"Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" Preprint

["Charles W. Bailey, Jr." <cbailey@uh.edu>]

A preprint of my "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = 
Digital Dystopia?" paper is now available.

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/cwb/DigitalDystopia.pdf

It will appear in Information Technology and Libraries 25,
no. 3 (2006).

This quote from the paper's conclusion sums it up:

What this paper has said is simply this: three issues--a dramatic 
expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of 
copyright laws; the ability of DRM to lock-down content in an 
unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality--bear 
careful scrutiny by those who believe that the Internet has 
fostered (and will continue to foster) a digital revolution that 
has resulted in an extraordinary explosion of innovation, 
creativity, and information dissemination. These issues may well 
determine whether the much-toted "information superhighway" lives 
up to its promise or simply becomes the "information toll road" 
of the future, ironically resembling the pre-Internet online 
services of the past.

For those who want a longer preview of the paper, here's the 
introduction:

Blogs. Digital photo and video sharing. Podcasts. Rip/Mix/Burn. 
Tagging. Vlogs. Wikis. These buzzwords point to a fundamental 
social change fueled by cheap PCs and servers, the Internet and 
its local wired/wireless feeder networks, and powerful, low-cost 
software: citizens have morphed from passive media consumers to 
digital media producers and publishers.

Libraries and scholars have their own set of buzz words: digital 
libraries, digital presses, e-prints, institutional repositories, 
and open access journals to name a few. They connote the same 
kind of change: a democratization of publishing and media 
production using digital technology.

It appears that we are on the brink of an exciting new era of 
Internet innovation: a kind of digital utopia. Dr. Gary Flake of 
Microsoft has provided one striking vision of what could be (with 
a commercial twist) in a presentation entitled "How I Learned to 
Stop Worrying and Love the Imminent Internet Singularity," and 
there are many other visions of possible future Internet 
advances.

When did this metamorphosis begin? It depends on who you ask. 
Let's say the late 1980's, when the Internet began to get serious 
traction and an early flowering of noncommercial digital 
publishing occurred.

In the subsequent twenty-odd years, publishing and media 
production went from being highly centralized, capital-intensive 
analog activities with limited and well-defined distribution 
channels to being diffuse, relatively low-cost digital activities 
with the global Internet as their distribution medium. Not to say 
that print and conventional media are dead, of course, but it is 
clear that their era of dominance is waning. The future is 
digital.

Nor is it to say that entertainment companies (e.g., film, music, 
radio, and television companies) and information companies (e.g., 
book, database, and serial publishers) have ceded the digital 
content battlefield to the upstarts. Quite the contrary.

High-quality thousand-page-per-volume scientific journals and 
Hollywood blockbusters cannot be produced for pennies, even with 
digital wizardry. Information and entertainment companies still 
have an important role to play, and, even if they didn't, they 
hold the copyrights to a significant chunk of our cultural 
heritage.

Entertainment and information companies have understood for some 
time that they must adopt to the digital environment or die, but 
this change has not always been easy, especially when it involves 
concocting and embracing new business models. Nonetheless, they 
intend to thrive and prosper--and to do whatever it takes to 
succeed. As they should, since they have an obligation to their 
shareholders to do so.

The thing about the future is that it is rooted in the past. 
Culture, even digital culture, builds on what has gone before. 
Unconstrained access to past works helps determine the richness 
of future works. Inversely, when past works are inaccessible 
except to a privileged minority, it impoverishes future works.

This brings us to a second trend that stands in opposition to the 
first. Put simply, it is the view that intellectual works are 
"property"; that this property should be protected with the full 
force of civil and criminal law; that creators have perpetual, 
transferable property rights; and that contracts, rather than 
copyright law, should govern the use of intellectual works.

A third trend is also at play: the growing use of Digital Rights 
Management (DRM) technologies. When intellectual works were in 
paper form (or other tangible forms), they could only be 
controlled at the object-ownership or object-access levels (a 
library controlling the circulation of a copy of a book is an 
example of the second case). Physical possession of a work, such 
as a book, meant that the user had full use of it (e.g., the user 
could read the entire book and photocopy pages from it). When 
works are in digital form and they are protected by some types of 
DRM, this may no longer true. For example, a user may only be 
able to view a single chapter from a DRM-protected e-book and may 
not be able to print it.

The fourth and final trend deals with how the Internet functions 
at its most fundamental level. The Internet was designed to be 
content, application, and hardware "neutral." As long as certain 
standards were met, the network did not discriminate. One type of 
content was not given preferential delivery speed over another. 
One type of content was not charged for delivery while another 
wasn't. One type of content was not blocked (at least by the 
network) while another wasn't. In recent years, "network 
neutrality" has come under attack.

The collision of these trends has begun in courts, legislatures, 
and the marketplace. It is far from over. As we shall see, it's 
outcome will determine what the future of digital culture looks 
like.

--
Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library
Planning and Development, University of Houston Libraries

E-Mail: cbailey@digital-scholarship.com

Publications: http://www.digital-scholarship.com/
(Provides access to DigitalKoans, Open Access Bibliography,
Open Access Webliography, Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, and others)