insomnia bytes

When called to testify in an RIAA trial about music file sharing, Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, embarrassed herself with a rather simplistic statement:

“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’.”

It follows that according to Sony BMG, the second largest record group in the music industry, making a backup copy of a CD to take it on vacation, ripping a CD you bought to play it on your computer or on your portable audio player, all these constitute an illegal act.

This is particularly puzzling since digital copies is the encouraged, and often only, way to listen music on MP3 or minidisc players. It is also the sole purpose of CD-copying devices. All of which are of course manufactured and sold by another division of Sony.

The Obscurantist Music Industry

It is not the first time the majors have waved around largely nonsensical statements about digital rights. The real issue is that they blur the meaning of “legality”, by assimilating a widely accepted practice (even your grand mother “makes a copy” when she imports a CD in iTunes) to the morally reprehensible act of theft.

The underlying goal is obvious: to create a state of fear and confusion where people are afraid to perform anything that the recording industry considers harmful. But the futility of this effort is just as obvious: you cannot convince the public that something they and everybody else has been doing for decades is wrong. Worse, the nuance will be lost between what exactly is illegal, and what isn’t.

An end must be put to this nonsense because it harms our society. The only acceptable definition of legality comes from the Legal code, which itself should reflect our society and culture, and not the mere interests of corporations.

Fortunately, while those gigantic capitalist dinosaurs graze happily in a fantasy world of theirs where bits are getting harder (and illegal) to copy, other actors of the music industry move on.
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I made a cameo appearance in Business Week’s article about our NEC C&C Innovation Lab entitled NEC’s “Big Brother” Lab (Aug. 16, 2007). It follows the inauguration day of the lab on July 12, when the press and officials came to visit the building and were shown prototypes of different projects happening here.

It is remarkable that most journalists, this one included, focused their interest and questions on the privacy concerns related to the ubiquitous monitoring of our lab. There were many other interesting projects shown that day (read the press release for a more abstract summary), but they hardly captured as much interest. (And note that the visualization part of the supposedly “proprietary mapping system” was implemented using the rather neat prefuse open source library.)

What is remarkable about the focus in this article is the lack of depth and context. First, the issue is not whether you’re being filmed, but by whom and why. Are you aware of it, and did you give your consent? The question of ownership and purpose of this data is premium, yet it’s barely hinted at by the author.

In addition, the article fails to put its arguments into the broader picture of our contemporary society: everyone is constantly tracked, whenever you use your credit card, your grocery store discount card or your RFID transport ski pass; whenever you buy books from the Internet or get filmed by a security camera in an elevator. More alarmingly than being spotted picking your nose at your desk, there are 400′000 CCTV in London, and 4′000′000 in the whole UK. There are thousands in Japan as well. And for all of those, you never signed any agreement and usage conditions.

The closing quote, “it would be a real hard sell in the [Silicon] Valley”, comes as a rather hypocritical remark in a country where the government gets increasingly more freedom at invading its citizens’ privacy without their knowledge.

This project would fail as a panopticon prototype, because it would lack the uncertainty of whether the participants are being observed or not. In the excitement of linking it with trendy topics such as privacy, the author confuses the danger of ubiquitous unapproved and unlimited surveillance with a circumscribed experiment.

Furthermore, it fails to capture a more important philosophical questions that underlines this project: inspiration, much like feelings, are traditionally credited as impalpable human traits; yet can you formalize, quantify, analyze innovation and inspiration? Are there patterns that can be exploited to stimulate and, eventually, simulate inspiration?

To anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention, it is clear that the situation of the music industry has become largely surrealistic. Lately, settlements to avoid lawsuits represent a profitable business for the RIAA (the trade group representing the American recording industry). In essence, they could stop producing music and live purely out of threatening people who download music illegally. This fear campaign has recently been extended to Europe, including France, Denmark and Switzerland.

However, there remains questions nobody cares to answer: what kind of business model involves threatening and potentially suing the vast majority of your customers? And after having paid thousands of dollars in settlements, do people really start buying CDs again?
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