 

I see Illich as a great source of the kinds of outrageous questions that, if we can give up our indignation about some of his postulates, will get us out of the box to apply some critical evaluation to whether and how our institutions are delivering on their promise, and what is it we (that is, all of the stakeholders) are really expecting of them, not in our proclamations but in our deeds and their results.  I also wonder if there is anything that makes the material dated or is it dreadfully prophetic instead.  I don't have the facts, I'm just one of the great middle observers of our public angst.

I am confident of one thing though:  Technology can be a great instrument for “education” at any level and however construed.  It is not the answer.  It’s not an answer at all. 

I see that I have also fallen into the contemporary association of technology with artifacts and mechanisms, rather than with the economist’s view of technology as know-how.  I supposed that’s something to consider (broadly) when we speak of technology for education and especially in “using technology to advance individual learning.”