[bc-gnso] here's a GREAT piece by Cory Doctorow which touches on many of the issues we like to discuss

["Mike O'Connor" <mike@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hi all,

this is a great thought-provoker piece -- kindof a unified field theory of why 
things like SOPA and IP protection strategies in general don't work.  it'll 
make some of you cranky, and i'd really like to have a discussion about those 
points.

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

here's a teaser:

> General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our 
> society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to 
> accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something 
> you might be sick of reading about: copyright.
> 
> But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape 
> of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the 
> general-purpose computer itself.
> 
> In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had 
> floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and 
> sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to 
> duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great 
> chagrin of people who made and sold software.
> 
> Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it 
> DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked 
> for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response 
> protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were 
> difficult to copy.
> 
> These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, 
> because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate 
> purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, 
> they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they 
> chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they 
> wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it 
> trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the 
> software without paying for it were untouched.
> 
> Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of 
> technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor 
> itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. 
> While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what 
> recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core 
> skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy 
> disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. 
> Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we 
> had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, 
> the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication 
> systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network 
> capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could 
> be spread on their own.
> 
> This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of 
> power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to 
> have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it 
> meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology 
> improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would 
> have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the 
> movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny 
> per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another 
> price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring 
> science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious 
> enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and 
> what might be charged for each.
> 
> Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could 
> control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. 
> After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to 
> their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music 
> from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once 
> you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to 
> stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and 
> processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user 
> to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.
> 
> But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.
> 
> You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it's 
> unencrypted—which must happen eventually— and you must stop the user from 
> figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to 
> permanently decrypt the media and ditch the stupid player app entirely.
> 
> Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to 
> decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you've got four problems, 
> because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from 
> unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too. And now you've 
> got five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract 
> these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were!
> 
> That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO 
> Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property 
> Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from 
> unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media 
> (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were 
> running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract 
> secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to 
> host copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy 
> streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without 
> having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap.
> 
> And with that, illegal copying ended forever, the information economy 
> blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide 
> world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished".
> 
> That's not how the story ends, of course, because pretty much anyone who 
> understood computers and networks understood that these laws would create 
> more problems than they could possibly solve. After all, these laws made it 
> illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs. 
> They made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside 
> your computer, and they made it easy to censor material on the internet 
> without having to prove that anything wrong had happened.
> 
> In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige 
> them. 
> 

the article goes on to cover a bunch of stuff from there.  enjoy.

mikey


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