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Knock it off: Global treaty against media piracy won't work in Asia Date: 11/13/2009 |
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By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate For the geekerati, it was a Pentagon Papers moment. Last week, the anonymous "total transparency" site Wikileaks unveiled a new cache of classified documents -- memos revealing the top-secret terms of a proposed international treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, being negotiated by the world's biggest content-creating regions. "The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations," wrote Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a grim post on the advocacy organization's "Deeplinks" blog. Or, as author and Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow put it even more pithily: "It's bad. Very bad." Under ACTA, Internet providers in the U.S., the E.U., Japan, Korea and other signatory markets would be required to actively police their users or face the threat of massive liability. Any allegedly copyrighted content would need to be removed on demand, even without proof of infringement. Even casual violators would face the threat of losing Internet access and, ultimately, criminal charges. And service providers, customs agents and law enforcement officials would be empowered to search private accounts and personal devices -- laptops, MP3 players and even cellphones -- for illicit content, all without the need for warrants or probable cause. Most people, if asked, would probably agree that content shouldn't be 100 percent free -- that artists and creators should have some way to earn a living from their work. The problem is that ACTA, like most proposed solutions to copyright infringement, is all stick, no carrot; it focuses on punishing offenders rather than encouraging innovative ways of doing business that account for the new realities of the global economy. All of which effectively makes the treaty a nonstarter for two-thirds of the world's population. That's because in Asia, "intellectual property" as we think of it is an alien concept, recently imported from the West and hastily transplanted with limited success at best. "It's almost like there's an institutional disrespect for copyright in Asia," says Seung Bak, cofounder of the video streaming startup DramaFever, which brings free, English-subtitled Asian television to U.S. audiences. "People feel like, 'If I can't touch it, why should I have to pay for it?'" China: The bandit-tech boom There are many reasons why this mindset exists in Asia; one possible explanation is that the collectivist bent of most Asian cultures encourages the belief that information -- and, by extension, all kinds of content -- should be a common social resource rather than a privately owned good. As a result, duplicating the bright ideas of others has become an embedded part of Asia's creative ecosystems. On the plus side, this means that new innovations spread with lightning speed across Asia's industries -- nowhere in the world is faster at turning a cool idea into a new product category or entertainment genre. On the minus side, it also means that Asian markets are rife with dubious me-too copies, duplicating the look and functionality but often not the quality of the original. Brian Lam, editor in chief of the popular consumer tech blog Gizmodo, grew up in Hong Kong, which, back in the '80s, was the knock-off capital of the world. "My dad was an engineer for Hewlett-Packard, and he got me and my brothers into gadgets early," he says. "I remember as a kid taking the subway over to Kowloon to just gawk at all the electronics shops. The real stuff was cheap, the fake stuff even cheaper." There was no shame in buying and owning counterfeit goods, although the understanding was that you usually got what you paid for. "My dad had 12 fake Rolexes, and they all sucked -- they'd fog up as soon as you walked into the bathroom," he laughs. But Lam points out that things are fundamentally different now. For one, hardware used to be differentiated by where it was manufactured. "Back in the day, Sony would assemble Walkmen in China for the global market, and in Japan exclusively for its domestic market," he says. "Officially, they'd be the same model, but the ones made in Japan would clearly be of higher quality -- they would feel totally different. So it was a big thing to own a grey-market, made-in-Japan Walkman. Now, 15 years later, virtually every consumer electronics product you buy is made in China. You have name-brand stuff and knockoff stuff being made side by side, maybe even coming off the same assembly line." Indeed, an entire consumer subculture has sprung up around counterfeit goods in China, what Chinese refer to as shanzhai or, literally, "mountain village" products (the name comes from the fact that, in ancient times, bandits would often build their redoubts in high passes, out of reach of the short arm of the law). Though its name suggests something remote and marginal, in reality shanzhai is now a mainstream phenomenon. It's estimated, for instance, that one of every five cellphones produced in China -- some 150 million devices -- are shanzhai. And they're becoming more than just cheap pirate booty: Increasingly, shanzhai goods are promising functionality missing from their original inspirations, at a fraction of the name-brand goods' price. Examples of shanzhai that raise the stakes include DaPeng's T2000, a $150 iPhone lookalike that offers built-in digital TV and a physical keyboard, just in case you get tired of touchscreen twiddling. Meanwhile, Haff-Comm is marketing the "Blockberry 9500," a $206 Blackberry Storm clone running Windows 6.1 and featuring WiFi, Bluetooth, SIRF III GPS, both 3G and EDGE network compatibility, and -- amazingly -- Barack Obama as its chief spokesperson, if we're to believe the company's advertising. For laptop shoppers, along with a bevy of slender Macbook Air clones, there's the VAINO, a $300 Sony Vaio-P knockoff that's half the price and has a faster processor than the original. One could argue that, by duplicating existing feature sets while striving to offer more, shanzhai may actually be driving innovation (of sorts), contrary to the argument made by those who suggest that without airtight and infinitely extended IP protection, there's no incentive for the development of groundbreaking new products and technologies. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. Not all of the "innovations" of shanzhai products are particularly useful (one shanzhai Blackberry Pearl clone offers a built-in electric razor, for instance). But the knockoffs have certainly exerted downward pressure on price, forced major brands to compete on quality and service, as opposed to perceived prestige and appearance, and derailed artificial constraints imposed by manufacturers and governments that are ultimately harmful to consumers. For example, the announcement of the Meizu, China's first and sexiest iPhone clone, whetted the market's appetite for the real thing (particularly when the Meizu largely proved to be vaporware); middle-class Chinese consumers quickly began snapping up unlocked gray-market iPhones, illegally transported from Hong Kong, at around $800 a pop. Which explains why, when Apple finally partnered with China Unicom to officially introduce the iPhone to the market earlier this month, the response was tepid at best: The official iPhone was crippled at launch (its WiFi connectivity disabled by government mandate), cost a cool grand and was locked to the Unicom network. "The rumor -- it's all water cooler gossip at this point -- is that they sold around 5,000 units in the first week," says Lam. "That's a shockingly low number. But you have to consider that anyone who's wanted an iPhone in China has been able to get one for years now, unlocked, fully functional, at a cheaper price. The 'official' launch is meaningless -- the unofficial launch happened so long ago that no one even cares." The estimated tally of grey-market iPhones in use in China? More than 1.5 million. Korea: The future is now If there's a lesson in the iPhone's flop, it's that in today's frictionless global market it's harder to put barriers between consumers and the stuff they want. If something is available anywhere, people can get it everywhere. Purveyors of other kinds of intellectual property, notably media and entertainment, have already learned that lesson. In our digital era, music, movies and software can be copied perfectly by a teenager in his mom's basement and transmitted throughout in the world in days, hours or even minutes. So what happens to content providers when everything is instantaneously downloadable, and everyone thinks content is essentially free? Welcome to contemporary Korea, where a titanic digital public works program in the '90s resulted in 85 percent of the population having home broadband access that's faster than anything commercially available in the U.S. "What they think is normal in Seoul is vastly different from what we think is normal here -- the stuff we read about in Popular Science, they take for granted," says DramaFever's Seung Bak. "A show will air on TV, and 10 minutes later it'll be uploaded in HD quality to a sharing site where anyone can download it in about 10 seconds." So Korea can be thought of as something of a laboratory for the future of digital media, because it's just a matter of time before the rest of the world's bandwidth catches up. Earlier this year, Korea began putting heavy pressure on filesharing sites, particularly digital locker services like Wedisk and ClubBox, frequently used by pirates as a platform to distribute their wares. But as authorities began shutting down illicit activity in those venues, filesharers moved to decentralized options like BitTorrent, making it even harder to squelch infringement. (To ease the migration, filesharers even held webinars and posted BitTorrent tutorials on public discussion forums and chat sites.) Prior to the crackdown, however, some enterprising film producers had begun to explore ways of collaborating with, rather than eliminating, filesharing services, whose aggregate membership had risen to over 25 million -- more than half of Korea's total population. Distributor Kino-eye, for instance, held a free "online premiere" of the low-budget indie film "Sleeping Beauty," allowing up to 1,500 people a day to watch the film on Wedisk. The promotion proved wildly successful: Not only were there virtual standing-room crowds for the online premiere's six-day run, the film played to full houses and sold an additional 10,000 video downloads on the day of its subsequent theatrical release -- an exceptional success for an indie film, which might otherwise be expected to sell fewer than 1,000 tickets and downloads in total. Call it the can't-beat-'em, might-as-well-join-'em syndrome. Strict enforcement has prompted an endless game of whack-a-mole, with pirates moving on to new platforms as their old ones are shut down. But by giving filesharers and sharing platform operators incentives to offer legal, licensed services -- while ensuring that the user experience their audiences have been drawn to remains the same -- a solution emerges that might just allow everyone to benefit. That's what Bak and college friend Suk Park were thinking when they launched DramaFever, a site offering high-quality episodes of Asian television dramas for free -- streamed via the Internet, subtitled in English. Bak and Park realized there was a surging demand for Asian television programming, but no efficient, legal way for people to get it. "For the longest time, the only way to watch these shows in the U.S. was to either buy bootleg DVDs in Koreatown or Chinatown, or pay $30 a month to satellite TV," says Bak. "And none of it was in English. Then fans started subtitling shows themselves and uploading them to YouTube, but the quality was terrible, and programs had to be chopped up into 10-minute long clips." Bak and Park decided to build a site that offered free content licensed directly from Asian broadcasters and producers. "We realized there was an opportunity to beat the illegal competition by creating a better legal experience -- something as clean and easy and streamlined as possible," says Park. The site has maintained 40 percent month-over-month growth since it left beta in August and passed 100,000 unique monthly visitors in October. But DramaFever still has a long way to go to catch up with the godfather of Asian streaming-media sites: The black-hat-turned-white-hat anime streaming community known as CrunchyRoll. Japan: Loving the enemy Founded in 2006 by Kun Gao, Vu Nguyen, Brandon Ooi and James Lin, who met as classmates in U.C. Berkeley's electrical engineering program, CrunchyRoll came into being when the four friends decided to create a shanzhai version of a video sharing site that had launched earlier in the year to great acclaim. "We pretty much just built a YouTube clone to share with our friends," says Gao, now CrunchyRoll's CEO. "But we're Asian, and our friends are all Asian or aspired to being Asian. So instead of skateboard videos, they were uploading what you might call Asian-centric content. And it just grew from there." CrunchyRoll became an online second home for anime fans, who gravitated to the site's fan-subtitled Japanese animation. "By the middle of 2007, we had over a million users, and we were maxing out our credit cards paying for bandwidth," says Gao. "We didn't know what to do -- we were at the point of having to make a decision: Quit our day jobs and do this full time, or shut the site down entirely." Salvation came in the form of an investment by Venrock, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller family, whose $4 million cash infusion made it possible to transform CrunchyRoll from a hobby into a business, but it came with a price: CrunchyRoll would have to replace the terabytes of illicit fan-uploaded content they'd managed to aggregate with legitimately licensed video, all without losing momentum. "It was a scary time," admits Gao. "We didn't know what would happen. We knew that there'd be a backlash. But we were convinced that our users were passionate about supporting the site -- and that if they had a legal way of seeing the shows they love, they'd stick around." Two strokes of good fortune helped CrunchyRoll survive, both occurring in the fall of 2008. The first was the cable channel Cartoon Network's surprising decision to cancel its venerable Toonami programming block -- for years one of the most reliable sources of anime on broadcast television. The second was an unique deal the company was able to negotiate with TV Tokyo, the broadcaster that airs more anime than any other Japanese network. "TV Tokyo controls 40 percent of Japan's anime series, and we were able to get them to agree to let us put episodes of their shows up on our site within one hour of broadcast," says Gao. "Not even Hulu can do that. It effectively means that we're the 'first window' for content. And the reason they agreed is that they know we're growing their audience: We're getting them viewers they'd never be able to access on their own." The deal prompted other broadcasters to fall in line. Now, CrunchyRoll simulcasts English-subtitled editions of 20 out of the 40 anime programs currently on the air in Japan. Free programming is bookended with advertising; a premium option costing as little as $5 a month eliminates the ads, provides access to high-definition content and subscriber-only programming, and puts a little premium member badge on a user's profile. "That's more important than you'd think," says Gao. "One of the things we realized early on was that CrunchyRoll isn't just a video sharing site, it's a social network for fans of Japanese animation. The little badge is social proof that you're a real supporter of the site." Fans aren't foes That partnership between content provider and consumer is exactly what's missing in the Western world's debate over intellectual property, where movie studios and record labels talk about their customers as potential criminals. In Asia, media companies have a much closer and more interactive relationship with fans, treating them as partners in evangelizing their products -- even when that means blurring the lines of copyright restrictions. Kai-Ming Cha, manga editor of Publishers Weekly, notes that Japan's media industry has "developed a detente" with fans. She points to the example of doujinshi -- amateur "homage" publications that depict popular anime and manga characters in original, sometimes pornographic storylines. "They realize these unauthorized spinoffs help to build the fandom, and ultimately drive sales of the original," she says. Contrast this with the notorious litigiousness of American companies that vigorously defend the slightest infringement of their IP. "Japanese tend to resolve things in extralegal fashion, whereas in the U.S., Disney will send out a whole battalion of lawyers," notes manga historian Fred Schodt. "It's not an exaggeration to say that much of the current state of U.S. copyright law has come about due to Disney's efforts to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain." But in a world where new technologies are offering consumers an expanding global buffet of media options, even an icon like Mickey is just a mouse in the crowd. By working so hard to preserve the status quo, the media establishment risks criminalizing potential partners and alienating their biggest evangelists. Put another way, by protecting the past, they risk losing their grip on the inevitable future. Jeff Yang forecasts global consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China," co-author of "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action" and "Eastern Standard Time," and editor of "Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology" (www.secretidentities.org). He lives in New York City. Check out Jeff Yang's blog at originalspin.posterous.com for updates on this column and alerts about politics, technology, and pop culture news, or connect with him on Facebook: www.facebook.com/originalspin, LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeffcyang, or Twitter: http://twitter.com/originalspin. |
| Source: SFGate.com |
