Sunday September 13′th is the last day make your voice heard in the 2009 copyright consultation.
One of the goals set by the Ministers is that a new copyright act should stand the test of time
given technology and business methods change fairly quickly, while
changes to copyright law are necessarily much slower. It is my belief
that any copyright bill that starts from the suggestion that we should
be ratifying the 1996 WIPO treaties is obsolete before it is written
given these treaties were backward facing when they were envisioned in
1995.
We should also learn from economics texts such as The Innovator’s Dilemma
(When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, by Clayton M.
Christensen), and allow those historically great firms and industries
to dictate policy which will harm Canada’s competitive position in the
global economy. We should not be looking to the members of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA)
(BSA members such as Microsoft, Apple and Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, etc) for
advise, but to their emerging competitors. These competitors are
adopting alternative business methods, and thus seem far more likely to
dominate future markets: assuming governments don’t manipulate
otherwise free markets to the benefit of yesterday’s companies.
It’s hard to talk about competition to the industry associations
representing the old way of doing things without highlighting Google
(Note: If you don’t know who they are, just Google them and find out
;-). As Google grows as a company they have entered into markets that
compete with many of the members of these older associations.
While they started out with a search engine, the way they monetized
search was through advertising. Google is able to target advertisements
in ways that old media companies could only dream of, and have been
able to grow a massive advertising network from this. This has allowed
many creators who might traditionally have worked as journalists for
print media publications to write online and get paid advertising
revenue more directly through Google. This competes with traditional
print media from both sides, with both advertisers and professional
journalists moving from print media to online with the help of Google.
Google is about to do to both the traditional book publishing and
cable companies through Google book search and YouTube what Apple’s
iTunes started to do with the music industry. By enabling creators to
skip traditional intermediaries they will one by one be replacing these
traditional companies, but where creators and audiences are more in
control of their own destiny. I know I’m looking forward to being able
to get rid of my Cable TV package and replace it with subscriptions to
legal online DRM-free content. It will allow me to choose the
programming I actually want, and far more of the money I spend (or
advertisers are spending) will be going into the pockets of the
creators.
What Google is doing in telecommunications is as interesting. They
have a cell phone operating system with Android which currently allows
people to connect to traditional carriers, but their involvement in spectrum auctions and Google Voice suggest the direction they are headed in the future.
Google was already seen as a competitor by companies like Microsoft in online properties, but with the announcement of Chrome OS.
While this is an operating system based on some of the same
technologies as a Linux desktop operating system, I see the promise of
Google making (and marketing) their open source platform to a mass
market that traditional commercial Linux companies have not been able
to do. Targeted at lower cost (and lower power consuming) netbooks,
Google has recognized something that many others in the open source
operating system markets haven’t yet: that the traditional desktop
computer doesn’t matter as it is largely going away.
My brother works at a company that started out developing a desktop
operating system, but has moved into other markets including email
servers. While they dabbled in netbooks (small computers intended to be
used for networking like the ASUS EEE PC), I’m told the operating system side of the company has no future. To put it in another way: “I see dead people.” “They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead. ”
It is interesting to watch what Google is doing, and compare it with
some of their old-economy competitors. Apple is helping to open up
markets such as for portable smart computers (you may talk into it, but
an iPhone isn’t just a phone), and paid audio and video distribution.
One of the things that define Apple, however, is that they are a very
closed platform: it is the trait that allowed Microsoft (then a much
more open company) to focus on developers and leave them in the dust
during past market transformations. Now that Microsoft is as closed as
Apple, and both very tied to that older way of thinking about
technology, both will be left in the dust by companies like Google.
Even with poor hardware (Google’s G1 wasn’t that great), there is a growing number of previous iPhone and BlackBerry fanatics that have moved to Android.
New handsets are on their way, and I hope that this batch includes
ulocked GSM phones that I will be able to put my SIM card into.
Google is starting with an open platform at a time when Apple is
already being asked questions from the USA’s FCC about the nature of
their excessive control over what owners of the devices are “allowed”
to do with these locked devices (IE: Apple has the keys, not the
owner). Apple’s response
is entirely of the “father knows best”, ignoring the fact that they
have taken the keys of important communications technology from grown
adults who should be treated respectfully as property owners..
If anyone wants to learn more about what Google is going, I recommend This Week in Google from the TWiT network. The August 30 episode
included some pretty interesting things that tie into the music
industry. They spoke about how young people who last years asked for
and received as gifts coupons towards the purchase of music. This year
they asked for and receiving as gifts coupons towards mobile
application stores. Mobile applications are the new content, and are
quickly becoming yet another replacement for buying power that
previously went to the music industry. This will lead to even greater
declines in the recording industry than we have seen already.
As I suggested earlier this week, I believe the recording industry
would be seeing similar (if not worse) declines in their revenue even
if there was not a single copyright infringement. This should not be
seen as a terrible thing for governments to “fix” given software plus
hardware can easily be much larger than the content industry. We should
not give up the larger number of jobs in these industries in order to
protect business models previously used by the content industries.
I always think of a conference where a representative of Intel said
that they were not worried about content companies and any harm they
could cause with their promotion of legal protection for technological
measures. He said that if ever these companies were lobbying for things
that didn’t benefit Intel (and DRM is something that benefits Intel as
a DRM provider), then they would just purchase the major labels and
studios and put them back in line.
What does all of this have to do with Copyright?
As examples, Apple and Microsoft as companies are stuck in the way
things were done in the past, and have lobbied the Canadian government
(directly and indirectly through the BSA, IIPA and the USTR) towards
passing backward facing legislation.
A summary of the round tables said this of the participation at the Toronto Round Table by Google’s Jacob Glick:
Expanded fair dealing, safe harbours for ISPs and search engines,
circumvention for non-infringing purposes, monetize P2P, copyright is
not a zero-sum game.
I recommend everyone read what Mr Glick said
and his good-news story about how Google helps content creators who
actually want to get paid (rather than want excessive control - not the
same thing). Google has been part of the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright which has forward looking policy suggestions.
The message to the Ministers is simple: If you want copyright to
stand the test of time you should be seeking advise from growing
companies looking towards the future like Google who are trying to help
both audiences and creators benefit from modern technology. Policy
makers should not be taking advise or emotion-laden (but content free)
directives from the types of companies whose associations make up the
IIPA which are looking backwards to the “good old days” when they had a
strangle hold on markets to the detriment of both creators and their
audiences/customers.
—
Russell McOrmond is a self employed consultant, policy coordinator for CLUE: Canada’s Association for Free/Libre and Open Source Software, co-coordinator for Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments (GOSLING), and host for Digital Copyright Canada.
