Doctorow's Microsoft DRM Talk Teaser
This has been silly hot in the tech community for awhile but I want to make sure everyone I know goes and reads the transcript of a recent talk Cory Doctorow gave to Microsoft's research division on why Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in many ways a bad idea. Since reading it about a month ago I've tried to tell as many people about it as possible. Especially those I felt might not be tuned into this type of thing like I am (you know, normal people with real lives who aren't hovering over their newsreader waiting for their next fix).
Real quick, for those who haven't been keeping score: DRM is to a
computer—which, by the way, is just about anything with batteries or a wire at
this point—as The Club is to a car, except Honda gets the key (to
The Club that is) and decides when it comes off and goes on. And oh yea, if you
were to saw the damn thing off, you can expect scary guys in black suits to
whisk you away for an all expenses paid trip to places that aren't on any map.
This stuff is important to me and it should be to you to. When my daughter grows up and is flying from Mars to a moon off Saturn in her—probably still petroleum powered—space thingy, I don't think she will appreciate having to lug around boxes of books and CDs because my generation failed to wield their collective influence against the status quo.
Unfortunately, I've found that people typically get through half of the crypto part at the beginning of the talk, their eyes begin to glaze, they peek at the scrollbar and see that there is still a long way to go, and they just punt. Or, they don't read it at all (possibly because I'm bad at describing things when I'm excited). So, I decided that I would take advantage of the fact that Doctorow dedicated his work to the public domain “for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of [the] Dedicator's heirs and successors,” and put the really juicy parts here as a sort of teaser like you see at the theater before the main feature.
Movie teasers need do only one thing: get you to see the movie. They are not
required to be informative or detailed or anything like that - just juicy. I
hope the following excerpts inflict enough stimulation for you to
go read the entire text (html), or if you are one of my many
illiterate friends, you can listen to the damn thing.
(Note: this link will get you directly to the excerpts)
Excerpts from Microsoft Research DRM Talk - By Corey Doctorow
Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!
...occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble...
Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
- That DRM systems don't work
- That DRM systems are bad for society
- That DRM systems are bad for business
- That DRM systems are bad for artists
- That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
DRM systems don't work
... We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol.
Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked.
DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with....
DRM systems are bad for society
Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!"
... I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM ...
...keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall.
...the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal.
... Copyrighted cars, print carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures?
... If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property"—a whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations—but real, no-fooling, actual tangible property--the kind of thing that courts have been managing through tort law for centuries.
... Copyright lawyers call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as "Capitalism."
...bringing him up on charges of unlawfully trespassing upon a computer system. When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
DRM systems are bad for biz
...from the Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto the end of your vacuum-hose to the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard lighter socket, standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes billionaires out of nerds.
... It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack...
... There's a company that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing that holds 30 movies, and they're charging $30,000 for this thing. We're talking about a $300 hard drive and a $300 PC — all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition..
DRM systems are bad for artists
We poor slobs of the creative class are everyone's favorite poster-children here...
...Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands - the hundreds of thousands - the millions. They did this without a penny's compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!
... Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso...
... Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America.
... If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at "My Way," well, now you know.
... created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people.
...the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents' TVs.
The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds...
But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984... "... if your business model can't survive the emergence of this general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go broke."
The Luther Bible...
I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and they're like the especially garment bag they give you at the fancy suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner notes and so forth — that's a liability...
... record execs used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.
...It's bollocks...
... Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
...when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em?
... Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of. That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright that changes.
... copyright didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality created by the inventors of the previous generation...
DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
... No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." ...
... As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music...
... You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play everybody's records...
Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood was willing to permit—Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they thought their customers wanted.
... Compared to anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take them with your arm behind your back.
... I wonder how they feel about alarm clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?
... There's a company out there charging $30,000 for a $600 DVD jukebox — go and eat their lunch! ...
Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record player that can play everyone's records.
Because if you don't do it, someone else will.
Okay, I can't believe you made it all the way down here... Go read the entire text!