Interesting People mailing list archives

IP: Re: Thieves R Us

From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 07:20:02 -0400

Date: Mon, 14 May 2001 12:05:45 +1000
From: Nathan Cochrane <ncochrane () theage fairfax com au>
Organization: The Age newspaper

Here, here.

FYI
http://www.it.mycareer.com.au/news/2001/05/08/FFXRSN74FMC.html
But even while it has file sharing of digital media to thank for its
revenues, Seagate, along with other  hard-drive makers such as IBM,
plans to lock out what it sees as unauthorised distribution of
electronic data.
 Hard-drive makers have thrown in with copyright holders such as the
Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture
Association, to fight piracy. In the near future it is likely that your
hard drive will refuse to store information obtained without the digital
consent of the copyright holder.
 "In the past, wherever you've seen changes in (the) way people consume
entertainment, there are risks," Pait says.
 "What we're doing from a standards standpoint is to see where that
balance is, to develop encryption standards that will work across all
makers' drives. In America we continue to have these debates over the
exact issue.
 "Seagate wants to be part of the discussion and then see how much
encryption is good enough to protect the rights of record companies and
those of consumers."
 Pait claims that this does not erode the public's right to "fair use" -
the copying of copyrighted texts for educational, research or critical
purposes - but it is not supported by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. It says earlier battles over videotape recording are being
re-fought in the digital age.
 Last month it fought off an attempt to create a standard that "tethers"
files to the hard drive that created them.
 EFF intellectual property attorney Robin Gross says: "Under the guise
of protecting copyright, the industry is attempting to kill fair use and
effectively prevent works from passing into the public domain - two of
copyright's primary goals."

David Farber wrote:

X-Sender: > > >X-Sender: mnemonic@166.84.0.212
Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 14:36:51 -0400
To: dgillmor () sjmercury com
From: Mike Godwin <mnemonic () well com>

Thieves R Us
Computer makers are building equipment on the assumption that we are all
copyright outlaws
Mike Godwin
The American Lawyer

April 18, 2001

Every year or two I upgrade to a newer, faster Mac laptop, and this means
I go through a now-familiar ritual of hooking up the new machine to the
old one through a cable or local area network and copying everything --
software, data (including my MP3 music collection), and settings -- to the
new machine. So you can imagine my surprise and horror when I heard
reports recently that a new standard for consumer hard drives would make
this kind of copying difficult or maybe even impossible.

The reports may have been at least partially wrong, as it turns out. But I
think they raise important issues, and ones we ought to be thinking

about now.


The notion that hard drives might be hard-wired to prevent copying first
collided with my consciousness in January. That's when I heard about a
technology known as CPRM, which stands for Content Protection for
Recordable Media. It's being developed by an industry group known as The
4C Entity, with the backing of IBM, Toshiba, and Matsushita.

CPRM, it turns out, was the basis of a flood of criticism against The 4C
Entity after a single news story appeared in December in a British online
computer journal called The Register. Titled "Stealth Plan Puts Copy
Protection Into Every Hard Drive," the article began with an arresting
lead: "Hastening a rapid demise for the free copying of digital media, the
next generation of hard disks is likely to come with copyright protection
countermeasures built in." Okay, that got my attention.

The article went on to say that standard-setting bodies were being asked
to adopt CPRM for hard disks. Each disk would have a unique identifier
that would help prevent unauthorized copies. The article suggested that
this padlock could be built into drives as early as this summer.

The reaction was quick and harsh. By the next day, computer activists,
including millionaire software entrepreneur John Gilmore, had circulated
the story to mailing lists and other online forums. Gilmore called CPRM
"the latest tragedy of copyright mania in the computer industry." He
warned that under the standard, users "wouldn't be able to copy data from
[their] own hard drive to another drive, or back it up, without permission
from some third party."

Industry spokesmen were quick to respond that the protesters misunderstand
the technology and that their concerns are overblown. The 4C Entity said
that CPRM isn't even designed or licensed for "generic hard disks." It is
instead meant for use with other digital media, such as MP3 players and
writeable DVDs. The group also says the technology will be optional for
computer manufacturers. The standard would simply specify a common digital
signal facilitating CPRM technology, but it would not mandate that the
signal be present and turned on in a device.
These qualifications have not mollified Gilmore and other critics, who
raise the prospect that technologies like CPRM will push the digital
electronics industry into producing only equipment and tools with little
or no capability for unlicensed copying.

Now, at this point you might say, "So what? What's wrong with designing
hardware in a way that prevents you from breaking the law?"

I think the best answer to this is: Nothing, so long as it doesn't block
you from lawful stuff you need to do. Consider: It's certainly possible
today to build a car that will never go over the legal speed limit.
Perhaps speed-related injuries and fatalities are enough of a reason for
the auto industry to produce low-speed cars. But then it would be
impossible for drivers to do things they legally have a right to do, and
often need to do, such as accelerating safely onto a freeway or
accelerating to avoid a road hazard. And a car that can do those lawful
things can also break the speed limit. Yet we don't assume that the owner
of such a car is a likely speeder.

Put more broadly: Technologies that empower people don't discriminate
between good uses and bad. So if we build constraints into our computer
systems that prevent infringement, we're also making it impossible for
users to engage in all sorts of lawful copying. Except for the most ardent
IP hard-liners, most people accept that it is a fair use to make private,
personal copies of music and movies. But the proposed standard could
prevent that sort of activity.

It's worth comparing these digital rights management technologies to the
copy protection schemes that were the rage back in the 1970s and early
1980s -- the first decade and a half of the microcomputer revolution. Back
then, plenty of commercial software -- not just games, but also
productivity software like word processors and spreadsheets -- was coded
to prevent copying.
Routine tasks like backing up a hard drive and migrating to upgraded
systems were an incredible chore. With backups in particular, the software
discouraged activities that normal, prudent computer users ought to be
doing. As you may remember (and certainly can imagine), this caused a lot
of users to gripe.
Some developers responded by creating programs that circumvented the copy
protection. In the long term, however, most software vendors moved away
from copy protection altogether; they began to rely on copyright
enforcement and the customers' needs for support and upgrades to protect
their interests. You generally need to own licensed copies of software in
order to get support when you have problems.

The vendors also began lowering the price of software so that it seemed
both reasonable and equitable to pay for it rather than copy it. The
primary reason that software vendors moved away from copy protection
schemes is that they were confronted with competitors that offered similar
products without copy protection and with lower prices. In other words,
market forces (Microsoft was not yet considered a monopoly) pushed
software companies into more rational setups and better relationships with
their customers.
But if copy protection is built into standard computer storage devices,
whether hard drives or anything else, what competitors will I be able to
turn to? Even my Macintosh PowerBook, which you might think is free from
standards imposed in the Wintel world, relies on an IBM standard-issue
hard disk.

There's another complication. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
expressly outlaws the dissemination of tools that can be used to
circumvent technologies that control access to, or copying of, copyrighted
works. I can't even circumvent those technologies myself. Courts have said
that it's illegal even when the underlying purpose of the copying (fair
use for a classroom presentation or permitted by license) is lawful. Even
if the license of my word processor allows me to make archival copies of
the software, it's still illegal for me to use circumvention tools to

do so.


This combination of law and hardware means that there's a real possibility
that someday soon I won't be able to choose between computer products that
employ such schemes and those that don't. If that day comes, I don't know
how the market will respond, but I know how I will. To the extent
possible, I'll stop buying new computer equipment altogether. I'm guessing
at least some other computer buyers will make that decision, too.

This will mean I won't have the fastest and best computer equipment
anymore, but I'm betting I can stay afloat by haunting used-computer
stores for a long time to come. And I'll have the pleasure of knowing that
the computer equipment, MP3 device, or CD burner, etc., that I'm buying
doesn't have built into it the assumption that I'm a copyright infringer.

Mike Godwin is chief correspondent of IP Worldwide. His e-mail address is

mnemonic () well com.


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