Some of the best work cataloging the effects of increased concentration has been done by the Future of Music Coalition. In November last year, they produced a great report about radio deregulation. (The punch line: more concentration, less diversity, less opportunity for musicians).
FMC is now part of a group of artists that has sent a letter to Michael Powell about the upcoming decision to further “deregulate” media. Here’s a link. More good stuff from people who know.
One important issue that the change in market structure affects is the independence of creativity. Because of the repeal of network ownership rules, there has been a dramatic change in the ownership of pilot shows on major networks. This graph shows the change. In 1990, the overall percentage was 11.3%. In 2002, that had increased seven-fold — to 70.2%.
How might this matter? Some of the most important television has been produced by independents. “All in the Family,” for example, created by Norman Lear, was created because Lear could say no to network executives who wanted to tame his creation to fit the network image.
The future: fewer Lears likely.
Here’s the data for new series:1990 — 12.5% owned; 2002 — 77.5%
One measure of the cost of concentration is the effect that creators say it will have. Here’s an extraordinary interview by Bill Moyers with Barry Diller. Favorite line: Moyers’ asks, doesn’t the explosion in the number of channels mean we have more diversity?
Diller: “No. Because what we have is an absolute fact that five companies control 90 percent of all of it. It has been reconstituted. Instead of it being three channels that were controlled by a few people, there are now 500 controlled by a few people.”
On June 2, the FCC is scheduled to release new rules governing media ownership. The expectation is that the revised rules will remove limits on media concentration. The consequence of that change will be an extraordinary increase concentration, in an already concentrated industry.
These issues are hard. Big is not necessarily bad. Change in media structure is not necessarily corruption of media content. But the more I have read about creators worried about this increase in concentration, the more I have looked at this issue.
Surprisingly or not, the issue of media concentration is not being covered adequately by the media — that same media that will be affected by the changes in these rules. So that makes this ripe for the media in this space.
I’ve got a bunch of stories and statistics to report, and will. But this is something we need many many voices to report. Where else will the news not fit to print get printed — except in weblog space?
I have just finished reading the opinion by Judge Wilson dismissing MGM’s suit against Grokster and Streamcast. The opinion is testimony to great lawyering. The key to the decision is the difference between the architecture of Napster and the architecture of Morpheus. To get a judge to understand that completely takes an extraordinary skill. This was not a case I worked on at all, so I am free to say this: EFF deserves a great deal of credit in this case. As Kapor said at its founding, “Architecture is politics.” Now it is also law.
Jon Udell’s got a nice piece about the emergingly Semantic Blog. One part he missed was the emergence of CC licenses as part of the semantic blog space. Movabletype and Userland now both incorporate CC license options. The technique we’ve used with html has been questioned, but we are pushing hard to get RDF out there.
What’s needed is a killer app, and here’s where the powerful need to be responsive. Google in particular has not been receptive to becoming RDF-aware, making it harder to build the amazing Google hack that would enable a search such as “give me all the pictures of the Empire State Building available under a non-commercial license.” Perhaps here’s where competition between AllTheWeb, or Yahoo and Google may do some good.
Some say the reasons Google remains Semantic-ly-unaware are dark — that in a world of articulate pages, it is harder to be the dominant search engine. I’m not willing to believe this yet. I suspect instead that it is up to us to spread the semantic word, and then others will find more reason to pay attention to it.
A while ago I reported the wonderfully radical testimony of Jack Valenti against the removal of the FIN-SYN rules. I have not been able to find the testimony online. Here’s a large pdf of a scan of the relevant section from the GPO’s reports.
Matt’s got a wonderful brace of posts (have we determined what the collective noun for web log posts is yet?) Thursday that reports a question and then a story to answer it.
In his first post, Matt usefully draws together a bunch of current perspectives on the compulsory licensing debate. In his last paragraph, he writes “I’m doubtful that compulsory licensing actually solves the right problem, but I’m curious about what problems led to compulsory licensing in the past.”
There’s been lots written about this, though none that has yet penetrated the policy debate. (I discuss this in two chapters of my book. Here’s a pdf
of the final (uncorrected) draft of those two chapters. Acrobat is on the fritz on my machine, but when I’ve fixed it, I’ll replace this with chapters directly from the book.) The Cliff Note version is that new technologies for distributing content have created the need for a compulsory license.
But then in the second post, Matt provides the best example of just why compulsory licenses have been used in the past. He tells the story of the demise of ReplayTV, which, in large part was caused by the extraordinary burden of litigation that company has had to bear. For years that company has been in litigation defending the right to deploy a digital version of the VCR. The consequence (in part) of that burden is that the company was forced into bankruptcy.
Again, many have written about the insanity of a system that forces new innovators to go to a federal district court to defend the right to innovate, and again, many have written that the real meaning of the Sony Betamax case was that we should allow innovation first (so long as there is a “potential for a substantial non-infringing use”) and let Congress deal with balances later on.
But the key insight from the Sony Betamax case that should have resolved the ReplayTV case quarters ago was that Congress has in the past used lots of tools to “rebalance” the rights of creators in light of new technologies. That should be its role in the future too — its role, not the courts. Congress can work out systems of compensation to assure artists get paid, without giving the dinosaurs of last century control over the innovation today. Or again, compensation without control.
JD Lasica has a nice pointer to a story about progress in the digital watermarking debate. He wonders about this progress because of work (in part by Ed Felten) suggesting “that all such encryption systems can be defeated.” But there is an important distinction that this debate needs. I’m a strong supporter of flawed (in the sense of defeatable) watermarking. Here’s why:
A watermark is a tag. If it is to work, it needs to be strong enough to resist reasonable incentives to remove it. What incentives are “reasonable” depends upon what the watermarking system is for. (Think of the difference between UPCs on a box of cereal and those chunks of plastic and steel on clothes in a department store.)
The DRM reason for watermarking is to enable digital locks to control access to digital content. The incentives to pick those locks will be strong — especially if prices for content remain high.
But some watermarks enable systems other than locks, and for those, there is very little reason to remove the watermark. These watermark systems in turn can afford to be weak.
For example, William Fisher’s proposal (outlined by Derek Slater here) for compensating artists depends upon a watermarking system. But there would be very little incentive to remove the watermark from the digital objects because the object is free anyway.
Or again, we at CreativeCommons have been presented with lots of useful and clever ideas for marking digital content to enable a simple link to the CC license. As CC licenses are meant to enable the expression of freedoms, not the mechanization of control, there’s again little incentive to remove those tags.
If we had a world filled with weak watermarks (again, like UPCs on products), that would tilt evolution towards systems that depended upon expression rather than control. Some of those systems would benefit compensation regimes (Fisher’s and others); some would enable “some rights reserved” regimes, like Creative Commons. But the more such alternative regimes that we can produce — alternative to the CONTROL model of DRM — the better.
We can have compensation without DRM control. We can have a respect for rights (Creative Commons) without building “the police state into every computer,” as Intel’s Craig Barrett so nicely put it.
Today, Les Vadasz will announce his retirement from Intel, effective June 1. We owe this extraordinary man a great deal.
Vadasz was a founding member of Intel in 1968. He has been a founding member of the small but growing (and exceptionally important) group of IT executives who understand the threat to innovation that this current “war” (the copyright war) presents.
Vadasz became famous to the public when he had the temerity to standup to Senator Hollings’ abuse. But his real work has not been in the public’s eye. It has been the person to person campaign that he has been waging in the valley, waking these good folks up to policy questions that they wish would just go away.
They won’t go away. Nor do I expect that Vadasz will. Instead, his work � from helping to build a company like Intel, to helping to remind Democrats and the world of the importance of free speech and consumer rights to innovation and growth � will remain: as a challenge to us, and an example to others.
Mr. Vadasz, thank you. (Path to email link here).
