I was listening to the leaders of the RIAA and MPAA present at the annual Educause convention in Anaheim. Afterwards I spoke with them, asked questions, and talked to their representatives. Along with the ritual moves of such discussions ("What about fair use?" " We like fair use, really", etc.), a new feeling was palpable. After mulling this over for a while, it hit me: the major IP leaders think they've figured it out, and will survive.
Here's why: Valenti kept repeating his faith in American technology. This was partly understandable, given his desire to win an audience largely devoted to (educational) technology. But it surprised me at first, since digital technologies are what's eating his lunch, and Sherman's, supposedly. Then I translated correctly: "technology" means "digital rights management (DRM)." Then it all became clear. The "legitimate" (IP endorsed, not-sued), DRM-based business models have finally worked. iTunes, which is a DRM application, works. iTunes for Windows works. Napster 2.0 has launched, and offers a college download service, generally along those lines. Another university considers such a service (thanks to the Shelf).
I asked Cary Sherman and the RIAA squad, how important was DRM to their enterprise? "Very," was the answer. Sherman emphasized personal use, which is progress, admittedly.
So IP holders (music for now, mostly; movies are next) can publish content in performance, and in storage media, but really work to increase revenues through legit downloading. Models will probably proliferate and Darwinize, further honing the profit engines.
It's really a two-handed strategy, DRM+subpoena. Increasingly widespread (and effective) DRM reduces the flow of authorized content into the darknet, creating something of a speedbump on the "piratical" superhighway. The darknet, then, can be kept more in line by continuing the subpoena campaigns, along with publicized raids of superpirates.
As someone devoted to education and libraries, I see the fair use problem right away. For the first kind of fair use claims under US copyright law, primarily for scholars, teachers, and reporters, we run into problems because we can't claim a partial usage (like a quotation or clip), but can only buy a full usage, once the number of copies is exceeded. Here, personal use becomes fair use's prop. For the second fair use claim, archiving, we run into even more problems. If they buy content like the rest of us, archives will be limited to a few copies per file. For a quick fix or a short project, this isn't a problem. But libraries must think in terms of decades. Surely files will migrate from aging machine to new machine, and from old storage medium to new. Will archives have to re-buy to archive, locking themselves into an institutional lifetime of repeated purchase, bound ever more closely to the IP owners' business models?
Fighting to win back fair use under the now-victorious IP regime is the big challenge for teachers, scholars, reporters, librarians, students, imho.
Thoughts? responses? how would this not happen?
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