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MTU CS 6461 - Protecting and Managing Electronic Content with a Digital Battery

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0018-9162/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE24 ComputerProtecting and ManagingElectronicContent with aDigital BatteryIn the days before personal computers became commonplace, a simpleand direct system ensured stable relationships among artists, producers,and consumers. An artist would create a work, then give it and certainaccompanying rights to a producer. The producer would manufacture aphysical artifact that embodied the work, then the producer or its rep-resentative would market this artifact, generating a revenue stream—and, inci-dentally, a measurement of the work’s popularity. Finally, the producer wouldshare the resulting revenue with the original artist in direct proportion to thework’s popularity—or at least in proportion to a measurable indicator of pop-ularity, such as the number of units sold. This system of rights, royalties, and limits on reproduction worked for books,records, motion pictures, and other physical media largely because of the diffi-culty and expense that reproducing them entailed. In the days of vinyl records,for example, few individuals had access to the equipment necessary to producesuch recordings. Indeed, only recently have individuals gained widespread accessto affordable CD duplicators. Likewise, gallery-quality picture reproductionsrequired sophisticated photographic equipment well outside the reach of mostindividuals. Reproducing films in celluloid form encountered similar obstaclesprior to the development of home videocassette recorders. Currently, Napster, Gnutella, and other peer-to-peer sharing services havestretched if not broken all these connections, posing such a dire financial threatto content providers that the Recording Industry Association of America andfive recording companies have brought suit against Napster.1If a consumer canduplicate a digital artifact and share it with a friend, the producer loses any profitfrom the duplicated artifact and any way to measure the duplicated item’s rela-tive popularity. Without a revenue stream or a means for measuring popularity,a producer cannot offer artists appropriate remuneration. Without payment,artists have little incentive for creating new work.Concerns about generating and measuring revenue have led many to ques-tion the long-term viability of the recording, publishing, and video industries.Rampant unauthorized duplication also threatens many other smaller indus-tries that deal in artifacts or ideas amenable to digital representation.2,3The digital battery’sper-use pricing modelmay be our best hopefor protecting artists’livelihoods, generatingmeaningful usagestatistics, and ensuringconsumer privacy.Timothy A. BuddOregon State UniversityPERSPECTIVESFortunately, technology—which helped create thisproblem—can also provide its solution. To protectintellectual properties, we need a digital system that• makes unauthorized duplication impossible or atleast extremely difficult,• tracks each use of a given work while ensuringthe user’s anonymity, and• can be implemented inexpensively and remaintransparent to the consumer.Such a system would benefit all parties. Producerswould receive the revenues due to them, along withvaluable marketing information, which would con-tribute to their financial success and help them con-tinue publishing new content. Artists would receivefull royalties for their work, encouraging them todevelop additional creative properties. Consumerswould enjoy a broader selection of titles, paying onlyfor the content they use, multiplied by how often theyuse it.Failure to develop such a system courts a grimfuture, as the “Commercialism = Creativity” sidebarshows. For, when the financial incentives for creatingartworks disappear, art itself withers.CONTROLLING DIGITAL CONTENTToday, most home computing systems contain allthe technology consumers need to copy MP3 files.Thus, even if the recording companies succeed in rein-ing in Napster, they cannot halt the reproduction ofdigitized music files in the privacy of users’ homes.August 2001 25Always controversial, the management of intellectual propertyhas fostered debates that have only intensified with the advent oflegal protections such as patents and copyrights. These measuresrepresent a compromise between that which benefits society as awhole and that which benefits an individual at the expense of thecollective. The French Revolution, which took place in the lateeighteenth century, provides an instructive example that showsthe complex relationship among society, commerce, and intel-lectual-property rights.Historical precedentWhen they first seized power, acting in accordance with theirEnlightenment worldview, the revolutionaries abolished all royalprivileges, including copyright. Doing so, they felt, advanced soci-ety by freeing knowledge from the shackles of commercialism.Heirs to this tradition, today’s Napster enthusiasts proclaim withequal fervor that music should be free.Unfortunately for the French of that time, the absence of copy-right and other protections did not cause the products of intel-lectual thought to flower, but rather to wither. A Paris police com-missioner’s observation, recorded in 1791, strikes a hauntinglymodern note: “There is no author who will consecrate his effortsto the instruction of his century if pirating is made legal.” Withina short time, the authorities noted the predictable and cata-strophic effects of copyright’s abolition—namely, a precipitousdecline in the quantity and quality of published works—andrestored effective laws.1A persistent legacyThe advent of photocopy centers provides another precursorto our current problems with digital media. Machines that gen-erate paper copies were not widely available until the 1970s. Ascommercial photocopy centers proliferated during that decade,an increasing number of consumers discovered how they couldcopy an entire book relatively easily and cheaply—rather thanpurchase it from the publisher. They proceeded to do so, eventhough the resulting product usually suffered from inferior paperquality, text reproduction, and binding.A crisis in the publishing industry seemed imminent,2until theUS Congress passed new laws and a few high-profile court casesheld individuals and copy centers legally responsible for copy-right violations. Commercial copy centers became more aggres-sive in enforcing copyright laws, and in large part the problem ofcopying entire books dropped to nuisance levels.Cassette tape recording and


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MTU CS 6461 - Protecting and Managing Electronic Content with a Digital Battery

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