It’ll be very interesting to see the result of a lawsuit currently brewing in federal court that is trying to shut down ReDigi (a judge backed the service, but an appeal seems likely), a service that will let you resell music you purchased from iTunes after taking quite comprehensive efforts to keep owners from having access to the music they want to divest of:

ReDigi says the plaintiff has a “profound misunderstanding of how ReDigi works,” pointing to systems in place to forensically analyze song files to make sure they came from iTunes, to delete files from devices, to upload files for streaming onto RAM, to control access to songs, to limit storage merely for personal use, and to allow users to downloads these files. If it all sounds complicated, yes, that’s the point. The semantic parsing of what’s happening in the transfer of music is at issue in this case, and it gets to the core copyright question, “What is a copy?” That’s an issue that the 2nd Circuit struggled with answering in the 2008 “Cablevision” case, where Hollywood studios attempted to shut down a DVR service that allowed users to store TV programming remotely. In that decision, the justices examined the transitory duration of data buffering and whether works are “fixed” in a tangible medium, and expressed some skepticism with studio arguments about copies being made along the way. But the 2nd Circuit handed Cablevision a win mostly on grounds that its remote DVR was merely acting at the behest of its users.

To be a bit clearer, what’s at issue is whether the doctrine of first sale, which gives content owners the right to sell their copy of content, but not copies of their copy, applies to digital content as well as to physical content. As the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard explains: “Currently, U.S. and European Union law have denied that the first sale doctrine applies to digital works distributed over the Internet, despite good arguments to the contrary. And the principle has yet to emerge in Asian-Pacific jurisdictions. The WIPO treaties currently stipulate application of the first-sale doctrine to tangible goods like books and CDs and not to intangible content distributed over the Internet.” It’s not surprising that this issue is coming to a head. Some outlets, like Amazon, already stipulate that customers can’t resell the files. But it’s not like the move to digital means that consumers will only want to be able to do different things with their content—it just means they’ll want to do more things, and have the ability to do all the old things as well.

But I do think that this mindset gets at two competing strains of thought when it comes to digital content. The folks I’ve talked to who download content outside of legal channels often come down to arguing that because they aren’t taking a physical object from its owner that could be sold for profit, they aren’t doing any harm. But extending first sale doctrine to digital content certainly means treating that content as if individual copies have value. I tend to think it’s in the interests of both content producers and content consumers, in terms of supporting the creation of new content and providing consumers with content of the highest quality, for content to be treated as if it has a value higher than free all the way through the process, and for content producers to focus aggressively on developing new licit ways to get content to consumers in a timely manner. But we’re a long way from reaching that consensus. Hopefully, this case can help establish some positive new norms.

When we talk about folks downloading copyrighted material outside of legal channels, much of the debate centers around whether or not the downloaders were ever potential consumers. If they are potential consumers who are just choosing not to pay for content, then the question becomes how to deter people who do have the disposable income to pay for things they want to watch or listen to. If we’re assuming that downloaders are not and will never be potential paying customers under current circumstances, then the question becomes which circumstances could induce them to become paying customers. And the circumstances we talk about changing usually involve bringing prices down.

But I wonder if there’s another subset of piracy (again, I think we’ll never get to piracy zero and it’s not productive to aim for that goal) that’s worth considering: downloading that’s driven by the unavailability of material due to staggered international air dates and failure to consider what prices are viable in international markets. I think it’s quite smart of ABC and the creative folks involved in The River (including one Mr. Steven Spielberg) to make sure that the show will be available to UK audiences via iTunes the same time it’ll be available to American audiences in the same format. It’s not the same thing as having a coordinated domestic and international air date, which I think would be preferable in terms of preventing piracy, though riskier in terms of aggregating ratings, would take a long time to set up, and wouldn’t be possible for all shows. But it does mean that folks in the UK have a legal, timely, fairly priced way to get a show that denies them any and all fig leaves to hide behind about torrenting it instead.

Similarly, it’s probably worth considering differential pricing for content in different international markets. If 68 percent of software in Russia is pirated, along with 82 percent of music in Mexico and 90 percent of movies in India, that may be an indicator of a different cultural attitude towards piracy. But it’s also probably worth trying to determine at which prices people in those countries would buy those content through legal channels. Could that create a reverse-piracy problem where customers in developing markets who were paying for content previously try to take advantage of lower prices available elsewhere, or move to piracy? Maybe, though it might simply be too much hassle relative to the savings and quality. In any case, it’s probably worth trying to figure out a mixed strategy that monetizes the content we make here at home and abroad. If piracy is a customer service problem, it’s not just about the needs of American customers.

The bridge is yours.

-Who needs product integration when you can set the show at the company?

-New Frank Ocean!

-Thinking about democracy and the internet beyond SOPA.

-Get your Avatar: The Legend of Korra fix with this clip.

-Apple is super-upset about the Times’ series on working conditions in their supply chain.

One of the big dynamics in the debate over SOPA and PIPA is who’s getting money from whom. The entertainment industry’s currently spending a great deal more on lobbying than the tech community is; MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd has threatened to turn off Hollywood campaign contributions to Democrats if SOPA or a form of it doesn’t pass; and both Democrats and Republicans are attempting to position themselves for the future. What a big, and usefully clear, New York Times story about Apple’s decision to move much of its work overseas makes clear, though, is while the tech industry may eventually have more to offer in terms of lobbying cash and campaign contributions, it may not have much to offer Democrats in terms of creating critically important American manufacturing jobs. In a conversation between Steve Jobs and President Obama before the former’s death, the Times reported that this exchange took place about the Apple jobs that have moved overseas:

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

It’s absolutely true that there would have to be radical changes in the American economy to retrain workers, to move huge parts of the supply chain back to the United States, and perhaps most difficult, to get American workers to expect a vastly different standard of living or to get Apple executives to accept slower development times and more expensive production costs. I’d argue that American workers have already made substantial compromises on the former proposition. But I don’t foresee a future where companies are going to move toward the latter out of the goodness of their own hearts. There’s no question that companies have a right to maximize profits, and that if they don’t care how they’re perceived or about creating a sense of moral obligation to buy their products, they have every right to produce their products wherever and under whatever conditions they can get away with. But if they’re going to take that approach, I sort of wish they’d be as blunt about it as possible, so we don’t risk mistaking shiny toys for some sort of greater good.

I think it’s pretty clear that there was no intentionality behind the fact that Siri, the AI assistant on the iPhone 4s, turns out to be pretty good at directing users to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, but not to abortion clinics (though it seems to find Planned Parenthood very easily when searched for by name). Some of it may simply be that Apple relies heavily on external databases like Yelp to source answers to queries. And pursuant to that, I think Jill Filipovic nails it:

That data is often messy, and savvier companies will pay for the data about them to be accurate and to include the full range of their services. Abortion clinics and other women’s health facilities, obviously, are not dedicating tons of time to figure out how to optimize their search results. So the data is crappy to begin with. To fix that, programmers go in and add tens of thousands of little tweaks to a program like Siri to make it as accurate as possible, and also to include some jokes (like where to hide a dead body). But when programmers are mostly dudes, the lady-stuff just gets… ignored. So Siri knows 15 different ways to say “oral sex performed on a man” and can find a place to get it, but anything involving female sexuality at all leaves her clueless. Which doesn’t make it excusable. It’s pretty appalling that programmers thought far ahead enough to know where to send users who needed to remove rodents from their buttholes, but didn’t consider a medical procedure that 1 in 3 American women will have. I mean, they appear to have thought far ahead enough to have Siri respond to the boyfriend of the woman who is pregnant, but not to the woman herself.

On the first point, and sort of pursuant to the point I made earlier this fall about tech infrastructure for the feminist blogosphere, it would be very smart strategic giving for someone to set up a fund to optimize the hell out of progressive service providers’ sites. I’d be pretty concerned about attempts to politicize algorithms, because I think any step in that direction can have profound and dangerous consequences, but I think it’s important to make sure that progressive organizations have all the resources they need to game those algorithms as effectively as possible.

Second, making technology for women isn’t really a matter of color, or angles, or whether it fits in your purse. It’s about whether the snazzy, solves-all-your-problems technology (which is unquestionably the way Apple is marketing Siri, rather than as a Beta) actually serves that purpose for all of your customers. If your ability to think about the varied needs of your consumers only extends to thinking about the varied needs of men, you’re not actually as an expansive thinker as you believe yourself to be. Tech companies should be particularly attentive to female feedback on products like this not because our tiny girl brains will give them marketing ideas, but because artificial intelligence is about perspective, not just information.