So, I finally got around to listening to a talk by Michael Ayers. Mr. Ayers is an attorney for Toshiba and he gave a talk at the University of Southern California last month. For the most part, he’s a reasonable guy. He’s a lawyer and so takes a fairly pragmatic view of the situation. Like most lawyers, he seems to accept the law as it is and talk about what can be done within it.
His job, as he explains, is to represent the interests of a consumer electronics company in the standards bodies for things like DVD-CCA and other rights-restricting technologies that Hollywood is shoving down our throats. In other words, the guys who, as Cory Doctorow says, are trying to encode in silicon what a family unit looks like.
While I was listening to the audio, I heard the most amazing thing. The discussion turned to the future standards that are being defined for things like High Definition broadcasts and DVD formats. Mr Ayers said he was reasonably certain they could create a system that would allow you to do things that you traditionally can do now, but not allow things that are outside “the norm.”
Now, I know what he means. I.e., he wants you to be able to watch a movie in both the living room and the bedroom. Perhaps, he wants you to be able to take a movie to a friend’s house and watch it there (as long as you don’t leave a copy), etc. But, anything else like ripping the movie to an unprotected format that can be played on Linux, well, that’s not really traditional, so no.
What really struck me about this comment was how much of today’s technology would not exist if that had been the stance the consumer electronics companies took twenty years ago. Think about it:
- The Phonograph: Was being able to listen to music without sitting in front of the musician a “normal, traditional use”? Nope. The artists fought to stop phonographs, but the best they got was compulsory licensing.
- The VCR: Was being about to watch a television show at a different time than it was broadcast a “normal, traditional use” of television? Nope. The VCR allowed people to manage their media in a new way. The studios hated it, but they couldn’t stop it.
- The MP3 Player: Was being able to listen to your entire music collection while jogging a “normal, traditional use” of CDs? Nope, but again, no stopping the march of progress.
I’m sure there are many more examples, but the point is that the major advances in the wealth of both the consumer electronics industry and the content industry have come about by creating a new thing. If we’ve now decided that we aren’t going to create any more new things, things the content industry doesn’t like (and they never liked any of the previous things when they happened), then we’ve just declared an end to innovation.
If I had stock in Toshiba, I’d sell it. And any other consumer electronics company stupid enough to sacrifice their future to satisfy the school yard bully in Hollywood.