[DMCA-Activists] Kevin Werbach on Broadband and Copyright

[Seth Johnson]

> http://werbach.com/blog/2002/10/26.html

Saturday, October 26, 2002 

Broadband and copyright

The idea that overcoming the digital copyright mess is
crucial to broadband adoption seems to have become
conventional wisdom. I first saw this argument in a piece by
Larry Lessig in the Industry Standard. He was using it to
point the finger of blame at the content owners. As the
article linked above shows, though, the content owners use
the same argument to blame the greedy technology industry
for balking at the digital rights management technologies
that will user in movies on demand. 

I think both sides are mistaken. Digital entertainment will
be a big part of the broadband market, but we should be
skeptical any time someone tells us they can foresee a
"killer app". Video on demand is actually a hoary example of
an app that didn't kill, despite lavish funding and high
expectations. It was the centerpiece of the failed video
dialtone networks of the 1990s, remember? 

Real killer apps tend to surprise people. No one in the
early 1990s thought that interoperable email would be the
driver of the Internet boom. And who would have predicted
that the most successful of the countless Internet startups
was the one that made it easy for people to swap Pez
dispensers? eBay looks obvious only in hindsight. 

Broadband isn't an application; it's a platform. No one
magic bullet will suddently convince everyone to adopt it.
That's also the fallacy of legislation such as the
Tauzin-Dingell bill that thinks one regulatory change,
whether deregulating the incumbent phone companies or
regulating them more, will transform the market overnight.
We can do things that will speed up or slow down broadband.
The difference matters to investors and to companies seeking
to capitalize on the broadband opportunity. It's dangerous,
though to set up a straw-man broadband nirvana and fight an
all-or-nothing battle about it. 

There will be killer apps on the broadband platform.
However, I suspect online multiplayer gaming, personal
videoblogging, and on-demand do-it-yourself and
personal-improvement videos will rank far above downloadable
movies on the list. 

Don't get me wrong. By insisting on extreme restrictions on
content, the copyright holders, especially in the movie
industry, have done a disservice to their customers and to
the economy. There's an attainable middle ground that
addresses realistic concerns about piracy, while no throwing
the baby out with the bathwater. I personally think the
content owners' intransigence is the primary reason we
haven't gotten there. Yet both sides are guilty of
ratcheting up the doomsday rhetoric instead of negotiating.
And that's why the "killer app" question matters. 

If you think your opponents are the only thing standing in
the way of immediate ubiquitous broadband adoption, you're
going to fight tooth-and-nail for your point of view. If you
have a healthy humility about your ability to foresee killer
apps, you'll do what the founding Internet technologists
did. They built a network on the principle of end-to-end,
meaning that the network didn't pre-suppose the
applications. Now, more than ever, we should adhere to this
approach.