- From: Alan Kotok <kotok@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 13:45:48 -0500
- To: www-drm@w3.org
Forwards deleted...
...
>
>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 17:06:07 -0800
>From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
>To: cryptography@c2.net
>Cc: Ron Rivest <rivest@theory.lcs.mit.edu>, gnu@toad.com
>Subject: What's Wrong With Content Protection
>
>Ron Rivest asked me:
>
>>I think it would be illuminating to hear your views on the differences
between
>>the Intel/IBM content-protection proposals and existing practices for
content
>>protection in the TV scrambling domain. The devil's advocate position
against
>>your position would be: if the customer is willing to buy extra, or special,
>>hardware to allow him to view protected content, what is wrong with that?
>There is nothing wrong with allowing people to optionally choose to buy
>copy-protection products that they like.
>
>What is wrong is when people who would like products that simply record
>bits, or audio, or video, without any copy protection, can't find any,
>because they have been driven off the market. By restrictive laws like the
>Audio Home Recording Act, which killed the DAT market. By
>"anti-circumvention" laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which
>EFF is now litigating. By Federal agency actions, like the FCC deciding a
>month ago that it will be illegal to offer citizens the capability to record
>HDTV programs, even if the citizens have the legal right to. By private
>agreements among major companies, such as SDMI and CPRM (that later end up
>being "submitted" as fait accompli to accredited standards committees,
>requiring an effort by the affected public to derail them). By private
>agreements behind the laws and standards, such as the unwritten agreement
>that DAT and MiniDisc recorders will treat analog inputs as if they
>contained copyrighted materials which the user has no rights in. (My
>recording of my brother's wedding is uncopyable, because my MiniDisc decks
>act as if I and my brother don't own the copyright on it.)
>
>Pioneer New Media Technologies, who builds the recently announced recordable
>DVD drive for Apple, says "The major consumer applications for recordable
>DVD will be home movie editing and storage and digital photo storage". They
>carefully don't say "time-shifting TV programs, or recording streaming
>Internet videos", because the manufacturers and the distribution companies
>are in cahoots to make sure that that capability NEVER REACHES THE MARKET.
>Even though it's 100% legal to do so, under the Supreme Court's _Betamax_
>decision. Streambox built software that let people record RealVideo streams
>on their hard disks; they were sued by Real under the DMCA, and took it off
>the market. According to Nomura Securities, DVD Recorder sales will exceed
>VCR sales in 2004 or 2005, and also exceed DVD Player-only sales by 2005.
>(http://www.kipinet.com/tdb/1000/10tdb04.htm) So by 2010 or so, few
>consumers will have access to a recorder that will let them save a copy of a
>TV program, or time-shift one, or let the kids watch it in the back of the
>car. Is anyone commenting on that social paradigm shift? Do we think it's
>good or bad? Do we get any say about it at all?
>
>Instead, consumers will have to pay movie/TV companies over and over for the
>privilege of time-shifting or space-shifting. Even if they have purchased
>the movie, and it's stored at home on their own equipment, and they have
>high bandwidth access to it from wherever they are. This concept is called
>"pay per use". It can't compete with "You have the right to record a copy
>of what you have the right to see". These companies can't eliminate that
>right legally, because it would violate too many of the fundamentals of our
>society, so they are restricting the technology so you can't EXERCISE that
>right. In the process they ARE violating the fundamentals on which a stable
>and just society is based. But as long as society survives until after
>they're dead, they don't seem to care about its long-term stability.
>
>What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don't
>disclose the restrictions to the consumers. Like Apple's recent happy-happy
>web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month
>(http://www.apple.com/idvd/). It's full of glowing info about how you can
>write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly
>neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any
>audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal
>right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you
>can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way
>your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your OWN
>disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to
>themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for
>"professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which
>cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your OWN recordings, nor
>can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in
>quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply
>ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product.
>
>It isn't just Apple who is misleading the consumer; it's epidemic. Sony
>portable mini-disc recorders only come with digital INPUT jacks, never
>digital OUTPUTS. Sound checks in -- but only checks out in low-quality
>analog formats. Intel touts the wonders of their TCPA (Trusted Computing
>Platform Architecture). You have to read between the lines to discover that
>it exists solely to spy on how you use your PC, so that any random third
>party across the Internet can decide whether to "trust" you -- the owner.
>TCPA isn't about reporting to YOU whether you can trust your own PC (e.g.
>whether it has a virus), it doesn't include that function. It exists to
>report to record companies about whether you have installed any software
>that lets you make copies of MP3s, or any free software to circumvent
>whatever feeble copy-protection system the record company uses. Intel is
>pushing HDCP (High Definition Content Protection) which is high speed
>hardware encryption that runs only on the cable between the computer and its
>CRT or LCD monitor. The only signal being encrypted is the one that the
>user is sitting there watching, so why is it encrypted? So that the user
>can't record what they can view! If the cable is tampered with, the video
>chip degrades the signal to "analog VCR quality".
>
>Intel is also pushing SDMI and CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable
>Media) which would turn your own storage media (disk drives, flash ram, zip
>disks, etc) into co-conspirators with movie and record companies, to deny
>you (the owner of the computer and the media) the ability to store things on
>those media and get them back later. Instead some of the stored items would
>only come back with restrictions wired into the extraction software --
>restrictions that are not under the control of the equipment owner, or of
>the law, but are matters of contract between the movie/record companies and
>the equipment/software makers. Such as, "you can't record copyrighted music
>on unencrypted media". If you try to record a song off the FM radio onto a
>CPRM audio recorder, it will refuse to record or play it, because it's
>watermarked but not encrypted. Even when recording your own brand-new
>original audio, the default settings for analog recordings are that they can
>never be copied, nor ever copied in higher fidelity than CD's, and that only
>one copy can be made even if copying is ever authorized (if the other
>restrictions are somehow bypassed). Intel and IBM don't tell you these
>things; you have to get to Page 11 of Exhibit B-1, "CPPM Compliance Rules
>for DVD-Audio" on page 45 of the 70-page "Interim CPRM/CPPM Adopters
>Agreement", available only after you fill out intrusive personal questions
>after following the link from http://www.dvdcca.org/4centity/ . All Intel
>tells you that CPPM will "give consumers access to more music"
>(http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/aw032300.htm). Lying to
>your customers to mislead them into buying your products is wrong.
>
>What is wrong is when scientific researchers are unable to study the field
>or to publish their findings. Professor Ed Felten of Princeton studied the
>SDMI "watermarking" systems in some detail, as part of a public study
>deliberately permitted by the secretive SDMI committee, so they could
>determine whether the public could crack their chosen schemes. (SDMI would
>not allow EFF to join its deliberations, saying that we had no legitimate
>interest in the proceedings because we weren't a music company or a
>manufacturer. There are no consumer or civil rights representatives in the
>SDMI consortium.) Prof. Felten was in the New York Times last week, saying
>the SDMI people and Princeton's lawyers are now telling him that he can't
>release his promised details on what was wrong with these watermarking
>systems, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's OK to tell
>the SDMI companies how easy it is to break their scheme, but it isn't OK to
>tell the public or other scientific researchers.
>
>What is wrong is when competitors are unable to build competing devices or
>software, vying for the favor of the consumers in the free market. Instead
>those devices are banned or threatened, and that software is censored and
>driven underground. Such as the open-source DeCSS and LiViD DVD player
>programs. Such as DVD players worldwide that can play American "Region 1"
>DVDs. EFF spent more than a million dollars last year in defending the
>publisher of a security magazine, and a Norwegian teenager, from movie
>industry attempts to have them censored and jailed, respectively, for
>publishing and writing competing software that lets DVDs be played or copied
>but does not follow the restrictive contracts that the movie studios imposed
>on most players. The movie studios spent $4 million on prosecuting the New
>York case alone. Few or no manufacturers are willing to put ordinary
>digital audio recorders on the market -- you see lots of MP3 *players* but
>where are the stereo MP3 *recorders*? They've been chilled into
>nonexistence by the threat of lawsuits. The ones that claim to record,
>record only "voice quality monaural".
>
>What is wrong is when the controls that are enacted to protect the rights
>reserved under copyright are used for other purposes. Not to protect the
>existing rights, but to create new rights at the whim of the copyright
>holder. Movie companies insisted on a "region coding" system for DVDs,
>because they would make less money if DVD movies were actually tradeable
>worldwide under existing free-trade laws. (They couldn't charge high
>theatre ticket prices if the same movie was simultaneously available on
>DVDs, and they couldn't combine the ad campaigns of the theatres and the
>DVDs if they waited a long time between releasing it to theatres and
>releasing it to DVDs.) This system results in the situation where a
>consumer can buy a DVD player legally, buy a DVD legally, and put the two
>together, and the movie won't play. The user has every legal right to view
>the movie, but it won't play, because if it did, movie companies might make
>less money. Similar controls exist in DVDs to prevent people from
>fast-forwarding past the ads or those nonsensical "FBI Warnings".
>
>Microsoft built some deliberately incompatible protocols into Windows 2000
>so that competing Unix machines could not be used as DNS servers in some
>circumstances. Microsoft released a specification but only under an
>encrypted file format that claimed to require that readers agree not to use
>the information to compete with them. When someone decrypted the trivial
>encryption WITHOUT agreeing to the terms, Microsoft threatened to use the
>DMCA to sue Slashdot, the popular free-software news web site, who published
>the results. (Luckily for us, Slashdot has a backbone and said "go ahead,
>we'll defend that suit" and Microsoft chickened out.) Copyright doesn't
>grant the right to prevent competition, or to restrict global trade -- but
>somehow the legislation that was enacted to protect copyrights is being used
>to do just those things.
>
>What is wrong is when social policy is created in smoke-filled back rooms,
>between movie/record company executives and computer company executives, not
>by open public discussion, by legislatures, and by courts. The CPRM
>specification, for example, allows a distributor of a bag of bits (who has
>access to software with this capability) to decide that future recipients
>will not be permitted to make copies of that bag of bits. Or that two
>copies are permitted, but not three. This policy is not legally enforceable,
>it was not created by law. The law says something different. But the policy
>will be enforced by equipment built by all the major manufacturers, because
>they will be sued by the movie/record companies if they dare to build
>interoperating equipment that lets consumers make THREE copies, or copies
>limited only by their legal rights. Is it unexpected that such back-room
>policies end up favoring the parties who were in the room, at the expense of
>consumers and the public?
>
>What is wrong is when the balance between the rights of creators and the
>rights of freedom of speech and the press is lost. Because any increase in
>the rights of creators is a DECREASE in the public's right of free speech
>and publication. Whenever copyrights are extended, the public domain
>shrinks. The right of criticism, the right to dispute someone else's
>rendition of the truth, is damaged. The First Amendment gives an almost
>absolute right to publish; the Copyright clause gives a limited right to
>prevent publication by others. Any expansion of the right to prevent
>publication diminishes the right to publish. For example, nothing that was
>created after 1910 has entered the public domain, because as the years went
>by, the term of copyright kept getting extended. But the copy-rights
>created by technological restrictions are not even designed to end. There
>is nothing in the SDMI or CPRM spec that says, "After 2100 you will be
>permitted to copy the movies from 1910".
>
>What is wrong is that a tiny tail of "copyright protection" is wagging the
>big dog of communications among humans. As Andy Odlyzko pointed out,
>(http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html, see "Content is not king"
>and "The history of communications and its implications for the Internet"),
>"The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10
>billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks!"
>Distorting the law and the technology of human communication and computing,
>in order to protect the interests of copyright holders, makes the world
>poorer overall. Even if it didn't violate fundamental policies for the
>long-term stability of societies, it would be the wrong economic decision.
>
>What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity,
>but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from
>scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind of information that
>can be compactly represented in digital media. We can replicate it
>worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs, affordable by
>individuals. We are working hard on technologies that will permit other
>sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily, including arbitrary
>physical objects ("nanotechnology"; see http://www.foresight.org). The
>progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to
>many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans
>were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in
>infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones,
>heat, clean water, sanitary sewers -- things that the richest millionaires
>of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want
>in the near future.
>
>We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth! Instead,
>those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating scarcity are
>sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our cheap duplication
>technology so that it WON'T make copies -- at least not of the kind of goods
>THEY want to sell us. This is the worst sort of economic protectionism --
>beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry.
>The record and movie distribution companies are careful not to point this
>out to us, but that is what is happening.
>
>If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a
>CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can
>make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a
>living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a
>dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a
>comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such
>developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we
>drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these
>peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural
>advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the
>rest of society?
>
>I think we should embrace the era of plenty and work out how to mutually
>live in it. I think we should work on understanding how people can make a
>living by creating new things and providing services, rather than by
>restricting the duplication of existing things. That's what I've personally
>spent ten years doing, founding a successful free software support company.
>That company, Cygnus Solutions, annually invests more than $10 million into
>writing software, giving it away freely, and letting anyone modify or
>duplicate it. It funds that by collecting more than $25 million from
>customers, who benefit from having that software exist and be reliable and
>widespread. The company is now part of Red Hat, Inc -- which also makes its
>living by empowering its customers without restricting the duplication of
>its work. It's no coincidence that the open source, free software, and
>Linux communities are among the first to become alarmed at copy protection.
>They are actively making their livings or hobbies out of eliminating
>scarcity and increasing freedom in the operating system and application
>software markets. They see the real improvement in the world that results
>-- and the ugly reactions of the monopolistic and oligopolistic forces that
>such efforts obsolete.
>
>Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such
>a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world
>economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely
>lucky if by 2030 we are *prepared* to end scarcity without massive social
>turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a
>peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW,
>transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text,
>audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be
>replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and
>thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and
>expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own
>inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen
>years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the
>wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy
>footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic
>structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that
>is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves.
>
>This may be a longer discussion than you wanted, Ron, but as you can see, I
>think there are a lot of things wrong with how copy protection techologies
>are being foisted on an unsuspecting public. I'd like to hear from you a
>similar discussion. Being devil's advocate for a moment, why should
>self-interested companies be permitted to shift the balance of fundamental
>liberties, risking free expression, free markets, scientific progress,
>consumer rights, societal stability, and the end of physical and
>informational want? Because somebody might be able to steal a song? That
>seems a rather flimsy excuse. I await your response.
>
>John Gilmore
>Electronic Frontier Foundation
--
Alan Kotok, Associate Chairman mailto:kotok@w3.org
World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 200 Technology Square, Room NE43-364
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Voice: +1-617-258-5728 Fax: +1-617-258-5999
Received on Tuesday, 23 January 2001 13:44:43 UTC