Teens and issues of media legality

Let me try to defuse some of the potential inflammatory comments:

1. DRM is evil.
2. The RIAA is not only evil, it is stupid.
3. Pirating media is not only illegal, it is morally wrong.
4. Artists deserve to be able to make a living from the art they create.


Back story:

I have friends and family who are artists and make money from the art they create. I have long been a proponent to everyone I know that if you enjoy art, you should be willing to pay a reasonable price for it. No question, organizations like the RIAA go in wrong directions and to far extremes, but I am willing to pay for art I enjoy and have always encouraged others to do the same.
As a parent, I have held to my guns on this one. My children have been taught copyright, the idea of creative value and that illegal media is not tolerated in this household. I am the parent who would not give them blank CDs to give to their friends to make copies of movies and music. I was the one who informed teachers that making copies of "Kid Music CDs" for fun is NOT an educational fair use and they should not be requesting blank CDs from home for it.

Limewire is banned. We buy or rent movies, we do not download them. My kids get iTunes allowances as part of a Christmas Present. I have worked hard to instill this in my kids. Honestly, there is a grey area that if I were in a house alone, I would live in that includes some violations of this principle. But when you are setting an example, you tread more carefully than when no one is watching. And Kids? they are always watching.

While they were younger, this was successful. But now they are older, independent thinkers. Plus we have broadband connections. Broadband= streaming media.

I can say with much confidence that my children do not, will not and disagree with downloading illegal copies of music and movies. They do not want to possess it, they know this is a good way to behave as a citizen consumer of the arts. You pay for what you own.

But what about the illegal videos on YouTube.. and the myriad number of sites that are available on the internet. It happens.. I know they do it, they even tell me about it without thinking about the wrongness of how that media is uploaded.

Then again, is it really wrong? Illegal, YES. But wrong? Watching something on the internet will not stop a bunch of teenagers from paying to go see something again. And in some cases, it goes deep into the gray area- video footage that they would have no access to, or outlet to pay for, if they were not watching it stream.

I want them to respect artist's rights and means of life. But I do not want to be such an "enforcer" that they never talk to me or tell me what is going in their lives, either. It is a very delicate balance. Is it OK to condone things that I might participate in myself if kids were not watching? Where do you draw the line with your children?

I told you once was not enough

Early this week, in preparation for the upcoming announcement of iTunes movie rentals, I rented a movie from Amazon through Amazon unbox. I wanted to play with the competition a little before I tested iTunes, and I am becoming more and more enamored of the Amazon mp3 store, so I wanted to see how their movie download process worked before iTunes woo'd me. ( more technical stuff after I get some sleep...)

The prices on both services are the same, and the terms are the standard, stupid watch it once within a 24 hour period some time in the next 30 days that all downloadable rentals are doing. This is the major reason I will not be doing this very often. Once is never enough in our family. I could not stand the thought of spending 3.99 to see a movie once on my computer screen ( yes, I AM cheap), so I found one of the movies on sale. It was .99 to rent at the time. Less than a bottle of pop- I can drop that without blinking. It was Waitress, a movie I had never heard of- but had the bonus that it starred Nathan Fillian.
It turned out to be a slightly sappy but wonderfully romantic, OMG almost made me cry and got me hot and bothered movie. I watched it tonight, because sleep was eluding me. It will go immediately on my Netflix queue.
Why would I put it on my Netflix queue?

1) I have two teen-aged daughters, and once you get beyond the fact that the two main characters are having an affair, this movie is about real love, and not settling. It is about how that moment of birth is transforming. It is about taking care of yourself and the ones you love. It is about having faith in yourself. It is about being able to start fresh, even if you made some mistakes and having life still turn out wonderful. It is exactly the kinds of things I want them to learn. I want them to see this movie. With Xandra's schedule, it is unlikely they will be able to see it at the same time. That is at least 2 more viewings next week. And then I want it here next weekend, so I can watch it again while Ogre is here and the kids are gone. It is incredibly romantic in a million unlikely ways, and well, it made me feel like this- I want to share that with the one I love.

So, this unlikely, movie that was just part of a small technology experiment cemented my belief that the draconic playback limitations of Rented VoD embedded in every major player will prevent this from ever taking off and being a huge success in the middle class family market. Kids will not learn this from their parents, the model does not hold for how kids watch movies. Teens will not pay the cost very often- they do not have that much money. The single, well employed folks who live alone and watch a movie once and return it will be the largest market. That is certainly enough to make some money, but it is not even close to what it would take to replace a Netflix or a BlockBuster.
Now I need to convince my body to sleep...

The MacWorld Point people are missing

I have been having a lot of fun remotely watching the craziness and goings-on at MacWorld this week. There are a handful of liveblogs of the Steve Jobs Keynote for this event that you can go and read. It is interesting to compare the coverage and reporting in different live blogs, what people think is interesting or not. There is a little blurb in the Engadget liveblog that jumped right out at me. It was not even reported on some of the other blogs, so small and inconsequential is it to Apple specific technology and developments. It was this excerpt from the Keynote when Jim Gianopulos ( Chairman & CEO of 20th Century Fox) took the stage [emphasis added are mine]:


10:06am - "The real back story, when Steve came to us, it was a no-brainer. It was the most exciting, coolest thing we've ever heard. VoD isn't a new thing. But there was music, and then the iPod. There was a phone, then the iPhone. Apple does things in an intuitive, insightful way... this will be a transformative version of the rental model. We're incredibly excited about it."

"There's another idea we've been talking to Steve about. There are other formats -- DVD. And there are next gen formats, like Blu-ray." Laughter and applause. "People still want to buy hard media, but we don't want to deny them the benefit of watching the same movie. So we developed a digital copy that will be on discs going forward."

Stuck in the middle of all of the hype and hoopla about movie rentals on iTunes and making this VoD for real is an interesting little tidbit. Fox intends to put a digital copy of all of its movies on the DVD. So when you buy a hard copy of the disc, you also get a digital copy you can copy to your computer, load on an iPod, put on a file server at your house and watch in a digital home video system, etc.
As far as I am concerned, this is actually a REALLY BIG deal. Some poking around on the web shows that someone with the new Family Guy DVD ( the first DVD to include this feature) confirms this functionality. There is no detail on the functionality/DRM built in. From the MacRumors report, it looks like this will require iTunes and will most likely be DRM'd. However, this is a step forward from the original Fox plan which worked only with Windows and PlaysForSure devices. It is not clear if this means they are abandoning their Windows only path, or if both types of files will be on the DVDs.

This is not the complete solution- none of this works on Linux or Unix computers, it is all still completely laden with DRM, but it is at least 5 steps in the right direction. I hate The Family Guy, but I am tempted to go buy the DVD, just to support the move. Most likely I will check the FOX releases and see what is being released soon. We are a household of media consumers, currently two of us having video capable iPods, three with laptops and 2 portable DVD players- if I can buy a disc and also get digital versions of the movie that the laptop and iPod users can play, I may actually start buying DVDs again- not just renting them. How about you?

ISPs to play big brother ?

Engadget reports that AT&T is talking with the MPAA and the RIAA about implementing network level solutions to filter pirated materials. This is a very parental position, where it has become a matter of "if you can not control your own behavior, we are going to control it for you". Studies continue to show that the majority of traffic on the internet is P2P( with some numbers as surprisingly high as 80%), and the majority of that is video. As far as I am concerned, video has the majority of the share merely because the files are so much larger. There is no good data ( nor a good way to get it) to tell if the number of music or video files is larger. Number of files would give you a better measure of the incidence of file sharing in each format. But governments, large companies and the RIAA and MPAA look at those numbers and say to themselves "there is no way that is all legal...." and are thus motivated to go after the offenders. Here is where we get into murky ground in my opinion video is split between TV and movies, with often equal splits between the two.

In my mind, Movies are easy. If you buy a movie, you should have the right to copy it to a digital format and watch it in your own home on whatever platform you want. But this in no way gives you the right to share that digital copy for use anywhere other than on your equipment. That is, you are not allowed to then give copies of that movie to your friends, neighbors or strangers on the street- no matter what the format or media you share it in. The only way you are allowed to share is if you lend them your originally purchased disc. It never ceases to amaze me that people who are very loudly supporting the writers strike also think they should have the right to give away copies of movies. Is the irony of this not obvious to everyone else?

TV is trickier. Not trickier according to the written law, of course- trickier in figuring out what the real solution should be. To understand the culture of what is acceptable and how we got here, you have to go back to VHS. The industries had complete meltdowns when home recording equipment was first released on the market, and predicted the end of all time. This end did not, as we see, come. But what happened was the birth of time/place shifting. People started recording the shows they love and watching them later. After some debate, it was determined that recording shows for your own individual usage was completely legal. But then you were at work ( or school) and talking to someone about the big episode that just aired and your cube mate says "dang, I missed that episode".
"well, didn't you tape it"
"no, I have not figured out how to work the programming on that yet, and I was not at home"
What is your response?
"well, I taped it- you can watch it and then return the tape to me".

Returning the tape in those days was important- they were not cheap. Technically, this was illegal. But should it be? Most people would answer no. Their gut tells them this is fair use. What was the difference if they came to your house and watched it with you or if they took it to their house, watched it and then gave it back? There was not much the industry could do to intervene in this sort of activity, so although it was technically illegal it was ignored.

I would contend that that TV portion of P2P is mostly this sort of behavior. Those who know how ( or who have the equipment to) recording TV shows and sharing them. Is it illegal, Yes. Should it be- probably not. The only reason that the industry is pushing for this to be controlled is that they are convinced that if people could not download, they would buy more TV shows on DVD. I contend this is not true. It does not lose them cable subscribers, because 99% of the ISPs out there who provide cable internet require you to subscribe to digital cable TV in order to receive cable internet. if you do not have high bandwidth connections, you are not going to be downloading video files- it is just too painful. The other reason for file sharing of TV shows is unavailability through normal broadcast. Our water cooler has gotten very large. It is not just folks who live in the same neighborhood- it is a global water cooler. And when people are discussing tv shows they watched last night, they want they same things everyone else is talking about. If your teammate at work now happens to be in another country ( mine are), and you are discussing tv, the whole "here, borrow my copy" issue comes up again. Only this time the copy is not a video tape, it is bits and bytes on a hard drive. Be certain, it is not just folks in other places wanting current US shows.. the folks in the US are busy downloading shows from BBC and India and China and....
If the TV portion of video sharing ( about half, give or take some depending on the region) were considered legal, how do we tackle the other half?

Why do people illegally distribute copies of movies? I can come up with a list of reasons why people might download them.. but what is the motivation for uploading them? Have you ever uploaded or illegally shared a movie you own? What was your reason/motivation?

There is a lot of discussion on this still to be had... but I need to bolt to work. Comment and let me know what you think.