Darknet

In search of the video jukebox

Dallas Morning News:

It will take at least a couple of years to get from this early stage to the era of the digital jukebox, when most movies and TV shows will be downloadable from a single place, tech industry watchers say.

Copyright holders are starting out timidly, unsure whether offering programs for download will siphon money away from their broadcasts and DVD sales.

Technology makers are trying to convince Hollywood that it can protect its properties from rampant piracy. Hollywood is worried about file-sharing technology such as BitTorrent, a software tool that allows users to download large files quickly.

And no one is sure what consumers want. What restrictions will they accept on the number of devices they can use to watch their videos? And will they prefer to order shows and movies through a TV set-top box, a Web site or a software program?

"There's a lot of confusion," said Tim Bajarin, president of research firm Creative Strategies Inc. "You have multiple channels vying to try to be the best video/music distribution vehicle, period. We're in a highly competitive phase." ...

The problem is that the companies that own movies and TV shows may be limiting the potential of the video download market by taking things so slowly. If consumers don't have a central place to buy whatever show or movie they prefer, they'll probably avoid the market altogether, said Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and leading advocate of copyright law reform.

"You only begin to have takeoff when you have total interoperability," he said. Even iTunes has kept the music download market from being as big as it could be, he said, since it allows songs to be transferred to only one portable player, the iPod.

True. And, once again, no mention of the burgeoning marketplace in free video downloads.

I hope to launch a new videoblogging site in the next week or so.

France lawmakers endorse file-sharing

I missed this the other day: France Lawmakers Endorse File-Sharing.

A French government crackdown on digital piracy backfired Thursday as lawmakers rebelled by endorsing amendments to legalize the online sharing of music and movies instead of punishing it.

'Darknet' named one of year's top 10 business books

The Miami Herald has a year-ender: 10 business books stand out from the pack. Of the books reviewed in Business Monday this year, 10 left a lasting impression and merit a second look.

Revolution in the Valley. The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Andy Hertzfeld. O'Reilly. 320 pages. $24.95. (Feb. 6) blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown and Co. 288 Pages. $25.95. (Feb. 21)

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Daniel H. Pink. Riverhead Books. 272 pages. $24.95. (May 9)

Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America. Les Standiford. Crown. 336 pages. $24.95. (May 23)

Think Big, Act Small: How America's Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive. Jason Jennings. Portfolio. 220 pages. $24. (July 4)

Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. J.D. Lasica. Wiley. 308 pages. $25.95. (July 11)

Why entrenched economic interests continually resist innovation and disruptive technology while hastening their self-inflicted extinction.

Tom Peters Essentials (four volumes: Design, Leadership, Talent and Trends). Tom Peters. Dorling Kindersley Limited. 160 pages (each). $15 (each). (July 18)

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. John Battelle. Portfolio. 311 pages. $25.95. (Sept. 26)

Battelle's absorbing narrative reveals the birth of the real New Economy, and why we'll continue to Google for the foreseeable future.

The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Neil Strauss. Regan Books. 464 pages. $29.95. (Nov. 14)

The Untied States of America. Polarization, Fracturing and Our Future. Juan Enriquez. Crown. 368 pages. $24.95. (Dec. 12)

My greatest disappointment during the past year is that Silicon Valley's two daily newspapers -- The San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle -- completely blew off Darknet and the hugely important issues, centered right here, that the book addresses. Next most disappointing: the Washington Post, USA Today and the dozens of other newspapers and magazines with tech sections that ignored the book and its message.

Still, it's gratifying that The Miami Herald included Darknet on its Top 10 list.

The coming bust in hi-def DVDs

NY Times: Fiddling With Format While DVD's Burn.

The war for control of the next-generation DVD is approaching a critical juncture: next week in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show, companies championing the two competing high-definition DVD standards - Blu-ray and HD-DVD - will unveil their lineups of new players and movie titles.

There are growing signs, though, that the battle for supremacy in this multibillion-dollar market may yield a hollow victory. As electronics makers, technology companies and Hollywood studios haggle over the fine points of their formats, consumers are quickly finding alternatives to buying and renting packaged DVD's, high definition or otherwise.

"While they fight, Rome is burning," said Robert Heiblim, an independent consultant to electronics companies. "High-definition video-on-demand and digital video recorders are compelling, and people will say, 'Why do I need it?' " when considering whether to buy a high-definition player. ...

So far, the marketplace's answer is: We don't need it.

Pro-Hollywood bill aims to end fair use in digital television

Missed this the other day by Declan McCullagh in CNET's News.com: Pro-Hollywood bill aims to restrict digital tuners.

A new proposal in Congress could please Hollywood studios, which are increasingly worried about Internet piracy, by embedding anticopying technology into the next generation of digital video products.

If the legislation were enacted, one year later it would outlaw the manufacture or sale of electronic devices that convert analog video signals into digital ones--unless those encoders honor an anticopying plan designed to curb redistribution. Affected devices would include PC-based tuners and digital video recorders.

"This legislation is designed to secure analog content from theft that has been made easier as a result of the transition to digital technologies," House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, said late Friday. Criminals "obtain copyrighted content and then redistribute for profit at the copyright owner's expense," he added.

Bullshit. This will outlaw fair use in the video/television realm.

Digital video recorders with analog tuners or inputs would only be allowed to record "copy-prohibited" shows for 90 minutes. After that, the digital recording must be "destroyed or otherwise rendered unusable."

• Analog video output of "copy-prohibited" recordings would be permitted as long as it was to a VGA output with a resolution of no more than 720 pixels by 480 pixels.

• Violations would be punished by civil penalties between $200 and $2,500 per product. Commercial offenders would be imprisoned for up to five years and fined not more than $500,000.

• The two copy-protection systems that must be supported are Video Encoded Invisible Light--used in a Batmobile toy--and Content Generation Management System-Analog.

Good company

A reading list from Audioblog co-founder Eric Rice:

Books I've mentioned/am using as textbooks for these cool things we do:

1. Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig
2. Darknet, JD Lasica
3. Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger

Coming up at Creative Commons

Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig offers two end-of-year missives, here and here, announcing the nonprofit's plans for 2006.

What's on tap? Well, new tech tools, and new projects, such as:

A public domain wiki

One project that we're very close to announcing draws together the wisdom and expertise of the Wikipedia project with the extraordinary foresight of a major rights organization keen to help clarify the boundaries of the public domain. The project would work something like this: This rights clearing organization (and we can't say which one just now) would give us a data dump of records they have about authors in a particular country. Those records would include books published by those authors, the authors' dates of birth, and if available or relevant, the authors' dates of death. Using that information, one could determine which works were in the public domain. ...

We'd then craft a set of APIs — basically interfaces to the database — that anyone could use to ping the database and get information about a particular work. For example, anyone could ask, for free, if a particular book by a particular author is in the public domain or not, and the database would return an answer with some indication about levels of confidence. (E.g., "With 95% confidence, we can say this book is in the public domain.") This data could then be used by people to decide what books could be made available on the Internet or what permissions are needed to use the book in a university class.

This project, called the WikiPD, has just received seed funding. For us to commit to it will require another big chunk of public support. So here's the question for you: Should we?

Absolutely.

Meantime, CC is still well short of its year-end fund-raising goal, so please contribute. (I have!)

Lyrics dustup ends in apology

Xeni Jardin in Wired News:

A music publisher has issued an unusual mea culpa in the digital copyright wars, apologizing over legal threats that led a software programmer to pull an application he'd written that automatically scours the web for song lyrics. ...

While Ritter now appears to be free of legal woes, ad-laden websites that offer unlicensed lyrics and guitar tabs will soon be under attack.

Beginning in January, the Music Publishers Association, of which Warner Chappell is a member, will begin pursuing a campaign against 5 to 6 such companies, according to MPA CEO Lauren Keiser.

"Lost revenue for rights holders is in the millions," said Keiser, "We're not going after fan clubs, but websites that make money."

'Analog Hole bill' introduced

New from
p2pnet.net:

Analog Hole Bill Introduced

Theft, infringement and misleading language, by Russell McOrmond

Seasons' Greetings: RIAA

Skypecasting as a Darknet tool

Davis Freeberg at Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Will Skypecasting will be the next weapon for the Darknet?

As if Hollywood hasn't had enough to deal with over the last five years, it appears that the phone company is going to be a new threat to their closed distribution model. Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch noticed a cool little freeware program called Splitcam that allows you to broadcast video and music through a Skype or Yahoo Messenger connection. Splitcam can split a video file into 64 different channels that internet users could then stream over the net. I don't really see this replacing the P2P networks because you would have to schedule a time to watch a show instead of having it on demand, but it will present a new challenge to Hollywood as VoIP gains in popularity. People could use this technology to subvert blackout NBA games or delayed live events, but Abramson sees the technology as having a greater impact on the international markets.

"Basically when you add in encryption that Skype already has it becomes impossible to know what's going through the pipe. That means someone in London could in effect Skypecast English Premiere League Football to an ex-pat in the USA. Vice versa someone here in the USA could Skypecast NBA basketball, which has rights deals in other parts of the world, virtually anywhere.

For Hollywood this is akin to Kazaa or LimeWire in many ways. But much worse. First Skype makes things easy. Like a Mac almost. So with TV shows seen at least one year behind in foreign markets the Skypecasting market could blow holes in that approach very quickly. Given the growth of broadband around the world Skype could become the illegal distribution pipe with a technology like the one described by Stuart, or someone else's. Now with Video and codecs geared for it already resident in Skype, the issue is no longer if, but when." ...

Davis adds by email: "It looks like it is no possible for the darknet to share video and mp3 files through yahoo messenger and skype. I'm not sure how widely the [Splitcam] program has been used, but it's definetely interesting."

If Hollywood and the tech industry joined forces

Scott Kirsner in today's San Jose Mercury News on how Silicon Valley and Hollywood could join hands to rescue a movie industry in distress - if only the studios would be willing to embrace new business models.

The cineplex dilemma

Randall Stross in the Sunday NY Times: Is Mark Cuban Missing the Big Picture?, about the difficulties involved in undoing Hollywood's elaborate system of movie release windows.

Darknets vs. lightnets

Great article by Jason Boog in Ziff Davis's Publish today: Darknets vs. Lightnets.

From Napster LLC's dramatic legal showdown to HarperCollins Publishers Inc.'s plan to erect virtual walls around its digital library, Internet file sharing has always been presented as an either/or situation: Either the Napster generation would keep stealing content, or the monolithic corporations would figure out how to end peer-to-peer activity.

Recently, two prominent Web developers have initiated a conversation that could replace that zero-sum game mentality with the complementary ideas of "Darknets" and the "Lightnet." ...

A Darknet is a hidden Web nook where a small group shares digital files. Lightnet refers to a theoretical push towards an Internet where sharing and remixing files is encouraged.

In May, J.D. Lasica initiated the dialogue with his book, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." The Web consultant riffed on a 2002 research paper that studied how micro-networks illegally shared music, movies and other digital media—the biggest threat to creators' digital rights after the fall of Napster.

"A Darknet describes a space or environment for private file sharing," Lasica said in an interview with Publish.com. "The Darknet can be a force for good (at least in my book), when people act in a secure space to exchange files or information for legitimate purposes."

Ultimately, Lasica began to see consumers' desire to play with digital media in new ways: using MP3s as marketing tools, remixing digital music or sharing video clips. He concluded that these Darknets marked an irreversible shift in media relations.

"Customers are redefining DRM so that the 'rights' in DRM flow both ways, not just in the direction dictated by the media giants," he said. As these guerrilla networks evolved, something fundamental was changing—users were pushing for a more interactive relationship with media.

Let There Be Light…

At the Open Media Conference last October, Web developer Lucas Gonze imagined replacing covert Darknets with a file-sharing-friendly vision of a Lightnet. A variety of Webloggers and developers have since helped develop and circulate the idea.

"In a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text," Gonze said. "Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog."

In Gonze's best possible scenario, every kind of media, from Hollywood movies to Wall Street Journal articles, would have an accessible URL so bloggers and Web users could play with the content.

Corporations may want to take their cue from The Washington Post, which recently began celebrating bloggers who circulate and link to Post articles, instead of burying articles behind an unlinkable subscription pay-wall.

The trick is convincing content producers to adopt these new modes of consumer interaction. ...

"Lightnet content will tend to be more popular than Darknet content," Gonze said. "Publishers will give away some content in order to be able to sell other content, and they will find new revenue sources when they become remixers themselves."

Web consultant Clay Shirky said he agrees with Gonze's market shift, and he took the message to his prominent clients, including Nokia, the BBC and the Library of Congress.

"What the corporations have to realize is that real revolutions don't involve an orderly transition from one business model to another," he told Publish.com.

HarperCollins to create searchable digital library

From Tuesday's NY Times: In the latest move in the battle between publishers and search engines, HarperCollins Publishers said yesterday it would create its own digital library of all of its book and audio content and make it searchable by consumers on the Internet.

French open-source plan draws ire

International Herald Tribune: French open-source plan draws ire.

Buy, play, trade, repeat

Astute piece by Damian Kulash Jr., lead singer for the Los Angeles-based band OK Go, in the NY Times via the International Herald Tribune: Buy, play, trade, repeat.

Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans, ones who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks, are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players - the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example - and sometimes won't even play in their computers.

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing to do, simply get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that's at best a nuisance. As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people might be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software. ...

Luckily my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought that we were a good candidate for it. Record executives reasoned that, because we appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections necessary for accessing peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.

That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to us, talking about us, coming to our shows and, yes, trading us.

More from P2Pnet.net.

Digital rights in Canada

EFF: New Canadian Voice in Digital Rights Issues.

Showdown looming

Associated Press:

European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content. "The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference.

We're heading for a showdown between advocates of the past and the future.

Debate on Google Book Search

The webcast (video and audio) of the New York Public Library debate about the Google Print (now Google Book Search) project is now up. Participants were Larry Lessig, Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, David Drummond of Google, Nick Taylor of the Authors Guild and two gents from the NY Public Library. Lessig on stage with anybody is an unfair match, and he proves it again.

Fair use in film

From Larry Lessig:

The Center for Social Media has released a fantastic report on “fair use” in film. The aim of the report is to try to state, and hence establish, norms or “best practices” that should govern “fair use” for film. This is an important effort and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi deserve thanks for the hard work pulling the team together to produce this. Download the report here (PDF).

Lessig on the right to remix, copy, etc.

Creative Commons chairman Lawrence Lessig writes today about important freedoms, such as the right to remix, to copy, and so on.

The main portion of his post addresses an essay written by Erik Möller (an Ourmedia volunteer from Germany), who argued against the use of a Creative Commons NonCommercial (NC) license because it rules out use of the material in places like Wikipedia. It's important to know your options when deciding how to license your works, so check out this fascinating dialogue.

Darknet: The Internet you didn’t know about

India Business: Darknet: The Internet You Didn’t Know About.

Lessig on making licenses interoperable

Lawrence Lessig at Creative Commons discusses license compatability.

Imagine you're a high school student writing a report about the philosopher Wittgenstein. But because you're a high school student in the 21st century, your report won't be a traditional essay. It will instead be a short film. Your title is "Wittgenstein's World, Today." And you create your movie based upon Wikipedia's biography of Wittgenstein.

Your plan is very simple: You'll set the life described in the Wikipedia entry to film, supplement it with images that you find in Flickr, and add music that you've downloaded from Opsound.

As I described earlier, perhaps the most important feature of digital content is that from a technical perspective such a project is now trivial. ...

Yet there's another difficulty lurking in this story that many are just becoming aware of within the Free Culture Movement. You might be able — technically — to remix all this creativity. But can you remix it legally? Will the licenses that "free" content permit that free content to be remixed?

The astonishing (and for us lawyers, embarrassing) answer is no. Even if all the creative work you want to remix is licensed under a copyleft license, because those licenses are different licenses, you can't take creative work from one, and remix it in another. Wikipedia, for example, is licensed under the FDL. It requires derivatives be licensed under the FDL only. And the same is true of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license that governs Opsound content, as well as much of the creativity within Flickr. All of these licenses were written without regard to the fundamental value of every significant advance in the digital age — interoperability.

We're going to fix this. Or at least, we're going to try. One way would be for everyone to use just one particular Creative Commons license. But bullying the world into using a single license is neither consistent with our values nor sensible for the ecology of free culture. So instead, we are launching a project to facilitate interoperability among sufficiently compatible license types. And we will work hard to persuade others within the free license ecology to join us in this movement. ...

Creative Commons needs your support, for this project and others. I wrote a check today. Check out Red Hat's dollar-for-dollar challenge.

Throwing mud at Google

John Heilemann in New York magazine on the Google Print fight. If you like wild-eyed, unsubstantiated accusations, you'll love this piece.

'Darknet' table of contents

Contents

Foreword by Howard Rheingold ix

Introduction 1

1  The Personal Media Revolution 7

2  Now Playing:  Hollywood  vs. the Digital Freedom Fighters 23

3  Inside the Movie Underground 47

4  When Personal and Mass Media Collide 67

5  Code Warriors 87

6  Cool Toys  Hollywood  Wants to Ban 101

7  A Nation of Digital Felons 127

8  Personal Broadcasting 151

9  Edge TV 163

10  The Sound of Digital Music 185

11  Channeling Cole Porter 203

12  Architects of Darknet  221

13  Mod Squads: Can Gamers Show Us the Way? 243

14  Remixing the Digital Future 257

 

Acknowledgments 269

Endnotes 273

Online Resources 295

     Index 297