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How Big?
The question at hand is, Can the entertianment industry force technology manufacturers to embed copyright enforcement in storage and memory devices? Big Industry has given up a lot of exclusive power: to raise and aggregate capital, to publish in volume, to operate internationally, to hire and keep the best talent. In many ways their loss is a gain for for the rest of us. The threshold of enterprise has been lowered almost to zero. We no longer need to make faustian bargains with employers. And it is becoming more and more clear exactly what Big Companies can do well and what they cannot. But not yet clear enough. That's the challenge. Manufacturing is an obvious one. If you want to make big stuff, or complicated stuff, or highly productized stuff, you pretty much need to be a big company.There are a lot of different kinds of companies any of us can start up tomorrow, even with the current VC investment slowdown. But none of us are going to start a GE or a Toyota. But what about smaller manufacturing concerns? Or, more specifically, the manufacture of small and highly technical things such as disk drives and flash memory cards? This is in-between stuff. The threshold of manufacturing is getting a lot lower. I see this when I follow the progress of embedded Linux, which makes it easy to hack an OS into all kinds of devices. But what about bigger stuff? Or any of the big businesses that now make highly compact "digital lifestyle" goods, like MP3 players and cell phones? Can you start your own cell phone manufacturing business? Okay, right now you wouldn't want to (just witness the fate-in-progress of Qualcomm), but still. Could you? It's easier than ever, but exactly how easy? What's just not do-able, becuase Big Boys are the only ones in a position to do it? We're still figuring that one out. For a look at the issue, try to get cheap memory for your MP3 player. The memory costs more than the player. Or look at Sony's Memory Stick. The whole idea is to maintain a highly catelized consumer electronics business. Consumer Electronics is not as fully cartelized as, say, oil. But there is a supply chain running from big companies to big box retailers that is remarkably efficient, healthy and barely interested in clues from The Consumer. The power comes from the source, which goes back beyond manufacturing, to R&D. Trace margin requirements all the way up the supply chain and you get to some pretty amazing headwaters, the most significant of which are giant R&D labs in Japan, the U.S. (e.g. Intel with flash memory), Korea and other places. Sony is not in the business of allowing the commoditization of its manufuctured goods, or the introduction of conversational marketing between its central research lab and the people who buy walkmen and camcorders. Nor are Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Samsung, Intel or Philips. Take a look at the biggest patent-holders in the U.S. — not for an idea of what these guys are up to, but rather for one picture of their R&D activities. Pay attention to size. This kind of R&D is not an open source activity, folks. I don't think the entertainment cartel will succeed at forcing copyright detection features into your disk drives. But they'll try. And they have a lot of weight on their side — and it's weight their breed alone can originate. The questions are, who belongs to that breed and will they act together to protect the interests of their biggest members?
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