The registration of content has been one of the DMP efforts for quite some time (see AD#5). Recently the twentieth General Assembly (GA20) appointed the National Information Agency of the Republic of Korea as the DMP Content Registration Authority.

On 12th December Joe Benso from RegisteredCommons has been invited by Creative Commons to participate in it’s Second Technology Summit. In this event a standardization initiative for copyright registry interoperability called therefore OSCRI (Open Standards for Copyright Registry Interoperability) will be promoted. To me their Declaration of Intent looks good, although they are reinventing the wheel. In DMP we had these discussions long time ago.

Joe Benso’s presentation will contain some slides which I prepared to explain the DMP approach. I hope that this presentation will help, although I have doubts, because I know that some Creative Commons people are sceptical about DMP. I suppose that they just think that DMP is not important for their strategy of creating their own web-based eco-system for managing rights. CC are standardizing their Rights Expression Language in W3C while DMP uses ISO/MPEG as a standards body.

Neither DMP nor CC will give up their standards, so the market will decide which of the competing standards will be adopted. Still, for interoperability’s sake, the registration of content (a basic Function in the context of the DMP Value-Chain) should be based on common protocols.

Meet me at the Communia workshop.

I attended an art performance today in Berlin. GEMA is a German Collective Management Society (CMS). In their Declaration Form for Original Works they ask to give the length of individual samples on extra sheets. The German artist Johannes Kreidler registered - as a live performance event - a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

Kreidler arranged his demonstration to protest against in his opinion absurd provisions that even the smallest quotes of other works must be declared to the societies. According to his statement this licensing model discourages the use of new technologies which enable creators to distribute and recycle cultural goods on a large scale.

It took about half an hour for Kreidler’s assistant to unload the 70,200 forms from the van and carry them to the building - Kreidler’s DoS attack managed to block the entrance of the building. However, GEMA appreciated the performance and invited us to the conference room on the top of their building. In the following discussions the GEMA spokespersons made very clear that as a collective management society they represent the commercial interests of their members and that their primary objective is to maximize the returns for a commercial exploitation of a work.

I asked if a GEMA member could license a work for non-commercial exploitation - e.g. by making it available on her private web site under a Creative Commons non-commercial license - in order to encourage the re-use of parts of her work. The GEMA representative answered along the lines that non-commercial usage is not in the interest of GEMA, but in principle it should be legal and possible for GEMA members to make available samples for free.

A lawyer needs to check this in the GEMA membership agreement, but if it’s true it looks like an interesting solution - as a consequence GEMA members could upload their sounds - not songs - to Freesound, a service that encourages the sharing of sound. This would resolve the problem of recycling cultural goods, because creators of musical works could decide to only register songs (”complete” works) with GEMA and at the same time register their sounds (”incomplete” works) with a Registration Agency for commons content (e.g. RegisteredCommons).

Julia Seeliger took some nice photos and 3SAT will broadcast an interview with Kreidler in Kulturzeit tonight.

Jiwa is a music portal which has been launched in March. It’s noteworthy that a major label (Universal France) supports an online service which gives away music for free.

Playing Jiwa tracks is legal, because the rights have been cleared. Jiwa’s business model is based on collecting data about their users’ musical taste. The user profiles are sold to advertisers. A share of the advertisement revenues will be paid to the rights holders (e.g. the major labels). Finally the music industry has discovered the Free-TV business model on the Web!

Jiwa’s business model reveals only half of the story. Until today the rights collecting societies (e.g. CISAC) are managing the copyright for artists and labels. An author who is a member of a society will receive a small fee for every copy of his work, because the societies collect levies from the manufacturers of blank media (e.g. CDs, USB sticks) and broadcasters (e.g. radio stations). See this beautiful diagram illustrating the music business model published by De:bug some time ago.

The societies’ practice would lose it’s justification if users could pay directly for the rights to play and copy music. An open standard for micropayments like one that is developed within DMP could make them completely obsolete, because creators and end-users don’t need intermediaries to exchange “value expressions”.

However, in the case of Jira it is very unlikely that this development will happen. One of Jiwa’s business angels is the CTO of Fasttrack DCN, the company that developed the technical infrastructure for CISAC and BIEM. The collective management societies’ war chest is well stocked. Services like Jiwa can be considered part of their rearguard action.

I will attend the Communia conference on Public Domain in the digital age, because I am the co-author of a paper on The Value of Registering Creative Works.

The question why an author should register a work at all is rendered obvious by the conference title “Public Domain in the Digital Age”. A while ago I argued that Copyright is misused by people who are anxious to appropriate public knowledge and call it private property. Isn’t it a contradiction that now I argue that it can be valuable that people can register a work by associating a machine readable identifier with a complex idea?

I notice that in a digital media environment which is increasingly dominated by private interests, such Autonomous Domains could become necessary to defend free public access to content. Of course, at first this may look like overkill, but with a distributed infrastructure for managing copyright, users could register works from the Public Domain and by releasing them under a CC license make sure that they can be found and accessed easily.

I nominated DirectFB as a candidate for the Sourceforge Community Choice awards, because this project is crucial for keeping the technology of digital media devices and services open to individual users. DirectFB is dedicated to creating a truly open standard for graphics, middleware and audiovisual applications for CE devices. The DirectFB 1.0 specification has been adopted by the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) as an industry standard. Major CE manufacturers are CELF members.

This afternoon I arrived in Mountain View. After a walk to my hotel from the Caltrain station I felt that this town is not made for pedestrians. Tomorrow the ELC 2008 conference starts and I don’t intend to pay for a taxi every day. And a local public bus system exists, but it would take hours to cross the relatively short distance to the Computer History Museum.

I thought that a bike would be cool. The hotel concierge called a bike shop in Stanford which rents bikes, but they would charge 60 Dollars for three days and this definietly exceeds my budget. So I went to my hotel room, googled for ‘used bike mountain view‘ and the first hit brought up the Bicycle Exchange | Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition helps needy families and individuals by repairing and donating used bicycles to our partner community service organizations. A warehouse and workshop is fully outfitted with storage, repair stands and tools for year round operation.

Well, I am an individual and I need a bike for three days… so I called Dave, who’s phone number can be found on the website. I reached him in the middle of a meeting - later I learned that he is a physicist conducting research on solar energy - but anyway he told me that of course he could lend me a bike and I should pick it up at his garage later that day.

So now I am a proud cyclist of a mint green Koga Miyata bike from the 80ies that purrs like a cat and speeds around the corners of Mountain View. It seems that through a link between the physical space and the digital space the White Bicycle Plan has been revived by some activists in the Silicon Valley. It’s not the old Provo dream to give away bicycles to the public. Dave gave me a lock and I deposited some money. The new concept is that likeminded people build communities and share goods - not only data in the digital space but also bikes in the physical space.

Wikipedia writes on Communalism:

???????? ????? ????????In many parts of the world, communalism is a modern term that describes a broad range of social movements and social theories which are in some way centered upon the community

The Bicycle Exchange is a good example that Communalism works, because it proves that a community of people which is connected through the digital space can really change the physical world for the better.

I discovered an interesting blog posting by Yihong Ding, a student from the Brigham Young University. The article is noteworthy because it shows that even in the blogosphere there are good reasons for asserting and protecting the copyright of data.

Yihong mentions the initiative of Data Portability and introduces the new concept of “Resource Portability”:

As we have discussed earlier, the central issue is how to allow users managing their “owned” resources properly. Improving the portability of Web data is a very important step towards this general request; but it is not the general request yet. To reach the eventual goal, we need to implement a new mechanism that well manages ownership, beyond portability, of data. Moreover, this ownership management issue is not only about data, but also about other resources such as services. Thus I am more favorite to the term “resource portability” than the “data portability.”

The key of resource portability is the switch of ownership over resources instead of the deployment of resources. For instance, when a user make a comment on a blog, who should own this comment, the commenter or the blog owner? By default, the current mechanism is that the one who owns the physical storage space of the comment owns the comment. Most of the time, the comment belongs to the blog owner. Many other times, however, the comment may actually be owned by a third party who provides the space for the blog owner. In very few extreme cases, the commenter actually owns the comment. This reality theoretically contradicts to the comment logic that the one who makes the comment (i.e. the commenter) should be the unquestionable owner.

So why is it important that a commenter owns his blog comment? Yihong suggests that “the commenter has the full control of updating or even deleting the comments based on their own interest”. In my opinion this makes a lot of sense, because for several reasons an author might want to revise or even withdraw what he wrote in public. Ownership over Resources means that the author keeps the copyight of his content, even if he has to publish it on a technical platform he can not control.

Of course, Resource Portability reminds me of many ideas we discussed on the DMP mailing list.

The Autry National Center is a museum in Los Angeles that “explores the experiences and perceptions of the diverse peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inform our shared future”.

Today I visited this place together with Phil and Bud. A map in the exhibition displays that North America was colonized in the form of communities sharing common interests and beliefs. This map made me aware of the parallels between American colonialism and the recent developments of the web. As a matter of fact, more and more companies spend money to build web communities around certain topics - on recent example is dove.msn.com.

These commercial Web 2.0 communites may serve as another example for a process called Electronic Colonialism, a term that was coined by Tom McPhail:

Electronic colonialism theory explains how mass media are leading to a new concept of empire. It will not be one based on military power or land acquisition but one based on controlling the mind. It is a psychological or mental empire. It is an evolving global “Empire of the Mind”. The global media are collectively influencing the minds, attitudes, values, and languages of individuals around the globe.

On the blog Rosenblumtv I discovered a brilliant article on Electronic Colonialism through TV. Projects like dove.msn.com prove that this form of colonialism has finally entered the Web. As I wrote in a previous posting, brands can dominate communities. Maybe I am the last one who got it but I found it really enlightening to understand that it’s the brands and the Web 2.0 companies building commercial Web communities which are powering the development of the Web towards Electronic Colonialism.

Last June I wrote about my objections to Creative Commons recommending Adobes’s Extensible Markup Platform (XMP) as the preferred format for embedded metadata.

This article from Bill Rosenblatt’s excellent DRM Watch called my attention to Adobe’s next step of introducing their new DRM system: the Flash Media Rights Management Server.

One of their marketing people wrote:

Adobe is driving a fusion of TV and the Internet with Adobe Media Player, Flash Media Server, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization.

Wow… this sounds promising and the architecture of their system looks interesting (see this diagram from their datasheet).

Of course I am curious. I want to play with it. Lets have a look… first I need to download their Adobe Flash Media Development Server 3. There is a version for Linux available, so at least there is a chance that I can run it on my computer. Then I need to grab the Adobe Media Player which requires Adobe AIR.

Finally, I need the Rights Management Server, but unfortunately this component isn’t available for download - I have to fill a form to be contacted by a Flash Media Rights Management Server specialist.

Hmm… maybe I will contact them another time.

Anyway, this article by one of Adobe’s product managers provides some interesting insights about Adobe’s strategy.

To be sure, content owners and developers can continue to deliver high-quality video without any protections or limitations to access of any kind (such as with Creative Commons licensing) through Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Media Player, and Adobe AIR. You can deliver video either embedded into your SWF, as a separate video file progressively downloaded from a web server, or through Flash Media Server. Considering that Flash Player has achieved over 98 % penetration on the desktop, this is the easiest way to get your free videos to the largest audience.

Moreover, content owners enjoy additional options with Flash Media Server to help protect where and when their videos are viewed, such as domain access control, authorization adapters, SWF verification, and RTMPE. Flash Media Rights Management Server introduces a new set of options for developers and content owners to protect their content.

In other words Adobe’s strategy is:

• User generated content e.g. published on Youtube resulted in a nearly 100 percent penetration of Adobe’s Flash Player
• Creative Commons actively promotes Adobe’s XMP standard
• One day content creators may wish to be paid for their work. Adobe’s document Using digital rights management suggests that this can be easily done through identity-based licensing, using the same Media Player that was previously given away for free
• However, the Adobe Rights Management Server, which is a key component of this platform will not be given away. Whoever wants to set up commercial video distribution services will have to pay license fees for Adobe’s server software

I don’t claim that Adobe’s strategy is immoral. Actually, it’ quite common. What I don’t understand is that the Creative Commons developers support a development that will lead to a situation where content creators will have to pay license fees to an intermediary software manufacturer if they want to be paid for their work. Open Source developers should rather support the development of the Chillout platform, which will be the foundation of a free platform to conduct content related business on the internet.