Digital Rights Management (DRM)
“DRM can be defined as the set of technical and legal mechanisms applied to help control access to and distribution of copyrighted and other protected material in the digital environment. “
The DRM-driven approach is criticized as an insufficient solution because it has at least three adverse consequences:
- Diminished consumer privacy, as DRMs generate significantly increased functional capability to monitor online user behaviour
- Reduced innovation potential, as the development of new methods to attack peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and applications can inhibit the capacity for “follow-on” or “second” innovators to build on copyrighted innovations (as we noted above)
- Greater imbalances in the relationship between copyright holders and users of copyrighted materials; it is impossible to program fair use/fair dealing exceptions into DRM systems, since fair use is a complex legal mechanism with outcomes that are dependent on individual aspects of each case”
- Responses to copyright issues in the media and entertainment sectors have often been aggressive
- Technological protection measures generally and digital rights management (DRM) in particular
DRM challenges:
- Cost vs solution - it costs a lot to develop and implement digital rights
More disadvantages:
- DIminished consumer privacy
- Reduced innovation potential
- Imbalances in the relationship between copyright holders and users
Political Economy
- Focuses on politics and power relations embedded in tech development and use
- Understanding of historical and current economic, social relations of production, military priorities, the role of state, gender and maintenance of racist hierarchy of power
- New media is a business
- Access to resources at various levels influence the directions that new media developments take: includes investment capital, political influence and to the technology themselves on the part of potential users
- Inequalities of access
- Political economy does not buy into new media hype and optimism. - Political economists are skeptical about the claims that new media leads to fundamental social change
- Evidence of old media monopolies which are deeply connected to new media forms
–> Kumar (2005) “the imperatives of profit, power and control seem as predominant now as they have ever been”
Ex. telecom industry
Copyright
Among the issues raised are the following:
1. The balance between public good and private benefit criteria for use of and access to information
2. The balance between individual rights of ownership and social use for common benefit
3. The nature of knowledge as both a commodity for commercial exploitation and as a public good for common use
4. The best ways in which to promote and equitably share the benefits of creativity in an age of digital networks for people, communities, nations, and global humanity
“Copyright presumes that original forms of creative expression can belong to individuals, who have both a moral right to ownership and a legitimate economic right to derive material benefit from the use of these ideas and works by others. It also presumes that the use of their original ideas and works should be subject to the laws of free and fair exchange, that there should be adequate compensation for use by others, and there should be safeguards against misuse”
→ At the same time, new ideas draw from an existing amalgamation of ideas, which need to exist in the public domain as Fair Use
“In order to balance these competing claims on knowledge, copyright law divides up the possible rights in and uses of a work, giving control over some of these rights to the creators and distributors and control over others to the general public”
- Ideas or concepts cannot be copyrighted, rather the work formed based off said ideas can be
- “Second, what the author or creator has an exclusive right to is the creative expression contained in a work, not the physical form in which that work is produced and distributed”
→ Ex. how an author owns moral rights, but the publisher owns distributing rights, still paying royalties to the author - “These fair use or fair dealing provisions for private, non-commercial uses without authorization have been typically applied to the photocopying of works in public libraries, but are now extensively applied in the copying of software applications and the placing of materials online (e.g., sections from books and academic journals used for teaching purposes”
2012 canadian copyright law act changes brought us digital locks
“Digital locks—also known as copy protection—are technical ways of preventing people from copying material or otherwise infringing on the rights of copyright holders. The controversy over protection of digital locks arises when users have rights—to back up your music downloads, for example—but might not be able to exercise those rights because to do so they would have to break the digital lock and the lock itself is protected by law.”
Importance of the Public Domain
- They lay out a number of principles that help clarify why the public domain is so important and how it can be protected:
- The public domain is the rule; copyright protection is the exception.
- Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for their intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge.
- What is in the public domain must remain in the public domain.
- The lawful user of a digital copy of a public domain work should be free to (re)use, copy, and modify such work.
Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and reuse of public domain works must not be enforced. (COMMUNIA 2009)
Free-to-Play/Freemium
“Increasingly used on the revenue side are new models such as “freemiums,” in which games are free to acquire—usually by downloading—but then create a demand for additional in-game item purchases that cost money. These in-game purchases either remove annoying advertising or provide additional advantages, such as abilities or weapons or desirable attributes that are either unavailable or rarely available to the players who do not choose to make purchases. In-game purchases are a significant part of the revenue model for social games, as well as a growing number of mobile phone games. The percentage of people who buy in-app items may be small, but the impact is large.”
Surveillance & Privacy
Privacy:
- Ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, expressing information selectively
- Boundaries and content of what is considered private vary across cultures and individuals
- Political and social right for the security of person
→ New media changes the view of privacy
Being known
- You need to give up some level of privacy to be function as part of society
→ To be a citizen, resident or consumer requires a level of personal information of who you are and what you do
- Exchange for information for access has always been historically clear
→ 1930’s - sin numbers, tracks earnings over lifetime, earnings determine old age security benefits
Privacy vs surveillance
- Constant surveillance - least understood and most controversial
- Coordinated and organized observation of someone to control their behaviour
→ Not just watching, being watched has an impact on society
→ Foucault demonstrates this with “panopticon” where prisoners are always seemingly in view of a guard, prisoners police themselves → The power of an invisible and omnipotent threat
Surveillance has commercial, state, personal and criminal aspects
- State collection of data is very unregulated
- Ambivalence of unsettled debates like data from credit cards, loyalty programs, cookies and biometrics → lack of concern, powerful people profits
Specific contexts of exchange and disclosure, harmful when it leaves its contexts, though some harms can come from surveillance itself
Luddism
Luddite → someone who opposes technologies
Originated from the 1800’s, workers destroying mill machinery that was replacing their jobs
Knowledge/Post-Industrial Economy
Knowledge based economy has contributed to the rise of creative/service based industries:
- “The relationship between information, knowledge, and creativity, and the ways in which sustained technological and economic innovation are accompanied by social, cultural, and institutional innovation, is strongly connected to the rise of creative industries”
- “Across all sectors the knowledge content of products and processes is rising. . . . Knowledge push and market pull have made know-how the critical source of competitive advantage in the modern economy.” - Leadbeater
→ Exemplified by mobile device ecosystems (technological convergence) that make us value the services over the hardware itself
Knowledge push, market pull
- “The concept of knowledge push refers, first, to the growth in outputs in education and scientific research arising from public and private investment, and second, to the ways in which ICTs speed up the production, collection, and dissemination of such research outcomes. The outcome of this research is more rapid transformation of new products, services, activities, and processes (David and Foray 2002). Market pull factors that promote the rise of a knowledge economy include economic globalization, increased competition, greater sophistication in consumer demand, and the growing importance of intangible assets, such as branding and know-how, to competitive advantage.”
Knowledge and Information
- “At an epistemological level, they distinguish knowledge from information on the basis of the personal dimensions of ownership of knowledge, the difficulties in disembedding knowledge as content from those who possess it, and that knowledge transfer requires a learning process, which takes time and effort.”
Global Games Industry
How the Gaming Industry Profits:
- “Global revenues in the games sector were projected to be at least US$159 billion in 2020 with more than 2.5 billion gamers around the world”
- “Kline and colleagues (2003:24) identify interactive games as “the ‘ideal commodity’ of a post-Fordist/postmodern/promotional capitalism—an artifact within which converge a series of the most important production techniques, marketing strategies, and cultural practices of an era.””
“Industry profitability is typically tied to the software (i.e., the games), with hardware sold at minimal sustainable costs and often at a loss. More recently, games development has been dominated by the rise of middleware, which straddles the hardware/software divide. Middleware involves the development of game engines, including physics engines that can be repurposed for different games, and also “renderware,” which turns mathematical models of shapes (called “wire frames”) into shapes with colour, shadow, texture, and even sweat”
- Middleware represents an increasing standardization of the industry
Globalization
Globalization describes:
- The rise of multinational corporations
- International production, trade, and financial systems
- International communications flows
- Global movements of people and the increasingly multicultural nature of societies
- Developments in international law
- Global social movements (e.g., environmental activism)
- The development of international governmental organizations, regional trading blocs, and international non-governmental organizations
- Global conflicts, such as the widespread war on terror after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
- Said developments are not new as trade has been established in north america even before columbus arrived in native communities, however these attributes are uniquely augmented with the rise of new media
- Social mobilization was taken to another level starting with protests outside of the World Trade Center in 1999 for the battle in Seattle, using new media to both organize the gathering and document the events that took place
- Sites for secure communication between online activists were created following this, although said sites have been for the most part overshadowed by the secure messaging functions on other sites
- Social media has since been claimed (more or less) as a legitimate tactic in social activism and politics
Regulatory Capture
- Happens when a political entity is undercut by the very forces it is trying to regulate
- Government policies are then developed to serve a special interest over that of the public
- Troubling in technology policy
The revolving door:
- A useful concept for understanding how regulatory capture operates in three ways mapped by the regulatory capture lab:
1. Exit stage → a government position exits public office for a private position that is close to the field that they previously regulated (ex Powell (?) leaving the government position of regulation to a lobbying company)
- Entry stage → leave private sector to enter public office government yada yada ex. Leslie Church
- Circular stage → private to public then back to private again bringing knowledge and contacts from government
- Really common in big tech
Astroturfing
“Machine-generated comments in online forums and platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can be crafted to resemble the work of real humans, suggesting a groundswell of support (or opposition) for a topic or policy when no such support exists. Sometimes called “astroturfing” (likening it to the artificial grass that covers soccer and football fields), this practice of generating a fake “buzz” (or opposition) is being applied in commercial and political realms and is driven by algorithms and machine learning that can be said to constitute a form of artificial intelligence.”
Creative Commons
- “but rather free in the sense that creativity and innovation are best served by information and culture that is as widely available as possible. In this respect, belief in the intrinsic value of an “information commons” or a “creative commons” is threatened by recent initiatives to strengthen the intellectual property rights regime, which is seen as presenting the danger of creating “a ‘permission culture’—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of the creators of the past”
Digital Platform
Platforms are hosts (infrastructure) for a multitude of content sharing purposes. They can be used to share photos, websites, markets, videos, etc.
- Google or web 2.0 in general is a platform for various creators to engage and build their own services/goods without needing to create their own infrastructure. This makes starting a new business much easier.
Cyber-Libertarianism
“The concept of internet governance is useful as an alternative to strong notions of cyber-libertarianism (particularly found in US user communities), which view the infrastructure of the internet as manageable through self-governance. Cyber-libertarianism was a key tenet of internet pioneers, like those associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who saw in the internet a “platform which will allow every person to speak their mind and query the world to create their own point of view” (EFF n.d.).”
Hype & Counterhype
Hype:
- Recurring features of new media tech, ex. Development of the internet and popularization of digital media technologies in general
- Generating excitement and optimism with tech → the idea that tech will transform your life for the better - a sort of utopian view
- Attitude is characterized by many analyses of the internet in the 90’s, also tended to deflect or ignore criticism
- Marketing tactic - very commercialized
- This led to the dot com crash of 2001, where a lot of people invested in new websites because of the hype surrounding them, only to lose money when things didn’t pan out
Counter-hype:
- The inverse of hype. This is the belief that new technology doesn’t have the ability to improve daily life. Someone who opposes technology can be called a luddite. This phenomenon started in the 1800’s with manufacturing workers destroying machinery that was taking their jobs
Intermediation and disintermediation
Important implications → disintermediation and reintermediation
- How products get to you
- Models: Traditional distribution (manufacturers - wholesalers - distributors - retailers - consumers), disintermediation (manufacturers straight to consumers - b2c), reintermediation ex amazon (manufactures - electronic intermediaries - consumers)
Disintermediation allows the producers and consumers to access each other directly
Reintermediation occurs when intermediary functions remain but are conducted by organizations whose operations are driven by the new ecommerce marketing logics
- Ex product and service customization, multiple modes of communication with customers, etc
- “The classic example of this is Amazon, which has positioned itself in between consumers and manufacturers and has removed wholesalers, distributors, and retailers.”
Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
“It might at first seem to be an odd assertion, but declining to regulate (which is called forbearance in legal terminology) is also a policy option for governments. In Canada, this has had significant effects in two new media domains in particular: mobile phones and the internet. When mobile phones were first developed, they were seen as an extension of the existing telephone system and, as such, logically subject to regulation by CRTC.”
Would cell phones be regulated as an extension of telephones?
- “CRTC, following government policy as well as the economic thinking of the day, decided on the latter stance: They would forbear from making significant regulations and allow a more competitive open market, as with automobiles, home furniture, or computers.”
“Although internet access is typically provided through the infrastructure of existing regulated businesses (usually a cable or telephone provider), CRTC decided to not regulate internet services beyond a few basic aspects. Importantly, they decided not to get involved in internet content. Content regulation was never a part of telecommunications regulation—the law is explicitly designed to ensure carriers are not liable for and need not monitor what people say on the telephone, apart from criminal prosecutions that are addressed in other parts of the law.”
Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)
“In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed by Congress in 1998” - a copyright law that prevents illegal reproduction of an original work. This is often used in combination with “the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, 1998, which extends the term of copyright protection for copyright works from the life of the author plus 50 years to the life of the author plus 70 years.”
After the author’s life plus 70 years, the work enters the public domain for anyone to access and reproduce. Once it enters the public domain, it cannot be taken out.
Ex. Mickey mouse, the copyright term extension law is often called the mickey mouse law as it extended the copyright of the character right when it was about to expire (near 50 years after the death of walt disney)
The Mechanical Turk
Mechanical turk - an automaton that would play chess against someone, often win, the robot had a person inside, controlled the robot from within the machine
- Early chess bot or AI
- Shows us that human labour exists beneath automation
The labour of data cleaning:
- Challenges using the entirety of the web to train AI
- If garbage goes in, garbage comes out, implications for bias (even though it is cleaned, it’s not entirely unbiased)
- Consumer facing GenAI models require robust data cleaning, setting exclusion criteria and removing certain types of data → A type of content moderation
- OpenAI made a bot to flag some of these issues as entirely human labour would take too long
- Platforms (especially social media) use AI to regulate explicit content, but also can misscategorize some content - ex shadowbanning → censoring of political and queer content
- Outsourcing of data categorization work to global south → exploitation of labour in economies that allow for cheaper work
AI capitalizes on the outsourcing of customer service calls as the materials and infrastructure was already provided. So as the industry shifted in north america, the outsourced work shifted to match it
→ This is their entire business model, without the human labour, these technologies would not run the way that they do
Metadata/Behavioral Data
“Mobile phone traffic is of particular interest to these types of surveillance programs in part because it contains a great deal of metadata. This term was previously only something a computer person would care about but is now in everyday use as more people come to realize how much information is generated and collected every time they use an electronic device”
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was a pioneer media theorist.
Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message”–> the key to understanding electronic culture is how tech alters the environment of which humans act and interact (part of theories of culture and technology)
Viewed as a visionary upon the rise of the internet, but his view was criticized by Raymond Williams:
- “British theorist Raymond Williams was primarily interested in the question of how technologies are shaped by social, cultural, political, and economic forces. Williams focused on the social forces, power relations, and conflicts among competing interests that lead to some (technological) options being pursued while others are not developed or are actively foreclosed upon. For Williams, a failure to focus on the social dimensions of how technologies are developed, and how they are used, is an example of technological determinism”
→ In short, Williams said that McLuhan was not focused enough on the factors influencing the development of technology, rather the effects of technology upon society.
Artificial Intelligence
Ai systems need to be trained on as much data as possible
The more data they have, the better they can mimic human generated text
The internet provides reams of data that are easy to take with web scraping tools and APIs
Connections to web 2.0 and social media
Data scraping and copyright
The challenge with data scraping is that it does not distinguish between copyright works or personal data
Getty lawsuit as an example of the legal battles between AI generators and rights holders
Getty images’ watermark was reproduced by AI
People as a result are not being paid for the use of their work, scrapers are making profits from the work
Copyright tensions:
- OpenAi and similar companies make a lot of money off of stealing this data
- Big Tech has been some of the most aggressive champions of strong IP laws
- Hypocritical as they profit off the scraping of data
- A governance problem
Copyright challenges:
- IP plays a crucial role in tech markets but example of the tech firm arguing their business model is not viable if they respect other peoples IP
- Altman (CEO) had made it clear that OpenAI wants regulations that should apply to future more powerful AI systems
Question of when should these regulations apply
Governments are moving fast on AI because copyright and trademark is essential to the knowledge economy
Users don’t tend to use AI to intentionally infringe copyright
- User as the actor - if there is a copyright violation by chat gpt then the user who put in the prompt will be responsible for the violation
- Guardrails in place to prevent outputs of copyright violating content, but it is possible that it would still happen occasionally
Speculative vs real risks
- Malicious disinformation vs overreliance on inaccurate tools
- LLMs will replace all jobs, vs centralized power and labour exploitation
→ Labour inequality and devaluing of work/invisible human labour
→ Deskilling and Wage repression in white collar workers as they’re paid little to monitor AI
- Long-term existential risks vs near term security risks
- Environmental harms
Creative Industries
Key economic drivers of creative industries:
1. Rise of the service industry sectors
2. Knowledge economy → rise of creative industries
3. Centralization of service industries
4. Incentivization of creativity by governments through policies
Creative economy policies:
- Government support for museums, broadcasters, library and archives canada
- Legislation to govern the funding and operation of these activities like telecommunications act
- Funding gives rules for the operation of certain industries
- Numerous funding programs to support Canadian content (CanCon)
Why adopt creative industry policies:
- Rebranding of arts industries and art policy to emphasize their significance as wealth generating sectors
- The more general identification of creativity as a key driver of growth and innovation
- Implication of digital convergence bringing the media and communication and culture and IT
- Turn toward user generated content
- Study in the US for the Arts report “arts participation through media appears to encourage rather than replace live arts attendance”
Risk in creative industries when it comes to economics:
- Public funding
- “In the absence of government support, the risks of this lifestyle, the low pay and frequent unemployment, are borne almost entirely by the individual, however. In earlier times, this sort of support might have been provided by a benefactor or patron, but these types of relationships are not nearly as common today.”
Contracts help to minimize the financial insecurity that comes with creative work
- “This can be seen in forms such as publishing, recording, broadcasting, and film companies commissioning production and managing distribution; guilds, unions, and legal arrangements protecting creative producers; and intermediaries such as agents managing the more commercial elements of a career in creative practice.”
Intellectual Property
Among the issues raised are the following:
1. The balance between public good and private benefit criteria for use of and access to information
2. The balance between individual rights of ownership and social use for common benefit
3. The nature of knowledge as both a commodity for commercial exploitation and as a public good for common use
4. The best ways in which to promote and equitably share the benefits of creativity in an age of digital networks for people, communities, nations, and global humanity
“The US Congress, in one of its first legislative acts after the Declaration of Independence, passed the Copyright Act of 1790 to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”
“Copyright presumes that original forms of creative expression can belong to individuals, who have both a moral right to ownership and a legitimate economic right to derive material benefit from the use of these ideas and works by others. It also presumes that the use of their original ideas and works should be subject to the laws of free and fair exchange, that there should be adequate compensation for use by others, and there should be safeguards against misuse”
- At the same time, new ideas draw from an existing amalgamation of ideas, which need to exist in the public domain as Fair Use
“In order to balance these competing claims on knowledge, copyright law divides up the possible rights in and uses of a work, giving control over some of these rights to the creators and distributors and control over others to the general public”
- Ideas or concepts cannot be copyrighted, rather the work formed based off said ideas can be
- “Second, what the author or creator has an exclusive right to is the creative expression contained in a work, not the physical form in which that work is produced and distributed”
→ Ex. how an author owns moral rights, but the publisher owns distributing rights, still paying royalties to the author - “These fair use or fair dealing provisions for private, non-commercial uses without authorization have been typically applied to the photocopying of works in public libraries, but are now extensively applied in the copying of software applications and the placing of materials online (e.g., sections from books and academic journals used for teaching purposes”
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