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Ian Rogers: Instead of SOPA, Here’s How To Combat Piracy While Encouraging An Open Internet

IanRogers

Guest post by Ian Rogers of Topspin Media.

Last week's Internet-wide SOPA/PIPA protests divided the Internet between content owners looking for stronger anti-piracy tools and technologists who believed the proposed legislation was an overreach. Those opposed said SOPA/PIPA opened the door to content companies taking down sites such as Tumblr and WordPress based on infringement by even one of the sites' millions of users. Though I was at AOL/Nullsoft when Gnutella was created I am not pro-piracy by any stretch – half of what our company, Topspin, sells is easily-pirated digital audio and video (it could certainly be argued Topspin stands to benefit from SOPA-style legislation) and our raison d'être is helping artists leverage their creativity to build a fan base and earn a living.

But I found myself on the side of the technologists in this debate; based on my read the legislation didn't solve the problems it aimed to and created a number of unintended problems instead. I voiced my opposition to SOPA/PIPA in a letter on Topspin's homepage last Wednesday, archived on Topspin's blog for posterity.

Given many of SOPA's proponents are people I count as both friends and business partners I found myself in frequent debates on the topic in person, over email, on Facebook, and in Twitter exchanges. In these debates I tried to convince this wasn't an question of "is piracy good or bad?" but more of a mouthful: "what is the practical way to support an ecosystem where copyright holders have options and control without breaking the openness and innovation which makes the Internet valuable?" This is not a question of pro or anti piracy, it's a question of how to put the controls of pricing and access into the hands of the person who owns the copyright while allowing innovation on the Internet as a platform for discovery and consumption.

More than one person turned the question back on me: "If SOPA/PIPA aren't the answer, then what is?"

The first question that needs answered is: Do we need a legislative solution beyond what's available today? Via previous legislation (DMCA, PRO IP) we already have a laws for protecting copyright online, as evidenced by the innumerable take-down notices issued to sites like YouTube every day and US government shut down and arrests of Megaupload and the company's officers. But these take-down notices are exactly the problem, opponents will tell you. I spoke to a lawyer representing music publishers who described the cat/mouse game he plays with illegal lyrics sites every day. He can only practically issue so many take-down notices and can't make a dent in the hundreds of thousands of pages these sites have up. Meanwhile legitimate sites which share ad revenue with the artists, or even artist pages who want to give their lyrics away for free online in the context of their own site, are pushed to search-results-page-two or further back. Similar are the complaints about torrents of MP3s or lossless files in search results, linking to .torrent files on transient off-shore servers and bundles of albums at sites like Megaupload, Rapidshare, and others who have plenty of legit purposes right alongside the illegal sharing of copy written material. Prior to this SOPA debate I would have told you further legislation wasn't the answer or needed. Now that we've seen some very scary legislation introduced I would prefer to err on the side of proactivity from the technology camp. If we're headed toward more legislation, let's help craft the solution rather than complaining about the byproduct of lobbyist pressure. If there *is* something we can do to improve the cat/mouse game for content owners while maintaining an open and innovative Internet, let's be a proactive part of that solution.

Also, as you are imaging what the Internet looks like once your solution is implemented, please keep in mind an increasing number of artists are releasing their content outside of the traditional models, in many cases for free. Take a look at the top 50 albums of 2011 on Pitchfork, 4 were given away as free downloads instead of sale (The Weeknd, Clams Casino, Danny Brown, and Frank Ocean). Read this incredible case study on how Pretty Lights went to #1 on Pirate Bay and reached millions of people as a result. Free is a price point many creative people will intentionally release their content at. Any legislation must be about giving artists control of how they release and charge for their creative work, not dictating a business model or price point to them.

There is a solution which curbs piracy, grows the industry overall, gives equal opportunity to all content holders, and allows for exponentially more innovation in the digital media space than we've seen in the past fifteen years. My proposal:

In brief:
A content registry where copyright holders can express the rules governing the use of their content and a legislative requirement sites dealing in media respect the rules expressed by the rights-holder in the registry.

In more detail:
A central organization or consortium would construct a content registry software solution and service. Copyright holders would place their media along with all the rules governing the use of said media, in the registry. These machine-readable rules would contain the prices for various uses of the content, from download and streaming to inclusion in subscription or other services. Any application creators willing to abide by the registry's rules would be welcome to utilize the content, though rights holders could still opt in/out of specific services via the registry, too.

If you are building a site with legitimate uses which could also be leveraged for piracy then you use the registry for a different reason, testing to see if the content uploaded by a user is available for the use in question. For example, if I upload a file to Rapidshare for free download, Rapidshare does an Audible Magic-style identification on the file then checks the registry to see if this content is available for free download. If so, awesome. If not, kick it back to the user. This is a non-trivial development challenge with many questions about who would build and maintain it, but it's not science fiction. The technology exists. YouTube has very sophisticated recognition and rights management technology today. Similar systems have been built by countless companies over the years. Look under the hood of services such as MediaNet, 7digital, Rhapsody, and many others and you'll find independently-developed versions of such a registry managing rights, paying rights-owners based on varying kinds of usage, etc. This solution would make a similar registry and technology available in a non-proprietary way.

An industry-wide content registry is not a new idea. In fact when Rob Lord and I started Medicode in 2001 the notion of a "digital packing slip" respected by all members of the digital value chain was a key part of our vision. I pitched this idea at Yahoo! when they purchased Mediacode in 2004 but couldn't make it stick. VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff worked on something similar at Universal Music Group several years ago but wasn't able to make progress there, either.

Today, if you want to start a music service, you start by visiting the major labels, sharing your idea and asking for a license to use their content in your service. Assuming you can get the meeting and general approval of your particular use, they ask for an advance payment (a steep barrier for most any startup technology company which immediately whittles the field down to relatively few players) and dictate the terms of an agreement. That's just for the four (soon to be three) major labels. Once you've cleared that hurdle you need to find a way to cut a deal with thousands of independent labels to build a catalog of music. Also, this is just music which is easily organized by label, distributor, artist, album, track, and genre — other forms of art (movies, images, etc) are even messier. No wonder piracy reigns supreme. Building successful consumer-facing businesses on content is a nearly insurmountable challenge. Few, if any, technology companies have historically made it to positive cash-flow on this model in the past 15 years. It's a high stakes game (evidence: the more than $100M Spotify has raised thus far) and the road is littered with the bodies of those who have attempted to run this gauntlet (recent evidence: Beyond Oblivion, a $40M smoking crater where $20M was spent on music licensing before a product even existed). For more on how this model works read Michael Robertson's pessimistic piece re: Spotify.

But what if there existed this registry of all content, one where any developer was able to use your music to develop a service, so long as he respected your wishes. You, the content owner, could set the rules and the prices. Which tracks are available for free download? Available for streaming? How long a streaming sample allowed? High definition? At what price points? The market could decide if the price you're asking is fair: "My service only supports downloads with a wholesale price of $0.70." "My service is only interested in free downloads." "My service is only interested in content which is available for subscription streaming." The content owners could opt in/out simply by setting the rules. The upside to the industry as a whole is massive, developers willing to play by the rules can integrate media into their apps (and pay for the rights to do so) simply, and a true digital marketplace for content governed by market forces, not gatekeepers of large catalogs of content. I strongly believe the net of this will be more money to content owners more quickly than the current course we're on today. We keep hearing "digital music needs to get to scale quickly for the music industry to succeed"; why wait for one player to scale when you could scale an industry of players?

Until this SOPA/PIPA debate I hadn't thought of adding a legislative component to this idea of a content registry. Thinking on it over the past two weeks the "enforcement" component here strikes me as a reasonable pill to swallow. Oh there's still something about it that makes me queasy and I reserve the right to change my tune based on the specific implementation but I think the quid pro quo here can be net positive for both sides. It would allow is a way for good actors to reasonably stop illegal uses on their sites while letting the many legal uses sail through without scary threats. You would effectively be drawing a bright line between white and black hats in the content services game, a line Safe Harbor works against today. This would be useful to both content sites who want to proactively respect copyright so long as the cost of becoming a white hat is not overly burdensome.

MPAA and RIAA: What do you say? Shall we work together to build an industry-wide technical solution to curb piracy and grow the overall pie? Embracing the above solution would show you aren't simply interested in regaining yesterday's control but are truly interested in seeing innovative content applications so long as your copyright is respected. Count me on board if you want to tackle this together.

Thanks for reading. I share this here to get feedback on the idea. If it resonates I can follow the thread. If it doesn't I can refine my position. If it's confusing I could devote an episode of This Week In Music to talking about it. Feel free to poke holes, comment, and share.

ian

ps – Dumb question:

In order to find a solution you have to identify exactly what you're trying to solve. I found myself asking this question repeatedly and getting blank stares: "What, exactly, are you hoping SOPA/PIPA stops?" I'd ask. (Incredulous) "Piracy! Of course!" Arrrrrrr and avast ye! Unfortunately many don't appreciate piracy is far from the only factor which has caused the traditional recorded music business to shrink in the past 12 years. What, specifically, are you hoping SOPA/PIPA eradicate? Limewire? (It's dead) Torrents? File share sites? Sneaker Net? File transfer via AIM? Something else? When discussing a legislative solution to a technological problem, an "I know piracy when I see it" argument won't pass muster. In order to propose a workable solution you have to first enumerate the specific situations you're looking to overcome. What people told me they were trying to stop:

Upload and share of copy written material to download sites (Megaupload, Rapidshare, etc), particularly when these sites are hosted on non-US soil and domains
Search engines linking to Torrent sites
Illegal lyrics sites

Anything else? Please be specific. 😉 I'd love to see a comprehensive list of the piracy outlets folks want to see stopped. For what it's worth, these are all quite difficult because they're general activities that have legitimate non-infringing uses, too, so any solution to these is by definition non-trivial.

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14 Comments

  1. What is the difference between this idea and what SNOCAP was trying to do? SNOCAP did not seem to gain any real traction here in their 6 years of existence….

  2. Presuming that you could get all the performance rights organizations, publishers, record labels, digital supply chains, physical manufacturers, and broadcasters of any ilk to sign on to a huge repertory database, (which is nigh impossible, since they can’t even agree to standardizing metadata over the last decade, – the DDEX project), who would pay for it? Who would run it? The costs, expertise, and labor needed to handle a global project would be massive, just in dealing with the changes to the database, let alone building it! Also, how would that stop the number one portal to infringement, google-searchable links to digital lockers? You couldn’t scan every person’s files that they’re uploading, it would be the equivalent of searching a box of papers that you’re sending with FedEx to a pal a few towns over.
    Plus, even if all of the above did happen, and the funding and staff was found to run it, what would prevent a foreign country from not abiding by the rules you’ve now set in place? Nothing. Even after setting up a huge global cost-intensive bureaucracy, you’d still be right back where we are now: we have to have new legislation to block sites that constantly and repeatedly violate US law.

  3. I like this better than anything else I’ve seen. The devil is in the details, right? And whether IP stakeholders want to give up control so that they can (hopelessly) keep control.

  4. As long as we have Senators like Orrin Hatch that have been in Washington for 36 years etc. and that say things like “If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we’d be interested in hearing about that,” Hatch said. “If that’s the only way, then I’m all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize” the seriousness of their actions, he said.
    http://www.dethronehatch.com/orrin-hatch-is-no-friend-of-the-internet/
    As long as people like this are running our Country the legal gun (Gov.) is going to continue infiltrating our lives and become increasingly invasive

  5. It’s an interesting idea ( it does sound like Snocap, as said above) , and anything that can streamline some of the unecessary complexities of this business ( without being just a scheme to transform content creators into fodder for tech companies ) is certainly welcome.
    I share however many doubts that Shane T. above expressed.
    In fact , i don’t quite see how this proposal relates to the title of the article “How to combat piracy”
    Piracy , by nature and by definition, doesn’t conform to rules and laws. All one has to do is to setup pirate servers in a place where copyright infringement is almost the rule ( russia ? china?), and voilà.. Why would they care about this registry ? You’ll just be told “to get lost” if you don’t like it ( as Pirate Bay does). P2P networks don’t have to play by the rules either, because they’re not really centralised, they’re not a business with an adress.
    However one slices and dices this subject, one has to realize that some form of enforceable laws are still needed.

  6. Ian, you’re right on.
    Leaving this to the lawmakers will never result in a working model – the complexities of rights & uses is always way deeper than thought at first glance.
    Those commenting with skepticism are right too. The business ramifications of a single registry would shake up the establishment too. Not just labels, but so too will the Rovi’s & Gracenote’s & Echo Nests be effected.
    IMHO, its not a question of whether or how we standardize this – its a matter of when. The longer we have competing/proprietary/incomplete metadata standards, the longer we delay the inevitable. Fir digital media to TRULY thrive, standards will need to emerge.
    I’m optomistic things like DDEX, GRD, and even to some extent UltraViolet and the Connected Media Experience may get us their sooner rather than later.
    -TM

  7. You said in your article:
    “For example, if I upload a file to Rapidshare for free download, Rapidshare does an Audible Magic-style identification on the file then checks the registry to see if this content is available for free download. ”
    Failure, right there. It’s already common practice to password protect content uploaded to cyberlockers. If they can’t open it, they can’t match it. At the moment it’s usually just the password protection of packagers such as Rar or Zip, but it’s trivial to use PGP instead.

  8. I am very afraid that your proposed solution will run roughshod over fair use (as youtube is already doing). There is a post at least as long as this one that needs to be written to deal with the issues of pre-emptive censorship and content takedowns based on rules derived by people that thought they knew everything, but that really knew very little about the true scope of the problem space. It is not a devil in the details scenario. It is a devil is in the implementation problem. The world you describe would squelch way too much creative expression and experimentation to qualify as a net gain over the mess we have today.

  9. Charles: I spent a career working in a gov’t regulatory environment. The plan Ian proposes sounds good to me (at least right now) largely because it allows writers to control their own destiny for a change. Our choices for “who’s in charge” seems to come down to: Special interest groups (RIAA + MPAA + Songwriters)—call it a co-op; versus a no interest regulatory entity (gov’t run or tough-to-establish private sector, not-for-profit group) that comes with Ian’s registry. Of course, that’s where the “IP stakeholders” have to give up control. So here’s my best point to make: The overall plan is the wheel; the ability to enforce it is the grease that makes the wheel turn. One will not work (for long) without the other. It’s good to be having on-going content protection discussion. Way overdue. But for a viable plan to gain traction any plan considered needs to be accompanied by a discussion for enforcement. Here’s another idea: let’s approach the entire content protection problem through a back door or side door:)—instead of creating a model from scratch, is there one out there already we can adapt to or modify? Capitalism works great until there’s no competition. Government regulation works fine until the very agency that’s supposed to protect you is mired down in red tape and politics. Monopoly tends to dog the former, bureaucracy tends to undermine the latter. So what other model is already out there? Get ready to laugh—the pirates. They are a guerilla, lean/mean outfit. Call them a non-static grid operation that can call audibles as needed. I don’t really know the mechanics of this model. But I DO know it’s working. I believe the pirate model embodies a component of DECENTRALIZATION (unlike our two aforementioned models) and actually resembles the head and heart of the internet itself: global, and yet so personal. Next, pirates TOOK THE ISSUE TO THE PEOPLE. In a way, they are EDUCATING the public albeit at the expense of those who make a living via content creation. I’m out of my league here but if any of this facilitates the discussion……

  10. “based on rules derived by people that thought they knew everything”
    As opposed to… rules derived by a tech industry that thought they knew everything ?

  11. Ian, thank you for this write up. While the intention is spot on, this is NEVER going to happen. SNOCAP “tried” and failed for the same reasons that this would always fail. Yes, there are many firms with the back-bone to run a DB of this sort, our Neurotic Media Platform included. But the challenge is in song identification and rights application, and that can never really be resolved:
    1. You will run into huge ownership issues, especially cross-territorial (older model prevailing etc.), debates between labels, publishers and PROs that will lead to thousands of court cases.
    2. You will run into a tone of uploads that are live takes by fans and can never be properly recognized. Many may be totally debated as fans introduce artists doing covers, or having a guest on stage, or otherwise using samples and whatnot in a live show where again, the ownership will not be clear and clean (and then X by territory…)
    3. You will run into hackers that will quickly figure out how to run code to interfere with any big-brother identification system (sonic, watermark, whatever) to render a huge number of files un-trackable.
    In summary, this will NOT curve the tidal wave of piracy, and is likely to introduce more confusion and costs (with lawyers laughing all the way to the bank) into the industry than the situation does presently.
    I agree with you that SOPA as written is “not it” but neither would this SNOCAP-like pipedream. We need to search further into other and new ideas and methods my friend.
    Sincerely,
    Shachar Oren
    Neurotic Media

  12. I’ve been a database guy at BMI, Sony Music, Harry Fox, emusic etc. and I would love to have access to a single database with accurate split info and everything you mention. I would also love access to a Victoria’s Secret model that owns a liquor store, unfortunately I don’t think either are going to happen. Appreciated your article though.

  13. Quite a number of ideas from the early noughties are alive and well after failing the first time round. The snag here is that the Majors obstructed everything (and still do) if it didn’t fit their world view. What is new about Spotify? Nothing. What is right about YouTube that is wrong about Grooveshark? Hard to tell. Why did Listen fail to get traction?
    As time goes by the old ideas that had legs will keep coming back until the Majors can resist no longer. Napster, we all know, was supposedly the death of the music business, yet now the Majors DO license very similar projects.
    Don’t forget the license database behind Snocap is the same thing as the Google Content-ID system (although it was probably better at the job).
    Now is not the time to discard old ideas simply because they “have been tried before”. As the Majors’ power shrinks this is the very time they will actually be realised.

  14. Thank you Ian Rogers for sharing this idea in a objective, non-manipulative way. At the very least, let’s take this tone and run with it. Although I pretty much agree with everything here, I think some aspects of this idea already exist, some don’t exist but can, and some don’t exist and cannot.
    MediaNet (and the like) facilitate a lot of the above ideas, in that they bring content owners and developers together, at the right price (as dictated by the openness of the platform). Unfortunately for some developers, not all content is created with equal value, so the idea of fully licensing 100% of the content out there does not necessarily fit into a model like this. For example, major labels have every right to act as “gate keepers” to their catalogs and demand huge advances, because they believe their catalog is more valuable. Truth be told, for better or worse, it probably IS more valuable. That’s just the price of doing business. If a developer is unhappy with this, maybe they should specialize in independent music (i.e. hypemachine).
    If we were to start with proper legislation, protecting the rights of content owners, solutions will inevitably emerge for those willing to give their content away for free (i.e. Google Music, Spotify), in some organized format. There is a free market solution to that, whether or not this organization is optimized for developers. This would be great news for websites, developers, artists willing to give their material away, but it still does not address the underlying problem: Where do you place the burden of liability in facilitating the sharing of content?
    Ian is absolutely right that the answer to this question is more technical than it’s been made out to be by big media vs. big tech. Hopefully going forward, we’ll really get our hands dirty and address the real issues. We need more people like Ian Rogers speaking up with an objective outlook to mediate the arguments on either side of the table.
    Love,
    Tom

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