Week 12: The IA That Quashed a War

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 8 and 9 and Conclusion; Borgmann, Introduction and Part 1

Borgmann’s reading this week promises to grow into a rigorous information-science foundation in which to root information architecture, and next week I’ll begin examining the conjunction of his work with IA. For this week, though, I can’t resist the provocations of Burnett and Marshall as they describe the distinctive characteristics of the online music industry. Since they wrote too early to see the evolution of the iTunes music store, I’ll apply some of their ideas to iTunes and see if any characteristics of online music consumers can be extrapolated.

Burnett and Marshall sum up their critique of the music industry’s response to Napster in three points (p. 193). The first and second are closely related: they are the industry’s underestimation of the impact of the Internet on their business, and the studios’ choice to see MP3 and Napster as threats and not opportunities. Both points exemplify a mistaken and unprofitable philosophy of change: “How can we continue to do business as usual as everything changes around us?” Studios, like other businesses (and like libraries), ought instead to have asked, “How can we stand at the vanguard of this change and be ready when mainstream consumers demand digital services?”

The studios never did develop their own business model to deal with MP3s; other entrepreneurs did it for them. KaZaA, YouTube, and the Pirate Bay have each tolerated or encouraged widespread piracy in their attempts to develop commercial models that would flout the studios entirely. Pandora, Rhapsody, iTunes, and others have taken a different tack, negotiating with studios for the right to play or out-license their songs legally. Stores like iTunes have effectively stepped into the digital niche of the physical retailer, doing the work of salesmanship while artists and studios produce new work to license.

Why iTunes took so long to appear on the music scene is a question that would consume a much longer paper than this weekly response. In large part, however, the answer must be that studios hoped that the Internet and its challenges would go away and leave them to their profits of the 1990s. Even today, studios’ willingness to license music online is only grudging, and came about from desperation to steal market share back from pirate sites rather than from their own innovative proclivities.

But come about it did: piracy is almost as easy today as it was in the days of Napster and KaZaA, yet iTunes has crafted a successful business out of selling songs for $0.69 to $1.29. iTunes does well even though its songs are licensed and not bought. Whether studios and artists do proportionally well is, predictably, a matter of some dispute, but both Metallica and its label Elektra clearly make more money when I buy “Enter Sandman” from iTunes than when I download it from the Pirate Bay.

Why do music fans pay money for licensed music from iTunes rather than downloading music free of license from the Pirate Bay? I suspect that part of the answer – but only a small part – is that fans want to support the artists they listen to. Another part – but again, only a small part – is that fans fear retaliation for piracy, though anti-piracy lawsuits against consumers are still uncommon. The most important part of the answer, by far, must be that iTunes is a nice piece of software. The architecture of iTunes and its store encourage easy navigation, search, and downloading in a way that pirate sites do not. iTunes’ built-in ability to organize and play music likewise advantages it over the Pirate Bay, which operates strictly on a bring-your-own-software basis. In the end, the copyright wars between studios and fans have calmed not because of legal settlements – still ongoing – but because of great information architecture that makes fans able and willing to pay for music.

Perhaps the conclusion of this week’s reading, then, is that when an Apple information architect is asked what he does for a living, he might answer “I end copyright wars!”

Week 11: Election Day

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 5-7

In contrast to the polar bear book, an information setting where I often felt I lacked important context, Web Theory puts me in mind of a thousand different responses: enthusiastic agreements, vigorous ripostes, and occasional moments of eyebrow-raising realizations about how much the Internet has changed since 2003. This week I’ll take advantage of today's date – Election Day – to discuss the interface between politics and the issues of Chapter 7.

In their treatment of copyright issues on the Internet, Burnett and Marshall successfully make the crucial distinction between creators and copyright holders. Plaintiffs in key intellectual property suits are typically publishers and other firms, not the individuals who created the property at issue. Especially egregious examples of such firms have abounded in the news recently. One is Righthaven LLC, a group that has systematically purchased the copyright to stories in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in order to sue weblogs that have quoted from these stories. Another is the U.S. Copyright Group, which hires itself out to movie producers to sue thousands of unnamed defendants accused of illegally downloading movies via BitTorrent. Watchdog groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Ars Technica have found such suits socially and legally problematic; for current purposes, the most salient point is that the original creators of the material at issue are nowhere to be found in the legal proceedings.

When politicians make copyright law, then, the most vigorous lobbying rarely comes from authors or creators, nor from the disorganized masses who benefit from copyright liberalization; rather, the loudest voices are those of copyright holders, whose financial interest in their material gives them ample incentive to seek stringency in copyright law. Congress’s most recent extension of the copyright term – to the life of the author plus seventy years – coincided with the year when Mickey Mouse would otherwise have entered the public domain, and the Walt Disney Company lobbied for the change with corresponding intensity. Yet a broad-based consensus exists across the arts and sciences that a robust public domain from which to draw information and inspiration, as well as an expansive view of “fair use” of copyrighted material, contributes crucially to the “progress of Science and useful Arts” prioritized by the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. And so the public interest is often at loggerheads with the interests of intellectual property owners.

The Internet enters this conflict partly with its promulgation of Web 2.0 tools like YouTube and Flickr, which permit everyday citizens with no acquaintance with IP law to violate copyright on a daily basis. A photo of a friend posing in front of an iPod ad, if posted to a public Flickr account, might conceivably draw a DMCA takedown notice from Apple. A cottage industry of YouTube videos that redub a few minutes of popular cartoon shows for satirical purposes have frequently received similar notices. The individuals committing the alleged infringements may well be engaging in fair use, but they lack the recourse to defend themselves from the much better funded corporations who own the intellectual property that Web users are adapting. Researchers, too, often skirt IP law when they seek to develop new technologies; DMCA lawsuits have been threatened or actually prosecuted in cases concerning security research, DVD-ripping software, and even the manufacture of universal garage door openers.

The Internet, of course, also makes actual piracy – with no pretensions to fair use – as easy as downloading the right file from The Pirate Bay. But while IP holders invest a lot of money in chasing down pirates, too many artists, scientists, and other genuine creators get caught up in the dragnet. There’s very little money protecting these individuals in comparison with what IP holders spend on lobbying and lawyering. As long as intellectual property issues continue to exist under the radar of the general public, and as long as no large organizations find it’s in their interest to step up for content creators, neither political party will find the will to challenge the status quo as copyright grows more draconian. Victories for copyright liberalizers will come in the courts, not the legislatures – and for those interested in these issues, Election Day doesn’t represent a meaningful choice between alternatives.