Friday, January 20, 2012

Blog

Apple: ‘SOPA, I am your father!’

By Rodney Brown

Two events that happened completely coincidentally in conjunction over the past two days are connected in one disturbing — and mostly unrecognized — way. The SOPA blackout protests on the web and the Apple Inc. launch of its iBook2 textbook authoring platform.

“How can these two things be connected at all?” you may ask. Let me tell you, you. First, a brief primer on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The horribly written Act, in its initial form, would have allowed companies claiming their intellectual property was being used or copied without permission to get a court order to shut down Internet access to the allegedly offending website, without the due process of even a hearing much less a trial. On Wednesday, many tens of thousands of websites went dark to some greater or lesser extent to show what would happen if SOPA were to pass into law.

Most of these sites, when explaining their position, had no problem with the idea that intellectual property needs to be protected, and piracy should be stopped. But this solution — to lift a great comparison found on the Internet — is like fighting against a man-eating lion by taking a flamethrower to all feline creatures, including kittens.

So how did piracy of songs, movies, e-books and music get to be such a problem? I’ll get there, by way of our second happenstance, the Apple iBooks 2 and iBooks Author announcement.

Thursday, Apple rolled out software that allows for the creation of fully interactive e-books, specifically geared toward the creation of textbooks. The software will be free, and the iBooks (not e-books, and this is important) will be made available through the iTunes store for whatever price the publisher wants (with the strong implication that ‘whatever’ means close to Apple’s suggestion of $14.99). The iBooks, of course, will only be able to be read — experienced? — on an i-device like the iPad, ideally, but also the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Sound familiar? Anyone remember the early days of iTunes, when it was realistically the only place on the Internet that you could buy digital music easily, and with a real selection? Back then, the music was only available in Apple’s proprietary AAC format, and was loaded with digital rights management software that kept it locked down to a single device — eventually expanded to all devices you had linked to your iTunes account, but still unable to be moved to non-Apple devices without jumping through hoops only a hacker could love.

That attempt by Apple to change the concept of ownership of intellectual property from “I bought this copy, I own it” to “I bought this copy and will do with it only what Apple allows me to” is in part responsible for the growth of Internet piracy, and its acceptance as an almost default stance by today’s young, Internet-raised generation. Stealing music via illegal sharing started to take off from its early days of Napster in 1999. Two year later, when Apple launched iTunes as a way to purchase digital music, it had the chance to do so in a way that was open, taking the wind out if the pirates’ sails.

Instead, Apple chose to go down a path that led to the response by tech-savvy computer geeks to what they correctly saw as a completely inappropriate attempt to change the very concept of ownership. Apple couldn’t be expected to see that, by hanging on to this wrong-headed idea for as long as it did, it allowed an entire generation of computer-raised young people to grow up seeing that getting music for “free” on the Internet is essentially a right.

Sure, the music industry as a whole is just as responsible for the sorry state of IP affairs on the Internet these days — if not more so than Apple — by burying its head in the sand denying that digital distribution of music was even desirable, and then supporting all sorts of attempts like Apple’s to change the way we think of ownership. But Apple, by being as successful as it has been with associating Internet music with its formerly outlandish attempts at control of ownership, bears a solid chunk of this blame. If it weren’t for respectable sites like Amazon coming along and offering completely DRM-free digital music in the industry standard audio format of MP3, there wouldn’t have been any hope of reducing the incidence of piracy short of Constitutionally horrifying Acts like SOPA. And Apple didn’t change its format and DRM policy until well after Amazon launched as a competitor.

In fact, Apple has not said one way or another what it’s stance is on SOPA beyond that of the Business Software Alliance that it belongs to along with companies like Microsoft and Dell. The BSA had been fully in support of SOPA until late November, when it came out against the Act in its original form, saying it needed some work. One day before Wednesday’s blackout, Microsoft came out independently against SOPA, but Apple has remained silent.

Now Apple is trying to lock down the growing market of using tablets in education. Instead of embracing the industry standard e-Pub format for the output of its iBooks 2 and iBooks Author software, and making it only playable on an i-device and only available for purchase through iTunes, Apple is again trying to change the nature of ownership of copies of intellectual property, in its own favor. Here’s a prediction — some intrepid programmer will have an iBook-to-e-Pub conversion tool available on the Internet in less than six months. After all, hasn’t Apple learned anything from the prevalence of “jail-breaking” iPhones that allows apps to be installed that didn’t come from iTunes? Apple rolls out a patch to its iOS operating system that shuts down the latest jail-breaking software, and that has been made useless within a week at worst, and lately within a day.

Wake up and see what you are doing, Apple. Sure, your draconian attempts at IP control — which are driven by the completely understandable business need to hang on to as much of a market as possible — have probably done more to drive innovation in the space you are trying to keep an iron-fisted control over. But the unintended consequences are things like adding to the proliferation of Internet piracy. And this latest attempt at complete control could be the thing that will slow down the acceptance of e-books as the logical next step in education.