AKMA’s Random Thoughts

How It Stands

The morning of the last day of DigIDW dawns, and it’s a good time to take stock. I think the conferenence has succeeded admirably in several ways. Predictably, it has usefully brought together the official Major Players in the DigID industry—which itself will catalyze a bunch of processes and energies. The conference also brought together a cadre of minor players, helping construct networks and grapevines which compass and penetrate the interests of the Major Players (which will catalyze a bunch of processes that may spur or impede the progress of DigID).

I’m disappointed in several ways, too, and I think this doesn’t reflect negatively on the amazing work that the DigIDW people have accomplished in bringing this conference together and making it fly. The heavy emphasis on technological and business solutions, though, has overshadowed on-the-ground users.

But users count. Users are people, they are subjects, they’re the center of all the interests that converge at this conference, and they are not simply nodes where information converges. People will respond to DigID initiatives not on the basis of disinterested reason or of a fascination with groovy things technology can do. People have been trained by years of popular culture to harbor a deep suspicion of DigID—and probably for good reasons. When gargantuan corporate concerns work out DigID solutions without deep engagement with civilians’ attitudes, they only amplify the likelihood that their deep investment in particular devices will encounter resistance whose scale they haven’t begun to estimate.

Users, people, count most fundamentally because the impulses that generate any interest whatever in DigID derive from the needs and concerns of users; without users, the topic is moot. Users (especially naive users) will make or break proposed DigID mechanisms, and a conference on DigID ought to keep the technologists’ feet close to the fire of popular sentiment.

My second disappointment involves the ways that the big corporations present here have addressed the radical changes at work in the spheres of digital reproduction and distribution. The leaden inheritance of copyright law has dominated the presentations and panels, where spokespeople for more flexible, adaptive responses to digital distribution have mostly had to raise their questions from the floor. (The interactive politics of the conference thus reproduce the distributive politics of technology: corporations on the spotlit stage, pirates harrying them from the margins.)

This is not about “piracy”; it’s about dealing with the digital transition on digital technologies’ own terms, rather than trying to constrict digital technologies to the capacities of analog technologies. The entrenched interests and their apologists try to limit the discussion to terms and legal concepts that derive their cogency from industrial conditions that no longer obtain, rather than trying to respond to the transformative effects of digital distribution by transforming their missions and business models.

That strikes me as a short-term, dysfunctional tactic. Digital distribution will transform (not simply “change”) businesses that have depended on analog reproduction and distribution for their revenue. As Doc says this morning,

It's only natural for the industry to protect itself. But there also needs to be some introspection about the changed market conditions that invite the piracy in the first place. The Net and the CD-R are facts of market life now. What the industry is trying to protect is an obsolete and overpriced distribution system.

I wish that this conference and the businesses that have gathered here demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with that transformation, rather than gazing fixedly at the hypnotic swinging pendulum of “intellectual property.”

Posted by AKMA at October 11, 2002 09:24 AM | TrackBack