<nettime> The Return of DRM

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

In early 2007, Steve Jobs (of all people!) concluded in his 'Thoughts on 
Music' that "DRMs havenât worked, and may never work" [1]. Soon after, one 
label after the other started selling music in "unstricted" [2] formats, 
and  there was much celebration about the death of DRM. And, there were 
lots of reasons see things this way: Digital Rights Management Systems were 
very unpopular with the public. People hated them. Plain and simple. And 
they were technically unstable, because the encryption, once released to 
the public, was regularly broken within a few days. And attempts to re-
engineer the entire computer operating system to make DRM possible -- 
Windows Vista -- turned out be be equally unpopular and fraught with 
internal problems.

Fast-forward three years. Increasingly, our data is up in the clouds. The 
decentralized architectures for digital production of the 1990s are being 
phased-out. Google is pushing an operating system (Chrome) were all data is 
being stored online and virtually nothing remains on the computer. The 
device which individuals own is being reduced to a relatively dumb 
terminal. The apple IPad, it seems, is optimized for consumption (and thus 
hailed as the savior of the old, consumer oriented media industries).

Much of online social interaction and production takes place on vast, 
centralized platforms. The older DIY approaches -- from mailing lists to 
independently run networks such as Indymedia and even p2p networks -- are 
fading away and are supplanted by super-professional service approaches. 
There are lots of reasons, and some of them very good ones, for this 
development. That's not my concern at the moment. 

More remarkable is that part of this development is the return of DRM. This 
time, not out in the open, accessible to the user, but completely hidden, 
built into the deep structure of the platforms themselves. The case in 
point here is YouTube. It has morphed from a freewheeling platform where 
users could share whatever they wanted, to a highly controlled system, 
where all content is scanned and mointored for copyright violation. 
According to YouTube itself, this works the following way [3]:

> Rights holders deliver YouTube reference files (audio-only or video) 
> of content they own, metadata describing that content, and policies 
> on what they want YouTube to do when we find a match. 
> 
> We compare videos uploaded to YouTube against those reference files. 
> 
> Our technology automatically identifies your content and applies 
> your preferred policy: monetize, track, or block. 

As they conclude it: "It's up to you." Which sounds great, it's up to you, 
until one realizes, that are not speaking to us, but to the big content 
owners.

Much of the work done by YouTube and other platforms has been to put the 
content industry back in control, even though it's a control controlled by 
the platform providers. So there is considerable tension among the old and 
new players in the media industries, but as they work out their 
differences, users are becoming becoming more precarious, more dependent, 
and more controlled. And the tool to do this is ubiquitous DRM. Each and 
every file on YouTube is processed through their DRM and, of possible, made 
entirely dependent on arbitrary decisions of content owners, who can now, 
at any moment, make disappear files that include portions of their content. 

A few days ago, Constantin Film decided to use their option and had all 
films which contained portions of their Hitler melodrama "Downfall 
(Untergang)" deleted from YouTube. There were hundreds of clips, since 
changing the subtitles of the scene where Hitler realizes that the war was 
lost had become a subgenre in itself. [4] This DRM systems know no fair use 
exemption. Control is total. There is no problem of the files being re-
uploaded, the system is effective, real-time and scales effortlessly. 

And the better YouTube and others become at this, the more pressure will be 
applied on those platforms which have not yet implemented something 
similar. Which, it seems easy to predict, will lead to a further 
concentration in this already highly concentrated field.

Of course, individually each of us can be smart enough to avoid these 
things, and many of us are members in closed file-sharing communities that 
function without such restrictions. But, socially, we can see how control 
is creeping back, how DRM is becoming part of the infrastructure, and how 
it is affecting our speech and culture in ways that are neither predictable 
nor accountable. With a flip of a button, one which you have no access to, 
all your nice little remixes can disappear, even if they were online for a 
long time. It's all up to them!


Felix


PS: Of course, there is a Hitler parody of this removal up online. Just not on Youtube.
http://www.vimeo.com/11086952

How long will it take vimeo to implement their own DRM?





[1] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

[2] mp3, is, of course, a proprietary format, and thus restricted, but most 
people were only interested in copy-restrictions, and not patent issue.

[3] http://www.youtube.com/t/contentid 

[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/attack-on-hitler-
parodies-now-newest-front-in-copyright-wars.ars






--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:
*|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009
*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 
*|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 


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