www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_6/kelsey -> www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/
The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights We introduce the Street Performer Protocol, an electronic-commerce mecha nism to facilitate the private financing of public works. Using this pr otocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an au thor in the event that the promised work be put in the public domain. T his protocol has the potential to fund alternative or "marginal" works.
Introduction Consider a world without copyright enforcement. People write books or mu sic but they get paid only for a single performance or print run. Once the work is released, anyone who likes it may make copies and distribut e them. In that world, high-quality, easily copied works like stories, novels, reference books, and pieces of music are, in the economic sense , a "public good." That is, the creators of these works must spend scar ce resources producing them, but they do not reap most of the benefits. This leads to the prediction that these works will be produced a good de al less in that world than in ours, and a good deal less than the consu mers of these works would like. However, for various technical reasons, we appear to be heading into a world that will look a lot less like ou r world, and a lot more like that world with no copyright enforcement. In this paper, we consider a very simple and common approach to funding the production of public goods such as advertisement-free radio and tel evision stations and impromptu music performances in public places. The artist offers to continue producing their freely-available creations s o long as they keep getting enough money in donations to make it worth their while to do so. We discuss social, financial, and technical arran gements that can make this approach work fairly well, though we don't b elieve it will ever provide a complete solution to the problem of payin g creators for their creations. We primarily discuss the way a specific instantiation of this idea, called the "Street Performer Protocol," mi ght work. In the remainder of this paper, we discuss why we believe a continuation of the current situation in copyright enforcement, extended through te chnical means, is unlikely to work well; how to build the social, finan cial, and technical arrangements to make this approach work; We finish by considering the large number of open questions about this and related schemes.
Why Copyright Will Be Hard to Enforce in the Future Before we discuss in detail how our protocol will work, we want to expla in why we are so pessimistic about copyright enforcement in the relativ ely near future. First, enforcing copyright laws is made easier when the creation and dis tribution of high-quality copies of information is relatively expensive and cumbersome. A plant that presses out pirated CDs and a network of trucks and salesmen that distribute them is relatively difficult to hid e Once found, there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the pirates were doing something illegal. Finally, the loss of the expensive equipment and the destruction of the distribution network probably represents a r eal benefit for the copyright holders, by eliminating a noticeable frac tion of the total pirated CD output. Perfect digital copies don't de grade over time, and they take relatively inexpensive equipment to use. A distribution network is already available, in a simple form, today - the Internet.
Anderson, 1996b and new storage technologies like DVDs, a futu re pirate is likely to require very little money to get started, and is likely to be an amateur sharing or giving away copies rather than a pe rson making a lot of money running a CD pirating operation. Technical mechanisms proposed for enforcing copyright automatically requi re a lot of police-state measures Our second reason is that the technical mechanisms proposed for enforcin g copyright automatically require a lot of police-state measures. Schem es to link each digital copy of some copyrighted work to an owner, and hold the owner responsible for pirated copies of the work, require that everyone buying a copy of the work provide a hard-to-forge ID; this le ads naturally to the existence of a database of all copyrighted works b ought, rented, or borrowed by each person. Schemes to keep all copyrigh ted content inside secure devices lead to different problems. The infra structure needed to make this kind of scheme effective is the infrastru cture needed to enforce restrictions on the distribution of some works; this infrastructure may be used to enforce copyright or to ban the red istribution of some books with about equal effectiveness. Schemes of th is kind also make it very tempting for copyright holders to lobby for b ans on technology that doesn't enforce copy protection.
World Intellectual Property Organization) for draconian anti-piracy laws, laws that limit research into computer security and cryptography, and for laws that se riously restrict what kind of recording and computer equipment is made available for sale to the public. Technical Solutions: Copyright Commerce Systems Technical solutions to the problem have been proposed in many places. Th ese tend to fall into two categories: 1 Some schemes attempt to keep the content encrypted except when it is inside a secure perimeter of some kind. The secure device plays, displays, or executes the content only when it is authorized to do so. In this case, publication on the Net of this content implicates the purchaser, who is probably sued for enormous damages to the copyright holder's intellectual property. Note that it's quite possible to combine both kinds of scheme in the sam e system. Secure Perimeter Schemes There are several problems with secure perimeter schemes. The most funda mental problem is simply that, for graphics, video, audio, and text, th e value in the content must actually be displayed in a way that the use r can see or hear it. With s ome custom-designed equipment, it can probably be made fairly easy. Consider a consumer who is choosing between a secure device that implements a secure perimeter, a nd an insecure device that does not. It is almost certainly more expensive, since it must include tamper-resistant hardware and support various cryptographic mec hanisms to operate. The only reason the customer will have to buy the s ecure device is if many of the works he wants to buy are only available on for that device. However, if the secure device isn't yet in widespr ead use, it will be difficult to make any money selling copies of works for the secure device only. It's easier to sell or give away software that provides the secure perim eter in which the copyrighted material is kept. However, this is also f airly easy to defeat, even for relatively unsophisticated attackers. The satellite and cable TV industri es have given us several examples of this, and their record of resistin g attack doesn't give us lots of hope for the future of this approach. Along with the various attacks on the box, there are also more general attacks possible - capture the output intended for the screen or speake rs, and save it for posting to the Internet. Again, we expect to see so ftware to do this posted to the Internet, as well. This c an be prevented only by never allowing copyrighted music outside these secure perimeters. This involves, among other things, never broadcastin g music or films, since they could then be recorded and posted. With tools like anonymous remailers and the Eternity Service, material t hat's ever posted simply cannot be erased, short of destroying the whol e Service. This means that one posting of a copyrighted piece of music, video, or text makes it available for free (or at least very cheaply) via the Internet. Indeed, even without the Eternity Service, informatio n that is ever posted or made available on the Net is very hard to eras e, though legal threats can probably get it taken off the major search engines.
Boneh and Shaw, 1995 attempt to trace the person who posted the copyrighted material, and to hold him responsible for the losses of the creator of that material. Since these losses are likely to be very large, and since criminal as well as civil...
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