Stupid content industries.
Dec. 9th, 2007 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenAnimeOnDVD has the following post today:
I thought this was interesting because we basically had the same conversation several times over in my Innovation Industries class: You're not going to stop piracy. You're not going stop circumvention of region encoding. What you need to do is make yourself more attractive than the pirates. Release things fast. Make it convenient. Make it high-quality.
The person who wrote the AnimeOnDVD post clearly is on top of DMCA cases: the locked doors/open windows analogy is what the court used when holding that making third-party toner cartridges that crack the manufacturer's "secret handshake" is not circumvention of a measure meant to prevent access to the printer code. [Courts really like calling it a "secret handshake" instead of authentication, which is kind of endearing and frustrating at the same time.]
A week or two ago, Justin Sevakis at ANN wrote an open letter to the anime industry that was a nice follow-up to my post about Gonzo's president lamenting the demise of anime at the hands of pirates.
[I've been too caught up in end-of-semester stuff to really read and digest the letter, but I guess I should gather all the pieces together now. I'll write more about it later, especially since I'll be writing a paper on copyright infringement over break. I'm also creating a tag called "digital copyright", since I seem to write about these issues enough to warrant it. I guess I am, and will always be, a copyright dork.]
A few days ago, the president of Bandai Visual USA responded to the open letter. Apparently AnimeOnDVD thought this was a coup, saying what was needed was for high-ups in the industry to talk about this, and for people to tell U.S. fandom directly about the Japanese side. Personally, I found the response pretty unsatisfying. Along the lines of, "Thank you for your feedback. It will receive due consideration." And then back into rhetoric about "please buy our DVDs and recommend series to your friends" and "boo hoo, look at us, we're trying so hard". Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it just seems like they didn't want to give serious thought to this at all.
Like I said, I haven't actually read the entire letter yet, but the first thing I got from it was: "Please, please, let's show that we have learned from the RIAA and the MPAA." And I really wish we could. But it doesn't seem like the industries are interested in learning.
I vaguely remember the days when DeCSS flew around the internet with the industry desperately chasing after it and trying to put it back in the bag. [In case you don't remember, DeCSS is a program for decrypting DVDs. When it first came out, the industry started filing lawsuits and sending takedown notices left and right. In response, people kept spreading the code farther and wider -- on t-shirts, as domain names, etc. The only part that really stuck with me was that people started singing it in songs, clearly trying to assert some kind of fair use defense. Only now do I know that, sadly, there is no such broad fair use defense for anti-circumvention.] If the industry ever wanted to show how utterly powerless it was, I think that was it. So after that fiasco, I thought they would have figured it out: the more you try to suppress something, the more the libertarian masses on the internet are going to fight it.
That's why I was shocked to find out in Innovation Industries that the exact same thing happened with HD DVD. Smart computer people discovered the key that encrypts HD DVD, a set of hexadecimal values that starts with "09 F9". They posted it online. The people in charge, AACS, responded by filing lawsuits and sending takedown notices left and right. In response, people started putting it on t-shirts, as domain names, etc. They kept posting it on Digg and voting it up so that the entire front page was covered with it. At first Digg tried to cooperate with AACS and took it down as fast as they could. Then they realized that the mobs were against them, so after they recovered from the server crash that resulted from everyone voting up the 09 F9 posts, they gave up and even posted the key themselves. AACS came out looking ridiculously impotent. Not to mention stupid, because the key is useless in the hands of most people -- not many people know how to write software that actually uses the key to be able to rip HD DVDs.
Of course, both DeCSS and 09 F9 were indirect threats to copyright protections. Piracy is direct. But the point remains: you just can't stop it. But the hysterical "fansubs are the devil" line of rhetoric suggests that they haven't really learned that what they really need to do is either preempt or coexist. Direct, head-on attacks just won't work.
Anyways. More thoughts later.
Attention Japan (03:51 PM EST): Claiming that the lack of region coding on high definition formats is an impediment to releasing there due to the fear of reverse importation is a straw man argument. Considering that the majority of cheap DVD players available worldwide and the easy availability of information on how to unlock them online, making this claim is the same beyond bordering on silly. It's like claiming that having locks on your front door are the most important thing yet you leave all your windows and back door unlocked at the same time. DVD is a completely open and broken format and the people that want to reverse import from Japan to the US are already doing so and have done so for years now. HD DVD is completely region free and Blu-ray has the US and Japan in the same region and has set rules in place to encourage no region coding. This is simple fact and the sooner that companies come to grips with it and move forward with a better plan, the less silly companies will look when posing such straw man arguments.
I thought this was interesting because we basically had the same conversation several times over in my Innovation Industries class: You're not going to stop piracy. You're not going stop circumvention of region encoding. What you need to do is make yourself more attractive than the pirates. Release things fast. Make it convenient. Make it high-quality.
The person who wrote the AnimeOnDVD post clearly is on top of DMCA cases: the locked doors/open windows analogy is what the court used when holding that making third-party toner cartridges that crack the manufacturer's "secret handshake" is not circumvention of a measure meant to prevent access to the printer code. [Courts really like calling it a "secret handshake" instead of authentication, which is kind of endearing and frustrating at the same time.]
A week or two ago, Justin Sevakis at ANN wrote an open letter to the anime industry that was a nice follow-up to my post about Gonzo's president lamenting the demise of anime at the hands of pirates.
[I've been too caught up in end-of-semester stuff to really read and digest the letter, but I guess I should gather all the pieces together now. I'll write more about it later, especially since I'll be writing a paper on copyright infringement over break. I'm also creating a tag called "digital copyright", since I seem to write about these issues enough to warrant it. I guess I am, and will always be, a copyright dork.]
A few days ago, the president of Bandai Visual USA responded to the open letter. Apparently AnimeOnDVD thought this was a coup, saying what was needed was for high-ups in the industry to talk about this, and for people to tell U.S. fandom directly about the Japanese side. Personally, I found the response pretty unsatisfying. Along the lines of, "Thank you for your feedback. It will receive due consideration." And then back into rhetoric about "please buy our DVDs and recommend series to your friends" and "boo hoo, look at us, we're trying so hard". Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it just seems like they didn't want to give serious thought to this at all.
Like I said, I haven't actually read the entire letter yet, but the first thing I got from it was: "Please, please, let's show that we have learned from the RIAA and the MPAA." And I really wish we could. But it doesn't seem like the industries are interested in learning.
I vaguely remember the days when DeCSS flew around the internet with the industry desperately chasing after it and trying to put it back in the bag. [In case you don't remember, DeCSS is a program for decrypting DVDs. When it first came out, the industry started filing lawsuits and sending takedown notices left and right. In response, people kept spreading the code farther and wider -- on t-shirts, as domain names, etc. The only part that really stuck with me was that people started singing it in songs, clearly trying to assert some kind of fair use defense. Only now do I know that, sadly, there is no such broad fair use defense for anti-circumvention.] If the industry ever wanted to show how utterly powerless it was, I think that was it. So after that fiasco, I thought they would have figured it out: the more you try to suppress something, the more the libertarian masses on the internet are going to fight it.
That's why I was shocked to find out in Innovation Industries that the exact same thing happened with HD DVD. Smart computer people discovered the key that encrypts HD DVD, a set of hexadecimal values that starts with "09 F9". They posted it online. The people in charge, AACS, responded by filing lawsuits and sending takedown notices left and right. In response, people started putting it on t-shirts, as domain names, etc. They kept posting it on Digg and voting it up so that the entire front page was covered with it. At first Digg tried to cooperate with AACS and took it down as fast as they could. Then they realized that the mobs were against them, so after they recovered from the server crash that resulted from everyone voting up the 09 F9 posts, they gave up and even posted the key themselves. AACS came out looking ridiculously impotent. Not to mention stupid, because the key is useless in the hands of most people -- not many people know how to write software that actually uses the key to be able to rip HD DVDs.
Of course, both DeCSS and 09 F9 were indirect threats to copyright protections. Piracy is direct. But the point remains: you just can't stop it. But the hysterical "fansubs are the devil" line of rhetoric suggests that they haven't really learned that what they really need to do is either preempt or coexist. Direct, head-on attacks just won't work.
Anyways. More thoughts later.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 06:15 am (UTC)It's just like how your example of hiding teachings in songs is not a copyright issue. Of course, there are major free speech issues in both cases -- and fair use was designed as the balance between copyright and free speech, which is why it's unfortunate that anti-circumvention doesn't have it. I'll probably get into that a bit with my paper, which is about whether you can sue people for just teaching people how to, say, use BitTorrent to download fansubs. (Which is back in copyright-land instead of anti-circumvention, but fair use doesn't help when the person's just copying the show outright, without any artistic contribution.) So stay tuned! ^.~
Yeah, copyright law is a big mess. Thank the big industries who have Congress in their pockets. -_-;;
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 03:57 am (UTC)The most amazing part of this was that someone actually reverse-engineered the key from a reading of the AACS system. (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=953036). It's almost trivial to design a system better than this. A simple public-key/private-key system would prevent this leak (although it would be still weak to insider leaks).
If Coke can keep its secret sauce secret, you'd think it'd be possible to key a bunch of number secrets.
While it's cool to see crazy Internet hijinks, spreading the key doesn't actually affect piracy. The key allows the removal of DRM on HD DVD which allows it to be ripped to x264. Only a select few need the key/software for there to be a problem.
Re: direct, head-on attacks
This is clearly an asymmetric warfare problem. You have limited resources to stop the piracy of many users.
Assume a simplistic model where all users will either buy or pirate depending on the cost of the alternatives. This assumes that the moral objection to piracy can simply be added to cost. We ignore the users that will not buy at any cost (die-hard pirates) and those that will not pirate at any cost (good guys).
Suppose there is a distribution P(x) that gives the number of users that will pay at most x for a product. If the retail price, R, of the product exceed a user's willingness to pay, that user will pirate if the pirated product is available. The pirated product is available if someone is able to defeat the protection scheme.
Let M be the integral of P(x) for all x>R denote the number of paying users. Let N be the integral of P(x) for all x<R denote the number of would-be pirates. The revenue to the company is M*R. The 'claimed' losses from piracy is N*R. At most, the company is able to spend M*R on anti-piracy. However, the pirates are able to spend the integral of xP(x) for x<R. Since the market has a long tail, xP(x) for x<R is greater than M*R. That means that there is no amount of money that the company can spend to prevent piracy! The intuition is that there are many people in China willing to spend a few cents to watch a movie and those cents add up. The company has already chosen a retail price R, that maximizes revenues. Thus, it cannot pass on any costs from anti-piracy measures to its customers. Therefore, the smart move is to not implement any DRM. It's simply not profitable. Clearly this model assumes that there is uniform pricing. The trick is that if we could price discriminate (region codes, anyone?), then we can actually increase the revenue and capture xP(x) for all x. That is a HUGE difference. In particular, xP(X) for all x is clearly more money than the pirates could spend! From this, we see that DRM is not to reduce piracy as much as it is to implement monopoly pricing. Piracy is a symptom of the LACK of monopoly. Piracy shows us that the free market is working! When Micrsoft stops complaining about piracy, they need to be broken up by the Justice Department.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 06:24 am (UTC)How can you make the key non-fixed if you are selling people HD DVDs, which you will never be able to modify again? Plus, according to Fred, at least they tried to be a little smarter than with CSS in that there are several keys, and 09 F9 was just the one that got all the publicity.
Yes, I know only a few people need the key. That is the modern problem with DRM. The way the industry envisioned DRM was that it wouldn't be an end-all to piracy but it would be a "speedbump" to mostly moral people who would rather pay than figure out how to decrypt their own DVDs. As long as they strictly policed people who distribute DVD-ripping software, the mostly moral people would be kept helpless enough to keep paying. The ease of filesharing in modern times has absolutely destroyed that theory. It only takes one person in Sweden to crack the DVD, and then unprotected copies are all over the internet. And note that none of these downloaders is liable for circumvention because they never did anything to break the encryption. (Obviously, they're still liable for direct infringement.) The "speedbump" theory simply fails. That, as I understand it, is what the Darknet paper was all about. So much for DRM.
I'll fight to the death before they take away my scissors! :P
no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 11:17 am (UTC)Anyway, unrelated to the topic here, but related to IP and entertainment in general, apparently the Stanford Law CIS folks are planning to come to the defense of the Harry Potter Lexicon:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071205/ap_en_ot/harry_potter_lexicon
It's like the perfect intersection of law school and fandom. XD
no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 03:15 pm (UTC)I've always been kind of hopeful that the CIS website has (or had? I can't seem to load their site at the moment) a link called "Anime Music Videos". Now that would have been fun, though I think the fair use case for most of them is ridiculously weak.