Friday, January 14, 2005
The usual new year predictions are out
Ed Felten's predictions for 2005 are here. A couple are worth commenting on a little:
- DRM being seen increasingly as a security/privacy risk. Which reminds me, there's an interesting article by Nic Suzor on SSRN on the relationship between privacy and copyright, particularly as it has come out in the Australian cases recently.
Actually, it also gets me thinking: I hope this particular prediction really does come true. Because Australia, in the next little while, will be drafting its new anti-circumvention laws. The greater the awareness of these privacy and security issues, the more capacity government is likely to have to make sure the laws aren't too unbalanced in favour of copyright owners. - As blogs continue to grow in prominence, we'll see consolidation in the blog world. This is a fairly risk-free prediction. Blogs are hard to maintain as a solo act, and there are benefits from consolidation, although costs too, no doubt (what do you do when your blog partner starts to dominate, and you don't agree with everything...?). My prediction would be a slightly different one: we'll see more existing prominent people take up blogging, and since blogs rest very signficantly for their audience on the prestige of the bloggers, the 'barriers to entry' will increase - it will more and more become the case that you need to either (a) have been around a long time, (b) be really prominent, or (c) be an amazingly good blogger (/writer).
- The Supreme Court's Grokster decision won't provide us with a broad, clear rule for evaluating future innovations, so the ball will be back in Congress's court. Of course, an equivalent prediction can be made for Australia: the first instance decision of Wilcox J in the Kazaa litigation is unlikely to provide a clear rule or satisfy anyone, so there will be an appeal, and every (copyright) man and his dog will have a view. If KaZaA are liable, few will have sympathy for Kazaa itself but every technology producer in this space will have legitimate cause for concern, no matter how the rule ends up being formulated. And we'll look increasingly like the most copyright-protective country around, if we hold Kazaa liable while Grokster gets off in the US. If Kazaa are not liable, the law will look like a bit of an ass, and the matter will go to Parliament. And if Kazaa are a "bit" liable, so that the court tries to force them to re-design, things could get really weird.
- Copyright issues will be stalemated in Congress: unlikely to happen here, given the dominance of a single party of both houses of Parliament. Of course, you have to wonder how much more legislation could go through, after the very significant amounts that went through last year....
- There will be no real progress on the spam, spyware, and desktop security problems. Sigh.
- DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. Yup.
- New P2P systems will marry swarming distribution (as in BitTorrent) with distributed indexing (as in Kazaa et al). Copyright owners will resort to active technical measures to try to corrupt the systems' indices. That could get really ugly. But given the doubtful legality of corrupting other people's software or computers, wouldn't the better solution be to start more law suits against individuals?
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