A Global Perspective on the Internet - Part 3 - Privacy

How is government, both on its own from bureaucratic self-interest and ignorance, and at the behest of the publishing businesses to protect its failing business model, eroding your privacy and rights using the internet and new technology as the lever?

In Part 1 we dealt with basic copyright laws both in place and in the works to help prop up the publishing industry as it has been for hundreds of years.

In Part 2 we dealt with how your rights as the owner of hardware or purchaser of copyright goods and services have been and continue to be eroded.

In this part we'll discuss privacy and civil rights in general and in relationship to the enforcement of laws that have no justification other than to continue business models that are outmoded or to foster a paternalistic government bureaucracy.

In part 1 you learned that the original copyright laws were put in place to balance off creators' rights with rights of the public. The creator got exclusive ability to copy and profit from their work while the public got the right to have that work in the public domain after a period (14 years initially, extended to 50 years by the international Berne convention of 1886) after the creator died. Simple! Copyright started from the time the creator "fixed" the work in physical form without registration.

Then the publishing industry got into the act and lobbied for changes. They first got ability to change the "ownership" of the protection of copyright to themselves under contract law. The creators are still stinging from this today, even more so since the advent of inexpensive self-publishing using computers initially and the internet now.

The 1996 WIPO (World Intellectual Propery Organization) Copyright Treaty was the first contemporary treaty that has obvious technological implications. While many countries were signatories to this treaty, not all have enacted law under it; Canada included. The treaty has many segments that governments (and their citizens) take as both over-broad and technologically stifling. This includes the section on "non-circumvention" of technical protection measures (TPM), aka Digital Rights Management (DRM); at least that's the way the publishing industry is taking it.

You see the treaty is not specific enough about what a TPM is. A simple "Caesar" cypher - alphabetic substitution, if implemented in a technology (i.e. by computer) would be illegal to circumvent by you, the "owner" of a work so protected. Adding in a layer of software that tracks your use of the work and sends the information to the publisher is something any junior programmer can do - and if it is part of the "TPM" system the publisher installs on your computer so you can "play" the work - you can't disable it, can't try to figure out what it does, can't object (because you're not supposed to know what it does)!

Thus is enabled the violation of your privacy, property and civil rights by a treaty that purports to have nothing but the best interests of the creator in mind.

This was the nose of the camel poking into the tent. The rest of the camel is following.

The publishers have been hurting ever since the advent of digital informatin storage being applied to "their" works. You see the old vinyl records and paper books had a relatively limited life span. They wear out. In my time in our stereo store, just prior to the large-scale introduction of the CD, we used to purchase multiple copies of the various records we used to demonstrate our stereo systems to potential customers. After about 100 playings these records no longer sounded as good as when new. Not so for the typical CD or DVD, and certainly not so for works stored on computer hard disk drives (if you take the proper backup precautions - see the article on "bit rot")

I've purchased at least a half-dozen copies of some of my favourite books over the years. Some I've lost, some have simply worn out. I could not easily keep a backup to restore a lost book, and even the best bound book on the best paper can become tattered and all but unreadable if you handle it enough. So the publishers get to sell me another copy. With digitial works they lose this.

You see, digital works can not only be copied easily by anyone with access to them, they simply don't wear out!

What is a publisher to do? The potential for selling more copies of the works they publish in some digital form simply doesn't exist anymore.

OK - they get to re-publish older works in new formats. I have a vinyl, tape, CD and DVD of several of my favourite music albums. They won on that one.

Ahhhh... the light comes on! If we continue to obsolete old technologies and stop producing media for them eventually the manufacturers will stop making new players and all our customers will re-purchase in the new format. This has worked for video disk (the big, clunky original video format), VHS tape (and Beta), and now DVD is on the block with the advent of Blu-Ray. Even Blu-Ray is on the block as a newer format for 3D is being talked about.

Hey! This is great! We get to sell more copies just by making the players different every few years!

But there's a hole in this story - the computer storage technology hole. You see all these various media formats are just digital containers of various sizes - and computer data containers are getting bigger and bigger too. I can now purchase a USB "thumb drive" that holds as much as a Blu-ray disk - and I can put the exact same movie on it that comes on Blu-ray or any other similar or smaller sized medium. Except I'm not allowed to because all the latest music/video media formats have DRM attached to them - DRM I'm not allowed to circumvent by the WIPO treaty. The treaty is stopping me from holding a few dozen movies in my pocket and being able to carry them around the world with me and play them on local players wherever I go because I "own" them. I can't do this because of the treaty!

Instead of being able to take my book (or cassette tape) with me like I could back in the days of old - and expect to find a player where I went that I could use to play it - or a light under which I can read the book - I now am hamstrung by DRM and region coding and rights management that has taken away my rights to do with what I own (I "OWN" the copy of that movie/music/ebook) whatever I wish.

Leaving behind the sales of works on physical media, what are the publishers doing in the internet and digital broadcast realm that is intrusive and subversive to your rights and privacy?

Here again we deal with DRM. This time in relation to playing works on YOUR computer - a general purpose device that is both physically able to read digital media (CD and DVD and Blu-ray) and connected via the internet to other computers, including those of the publishers.

In Part 2 you learned about Sony installing a "root kit" on the computers of anyone silly enough to try to play one of their music CDs on it. You also learned of Amazon's ability to "de-sell" a book via their control over the Amazon Kindle e-reader. These aspects of DRM attack your rights to what you own.

DRM also allows the publishers to attack your right to privacy by looking over your shoulder every time you want to view DRM protected works on your internet connected computer. In fact some DRM systems simply won't let you view the work unless the computer is connected to the net. Under today's laws in most countries the publisher not only can do this, they don't have to tell you that they're doing it, or that they've installed such spying software onto your computer. They're not liable for any damage they do to your computer by the installation of such spying and/or DRM software either - unless they get caught and you and a bunch of others put together a class-action lawsuit, and win. There are no regulations regarding what DRM can and can't do, whether it must be standardized, or even whether it can affect your other uses of YOUR computer.

Think about this for a minute. If you purchase music from 5 different publishers, and all of them put different DRM on your system in the fashion that Sony did, your computer could thereafter be totally useless for the purposes you purchased it for. It might not even work at all and you would have to pay someone to fix it. The publishers have even gone so far as to get the anti-virus vendors to ignore their specific software.

This is like a gasoliine vendor installing a device on your car when you purchase gas from their station - and that device disallowing you from driving on certain roads or at certain speeds. If you bought gas from 5 different companies eventually your car would be all but useless.

In Part 4 I'll go into the future a bit and give you some ideas on what you can do to help save the world from the hands of government and the old-style publishers.

richard