This morning, President Obama released a new report on federal cybersecurity efforts and announced plans to develop a comprehensive federal cybersecurity strategy.  Arts+Labs released the following statement.

By making cybersecurity a national priority, President Obama has taken a critical first step toward a safe Internet environment that will enable Americans to enjoy the full benefits of our emerging digital society.   In both the physical world and the digital world, people want and deserve a safe neighborhood.  But, as today's report makes clear, we have work to do.
 
One in five online consumers say they have been victims of cybercrime in the last two years, two million have had their identity stolen via the Internet, and an estimated seven million have been duped by phishing scams.  Added together, these crimes and larger attacks on business and government, drain tens of billions from our national economy every year.
 
Working together, we can protect our economy and our security with a collaborative response to the challenge of cybercrime.  It's time for a public and private partnership that brings together every Internet participant - software and game developers, network operators, content creators, search engines, Web sites, advocacy groups and consumers - to build an Internet that is safe for all of us.

Sony CEO Michael Lynton has written an interesting essay at the Huffington Post.  Essentially, his point is that the internet gives us a tremendous opportunity, but only with rules that promote and encourage both individual rights and commerce.

Contrast the expansion of the Internet with what happened a half century ago. In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation's history -- the creation of the Interstate Highway System. It completely transformed how we did business, traveled, and conducted our daily lives. But unlike the Internet, the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines. Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed. As a result, as interstates flourished, so did the economy.  [...]

We can replicate that kind of success with the Internet more easily if we do more to encourage the productivity of the creative engines of our society -- the artists, actors, writers, directors, singers and other holders of intellectual property rights -- yes, including the movie studios, which help produce and distribute entertainment to billions of people worldwide.

But, without standards of commerce and more action against piracy, the intellectual property of humankind will be subject to infinite exploitation on the Internet. [...]  Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.

Lynton's essay has met with some criticism, but I think a lot of the criticisms amount to semantic disputes over what he means by "rules".   Here's the thing: nobody really disputes the importance of having social, technological and legal standards.  They are the basis of a functioning society (see: social contract), and they are equally important in a digital society.

The questions are not about whether we will have standards, but what our social, technological and legal standards are, how they will emerge and how (or whether) they will be enforced.

In a sense, our social standards and mores might be thought of as a kind of code that has developed over the history of our society.  And while we have generally incorporated our social standards and mores into legal code, we are still learning how to incorporate them into technological code. 

In a recent essay at Cato Unbound, Larry Lessig wrote that "there can be "code failures" ... that threaten important values that we all should ... hold dear."  Lynton's argument is that we have a social and legal code that respects the individual rights of creators, and it is important that our digital society also account for these mores and laws.  As Larry Lessig also wrote at Cato Unbound, there are times "when "no law" is the inducement to "bad code," and where a "good law" would stanch evolution to bad code."

What those codes look like will "be found only with time", but "no code" for these values we hold dear (the rights of creators) would be a code failure.

In that sense, Michael Lynton is indisputably correct that we need "standards of commerce".   And it's very good that he (and Sony) also recognize that we need creators who "meet [the digital] demand as efficiently and effectively as possible".

A final point: Earlier today, Arts+Labs spokesman Mike McCurry and I exchanged a few emails about Lynton's essay, and he made an interesting point (which I reproduce here with his permission): "Michael Lynton is only asking for some civilization to prevail within the digital society of the Internet.  We want an ethical structure to that society that allows creativity and innovation to prosper and that can happen with the right protocols and standards -- his plea is for fundamental fairness and honesty."

We have social and legal standards and mores for our analog society.  It is time we start solving these problems for our digital society.

Jaman is yet another video on demand site aiming to break down the barrier between your computer and your TV. Jaman's specialty is in foreign and independent films, though it has a respectable library of Hollywood films as well.

Jaman offers hundreds of free, ad-supported movies, alongside a greater number of movies that are available to rent on an as-you-go basis. Rented movies can be watched as many times you like within the allotted time period, which can be 24 hours or a week.

Almost 600 of these movies can be queued directly to be downloaded onto your TiVo, and 50 can even be watched on your mobile device.

For the rest, you can still watch them on your TV if you hook it up your computer, and the Jaman website has a very helpful guide to selecting the best connection between the two devices, depending on which inputs and outputs are available.

For those who would rather watch their movies directly on their computers, Jaman has multiple options there, too. You can either watch your movie directly in your browser, or you can get higher quality by downloading the Jaman player and downloading each movie to your computer.

If you go with the Jaman player, the application takes advantage of P2P technology in the background to download content from other users in addition to their central servers, which gives you a quick download while keeping their costs down.

As a site that focuses on independent and international media, a big part of the Jaman experience is discovering content you like.

When you sign up, Jaman allows you to create a personal profile, and asks you about your taste in movie genres, just to get you started. Having a variety of foreign-language films, Jaman also asks what language you prefer in your movies, and asks about your tolerance for subtitles.

After you've set a baseline for your preferences, you can get more specific about what you're in the mood to see right now. Each movie at Jaman is rated based on several rough criteria - serious or funny, mellow or charged, deep or shallow, tears or bullets - and you can set each of those along a sliding scale.

Also helping viewers to find new things is that staple of video websites, the social network. Jaman's social network, which is augmented by Facebook Connect, is part of that sharing aspect of the site, allowing you to rate movies you like and discuss them.

And once you start to watch movies and rate them, Jaman's recommendations system gets a better handle on the kinds of movies you like and adjusts accordingly.

It's a solid way to introduce yourself to indie and international films, because it looks for movies that match your interests and your mood. The content is high-quality, and of course by going through Jaman you get it safely and legally, and you can pump it directly into your living room.

So if you're looking to try new things, or you're already a fan of films outside the mainstream, Jaman has what you're looking for and wants to share it.

Harry McCracken at Technologizer looks at why consumers tend to favor the iTunes download model for music over the Rhapsody/Napster/Zune subscription model (which can sort of be considered "renting" a gigantic music library).  As McCracken points out, the cost of buying a single album on iTunes can be more expensive than an entire month's subscription, so why is the market so heavily skewed towards downloads?

A few reasons:

• You really are "renting" the music.  If you stop paying your subscription fee, you've got nothing to show for it, unlike a downloaded purchase.
• If the music service goes under (as some have), you lose your music even if your payments were up to date.
• Apple did one heckuva good job marketing the iPod and tying it to the iTunes music store. As McCracken points out, "I'd switch from buying music to subscribing it in a heartbeat...if you could do so and still own an iPod or iPhone." (He advises that if you don't already have a digital music player, you may want to look into getting one that supports subscription services.)

I'm sure there are more reasons.

But I think a combination of both might work.  I'd happily pay a modest rental fee if, for example, I could access Rhapsody's entire library for the duration a party.  I certainly would have saved a lot of money by renting access to music for a recent early 90s dance party I hosted rather than buying 30 individual songs that I'll probably never listen to again.  And I'd definitely pay to be able to add music to a playlist as it occurs to me, rather than having to download songs and resynch my iPod.

McCracken is dubious about the future of subscription music. But I think there's a lot more experimentation to be done before the jury is in.

Forbes.com had a fascinating interview last week with ZillionTV CEO Mitch Berman about the future of television. In a nutshell, Berman explains, there are a myriad of technologies and models out there--cable, satellite, fiber; streams, P2P, downloads; subscription, ad-supported, pay per use--the winning combination will focus on the consumer experience.

One obstacle will be separating the Internet-TV experience from a PC. Netflix is already trying to do this, and I often stream my Netflix Instant Queue over my Xbox to my television instead of watching POTV. (That's plain old TV.) As Forbes notes, however, to get my Netflix queue in order and add movies to it, I still need the web interface. This results in a "fragmented user experience." This actually doesn't much bother me, since I usually have my laptop in lap when I watch TV. But I can see how it isn't optimal for someone with a desktop in an upstairs home office and an Xbox in the downstairs family room.

The second obstacle, as Berman sees it, is personalization:

Berman's description of an ideal world of TV would be unlimited video-on-demand, perfectly personalized to the consumer taste, and with advertisers able to push ads precisely to align with that taste. Also, the delivery infrastructure will take into account the ISP's interests, and the box will not be charged to the consumer.

As the article notes, that's a vision of the future that may still be a ways off; and it may not ultimately be the exact experience that evolves from consumer demand.  But the evolution of television is certainly well underway, as the universe of options for consuming television programming continues expanding.

Speaking of experimentation and business models, Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation had his essay on Larry Lessig's Code posted at Cato Unbound on Friday.

Adam argues that quite to the contrary of Lessig's pessimism about an unregulated Internet, the digital society is a thriving market where there's something for everyone:

[D]espite all this hand-wringing by the Lessigites, there exists a diverse spectrum of innovative digital alternatives from which to choose. Do you want wide-open, tinker-friendly devices, sites, or software? You got it. Do you want a more closed, simple, and safe online experience? You can have that, too. And there are plenty of choices in between. It sounds more like "perfect competition" than "perfect control" to me. Of course, one need not believe that the markets in code are "perfectly competitive" to accept that they are "competitive enough" -- or at least, better than regulatory alternatives. That is the critical distinction between cyber-libertarians and Lessig's cyber-collectivists.

The freedom to experiment--to not be locked into a single regulatory mold--is what has given us this spectrum of digital experiences Adam is talking about. No central authority is telling devices makers what their products can or can't do, which results in a market in digital devices that runs the gambit. That same freedom to experiment is also what is giving us such a rich new set of options for consuming digital content.

We're happy to agree with Adam that Lessig's vision of "perfect control" never came to pass. Indeed, far from it: we're enjoying unprecedented competition in the digital age, with a host of Internet companies constantly experimenting with different ways to offer users a wide range of digital experiences from which to choose.

Sounds like a winning strategy to me.

As we've said before, the key to getting more and better content online and available to consumers will be experimentation. Sometimes, those experiments are successful, which explains the many platforms available for acquiring video, music, software, games, or books. Now we can add three more companies experimenting with digital music sales: eBay, Fairmount, and Live Nation. As Bruce Houghton reported last week at WebProNews, all three of these potential vendors have an advantage for digital download sales over a number of their competitors: "1) significant existing traffic and 2) on-file credit cards of potential downloaders."

In the case of eBay and Live Nation, there's yet another advantage: people visiting those sites are already looking for music related items, be they physical CDs, concert tickets, or fan gear.  As Houghton notes, that's a "logical point of purchase" for music downloads.

Of course the other side of the experimentation coin is that not every venture works out as planned. Last week, TechCrunch reported that imeem, a music streaming service, was facing some dire financial straits, largely because the business model was based on compensating record labels on a per-stream basis. The company is renegotiating its deal with the labels, instead sharing revenue on a per-user basis.

There was no way for imeem to know going in which model would be better: it just had to experiment to find the right one. And that's what the future of digital content is all about: experimentation. Trial and error--and eventually, success. As long as the freedom to experiment is preserved, consumers, platform providers, and artists will find the business models that work best for all of them.

On a somewhat related note to the post below about the need for a social response (in addition to a legal one) to deal with cybercrime: the San Francisco Chronicle's technology blog noted earlier this week that a recent Consumer Reports survey found that much of the public has a "cavalier attitude" toward cybercrime, despite a relatively high incidence of attacks.

Notably, the article provides the following statistics:

-       1 in 13 gave up personal info in phishing scams in the past two years,
-       1 in 12 had problems with spyware,
-       1 in 7 was conned out of money from online fraud,
-       1.7 million had their identities stolen, and
-       1.2 million had to replace their computers due to infected software.

With numbers like those, cavalier is the very last thing web users should be. As the Chronicle points out, "Over a third of those surveyed didn't use software to protect against accidentally downloading malicious code, and nearly 20 percent didn't try to block viruses."  Just as there's an inadequate social response to the issue of piracy, that's a lot of people who aren't adequately protecting themselves from very real cyber threats.  Unfortunately, that lack of precaution has harmful effects on the rest of the network too and makes solving the problems posed by cybercrime more difficult than it needs to be.

For the last week or so, there's been a conversation going on at Cato Unbound that takes stock of things on the Internet in the ten years since Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace was published.

Declan McCullagh started off the discussion by noting that Lessig's call for strong government involvement in the growth of the Internet was--and remains--misguided, and that companies have largely been good actors in the development and administration of the network:

[I]f the experience of the last decade has taught us anything, it's that Internet companies have proven to be flexible and responsible in crafting code in a way that benefits their users. And we've learned that technocratic philosopher-kings in Washington, D.C. are very difficult to find.

True enough. As Declan illustrates in the essay, heavy-handed regulatory intervention has largely been unnecessary or even counterproductive.

But yesterday, my friend Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard responded to both Declan's essay (which could be loosely interpreted as a free market approach) and to Lessig's premise that strong government involvement is necessary. Zittrain notes that in large part, the network has evolved in a third way: through collaborative interactions.

What has made the Internet special is that it is a civic technology. By "civic" I mean its success has depended on an astounding amount of goodwill and cooperation, phenomena not completely accounted for by markets and regulations. [...]

These enterprises are not only made possible by civic arrangements among strangers, but they give hope that people can come together for civic purposes in realspace, at a time when our social fabric is fraying. I look to projects like the unlikely CouchSurfing, or the revival of hitchhiking through, yes, Craigslist (wisely called "ride sharing" instead), as ways in which technology can cultivate new social connections. As they become more popular, they will need to continually evolve civic defense tech and social practices to deal with the bad actors who inevitably show up. These practices aren't exactly "market" since they don't involve the exchange of cash -- rather it's the mutual reinforcement and implementation of goodwill.

This reminded me of what we think of as the "digital society." Just as in the real world, there is a common set of values that guides our behavior online, or at least there should be. There are good actors and bad actors, and the response to bad behavior (in addition to any necessary legal action) should be the same as it is in the real world: a little good old-fashioned shame. That's a response that just can't be duplicated by either market forces or regulators.

Whether it's cybercrime, content piracy, SPAM, DDoS attacks, identity theft, or anything else, what's missing from the digital society is the sense that bad actors shouldn't just be legally accountable--they should also be socially accountable.

In the case of piracy in particular, there is some criticism leveled at the entertainment industry for not putting more content online. But replacing complicated, entrenched business models doesn't just happen overnight. It takes time and experimentation to figure out what will work and what will protect the rights of everybody involved (not just the distributors, but also the songwriters, performers and other rights-holders). There is also a legitimate caution about making content more easily available and accessible digitally in the face of rampant piracy.

Perhaps more Internet commentators should acknowledge the fact that it is difficult to experiment with new business models in the face of a permissive attitude towards content theft. Perhaps the evolution to the new business models we all seek would go more quickly if more people were a part of the digital society's response to piracy, so that--rather than turning a blind eye or criticizing the content creators for being protective of their intellectual property--we could move past the problem of piracy and work on getting more content available online.

There's a time and a place for legal response to some cybercriminals. But--in addition to creating positive incentives for legally and morally virtuous online behavior--a digital society, like our offline society, needs both legal and social components to address cybercrime. As we've learned so far in the content industry, the legal approach alone won't do the trick.

The digital society must have what Zittrain called "social practices to deal with the bad actors who inevitably show up". That "power of cooperation" will maximize personal freedoms, but only if our digital society recognizes the "serious responsibilities we can undertake together to help retain them."