Gilmore on nanotech & copy-protection
from the what-do-you-mean-replication-is-illegal? dept.
Senior Associate John Gilmore of EFF has written this item on the problem of copy-protection including the connection to nanotech. John prefaced it with: "My latest missive about copy-protection. I tie in the big nanotech angle toward the end. I have to sneak them up to it because they think I'm crazy if I lead with it. Feel free to reproduce this. If you publish it far and wide, let me know so I can feed you corrections as they come in from the critics…" Sounds like John would appreciate feedback, so add your comments below.
January 24th, 2001 at 1:18 PM
Apparent Antitrust Violation
John says, "… Apple's recent happy-happy web pages on their new DVD-writing drive, announced this month (http://www.apple.com/idvd/). … [doesn't] say that you can't copy-protect your OWN disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your OWN recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity."
It seems to me that this alone is a violation of the anti-trust laws. We have a consortium of industry competitors conspiring to prevent the market entry of new competitors.
Bill Frantz
January 24th, 2001 at 11:10 PM
Re:Apparent Antitrust Violation
I suspect they would say: "Oh, but if you want to do DVD authoring, you should get the industrial class drive from a reputable retailer starting from around US$20000, which I'm sure you'll agree is a trivial capital cost for any serious business." This would then make it a case of pricing out of the market, I suspect much more difficult to prove. And if they ensure the DVD-authoring drive is worth around $20000 (because there's no consumer grade version), then it's even more difficult again …
January 25th, 2001 at 1:50 AM
Freeing the future
Excellent essay, a detailed and chilling picture of the restrictions being implemented in hardware and software, backed by the DMCA, and an inspiring conclusion about the open source alternative.
One point he doesn't mention is the history of shortsightedness in the movie industry, most notably their initial resistance to videotapes which ultimately greatly expanded their income and profits. Personally I've noticed that with the convenience of converting my CDs into mp3 files and playing them on my computer, I'm actually buying more CDs than I used to.
Hollywood seems to be once again demonstrating the congitive bias that fear of losses outweighs interest in opportunities. More reason for supporting EFF, Slashdot, Foresight and others taking a longer, more dynamic view and working to free the future.
January 25th, 2001 at 2:36 AM
Wrong target
I see much greater threat to freedom in the control of access to bandwidth by the private owners of what should be the common-carrier network. Why should cable operators like Time-Warner be pumping x100 channels of their sludge into everyone's home, with only a small setaside for "broadband" which is not quite broad enough for HDTV, instead of going to a universal switched system with infinity "channels"? Why is AOL being allowed to set up a "walled garden" under their proprietary Instant Messenger standard? Why has the Microsoft desktop become an advertising space for Disney, MSNBC, AOL, etc? These are the real issues on the electonic freedom frontier.
I don't see the harm in copyright protection, as long as it does not prevent people from duplicating, storing, and communicating unprotected content. If, as a result, people spend less time watching Hollywood movies and listening to computer-synthesized pop music, great! There is so much genuine creativity out there among people who would not mind having their output duplicated freely and spread like wildfire across the internet, or who would not charge much for its use. But much of that (the part that requires high bandwidth) is currently unaccessible thanks to the corporate-controlled network. Note also that all forms of copyright protection of intellectual content can and will be defeated, if at some cost in degradation and inconvenience.
I disagree completely with John's idea that we should be moving towards a nanotech economy where everyone has an assembler system that can make anything to specs downloaded freely from the net. If such a technology is ever released to the public, there will be a need to control the uses to which it can be put. From that point of view, the trend toward hardware-level copyright protection is very much welcome. Artificial scarcity may be undesirable, but mass-destruction warez would be much worse. In the end, we won't have to make such a tradeoff, but we will have to keep the technology under control.
January 26th, 2001 at 4:13 AM
Gilmore is on target
Time Warner and company are an issue, but so is the proliferation of stealthily implemented hardware/software control on duplicating content. Maybe you missed Gilmore's point that many of the standards are defaulting to not permit duplication even of unprotected content, or only at much lower quality. Gilmore used the anecdote about a digital video of a wedding, but the issue is far broader. And more generally he points out how the "fair use" freedoms which have been inherent in copyright are being de facto progressively restricted.
He posits a nanotech economy where duplication of matter is very cheap. That does not necessarily mean everyone has their own universal assembler system at home. There could be various ways to have controls, with either dispersed or more restricted fabricating equipment, while still enabling very cheap fabrication. And equipment might well be specialized ("limited assemblers") anyway, again yielding low cost without necessarily high risks. So even under a scenario of "well-controlled" technology the issues of how to share abundance and provide incentives for innovation will be a challenge.
And, to challenge another part of your anti-corporate critique, I think it is now mainly corporate deep pockets that are financing the network capacity that will allow more and more high bandwith content. The economics of fiber optics, rights of way and other aspects of networks seem, at least for now, to allow competition, but it is still a capital intensive business with long payback periods. So unless you are proposing to have the government do it, it may be worth acknowledging a role for companies. A better target for your critique would focus on whether network services are better financed through flat fees rather than by volume or pay per use. Which then runs into the issue that a lot of people think micropayments could stimulate a lot of good stuff. So there are several sides to the issues, and several worthile targets for criticism and for development of alternatives.
January 26th, 2001 at 10:40 AM
Re:Gilmore is on target
That would be more serious, but is it real? The only example I saw was the lack of digital outputs on Sony audio equipment.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way is to ackowledge that we are a society, in which a huge amount of wealth and power happens to be concentrated in the hands of corporations. They are determining how our network is being built, structured, and will be used.
You still have a natural monopoly at the delivery end. For most customers, the promised competion has not emerged.
Having the government do it would be fine with me. But short of that, I object to the surrender of public control through regulation. The old regulated monopoly was a fine thing. We could have had a high-bandwidth network 5-10 years ago if the phone companies had been permitted to buy up cable-TV systems and implement switched broadband under common-carrier restrictions. That was not done because broadcasters and publishers had enough political pull to block it. They wanted to maintain control of restricted-access media and they peddled fears about the creation of exactly the kind of unregulated supermonopoly that now looms ahead.
The delusion that "competition" would save us from having to make decisions about how to structure an essential social service was the excuse for abandonment of the eminently sensible common-carrier framework of regulation. So now we are not getting a common-carrier network, but one wholly owned and controlled by a few corporations intent on selling content to us and us to advertisers.
Regulated monopoly is much preferable to an unregulated oligopoly which puts individuals completely at the mercy of one or at most a few giant corporations. What is John calling for, if not for democratic control of the standards and products foisted upon us by oligopolistic consortia? I just think he's picking a relatively silly issue, which is mostly about teenage pirates wanting to make bootleg copies of Puffy Combs' latest opus. And he, like everyone else, is ignoring the huge issue of the emerging content-controlled network (with a small setaside for internet maniacs like you and me).
Yes, I agree, this is a good idea, but one that apparently would require some kind of government initiative. (Otherwise, why has the market still failed to pick up on this?)
January 27th, 2001 at 6:24 PM
telecoms competition, micropayments
Coming in a period where cable access to internet has emerged as a serious competitor to phone lines, I'm not convinced that "You still have a natural monopoly at the delivery end." And satellite dish and wireless systems are already emerging as challengers in specific niches.
I think most would agree that the Telecommunications Act was an admission of ignorance, that government couldn't "pick winners" and instead opened things up to lots of alternatives. That does not mean that government can't come in later, though obviously there would be opposition (just as Microsoft talks about how much it has helped consumers and how "threatened" it is by competitors). One issue, on which there is clearly lots of room for disagreement, is when and how the government may need to get involved. While worried about the threats of corporate power, I think I'm not the only one who may not have a much faith as you seem to place in benevolent government regulation. "The old regulated monopoly was a fine thing." Even if it, arguably and relatively may have been a fine thing in its time, that doesn't justify keeping an increasingly crucial part of the economy tightly regulated when technology seems to be allowing more, not less, competition.
I would agree that pushing for "common-carrier" access might be a good target for government to promote, particularly if things become as concentrated as you fear. However, even such a seemingly narrow form of "democratic control" as insisting on network access/common carrier gets into incredibly messy details of standards and charges, once you try to put it into practice. (A bit of which can been seen by looking at the clutter of fees on your phone bill.)
Why assume that government initiative is required for micropayments? Maybe just a bit more patience for market processes to discover something that works. Putting something like micropayments into practice is much harder than laying out an exciting concept. Paypal has now taken electronic payment a substantial step lower, though still at the level of dollars rather than pennies. I don't know the history of Paypal, but there is a big challenge in getting an initial "critical mass" of enough users for a network to take off. For anyone interested in the unconventional thinking that might have to lie behind financial innovation I recommend Dee Hock's book "Birth of the Chaordic Age" on the origins of the Visa credit card system. Micropayments might require a similar unusual mix of cooperation among competitors.
January 28th, 2001 at 8:53 AM
Re:telecoms competition, micropayments
There is still only one high-bandwidth wire going into homes. The high-bandwidth wire can easily incorporate the low-bandwidth application. Even so, the cable companies have not had a great deal of success marketing their alternative telephone hookup. Meanwhile, they continue to dictate the content and use of nearly all the available bandwidth.
Are primarily one-way broadcasting systems. There is not the bandwidth available to support dense, many-way, infinity-channel, broadband "video internet" communications. Technology points to land-lines for the bulk of communications bandwidth, with wireless as an adjunct for mobility.
It was a triumph of closed-door, big-bucks, special-interest politics. Public-interest groups were almost nonexistent, those that did exist were excluded, the public was not involved and was largely unaware of the issues at stake. Who was going to inform them? The corporate-owned mass media was one of the major players, angling to deny the public access to an open broadband network for as long as possible.
Yes, we should not give up, but it is clearly more difficult to change what has already been done than it would have been to influence what was going to be done.
I have no such faith. The telecom act is one clear example of malevolent gov't action, but it was done in a completely undemocratic (money-driven) fashion. What I do have faith in is the possibility of enlightened regulation which serves the public interest. I don't even think it is a matter of the public needing to be more involved, the process more democratic; an enlightened, benevolent elite could put good rules in place (like the Communications Act of 1934). The public and public-interest groups should be getting more involved, but what we should be talking about is what kind of rules would serve the public interest, not debating whether it is legitimate or desirable to have any rules at all.
We should not have regulations which block the introduction of qualitatively new technology, although some resistance to the proliferation of incompatible proprietary standards is warranted. What I am mainly calling for is divestiture of the communications infrastructure from the ownership and provision of the content that flows over it–the principle of the common carrier. There is no good reason why the cable I use to connect to the internet should be owned by a company that forces me to boot up its software and view its startup page with built-in restrictions and features shepherding me to its preferred destinations. There is no good reason why 90% or more of the bandwidth available to the public should be locked up in one-way broadcasting of hundreds of channels of the same Hollywood movies starting at 15-minute intervals, ad-driven shlock programming, corporate-controlled infotainment, etc., instead of allowing each of us to choose the content providers we will connect to. As it is, the network is being structured solely to serve the profitability of corporations, while the words "public interest" elicit snickers.
Again, no one has stepped forward to build a second high-bandwidth network, and it would clearly be a waste of available resources to do so. My guess is that we will get the kind of network I am talking about, eventually, because the technology will keep getting cheaper. But it will take much longer, and cost much more, than it would have under enlightened regulation. In terms of technology and economics, we could have had this five or ten years ago.
Good, we've made progress. But it will take much more than "promotion." It will take legal action. And this will not come easily; hundred-billions of dollars are at stake.
A simple common-carrier law would minimize the number of such issues. The telecom company provides you a pipeline to the internet. That's it; they don't set any standards for what kind of bits you exchange with it. I think there is a role for government in helping to establish standards for formats, software interfaces and so on, but that should probably be done on a more voluntary basis (e.g. NIST coordinates industry/public interest consortia to hash out standards, then publishes them as "NIST standards" with various mechanisms to encourage but not force compliance).
Give me back the regulated monopoly that sent me one bill and didn't harass me with offers to switch carriers from flunkies who ignore my "No, thanks" and jack me anyway.
Maybe, but the idea has been around for about several centuries of internet time, so there must be reasons why it is not sufficiently profitable. It's not too hard to guess what the reasons might be:
Exactly, and when the transaction amounts are pennies, the proposition is going to be very unprofitable for a long time. A government initiative could jump-start the process, and transition it to the private sector.