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Canada’s Don Tapscott, author, recently  interviewed Canada’s Cory Doctorow, author, on music streaming.

It was an interesting Q&A because Cory doesn’t think is any such thing as streaming.

Don is the author or co-author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital and Wikinomics.

He’s also the chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight, and an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

He was talking to Corey for Rebuilding the World, co-authored with Anthony D. Williams and due out next spring.

The book centres on the thesis that we need to “rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle,” says Don.

Cory is, in turn, a “blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing,” says the Wikipedia, going on:

“He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post scarcity economics.”

Here’s the Q&A >>>

Don: I like the streaming idea in principle because it makes the IP issue go away.  If music becomes a service rather than a product, no one will ever want to ’steal’ music — why would I take possession of a song?

Cory: Because collectors like to own things. Because people download music today and don’t show any sign of stopping. Because your plan to stop the chaos can’t be predicated on a massive, totally speculative shift in the behavior of the majority of Internet users if it is to be plausible.

Because “streaming” is 21st century phlogiston. There is no such thing as streaming. There is *only* downloading. In some cases, the sender trusts the receiver to throw away the bits after downloading and can therefore pretend that copy isn’t being made. But it’s still downloading, still copying. We pretend this isn’t true, but it is. And it gets more true every day, because writing a client that *doesn’t* throw away the bits is trivial. And this creates the perverse incentive to design obfuscated protocols, DRM-locked clients, hardware and Oses that users can’t inspect and modify.

Because wireless companies are consistently rated the worst in the world. They treat their customers very, very badly.

Because hard-drives are getting cheap, small and ubiquitous MUCH faster than wireless links. When I can accidentally acquire 700GB worth of SDcards that fill half a coffee-cup without spending any money, there’s no good reason to assume that connectivity is going to outstrip bandwidth any time soon. Indeed, the fastest, cheapest data-transfer for large files is fedexing SD cards around.

Don: Another upside of streaming is that it opens the door to a third party managing my music for me.  I’m tired of managing thousands of songs on my iPod.  Most of the time I just choose shuffle. But think of a Netflix or streamed music.  It could recommend different songs based on the material I already enjoy.  It could alert me to new tunes when they are released by the artist.  I could ask for background music for different events. It could offer innovations such as BB King’s favorite tunes, or tunes associated with whichever country I’m in.

Cory: Which also means that every time you listen to music, the third party finds out where you are, what else you’re doing (by combiningtracking cookies from multiple sources), who you’re with …

And will it work on airplanes? Or in coal mines? We may get bandwidth via sat feeds into planes, but will it be enough to deliver a 384K stream to 250 people on a 777 without a bobble?

Don: You’re concerned about the quality of 3G networks, can’t we take as  a given that individuals will soon have a high-quality always-on connection to the Internet while stationary or mobile.  Maybe it will be 4G or wi-fi or a combination of different technologies.  Would you agree that it’s coming?

Cory: The notion of putting everyone’s electronic life into the same fractional electromagnetic spectrum (rather than giving us each our own spectrum by running a wire to our homes) is technically implausible, as there are Shannon’s Law limits to how much RF energy you can put into the air before it starts to cook passing birds.

Now you know.

(Cheers, Don)