Picker: Copyright and Product Design

A key post-Grokster question is: how will innovators take copyright into question in building new products? A couple of interesting examples from the Wall Street Journal yesterday and today (here and here and I suspect available only if you subscribe online as I do). The stories involve $300-per-share Google and, at the other end of the spectrum, a company new to me, Sling Media.

Google is constantly expanding its services, and if you visit the Google Lab—described by Google as its “technology playground”—you will see products in the making, as well as products that have graduated to become part of Google’s regular full-service, including my personal favorite, Google Desktop Search.

Google Video is one of the new toys. Google Video is directed at the important problem of figuring out how to find rich media. Original Google—think of it as Google Classic—solved the text problem—or at least close enough for most purposes. But the promise of the current web and certainly the future of the broadband Web is text plus rich media—music and sounds and video—and Google Video is intended to make that world available to us.

Google Video consists of three parts: a video viewer; a search engine; and an upload service through which content creators can make their videos available. The video viewer plays back files only if they are stored on Google servers. At least that’s how it worked for four days, until Jon Johansen of DeCSS fame—posted code to remove the restriction. (See c|net for more on that.) The technical link between the video viewer and the content service is interesting in its own right, especially since Google contemplates future fees in connection with video downloading.

But today’s issue is copyright, not antitrust issues down the road. According to the WSJ report, a number of copyrighted works—including two thirds of the Matrix trilogy (but not the good one)—were uploaded on Google’s servers without the permission of the copyright holders. Google’s FAQ makes clear that it will comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice-and-takedown procedures in running its video service, and did so in deleting The Matrix Revolutions and The Matrix Reloaded from its servers. (Now only if Google Labs could delete them from my memory ala Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)

Next consider the Slingbox, brought to you by Sling Media, and described in Walter Mossberg’s personal technology column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. The Slingbox “placeshifts” TV shows. You have a TV at home and a content source, such as a cable box, satellite receiver, or DVR. You then add the Slingbox and you are ready to ship content across your broadband connection to a computer wherever you are located. TV at home, you at your in-laws across the country, big game at home. Not a problem: you can watch on your laptop over their broadband connection.

It will be interesting to see how the Slingbox unfolds. As Mossberg describes it, Sling only streams to the remote computer and does not allow copying so as to avoid potential copyright issues.

That may not be enough to protect Sling from copyright concerns. The description of the product suggests that I might be able to watch The Sopranos at home and allow someone else to watch remotely through my Slingbox if I have given them the appropriate password. This would allow me to share my HBO subscription with my sister, even if she was living across the country. HBO frowns on that.

Moreover, Mossberg describes the joy of watching the new Washington baseball team—the Nationals—while in Boston. But it was precisely this kind of location shifting that led to a dispute between the National Football League and TiVo in connection with TiVo’s new TiVoGuard service. That dispute was resolved by an agreement between the NFL and TiVo to restrict content to the subscriber’s local television market.

Content restrictions of the sort implemented by the National Football League raise tricky questions regarding the appropriate bounds of price discrimination so as to how content creators to maximize the value of their content. Technology that enables “placeshifting” puts pressure on those business models and will almost certainly raise delicate questions over who should control content.