Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Last week was a pretty busy one loaded with meetings, a news item regarding RIAA sending (yet again) their typical threatening letters, this time targeted at 400 students and an interesting ATR talk by Jim Neal from Columbia on “Copyright Policy and Practice”.

You can read about the RIAA story at http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3662716/. Basically, RIAA and MPAA are continually trying to find ways to go after the alleged illegal use of copyrighted materials (music and movies). They do this by sending pretty scary lawyer notices to the ISPs to be handed over to the individuals who are responsible for this. The reason for this is that whereas RIAA may know the IP number of the violator, they may not know anything more than that. The ISPs are supposed to know who owns the IP number.Obviously, all of us have opinions on this practice and strategy of RIAA. Regardless of our own beliefs and position on this subject, we have to abide by the law.

Illegal sharing of music or video is punishable by law and the underlying assumption here is that RIAA or MPAA who is accusing someone of engaging in illegal activities better be sure that they have proof. And, if we were to receive such a notice, we are required to pass it on to the “offender” and legally, this is where our responsibility stops. If RIAA/MPAA want to be serious, they will produce a subpoena asking us to identify the individual. Until the subpoena is produced, we are not obligated to tell anyone any information. Obviously, the student has the option to fight the lawsuit or there are two opportunities to settle the lawsuit.

This is actually a big deal if you think about it. If we receive a notice from RIAA and MPAA we do not want to get involved in anything beyond passing the letter to the student because anything else will be a legal nightmare for all involved. It is the student’s responsibility to seek legal counseling.

Despite the fact that we did not receive a notification, we felt that we should use this news story to let our students know what our position on this is – that our computer usage policy states that illegal file sharing is not allowed on the network and that if we were to receive such a notification, we will abide by the law and the student(s) identified as the offenders will have to fight the lawsuit on their own.

We continue to inform our students the seriousness of illegal file sharing. Most recently, we required all students to sign a statement that highlighted this issue when they logged into their portfolios. We offer Ruckus which has a large collection of music free of charge with options to purchase additional offerings with expanded selection.

I have suggested bringing experts on both sides of the issue for a discussion forum on campus. Not that this will solve the problem, but it will at least bring the issues to the front and possibly increase awareness. We are looking to make this happen for the Fall with collaboration from the Library and other departments.

What follows is my own personal opinion and not necessarily that of the University. RIAA and MPAA are going down the wrong path. Their current strategy has not worked in the past nor is it likely to succeed. They should examine the core issue – why is it that people illegally share music? Some of the common reasons given are:

• Ease of access – you can get what you want much more easily on the net than going to a store and buying music on a CD or a movie DVD.
• Customization – this is more applicable to music than video in that one can pick and choose the tracks they want to listen to and “purchase” than a whole CD.
• Cost – many believe that music and movie cost a lot more than it should because of all the middle layers. Many are bitter that the fraction of the money that goes to the actual content provider is minor compared to the money made by others in the middle.

I am sure RIAA and MPAA are well aware of the issues and are trying to stop the piracy in various ways. Whether it is the legal notices or DRM, it is clear that they are trying to protect the interests of all the “middlemen”. It is understandable. But the fact that none of these approaches seem to work means that everyone needs to think outside the box…

The standard complaint of having to buy a CD in the store though you may only want a couple of tracks has been largely addressed on the net where in many cases you can buy individual tracks. Unfortunately this is not available all around. For example, I am only interested in purchasing 3 tracks from a CD but iTunes will not let me buy them individually, instead I have to buy the entire CD.

But, how about a radically different pricing model for the net? Would one rather price the tracks to be $1 each and have 1 million people buy it or price it at 10c each and have 10 million people buy it? This is an oversimplification, but if you price it low enough, there will be many more takers and once you get them in the habit of making payments, they are likely to do so. In the process you make essentially the same money (downloads from the net doesn’t cost the distributor that much more between 1 million and 10 million….). May be over a period of time the market dynamics will shift this the purchases to the net for the most part.

Of course, many will suffer – those who make CDs, CD covers, packagers, producers (once I was researching how to mass produce CDs for a friend of mine, so I know how much these things cost), all the brick and mortar infrastructure. But, the content owners will still get their share of the money and the new breed of marketers on the net will emerge. Thats life! We have seen this happen several times over – most recently the digital photography changing the landscape of film rolls and the infrastructure associated with film developing…

DRM is another way these companies are trying to protect the media and frankly, it is not working. Steve Jobs wrote an excellent piece on this called “Thoughts on Music“. Here he argues why DRM is a bad idea and why it would not work. It is an interesting writeup and I strongly encourage you to read it.

Finally, I recognize that US is the biggest market for music video, so trying to get it right here is seen as delivering the best return on investment. However, the problem is global and we have to constantly remind ourselves that while trying to control piracy here in the US, we also need a strategy that works in other parts of the world. In an ideal world, no one would serve out the digital content from anywhere in the US, instead they will simply download it illegally from elsewhere in the world and the current RIAA policies cannot do anything about it. Currently RIAA/MPAA can only detect the serving out of illegal content and go after them. There is no easy way (without violating several laws) to find out who all are downloading illegal music or video.

This reminds me of my last visit to India…

In India, we are way behind in protecting the content – be it music or video. The joke there is you can probably buy a DVD of the movie that is yet to be made. In general, you can buy music and video in the open market on the day the content is being released (or in some cases, a few days before). So, whenever we visited India we picked up a few Tamil (my language) CDs and DVDs. When I went there a couple of years ago, I was shocked to see no Tamil CDs or DVDs on shelf. When I asked I was told that the state government is cracking down big time on the sale of these illegal CDs and DVDs. On the one hand, I was happy that finally some intellectual property protection has arrived, but sad that I was unable to pick up some of my favorite movies and music.

However, I noticed that the stores proudly displayed a lot of Western Music CDs and a ton of Hollywood movie DVDs, some of them very recently released. So I asked, how come they can do this. The answer was simple. The state government was trying to protect the Tamil content because of a very strong producers’ lobby and they were least concerned about piracy of Hollywood content. As the store owner told me “They already make so much money, they probably don’t care”…

Well, all you need is a few of the net-savvy people there to put up the DVDs and music they buy in the streets for the world to consume…. and I am sure it is happening now.