Video shots of the IP panels from Aspen are now up. See John Duffy and panelists on patent reform & property rights, and Solveig Singleton and panelists on the theme of "Let's make a deal: Getting content and tech to the table."

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 2:59 PM | Aspen

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Just in case you were having Aspen Summit withdrawal, we've been releasing the text of select keynote speeches from the event.

A few that may interest you:

"Copyright is Even More Right in the Digital Age," Sumner Redstone, Founder and Executive Chairman, Viacom and CBS Corp.

Right after firing Tom Cruise, Redstone traveled to Aspen to give the Chairman's dinner address at the Summit. In his address, Redstone made three main points about the importance of copyright in the entertainment industry:

-The Copyright industries are increasingly a major driver of the U.S. economy;
-Copyright compels creativity; and
-Copyright is fundamentally right for creator and consumer.

"Promoting Competition and Protecting Incentives for Innovation," Irwin Mark Jacobs, Co-Founder and Chairman, QUALCOMM Inc

Jacobs gave an extensive speech on the importance of patents in industry and addressed current calls for reform of the patent system. Jacobs also touched upon the network neutrality debate, explaining, "Although the name sounds positive, it removes incentives to innovate and could have negative impact on wireless."

posted by Amy Smorodin @ 1:45 PM | Art , Aspen , Big Tent , DMCA , DRM & Watermarks, etc. , Patents

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Aspen is very pleasant this year. As every year.

Today's speakers have been discussing child safety. There are a tremendous thrust of efforts on the part of various players to alert parents to the dangers of the Net. Of particular interest is a game called "Missing" in which a child or parent searches for a missing child. My sense: these efforts run up against resistance from busy parents, most of whom see little danger to their children--and for the most part, they are right! The risk remains small. But a small risk of great peril is still significant.

I think the law enforcement end, which is more targeted to predators (perhaps easier to identify and target than "at risk" victims) has more potential. But U.S. culture has a built-in skepticism of targeting. I think that today's security environment in a wide variety of contexts require that to some extent we just get over this; on planes, for example, Israelis focus on finding suspicious people, not suspicious weapons. Here, though, we must all endure scrutiny and the oppression of shampoo and toothpaste, because of our love of equality. Ah well. I digress.

One question which arises in my mind as I consider these efforts;; how do efforts to control risks to children, to protect valuable or private content online, to control phishing, spam, and so on--how do these relate to one another? To what extent would the authentication mechanisms being considered for the next generation of Internet protocols help control a wide subset of security problems? To what extent would some new methods or institutions at the law enforcement end help resolve this whole subset of problems?

This overlap is of particular interest to me because in part the battle over new copyright laws is a battle, not over whether the new content will be secured, but who will pay for the network features needed to secure it? Traditionally, the copyright owner has borne most of the expense. Michael Fricklas of Viacom noted yesterday that the content provider is no longer in the best position to do so cheaply; rather, he argued, the network and equipment providers are. This then raises the separate issue of

Continue reading Aspen Thoughts: A Safety, Security, and Copyright Nexus . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:54 PM | Aspen

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This commentary in Jonathan Schwartz's talk comes from my notes taken in Aspen last week; I didn't have time to type it up then.

Aside: Jonathan Schwartz has a very tidy ponytail. Many men with long hair do not know how to take care of it properly, but he does very well.

J.S. opened up with a question--what would happen if bandwidth were readily available, cheap, ubiquitous? And an answer popped into my head--devices would tend to converge--all devices would, like cell phones, evolve in the direction of doing everything. That was what he had in mind, too, and he continued, with the thought that devices would not all be the same--they would continue to distiguish themselves by level of portability, size, that sort of thing, but less and less by function. This I did understand, making a mental note to be cautious (sometimes multifunction devices don't do everything that they do equally well).

He added the thought that consumers would want no limits on location, playability for things like movies, music, software, etc. And that DRM would evolve and must evolve in the direction of ubiquity; consumers would want free content; the technology should remain free (no restricting computers to play only watermarked content, for example). Solutions must work for data, software, movies, etc. And he added that it makes sense to build DRM on top of existing systems for authentication, like SOX. This makes sense.

Some of this began to lose me. Certainly, free content is popular... it's free. But it seems to me consumers are perfectly able to recognize that paid content (from cable TV to Lexis Nexis and Nintendo and on and on) is often just plain better. Google is fantastic and serves almost all of my search needs. But for some things, I MUST go to Lexis; for one, Google doesn't have an 800 number I can call if I can't find something. I just don't think the free economic model can support the level of service to which many of us have become accustomed. And why free content, but not free broadband service (marginal costs of providing additional units once built are also low) or hardware (heck, once the chip is invented, you can stamp out many more at pretty low cost)?

And I certainly think that whatever legal and policy principles we adopt to tackle the online IP problem must work for software, photos, blogs, music, movies. But I think the technology can be much more niche. This has worked well so far--indeed it is all that has worked so far--with credit card access for adult material, hardware ties for Nintendo systems, passwords for online games, and so on. When I asked JS about this he seemed a bit dismissive--paid content would just be for niches, not for the most popular stuff. But I just don't see it. And haven't we seen a consistent movement of content markets towards serving niches and away from mass market? Cable is much more niche than broadcasting. Games are way niche, and so on.

Building DRM on top of systems to authenticate the user is going to work well sometimes. But there was a bit of a disconnect--if the content is free, why would one bother to authenticate the user? Did he mean that one needs to make sure that the user had subscribed to the content as a service, but that the content would be without a per unit charge? Also, authenticating the user in a corporate context is an easier problem--the user sending in his SEC forms or a letter or what have you WANTS to be authenticated--but a lot of users looking to get free music, movies, or software won't WANT to work with the system. Somewhat different problem. So far, for most content providers, the content itself is at least at one stage within their control--the networks and users aren't, so it's understandable that they have gone the route of watermarking content.

Finally he mentioned a government role in standards, which seems to me to be sheer madness... government is slow. Very slow. And government standards precludes competition between standards, which surely no one wants.

In short, for a guy who likes competition, he seems awfully determined in the view that only one way is going to predominate or even survive. I remain skeptical.

Phew, that's all for now.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 11:55 AM | Aspen

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Want to read still more on Aspen? 463 Communications' Sean Garrett was there, and had a running blog on his impressions.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:57 PM | Aspen

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Now that Jim has turned off his brain and handed over IPcentral's keys, I feel an obligation to jump in with a post. I'll do that by following on Jim's Aspen blogs.

First, if you'd like to read more about the Summit, on the PFF site you'll see several press releases and newsletters Amy Smorodin and I put out from Aspen. You can also see every session and speech streamed here. As for my thoughts, click on the link just below this text.

Continue reading The More You Know . . .

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:51 PM | Aspen

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PFF’s 11th Annual Aspen Summit has now concluded. It produced rich ore, as shown by the stream of press releases that Patrick and Amy produced over the past few days, and by the number of stories mentioning the various events that appeared in the press.

Webcasts from Sunday & Monday are available at www.pff.org. Later seesions will be made available as we get them.

Once the August hiatus is over, we will mine the Aspen sessions for material to publish and otherwise exploit. In particular, we have had numerous requests for both Nathan Myhrvold’s discussion of invention and patents and Edgar Bronfman’s speech on the music business, and both the patent and copyright sessions exposed some veins that need exploration.

We already know two dimensions of IP that deserve attention at the 12th Aspen Summit, in August 2006: (1) The international scene, which is a growing preoccupation of everyone involved in this Digital Age space, whether their niche is tech, telecom, or content; (2) The similarities and differences between physical property and intellectual property, and the degree to which our experience with one has lessons for the other.

Until around Sept.8, however, blogging will be limited to whatever Patrick and Solveig feel like doing, because I am turning off my brain for two weeks.

posted by James DeLong @ 6:27 PM | Aspen

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