A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 2 - DRM, Territories and Sales

In this part we'll extend the discussion of technology stifling to include the hardware you purchase to listen to your music, watch your video and interact with the internet. The publishing industry has had a hand in all of it and wants to stop you from doing many things, things that are the essence of living in a technological world. In Part 1 you learned something of my background and about why/how the publishers are trying to stifle technology in the face of their changing business. In this part we'll explore the changes proposed to the works and hardware you purchase.

When copyright law was first set in the Statute of Anne (1709) the law governed only England, Scotland and Wales. Over time, similar laws were enacted throughout the world, and the Berne Convention of 1886 served as the first attempt to unify these laws. Copyright law is based entirely on where a work is published physically - which jurisdiction. A single work like a book might be published under hundreds of jurisdictions by many different publishers, and negotiating the rights is another of the "services" that initial publishers might perform for their contracted creators.
Today this makes no sense since a work "published" on an internet site is immediately available in all connected jurisdictions. The publishers want your ISP to work to limit such broad publishing abilities - to their benefit of course, not yours.
In addition the publishers are working hard to push both government and industry to put technical limitations into hardware platforms to limit their ability to allow you, the purchaser of rights to view or use a work, to enjoy that work in the same fashion that you could if you purchased a physical copy of the work such as a book or record or tape. In other instances they have already, or are looking to impose, a tax on general purpose hardware if even one of its uses is the potential to hold (illegal) copied works.

First, let's set some technical background to the challenges posed by technology today to the creators and publishers in their quest to control copying. This is relevant because it turns out that there really isn't any technology that can stop the wholesale copying of works by pirates, and most such technologies end up being a true pain in the butt to the end consumer - the one who legitimately pays for the use of the works and pays more for the cost of the technological prevention measures (TPM) that the publishers try and fail with.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

This means putting some sort of lock on the digital works such that the consumer can only view/enjoy it in the way(s) that the publisher allows - can't copy it to another device, can't re-sell it (in violation of current copyright law I might add) and might lose access to it at some time in the future - again in violation of current copyright law.

At its most basic level, DRM encodes the work such that a digital key is necessary to decode and enjoy it. The first really wide-scale deployment of such technology was with the advent of the video DVD and its player. The publishers decided together to limit the usefulness of a DVD to a geographic region by introducing CSS (Content Scrambling System) and forcing manufacturers (through patent as well as law) to add this "feature" to all DVD players, varying the key in the machine by where that machine was destined to be sold.

The effect of this was similar to you bringing a book with you on a trip from North America to Europe and having it taken away from you when you land because it was not purchased there, something that is against what is called the "First Sale Doctrine" enshrined in copyright law and recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908.

More intrusive locking includes that imposed by Major League Baseball on the viewing of archive games via an internet connected computer. In this case the key was kept on a server that MLB controlled, and they turned off this key server. This meant that all those who had purchased the videos could no longer watch them.

It also includes software included on some of publisher Sony's music CDs. This software, meant to control what could be done with the music on the CD, installed itself in such a fashion (and permanently, not just while the music was playing) that it opened security holes in the PCs it was on, slowed those PCs down even when the music CD was not in the drive, and overall treated the CD owner's computer as if it were the property of Sony.

The point is that no matter what these and other DRM schemes do, they all rely upon one of two things:

• They hide and obfuscate the fact that the key to the system is contained on the system - which includes lobbying governments to forbid you from looking for the key or modifying your own equipment to bypass the key or change the hardware/software in any way - another violation of First Sale Doctrine.
• They keep the key to themselves and make you and your equipment "phone home" to get it each and every time you want access to YOUR copy of the work - which gives them both the control to remove your right to view/use (as Amazon has done) the work, and intrudes upon your privacy by providing them information about how, when and where you might view/use the work (as Sony above did with their DRM install).

Every DRM scheme to date, and the consensus is that EVERY DRM scheme, can be hacked or worked around by someone - and the knowledge gained can be distributed in seconds to the world. Thus there is NO DRM that is proof against what the publishers claim to be trying to protect against - the wholesale copying of works by pirates. In the case of CSS for example, the pirates simply copy the encrypted DVD exactly. They don't have to decode and re-encode it. To circumvent the region coding there are some manufacturers who have simply put all region keys into their products, sold millions of the units, and closed that particular business to avoid law suits - or been masked by being in a country that has not enforced the license terms effectively.

What the DRM schemes have done is made it harder (not impossible) for the legitimate owner of a copyright work to enjoy it. You're locked into viewing a DVD with an approved DVD player - not the equally capable computer with its DVD player - unless you run one particular operating system and allow it to impose the rights standards upon you - along with anything else that manufacturer wants to impose on you such as high prices, poor quality and lock-in.

This leads us to the discussion of Microsoft's Windows Vista and what many consider the concept of customer as enemy.

In the creation of Windows Vista, Microsoft seems to have taken it upon themselves to fight their own customers in the war waged by publishers. Looking back on the lack of success of Vista I can only hope other companies learn from Microsoft's failure. This fight cost its customers (you if you purchased any version of it or a PC with it) in several ways:

• higher cost of hardware - had to compensate for the inefficiencies of the OS as it checked for "badness" about 30 times a second
• higher cost of peripherals - Microsoft forced any/all peripheral manufacturers who wanted their drivers blessed by Microsoft to put hardware facilities in that had nothing to do with making things work well and had all to do with ensuring nobody could circumvent copy protection.
• lower reliability and utility - the increased complexity of the hardware, operating system and drivers meant more could go wrong - and with 3rd party peripherals (video cards in particular) it meant far poorer performance than should have been.
• New hardware breaks existing software and "non digital rights system.

The publishers are now working on hardware manufacturers to change their hardware, and government to enforce the changes, to try to make it impossible for you, the consumer, to do what you have been doing for years; make recordings of things you value, whether it is your child dancing to a pop tune, a copy of a TV show so you can watch it at your liesure, or a copy of your favourite music from the format you purchased it in to the format you want to listen to it from. They'll eliminate all analog outputs and encode all digital outputs such that unless you connect them to "approved" inputs that also respect the DRM, you won't be able to do anything, let alone listen/watch. You will have to purchase new speakers, new video recorder, new music players, etc. and all will be full of DRM hardware and software so that even if you are legally allowed to "abstract" a piece of a work for fair use or fair dealing, you won't be able to.

How does this tie into the internet of the future?

Well, the internet of the future could allow you to sit in your hotel room in France and watch the Vancouver Canucks hockey game redirected from your TV via your "slingbox" or other redirection technology. Or, the internet of the future could stop you completely from even thinking about getting such entertainment because there are no French distributors for that program, or could cost you double what it has already cost you (you purchased the annual package at home) to watch something you've already paid for - because you're in a different physical jurisdiction (France) rather than your home jurisdiction (Canada).

The internet can continue to be an enabling technology, rapidly changing and adapting to the needs and wants of those of us who are using it daily.

Or it can be stifled and held up for ransom by companies whose values and business models are stuck back in the horse and buggy age.

It is up to you - tell your congress critter or member of parliament or whatever local politician that you will not have progress stopped by those who cannot adapt to changes in technology.

richard

Tag: drm publishing music video tv radio acta privacy