[ox-en] DRM and all that....
- From: "tOM Trottier" <Tom Abacurial.com>
- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 14:36:41 -0400
For Your Information , Tom
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Date sent: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:56:03 -0500
From: AheadoftheCurve bdcimail.com
Subject: STEVE GILLMOR "Ahead of the Curve" from InfoWorld.com,
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Send reply to: AheadoftheCurveHelp Bellevue.com
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STEVE GILLMOR "Ahead of the Curve" InfoWorld.com
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
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LINK FREE OR DIE
Posted September 6, 2002 01:01 PM Pacific Time
REMEMBER THE browser wars? Weren't they something -- a
titanic struggle for control of the Internet operating
system.
Now it's the run time wars. Microsoft bootstraps
Internet Explorer and NT's IIS (Internet Information
Server) to launch the Web services stack. In the
courts -- well, you know that song. Microsoft: "I just
want to inn-o-vate." Sun: "It's my party and I'll sue
if I want to."
Meanwhile, SOAP wins. IBM teams with Microsoft to
hijack the standards process with WS-I (Web Services
Interoperability Organization). Investment and
innovation grind to a halt as Wall Street goes back to
ignoring information technology.
But wait, you say, innovation is not dead. There's
peer-to-peer, the mobile client, Weblogs. No, says
Hollywood gatekeeper Jack Valenti of the Motion
Picture Association and his trusty sidekick Hillary
Rosen of the RIAA (which should stand for Restrict
Innovation Association of Americans). There is no
peer-to-peer; it's property-to-property. No, you
misunderstand: It's fare use, not fair. No, you can't
have it your way; it's our way or the highway.
That leaves Weblogs, the last bastion of free speech.
Or is it? Once again, we are held hostage by the
gatekeepers. The strategy: Shut down the peer
protocols and slap a dongle on content creation. The
vehicle: our old friend Internet Explorer and its DRM
(digital rights management) checkpoints.
Here's how it works. Say you have an idea, a thought
you want to share with a friend, a group, or a
business partner. You can use the phone to communicate
the idea point-to-point or, with a little more
difficulty, in broadcast mode via a conference call.
The gating factor for broadcast is knowledge of the
event and access codes.
Forget for a moment that phone communications are
rapidly being absorbed into the digital domain with
VOIP (voice over IP); in analog form voice
communications are still largely unregulated. But move
to e-mail or corporate instant messaging -- anything
that goes through a server -- and the data stream can
be captured, parsed, and audited.
In a business context, we are willing to cede this
control to an authority in trade for compensation:
salary, status, benefits. In our "private" world, we
are willing to trade control for compensation of a
different order: entertainment, information,
education. Enter the IE add-ons: Outlook Express,
Windows Messenger, and Windows Media Player.
Microsoft proposes a barter deal: control for features.
Windows Media Player produces cleaner, faster video
and audio, but only if you eat this DRM chip first.
But where does Microsoft make money on this circuit?
Some of the revenue comes from selling off eyeball
access via advertising and marketing, but peer shift
devices strip much of that value.
Increasingly, the answer is in content creation.
Attract the customer via the free, thin browser, but
force them to thick Office to create, enhance, and
distribute the content. Here's where Weblogs return to
center stage. The Weblog architecture relies on the
crippled IE edit control for its content creation
tools, and it chokes off the virtuous cycle that is at
the core of the Weblog tsunami.
As Don Box discovered and Jon Udell shared with the
Weblog community in pseudo-code (
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/09/04.html#a396
):
while (true) {
ScanRSSFeeds();
RantAboutStuffYouSawFromRSSFeeds();
ExposeYourRantsViaRSS();
}
RSS is an XML syndication standard authored by Dave
Winer of SOAP fame, and currently mired in a standards
struggle that extends to even what the acronym stands
for. Winer's Radio UserLand Weblog authoring tool both
aggregates and emits RSS objects that can be consumed
by other Weblogs in a modular and deeply viral way.
But IE's crummy editing tools slow down the cycle by
forcing bloggers into repetitious cut-and-paste fests
to keep the ideas flowing.
The result: competition between a virtuous cycle and a
vicious one. Microsoft wants to drive users to Office
and its rich-client DRM hooks, to SharePoint Team
Services and its IIS-centralized DRM hooks, to the
.Net run time and its unified storage DRM hooks. And
let's be honest: I want my MTV. I'll sell myself down
the river eventually if no one else steps up to the plate.
Two possible players: Scott McNealy and Steve Jobs.
Next week McNealy (this is only a theory, mind you)
will open source J2SE. After Sun's Linux announcements
of last month, a free "Windows" will sit cozily
together with Star Office, databases, the Sun ONE
(Open Net Environment) app server, and Mozilla.
How much more investment would it take to build a
blogging editor on top of this stack, one free of DRM
limitations? And who better to partner with than
Apple, the last remaining engine of innovation? Jobs'
Pixar studios leveraged Linux and p-to-p rendering
farms to send Disney to the showers in the animation
playoffs, after all.
Whether it's Sun's Linux boxes serving the edge, or
Apple's Xserver in the cloud or iPods on the hip, a
DRM-free zone is possible. Let's face it: There will
be a DRM solution. Jobs has a foot in both Hollywood
and Silicon Valley, and McNealy has shown resiliency
in the face of the IBM-Microsoft axis.
They don't call it
a representative democracy for nothing.
Exercise your right to vote at InfoWorld's Next
Generation Web Services II conference Sept. 18 through
Sept. 20 in Santa Clara, Calif. Go to
http://www.infoworld.com/nextgen to sign up and plug
in priority code XV73002 to get a special discounted
registration price of $895.
Steve Gillmor is director of the InfoWorld Test Center.
You can reach him at steve_gillmor infoworld.com.
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if anything small falls into them they ensnare it,
but large things break through and escape.
--Solon, statesman (c.638-c558 BCE)
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