| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:04 | Ever since Napster, the music industry has been trying to kill filesharing. |
| 00:00:09 | Napster was this huge global party of you know... |
| 00:00:12 | Everybody suddenly had access the largest music library in the world |
| 00:00:15 | and what'd they do, well they went after Napster and shut it down. |
| 00:00:18 | Well it completely backfired, you know, they shattered Napster into millions of little pieces |
| 00:00:22 | spread across computers all around the globe. |
| 00:00:25 | And now if you want to shut it down you have to track down every single one of them |
| 00:00:28 | and turn it off, and they just can't do that. |
| 00:00:31 | They send out letters every month trying to shut down a couple here and there, |
| 00:00:34 | but it just doesn't work, you know, there are just too many, it's out of the bag now. |
| 00:00:39 | Once it's that far distributed it's really going to be be hopeless, |
| 00:00:42 | They have various technical attacks of spoofing, legal attacks |
| 00:00:47 | threatening to sue people, but it's just too late, filesharing isn't going to go away. |
| 00:00:52 | The music industry, if they want to stop file-sharing, |
| 00:00:54 | there's no central computer for them to go to and shut it down. |
| 00:00:57 | They have to go all the way to the ends of every wire, |
| 00:01:00 | and they have to snip all the cords across the globe if they want to try and stop it. |
| 00:01:04 | The network is built so that there's nobody in charge, |
| 00:01:07 | that everybody has control over their own communications. |
| 00:01:14 | So the fascinating thing about the internet is it's built around this thing called |
| 00:01:17 | the end-to-end-principle, which says that all the intelligence is at the ends of the network. |
| 00:01:21 | If I want to talk to Fred it's my computer and Fred's computer that's in charge, |
| 00:01:26 | in between there's just a bunch of wires. At a very concrete level |
| 00:01:29 | I have a wire to my ISP who has a wire to a data center somewhere, |
| 00:01:33 | who has a wire to Fred's ISP who has a wire to Fred. |
| 00:01:35 | There's no central computer in charge that you can go to and shut down and say "no filesharing" |
| 00:01:39 | They have to go and find my computer and Fred's and take us out, |
| 00:01:43 | or they have to snip all the wires across the globe. |
| 00:01:45 | There's nobody you can go to and say "shut down file-sharing!" |
| 00:01:48 | it's just not built that way. |
| 00:01:54 | The entertainment industry thinks they can solve this problem by using something called DRM, |
| 00:01:57 | which basically means locking up all their songs using encryption. |
| 00:02:01 | But there's this fundamental mistake they've made |
| 00:02:04 | which is that like if you lock up a song before you play it you have to unlock it |
| 00:02:08 | and if i'm playing it on my computer my computer has to unlock it |
| 00:02:11 | and since I own my computer I've unlocked the song. |
| 00:02:15 | It's this very obvious mistake they just can't seem to get through their heads, |
| 00:02:19 | if my computer is unlocking the song, I can tell it to make a copy when it's done unlocking it. |
| 00:02:24 | There's no way around that, and so if you see every DRM system gets broken, |
| 00:02:30 | the Apple system has gotten broken, the DRM on DVDs has gotten broken - |
| 00:02:33 | no matter what you do it's going to get broken. |
| 00:02:36 | And it's also kind of idiotic because even if the DRM systems weren't broken |
| 00:02:41 | there are lots of other ways to get movies, not just downloading it from the iTunes music store. |
| 00:02:46 | You can go out to a theatre and take a copy of a print, you can have a video camera, |
| 00:02:51 | you can have a screener that they send out to people, there's tons of ways to get this stuff. |
| 00:02:56 | Putting DRM on the handful that happen to go to consumers isn't going to change anything. |
| 00:03:01 | Instead what a lot of people have suggested is that DRM is a way of handcuffing users |
| 00:03:05 | or saying OK we'll give you our stuff, but you can only watch it five times on four machines, |
| 00:03:10 | and only watch it when we say so and we can de-activate it when we're done with it, |
| 00:03:13 | we have control over how you experience our film. |
| 00:03:17 | That makes a lot more sense, it's harder to prove obviously but |
| 00:03:21 | it's certainly much more compatible with the way that they've been behaving. |
| 00:03:24 | Network is a copy machine. |
| 00:03:26 | Every single time you do something on your computer, it makes a copy. |
| 00:03:31 | First it copies it into your computer's memory, then it copies it to your computer's CPU, |
| 00:03:35 | then it copies it out to the network, in every step along the way from |
| 00:03:39 | you to the person you're talking to it makes another copy. |
| 00:03:41 | The entire system works because it's digital and because copies are free. |
| 00:03:44 | Everything works by making copies on a computer, you're not going to stop that. |
| 00:03:49 | It's the simple economics of supply and demand. |
| 00:03:51 | If you have one of something, you can sell it to the highest bidder |
| 00:03:55 | for the highest price, whatever anybody in the world is willing to pay |
| 00:03:58 | you can sell it to them for that. |
| 00:03:59 | If you have two then you can only sell it for what the second highest bidder is willing to pay. |
| 00:04:03 | If you have millions of them the only thing you're going to be able to |
| 00:04:06 | charge for is the cost of making another copy. |
| 00:04:08 | 'Cause otherwise someone's always going to be willing to sell it for cheaper. |
| 00:04:11 | On the internet the cost of making one additional copy is free |
| 00:04:15 | the so called marginal cost is zero so everything gets driven down to free. |
| 00:04:20 | You're not going to be able to make money through the old model of selling |
| 00:04:23 | individual copies any more because there are just to many of them. |
| 00:04:25 | You're going to have to go to other schemes. |
| 00:04:28 | The entertainment industry is desperately trying to save their old business model, |
| 00:04:31 | they're going round saying how can we to patch up and continue doing |
| 00:04:35 | things the way we've done before. That's just not going to work. |
| 00:04:39 | They can try and continue this rearguard actions like DRM and lawsuits, |
| 00:04:42 | but eventually they're going to have to change their tune. |
| 00:04:47 | So there are alternatives, there are sites like Rever.com which are like Youtube, |
| 00:04:51 | except everytime an add gets shown with your movie, you get some of the money from the add. |
| 00:04:54 | The problem is that the users don't seem to care about it enough. |
| 00:04:58 | Each individual movie only makes 30 or 40 cents and it's just not worth it to you |
| 00:05:03 | to go and put it up on a smaller site like Rever when you can get the huge audience of Youtube, |
| 00:05:07 | and, you know, forget the 40 cents. |
| 00:05:09 | But these little 40 cents add up, with the millions and millions of movies on Youtube |
| 00:05:14 | suddenly we are talking about millions of dollars of revenue. |
| 00:05:17 | So you have this weird trade-off, where each little bit's not worth it enough to users |
| 00:05:23 | but on the whole companies are prepared to pay a lot of money for it. |
| 00:05:27 | There's no technical reason users can't do this for themselves, |
| 00:05:30 | but there's an economic reason which is that |
| 00:05:32 | building the software takes money and programers, |
| 00:05:35 | and the venture capitalist are only going to pour money |
| 00:05:38 | in to the things that have a high chance of return. |
| 00:05:40 | which means the centralized sites that run adds and take the money for themselves. |
| 00:05:44 | So yeah sure, it's technically possible that we could develop this distributed system |
| 00:05:47 | and in fact that was the way that the way that the internet was originally set up |
| 00:05:50 | People put their stuff on their own computers and when they hooked them up to the internet |
| 00:05:54 | people visited their own machine and they controlled their own data. |
| 00:05:57 | The fact is that could've worked, that's just as reasonable of way of doing it than ?any way else?. |
| 00:06:03 | The problem is that's just not the where the money is, and when software gets funded |
| 00:06:07 | it gets funded where the money is. |
| 00:06:09 | There are two big problems, one is technical and one is political. |
| 00:06:13 | The technical problem is that basicly computers, people's machines at home, |
| 00:06:19 | don't have the power of servers. |
| 00:06:21 | They're not on all the time, people buy this cable modems that don't have the |
| 00:06:26 | high enough upload bandwidth to be popular. |
| 00:06:29 | Cable companies have people signing user-
agreements |
| 00:06:33 | saying they can't run servers from home. |
| 00:06:34 | So if you want to do something like host a youtube video |
| 00:06:37 | it's just kind of impractical to host it off of your computer, let alone your laptop |
| 00:06:41 | that you pick up and take home with you. So it's really hard for normal people to run servers. |
| 00:06:46 | So that's a technical problem, it means |
| 00:06:48 | at some point you're going to have to upload your video to somebody's server |
| 00:06:51 | somewhere else where it is run reliably, and that means inevitably giving up a measure of control. |
| 00:06:55 | So the question that comes is who do you give the control to, and users just don't care enough. |
| 00:07:00 | Wether it's Youtube or it's Amazon or somebody who's signed an agreement with them. |
| 00:07:05 | They just don't care who they give it too, the simplest thing is the best, |
| 00:07:08 | whatever gets their movie up, that's all that matters to them. |
| 00:07:12 | I mean It sucks each time it sucks when somebody takes |
| 00:07:14 | advantage of your stuff just to make money for themselves. |
| 00:07:17 | But each time it's not enough for you to do something about it |
| 00:07:20 | each time it's OK, "oh well know they got my videos that sucks", |
| 00:07:24 | or "they got my photos that sucks" or "they got my email now that sucks" |
| 00:07:28 | They just don't put it together, there's no
tipping point |
| 00:07:31 | where you say "OK finally I am fed up and I'm not going to take it anymore! |
| 00:07:35 | I am taking back my computer!" |
| 00:07:37 | It just doesn't happen, it's another one of myriad little pains. |
