Letter to my Member of Parliament

June 13, 2008



The Honourable Bryon Wilfert


House of Commons


Dear Sir,

I'm writing as a constituent to let you know that I am strongly opposed to the amendments proposed to Canadian copyright legislation on June 12, 2008. While I understand many Canadians, voters or otherwise, don't understand the technical implications of these changes, I find them a direct infringement of my liberties as a Canadian citizen.

By criminalizing workarounds for Digital Rights Management technology, this Bill allows any company to essentially determine the bounds of copyright law - destroying fair dealing options such as time or location shifting of content, with no legal recourse for users.

Most importantly, to enforce this legislation, the entire concept of a right to privacy would have to go out the window; any actual enforcement would require monitoring and inspecting the usage history of every Canadian with an internet connection, and likely allowing companies to do so.

My privacy, as a Canadian citizen, does not outrank essential concerns such as the safety and security of my fellow Canadians. However, I must insist that my right to privacy comes before the rights of entertainment industry conglomerates that seem to have dictated the content of Minister Prentice's Bill.

I ask that you stand against this legislation.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Crowley


radiohead gets it.

I should be sleeping. I have to wake up in a little over 6 hours. But, there are things afoot. Things that cause bliss.

Thom Yorke and Company UNDERSTAND.

I've been rambling for a little less than a year about the separation between object and content. In relation to the music business, the point is simple: somewhere along the way, everyone forgot that the business was based on selling music, and assumed it was based on selling plastic discs. This more or less made sense when the plastic disc was the only method of moving music. Insert one massive digital revolution, and voila, an industry that thinks selling music means selling slabs of plastic begins to fail horribly.

The two best ways to deal with the separation between object and content in the music business are fairly simple: 1) recognise that to be worth money, you better have a slab of plastic that offers value beyond just the music, and 2) acknowledge that the music is really just a promotional tool for selling other, related products (slabs of plastic, tshirts, concert tickets, dvds, ringtones, etc.)

So what does radiohead to, when not tied to any old-distribution label paradigm?

They offer the album for sale, on the web, in a glorious package. 2 discs, vinyl, attractive packaging that realises the product IS A SLAB OF PLASTIC, and makes it the sexiest plastic they can. At the same time, they make digital downloads available for free to anyone who buys the meatspace version of the record.

The real brilliant move? The digital download by itself is available for a price of you-call-it. By you call it, I mean radiohead lets you add the album to your outbox from the exclusive retailer, and you get to decide how much it costs.

Not only is this invaluable research for a band in control of it's own pricing and sales, it provides a reasonable, DRM free option for sane consumers. As someone who actually downloads albums they already own, just for simplicity, this speaks volumes. Radiohead UNDERSTANDS, better than any other album release has ever indicated, that music cannot be sold as though it is still contained in plastic slabs.

This is the one record no one can justifiably download illegally. They are meeting you so far past half-way that you can't really bitch. At the very least, give the the data. Let them know you want it free, or for a cent, or what have you.

Several months ago, I was ecstatic when the iTunes music store began selling DRM free (sorta) downloads. That was premature, and I apologise. Assuming this isn't a hoax, radiohead have just (again) knocked the music industry on it's ass. It's so rare to see innovation even musically, but this group of consistent innovators are trying something legitimately new, and inarguably well-informed.

Shall we make it worth their while?

[this is ignoring the fact the album comes out in 10 days, and they have created nearly unlimited press just by setting a tight deadline, and doing something logical, but unheard of.]

by way of explanation.

The electric car is perfected. You can drive now, with no emissions. Obviously, the oil companies are pissed. Because, they have a monopoly on providing energy for drivers. Getting the energy to move a car is what oil companies exist for. But suddenly, beautifully, they aren't as important. You don't need to buy the gas as a means of conveying the energy to your car. You can just buy the energy. Or even MAKE it. And some people, some way, will find a way to steal energy, because electricity is a hell of a lot easier to transport than gasoline. Leeching off the grid unauthorised is massively simpler than hijacking a transport truck filled with liquid kaboom.

Now, the oil companies are pissed. They are getting fucked over, here. Decades and billions spent creating this functional, if wasteful infrastructure, and now some bastard makes it all worthless. There's only two options. Either they can realise their core business was never oil, it was energy. They can start again at the bottom, but with their massive war chests, important connections, and influence; or they can fight tooth and nail to demand that everyone keep buying and using gas-powered cars.

So guess which one they choose.

They bribe/lobby government representatives, talk about the ease of stealing energy as opposed to being forced to buy it in a physical form. They start suing people who slip past their stranglehold on the new technology, after convincing the government to pass a law that makes it illegal to break through the industry created locks on automobile systems. The issue of efficiency, and of the actual product versus the popularised means of transport are occluded it's about theft, and right, and how much they put into creating the current, though obviously inferior system.

So, people do the logical thing. They make and buy their own electric car systems when they can, and sometimes, they go a little further. When the electric car sneaks through legally, and companies insist you buy electricity at artificially inflated prices, from a specialised grid that will intentionally be incompatible with certain car systems, consumers start stealing the energy from the grid, because, really, fuck it. At a certain point, it's no longer logical to keep bending to a market that forgets you are the one making them rich.

Eventually, the threatening lawsuit idea proves insufficient as a scare tactic, and society needs to decide whether to put everyone in jail, or to stop listening to an obsolete industry that has no clue how the world works now.


*

This all came to mind while I was driving home from starbucks, and wishing I had a good adapter for playing my ipod through the car stereo. There's a CD player, and a radio that doesn't work, but both of these come with limitations that make them more irritating than pleasant. Obviously, the above was an attempt at pointing out the idiocy of the music industry, who have forgotten that the only product that ever made them money, was music. Not vinyl, tapes, cds, radio play, whatever. They sold music. And suddenly, when you could buy music without having to buy it on some form of plastic slab, they freaked the fuck out and forgot that music had been the product all along.

Stop trying to recreate the plastic slab model in digital form, stop trying to make everything the way it was. I understand most of the people in a decision making position are old, and confused, and have no concept of how to operate in the conditions that have arisen in their market. Much as any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic, any massive shift in the realities of a market, provided it destabilises enough limitations, will always be taken as an attack, and probably morally wrong.

if you keep trying to sell people an electric car that ensures you get paid just as well as you did for the internal combustion engine, PEOPLE ARE GOING TO STEAL. In anger, in defiance, in acceptance of the fact that you really, really, refuse to help them out even a little here.

Does anyone else think it's crazy than in less than a decade the music industry has created a situation in which the majority of the population would rather face the risk of a lawsuit demanding tens of thousands of dollars, than pay for music? Any subway system in the world can create a happy medium that ensures more people will pay to ride, rather than jump the turnstiles and risk attack. Hint: they didn't do it buy increasing the fine for turnstile jumping until it would ruin a family financially. They just didn't demand that each rider submit to being handcuffed to a seat until they reached their predetermined destination, in a form they submitted a month earlier.

People are afraid of retribution. But not to the point where they will put up with anything to avoid it.

observations on open source

When I first made my never-far-from-the-conversation switch to Apple, I decided I was going to put my actions up against my words, and use OpenOffice for all of my text editing needs. And, for a little while, it was tolerable. When a fellow user and friend switched back to microsoft Word, he did so because OpenOffice felt like 'a windows app that just happens to run on a mac.' I later corrected him that it was much more like a linux app that just happens to run on a mac, but you get his point.

I persevered. But, today, I reached my breaking point. The hassle of settings, of formatting, of doing pretty much anything other than entering text, was getting to me. Hell, the hassle of saving a set of changes, and then opening .doc files to find that they had reverted, got to me. Moreover, my friend was right. The interface was hideous, counter-intuitive, and didn't work well with anything in a .doc biased world.

Today I learned something very odd. Microsoft products can look appealing. Apparently only when they are coded for a Mac, though. Confusing. Still, I had to abandon my open source ideals, and for one simple reason; it doesn't work well enough.

It works, inarguably. I COULD, if forced, live with using only that one program. But, for me, open source isn't just about escaping the tyrrany of massive corporations, or harnessing the power of crowdsourcing. For me, open source is mostly about creating alternatives to fight the limitations intentionally imposed on users for corporate gain.

Today I learned that unintentional limitations and failings are worse, on an individual experience level. Worse because being unable to do what you are supposed to do will always be more glaring than being unable to do something the designer doesn't want you to do.

Still, using Word makes me feel dirty. Maybe I should switch to Pages...

hitting close to home.

I just received my new phone in the mail, and was fairly certain the handset was broken - i couldn't set any mp3 ringtones that i attempted to transfer via bluetooth.

But no, this is a common problem in Canada, for fido customers, apparently. They DRM locked my phone so that it will only play ringtones downloaded from the online WAP store, accessible only via the phone.

They also, just to piss me off, seem to have locked out the option that lets me connect to my home internet through the phone, via bluetooth.

Fido is doing a really good job at making me regret customer status.

finally going to talk about the iphone.

I haven't actually had the opportunity to NOT buy one yet, being Canadian, but I have essentially made it impossible for me to justify doing it financially, whenever it is that the iPhone gets a Canadian release. I am trying not to lust after the thing further, and the only method I have is to list the things that piss me off about it. Not the least of which is, the oft mentioned moratorium on third party development. No outside programs on your iPhone unless they run online, without flash. And over embarrassingly slow EDGE service.

Funnily enough, part of the reason I bought a Mac was to avoid Vista, because everything I'd heard had led me to believe that it was a DRM devil OS, designed to penalize me for using any non-microsoft approved software.

And yet, here we are.

I never cease to be impressed by Apple's ability to use it's position as a contender to obscure the decidedly non-little-guy-friendly stances being taken with iPods, the iTunes music store, and now the iPhone. The ubiquity of Apple branded media playing devices makes them, in my mind, one of the worst offenders when it comes to sales of locked media. At the same time, I'm typing this on a MacBook, which is connected to an iPod, and I'm saving for an AppleTV (my reasoning is at least somewhat solid on that one, see below). Obviously, I have developed a kind of cognitive dissonance that can only be described as having taken a liking to the Kool-Aid.

It was easy for me to blow off Microsoft products wherever possible, mostly because the simple act of USING them is enough to make you hate the corporation. Couple that with a distaste for practices, and I'm out the door. However, my Mac is a joy to use. The mixture of iPod and iTunes is, in my opinion, the best digital music experience (from a UX standpoint), and that makes it harder for me to flip out when I hear that there will be no third party apps on the latest Apple object of obsession.

I don't like this hypocrisy coming from my end, but I'm having a hard time seeing an out. So, I look at all the post-release hullabaloo coming from the south, and I'm repeating flaws like a mantra because there are MANY justifiable reasons to dislike the device. But at the same time, Apple has, in recent years, developed some kind of direct stimulation for the 'BUY IT' reaction in my reptile brain.

So I'm looking for a happy compromise, like maybe Jobs will wake up tomorrow and consider policies that are better for the community at large, even if they slightly complicate things in Cupertino.

[In relation to the AppleTV, I want one as a solution to two problems; 1) I hate waiting for DVDs, 2) I don't keep a TV schedule. An addendum to this is, even though I pay for cable, I think subscribing to specific shows over iTunes on a per season basis would be a reasonable and useful option for me. And, even the time spent 'finding' 'reruns' is worth enough that I would be willing to pay.

That, and the salve to my conscience that would come from actually paying for battlestar galactica.]

this is a brand new low.

I'm now forced in to an awkward situation. I have to decide whether my principles are worth me no longer watching entourage.

This will be exceedingly complex to negotiate.

Rebranding Digital Rights Management as Digital Consumer Enablement is similar to selling suicide as a means to 'Take back Control of your life!' Add to the already insulting suggestion the comment that 'CTO Bob Zitter says DRM is a misnomer, because the technology "allows consumers "to use content in ways they haven't before."'

So, only being able to watch it at the time, or via the devices pre-approved by the network is a form of 'enablement' for the consumer...

I really didn't expect to wake up today and have to hate HBO.

[edit: forgot to thank Consumerist for the link, and the quote.]

my god, steps forward.

This is obviously the best news I have had in a very long time.

Not because I'm going to start buying music from iTunes in a large volume, but because it is, to my mind, the first indication that a major player in the music industry has made that they employ even a single person who understands the changing game. DRM free music is the first step towards acknowledging the object / content distinction.

By this I mean (if I can remember the paper I wrote last term) that technology has progressed to the point where an understanding of product as a unified object / content creation is obsolete. Music isn't a CD, or even a file anymore. It's a reproducible, object mobile entity. DRM is, to me, and attempt to enforce the obsolete unity of object and content. The idea is to keep a CD a CD, and not a music distribution tool, to be played with to the users content. This means, basically, that the music industry is finally admitting that the expectation that consumers will buy one version of a song for a CD player, another for an iPod, and one more for their zune, is insane.

And it is insane. It's so insane that the only way to keep the threat working is nuisance lawsuits that greatly inflate the supposed value of the content, or the 'intellectual property'. Luckily, someone at Apple (who was probably convinced my Norway), convinced someone at EMI, that the best way to reduce piracy is to stop selling your customers broken products.

This is a very, very good day for anyone who has been looking rationally at the future of creative products in our society, at the flaws in copyright, and at the mounting subjugation of technology and innovation to archaic and obsolete business models.

Also, another brilliant strategic move on the part of Apple, somehow managing to position itself yet again as the little guy, fighting against the system for the people, despite it's position as a dominant player is the sales of DRM burdened content online. I am in awe, as always, at how ascending into ubiquity has only caused this minimal amount of backlash for a company that defined itself by asking you to 'think different'.