Crip Talk: As Crips Slide By

In a paper published on SSRN, The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan and Aaron Perzanowski analyze the remarkable blunder made by Sony BMG in a futile attempt to protect its music assets by choosing to install software on user computers that was potentially damaging.  While there conclusions are not revolutionary nor come as a surprise to analysts and groups who has spent a great deal of time looking at DRM, their paper does represent one of the first scientific analysis of the incident and its ramifications within the music industry.  Not only that, however, this paper begins to point out the utter disaster that the incident represented for the industry as a whole.

Consumer attempts to let the industry no about DRM and its consequences to music sales had gone entirely unheated by the music industry in the past.  The Sony BMG incident that only provided the means for the consumer to speak out against DRM in an organized fashion, but the fallout from the incident also provided Sony BMG, its partners, and its competitors the first large-scale opportunity to gather data on how their efforts were being perceived by American consumers.  The efforts of the RIAA and courts as well as in various legislatures to limit distribution of their music have done nothing but hindered the music industry from looking at different distribution models.  However after many years of stonewalling, the music industry has begun to look at distribution models that provide more freedom to consumers.

The conclusions reached by the authors of this report provide us with a glimpse of the company — and indeed an industry — that was plagued by antiquated business models, a failure to perceive technological developments, and utterly unreasonable mindsets that led to strategies that went awry despite the enormous defeats seen in continuous uptakes of peer-to-peer music sharing.  Various efforts such as Amazon music lead us to believe that the industry is now willing to make compromises or look at different distribution models demand by consumers for the sale of their music.  While the newer business models do not provide the industry the perfect avenue for control over the music that is sold, they do enable consumers to obtain music legally. 

Trust is often a two-way street.  Sony BMG learned that the hard way.  When consumers believe that they will be trusted with the music that they are given, it is more than likely that the peer-to-peer music sharing will lesson a great deal. That is not to say, the peer-to-peer music sharing will end anytime soon.  However the success of efforts such as iTunes and Amazon will tell a great deal to the industry that the change is not always a bad thing.  Now only if the movie industry would learn the same! 

In a story, Security Firm Sophos Calls WiFi Piggybacking ‘Stealing,’  Techdirt lampoons the security organization for attempting to skew its report to it’s own commercial means.  The question is, does it go far enough?

In a perfectly transparent attempt to characterize a public behavior by adding a moral judgment to a whole class of Americans, not only does this company manage to put its interests above those of its clients, but manages to look entirely idiotic by suggesting that any type of moral responsibility completely belongs to the people accessing internet by using open wireless signals.

From the wireless security point of view, the almost exclusive focus on the people accessing the "open" signal detracts from the real point of open wireless, the security of PC’s behind those open routers.  When this firm should have been focusing on suggesting that security might be better achieved by securing wireless networks with strong encription, it chooses to incinuate a whole lot of pointless, rubbish nonsense by marketing its name through a a ploy.

As all corporations’ primary mission seems to have become serving the needs of their pocketbooks rather than serving the genuine needs of their customers, this moral dictate does not come as a surprise.  It, however, does bring the large question of dictating behavior in focus.  By clearly dilliniating acceptable behavior, firms such as Sophos engage in subtle manipulation of their perceived authority–real or not–toward their commercial ends.  Google’s entry into China and Yahoo’s betrayal of Chinese descidents should provide perfect examples of how such firms are incapable of making moral judgment calls.  Yet, more and more, we give our whole lives and trust to these firms.  Where religion and public "norms" dictated behavior, now corporations take their place in the hierarchy of the public sphere.

While never having been a large fan of the process by which a sense of normality is established, the invluence of commercial realm becomeing a large part of such a process somehow disturbs me more.

P.S. I have own stock in both Google and Yahoo.  What does that really say about me?