Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Trust becomes an issue in copyright in the digital age because it is based on an implicit understanding of the way content is copied and distributed versus how copyright could be infringed. In the pre-digital age, it is based on a foundation of trust between businesses and the amount of trust that was implied in relationships between creators and consumers. In the digital age, every user has the ability to make virtually an infinite number of copies of creative works for almost no cost and distribute them to anyone they want in the world. And so the copyright owner no longer has this ability to obtain recourse against people who he doesn’t know and who to trust.
In this interview Bill Rosenblatt discusses the various technical means to establish that trust in digitally distributed works, from digital rights management, watermarking, financial means like levies, and other means. He reminds us of the US CASE law and the problem with legislation to solve the trust issue in dispersing digital copyrighted material.
About trust in the consumer of copyrighted works in the pre-digital age
(…) think about what copyright has meant in the pre-digital age and compare that to what copyright means in the digital age. Regarding the everyday people, consumers, if you want to call them that, who engage with media products, they buy them, they subscribe to them and so forth. And so in the pre-digital age, you could trust if you were a media company, a copyright owner, a record label, a book publisher, a movie studio or anything like that, you could, in a sense, trust the consumer not to infringe your copyrights because simply it wasn’t very easy for them to do that. It took some effort and cost to engage in activities that might be considered to be infringing. And then, on the other hand, if you’re if you are making your materials available to a business as opposed to a consumer, then you have trust issues that are bound up in licensing agreements and other contractual bases. And if your licensee or whatever it may be, is doing something that you don’t think is right, you have legal recourse. And the speed at which the entity could do something wrong is roughly equal to the speed of the legal recourse that you could have. You could sue them, you could send them a demand letter. You could do things like that. And so that was the case in the pre-digital age.
About digital watermarking technologies to track copying
(…) But there are other technologies as well that fall in different spots along the trust spectrum. And one of them is the technology of digital watermarking. And that is instead of encrypting the content so that you have to decrypt it to get access to it, there is some invisible or inaudible piece of data embedded in the content that’s known as the digital watermark in reference to watermarked paper or watermarked currency in the past. And so the watermark can contain various types of information. Harry Potter e-books are a well-known example of this. So the organization Pottermore, which is the sort of company that manages all things Harry Potter, distributes e-books on its website that are not encrypted with DRM, but they have a watermark in them, and the watermark contains simply an ID number that no one understands the meaning of, except the Pottermore company itself, but it refers to the transaction in the user where the e-book was purchased. And there are other watermarking technologies that are less trustful of the user in the sense that they embed things like the user’s email address. That’s one example. (…)
What did the digital age change and how did that affect trust?
(…) But then something happened in the late 2000s, which is that the record labels really wanted competition to Apple. iTunes was around, iTunes had an enormous share of the digital music market and then eventually an enormous share of the music market in total, digital or otherwise. And the record labels really wanted a competitor to come in to make it so that Apple had less clout in the market. And along came Amazon. And basically they made a deal with Amazon, one prong of which was Amazon didn’t want to have to deal with DRM. They it was so much easier for them if they didn’t have to deal with it. So they agreed, the labels agreed with Amazon, OK, we’re not going to use DRM. And so they made a deal with Amazon to distribute MP3s without DRM. And so Apple followed suit quickly thereafter and dropped DRM. And then Steve Jobs wrote this public letter taking credit for removal of DRM from the music industry, which is actually a bunch of nonsense. The writing was on the wall about that for a couple of years before Steve Jobs took credit for it. But that’s what happened in music. But just to quickly wrap up on that today, of course, we don’t have downloads so much as we have streaming with companies like Spotify and Tidal and well, Apple‘s doing streaming, Google‘s doing streaming. Everybody is doing streaming. And streaming is all DRM enabled. All streaming services use DRM. So on the one hand, it’s extremely easy to use these services and they give you access to these enormous libraries of music, sometimes for free. But DRM is involved. And so there is I think that does take us back to the trust issue. Because when you’re using a service like Spotify, if there were no DRM, then you could simply download everything that you stream and do whatever you want with it and the record labels and Spotify don’t trust the customer to do that.(…)
Interview with professor Guido Möllering, director and Chair of Management at the Reinhard Mohn Institute at the Witten-Herdecke University (Witten, Germany) and editor-in-chief of the “Journal of Trust Research”. In the new episode of the TrustTalk podcast, he reflects upon the question of whether trust is a useful subject for research as it is so elusive and hard to define? He talks about his 2006 book “Trust, Reason, Routine, Reflexivity“. Inspired by the German sociologist Georg Simmel he reflects on trust as the ability to believe in someone without being able to really say what it is you believe and. About trusting versus trust and how pharmaceutical companies and the HIV/AIDS community finally got to trust each other. About the “trust gap” where longtime business partners like Apple and Qualcomm and Microsoft and Intel had to readjust their relationship, once very successful but went sour because they realized too late that their relationships had become locked-in.
Opening question by the host of the TrustTalk podcast, Severin de Wit
At the start of this interview, I would like to use a well-known story, that of the Eagle and the Lion. An eagle flies over a lion’s cave, the lion welcoming the eagle, offers him some fresh food. And the eagle wants to be friends with the lion to get this food more often and offers the lion an alliance.
The lion then said: “My friend, it sounds good to have an alliance with a powerful bird like you but how can I trust someone who has the privilege of flying away from the situation any time?” To me, this sounds like a quintessential problem with trust. Everyone feels what it means, and the concept gained increasing popularity across the social sciences, but it remains elusive. Its many facets and implications obscuring a clear overall vision of its essence. What’s your view? (listen to the reply of Guido Möllering in the podcast interview: https://pod.co/trusttalk)
On Trust Research and the Definition of Trust
“I think that has been an important question for all of us struggling with the definition. It has even been subject to a debate with Williamson, like should we even use the word trust in research because we’re not really sure what it means? So I think that’s a very important discussion and it’s still ongoing. By now, nobody has kind of caught the eagle and chained the eagle to the ground so that it can’t escape anymore. I think sometimes while I myself tried to pin down trust, sometimes I think it’s also helpful to be clear what trust is not and to kind of clearly distinguish it from other things. For example, that trust is not calculation or the same as calculated risk-taking, that it is not simple, routine or rule-following or just a matter of habit. It’s not a soft form of control. It’s something beyond that. And sometimes I think the lack of clarity has to do with the fact that we confound trust with other things. And just to clarify how trust is related to these other things, we get a clearer those still kind of obscure picture of what trust really is. And also, it’s important to be clear when trust actually matters and under which circumstances it may matter less. For example, if preconditions like vulnerability and uncertainty are not very present, then trust is also not so relevant. So we shouldn’t bring in trust as an important factor in situations when other mechanisms can serve us just as well. So I think it remains elusive. And that’s why sometimes it’s even more important to ask what trust is not than to just try to have the perfect definition.”
About his learning from the German Sociologist Georg Simmel
“And I picked that up from Georg Simmel, the German sociologist who more than 100 years ago wrote that trust means to believe in someone without being able to really say what it is you believe. And that trust is somewhere between knowledge and ignorance, and that was one important thought that I had already picked up before the book and then for the book, I tried to kind of sort out and map the landscape of thinking about trust. And one approach to trust is very calculative, which is a rational choice approach. And if you look at all that literature, which I summarize as the routine part of trust literature, it actually explains a lot. But at the end of the day, calculations don’t explain trust fully. Then we have the more sociological approaches. Let’s think of Garfinkel and others who explain trust mainly as a routine following, as something that is embedded in roles that we just fulfill, but also that doesn’t really lead us all the way, because even with all the rules and roles and routines that we have, there always remains the possibility of being disappointed. And we somehow have to be able to live with that, or even if trust is a matter of learning or reflexivity and where we gradually find out how much and how we can trust people, it’s still that learning process that is ongoing.”
On Trust in Vaccines:
“It’s very important that when we talk about trust in vaccines or let’s say in machines, in non-human entities, it’s important to clarify whether that’s actually meaningful, because the vaccine as such is not an actor that is benevolent to me personally or not, you know, or my car, when I get my current morning, I don’t really have a trust relationship with my carr in the sense that the car decides whether it starts or not, depending on how it feels towards me that morning, you know, and also the vaccine the liquid that is injected into my arm, it’s not what I trust. I trust the person injecting it and I trust the person ordering it to be injected and I trust the person developing it and selling it for those doctors to actually use. And so we are really with vaccines and the like talking about system trust here, where we are looking at various responsibilities as a network of actors almost, that are involved in making sure that the product is safe or not safe. And so I would encourage us to really look at the web of relationships that we have here. And finally, again, when we use the word trust in this context, it is clear already by using this word that we don’t have perfect certainty.
It’s not perfectly safe, but we have a choice between making the type one or type two error, type one being I’m not trusting a vaccine that is actually safe or I’m trusting a vaccine that is actually not safe. And we have to decide which of these two errors is worse. And in trust research, generally, we come to the conclusion that it is better to try trust and find out that it wasn’t deserved and then to stop the relationship, then do not even try and risk trusting, mistrusting something that is actually trustworthy. And I think I personally would recommend with the vaccines that after they have gone through all kinds of control processes and have been supported by authorities, then from a patient or citizens point of view, I think it’s worth trying something that might turn out not to be as safe than to not try it at all. I know this seems harsh because it’s a matter of life and death, but what I really wanted to illustrate is that trust can go wrong, but distrust can also be wrong. And it is a very important question which kind of error we risk and which one we don’t. If we talk about pharmaceuticals and pharma and stuff, you also refer to an interesting study on trust as a process, the relationship between trust and identity. They analyze the relationships between pharmaceutical companies and HIV/AIDS community organizations in Canada. What does that study illustrate?”
Garfinkel began developing his famous Trust argument, that a minimum of equality and reciprocity he called ‘Trust Conditions’ is a prerequisite for sense-making in interaction, while working with Parsons from 1946 to 1952. The argument grounds a social justice approach to social order and meaning with affinities to Durkheim’s ‘implicit conditions of contract’ and Du Bois’ ‘double consciousness’.
