An interesting development I heard about last week is the Content Recognition Rules (CRR) specification, an XML schema that allows content owners to express, in a standard manner, how they would like their content to be treated. Some examples from the document:

1. On recognition of at least 60 seconds (for example) of this asset, please remove it from use.
2. This asset is playable only in the US.
3. This asset is not playable in the UK until July 4, 2008.
4. In a mashup of multiple assets from the same series, if the total time of all assets from the series totals 3 minutes, then remove it from use.
5. On appearance of this asset on a UGC site, send an email notification to the rights holder.
6. When delivering an uploaded copy of this asset to a consumer, some ads are associated with it and should be shown.
7. If an uploaded video contains over 60 seconds from this movie, and that represents over 50% of the video‘s total length, quarantine it, pending investigation.
8. If an uploaded video contains more than 33% of an original asset, take it down and notify the originator of the copy and the owner of the original.
9. If an uploaded video contains an AACS theatrical use only watermark, send a DMCA notice.
10. If the quality of an uploaded video is low enough, take no action.
11. If the last 3 minutes of this show are found in uploaded content, replace the UGC with a teaser clip.

I understand CRR is not intended to express copyrights or policy, but to permit a much wider range, and granularity, of possibilities than simply "infringing" (can't use) or "non-infringing" (can use). In fact, I see here a parallel with the enabling framework of the Creative Commons that also provides for a spectrum of granularity beyond "all rights reserved" and "no rights reserved" under copyright.

For three years, the Digital Citizen Project at Illinois State University has been doing some very interesting research and data analysis on what their students actually do (versus what they say they do) in terms of illegal file sharing. The first two papers that have been published out of this research are Dimensions of P2P and digital piracy in a university campus (Mateus and Peha, CMU, 2008) and Intention to Engage in Digital Piracy (Taylor, Ishida, Wallace, ISU, 2009). More papers are coming. (Disclosure: I have been on the DCP’s advisory committee from July 2008.)

The Mateus paper sought to quantify the level of digital piracy over a period of time in 2007: very loosely speaking, more than 119,000 potential infringements were detected over about a 25-day period in April 2007. Food for thought when you contrast that with the typical level of DMCA claims of infringement an institution typically receives.

A service which has come out of the DCP is Birdtrax, a list of legal sources of digital entertainment media maintained by the folks at ISU. With so much happening in this space these days, it’s great someone is taking on this task to help sort through this new world of content.

I’ll mention here Casey Green’s 2008 survey on The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance, which for the first time begins to quantify what colleges and universities are spending to combat this type of illegal activity. It’s a nice complement to the Mateus paper.

... of the EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference site. I'm moderating the closing plenary, Don't Download This Panel and it's going to be a blast! The panel lineup is terrific, if I do say so myself: Greg DePriest from NBC/Universal, Kenneth C. Green of the Campus Computing Project and Fred von Lohman from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Come one, come all: early bird registration until March 3.

Thanks to Michael Berman, 2008 WRC Program Chair (Senior Vice President and CIO at the Art Center College of Design in his day job), for the impetus and all the support to make this happen.

The fine print: In case you didn't notice, this item is a shameless plug.

Tags: EDUCAUSE, DMCA

Gregory Jackson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago, observed in The Digital Carrot, The Digital Stick (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2007) that illegal file sharing would rapidly become moot if we could resolve these problems with respect to legal online acquisition of music and movies: I can’t always get what I want; I can’t always use what I get; and I don’t think the price is fair.

Maybe we're close. Consider:

Amazon.com offers music in MP3 format—free of digital rights management and thus untethered from the iPod—often for less than what iTunes charges. Nokia is bundling music access with cell phones, and Universal Music Group is looking to extend this model to other devices. iTunes is suddenly a dominant force in digital movie rentals, having partnered with all major studios, adding alternatives to services already offered by Amazon.com, Netflix (now with unlimited streaming videos) and hulu.com. NBC, CBS, and ABC make available streaming video of popular TV shows from their websites.

Then there's iTunes' new ranking as #2 music retailer in the world, behind only Wal*Mart. And as the ars posting indicates, that's #2 relative to all music sales, including CDs; not just digitally purchased music.

Still a lot of experimentation and practical problems, but the glimmer of a tunnel end seems apparent.

Tags: new business models

Last month, C|NET news.com ran the article Why did colleges stay mum on MPAA stats? It was in response to the disclosure by the MPAA, which noted that 15 percent, not 44 percent (as it had previously claimed), of the movie industry’s domestic losses come from illegal downloading of movies by college and university students. It wagged its finger at colleges for not standing up for its own: "learn the truth before you cower".

What a frustrating article. Let me identify issues that seem to me to be most important.

First, studies are being performed by higher ed: consider Illinois State University’s Digital Citizen Project, Kenneth C. Green’s Campus Computing Project or the Brandeis University survey on DMCA practices. [Update: the Campus Computing Project published The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance in 2008.]

Second, such studies aren’t always easy or straightforward. Most institutions set high bars for protecting individual privacy that are in place for good reason: privacy underpins the intellectual freedoms of the academy. I don’t mean to brandish privacy as a bludgeon, but I think it's fair to say the type of monitoring involved for such studies could easily cross the threshold where monitoring becomes surveillance, or the monitoring of behavior. (Consider that the Digital Citizen Project went through the standard rigorous privacy requirements for any human subjects research.)

Third, institutions are doing their own analyses. I don't know what caused the author to mention UCLA - but let me assure everyone that within the framework of our policies, we actively pursue understanding what we are seeing to better tune our programs, whether educationally or advocacy related. Sometimes these insights are very public, as in the testimonies before Congress, whereas other times the information is shared with those who may find it useful, or simply used internally to enhance what we do.

Finally, I think it's important to remember higher education comprises thousands of individual and highly individualistic institutions; and that we have to work hard in order to work together. And we do: often through national associations such as EDUCAUSE, AAU, ACE and NASULGC.

All this said, it’s hardly the case higher ed couldn’t do (a lot) better, which perhaps is the point of the article. But this is, believe it or not, a complicated issue.

UCLA School of Law Student Wins GRAMMY Foundation Writing Contest

Tags: Grammy

A few articles I enjoyed because they offered me a better understanding of what people in the music industry are facing.

The Music Man (New York Times Magazine, September 2007), follows Rick Rubin, founder of Def Jam Recordings and now co-head of Columbia Records: "Columbia didn't want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business."

Then a pair of articles from the December 2007 Wired Magazine. David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music points out that music was originally tied to a certain time and space and only later, with recordings, could the knot be broken; until we've reached a point where it is the recordings, not the music, that counts. David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars is exactly that: a useful set of categorizations that can be used to think about new business models.

Every so often I come across a reference to UCLA's approach to curbing illegal file sharing that claims, incorrectly, that we are using one technology or another that somehow shuts students down. Perhaps this isn't surprising because there is quite a bit of nuance. For example, Cindy Mosqueda's blog item from last year Are local universities in bed with the RIAA and MPAA?, while as balanced and researched as one could hope for, still says "a notification system has been installed on residence hall computers to detect violations". We don't monitor! This is entirely a reactive system to handle claims of infringement the campus receives from copyright holders (i.e., the copyright holders are the ones that are searching and monitoring).

Even back in 2004 when the quarantine was first deployed, our system was not properly described in C|NET's article Hollywood's new lesson for campus file swappers. It has plenty of small errors, but the biggest problem was the implication that our system was similar to the University of Florida's ICARUS system because they both provided automated notification - ignoring the point that our system is reactive to external claims whereas ICARUS is actively looking for illegal file sharing on its internal networks.

And most recently, I was pointed at this article, The buzz on Illegal Music on college campuses, from the IT Bulletin at the University of South Carolina, which states we are using Audible Magic's Copysense technology. We don't.

One day I'll have to write up the nuances. In the mean time, technology is an important component of any overall strategy to deal with illegal file sharing - for automating claims management (the quarantine) and ensuring the integrity, reliability and security of our network - together with education, policy and legal alternatives. Others may choose to use technology in other ways, and there is clearly an emphasis these days on using technology to "fix" things.

One interesting thought came from Craig Seidel at MovieLabs while at a workshop I attended held in April with the goal of defining university requirements for filtering technologies: technology that would communicate with users directly for awareness rather than with institutions for compliance, thereby mitigating privacy concerns in some manner. Terry Gray from UW wrote up a wonderful set of notes out of this meeting.

Tags: Quarantine approach

Edgar Bronfman (chairman of Warner Music): “The music industry is growing. The record industry is not growing.” See the Economist's article A Change of Tune.

Fascinating insight from the New York Times' The Music Man.

Protect Harvard from the RIAA by Charles R. Nesson and Wendy M. Seltzer (May 1, 2007).

Tags: Harvard

Jim Davis, UCLA’s AVC-IT and CIO, testified before a Congressional hearing chaired by Representative Howard Berman entitled An Update – Piracy on University Networks on March 8, 2007. His testimony, A Student-Life Approach to Copyright Infringement at UCLA, articulates UCLA’s student-life approach to this issue.

Two articles covering this hearing are Congress is Unhappy With Higher Ed’s Copyright Infringement Activities and the Washington Post’s article Music Industry Tightens Squeeze On Students Campus Network Access Targeted. (Interestingly, BusinessWeek’s April 9, 2007 article Now Playing: Digital Disarray, supports the argument that good business models aren’t there yet.)

Jim also testified in October 2004 before the same subcommittee on the UCLA Quarantine Approach and Studios Working Group.

Tags: Quarantine approach, DMCA