Monthly Archives: December 2011

Want honorable promotion through sharing? License your work to share!

Posted on by

TorrentFreak.com writes about Mark Diestler, a filmmaker who doesn’t mind illicit sharing of his latest movie, “The Inner Room”:

I would much rather have 500,000 downloads than 5,000, although our distributor may feel differently. The worst thing that can happen to a small film, any film for that matter, is to fall into obscurity. 500,000 people could download it and hate it, but in my mind that is better than then not seeing or hearing about it all.

Diestler is correct as far as this goes. Setting aside for the moment the poor choice in wording with “piracy“: Tim O’Reilly said, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”. But Diestler doesn’t go far enough—”The Inner Room” is not licensed to share. Or, as TorrentFreak.com puts it, “When the “The Inner Room” was released the people behind the movie even toyed with the idea of pirating the film themselves to gain exposure. But eventually they decided to leave that up to the pros.”.

Without licensing the work to be shared, Diestler could drag any sharer into court on copyright infringement. The poor defendant would have to point to articles like TorrentFreak’s to convince a judge that Diestler doesn’t mind the sharing when it suits him.

A more honest approach is to license the work to be shared and benefit from the publicity that comes from working with your audience as partners rather than holding the legal sword of Damocles over your audience.

We’ve seen this kind of behavior before: the Winans and their movie “Ink” treated the public in the same way: the copyright holder wants the free promotion that comes with illicit sharing and the power to sue anyone who shares the movie illicitly.

If any work could be easily relicensed to allow sharing with no foreseeable reduction in income, it’s works like these. People who pay aren’t paying because they can’t get the work any other way. They’re paying because they were treated properly; part of treating your audience well means your audience does not have to fear losing a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Louis C.K. turns a quick profit treating his customers well

Posted on by

Some years ago I attended a talk at “Ebertfest”, movie reviewer Roger Ebert’s annual movie festival held in Urbana, Illinois. The talk was held in the Illini Union’s Pine Lounge by the now late MPAA chief Jack Valenti. Valenti used a series of half-true emotional arguments to justify increased copyright power, maximal copyright length, and he also took some time to reject the notion of fair use.

After Valenti’s talk, I was first at the mic. I took my time to rebut as many of his distortions as I could recall. I ended on the point that the MPAA and its member companies didn’t have to treat people badly by suing copyright infringers. The Free Software Foundation has shown time and again that copyright infringers can be dealt with another way: seeking compliance not punishment.

Now comedian Louis C.K. seems to be doing well by dealing with infringers another way: ignoring the copyright infringers and treating his customers well.

Four days ago Louis C.K. released “Live at the Beacon Theater”, an hour-long standup comedy show he funded himself and sold online for $5.00 without digital restrictions management (DRM). It’s as simple as you pay $5.00 and you download (or stream) a copy of the video file. If you download the file you can play it anytime you like on any of your devices without subscription, registration, or notification.

Someone posted a copy of the concert recording to The Pirate Bay where apparently thousands of people have been seeding the file, sending copies of the file to others.

In a statement, Louis C.K. said he recouped the cost of production ($250,000) in the first 12 hours. Four days later he earned $200,000 profit.

There is no indication Louis C.K. is going after the copyright infringers. He acknowledges the infringers in interviews (misidentifying the infringement as “stealing”) but never castigates them. I suspect he knows that there’s no way to know how many people in the torrent are actually copyright infringers, how many purchased the recording, and how many never would have purchased the recording regardless of its price (thus no forgone money there). I think he also knows that he only stands to lose by treating the infringers with scorn.

Years ago, author Stephen King tried releasing a novel a chapter at a time where successive chapters would only be written and released if King reached a sales quota with the previous chapter.

Free software activist Richard Stallman gave a talk at MIT on April 19, 2001 where an audience question prompted a discussion what King had said and offered:

STALLMAN: Yes, it’s interesting to know what he [Stephen King] did and what happened. When I first heard about that, I was elated. I thought, maybe he was taking a step towards a world that is not based on trying to maintain an iron grip on the public. Then I saw that he had actually written to ask people to pay. To explain what he did, he was publishing a novel as a serial, by installments, and he said, “If I get enough money, I’ll release more.” But the request he wrote was hardly a request. It brow-beat the reader. It said, “If you don’t pay, then you’re evil. And if there are too many of you who are evil, then I’m just going to stop writing this.”

Well, clearly, that’s not the way to make the public feel like sending you money. You’ve got to make them love you, not fear you.

SPEAKER: The details were that he required a certain percentage — I don’t know the exact percentage, around 90% sounds correct — of people to send a certain amount of money, which, I believe, was a dollar or two dollars, or somewhere in that order of magnitude. You had to type in your name and your e-mail address and some other information to get to download it and if that percentage of people was not reached after the first chapter, he said that he would not release another chapter. It was very antagonistic to the public downloading it.

Louis C.K. and Stephen King are both famous artists. Both are willing to work to satisfy an audience hungry for new material. King’s approach didn’t go over well with his audience and that experiment quickly died. Louis C.K.’s approach was so successful he concluded, “I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again.”.

Update 2011-12-28: On December 21, 2011 Louis C.K. wrote that he broke $1M 12 days after he released his show.
Louis C.K.'s PayPal account screenshot.

Another reason why all your software must be free software: Carrier IQ

Posted on by

Freedom is participation in power.Marcus Tullius Cicero

Wikipedia’s summary of Carrier IQ rootkit events to date:

In November 2011, researcher Trevor Eckhart claimed that Carrier IQ was logging information such as location without notifying users or allowing them to opt out, and that the information tracked included detailed keystroke logs, potentially violating US Federal law.

Carrier IQ did what proprietors usually do—bully the investigator. But Eckhart was smart, got in touch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and defended himself. Now Carrier IQ is backing down.

CNN has an article on this scandal in which they bury the lede. What’s the real solution here? Simple: all your software must be free software, software that respects your freedom to run, share, and modify the program. Freedom (by any reasonable definition, such as Cicero’s above) is denied to you by design under proprietary software.

Why?

  • Because free software is the only way to keep programmers, resellers, and anyone else who can program a computer honest and since it’s likely you don’t program (most computer users don’t program) you’ll need to become accustomed to hiring an expert to look out for your interests in the same way you hire a plumber, electrician, doctor, or lawyer to do their expert work. Face it, the computer is a part of your everyday life now. This means you need permission to make all of your computers do what you want them to do, not what some proprietor like Apple, Nokia, or Carrier IQ says they should do.
  • Because apparently you can’t trust proprietors. Consider what Apple told CNN in the aforementioned article: [Apple] says it stopped supporting it in the latest version of iOS and will completely eliminate Carrier IQ from all iPhones and iPads in an upcoming software update. Apple’s claim is entirely unverifiable. Without software freedom nobody has any idea if any Apple update will remove Carrier IQ or replace Carrier IQ with some other program that does the same job. The only way to figure that out is doing the kind of work Eckhart did—reverse engineering—which is time-consuming and runs the risk of facing Apple’s hyper-litigiousness. Apple is no stranger to bullying people who want to take control of their computers (1, 2, 3 to name a few that happen to involve the EFF). Your trust has already been betrayed, so there’s no reason to believe a proprietor is on your side. There’s no reason to believe any proprietor will become as trustworthy as an expert who competes by revealing as much to you as you want to know. If you learn to program, you can become your own expert and diagnose and fix your computers anytime you wish. Deciding for yourself which jobs are too big or just right for you should be your decision to make. Therefore you need software freedom.

This is an ethical and social issue, not really a technological issue. The heart of this issue is not how to increase software development efficiency, it’s how to build a society where all computer users live in freedom. The pursuit of software freedom is what the free software movement is all about.

Continue reading →