Transcript of the Debate

Tracy Mitrano:

Good evening, my name is Tracy Mitrano. I am the Director of the University Computer Policy and Law Program which together with the Dean of Students is offering our session this evening, The Download Debate Number Three. The University Computer Policy and Law Program is out of the Office of Information Technologies and vice president Polly McClure. Thank you very much for coming this evening. We're going to have an interesting discussion this evening focused on the legal media alternatives for Cornell University. I am going to introduce in a moment the student who has done the absolute lion's share of pulling together this evening's program. But first, I simply want to give you an outline of what we will do this evening. Tarleton Gillespie is going to be our moderator and we will have three speakers. Kwame Thomison is a student here at Cornell University. He is going to be doing an analysis of the Napster program which we have had here at Cornell for the last couple of years. We will then hear from Brad Vaughn who is representing Ruckus, a vendor of media services. Then we're going to hear from Chris Palmer who is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But first, let me introduce to you Ben Walther, and I do so with my enormous thanks and admiration for the great work that he has done in pulling the session together. Ben. [Applause]

Ben Walther:

I'd just like to take a moment to reintroduce our guests because they are so distinguished and notable. Starting off is Tarleton Gillespie, our moderator. I have had the pleasure of taking a course with Tarleton and seeing him in action in seminars and colloquium as part of Information Science. He has the ability to always ask a question that really first of all, no one else has thought of, but second of all gets right to the core of the argument and makes us all sit there and reflect and think (INAUDIBLE 2:04-2:07)have him as our moderator today and I hope he will continue. I'm of course setting you up for high expectations but I have complete confidence in you. Kwame serves as a representative on the student assembly and has been extremely active with vice presidents, deans, and Tracy, the director of CIT Policy here, and has gotten their attention because of his creative ideas. He almost had a program implemented here (INAUDIBLE 2:38-2:40) groundbreaking, but instead we've decided to pursue some other alternatives first before we go ahead with his plan. But it is truly remarkable some of the things that he's come up with so we're glad to have him here.

Brad Vaughn, representing Ruckus, is the Vice President of Campus Sales and he's been with them for quite a long time now. He seen them grow and helped them grow. And he's really knowledgeable and has already spoken with us a bit about the new directions he's taking the entire industry, in terms of the future.

And lastly but not least is Chris Palmer from the EFF. I'd like to share a little anecdote. Chris Palmer informed me that he started off at the EFF as a systems administrator. The EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation and they fight for privacy rights and free speech and other key issues of the modern age, which means everyone there has a professional opinion on how the network should be run - and he was the one actually doing it. He had to cook with all these different chefs trying to stir the soup at the same time and he was able to do it so well that they have since promoted him several times and he's very knowledgeable about policy and technical implications and has a great ability to combine the two into finding a solution that will actually work for people, rather than being either too idealistic or overly technical. I'm glad to have you all here today. Thank you very much for attending.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Thanks Ben. Thanks Tracy. And thank you to all of you who came out to join this conversation. Hopefully we'll have the chance to really think about what's going on with digital copyright and Cornell's role in it. My position here is to moderate the discussion when it begins, but also to situate the topic a little bit so that we have a little context for some of the political disputes around copyright and the university's particular role in it. In the context of the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Katrina, the genocide in Darfur, the impending graduation, and Tom Cruise's new baby, it might be very difficult for us to weigh the relative importance of copyright as a political issue. I'd like to see if in the next 10 minutes or so I can convince you that it is one of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. It is very much more than a question of pop music.

So we start with the Constitution which says, "The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." So the very premise of copyright is written into the Constitution and gives authors, in this case, property rights over the work that they create and then they or the publishers that they hand their rights over to are able to market that work. Readers of this work can purchase it and consume it but they cannot, under this rule, duplicate it or distributed without asking for permission and usually paying some compensation. In the process, ideally, the public gets the benefit of a wide array of culture, knowledge, arguments, and information. This is really important for science, it's important for art, it's important for journalism. And most importantly at least in a constitutional context, it's important for democracy. Democracy needs widely available information. It needs robust debate, and it needs open critique, and we never know which information is going to be vital, so we allow it all to circulate as best as we can.

This is a precarious project. It has a utilitarian progressive goal but it gets there by creating an artificial economic monopoly where none need exist. And of course as we know, historically, monopolies are ripe for economic abuse. The same mechanism that would facilitate the circulation of information could also be used as a legal sledgehammer to squelch it. So we've added limits and balances. We've added a limited duration for this property right, we've added fair use exceptions. In other words, the work that belongs to an author, from the moment the copyright offers it to them, really belongs to the people, and it ends up belonging to them in the end. And the people have the right to use it in some ways, even while it is legally owned and assigned to its author or the representative. So as much as the first amendment, copyright is our nation's politics of information, and it is vital to the workings of democracy and culture.

So let's move to the present day. Obviously a number of things have changed. The first US copyright law was duplicated on a printing press and was delivered by Pony Express. These are expensive mechanisms of copying and distribution. They require skill and they are quite slow. These factors kept illicit copying down by themselves, regardless of the law's intervention. Since this moment, innovations have lowered the costs and skill barriers for both copying and distribution. We can think about the Xerox machine, VCR, audiotapes, broadcasting, cable, satellite, and most importantly for recent discussions, is the personal computer which is premised on copying data and can do it with quite little fanfare. And the Internet allows nearly instantaneous and nearly costless distribution to anyone. But it's not just the technology that has changed. Economically, when copyright was designed for the US, the US was a young nation, it was an information importer. It needed to establish home-grown scientific, artistic, and philosophical traditions. This was very important to early days of the US. We were worried that we would always be in the shadow of Europe, and we needed to make sure that we developed information traditions and information production. Now we are an information exporter. Incredible economic and ideological power based on the production of films, books, TV shows, and music that much of the world ends up listening to or watching.

We also have an array of corporations that didn't exist at the time that produce music and entertainment on a mass scale premised on the kind of rewards that they can receive because copyright works the way it does. There are also a number of cultural changes. Obviously literacy has increased, and universal education, popular culture has In some ways become the terrain of cultural politics. And, especially now, people expect to enjoy facility with information. Their jobs demand it. They expect to be adept with computational tools that allow them to collect, manipulate, rework and share information. This is a generation that is being raised on Google and that builds a certain set of expectations about where they get information and what they can do with it.

And policy has changed. Copyright law itself has changed quite a bit. Few authors registered copyright in the early days which meant that they didn't, in practice, need protection or get protection. But ever since 1976, copyright applies to all creative work the moment that it is produced. So the law's new default is that all things are protected by copyright. All information. Copyright also covers a much wider array of kinds of information. From film, to radio broadcasts to web sites, to software. So the law that was cannot be the law that will be. Within that law, economic and cultural arrangements for how culture moves must adapt. The question of course is how. And finally, when things change for whatever reason, they offer those involved a strategic opportunity to rework the rules in their favor. This goes not only for record labels but also for users of peer-to-peer technologies. So then we get to the copyright wars and I think for this audience I don't have to rehearse how these things go. Peer-to-peer applications, lawsuits, speechifying and recriminations, new laws passed and proposed. Technological countermeasures and high-profile hacks. Supreme Court decisions. Together these have changed the landscape of copyright law, the landscape of the Internet, and the landscape of the entertainment industry in powerful ways.

Now for the most part, the battle that has since erupted around these new technologies and new practices has primarily been fought in the courts, and perhaps in Congress. But increasingly it's being fought as much in the market and what makes it to your desktop. This is both a question of the principles of copyright, information, culture and technology and a question of the practical realities of how to make this all work amidst those principles without perverting them. And now the success of Apple's i-tunes and Napster 2.0 were seen by some as a sign that we were going to reach a compromise, a kind of compromise that the record industry and peer-to-peer users couldn't reach on their own. And they've been joined by e-music, by Ruckus by Rhapsody by Cdigix, a number of commercial providers that were trying to offer some arrangement that would fall between the extreme poles of this dispute. Every peer-to-peer application, every court decision, and every new law has an idea about how copyright should work and how we should work with copyright built into it. And in the same way, every business model is a proposed solution with its own particular implications.

Now we here at Cornell are also in search for a compromise but at the same time, we also want to scrutinize those compromises to see how those principles are handled. Now in a lot of ways university students in the universities they attend are very much in the thick of this dispute for a number of reasons. One is that students are of a very particular age and economic demographic, that is very very interesting to music producers and to entertainment producers. Despite how they feel on a regular basis, they actually have quite a bit of disposable income, and they spend quite a bit of it on music and entertainment. At the same time, these entertainment industries are very interested in what you like and assume that people your age are the kind of taste cultures that if you embrace a band, if you embrace a film that's going to be a very powerful.

Students also have an incredible access to a high level of information technology, they almost all have personal computers and they have incredible access to "fat pipes" -- to high-speed broadband networks that are built in to their universities. Students are also in the thick of this because of a series of lawsuits that have been brought, especially by the record industries, against individuals who have been sharing music on peer-to-peer networks and sending what are called DMCA takedown notices that urge people to stop participating in illicit music trading. This is a relatively new strategy just in the last two years of going after individuals rather than the designers of tools, or the Internet service providers. And college students are in some ways their favorite target. Not only because they do spend a lot of time on these peer-to-peer networks, but also because of the maximum word-of-mouth impact if someone gets sued. Their dorm friends are going to hear about it, their classmates are going to hear about it and maybe that will discourage a whole set of people. Universities are also a pinch point of this strategy. If the record labels can indicate that their students are a part of the problem, they can try and put pressure on universities to make regulatory changes, to impose technical solutions themselves.

Now of course students are not just consumers of music, although in some ways this discussion has focused on their role as consumers. Students are also if not already then certainly training to be artists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, librarians, engineers, software designers, scientists. And the university has a number of intellectual commitments that are at play here. We are not just the home at which the students exist. We are not just a place at which they consume their music in their free time. The university is committed to educating citizens, which means a healthy respect for laws and ethics and democratic principles. But that doesn't simply mean compliance with the law or acceptance of common business practices. It also means understanding the law, debating its implications, and challenging it when it's right to do so. We also educate students to be producers of information, not just consumers, users of information, caretakers of information, designers of information tools and some of them to be lawmakers themselves.

And as teachers, we are in the unique position in relation to copyright ourselves. We may be consumers of information. We listen to music when we are home. We are also producers of information. And we also use information in the classroom in very important ways. So both students and faculty and the members of the university community see copyright from all angles. This particular university, Cornell, has been deeply involved in this issue for our own reasons-- because we have a number of students, because we host both copyright consumers and copyright users and copyright producers, but also because it's an important part of the landscape of information politics. We've engaged in a number of educational efforts, like this, we've been responsive to legal challenges, but were also hoping to provide some legitimate option for music and entertainment that will to a number of things. One, it will satisfy students as consumers, it will reasonably comply with existing laws, it will work economically with the providers of culture and entertainment, it will fit technologically within our infrastructure, and most of all, it will dovetail with these intellectual commitments. To immerse students in and help them to feed their own culture. To ethically and justly participate in the market of information. To pursue the democratic principles on which copyright law is founded. We hope tonight will be an opportunity to investigate our options. To shed light on the obstacles and the opportunities involved. And maybe to pinpoint, to move towards, or perhaps to even invent the future of digital culture. That discussion has to begin with a consideration of what we've tried so far. We've had a two year experiment with Napster 2.0. As part of the student body, I'd like to it over to Kwame Thomison who will tell us how that's gone so far.

Kwame Thomison:

Thank you. I'd like to begin going over a little of what he just said and discussing really what brings us here today. Over the course of my introduction I will talk a little bit about copyright law, also criticisms of Napster, but also of the music industry. Because Napster really functions as just a distribution tool. So first, of course we all know that music pervades our lives as students. We talk about it, we discuss it, we debate it, we buy it, sometimes share it. We love it really. You know, one little song evokes so many memories and serves as a backdrop to our lives. But also, one little song can evoke up to a $150,000 fine, as we've heard in the news lately.

So, it seems like such a simple system, right? So is this miscommunication? We all know how much a CD costs. $16. We all know how much a song cost these days. $.99. So why are people getting sued for an average of $3000? The reason really is copyright infringement is a crime like no other. We as students don't encounter laws like this. We encounter laws that are more morally intuitive. Copyright law doesn't seek to eliminate an activity, it really seeks to regulate it. This is similar to another law that I'm sure we, as students, are all familiar with - or another policy, which is the alcohol policy. Which, you know, people also may debate. A little bit of history, in 1919, the government chose to make alcohol basically illegal. The manufacture and distribution. This was called the Prohibition Era and what ended up happening was that public opinion prevailed. There was always public outrage, it didn't eliminate the problem. There were underground clubs called speakeasies, not that difficult to find. People would go there and drink. Filesharing networks are becoming the speakeasies of the 21st century. So the real question is, will public opinion prevail? Or will, I don't want to say Big Business, but it seems appropriate, will Big Business prevail?

Intermediaries have emerged. One of these is Napster. A couple years ago the student assembly began an experiment in two legal ways of obtaining music over the Internet. Over the course of these two years, I've had ample opportunity to use the system and at first, I was very excited because essentially this was free music. This was a free trial so we will have to wind up paying for it if we continue it, but of course we were very excited to get free music legally. But after two years, I can say with confidence that Napster fails to accomplish what we really need at this institution which is to draw students away from the illegal filesharing networks.

They said I was going to talk about what's wrong with Napster, here we go. So they say you can download as much as you want. The problem with this is that you download 10, 20, 100 songs, they're all tethered to your computer. So you're going to end up sitting at your computer for hours a day if you listen to music that much, you're not able to walk around with it. You're confined to a chair, basically.

Another problem is that you can only listen to it. About five years ago I was basking in the glory of free music with Napster. I remember downloading (yes I did download. Please don't come after me.) a lot of songs and I could mix them if I wanted. I could edit them. Cut. Copy. Paste. It turned into a hobby of mine. With Napster you can't do that. Like I said, tethered to download. They basically have a leash on that music and you're going to be able to use it the way they want you to and nothing else.

Also the 1.5 million song catalog is very misleading. You're only going to search a small fraction of that catalog. If you used Napster, I'm sure you've seen a number of Buy Only tracks or you've experienced sometimes you search for a track, but it will just be AWOL as if it didn't exist. There's a whole world of music that exists outside of Napster. So they throw these numbers out there, 1.5 million, but what about the millions of songs that aren't represented on Napster? That's not their fault, but it's just the reality.

IPod is incompatible with Napster and this is a huge issue on this campus. Sometimes walking around Central Campus you'll see more of those little white earbuds than eyeglasses. I mean it's the MP3 player at Cornell, at least. So this is a huge problem. If you bring a music service here, then it may not be possible at this point, seeing what Apple's business practices are like, but we would like it to be compatible with iPod.

You're probably looking at me right now like, "You say Napster doesn't work, what do you propose?" I don't have the solution but I feel that I've narrowed it down to three things that students really need. We need a large quantity of music that's affordable. The $.99 game is not affordable. Say you want to buy five albums in a year and you end up paying how much money. I don't know. To me that's not worth it. I can feel confident that I can speak on behalf of several of the students that that's not worth it. We want high-quality music and we want portable music and like I said that goes back to the iPod. Music services so far have only been able to offer two of these things at once in any given service. With i-tunes you get the portability and the high-quality, but the $.99 game for college students is not affordable. With Napster, you get affordable and high-quality music, but it is not portable, it's tethered to your computer. There are MP3 players that are compatible with Napster, but like I said, those earbuds, they're a craze so we need something that is compatible with iPod.

So the battle so far is really what the consumer wants, this case it is the students, and what the music industry is willing to give. It's not what Napster's willing to give. It's what the news industry is willing to give. Because really right now, they're controlling what Napster can do. Right now, really, they haven't made any sacrifices. It's been the students. All give you a scenario. You buy 14 songs. That's about an album's worth. You're paying $14. The average price of an album in 2005 was $14.50. So it seems as if they're selling you an album for $.50 cheaper. At first glance. However, if you look at the price of manufacturing a CD, distributing the CD, and also the overhead costs, those are all eliminated when you are using this electronic distribution system. When you take that into account, I think they're actually pulling in a lot more. I'll get you the actual number in a few minutes. So the music industry right now is making out like bandits.

So this compromise that Professor Gillespie spoke about earlier, the consumers are the only one that is taking a step towards the Golden medium between the two extremes. Right now this is where we are at. The music industry really needs to take another step and see if we can meet in the middle. Thank you.

Professor Gillespie:

I will pass it over to Brad Vaughn to give us an opening statement.

Brad Vaughn:

Thank you very much for having me. I'm Brad Vaughn and I've been with Ruckus now two years and really since the start of Ruckus and where the digital music debate and where do you take digital music and where do you take digital files and how do you worry about copyright. Some of the things that Kwame wants for students aren't there and they're not there for a number of reasons. You have big companies on both sides, meaning Apple and Microsoft, who don't like each other's products too much. You have the record industry. You have this idea of digital distribution at $.99 which does have some fixed costs associated with it as well as the ability to mix and match your tracks. But again that is not reasonable for a college student and that's where subscription is the intermediary. We've developed a system that provides a number of tracks. It goes back to what Kwame says. Music pervades students' lives. We see music really as a community tool, rather than an activity. If you talk to students, or you sit in the dining hall, you hear, "What concert did you go to last summer?" Or "What movie at the scene?" So we've based the entire product and our entire service off of this community aspect. The challenge that we face is that you're competing with free and illegal which for students, it's not the top of the issue. It's not the top of the deck. It's been a challenge to keep students interested but we continue with over 50 colleges today and it's been in an interesting business and very successful so far.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Chris Palmer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Chris Palmer:

I'm from the Electric Frontier Foundation and if you don't already know what EFF is, we are a legal defense and advocacy organization. Our focus is on, as we like to say, the first fourth and fifth amendments of the Constitution as they apply to the Internet. That's free speech. That's the right to privacy. Also intellectual property and copyright law, because they impinge on free speech and privacy, and of course they are worthy topics in themselves. Computers and networking technology impinge on those rights and those responsibilities, fundamentally.

I like to say that technology doesn't really usually fix a problem or solve a problem. It changes what the problem is. In the case of computers and networking, we've changed a distribution problem. How do you get information assets to the people who want them? We've eliminated the distribution part, and now it's easy. Internet is cheap and instantaneous and nifty. Computers will gleefully copy anything you give them. Now we've changed it into an economic problem and a policy problem and a problem of social norms. Those things are very much not in harmony right now. The norm, I mean, many tens of millions of Americans use filesharing to get music for free. The norm is that that is if not downright great, it's at least acceptable. Tens of millions of people are doing it. But it's also clearly copyright infringement, which is against the law. So we have this huge divide between common practice and the law.

We also have this economic problem. We want to reward creators of valuable information assets, or as I like to call them, songs, or works of art, or whatever. We want to reward them so they will keep doing it. The old way of doing that, as flawed as it was, is dying because technology has changed what the problem was. Distribution is not the problem anymore. Or it's much less of a problem. Now the problem is getting creators their reward, but also maintaining for users, for listeners, readers, their fundamental rights which are actually a lot more extensive than a lot of people think. Fair use is a concept in copyright law that covers a lot of stuff. Like Kwame was talking about how he would like to, or did, edit the music tracks that he got, mix them up. There's a now famous musical style called the Mash Up where you take the vocal track from one song and stick it on the instrumental track of another from two totally different artists and you have a new musical work. That is for one thing a creative act, an unconventional, maybe, creative act, although not that unconventional. It's standard practice in a lot of forms of music, like hiphop. Electronic music has always been about sampling and modifying and cutting up. It's a valid form of art. That Kwame was doing that underscores the point that art is a thing that happens in the listener's mind, as well as in the creator's mind, in the studio.

If we want to have the most open culture, the most creative culture, the most productive culture, we need to think hard about not just our policies, certainly our policies and our norms, but also about our technical infrastructure. That's what people have been talking about tonight. Napster is a technical infrastructure for distribution of information. Ruckus is. The Internet is the platform they're built on. Kazaa is. These technical infrastructures afford some rights and some abilities more than others. We want to make sure that we pick ones that suit our values. Our values, our creativity, fair use is one of our values. Portability is a fair use. You have the right to space shift your media once you've legally acquired it. Napster does not allow that. Whereas Kazaa you're going to get regular old MP3s and you can put regular old MP3s on your iPod, any such device, on your computer, you can mix and match them in an audio editor. Whatever. Those are all rights you have. I'm a tech guy, largely, at EFF. So I'm always looking at things at the technical point of view. What norms and policies do different technologies afford? And which ones today disable or impede? So I'm going to be critical of a lot of proposed solutions. Maybe overly critical, maybe not. Because I want to see our rights as citizens and as creators and as listeners, readers, maximally defended. That's my job, right?

As we discussed, the various options we have -- that's the tack I'm going to take. I hope that I don't get too techno mumbly on you. If I ever say a random technical word that you don't know, you can just yell at me. I'll try to keep that in check. But a lot of times it can be relevant. A real world rubber hits the road difference in your life can be made based on how a technology was designed and implemented and deployed. So that's my little opening statement.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Brad would you like to say anything before we continue? Kwame?

Kwame Thomison:

Yeah, I found the number. When the record companies sell this music through the Napsters or whatever other music store, they're making about, give or take, $.80 per $.99 track. Normally record companies bring in about 30% per CD and 10% of this is profit. If you're looking at a CD that costs $14.50 and they are taking back about $1.45. But if they sell those same 14 songs using Napster, then they're making about $11. So that's $1.45 versus $11. Like I said earlier, clearly the music industry has something to gain from selling through Napster. We're the ones who are taking a step towards a compromise, not them.

Tarleton Gillespie:

OK, I think that there is a number of elements that are coming up just in the conversation as it's gone so far. I think part of the question is going to be about fair use in the kind of creative works. But before we get to that, wonder if I could ask Brad - as students and as members of the University, people outside of the process of having to build a network like this and having to negotiate a network like this. We're struggling with understanding the numbers. We can go find out and get a little glimpse of how this works. You've been able to be inside this process, not only building a network yourself but of having to negotiate with people and companies like Microsoft, companies like record labels. I wonder if you can give us some insight into what that's looked like, some of the economic realities that you faced, the obstacles that make the business have to go certain ways.

Brad Vaughn:

Certainly. Thank you. I think that the economics that Kwame lays out are a little flawed and I think the question that you've asked kind of begs further explanation. One of the paths that Ruckus set out upon three years ago now, was to build your own music library and to have the rights to that library, which means that you were responsible for encrypting the music. One day from an independent label we had 1900 CDs show up on our desk. That's a lot of work to get that into a distribution system. You have a system that has to manage licenses for the distribution system because as you talk about use cases, you have fair use and you have subscription rights and the rights in the movie and music industry can be interpreted many different ways. There are many different processes. The real devil is in the details as you get into those types of areas. It took us nearly 2 years to build a 1.5 million track library that has to be updated every single week. Because providing music for a student or for anyone else, on Tuesdays the record stores get the new CDs. That song needs to be on the system on Tuesday because the music groups, the vocal criticisms will come from that type of point of view. So you have to be street day current and you have to be there every week. You have to manage the system. 1.5 million tracks is a lot of storage space. It is a lot of bandwidth to go deliver those tracks and to constantly keep that up.

I think the real interesting thing that we were talking about briefly at dinner is that what Ruckus is doing in the college market, you are going to see digital distribution of video and audio content everywhere. The only place that it is really a valuable asset right now is college campuses. You've built this technical infrastructure that is five years in front of what you and I have in our house. So the ability to understand how you do that, and how you leverage this network to deliver a robust technology package that speaks to students' wants and needs, is really really important.

The idea of peer-to-peer, and I was corrected by CIO about a year ago, very bluntly, is that peer-to-peer is actually a great thing, when it is used properly. Peer-to-peer isn't always bad. Many researchers at this institution alone use peer-to-peer on a daily basis to collaborate with research. That's what the Internet tool is built for, a high-speed network connecting 400 plus campuses across the country who have research components. So the idea that you can deliver digital assets over very robust networks is really the long-term plan. Today it happens to be something where we came out and we came out of the business model of the need for music on campuses, the legal assets, but it's really evolved and my discussions as I speak to administrators across the country are really no longer about the legality.

That is where we started two years ago, but today it is, "How can you make Kwame happy? How is Kwame going to use the system? Why is he going to use yours, Brad vs. Ruckus' versus Napster versus anybody?" And that's really the challenge. That's where we've come to today, although we did come out of this very security suing public relations. There's a school out there that adopted a music service solely for public relations. That was the driving fact. So that's where it's come from and that's the challenge that you have in the business. The music and video business is very archaic. They are used to cassette tapes, if that was still around. So the ability to adjust into this digital form is a very interesting conversation when you sit down with them.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Can I push you on a couple of pieces? So it seems that there are a number of economic components that you as a sort of middlemen/distributor have to deal with. One is your own costs that you just described. It seems like there that is two others. One is obviously the record labels. To the extent that you can, we'd love to hear financially what that ends up meaning for you. How much of that goes under what conditions. The second party is your DRM provider, Microsoft in this case. What kind of expectations does that impose on what you need to do cost wise, technology wise etc. Just to draw out the picture.

Brad Vaughn:

I think that the economics, we won't get into dollars and cents, they are flat across the board. Everybody has similar economic structure with the record labels. It even goes down to the per play rather than per download. And that's where the cost structure is. But it's a fixed cost and at Napster we all pay the same exact amount. There are only four major record labels and they're very tightly connected. The next piece was the digital rights piece. The digital rights piece is a real challenge. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it allows you to have certain licenses. So if you buy a song from i-tunes I think it can go 5 computers or something of that nature. If you're a subscriber to our subscription service you can go on two computers. If you're a portability subscriber it can go on two. This is where it gets hairy. But what Microsoft will give you is the digital rights management. But they don't give you any of the management tools. To actually manage the management sites. So you have keys and passing of information back and forth and you have a system where you don't want all the content and all the keys in the same place. Then your system isn't so secure. People always underestimate the challenge of maintaining and building that music library. Everybody does because to manage all these keys at, we are downloading millions and millions of songs a week. There is millions and millions and millions of licenses. That is really the challenge and they have to be two separate entities.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Chris there's a sense in this discussion so far that the legal brouhaha has somehow subsided. Is that the case from your perspective?

Chris Palmer:

I don't think so. You know, fans of music are still being sued. There is still this problem that the filesharing copyright infringement is widespread and of course when that happens, whatever compensation the artist may have gotten, however miniscule, they don't get it. That's still a major problem. So I don't think the legal brouhaha has really gone away because the fundamental clash between norms and the law are still there. People's practices have not really changed. Filesharing is still a huge phenomenon. Nobody has really been too scared away from it. By some accounts it's growing. So the basic clash is still alive I think. The technology keeps shifting, but it can't really address that clash between norms and the law yet or ever.

Tarleton Gillespie:

I'm going to take my moderator's position for one more moment and ask a question about fair use because it seems to be on the table. But after that I'd like to open up the conversation to anybody who would like to ask questions. We've been asked that if you would like to pose a question you can come up to one of the microphones. That way, people who are watching on the Internet can hear this as well.

Tracy Mitrano:

And can write in at tbm3 @ cornell.edu.

Tarleton Gillespie:

tbm3 @ cornell.edu if you're watching online and you want to ask a question. We'll try and feed it up to the panel. So my question is, Kwame describes not only the desires of how to consume music, what kind of costs, quality of music, where to get it what to do with it in terms of portability, but also this possibility of mixing songs, editing songs. Chris mentioned the Mash Up as a genre. To Brad and Chris, is there ever going to be a digital distribution system that will allow those kinds of fair uses. Is that ever going to exist?

Chris Palmer:

It already exists, it's called Kazaa. The thing about digital rights management systems is they are a very flimsy technical means to enforce a contract between you and the vendor that is more restrictive than what your fair use rights already all are. If you legally acquire a song, or a record, you already have the right to space shift in time shift, put it on your iPod. That kind of thing. You already have the right to satirize it, or parody it, which may well involve remixing it or doing your own thing with it. That's already a fair use. So any DRM is a system for limiting your fair use. Technically, they tend to be pretty weak, but that's not the point. They're really there to control the contract between the user and the vendor, but also between the vendor and other suppliers. Apple has DRM on i-tunes music not because they really want to limit you to five computers so much as they want mandate who gets to use the i-tunes sales platform and under what terms. They can lock users into Apple products. If you buy i-tunes stuff, music from i-tunes you are stuck with Apple products forever, unless you want to just throw away all those purchases, which you probably don't. So lock-in is one of the main things of DRM, not just of buyers but also suppliers. If they can get a music supplier, a label, to have a special contractual relationship with Apple, they can use DRM as a way to mandate some strictures on the supplier, too.

So, it's not really a piracy stopping tool. It's a failure as that. It's a way of limiting various parties' otherwise natural rights. That to me is a giant concern. So, Kazaa is out there and as long as you're not worried about being sued for couple thousand dollars and as long as you don't worry about not paying artists, you have all of your fair use rights. But that's not really a good deal. It's kind of a bummer isn't it? But our other legal options are also currently bombers, so something's got to give.

Brad Vaughn:

I think when you look at it from what Chris is talking about is that the idea that if you went out and purchased a song, you can do any of that stuff. When you download a subscription service, and this is where it's complicated, you are not owning that music you are leasing it. It is like a car. When you lease a car, what happens in two years? You fix all the scratches and you turn it back into them. It's the same with subscription, but it's the only platform that allows you to download unlimited amount of music. So you can go in turn and buy things and you can get the DRM off and you can have your fair use rights, but you do have to pay for it. The artists have to be compensated and the record labels have to be compensated and the publishers have to be compensated and, frankly, the vendor has to be compensated, as well.

But the idea that Ruckus has moved to is that you are competing with free so we are free. You have the limitations and have the ability to buy it and do what you want, but you are free, you are legal, you are clean, you are high-quality and you're a large library owner. And in the scope of the challenges of what fair use and what digital rights and what the record labels and what the artists at the end of the day want, it's a middle ground that obviously isn't perfect. It isn't a complete solution, but that's where it is, and you just have to -- that's how it works, that's the business.

Tarleton Gillespie:

If there's anyone who would like to join us for questions, there's a microphone at the end of each aisle, feel free to come up and pose your question. These guys are ready to answer questions, I think. I will continue by asking a question for Chris. I want my fair use rights, and I want to be able to remix my music and figure out how to become a Mash Up artist and play clips in my classroom and all those good things. I, for the moment, find Kazaa a bummer in the ways that you described. So, what's when to be the next step? Do you have a sense of where this could possibly go or who's going to be able to open that door?

Chris Palmer:

Well, one option is collective licensing. Think about when you listen to the radio. You are getting music for free. It's paid for by advertising. But actually the composer of the song that you're hearing is getting a little micro payment. They are getting their quarter of a penny or something. There are these licensing organizations like ASCAP and BMI that do very rough, and that's one of the criticisms of these systems, guesswork about how many times the song is played. They say, "oh, Jane Doe, your song we think was played 100,000 times, so here's your 25 bucks. Or here's your 2000 or whatever you get." That has worked. Originally, music publishers hated the radio just as much as they hate the Internet now. But it was resolved with collective licensing. So it's possible that a collective licensing scheme could work on the Internet as well. That would be great.

The issue, one of the issues, is measurement. On the Internet, for better or for worse, you have a pretty detailed measurement capability. All those packets that you send and receive are going through routers that are operated by people. The routers and the servers and all of the machines that get the information to you, can do as much logging or noticing what's happening as they want to. So you can imagine, little ASCAP and BMI machines at ISPs, maybe, that would simply look at the traffic going over the wire and have a little counter. Say, "Oooh, chaching! That's Metallica. Chaching! That's Outcast. Chaching ! That's Bach" or whatever. You can get a better measurement capability. That brings about the privacy implications. Like I just said, that machine is going to be listening to the traffic going over the wire. Well what else is it going to see besides Outcast and Metallica? You would have to build in safeguards. If ever such a thing were proposed and deployed, you and EFF certainly, would examine it carefully for not only accuracy and goodness, but for privacy concerns. But it could be a way of compensating artists very well and you can change the law so it's legal. And people could still get the same rights that they have now like they have with listening to stuff on the radio. You can record off the radio. You can take a recording from the radio and parodize it, use it in your classroom. Those are fair uses.

It's paid for, to an extent. The composer is paid a little bit. Roughly measured. So it can work. You can imagine a legal Kazaa. We can make Kazaa legal now, just by metering it, by having licensing agencies pay the composers. Maybe pay the performers. There are certainly problems with the licensing agencies now, but we have a second chance, maybe we can address those.

Tracy Mitrano:

Tarleton, I have a question here from someone watching on the Internet. They recognize that the interviewers have different positions and different interests in this discussion and they were wondering if each of you could identify just one thing that you could change about copyright, what would it be?

Kwame Thomison:

I think someone else is going to have to go first.

Chris Palmer:

I'll go first. I would like to change the term of copyright. The whole point of copyright is to give creators and authors an incentive to publish their work. It's a temporary monopoly. You can make a bunch of money if you play your cards right. But ultimately, your work will just be put in the public domain where everyone will have equal right to it. So the point is, like the patent system, it's supposed to be a temporary monopoly on copying to allow creators to make a living. That's great. But currently, it's been distorted, I think and abused so that Mickey Mouse can stay private long past his creator's lifetime, long past the time when his creator has an incentive to do more because he's dead. Right? It's much too long right now. A much shorter term will get us all of the utilitarian benefits, both to the public and to the creator, with not really any serious loss to anyone who is really concerned. A rights holder who's got the rights long after the original creator is gone, I don't think has any real moral claim to that income anymore. No moral claim to a monopoly. A monopoly is a dangerous thing and if it's going to be there it should be temporary. So I think the original copyright regime was a lot more in line with the utilitarian principles than what we have now. So that's the one thing that I would change, shorten the term of copyright.

Brad Vaughn:

I think when you look at copyright, as Chris just spoke to, it was put in place for utilitarian purposes. Copyright law is now so complicated, but no one can understand it. You cannot communicate copyright law to Kwame and to your end-user in the position that I am in. It's been taken so far that the utilitarian aspects are gone because no one understands any of what it is. That's what I would change. Simplify it.

Kwame Thomison:

This may seem a little bit idealistic, but if there were some way to try to force these businesses to change their business model and keep the rights in the hands of the artists more, that would be great. Anytime you give something to a corporation they're going to find a way to exploit it. That's what happening with copyright law right now. It's used not as a tool. It's not an incentive right now for artists. It's a tool to make money right now. It's a tool to collect. To collect from intellectual property that oftentimes doesn't belong to the business. It's not wrong, it's a great model for them, but there are people who are suffering for it, the artists and consumers.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Question over here?

Questioner:

Can you hear me? Oh yes. So, I'm interested in the future, especially for universities, as well as the general public and also these utilitarian goals. The issue that I wonder about is, we've got these battles going on, market battles, legal battles, battles for the consumer battles for mind share and for us young people who will probably be influencing the rest of our culture. Record companies know that. That's one of the main reasons Ruckus has so much power in the market right now, even though they are relatively new, is because they have a hold of the people who are really influential right now. I may be complimenting myself but… so what can the University do to help fuel competition in these various battles so that we all end up winning as a society so that best business wins? May it be Ruckus. So that the legal battles are less profit motivated and more ethically motivated. What can we do to help build the future and make sure that it doesn't continue in its current state?

Kwame Thomison:

Well I think one solution is to get away from the businesses a little bit more. If you want to build something on ethics, then you need to take the motive for profit out of it. If universities start taking this into their own hands a little bit more, then we have a much better system. MIT has done this with music called LAM (library access to music) where basically they've accumulated their own library of CDs and they distribute on coaxial cables. Their students can enjoy music that way. It's entirely self-sustained. They negotiated the rights themselves with Harry Fox, I believe, and if more universities start to do that, it will put pressure on businesses and if businesses don't respond the right way, then universities can just go ahead and sustain their own music systems.

Brad Vaughn:

I think that the role that universities need to play is that ethics and business are not factors that are going against each other. That's one point that I think you should make. That 99.9% of business is ethical. You only hear about the ones that are very unethical, but most operate in an ethical manner. But when you look at what can the universities to, is that when the university partners and takes on a music service, it's as great stride. But many universities take a Band-Aid like approach. I have Ruckus, now I am done. But that is not the role. The role of universities is to educate. The university can play a major influencing factor in educating about copyright, the importance of copyright. Copyright over history. And changes in copyright. So for a university to be able to educate and to put more influence on the idea of copyright. Many universities break quite a few copyright rules themselves. When you look at universities, and MIT has had a lot of problems with this copyright issue with their little system they have. And they've been sued and takedowns and the whole nine. But really to go back to their roots and educate about what the importance of this is and why it has come to be and to Chris, where technology has evolved. One day there was the boombox with two tape decks on each side and you could record back and forth. So all it has done is just sped up the distribution and the change in model.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Let me pose a follow-up to Kwame's MIT example. Could MIT or Cornell called Ruckus and say, "rather than having you build the Ruckus service for us, we want you to host our LAM system. We want you to host our university-based music delivery system to our population only." Is that something that would be tenable? Is that something that Ruckus or another provider could provide the infrastructure and let the university try to take the lead in terms of their use of content?

Brad Vaughn:

I think it's an interesting question. I think it's a little idealistic, and somebody asked me basically the same question earlier today. I said by the time that you went to get all these rights and all these things cleared, none of the students who were working on it would still be at university. So in essence, the university actually host Ruckus and technically we utilize the network that Cornell or whatever university has built. So, in general, the university is hosting us, rather than we are hosting the university or the content ourselves. So it's just the other way around.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Gentlemen, there's a statute that's being considered in France where they are considering arguing that DRM systems like Apple system and like Microsoft system because they are not interoperable, would be a violation of trade rules and they are considering passing a statute that would require DRM providers to make their systems interoperable. If that goes through, it's not clear that even if it went through if that would force them to do it on a wide scale or just in the context of France. Would that change the business game significantly and if so how?

Chris Palmer:

I think the impulse is right. The purpose of DRM is anti-competitive. Whether or not it's yet metastasized into an antitrust issue, here we have the Sherman Antitrust Act -- don't know about France. I don't know about that yet. It hasn't reached nightmare proportions of un- interoperability. I hope, and maybe I'm just being a techie here, but I think DRM will wind up collapsing over its own silly weight. Pretty soon. Because the threat model of DRM is fundamentally untenable. That is that in security we always talk about Alice talking to Bob. In this case Alice is a record label and she wants to talk to Bob. She wants to give Bob a song. But she also thinks that Bob is her mortal enemy and Bob should never get the song. So that's the problem that DRM faces. It's a silly problem. Brad mentioned that in the DRM system you can't have the delivery item, the content, and the decryption keys in the same place because otherwise you have blown your security. But all DRM systems must do that so Bob can get the message from Alice, even though Alice hates Bob.

So I think DRM may go away on its own, and I'm not sure legislation is called for. Maybe it will be, maybe not, I don't know. I'd rather see it die its own death on the market just from people saying that's a bad deal I'm not going to buy it. Like Divex, remember Divex? It was a competitor to the DVD format. It was going to be a pay-per-view thing but nobody went for it. It was too silly. Now DVDs have their own DRM but it's not so critically silly like Divex was. Divex killed itself by being too restrictive. I think that over time, as these interoperability questions arise, and it's going to happen more and more, people are to have i-tunes libraries worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars and then they're going to get a different kind of computer or they're going to use up their five computer rule. Then they're going to be pissed. Then they're going to say, "why did I spend $2000 on this locked down stuff. I'm not to make that mistake again." It might take awhile but I think it can die in the market and I think that's the way for it to die.

Tracy Mitrano:

Tarleton, I have a question here that must have almost presaged the comments that you were just making, Chris. But the observation of this viewer is that technology has challenged the business models and copyright and they want to know what you folks think as to whether the Internet will now be changed because of the pressure that the business models and copyright may be placing on it, and in what ways I imagine they would want to know.

Kwame Thomison:

Personally, I don't think that the Internet should change. I think that it should be the businesses that should change. I don't think that something as widespread, pervasive, and just so varied as the Internet, so diverse the way it works in different countries with their different laws, I don't think that business should be the one regulating the Internet. I know there's been talk of eliminating privacy and Internet anonymity. There's been talk of an Internet tax. I think these things are ridiculous and they're brought on almost purely by business. I think it's a travesty that you have a new technology that comes in, pretty much changes the world, but then we have to change it because of business?

Chris Palmer:

I doubt that dinosaurs liked the meteors very well either. The Internet may die, but it is certainly going to be replaced by something that resembles it in its most important features very much. It's not going to go away. I think that the fundamental features of the Internet are openness. Compare it to the telephone network. The telephone network is very closed. Say you are Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet. He just got an idea one day and said, "I can exchange cross-platform documents that are linked hypertextually. That would be great I'll just do that." Then he took a week and programmed it and it worked and it was awesome. You can never do that on the telephone network. Now that we have that ability, nobody's going to give it up. The Internet may come or go but that basic openness which enables so much commerce and so much expression and so much craziness like blogs and myspace and all those things, nobody's going to let Those things go. The dinosaurs may die but they're going to be replaced by the Brads of the world. There's going to be new distributors, new editors, new middlemen who are competent in this medium. They're going to make the most of it. There's a lot to be made there and so basically, Brad's business Ruckus is a new life form. It's going to fill the niche left by the dinosaurs. Maybe Ruckus might live or die but something like it or collective licensing, or some new thing is going to come along. New business models are going to come along. Now, of course, those on the business end of the change are going to resist. But the change is as inevitable as the meteors. It's just the way of it. So it is a giant opportunity. I think there's going to be some destruction but it's going to be creative destruction.

Brad Vaughn:

I don't see that the Internet... Chris, the Internet is here to stay. Challenge your business model and figure out how you adjust to it. The Internet also doesn't kill the business model, it can make your business very efficient. You can do many things. Chris and I, if we need to have a meeting, could have it via the Web, but he's in San Francisco and I'm in Washington. Time and money and effort can be saved and averted. So you have a lot of efficiencies that come along with the Internet. You do have a lot of killing of some businesses, but obviously some opportunities as well. So I don't see the Internet going anywhere. I just see business models being adjusted and tweaked to fit the new mold.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Brad, I'm sorry in the Paleolithic metaphor that you're now the furry mammal after the dinosaurs. So let me ask a question about the climate that this furry mammal needs. If these new models are going to work, is there something that needs to change in the policy world about copyright or about trade or about other regulations of information systems that would make your business more tenable or more possible? You're in the middle of the number of these sorts of dinosaurs, whether they're content provider, whether they're DRM providers whether they are ISPs. What would change that would benefit that system?

Brad Vaughn:

I think the first thing that comes to mind is that it goes back to to the question of what I would improve and what I would change is simplicity. End-users need to understand and be simply educated about what this all means. It's so complicated. You have lawyers that have been practicing for 10 years who can't even get through all this stuff. So how do you expect Alice for Bob or anyone sitting at home to understand what all this really means? That's the complication and that's where we need to see some movement.

Tarleton Gillespie:

To continue the policy question, and Chris may have a particular view on this from the work he's been doing, do systems like Kazaa or Grokster have to die for a system like a Ruckus to persist in the long term? Do they have to be killed or is it possible that these models could coexist and one always be casually legal the way that speeding and underage drinking are or do they actually need to be disabled for this to work?

Chris Palmer:

I don't think that there's anything inherent to Kazaa that's illegal. As Brad was saying, he learned that peer-to-peer networking can be used for good as well as for evil. Kazaa could just be the new transport layer of Ruckus, someday. Or Bit Torrent. Bit Torrent is probably one of your better choices. It's just so efficient. I think they can certainly coexist. I don't know if you mean Kazaa the business or Grokster the business or Kazaa the software or Morpheus the software or whatever. As software, they're just pieces of the pie and pieces of the puzzle that Ruckus could put together just like http, the Web protocol is. You know whether or not, whoever is the owner of Kazaa, they make their money by popping up the advertisements and stuff. There's other problems with that kind of invasive borderline Malware kind of thing. That's probably going to have to get smashed or smooshed. But on the technology point of view, they certainly can coexist and maybe Ruckus or some Ruckus-like business can just use them as a free transport and make the most of it. Maybe.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Brad, it does it seem like in the short term your business has coexisted with these systems. But is there the sense that to be a long-term success we have to sort of make them die away, or are they always going to compete and that's going to somehow be fine?

Brad Vaughn:

I don't think it's a competition, architecturally and technically. I'm not a very technical person. But those systems are incredibly efficient. So yes, what's being transported across them today, the majority is probably copyrighted files. The idea of how the system works and how a bit torrent works is revolutionary to moving data information across any stretch of distance in very high-quality, very high time. It's all incredible. So I think that technology needs to coexist. We learned, one of the things that comes to my mind when you talk about a peer-to-peer is that one of the things, and a professor at Michigan State did a study on this, about the peer-to-peer was more of a community-based and more of the conversation between college students which is why it was so popular, rather than a means to an end. I think that so peer-to-peer is going to be here it's going to be here to stay. Now Ruckus and peer-to-peer need to coexist and work together and frankly if our architecture would support peer-to-peer across all of our campuses, it would be a very efficient system from our end. I do think they will coexist.

Tracy Mitrano:

Tarleton I have one more question. This person recognizes Brad that you are not the RIAA but they sort of addressed it to you and want to know if you have some insight into why the content owners like the RIAA have taken the approach of suing users. They also have a note here. They say that universities and colleges in higher education have been doing a lot to educate people, and they sort of followed up with, "Why doesn't the industry take some measure of that education, especially for younger users in ages earlier than the college population?"

Brad Vaughn:

I think that your second point to users younger than the college population, that's where we have to be. John Seely Brown talks a lot about digital natives and digital immigrants. I'm not very old, but I would be considered a digital immigrant. You have freshmen in college who would never know what writing a paper for school is by hand. Or not getting on your AOL instant messenger at night to talk to somebody across town. Or frankly you might have moved from San Francisco to Washington, DC and Chris and I can talk for no cost. So it's a very different environment today and it continues to evolve. I don't know the RIAA. I can't speak on their behalf. I think that at some points they're lost to what to do. They're not sure what to do. They don't know a solution. They've hit on something that's a public relations mess but they view as being effective. There just aren't a lot of solutions to police this right now. I don't know what their stance would be on it, but I'm guessing. One of the things that I think people, and technically you are going to understand this went very well, why college students are often targeted. It's not for me to giving the music to Chris when you open yourself up to systems. College students have the fastest network. So when I'm on a network and I want to go download a song, I want to go to the person with the fastest network. So in general it's not the fact that they want to come after me for giving a song to Chris, but the fact that I can be a mass distributor when I'm on a college campus, whereas if I'm sitting in my house, it's not a great experience for you guys. So I think that's one of the problems. Also the pressure point on college and the visibility.

Tarleton Gillespie:

Since we're at this table in part because were at a university that's trying to think about their role, the question was sort of raised about what universities can do, to encourage competition. Are there other roles that the university could be playing that they've been in position to play that could shift the debate a little bit? This could do things that record labels or peer-to-peer designers or even the EFF can't do? Is there some role that universities could be playing besides choosing a vendor and educating people on copyright?

Kwame Thomison:

Well obviously the extreme would be things like packet sniffing, content filtering, things that luckily Cornell does not do and hopefully in the foreseeable future will not do. But more and more, I think with the RIAA has done is put people in panic mode. Brad spoke a little bit about this earlier. He called it the Band-Aid approach where universities obtain one of these services and say, "that's it for now." I would blame the RIAA for that because they're the ones were putting the pressure on the universities to do something about it. They obtain the service, but there still needs to be that educational piece in there. I don't think just getting the service quite gets you there because students can easily turn to these illegal services and when they are doing it internally, we've spoken a lot about the network pipes, and they're sharing back and forth. Who's going to infiltrate that? There's no way to get around it. It's just going to happen. Like I said, it's the RIAA's fault. Enough on that commentary.

Chris Palmer:

I think Tarleton, in your opening statement you sort of alluded to one of the big things. That is that people who are at universities are training to be intellectual property creators. Musicians, writers, journalists. All those things. So universities can instill new norms, as well as sort of a factual education about what copyright is. You can also instill an ethic, I think. I think universities have a special ability to do that. More so than me from the EFF or the business community or someone else.

Brad Vaughn:

I would agree along those lines. Every school should have a service provider, of course, would be my stance, but also a service provider that is integrated into the society of the school and is really part of the school. One of our big pushes is the pre-freshmen. When they come to school it is a way to connect them, this digital umbilical cord where every student is connected to their home all the time. That's a new phenomenon in a new thing that a lot of schools struggle with. It's a way to integrate it. To your fair use piece, there's a lot you can do with Ruckus. Unfortunately we wish more schools were using it. But as you see media use grow in the classroom, these students that are digital natives, that's the way they learn. That's what they enjoy and so you're really going to see the model change a little bit to incorporate more of this. I'm sure you walk by numerous classrooms on this campus where everybody's got their laptop open.

Kwame Thomison:

I want to speak a little bit on this concept of digital native. Obviously my generation, or at least me, I grew up in front of a computer. The concept of copyright law was not really introduced to me. Or maybe a little bit, in high school, when Napster got big and Napster got sued several times, or went to court several times. But this concept of copyright law, what is copyright law, was not instilled in me. So like Brad said earlier, you really need to start in the elementary schools. Usually being a digital native you get property. Digital property, intellectual property obviously is something very different because you can copy it. You can't copy a chair, you can't copy a table. But you can copy a song. Intuitively it doesn't quite click, I believe, in students that this is a crime to copy it. It seems so simple. Point and click. That's what we were brought up on. So, "Wait! I can point and click when it's a song?" It doesn't quite click with students.

Tarleton Gillespie:

So I think we'll have to see if the digital natives and the furry mammals can coexist in this room. We are going to close down the panel now. I want to thank Chris, Brad, and Kwame as well as Tracy Mitrano and Ben Walther for setting it up. And the audience thank you.

[Applause]