Media Wonk

Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Downloading illegally? Shame on you - May 7, 2008

It's said that you can't legislate morality. But is it possible to graft a moral framework onto the intentionally anarchic and extra-jurisdictional Internet? Media Wonk sat through a day's worth DRM panels at the Digital Hollywood Spring conference in Los Angeles Wednesday (Do Not Attempt, Media Wonk is a trained professional) where the emerging gestalt seemed to be that shame and the loss anonymity could do more to deter rampant copyright infringement online than all the encryption systems yet devised.

"We did a survey of college students recently, and 85% of them said that taking music for free online was wrong. But 71% admitted to doing it anyway," RIAA senior VP of technology David Hughes said. "We have a whole generation of kids who know something is wrong but do it anyway. The college administrators tell us, well kids in college do a lot of bad things but when they get out into society they stop. Well, yeah. When they get out into society they're no longer anonymous. I think anonymity is one of the biggest challenges we face. But if we could make getting music for free less anonymous, I think that would have a significant deterrent effect."

It was a theme sounded repeatedly throughout the day, in numerous variations, both by content industry executives and DRM providers.

"When you add anonymity to the process of acquiring content there's very little incentive for people to follow the rules," Sony VP of digital media technology Albhy Galuten said. "If you could get a house for free by momentarily dropping your morals, with the guarantee it would be anonymous, most of us would have free houses."

But would knowledge that your actions could be traced to you really change behavior?

"One of the watershed developments in DRM was when the Motion Picture Academy went to screeners that were forensically watermarked to so they knew who got which disc," Verimatrix chief sales and marketing officer Steve Octegenn said. "The watermarks didn't enforce any rights. But just the idea that you could be identified if you passed a disc on and could be thrown out of [the Academy] or whatever made people a lot more careful about how they handled those discs."

Stripping the veil of anonymity within the closed, privileged world of the Motion Picture Academy is one thing, but could it be extended to the protean, dynamic world of the web? The potential for anonymity, after all, has long been a hall mark of the public Internet. As the dog in the old New Yorker cartoon put it, "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

"It's a question of whether you can bring a moral framework to the Internet," Phil Lelyveld, the former head of digital industry relations at Disney said while chatting with Media Wonk between sessions. "When the Internet was being built it was designed not to have any of those sorts of strictures. It was designed to be morally neutral. So the question is, can you now introduce the moral framework it wasn't intended to have?"

The crux of that moral framework, the panelists suggested, would be to make the acquisition of copyrighted content less anonymous, through the use of forensic watermarks and other such mechanisms.

"I think if people knew that this wasn't quite as anonymous as it used to be that would have a significant deterrent effect on bad behavior," said Rajan Samitani of Digimarc, whose company develops forensic watermarks. "It would take a coordinated consumer education effort, so that they understood that each piece of content they acquire can be traced to them if it's discovered where it shouldn't be, and you'd probably even need to sue a few, so they understood there are consequences for bad behavior. But you could also use forensic watermarks to offer the consumer rewards for good behavior."

I felt like I was back in college, studying Kant's Metaphysics of Morals.
[Consumer Trends]  [Digital Copyright]  [DRM]  [Legal]   LEAVE A COMMENT