Much more on Biometric DRM; RIAA; fingerprints

[dave () farber net]

___

Dave Farber  +1 412 726 9889



 ..... Forwarded Message .......
From: andrew_orlowski () theregister co uk
To: dave () farber net
Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 04:51:55 -0700
Subj: Much more on Biometric DRM; RIAA; fingerprints

Dave,

Gary Brant, CEO of Veritouch, which hopes to introduce 
the first Biometric DRM music player, was kind enough to 
participate in a long interview on the subject at The 
Register in June.

He agrees that file sharing is not a problem with a 
technological solution; like many other similar problems 
it requires only a simple legal fix. 

But technologists are used to viewing every problem as a 
technological problem.  Text of the interview is enclosed: 
IP subscribers can find an iVue mockup at 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/11/
biometric_drm_interview/

with best wishes,

Andrew Orlowski
US Editor, The Register

-------

Biometric DRM is 'empowering' says iVue maker

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Friday 11th June 2004 20:26 GMT

How do you understand a man who wants us to use 
biometrically generated keys before we can listen to our 
music?

Gary Brant's company VeriTouch will soon be marketing 
a media player called iVue, which will ensure that no 
music is ever shared again. The iVue uses your 
fingerprint to generate a unique key when you buy music 
online, and you can only play that music back once your 
fingerprint has been verified by the machine using this 
key. 

It's a brilliant idea!
 
As it turns out we simply couldn't get indignant or 
righteous with Gary over his quixotic adventure, and that's 
not just because he's a very nice man. It's because over 
five hundred Register readers spelled out exactly how 
they might use it, when we asked.

"I'm guessing there wasn't one in favor?" Gary asked us, 
a bit nervously.

Well, no. Not one.

We began by reading a typical, but very succinct comment 
that we received - this one from reader Tim Everson.
"Bit of a no brainer really, the choice between an MP3 
player that plays tunes, and an MP3 player that records 
biometric information and restricts my ability to transfer 
MP3s between devices," writes Tim. "I see no better way 
of ensuring that a media device won't sell apart from 
smearing it with excrement before packing it. "

"Oh. I've read worse ones than that," said Gary, laughing. 
He hasn't had one positive email either. But you might 
correctly guess that some other people, and you can 
probably even guess who they are, could be really 
interested in the idea.

Brant thinks that the iVue will be as revolutionary as the 
Walkman, which knocked him out when he first saw it in 
1979.

"I've tried to read as many replies as I can and as many 
pages of what people are feeling about this. But I believe 
this technology can really empower the end user," he 
says. "You'll have the ability to lock up and secure stuff in 
this digital diary. That's a part of it I would really like to see 
brought into the light - the Victorian Diary in the padlock, 
the journal in a leather case that held the secrets of the 
owner."

Evoking the era when piano legs were covered with fabric 
because their wanton erotic displays of wooden-
leggyness might upset the stability of the Empire, and 
when adolescents were forced to wear metal 
contraptions which would inhibit masturbation, hardly 
seems to set the right tone for a new era of 
empowerment, we thought. (We'll come to the coercion 
aspect of this whole biometric DRM proposition in due 
course.)

> Machines, for better or worse <

But back to the original question. How can you 
understand this mind? It's simple really - it just depends 
on how you define the problem. Gary Brant's iVue is a 
good solution to a particular problem: it's just that many 
people identify the problem quite differently. The two have 
very different solutions. As your reporter sees it, music is 
created to be shared, so there's little sense in finding 
technological solutions that try to stop people sharing. 

The real problem is that the artists aren't being 
compensated, so rather than engaging in futile attempts 
to make people not share music, something we have 
always done and will not stop doing, the much simpler 
task of compensating the artist can then be addressed.
Only this, much simpler problem doesn't really have a 
technological answer. It requires a social and economic 
solution, with perhaps a little bit of dumb technology there 
to help us add up the sums quicker. Fortunately we're 
good at social solutions. Not great ones admittedly, and 
they can all be better, but collectively we do muddle 
through, once we can all agree on what the problem is.
In fact Gary agrees that finding a way of compensating 
the artists is the real problem.

"Absolutely," he said. "That's the top of the heap 
challenge."

(We told you he was a decent chap, didn't we?)

Gary isn't familiar with the compensation schemes being 
discussed (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/01/
free_legal_downloads/), which would levy the price of a 
pint of beer on us every now and again, so we can get 
back to where we were: an equitable arrangement for the 
artists. It all makes sense, in this light. So getting him up 
to speed is important, because as a potential 
manufacturer, he can make things that are really useful to 
us, if he's on the right lines, and as we'll see, he nearly is.

But to return to where we started. Gary is not a mystery: 
he's simply following a very familiar trail blazed by many 
techno-utopians before him, who believe that technology 
itself can light a path out of our mess. In this respect he's 
no different from Newt Gingrich - who advocated giving 
laptops to the homeless - or George Gilder or Esther 
Dyson, or today's weblog blowhards, all of whom have 
employed similar empowerment rhetoric. Only there's no 
magic in these machines, and once we lose this idea 
that they can do something for us that we can't do for 
ourselves, our problems are much easier to identify and 
solve.

(As a consequence, we might have better machines, too).


> I want an iVue! <

So here's what iVue will look like. It's a small Linux box 
with a 120 GB hard disk and a 1200 by 800 resolution 
screen in 16x9 format, according the CEO. (This sounds 
a bit fishy, and you'll be wondering, like we were, where 
he's sourced such components. Maybe it's not too far-
fetched, as similar form-factor PCs like the OQO are 
almost on the market; but it does suggest that it's more 
next year's product than this year').

You'll be able to run a shell - but you won't be able to 
move anything on or off the device if VeriTouch's 
encryption technology works. This took two years to 
develop and relies on a 21,000 bit key. Break that! says 
Gary. (We paraphrase here).

The user submits a fingerprint when first shopping at an 
online music store. This is then verified by the service 
provider and you're OK'd to listen to the music you just 
bought. You don't need to authenticate each song 
individually, Gary stresses, you can authenticate 
hundreds in one go, very easily. But you must pawprint 
every song before you can hear it.

(Several readers with Eczema have pointed out this a real 
nuisance, by the way. If you have Eczema only part of you 
finger rubs off on the sensor. The rest is flakey bits. So 
like the FBI (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/28/
terror_technology/), you only get a lousy fingerprint. And 
unlike the cryptographic certainties factored into 
Veritouch's system, it seems that skin loss sufferers are 
un-obligingly random.

"How much is missing from which finger depends on 
which fingers disliked the shaving foam that morning," 
says one reader, which may be far more than you wanted 
to know, but still illustrates the point that biometric 
security technology has some challenges ahead of it, if 
we are to take it seriously.

As one reader asks, "Will I be able to get a non-DRM 
device on account of my medical condition? It'll be 
interesting to find out what the Disability Discrimination 
Act makes of that one."

Quite so, and we're shoulder to shoulder with you here. 
Technology that can't cope with something as 
commonplace as a skin condition is problematic: iVue 
must work for everyone.

Brant nevertheless insists that anonymity can be 
preserved in this process. He claims that unlike 
watermark technology, there's nothing that links your 
identity and that of the fingerprint. We seem to remember 
something like a credit card being involved somewhere 
in this transaction, as this music is not being given away 
freely, and this is usually how you pay for stuff online, and 
not through an anonymity broker (of which there are right 
now, er none) - so we're not sure how well his argument 
holds up.

On the iVue, there is no slot for removable media, and no 
ports. It's entirely wireless - GPRS, Bluetooth, and 
802.11b/g flavors of Wi-Fi. So it's a phone as well, if a bit 
of a dorky one. That's quite impressive, we said, in fact - 
that's great! Your reporter told Brant that he would happily 
buy one - if only the fingerprint technology wasn't there. 
That's because it's very close to something we dreamt up 
here - the Bluepod device - that a lot of people also 
dreamt up at the same time, in an odd kind of collective 
hallucination. It's a pocket-sized device than you can 
share music with, socially. We think the demand for such 
a thing would be quite high. You seem to think so (http://
www.theregister.co.uk/2002/12/06/
apples_bluepod_promiscuous_exchanges/), too. Given 
ubiquitous, high bandwidth wireless and a fair copyright 
scheme, a Bluepod user could walk down the street and 
share and collect as music as they wanted to hear. The 
artists would get paid, and we'd be happy. Which is a 
good thing.

So why has Veritouch come very close to making this 
perfect device, only to turn away at the last minute and run 
into a wall instead? It has everything we want, except the 
one function that makes it useful. Why has he done this?

> Coercion and control <

Clearly, as we agreed, you can't change thousands of 
years of human behavior. People share music because 
it's a natural thing to do, and we communicate a lot of 
useful stuff with our music and it's very important to us. 
Will we wake up one day and see iVue's magic, or will 
more laws be needed for iVue's to work as predicted?
"Emphatically, no" he says.

How will we accept iVue, then?

"Believe me fingerprint scanning is becoming our lives," 
he says, turning to his own technology first as 
justification. "It's part of your driving license, it's part of 
your passport, this is an early adoption of it." He might be 
right, but is that national security compromise about to be 
willingly applied to basics, like enjoying music? Our 
mailbag suggests otherwise. His mailbag too.
Nor is applying a fingerprint to play your morning music 
strange either, he reckons.

"There are changes in direction that at first seem 
incredible. When the Wright Brothers first flew their plane 
I'm sure people were surprised when they witnessed 
that."

Given all this, he's pretty sanguine about his prospects. 
Heroically so.

"At the end of the day, you think you can have a good idea, 
but then God can tap you on the shoulder and say 'no 
dice'", he says. ®

> > Related stories <<

RIAA wants your fingerprints (http://www.theregister.co.uk/
2004/06/04/biometric_drm/) 

Promiscuous BluePod file swapping - coming to a PDA 
near you (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/03/
pocket_rendezvous/) 

Labels seek end to 99c music per song download (http://
www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/09/pigopolist_price_hike/
)

© Copyright 2004 


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