Watermarking DRM Could Offer New Opportunities

Many see DRM as a glass half empty and also a barrier to interoperability, others see it as a means of restricting abuse, copyright infringement and piracy. The solution may not be as black and white as many believe.

Only a few years ago we would have advocated the wholesale dropping of DRM and a position similar to that adopted by MP3 music. Today however, there is potential for a softer approach to DRM to offer great opportunities for the marketplace. 

First we must accept that the current prevailing ‘unsocial’ or encrypted DRM serves few and in fact in many cases can be broken fairly easily. The major retail channels have walked away from a common standard and have created their own DRM ‘walled gardens’. There is little point in pointing a finger at Amazon, as Apple, Kobo, Nook all have their own DRM flavours and Adobe’s ACS4 is still locked into 2006 and apparently going nowhere fast. There are even some who are now actively pursuing the establishment of DRM on HTML5.

There is watermarking, which through the provision of a sort of an ‘ex libris’ stamp, offers a softer and more social form of DRM. Some would argue that watermarking can be removed, or abused, as easily as it can be applied. However, watermarking offers visible authentication and ownership. If it were coupled to a virtual registration database then removal, or alteration, would quickly identify the file as a rogue. So in principle we have the opportunity to establish an ownership model, but what is in it for the consumer and the author and how does such a stamp offer a market opportunity?

Today it is not possible to resell a used ebook. This applies loosely to all digital files and although this is being tested by the likes of ReDigi in both the music and book markets, we remain tethered to the first sale doctrine. However, why would we not want to resell ebooks? Some would suggest a used ebook market could kill off the front list market, others that the author would see no revenues for the supplemental sales.

However, others would suggest that a vibrant used ebook market could actually stimulate the market and that offer revenues against not just the second but third, forth, fifth, etc sale of the ebook. If coupled with an authentication and audit trail, watermarking could create additional revenue for all, social information and marketing opportunities and mirror the rights on physical books. Importantly it could act as a significant barrier to pirates who would have to establish a different value proposition.

Today’s DRM is restrictive, segmented and frankly a mess but that doesn’t mean that we need to flip and go DRM free which equally may be counterproductive as it would be difficult to put the horse back in the stable once it has bolted. Alternately, we lack any watermarking standards today and this itself could inhibit the adoption of the technology.

The question is, who is seriously looking and discussing this issue today? Stumbling blindly forward with unsocial DRM is not the answer, nether is a mass exodus to no DRM.

Book Piracy: A Case of Whack-A-Mole

Last month we wrote about the issue of digital book piracy and along with others such as Peter Cox at Litopia, raised the bar on the public awareness of the issue. Today the New York Times wrote an article ‘Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web’, which again raises the agenda further.

One quote from the article which can best describe the problem was made by Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates who said “It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole, you knock one down and five more spring up.”

When Litopia raised the issue of Scribd, some said it was unfair and the site shouldn’t be targeted, as it tried and was responsive when take down notices were sent. Others said the same about Wattpad. Our defence would be to browse Scribd and see the volume of taken downs that have been actioned and where they state the file has been removed. There isn’t a takedown without an infringement!

Some say that piracy is small and only the same as shrinkage and theft in physical stores, but is that a real excuse, or merely a case of apathy?

Plead all they can, the sites simply allow any material to be posted and only if it is a know infringement, or they get a take down notice, do they respond. They may claim that taking proactive action could land them with the liability so to take no proactive action is safer. The problem is that the mechanism of the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act) is inherently flawed, as it is retrospective action and is like trying to put the cat back in the bag – its too late its out its out and having kittens!

The efforts being expended by publishers in tracking infringements is growing, with many large house having to have dedicated staff continuingly trawling, tracking and issuing take down notices. This may work for the large corporate, but is it realistic across the thousands of medium or small publishers? Some may say that it’s like giving each a shovel and asking them to all to ‘wack-a-mole’?

Today we are only talking about whole works and not even attempting to cover part works or content of sufficient size to warrant permissions. Rather than build infringement databases that just generate take down notices, why not address the problem. We are trying to manage a rights business with no rights management.

This has been raised over and over and the proposed BRR registry isn’t the answer but only part of the answer. We have bibliographic agencies who catalogue all titles. We know that you can’t resell a digital file and each rendition and manifestation is unique. We have identifiers which identify genuine booksellers, publishers, libraries. Yet we can’t join the dots up and create a proactive environment. Some may say that we let businesses hide behind ineffective DCMA.

If leadership is not taken, then we may all find that ‘Whack-a-Mole’ becomes an increasing part of the publishing business.

Copyright Infringement Consistancy?

Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom were collectively found guilty of promoting copyright infringement this week by a Swedish court. They were heavily fined and also each was sentenced to a year in prison. These were the men behind The Pirate Bay, the world's most high-profile file-sharing site.

This rare victory for the entertainment industry could have some double edge implications and now exposes the inconsistency of approach to piracy across borders and media sectors.

The Pirate Bay defendants claim that although shocked by the severity of the judgement they openly expected to loose. The fine of $4.5 million was a fraction of the $17.5 million sought and the ensuing appeal process is likely to be drawn out and long with The Pirate Bay now have nothing to loose and determined to fight on. Every piece of press creates further awareness of the dangers of piracy, the challenges of protecting copyright and also gives the pirates the publicity and market awareness they crave. Some say it also elevates them within an anti establishment sub culture.

Unlike Napster, Kazza and other from the past The Pirate Bay has been found guilty of not storing materials or distributing materials but in providing links to materials. Sunde claims that in doing this, they are not different how services such as Google and search engines work. An interesting perspective when we consider the basis of the Internet itself is based on links, indexes and search and discovery.

The book industry challenges to digital infringement have not followed the hard line of the music industry. There is the Scribd, Wattpad and eBay piracy files which are not links but hosted or sold product. Yet we see no court action, just a take down notices and slapped wrist behind closed doors. As we have said before we don’t say this is wrong but that we should have a public awareness of the files and offenders. Then there is the Great book Bank Robbery where the party challenged could be seen by many to being rewarded for their infringements. Also rewarded with something that any party involved owned and granted a monopoly of it to boot! This sends out what message?

Copyright will remain a digital battleground but consistency and education are important if the general public are to be brought onboard.

Dot2Dot

Book publishing can always learn from other media sectors. The environment may be different but the similarities are often stark and can’t be ignored. Many will try to argue that the differences are so huge that the comparison between media sectors is inappropriate, but the more we watch the media world unravel and morph from one model to another, we start to see the same or similar warning signs.

The old world created media conglomerates that controlled the channel, the creative process and focused on their market share. These grew swallowed each other up to the point where they could hardly grow any bigger. The result was that the corporate blue chip publisher ruled. This worked within the physical world where the controller of the supply chain reaped the economies of scale and the 80 / 20 economic model prevailed. However, the digital world effectively turned this upside down. As we have seen so many times, the Internet doesn’t respect corporate size and actual revenue, it respects eyeballs and potential revenue. We remember those, who ten years ago said Amazon would not survive, was over valued and the likes of Bertelsmann would crush them. The old world saw one Goose, the new world saw the Golden Egg.

Enter the omnivores who were not tied to any sector and were driven by moving technology, valued on the number of visitors and their potential pulling power, rewarded maybe by advertising. They often viewed content, on whatever format, as merely a means to an end. Also enter those from the technology sector who wanted their technology to dominate and were often focused on shifting tin or software, not content.

We now have upheaval in music, which has never recovered from Napster and continues to unravel. Newsprint and magazines could always rely on advertising. That was until the Internet stared to grab it before the newspapers could grapple with the digital shift. The film industry had a great release model that controlled what, where and when films could be seen. However, this only fuelled the pirates offer to beat both the release schedule and the price. This month gave us the ultimate piracy with the pirates even beating the release of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” , not by a day, but a whole month!

We hear one name repeatedly – Google. Their quest to make YouTube deliver stronger revenues has created new battles with the music industry bodies, such as PRS and the artists themselves. Peter Waterman’s composition ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ experienced a phenomenal 154million YouTube downloads, yet he only received £11 royalty from Google. Google now want to create Vevo.com in collaboration with Universal. But who will win from the envisaged new revenues? When Bono first suggested the marriage, he must have envisaged the artist winning, but we reserve judgement.

Google News grapples with the newspaper world on whether their use of snippets is ‘fair use’ or infringement. Some would say that they have the newspapers over a barrel, others that its time the newspapers stood up.

Google Book Search and the land-grab settlement, has had not nearly enough written about it.

When will the media sectors join up the dots?

37 Countries Negotiating a Anti Piracy Trade Deal

Last week the French Assembly passed a law that forces ISPs to disconnect those suspected of illegally sharing copyright infringing material on the ‘three strikes and out’ policy.

OutLaw.com reported today 'US outlines secretive international piracy deal' on details of a process aimed at involving ISPs (internet service providers) in fighting copyright infringement and pirated material crossing borders, has been released by the US Government.

Thirty-seven countries are negotiating a new worldwide trade deal which was originally initiated by the US and Japan in 2006 and now includes Australia, Canada, the European Commission and the EU's 27 member states, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore and Switzerland. ACTA ( Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) has been keep quiet until now but has been disclosed as part of Barack Obama's commitment to transparency in government.

The Treaty aims to harmonise what scale of activity needs to be reached before infringement becomes criminal, and what rights authorities will have to destroy material.

Wattpad Pulled From Blackberry App Store

How are sites such as Wattpad and Scribd to be controlled? Today they continue to work within DMCA and some would say hide behind the act. Anybody can literally upload anything and only when an objection from the copyright owner is received does it get taken down. By then its been read several hundred times and copied by many. Tomorrow it turns up under another name and the process starts all over again.

Today we hear from several sources that the Wattpad application has been withdrawn from the RIM service. According to Wireless and Mobile news, ‘the app was pulled by RIM while they are investigating the usage of the app. We are working with the App World team and hope to restore availability soon.’

Whatever the reasoning behind the decision we believe that Apple, RIM and others should look at the document and book sharing apps they are approving and could demand procative action. Publishers should remove all support for sites such as Scribd and Wattpad. That would be a start and would certainly wake the owners of the services up. Afterall they would want to loose those potential marketplaces.

If we cast our memory back to Napster and Kazza there was a recognition it was infringing copyrighted music but it was hard to control and even the introduction of legal downloads didn’t really work. Do we want books to go the same route? Unlike musicians authors can’t go back to merchandising and live performancesdeter. The time to act is now, not tomorrow or maybe wait in hope for legislation.

We respect that there are many legitimate uses of these sites and new writers may wish to promote or give away their content in hope of being seen or read but if we can find files in a matter of a few clicks what is the extent of the problem and what chance has anyone of policing it?

Scribd Trips Out of Litopia

Litopia After Dark started as usual last night and had a special guest – Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd. Having identified and highlighted the issue of copyright infringement in the UK media, Peter Cox had invited Adler to come on the show and discuss the issue of digital piracy on his site. Adler who had agreed, didn’t show and his direct line went straight to his answering machine and record.

Did he get the time wrong? Was he called to an urgent meeting? Did he feel that there was little to answer and little point to the exercise? We will not know what his motives were only the sound of his answering machine.

Whether we like it or not, we all have to face our critics, but more importantly some would say that we must face them when we are found to be in a questionable position. Whatever the rights or wrongs, Scribd had been found displaying copyrighted materials, which could be copied and further infringed. Scribd had an opportunity to support and been seen to support copyright protection.

Book publishing is at a digital turning point where the door of opportunity is opening, but it is also opening the door of infringement. We have seen the damage done by the pirates to other media sectors and should be taking steps to minimise the risk to book publishing. Is the threat new – no. Can we stop books being scanned – no. Can we stop infringement – no, but we can make it difficult.

So we need to ensure digital copies of books are not pirated. We will never stop the hardened copier be they malicious or professional and stopping ordinary consumers has posed a challenge to other media sectors. In these days when it costs relatively small amounts to scan and digitise books its not the digital renditions that are the threat but the physical ones. Watermarking physical copies may help but we would suggest it is inappropriate and ineffective – if they want to scan it they will.

Some would suggest that publishers such as Random House and Simon and Schuster should reconsider their new arrangements with Scribd and others until such time that they have taken proactive actions to clean up their site?

Today we operate a take down notice approach covered by laws such as the DMCA. Yes it works and often the offending material is taken down promptly, but it may be only one manifestation or instance and more importantly, its reactive not proactive. Once the cat is out the bag for a minute its likely to have many digital kittens.

We believe that unlike physical copies of books it is impossible under copyright to resell a digital rendition or make a copy of it to share with others. Obviously public domain works have different issues. So if that is correct, or we would suggest half correct, why not establish a seller licence or approved seller policy. Scribd, eBay, Wattpad whoever can block all digital renditions of books being sold, posted, linked, uploaded unless from an authorised licensed body. In a digital world this is not difficult to achieve if the will is there. Ok there will be ways around it and it may cost money, but its better than expecting thousands of copyright owners to check thousands of sites everyday and issue potentially hundreds or thousands of take down notices after the cat is out of the bag.

Exposing the Pirates

We applaud the UK Publishers Association for their development and free members access to a powerful new tool, which simplifies the process of having infringing content taken down. The tool effectively distributes the workload and leverages the benefits of information sharing between members. Members simply log, enter the details of the infringement. The system identifies the ISP, checks for repeat infringers, and automatically drafts and serves an appropriate notice.

More info at http://www.publishers.org.uk/en/home/enforcement/copyright-infringement-portal/

This is a great start. Unlike many of the other media sectors book publishing is not consolidated and there are thousands of publishers and copyright owners. Asking them all to police this is unworkable. But it goes past publishers and also impact agents and authors and they should surely also have access and share the same resource. Then we have the global position and yet more fragmentation. Finally we have the orphan works which will be unable to be defended. Who will protect them, or are they fair game for all?

If we are to have any hope in suppressing the pirates we must move from reactive measures to proactive ones.

We would go further and suggest that industry papers such as the Bookseller and PW should publish the statistics, a worst offenders top ten and raise the profile, such that it becomes uncomfortable for those merely waiting for take down notices and not doing anything to avoid them. Naming and shaming could work both ways, but we would suggest that it should also start to raise public awareness now before it becomes an epidemic. The public conscious must be raised and as proven this week in Sweden, many will wish to live within the law. The key is not to go after the individual’s but to stop their source of distribution and close down their visibility.

No one is Immune to the Pirates

As we look increasingly at the world of peer sharing, we find more and more dubious postings. One would expect them to be hidden away on unknown sites and only know by word of mouth, but they aren’t and the problem appears to be far greater than we envisaged. This last week we have highlighted the clear infrigements that are happening in eBay, others have identified them on Scribd and on following up on news about Wattpad.com we believe we have found yet more piracy of books.

Wattpad was founded back in 2006, and claims to be ‘The world's most popular ebook sharing community’ its trademarked strap line says ‘read what you like, share what you write’. It has iPhone and Blackberry apps and is obviously creating attention with them claiming to be the number 4 iPhone app in Canada and also to have ‘delivered over 150 million pages to mobile devices with millions more every month.’ ‘Using any mobile phone or the latest smartphone, you have instant access to hundreds of thousands of novels, short stories, fan fiction, essays, jokes and more. Anyone in the community can upload whatever they wish to read from.’

They clearly state in their terms:

Restricted Material
Do not submit any material that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially offensive, or is otherwise inappropriate. We will promptly remove any such material submitted to the service.

Copyrighted Material
Do not upload copyrighted material for which you do not own the rights to or have permission from the owner. If you are a copyright holder and believe any user submitted content infringes on your copyright, you may notify us here or by email at report@wattpad.com. Include a reference to the copyrighted work and contact information of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner. We will act promptly to investigate such claims.

Repeat offenders will have their accounts terminated and access revoked

It all sounds great and a novel way to share and encourage writing. When we searched we had no problem finding what clearly appeared to be in copyright material from authors such as; John Grisham, Tolkien, Margret Atwood, even ‘The Audacity of Hope’ by Barak Obama! There are also many excerpts and part works from books some with curious hyperlinks on words to sell products.

As a creative writing and sharing site we would fully support the aims of Wattpad, but it is clearly open to abuse operating within the DMCA and is yet another one to be watched by copyright owners. How can we move from reactive to proactive copyright protection?

Copyright Conundrum

Suing individuals for suspected illegal downloading of music via peer to peer is a bit like King Canute trying to hold back the incoming tide. Now 5 years and 35,000 cases later the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has apparently conceded and decided to stop suing individuals. It now has reportedly reached agreements with several Internet service providers to intervene on their behalf.

So they now shift from a lost public relations battle which had targeted individuals, included elderly couples, children, single mothers and in one instance a dead person, to one focused to look a better focused legal actions.

The RIAA will continue to monitor networks for illegal action and notify the ISPs on any findings asking them either to warn consumers or, in the case of repeat offenders, to deny access or service. The outcome is not clear today as the ISPs themselves are now starting to change their models and align closer to the content but it only takes one ISP to say no and a potentially and costly battle starts.

In January the UK’s Publishers Association is to launch a copyright infringement portal allowing publishers to pool information and identify repeat infringers. The site has been funded by a number of leading publishers and allows members will be able to log infringements which will be automatically sent to the ISP. Obviously as the content is unique then it’s the identification of repeated infringement that is key along with the visibility of the community to potential infringers. The site will obviously assist in gathering evidence for any resultant legal action.

Copyright infringement is not going away, has always existed but is now getting easier. Locking down the digital copy and preventing its abuse doesn’t stop the dedicated thief who is often willing to copy the physical and convert it. Digital watermarking is an obvious route to help deter digital piracy and monitoring but again doesn’t prevent the physical copy being used.

So where does the buck stop? Is at the individual who buys it, the seller or provider, the ISP who enables it to happen, the search engine who indexes it and enables people to find it, or all the above? There maybe a clear legal answer but even the RIAA appear to have realised that the need to be more selective and go for the point of consolidation. However the ISP may plug one hole to find another popping open next to it.

Beating up ISPs after the event is not necessarily productive and maybe the problem is that we haven’t helped bodies such as ISPs and search engines determine who owns what? Perhaps expressing the rights as we do is not enough and we now need to couple it with an individual watermarked licence to use which can be proactively detected but there again this hasn’t stopped software and games being infringed.