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Friday, August 2, 2002
Losing the DRM story 
| | One sample of Jonathan's thinking: |
| | But the problem is that Big Content is unwilling to think peer-to-peer. At the end of the day, their business isn't art, it's marketing and distribution. They think supply-chain and supply-chains aren't peer-to-peer. Big Content wants to maximize the profitability of their chunk of the content supply-chain by squeezing the artists on one end (raw materials producers in their world view) and the customers on the other end (ever notice how rarely we are termed customers instead of consumers?). Big Content isn't interested in competing in a five forces world, so they are attacking everyone who isn't Big Content with the legislative stick. |
| | Let me see if I can help bring this thing the rest of the way home. |
| | First, we have a problem with ennui going on here. |
| | It's remarkable to me that lots of people who care deeply about free speech and free enterprise -- hard core libertarians, dynamists, objectivists and other enemies of Big Government and Big Regulation -- would rather carp about yet another left-wing hypocrisy in a Times op-ed piece than take notice of the most big-gov, big-reg, big-tax campaign to destroy a marketplace in recent memory. And on the Net, no less, where hundreds of these people blog every day. Shit, why isn't Rush Limbaugh all over this thing? |
| | The answer is simple: there's no story. Hollywood is winning in a rout, and the victory was secured a long time ago, when the top strategists in the most politically correct industry the world has ever known -- Entertainment -- wisely began wrapping their anti-market agenda in the rhetoric of conservatism: "rights," "property," "security," "protection," "enforcement." They even labored, successfully, to render irrelevant the old leftist value of "fairness," by moving the base meanings of copyright from usage and fairness to ownership and property rights. Even if it wasn't fully conscious, the results tell it all: the strategy was flat-out brilliant. |
| | In 1995, George Lakoff wrote Moral Politics: What Conservatives Konw that Liberals Don't. Here's a condensed outline of its case. Lakoff said that conservatives like Ronald Reagan succeeded in the Eighties and Nineties by adopting rhetoric that derived from a deep metaphorical system that equated the government with a "strict father" model of the family: |
| | Conservatives speak of the government meddling in people's lives with the resentment normally reserved for meddling parents. The very term "meddling" is carried over metaphorically from family life to government. Senator Robert Dole, addressing the Senate during the debate over the Balanced Budget Amendment, described liberals as those who think "Washington knows best." The force of the phrase comes from the saying "Father knows best" which became the title of a popular TV sitcom. It appears that the antipathy to government shown by American conservatives derives from the part of the strict father model, in which grown children are expected to go off on their own and be self-reliant and then deeply resent parents who continue to tell them how they should live. |
| | But there is another side to strict father conservatism, which the Liberals in Hollywood have leveraged to the max. According to Lakoff, there is also this about the strict father family model: |
| | Life is seen as fundamentally difficult and the world as fundamentally dangerous. Evil is conceptualized as a force in the world, and it is the father's job to support his family and protect it from evils -- both external and internal. External evils incLude enemies, hardships, and temptations. Internal evils come in the form of uncontrolled desires and are as threatening as external ones. The father embodies the values needed to make one's way in the world and to support a family: he is morally strong, self-disciplined, frugal, temperate, and restrained. He sets an example by holding himself to high standards. He insists on his moral authority, commands obedience, and when he doesn't get it, metes out retribution as fairly and justly as he knows how. It is his job to protect and support his family, and he believes that safety comes out of strength. |
| | And there you have exactly the story Jack Valenti, Hillary Rosen and Michael Eisner have been telling, tirelessly, to Capitol Hill — even before Napster showed up and scared the shit out of everybody. |
| | Think about how Hollywood has recharacterized "sharing" as "piracy" and "fair use" as "theft." It was an easy sell. Those old terms gave conservatives the creeps anyway. |
| | We can fight this. We can appeal, as Reagan did, to the libertarian less-government side of the conservative psyche. We can even use some conservative buzz-concepts, as I've tried to do by characterizing the CARP/LOC fees as "taxes" and "punishments." Let's face it: saying they're "unfair" would go nowhere. |
| | But we're down by hundreds of points here. That's the first problem, and we have to admit it before we go on. |
| | The second problem derives from another metaphorical matter that we discussed a bit in Cluetrain: the fact that one of our strongest base metaphors for business is shipping. We see business by default as an activity by which something called "content" moves from "producers" to "consumers" through "channels." We "address" and "deliver" stuff that isn't remotely a form of content, including "messages" and "service." As we said in Cluetrain, this kind of thinking is deeply undermined by the conversational nature of the Net. And we were right to say "networked markets are getting smarter faster than most companies." |
| | But old metaphorical systems don't die overnight, especially when they still accurately describe lots of stuff, including the movement of packets between computers. We can call the Net a "commons" all we want, but the term still sounds like the "communism" to lots of folks, and there is the inconvenient fact that the Net is still a mess of "pipes," and most of our "bandwidth" is "delivered" by telephone and cable companies that get the creeps when they think about networked markets that talk back, much less amongst themselves. |
| | The third problem has to do with outfitting customers to stop consuming and start participating in real market conversations with the vendors and suppliers of the world. This is what PingID.org is all about. Customers don't just need a "user" interface (provided, of course, by some company). They need a business interface, including their own APIs and their own datasets and schemas, that they alone control. They need to be fully in charge of who they are and what they can do in a business relationshihp. This cannot be conferred by an outside organization. It has to be native to the individual. |
| | Identity services need to be part of the Net's infrastructure — its operating system. Just like Web services and mail services. When identity services get specified, and the protocols (which nobody will own, everybody can use and anybody can improve) virally spread across the Net, the whole demand side of networked market relationships will finally have the power to equal supply. Whole new businesses, new industries, will be built on full-powered customer identity services. One of them will be DRM, or whatever we call it when customers have a hand in the meaning. |
| | Until then, Hollywood will keep kicking our asses. |
OSIF
| | That's for Oh shit, it's Friday. Lots of work, not much time. |
| | One good thing, though: I passed the eye test at the DMV. My eyes have steadily become less nearsighted over the years, and now they're up to about 20/40 or something. Anyway, good enough for government work, apparently. |
| | No, I wouldn't drive without my glasses, but still. I hate restrictions, and don't mind losing one I've had since my 20s. |
Personal Identity Management at work
| | One of the things — no, come to think of it, the only thing — I like about the Department of Motor Vehicles is that, sooner or later, everybody has to go there, including the rich and the famous. Even though you still never see them. |
| | Today's my day. This morning I gotta go down and get a new bad photo for my new driver's license with my new address that will persist for the next five years, even though it will be old in about three weeks. |
Re-elect your Hollywood tool!
| | There's a long history (as my readers know) of oligopolies trying to use Congress to legislate against technology. It's easiest to see how pervasive this is by looking at Federal Express, a notable exception to the rule. The fax machine took a huge chunk out of their business (followed by email) but they resisted the urge to get some powerful senator from Tennessee to pass a law stating that faxes should be taxed, regulated or banned. After all, think of all the American jobs that would be lost to this infernal hardware device! |
| | ...We need to expose these issues to a large number of voters. Congress will respond if they hear from us. Can you imagine Chuck Schumer or Dick Gephardt standing up at a big rally and claiming that they deserve to be reelected because they made it impossible/illegal to put a snippet of Star Wars into a Powerpoint presentation? Bragging about how they've filled the prisons with nerds who had the audacity to run an internet server without Jack's approval? |
How about co-netting?
Familiarities
| | Had a great time with the kid yesterday evening. Watched a bit of The Replacements on HBO, then drove up into the Santa Ynez mountains, stopping along the way to examine the rocks and graze on wild fennel. The kid is crazy about fennel. I turned him on to the stuff when he was about three, and now he can spot it from about a hundred yards away. He likes to eat the yellow blossoms when they're in season (now), and the seeds after the plants have dried. The seeds are anise, by the way: the source of licorice flavor. |
| | Afterwards we drove home and went up on the roof to watch one of the clearest skies of the summer. The milky way was out, and the first Perseid meteors showed up. We even caught our first Iridium Flare. Pretty neat. |
Cross-blog back-up
There are responses to this message:Re: Losing the DRM Story, Peter Harbeson, 8/3/02; 8:32:38 AM Re: Friday, August 2, 2002, Tom Poe, 8/3/02; 2:22:02 AM Re: Friday, August 2, 2002, Kenneth Hunt, 8/2/02; 8:03:49 AM
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