Mayhem & Chaos Blog

 

Copyright

Thoughts on Copyright Registries

The Creative Commons invited me to sit on the "Developers of digital copyright registries and similar animals" panel tomorrow at their Creative Commons Technology Summit. The CC is asking the question: Should we create a copyright registry so people can find CC licensed works? The summit tomorrow is designed to answer this question and I'd like to post some of my thoughts here.

When I first got involved with the CC shortly before their launch, I applauded their intent to create a copyright registry. After all, what good is a license when you can't find the licensed works? Unfortunately the possible liability issues in operating such a registry (e.g. if someone fakes a CC dedication the CC could get sued) killed that idea. Now, six years later, I think the CC should not create a copyright registry. Live and learn -- my experience with MusicBrainz has taught me a few things that make me believe that the CC hosting their own copyright registry is not the best idea.

One issue is with scope and attention -- operating a registry on the scale of MusicBrainz is a lot of work and costs a bit of money to host. Unless the CC can make this copyright registry sustain itself, it could be a significant money sink.

More importantly, consider this: Findability == good metadata.

Take Flickr for instance -- there are gazillions of pictures. Those pictures that have tags and descriptions can be found in a meaningful manner and those that don't can't be found. Of course there are tools that let computers analyze what the colors in an image are, but they can't really tell us that a picture contains a beach and seagulls. Content without metadata may as well not exist -- if you can't find it, its of no use to you. This, of course, is the crux of the problem.

But creating good metadata systems that collect useful information is really hard. Most content creators cannot be bothered to properly provide metadata for their content. Just saying the word meta will cause most people to glaze over their eyes and wish they were doing something else. And forcing people to enter metadata is a perfect recipe for gathering crappy and useless metadata. How do you collect good metadata then?

Get fans to collect and manicure the data! They're engaged in the works created by their favorite artists. If you can provide the fans with a value proposition that makes sense, they will go to great lengths to collect good metadata. MusicBrainz has a constantly improving metadatabase because fans can organize their music collection using tools driven by the music metadata. Fans manicure a little bit of data at a time and reap great benefits of a cleaned up music collection. This value proposition makes sense and when coupled with peer-review of the data, the data improves constantly.

This process is quite challenging to establish -- its not about the data or software that collects the data -- its about the community of people who are working to manicure this data. Without the community you can do nothing but collect rubbish. MusicBrainz has restricted itself to one knowledge domain -- the CC aims to cover all types of works. Fostering communities to cover all aspects of knowledge would be much harder than covering only music.

I think the CC should not create its own registry, but instead use existing databases and connector technologies like DBpedia. DBpedia has managed to connect a lot of databases already (including MusicBrainz). The CC should identify/create/extend standards, protocols and best practices for creating, operating or augmenting existing projects to include the aspects of copyright registration it would like to see supported.

I believe this would be the best use of the CC's efforts, since:

1. It leverages existing projects/databases
2. Pushes the bulk of the work onto other projects
3. Many disparate data sources exist already and tying those together increases to total worth. (see metcalfe's law)
4. Gives a meaningful purpose to the Web-of-data (formerly the Semantic Web)

This approach makes the most amount of sense to me -- but then again, I'm a big fan of bottom-up systems. I'm looking forward to the summit tomorrow!

UPDATE: Yves points to a better map of the Data Web

 

Dumbshit Dept.

Proof that media company's lobbying efforts have gone too far

The Canadians are thinking of taking the trend of border patrol insanity one step further. As if the security theater isn't enough to make people shy away from traveling, the normally level headed Canadians want to have border agents check your iPod for illegal content!

WHAT?? Seriously, they are proposing to inspect people's iPods for infringing content. I keep checking the date, but sadly its not April 1. I can't begin to fathom the problems associated with this:

• Massive travel delays -- How long is a border agent going to spend inspecting someone's 160GB iPod with 40k songs on it?
• Different countries -- What if you and your iPod come from a country where you can legally copy music off the internet and into your iPod? Isn't that/wasn't that legal in Canada?? Are border agents supposed to be in tune with all the IP laws from all of the countries?
• Border agents are unsuited for this task -- How the hell are you going to train the bonehead inspectors to even have passing chance at doing this job right? The things they are asking of border agents require not only technical knowledge (imagine the horror of these idiots having to use all sorts of music players, not just iPods!) but also IP knowledge form all around the world.
• Invasion of privacy -- Well, privacy has been lost a long time ago.

This is the most asinine proposal I've ever heard. This proposal is not based in any sort of reality -- can you imagine the damage it will cause to Canada's tourism? And the amount of tax money spent to enforce this? The money spent on this program and the damages from this program would dwarf the entire media industry in Canada. Save a broken incumbent industry by lining their pockets with tax dollars -- very clever for the media companies. Too bad it has far reaching and serious implications for the whole country.

Media company lobbyists need to be shot. Plain and simple -- seriously, who thinks up this shit? I'm confident this proposal won't go anywhere, but its really embarrassing for Canada that this proposal ever made it into the public light.

 

Dumbshit Dept.

Email troubles

The heat wave in California over this past weekend fried the disks in my community mail server and I lost all the email from over the weekend. If you sent me mail over the weekend, (either to rob [fat] eorbit [dork] net or rob [fat] musicbrainz [dork] org) please re-send it so I can respond to it.

Sorry for the hassle and thanks for your understanding.

 

Legal/Government

FDA: High fructose Corn Syrup is NOT natural!

Finally the FDA has done one thing right: Foods that contain Corn Syrup cannot be labelled as "Natural":

Products containing high fructose corn syrup cannot be considered 'natural' and should not be labeled as such, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said.

The decision is likely to cause a massive stir in the food and beverage industry, where a discreet battle has been raging over the status of the controversial sweetener.

Awesome! Anyone even slightly concerned about eating "Naturally" should take note. I hope this will raise awareness to the fact that corn syrup has laced nearly all of the foods you can buy at a regular store. Now I can only hope that manufacturers return to more realistic ingredients like sugar and evaporated cane juice, and not delve deeper into creating another evil sweetener.

 

Music industry watch

Collective licensing is good for music industry, bad for artists

Now that Jim Griffin and Warner Brothers are pushing collective licensing, I feel compelled to re-state my feelings about collective licensing. Let's boil it down to this:

Collective licensing solves a tricky legal problem, but creates an uneven playing field for artists.

At first glance collective licensing seems like a perfect solution. You have ISP's take a little money from users and then give that money to the music industry. Then money should flow to the artists to compensate them for "lost sales" due to P2P traffic. The keyword here is should.

If you go and sue P2P downloaders and get money from them, that money should flow back to the artists, right? Well, that's not happening. The artists haven't received any money from the RIAA & Co -- remember the music industry is full of rat bastards.

But, lets give the "music industry" the benefit of the doubt for a minute. Now consider this uneven playing field:

Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.

Just how do you intend to measure the infringement to pay artists? Given that the recording industry has proven itself completely incompetent (intentionally or otherwise) I don't trust them to do this right. Figuring out who deserves what turns out to be a hard problem fraught with many perils, unless you simply put the music industry in charge.

From everything I've learned about the music industry, they relish opacity in their accounting. Labels commonly hide behind numbers in obscure contracts which prevents artists easily asserting their fair share. The artists lose this struggle because they have to fight for money tooth and nail (with lawyers and accountants, who cose $$$).

The labels would love to have a spout of money turned on and poured directly into their opaque accounting cash cow. Little if any money would ever come out and then only the big artists sucking up to their labels will see any cash. The rest gets squat.

This makes life for indies harder and harder -- unsigned artists get infringed on just like signed artists, yet with this system the indies would never see any cash. Collective licensing could put the big labels back on top with an ever firmer grip on the music industry -- it would have the cash to squash the edgy Internet labels and Music 2.0 companies. The quality of music would continue to go down and the prices would still be kept high.

Ugh. No thanks. Please let the free enterprise and our legal system figure out the best approach! I feel that we're getting close to striking a realistic balance between the needs of fans, artists and the labels.

Say no to collective licensing!