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

["Smith, Bill" <bill.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excellent piece Mikey!

I especially like the part that discusses how some have argued that DNS 
Filtering is being used (and purportedly works) for some nation states, 
therefore the United States should use it. I won't go into the many reasons why 
this argument is flawed other than to say Spring 2011 provides more than enough 
evidence that DNS filtering does not work.

On Jan 12, 2012, at 12:50 PM, Mike O'Connor wrote:

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<http://boingboing.net/tag/DRM> 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<http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/wednesday-weird-bible-verse-1.html> 
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<http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/trtdocs_wo033.html>, 
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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