User-Generated Media, DRM vs. DAC
Wired News: YouTube in Copyright Cross Hairs?
Here’s an alleged quote from the head of Universal:
"The poster child for user-generated media sites are MySpace and YouTube," said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars."
Let’s put aside the fact that kids using commercial music in their YouTube videos will generally help music sales — I would have never heard Numa Numa had it not been for YouTube (not that I went out and bought it, but I’m sure someone did). Let’s put aside the fact that using music in 2 minute amateur videos does no harm — no one in their right mind listens to their music collection by playing an assortment of video clips on YouTube.
The reason people use commercial music is because it’s the soundtrack to our lives. It’s used in movies, TV, and much of our waking day. It’s also admittedly hard to create original quality works. But most people don’t have the resources to call up ASCAP and get a "proper" license to use commercial music in their YouTube cat flushing video. It’s next to impossible, largely by design. Even film school students trying to build soundtracks for their projects are often forced to create custom music rather than go through the labyrinth of ASCAP procedures.
If the music industry is so keen on extracting every penny of revenue from their (the artist’s?) intellectual property, they have two main choices, or people will pick the third natural option (use it without permission). Option one is to blanket license sites like YouTube to allow music in any videos. YouTube would likely pay up, though they may not yet have the advertising revenues to do so. Sites that make no money have no choice. Option two is for individuals who either watch or produce the videos to pay an up-front fee themselves. And that’s not going to happen.
But something vaguely along those lines is actually possible and as yet untried. With the proliferation of sites like Second Life and MySpace, user-generated content is going to be increasingly big, perhaps even dominant by sheer volume. That means somewhere, someone will always be copying something. We’re going to have to deal with it, and RIAA and MPAA will not, in any real world scenario, get blanket licenses from every content-enabling site or service, much as they’d secretly like to create a sort of global music tax and do nothing for their profits. In a free market, it’s not going to happen.
Now, in Second Life, there are strict copying permissions enforced by the virtual world’s operating system. But their software still can’t (as far as I know) detect whether someone uploads a commercial track or texture. It still relies on human eyes and ears to find the evil IP infringers and bring them to justice.. But the more successful the enforcement is, the more likely it is to get bypassed. Once it gets onerous enough, people will find a way around it. Just look at iTunes, which now has several ways to unlock the tracks so they can play on standard MP3 players. It’s all about convenience and true fair play.
What we need, actually, is one step down from Second Life’s DRM for general content re-use — a way to tag or watermark media such that the copyright (or creative commons) is preserved intact but not enforced. It’s like end credits on a movie, where they list all of the songs and products they used, down to the catering service. What we need is a way to automatically generate "credits" for any derivative work that faithfully represents what bits and pieces went into that work.
Think about it. No one bothers to edit out the credits from movies. We don’t always watch them, but we leave them intact. If the MPAA started using the credits to charge us (directly) for having heard songs in a movie, wed see credit-less versions of movies on the net in no time flat. I’m talking about digital authorship credit (DAC), not DRM. It’s simply informative, not coercive.
What does DAC do for Hollywood? Well, for one thing, macro trend tracking (opt-in, of course). Hollywood can finally learn that of the 10 million people who watched at least one Numa Numa video, half of them already owned the $0.99 track and should require no further license (I suspect they secretly already know this). Of the remainder, half of those probably bought the track after hearing it a dozen times. And half of those (I’m exaggerating now) made their own silly videos in response, which only helped sales.
For the few who didn’t buy the track, Hollywood could start to understand why, and do the actual job of a marketing/distributing middle-man: "sell until it don’t sell no more." That’s the most money Hollywood will ever get under any real-world scenario. Blanket licenses, it turns out, create market inefficiencies — phantom paying customers — which will makes Hollywood more money in the short term, but will kill their business in the end as more efficient schemes take root. That’s capitalism, Mickey.
In the realm of user-created content, people who make content using bits and samples (and 3D objects) released by others would quickly build up a growing DAC tree in the resulting works, a list of "who made what" to make it happen. If and when that derived content makes it big, some of that money (or mere cachet) can proportionately flow back to the underlying authors, who so graciously and speculatively donated their works. If the composite work makes nothing, no problem. And if we try to enforce that relationship for anything but the most successful works, the information will get stripped out very quickly. It has to be strictly voluntary or it doesn’t work.
Hollywood needs to understand that the danger to their ancient business model is not from people seeing content without a license (we do it all the time, in movies and on TV or at our friend’s house), but people making money off that IP without it flowing back to them, in other words, bypassing their business model. Since mandatory DRM schemes will always fail, and lawsuits destroy customer loyalty, the only thing they have left to try is the voluntary scheme I described. It’s either trust the customer-as-creator, or sue the hell out of them.
I don’t think most of us would be comfortable with our media “phoning home”. It’s not actually that uncommon for people to go to some lengths to disable such things, because they don’t want lawyers to come sniffing, because they’re privacy nuts, because they don’t want IT folk to see more signs of what they’re doing on their laptops, or for any number of other reasons.
I’m not imagining something that phones home, unless it’s strictly opt-in (e.g., gives some benefit to the end-user for participating). If some percentage of people participate in the market-tracking programs (using DAC), that can be extrapolated into meaningful numbers for the overall population, without requiring our media to phone home.
But for most of us, the point is that if we produce something or create something, the authorship info would be preserved when we publish or reuse content.
And it need not be a privacy issue there either. We can embed GUIDs and store the contact info elsewhere in a more protected form. Ideally, these GUIDs would even be re-encoded using the media itself, so someone couldn’t simply insert his GUID on someone else’s media and claim credit.