The Virtual Goods workshop series is an interesting gathering from different disciplines: IT, Law and Business and is sponsored by IFIP TC 6.11. It was a comparatively small conference (considering the length of the program) with about 35 attendees, but featured participants from at least 11 countries and 5 continents (there was no South American attendee). This diversity certainly made the conference very interesting.
This is the first conference I have attended which officially started in the afternoon, and then carried on to Saturday. I am not sure if this is a bad idea or a good idea, and I think the conference could have been accommodated into two days. But this did allow for two social events ... so I have no problem with the organisation! I am only reflecting on the papers I found interesting. Complete program, abstracts and the presentations can be found here.
In the first (and only) paper session of the first day, Eetu Luoma's paper on copyright management was definitely the highlight. He is specifically looking at the requirements for electronic copyright management in universities. Universities are in a strange position in some ways - they need to encourage learning and publications, but at the same time, have control over the copyrights of these publications which are complex to manage due to the number of parties involved: publishers, the authors and the university. Add to this the cost of lawyers and administration, and copyright management is often just a mess ... and mostly not available in an electronic form.
The social event featured a key note talk by Dr Susanne Guth, who discussed content protection in the mobile TV standard DVB-H, which is being rolled out in Germany. There are two profiles available for DVB-H: Smartcard profile (driven by smartcards such as SIM) and DRM. The talk was enlightening particularly because of the decision process and the factors that affected the decision. The DRM profile is cheaper and easier to implement, and arguably offers a more complete, open and flexible solution. The smartcard profile is more expensive, a lot more complicated to implement and features some proprietary technology. Yet, at the end of the day it was the smartcard profile that is being deployed; for a simple reason. The smartcard profile allows operators to lock customers in for a longer time and thus it means that there will be less numbers of customers who will switch networks. At the end of the day, that means a higher probability of breaking even, and thus the economics dictated the choice of system.
Some of the issues raised by Eetu, were addressed by my presentation, bright and early, first thing in the next morning. My presentation on negotiations was really an advancement of my first ACM paper and then the paper I contributed to the Digital Media Project last year. It is one of the cornerstones of my PhD, and it was nice to see that the paper following mine, looking at the use of ODRL to specify web service agreements, would be a great application of my protocols.
The second session of the second day was possibly one of the most interesting of the conference. Martin Springer gave a presentation on music sampling, and an ontology that can represent sampling rights. The ultimate aim of the ontology is to create a mapping for copyright law. I have two reservations on this: I do no think it is possible to make such ontology, and I do not think it is possible to technically enforce licenses that allow sampling. Regardless, it should not mean that such attempts should be ignored. The next paper was from Australia, looking at search engines and copyright infringements - and some famous cases were analysed. The last paper of the session was interesting to me for two different reasons. Firstly, the author presented an alternative rights model: instead of focusing on licensing, it focused on copy control. basically, if you have a copy, you can do what you want. The model is a very impressive representation of the analogue world - no doubt about that - but I think it is digitally irrelevant and not enforceable: digital goods exist and operate through copies - on the disk, on the network, in memory - controlling this is infeasible. The second reason I found it interesting, is that the author was an independent researcher; and in fact not even involved in IT in his daily professional life. Since the growth of large universities and corporate research labs, private research is almost non existent, and it is the first time I have seen such a contribution (in IT at least). The author, Nicholas Bentley, told me that many conferences and journals have refused to even consider his work ... maybe we should get off our high horses. Surely, public access to academic work is what academia is all about?
The next interesting session was the next day, on superdistribution, which featured two contrasting papers. The first paper, presented an incentive scheme for super distribution. A lot like Amway, but for digital goods. It sounded a bit like a pyramid scheme to me, and I do not think the business model can be supported, for music anyway. The next paper was on why superdistribution incentive schemes will fail. In their, admittedly short, study the authors found that users are just not interested in superdsitribution, and one of the key reasons: users just did not want to make money off friends.
The last session of the conference had two interesting papers: first on user collaboration in second life. I had not thought a lot of virtual environments and their impact on virtual goods - but they represent some of the most interesting cases. If you think about it, the real market for World of Warcraft items exists because they are unique and cannot be replicated. I wonder if some of these models can be replicated outside the tight controls of the virtual worlds. The last paper was on universities - specifically the specific DRM needs of universities. It promoted a lively debate, and was a great finish to the conference.
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