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Monday, July 08, 2002

Technology Review -- Do Readers Matter and DRM

No argument can be made that the broadcast industry is critical to any national or social interest and people like Kellner deserve a rude awakening to marketplace realities. Their investments are irrelevant, their history of import only to academics, their job base relevant only to the extent it produces something of actual value to the consumer.

In Kellner's world networks exist only as a delivery vehicle, transporting the sheep of a viewing audience to the slaughterhouse of advertisers. This model is of questionable value to society -- to the extent that Kellner thinks it should drive legislation it is a detriment.

Broadcasters, record companies, and (to a large extent) newspaper and book publishers have grown over enamored with their past success and lost sight of who's in charge. They have lost the sense of serving the customer that all their founders embodied.

There are certain technical advantages to, and justifiable uses for, specific DRM protocols and applications, but we should demand they justify themselves in the open market and not tolerate the subversive use of legislation to sustain outmoded, counter-productive business practices.

MIT's Technology Review - Treating Viewers as Criminals. Networks say watching TV without the ads is theft. Will blipverts be next?

The 1980s science fiction series, Max Headroom, depicted a society "twenty minutes into the future" ruled by powerful television networks locked in ruthless competition for viewer eyeballs. Concerned by the growing trend towards channel surfing, the blipvert was developed as a rapid-fire subliminal advertisement which pumped its commercial messages directly into consumers' brains before they had a chance to change the channel.

Unfortunately, the blipvert had the unanticipated side effect of causing spontaneous combustion in a certain number of overweight and chronically inactive couch potatoes. This outcome was viewed as an acceptable risk by the networks, even though it potentially decreased the number of viewers for their programs.

I could not help but think about blipverts the other day when I stumbled across the recent comments of Turner Broadcasting System CEO Jaimie Kellner, who asserted that television viewers who skipped commercials using their digital video recorders were guilty of "stealing" broadcast content. Kellner told an industry trade press reporter that "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots." He conceded that there may be a historic loophole allowing us to take short breaks to go to the bathroom but otherwise, we are expected to be at our post, doing our duties, watching every commercial, and presumably, though he never said it, buying every product.

Kellner's intemperate rhetoric is, alas, characteristic of the ways that the media industry increasingly thinks about, talks about, and addresses its consumers in the post-Napster era. Napster may--and I stress, may--have been legitimately labeled piracy, but now all forms of consumerism are being criminalized with ever-decreasing degrees of credibility. Once going to the bathroom or grabbing a snack on a commercial break gets treated as a form of theft, the media conglomerates are going to be hard pressed to get consumer compliance with their expectations, making it impossible to draw legitimate lines about what is and is not appropriate use of media content.

[ ... ]

If the networks stopped at name-calling, that would be one thing, but they didn't. Last fall, the networks sued SONICBlue, the manufacturer of ReplayTV, and convinced a Federal Magistrate to force the company to collect data on thousands of individual consumers: what shows they watch, what commercials they skip, and what--if anything--they forward to their friends. Not content to wait and worry, the networks are now invading our privacy to ensure that we make good on Kellner's imaginary contract. Thankfully, the order was subsequently stayed by a higher court.

Confronting such hostility, consumers are increasingly committing acts of passive resistance (flush often!) and forming organizations, such as DigitalConsumer.org, which is making the case that consumers have rights and interests in the negotiations that occur between media producers, technology companies, and policy-makers. To borrow a line from Network, "we are mad as hell and we aren't going to take it anymore."

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Copyright © 2002 Terry W. Frazier