DRM - knowledge as an economic good and hierarchies in media PART ONE

So this post started as something about DRM and intellectual property a week ago but became too long...so I decided to break it down into two parts. Here is the first:
Last week there was some uproar at Digg concerning the BluRay crack code (part of the DRM scheme they are using) and the site's moderation and deletion of posts and user accounts of people who posted it. Many of the threads concerned take the F-U approach towards the RIAA and corporate America.
One more interesting and balanced post that touched upon the issue of laws as part of the underpinnings of our society and also called for proactive approaches and for people to try and suggest solutions for the issues.
Obviously this issue revolves around two critical themes - freedom of speech and intellectual property rights. Though most people tend to focus on the first i would like to look a little of the IPR issue (an easy overview of IPR can be found .
So essentially what is the big deal with IPR? Well it turns out that the crux here is the fact that ideas or knowledge are a special case of "good" in the economic sense. Why are they special - well mostly due to the fact that they can be copied without end, and if i give you my IPR i am not left with less, and also that once you expose someone to your IPR you cannot take it back. This creates a situation where (at least according to common schools of thought) if an open economy is left to its own accord there will be very little incentive for people to create any new knowledge since they spend huge resources on creating them but cannot reap the rewards.
so the classical view was to give the creators some sort of limited monopoly for using the idea and keeping other people from using it (hence patents, copy rights and trade marks).
The main problem is that the rate at which the law and big corporations have been able to adapt to the new digital economy and information age is too slow. The result is that some entities receive unreasonable IP rights that grant them say patents over doing square roots, while others (especially so in the media industry) are helpless against piracy and digital redistribution of their material.
So to the point at hand - media. Let's review the issue again. some people seem to feel that no matter what type of media we are talking about - the solution should basically be scrap DRM and let all digicontent be free...hmm. So what would be the incentive to create it in the first place?
Some more advanced ideas talk about empowering the artists by cutting the publishers out of the loop. This is already being done by some sites offering direct PayPal donations to artists. one of the things people are missing here (IMHO) is the fact if we have learned anything form the web2.0 revolution is that quality content is hard to come by and difficult to create. Taking an idea from Wikinomics: the three cornerstones of p2p, non-hierarchical co creation are:

• Object of creation is information or culture - puts low threshold on participation
• Work needs to be divisible into small chunks - so people can contribute with small effort
• Cost of re-assembly and editing needs to be low

So how does this apply here? Well obviously not all media is the same! I shuffled these ideas around a bit and suggest looking at the problem using the following filters (this approach is by no means perfect - but I will see how this pans out):

• ease of creation (what equipment is needed, how deep is the skill set, funds, need of concurrent effort vs. time deferred effort, division of labor and editing)
• criticallity of the human brain in analyzing the media (sensory inputs, cognitive vs. visceral digestion, sensitivity to distortion)
• ease of distribution (bandwidth, QoS, device and system requirements)

[ I borrow here the terminology of visceral from cognitive sciences. Namely from Donald Norman's Emotional Design]

What is the outcome? Well considering that IPR is worth the effort only when the creation is of high quality (read: not MySpace junk, not just funny flicks on YouTube or silly photos on Flicker) here is my take on it:

Text:

• Creation -written media is the easiest kind to create. It requires only thought and research (this can take years of course), but the tools of production are these days basically a simple laptop. And owing to the nature of the effort there is no real need for concurrency (e.g. - no need for 20 people to be in the same room to do this). Granted editorial effort is needed here - but at the end of the day all you need is a wiki SW or some other text editor and time - the general scope of the creation can be agreed upon and every person can be allocated a part of the work.
• Brain -our understating of written language is 100% cognitive (it requires higher brain functions to interpret the symbols and create the meaning) we are very insensitive to distortion. as an example think of the following: I can very easily read text in any font, probably in font sizes 6-50, in two languages (that's all I know), on the laptop, newspaper, small paperback, billboard, piece of paper and so on.
• Distribution -The distribution of such media is very easy - in compresses well and can be sent in small installments and easily recombined. It is mostly device agnostic

The end result is that media in the form of text lends itself to low cost creation and distribution schemes and as such will tolerate considerable distortion and changes along the way. This is evident in the fact that some blogs or community based projects are gaining respectability as a real information source (whether news, literary or analysis).

Photos and graphic art:

• Creation - high quality media of this kind requires usually more sophisticated equipment (say good quality camera, high end computer, knowledge of art, sophisticated SW, maybe lighting equipment etc.) It might also require you use a model, travel places, test out stuff and spend resources. To effectively collaborate on such a project is also quite more difficult - it is hard to create a common understanding of the general scope and look and feel of the output (the equivalent of table of content) and all people involved need to have all their technical tid bits solved (compatible SW, same viewing settings and so on). The editor of such an effort is not just changing wording and cut'n'pasting - he is literally changing your art! Concurrency might be an issue what with models, assistants, props and so forth
• Brain - our brain is much more critical in analyzing photos - we very quickly discern poor technical quality, loss of resolution, digitization artifacts and the limits of our I/O devices in contrast and color saturation and so on. Also images are not processed completely within our cognitive brain. Some of the information goes through a complicated (and yet not fully understood) mechanism that is not completely conscious - we react on this visceral level to various types of stimuli like symbols, colors, faces, general tone and so on. This part of the experience is sensitive to small changes and to the creators ability to master these facets.
• Distribution - such media requires high storage capacities, more robust transmission schemes and are somewhat device dependant (e.g. cellphone vs. TV).

So there are less large scale digital creations in this space than in text based media - thus far.

Music - well this is probably the media that started it all (with Napster). Lets look at the details:

• Creation - high quality music usually requires some special SW and/or HW (music editing SW, musical instruments, microphones, studio and so on). It also necessitates deep fundamental knowledge on how to create music. Again it is not as easy to form a skeletal structure that collaborators can use to understand how the piece should sound - so chopping up the creation is not as easily achieved. Many times concurrency of several people is needed (sound engineer, musicians)
• Brain - we interpret music very much at a subconscious level. This means that subtle differences in the music itself change the way we listen to it drastically. Also production quality (noise, balance, distortions, jitter and other artifacts) can disturb the listener in a big way.
• Distribution - serious disc space is needed, high quality compression schemes (that means R&D effort), good bandwidth and quality of service for streaming applications.

So yeah - co-created free music is possible (mainly electronic/remix), but has limits and will usually suffer form lack of resources

Video/Multimedia/Gaming - well this is no doubt the holy grail! It is basically the Photo/graphic arts/music multiplied by say 200,000 (the number of frames in a feature length film?):

• Creation - high quality requires not only serious SW and HW but also deep knowledge of all aspects of film creation since every frame counts and any problems with directing, continuity, lighting, sound or whatever are difficult to control or edit out in post processing. One usually needs tens of people concurrently to manage such a task. Although division of labor is possible it usually works within closely knit units that have deep understanding of the need and the technicalities. Over all a lengthy and extremely costly endeavor. Just to think of this in real world examples - most high quality feature films that we have learned to expect cost hundreds of millions of dollars - most of which is CGI time! World class games like WoW cost tens of millions of dollars to create!
• Brain - obviously this is the most sensitive form of media since it not only encompasses all the others but the sheer size of the data and the interconnectedness nature make these creations very sensitive to distortion and quality issues (notice how easy it is to realize you are watching a B movie just from seeing a couple of seconds...)
• Distribution - high capacity, high BW, jitter and timing issues - what more could you ask for?

Just to get everyone on the same page here - the first feature length film (I know of) to be produced and marketed virally is FourEyedMonsters which, although is highly credited and interesting is hardly at the level one expects from a tier one blockbuster.

So what is the conclusion i draw from this? Despite the advent of web2.0 and advancements in easy to use and accessible tools for collaboration and creation of media genuine high quality creations become increasingly difficult to produce as the media is more complex. IMHO any way you dice it Mission Impossible III level films cannot be made with low budgets and by sparse teams of loosely coupled individuals, and this will probably remain true for quite some time to come. So why is a large and loud group of people so disrespectful to the need of the creators to recoup their development effort and funds by exercising their legitimate right to protect their IPR (whether through DRM or other means)?

MC