pebkac thoughts

Hopefully I’ll have a link to video of the talk this afternoon soon. For now, here’s a writeup that I started during the talk:

Firstly, Paul Jones intro was hilarious. He listed the “sponsors” and then said, “And paid for by Duke,” since Cory was paid to come to the triangle to talk at Duke. Erin Watson gave the full introduction. Her effusiveness was contagious.

Cory started by talking about how bits are getting cheaper, both storage-wise and network-wise. “There is no future in which hard drives are less capacious.” He quickly went from that to DRM, which has the potential to retard the bright future. So what is this DRM? His explanation went something like this:

DRM has roots in cryptography, from back when the characterization of cyphers as munitions was more or less accepted. He gave us a bit of a history lesson, starting back before WWI, when the assumption was that you kept everything secret. That is, you kept the message a secret (didn’t let anybody but the intended recipient see it or even a scrambled version of it), you kept the cipher a secret (the method of scrambling the message), and you kept the key a secret (the itty-bitty piece of information that let you unscramble the message). The presumption here is that there are at least three people: Alice, the originator of the message; Bob, the intended recipient; and Carol, a person that Alice does not want to allow to receive the message.

So we started out with all three things (message, cipher, key) being kept secret. That works decently when the message is in the form of a physical object (eg. a piece of paper carried on the person of a runner on the front lines), but what happens when you start broadcasting with radio, which was the main way secret communication was done during WWII? Suddenly Carol has a copy of the message, too. We’re down to keeping the cipher and the key a secret.

What we discovered in WWII was that it is always possible to construct a cipher that you yourself cannot figure out how to break, but that is not a guarantee that others won’t break it. The fact that the German Enigma Machine was broken was powerful evidence that you could not rely on your cipher being a secret. Now we’re down to just having the key be a secret. That is, modern ciphers are published. Everybody has easy access to the inner workings of modern ciphers.

So now let’s look at DRM again in this context. Alice is publisher of movies. She wants you, Bob, the consumer, to buy encrypted copies of the movies. The message has been sold to you and the cipher has been published. Here’s the tricky bit: the movie is useless to you unless you have the key. How, then, is Alice to keep you from also being Carol? That is, the movie studios don’t want you to be able to do any more than just watch it, but you’d like to make a copy that you actually take with you on the plane or to the beach or whatever, and the movie studios–err, Alice–don’t want you to be able to make copies. So how is Alice going to keep you from doing whatever you want with the movie once you’ve decrypted it? The answer is that Alice can’t do that unless she also controls the devices you use to render the message. That is, Alice must have the power to make your PC betray you and do things you don’t want it to do. The only way for DRM to work is for general-purpose hardware that can be tinkered with and controlled completely by the purchaser to disappear. Without that, DRM will always be broken. The DRM on DVDs was broken by a bored 15-year-old. Significant bits of Vista’s DRM were broken the day before it was released. DRM is doomed to failure unless we allow our devices to betray us.

How long does this (the breaking of the DRM) take in the case of the average song published on iTMS (iTunes Music Store)? Two to five minutes, according to bigchampagne. What does this say about the way people are actually using the content they’ve purchased, then? Segue on the part of Doctorow: do science fiction writers predict the future? No. Science fiction writers (and literary types in general, he argues) don’t actually look at scientific evidence of how people are interacting with technology. Jules Verne, for example, can tell us a fair bit about attitudes in France during his day, but nothing about the technology that came after him. There’s a kind of idealism that goes into science fiction. It is an idealization of what technology can or should or will do, not in any way a powerful predictive tool. DRM is bad science fiction, he argues, since it is rooted in the business ideal of being able to make infinitesimally small slices based on “added value” and charging for each slice. For example, he talked about being at a conference where an attendee seriously proposed the “ideal” of being able to restrict a video or video delivery system so that it could only be watched in the living room. If you wanted to watch it in the bedroom, that’s added value and would require another payment.

“If value, then right”

Doctorow didn’t have to deride this “ideal” because it is so counter to our basic notions of fair play, because everybody in the audience knows that that is an artificial “ideal” that does nothing to improve the lives of the many. It doesn’t help artists. It only serves to enrich the already wealthy.

So what’s the danger? The danger is that the people with these “ideals” are in control of massive media empires, and they’re in cahoots with Microsoft and Apple, which together account for mor than 95% of the general purpose computing market. The danger is that in the pursuit of the mythical copyright bit, we’re creating technology with a big red self-destruct button that we see in bad science fiction movies.

Corey made reference to the underpants gnomes episode of SouthPark in describing how this maps onto the business model of the recording industry:

1. Alienate your former customer base by sueing people who share; treat the remainder like crooks with DRM.
2. ???
3. A chastened America returns to the mall.

So what’s the answer? In part, Creative Commons licenses. Not enough for you? Join EFF. They are currently in a suit against AT&T because of its complicity in the warrantless wiretapping started by the Bush administration. Want something local? Join a Free Culture chapter.

I’ll post an update when I get the URL for the video of the talk.