Intellectual Property Affects K-12 Students Too

My oldest daughter was asked to enter a national contest through her school with some photos she created, sponsored by the National Parent Teacher Organization. Last night they sent home a waiver form that I had to sign. After my daughter read the waiver, she was concerned and asked me to look at it. After looking it over, I was a bit alarmed. The provision that raised red flags for me was:

I grant to PTA an irrevocable, unlimited license to display, copy, sublicense, publish, and create and sell derivative works from my work submitted for the Reflections Program.

OK. I'm not under any delusion to think that my daughter or any other student should be paid or recompensed for submitting to a contest, nor am I contesting that the PTA shouldn't have the right to redistribute or derive the works. What I am contesting is that there isn't a single provision in the waiver that states that they will do so with the condition of proper attribution to the author for the original and any derivative works. Let me go on the record by saying that I don't believe that the PTA would ever act in a malicious way, nor are they trying to profit from students' creative work. In fact, the opposite is quite true - they are encouraging kids to be creative, and I applaud that heartily. Nonetheless, after working with numerous publishers on IP Rights issues, this is a sticky issue. My main point is that even though my daughter is in the K-12 school system and participating in a school function doesn't mean that any creative endeavor she pursues shouldn't be protected.

The way out, in my view, is that PTA should seriously consider that any waiver for this activity be governed by the Creative Commons License. It basically states that the author of the work grants others the rights to use, sell, derive the work, provided that the user must include proper attribution to the author of that work. It gives the PTA broad rights on how it can use these creative works, without the kids (my daughter) giving up all her rights to the work entirely.

For me, this is just another indicator that IP Rights are becoming more and more important, and that we need technology (ODRL, and other platforms) to support it. We've built such technology.

SOPA Will Be Our Generation’s McCarthy Witch Hunt

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Joseph McCarthy was determined to eradicate the Red Scare by accusing numerous Americans of treason and being communists.  It resulted in many actors being blacklisted, and resulted in the now infamous question to the “Hollywood Ten” from the House Committee on Un-American Activities – “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”  They exercised their 5th Amendment rights and refused to answer the question, principally because they felt their First Amendment rights were being impinged.

In its current form, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) would allow the Department of Justice and Copyright holders to seek injunction against websites that are accused of enabling, facilitating or engaging in copyright infringement.  It doesn’t stop there:  It would force search engines to remove all indexes for that site, mandate that ISPs block access to the site, and require 3rd party sites like PayPal from engaging or transacting with the offending website.  All because the copyright holder (or DOJ) makes an accusation.  The burden of proof is on the ISPs, the search engines and the 3rd party vendors to show that the “offending website” is not violating any copyright (So perhaps Congress should consult the 6th Amendment).   The implications are severe even for websites that reference these infringing sites.  They could be shut down too.

Let’s be clear, I’m not condoning piracy of any kind.  Intellectual Property vis-à-vis copyright is the coin of the realm of many companies, even whole industries like Publishing, Media, Software, and yes, the Entertainment world, and they should protect their assets. They should derive value and profit from their IP.  An author who pours their heart into a publication, or an artist whose performance I like should be paid.  Likewise, content producers – studios, publishers, media companies – should be able to garner payment for their role in providing content.  But they are looking at the whole piracy issue the wrong way.

Brute-force tactics to protect copyright have been epic failures.  DRM approaches don’t work.  In fact, they incite piracy, and worse, they harm the very companies they try to protect.  In 2007, Radiohead released their album “In Rainbows” DRM-free.  A year later, they had sold over 1.75 million copies and 1.2 million fans would buy tickets to their show.   Bottom line:  Locking down content doesn’t protect copyright holders.  Instead, DRM tactics will end up frustrating consumers who legally purchase content but can’t use it or copy it to a new device and, as a result, diminishes revenue.  And at that point, the opportunity cost of future purchases with the same DRM constraints will grow higher and higher.  Media, publishing and entertainment executives know that DRM has failed, and feel that their only recourse is through SOPA.

There will always be a small percentage of consumers who will use pirated content.  But it needn’t be a negative sum game.  In some cases, it should be written off as a business cost in order to generate more revenue:  a pirated song, might lead to the offending consumer to purchase a ticket to a concert, or to the next movie because they can’t wait.  Yet, to prevent wholesale piracy, technology exists today that can protect copyrighted content:  XMP (even ODRL can be serialized into XMP), digital fingerprinting for starters.  By using these, along with other tools that can scan the internet for matching assets, asset producers can identify and isolate pirated copies.  Then they can go after the offending sites directly. 

SOPA won’t stop piracy, but it will impact everyone’s access on the Internet.  And in that vein, SOPA legitimizes the piracy of 1st Amendment rights, much in the same way that McCarthyism censored free though in the 1950s, simply by accusation of copyright infringement. 

NOTE:  The views expressed in this post and on this blog are my own.  They do not reflect the views of my employer, its employees or its partners. 

IPRM != DRM

Over the last year, I've been developing strategies that allow publishers to define and identify IP Rights. The big difference between digital rights management (DRM), and IP rights management IPRM is that DRM is about locking down assets to mitigate against piracy. IPRM is about identifying and calculating clearance to use assets for any given context, and enabling publishers to make informed decisions about using specific assets.

ODRL, or Open Digital Rights Language, is a well-established, robust, extensible XML markup designed specifically for this purpose. At it's core is the ability to define relationships between parties, assets, and permissions (i.e., print, display, execute). But it's real power is the ability to express complex permissions that include conditions and constraints. For example, "a licensee can use an asset in a printed book, but the print run is limited to 2,000 copies, and the asset creator must be given proper attribution and will receive two copies of the book prior to its release", or "the asset can be used in print, except that it can't be distributed in North Korea".

This is powerful, and gives publishers the capability to monitor and evaluate rights clearance while the product is in development. Using an XML Database and XQuery, it's relatively trivial to calculate clearances for all assets for a product and to display the information in a dashboard. Editors can monitor the progress of rights clearances against all assets and determine whether to acquire additional rights to use assets that haven't been cleared, or to use other assets instead. Publishers can also track asset usage to ensure that the proper royalties are paid. It also helps publishers in "what if" scenarios: they can easily determine the cost and feasibility of adapting a product for a different market, which will tell them how many of the existing assets are cleared for use in that market and how many remain that either need additional clearance or should be replace with other assets.

Another scenario we're working on is using ODRL for wholly-owned assets. Publishers frequently commission third parties to produce photos, images, and other rich media for which the publisher retains the rights to. They want to reuse these assets for obvious cost savings, however, they don't want to over-expose assets. Frequently, editorial teams are primarily focused on one project or program, and have little insight as to what others are doing, so it's quite possible that an image could be used by more than one product at the same time. Not that this is always a bad thing, but it can lead to over-exposure. Using ODRL to manage access to assets, using embargo dates and other usage information, editorial groups can quickly make informed decisions whether to use an asset or look for another.

Pretty cool stuff