My Mistakes: 1. Digital Asset Management

But every so often I remind myself of Douglas Adams 3 rules of tech and realise what I might sound like to youths who’ve only known smart phones and social media…

1. Anything in the world when you’re born is normal, ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new, exciting, revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

When I talk about the horrors of the modern web, I’m coming at it as someone who started in group 2, living thru web 1 and its new, exciting, revolutionary promise, then got a career in it – and I’m sort of stuck in group 3, focussed on problems with both new tech (AI) and the tech we’ve been living under for two decades.

Former threats: AOL, IE6 & Murdoch’s MySpace

There was a tech giant in the late 90s – America Online or AOL – and we’d all run away from it into the open WorldWide Web as AOL was gobbling up Time Warner. There wasn’t another threat online until Microsoft, whose crime with Internet Explorer was trying to write its own weird version of HTML, then installing it by default on Windows – so we flocked to Firefox and cursed IE6. There wasn’t another threat until Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and we all ran to a small website run by a college kid called The Facebook, which is another story.

Compare Microsoft’s web crimes back then, to Google’s monopoly with Chrome: you’re pushed into using it on billions of smart phones, it, like almost every browser defaults to Google search, it has Google ad tracking built in, in a way that’s hard to prevent, and 66.6% of the world use it (! https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share). Did we mention this is the same Google with 98% of the embedded video player market (https://6sense.com/tech/media-players-and-streaming-platforms/youtube-market-share), 90% of search – while offering websites free fonts, analaytics, javascript hosting, you name it, all to put its tracking code into every corner of the web.

But if your first phone was an Android, you’re in Adams’ group 1, and all that I just said probably sounds like questioning Catholicisim in 18th century rural Ireland.

Group 1-ers who first logged on during Web 2 are probably … “We have a TV channel we can post to and a million ways to reach several billion people? Sounds like you don’t like democracy mate. Sounds like you want to put the genie back in the bottle.”

Or at the very least – yeh social media makes me depressed, I try not use it too much. But everything else is kinda boring.

So rather than just complain about the present, while occasionally boasting of having a big idea before it became big, I want to look back over a couple of posts to my biggest mistakes.

Digital Rights Management

The biggest thing I think I’ve got wrong in my published writing came in a book in 2001 : Digital Asset Management, which was less about the technology of ‘DAM’ systems and more about the business strategies for media companies in using their ‘content’ across multiple platforms. I was 21, and a university drop-out struggling to find a way to keep Netribution running, and here was an offer of a £5000 advance on 25% on a £700 cover price (I never saw a royalty check!) to continue the media business analysis I’d begun working for my uncle’s company Market Tracking International (MTI) intermittently from leaving school until co-founding Netribution. It was full of hyper-capitalist analyst bullet points, like:

“The new media explosion has created a shift from ‘push’ distribution systems, where rights owners bundle content as sellable packets, such as albums or TV channels; to ‘pull’ systems where users select the content they require from vast databases. This unbundling of media packets, evidenced by peer-to-peer (P2P), web search engines and VoD, forces rights owners to re-examine the exploitation of their creative assets”

I described the digital world as stuck in a ‘many-to-many paradigm’, a problem that needed solving. There were many types of media, from many rights-owners, going thru many platforms, to many devices, in many territories – and the only way to handle all these competing systems and juristictions I then – knowing almost nothing about open standards and protocols, opined – was with Digital Rights Management. It was the answer the industry expected from me and I referenced it without question.

All the books I’d worked on back then for MTI (similar £500+ ‘executive reports’) would have a chapter on piracy where the author would report the IIPA figures for copyright ‘losses’ in music, film or TV by country, and the various market measures to mitigate it. My first job at MTI was formatting those tables in MS Word ahead of print. Later I’d type data into them from the IIPA (pirating them?), and eventually make unquestioning analysis of the data. I wrote how DVDs had been released wrapped in complex region-codes to minimise piracy – the idea that digital media distribution would be wrapped in similar piracy-reducing measures seemed inevitable, and as much point questioning as the idea of capitalism itself. I was in Douglas Adam’s group 1, attempts to stop piracy through technology was just one small part of the film and media industry.

But I was wrong.

DRM systems are not only easy enough to circumvent for the determined, they present a far worse threat – they enclose a market that otherwise wants to be free, they turn an open market square into private supermarket. Most people, it turns out – years after the Pirate Bay lost out to Spotify and Netflix – are happy to pay for something convenient, safe and easy-to-use that appears to reward the creators they appreciate. Those who don’t either don’t have the money, are politically opposed to the media industry, or – most commonly, I think – are trying to find media that doesn’t exist on legitimate platforms. But what DRM – central to all the modern platforms does – is lock in users to that platform.

When I buy a film from Apple or Amazon that I don’t own, I can’t download it and keep it and store in a backup to watch again in 20 years or let my kids inherit. It’s a database entry that lets me load a DRM-encoded version of the film from their server, until the time they change their mind. It’s as if I bought a record from HMV and now need to go back to the shop every time I need to play it, and hope they still let me, or haven’t shut down the DRM website (as happens often).

Where once, say, a film distributor, stored DVDs at a central warehouse, allowing any shop in the country to buy them at a minimum fee and resell at cover-price (or discount) – while you, consumer bought the DVD, kept it for life, or re-sold, leant, or bequeathed it – now a film distributor has to make a deal with every platform, and upload their materials there, and you consumer need an account with all of them in order to find the film you want.

Consider how it could have been.

I upload my film somewhere, and declare the price I would like from it and any restrictions (no adverts in the middle of it, perhaps; free to stream in any World Bank classified third-world country; first 20 mins free, etc). I could charge a fix fee if someone wants to download it and a fee-per-minute for streaming it. And that’s it. Anyone who wants to watch it or sell it or package it as part of a screening night or micro-website with similar films not only can do it, but they could take their own cut, just as bookshops take 30-40% of the cover price of every book they sale.

We’ve been led to believe this path is impossible because people aren’t honest enough – but I suspect it’s a mix of the technology not being built that way helped by the interests of DRM companies who see their business as worth so much more if they can control all parts of the process from hosting to playback. YouTube and Netflix probably feel the same. It’s not a new idea: Thomas Edison tried to monopolise thru patents filming and projecting 35mm film stock: without the permission of his Motion Picture Patent Company, the East Coast American film producers fled to the West Coast to dodge the MPPC – ‘circumventing a copyright protection’ – and founded Hollywood.

But when Radiohead asked fans to pay-what-they-want for In Rainbows the album earned more than all the previous albums since OK Computer combined. When Apple dropped DRM from the iTunes music store to sell MP3s – sales rose.

So I was terribly wrong about DRM, and I risk alienating myself from tech friends just by confessing I put those words in print.

Trying to making amends by building a DRM-free video ecosystem…

Perhaps this is the reason that from around 2008/09 onwards I became increasingly fascinated, bordering obsessed, with what the alternative is. Around that time I developed VALID – ‘the Video Access Licensing and Identity system’ using an extension of the Creative Commons XML language (CCRel) that was based on Aaron Swartz‘s Creative Commons RDF (the genius killed himself while being aggressively persecuted for circumventing academic DRM). The idea was : we don’t need DRM, we just need a reliable machine-readable rights language, and we’d test it in the academic sector where streaming feature films was plausible.

We had £50k from Innovate UK, partnerships with Leeds Film Festival for screenings and films, Scottish Documentary Institute and the Edinburgh College of Art where it was based for an institutional link to the high-bandwidth JISC network and the tech developers of Kendra. But my sister got bowel cancer – and I pulled out of the project after some scoping meetings and a launch Open Cinema Unconference at Leeds Film Festival – to try  to be there for her as much as possible in her final year.

On the day of her funeral, Labour lost power and the next time I applied to Innovate UK we didn’t even get past the preliminary round; things had changed. It would be another ten years until we got funding to try again.

Anyway, that’s my confession, please go ahead and cancel/block/mute me as necessary (or wait until I publish my next one).