Gilmore On Hardware-Restricted Content

An unnamed reader links to John Gilmore's explanation of just why it's a bad idea to let companies (Intel in particular) cave to industry demands for so-called content protection in hardware. The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.

Comments

People don't care...

[anthony_dipierro]

The sad fact of the matter is that as long as a product does at least the minimum requirements, people don't care. That's why eBay can get away with pop-up ads. That's why people buy software with EULAs which take away their right to fair use. That's why we cave in and sign up just to read NYTimes articles. That's why we put up with BFAs and inane copyright restrictions on slashdot. It's why Microsoft gets away with charging people over and over for the same operating system, just because they buy a new computer.

Computers, the internet, the world could be so much better. But people constantly settle for mediocrity.

Geez, actually on-topic

[ZoneGray]

This one IS appropriate for the YRO section. You should have the right to buy any computer, with or without copy protection in hardware. Of course, this is not a right that's very well protected by the Constitution.

Efforts to force inclusion of hardware copy protection are simply the work of a special-interest group. It's as if Microsoft or Sun wanted a law that mandated that every computer have the Java or .NET runtime included, or if AOL wanted to madate inclusion of AOL software(Ironically, MS, Sun, and AOL have been pretty successful at distribution of their clients, even without legislation).

That's what Hollywood is trying to accomplish, to use legislation to build their distribution channel. Get off your asses and figure it out yourselves.

Game plan

[Syntari]

I'm not sure how likely the hardwired "content protection" scenario is... but, a pessimist by nature, I think we should start preparing as though it is going to happen.
The simplest version is if Intel unilaterally decided to cave in to Disney, AOL/TW, RIAA etc. and build its own hardware with little censor chips in them. In this case, the response is straight-up economic. Turn to alternative hardware vendors. I don't just mean in your personal purchases. Slashdot readers who are sysadmins or IT specialists at corporations should start preparing their explanations of why the company really should move away from the risks inherent in having unintelligent censorware control the use of potentially mission-critical data. If large corporate clients start abandoning Intel as a result of content-control, you can guess which product-line will get scrapped pretty quick.
The two other scenarios are legislation and regulation that will prevent anyone from seeking out alternatives, by making those alternatives illegal. This is more problematic, because slashdotters punch well below their weight politically. However, in both cases there will be a political "hook" - in the case of legislation, one can write one's congresscritter (for whatever good that will do), and in the case of FCC regulation, there will be a notice-and-comment period. So take notice, and make comments :)
As a penultimate line of defense, there is always the courts. In addition to the obvious first amendment claims, there could be an interesting "restraint of trade" (antitrust) claim based on denial of "essential facilities" (computing services).

In the long run, however, I think the answer to content protection is, "fine, go take away your ball and go play with it by yourself. I have a better game now." When all manner of content (not just free software) is made without any desire to restrict it, and when that content is both quantitively and qualitatively superior to restricted content, there will be no point to having hardwired censors. Even if people all use "approved" monitors and computers, they will be using them to view "free content" (free as in free speech, not free beer). So the "oligarchy" will wither, and there will no longer be any significant force pushing Intel to continue making hardwired censors...
How likely is that end-scenario? *shrug* Ask yourselves.

Copyright

[SmileyBen]

I've said this before, but it's important and needs saying. The most important part of what Gilmore is saying is the bit about 'A mandate from all concerned parties' without consultation of consumers. You just know that the 'content industry' would argue that consumers are /never/ going to ask for their rights to be curtailled, but that's exactly the point.

The *essence* of copyright is that all the people got together and said 'Let's curtail our rights, let's say that if any of us wants to copy something that someone else wrote, they have to pay for it, for a limited period of time'. They did this to promote the public domain - to get more stuff written by allowing authors a temporary monopoly on their works.

But the point is, the moment the public mandate for copyright is gone, there can be **no** justification for copyright. It's not a moral right. It's not a natural right. This isn't like saying that we shouldn't kill people. The point is that it's a mutual agreement on the part of a population, for their own gain. And the moment society decides it doesn't get anything from copyright any more copyright is defunct. You can't argue 'But copying is *wrong*'. It's not. All that is wrong, and all that would make copying wrong, is if everyone in society has decided to take on this copyright burden, and a few people decided they would be freeloaders.

As it is, I think that time has come. Clearly people no longer thing there's anything to be gained from copyright. I'm inclined to agree. Once, it took a long time to copy a book, and if you 'published' something, copyright was your only protection from other people selling it. But as it is now, the moment you start selling a book, a CD or whatever, you can publish so many copies that there would be no point in others trying to sell the same thing. Once a book is on the store shelves, nobody is going to type up the whole book, lay it out, and print it - there just wouldn't be any point. The person that got their first would be such an advantage due to having a head-start that they'd make tons of money anyway...

Re:Copyright

[Carnage4Life]

As it is, I think that time has come. Clearly people no longer thing there's anything to be gained from copyright. I'm inclined to agree. Once, it took a long time to copy a book, and if you 'published' something, copyright was your only protection from other people selling it. But as it is now, the moment you start selling a book, a CD or whatever, you can publish so many copies that there would be no point in others trying to sell the same thing. Once a book is on the store shelves, nobody is going to type up the whole book, lay it out, and print it - there just wouldn't be any point. The person that got their first would be such an advantage due to having a head-start that they'd make tons of money anyway...

This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.

If after expending n amount of months or years someone can just copy books I author for free then the Opportunity Cost of writring books will become to high for me and I'll find another line of work or write less.

The main problem with rants like yours is that they are throw the baby out with the bath water solutions. Most people agree that life of author + 70 years is an obscene amount of time to hold copyright on an intellectual work and is harmful to society in the long run. Similarly the lengths that content producers are beginning to go to so as to prevent copyright infringement have begun to intrude on the rights of consumers. However saying that intellectual works should be devalued as to where they should be offered no protection is just as harmful to society if not more.

Would you also suggest abolishing the welfare or health systems because there are inefficiencies therein and people who cheat the system? I sincerely hope the answer is no.

Re:Copyright

[Chris Johnson]

The trouble is, in a digital society, intellectual works have only functional value. Any intrinsic value of a copy (printing costs, materials etc) is nil.

It's like talking about the value of a James Brown record as art and arguing it can't be art because it's mass-produced. It depends on how you define it, and there is no one 'hand-crafted' record out there from which all the others are prints (a master isn't the final product and can't be played on record players), but even though the James Brown record is a mass-produced object it has use-value that makes it more than a chunk of plastic.

Well, in digital society, the medium is even more worthless than a chunk of plastic- and even transporting the bits around will typically involve making lots of copies of the work. Every time this very sentence goes to one of the half-million Slashdot readers, a copy is made. You're not 'going' anywhere to see it, a copy of the IP is made on your local computer to show you, assembled bit by bit from instructions given by another computer. In fact, a quick traceroute shows my own path to Slashdot as containing more than 20 hops- sprintlink, newyork.cw.net, exodus.net... so we're talking about 10 million copies of the IP made in order to bring the sentence to the eyes of Slashdotters.

Yet these copies are valueless- the only value present is if someone reads it, and goes 'hey!' and decides it's a good, insightful argument on the reality of digital media. Perhaps the reader is a lawyer- and wins a court case by making the points I'm outlining. Suddenly, this IP has value- suddenly it's serving a functional purpose.

Imagine a James Brown record travelling around on the Internet as mp3s. As it goes from server to server, local copies are made and discarded- and have no value. 90% of the time, it ends up on the hard drives of data-hoarders who don't even play it- again, resulting in no value. And then it finds its way to the hard drive of a DJ who works playing music at dances, raves etc: and that DJ sets it aside specially, for times when he needs to make people get up offa that thing! And when he plays it, people dance! THEN it has value, huge value- it can move people who otherwise wouldn't be dancing. Use-value means you look at what it's DOING, not what it IS. It's only a string of bits, when you look at what it IS.

The trouble with copyright is, it's not equipped to make any sense of the digital situation. It focusses solely on what the IP IS, on whether a string of bits is effectively the IP (a 128K and a 256K mp3 are different strings of bits, but can both be the 'same' IP). Copyright cannot comprehend the notion of IP being copied willy-nilly as a normal activity. You don't transport books by lining up a bunch of people with pencils and having them looking over each other's shoulders and copying what they see- yet this is how digital data is transported over networks. In some cases, it's only the 'stream of letters' being carried, and in others the whole work is stored temporarily on the server, such as Usenet posts. It's all copying.

By the same token, copyright cannot distinguish between IP being copied into a totally meaningless, no-value situation, and being copied into a situation where it has the same value a physical item would have. Copying a James Brown record into a James Brown fanatic's collection is the same as buying the record, functionally. Copying the James Brown record to border11.ge3-0-bbnet2.nyc.pynap.net as part of the working of the internet carries NO value- yet both of these copyings are the same to the computer.

Copyright is worthless if it cannot make these distinctions- and actively harmful if it gets in the way of the workings of modern communications networks. And it's not unthinkable to count Napster users (or their current equivalents) as communications networks themselves. Which of them are making use of the IP, and which of them are serving basically as organic components in a titanic data caching scheme?

The future is this: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds. It's not just the computer networks but the human networks bringing this about. You can get ANYTHING within seconds. Once I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book, in which he referenced Mencken's famous, brutal obituary of William Jennings Bryan. Half a minute with Google, and I was reading that obituary, like a footnote Thompson hadn't bothered to add. It's possible he didn't have rights to reproduce it- but could he have envisioned a world in which any online reader of his book could go find that reference in seconds? If so, would he have seen it as a dangerous crime, or as a public benefit? Would Mencken have seen this as a crime or a benefit, to so easily place his work before a curious reader- given that Mencken's agenda was to expose Bryan as a dangerous, stupid, destructive fool and buffoon? Mencken wanted to be read and understood. I'm not sure who owns the copyright to his words now...

Copyright IS incompatible with the future- unless we're seeking to bring about a new Dark Ages in which the common people don't have access to education, information- don't have access to IP. Intellectual property is knowledge, information. It's fine to want people to be compensated, but to seriously work to cut off access to knowledge and information means something is wrong.

The thing that is wrong is this: we're heading into a future where nobody ever need be illiterate or uneducated- where we're swimming in an absolute sea of information for all, rather than dying of a drought of it- and we have people wanting to stop that, because they want people to be only as informed and educated as they can afford to be.

Copyright as it's being extended is wrong, and it must be thrown out.

Companies Who Are Inept at Protection will Triumph

[Schlemphfer]

Gilmore's main points:

1) The costs of copy protected systems aren't paid by the "content" holders -- they are paid for by consumers. Essentially, you will end up paying more for a less capable computer, while Disney laughs its way to the bank.

2) For a copy protected computer to work, every peripheral -- from monitors to speakers -- must have copy protection built in. Think you're having trouble getting your Wintel box to behave now? You ain't seen nothing yet.

3) This is all being decided by government, so that no rogue manufacturers can ship non-protected computers. If that weren't the case, Apple might skip imposing copy protection, and we'd see 75% of Wintel users buying Macs so that they could avoid copy protection.

Gilmore seems puzzled by the fact that Intel isn't telling the content companies to cram it. Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in their best interest to side with the content guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been answered.

It seems the pivotal question here is: will the Hollings bills require all manufacturers to build end-to-end protection throughout their computers and peripherals? If not, what degree of protection does the bill require?

A wrinkle in this that nobody has thought of. Suppose end-to-end encryption is required. Each company's protection would be a little different, as we're talking about hundreds of components from various vendors. It might turn out that Apple or AMD sort of messes up their encryption (oops!) -- and by that "mistake" captures 75% of the computer market. After all, would you rather own a machine with rock-solid protection, or one that has a huge chink in the armor?

I know I'd want to buy my computer from the supplier who was most competent at designing machines and least competent at providing 100% protection of content.

Want to start a successful computer company? Just hire designers who don't know or care about ensuring robust protection.

The Constitution IS Enough, If it isn't Ignored

[FreeUser]

This one IS appropriate for the YRO section. You should have the right to buy any computer, with or without copy protection in hardware. Of course, this is not a right that's very well protected by the Constitution.

It is a right very well protected by the constitution. Any powers not explicitly granted the federal government by the constitution are reserved for the states, for municipalities, or for the people (10th amendment).

The Federal government has been granted no explicit authority by the constitution to regulate the sale or construction of computers.

The problem is that the government hasn't been abiding by the constitution for at least 70 years now, so we really can't expect it to start now.

Instead, for the sake of expediency over constitutional law, the courts routinely misuse the so-called commerce clause to extend the federal government's powers into all kinds of areas it is constitutionally barred from, but are nevertheless popular with the people to regulate anyway (War on Drugs, Child Pornography, etc.). By diluting the power of the constitution with these causes, irrespective of their legitemacy, we are now in a situation where real social and political pressures are coming to bear on our way of government (the Copyright Cartels' attacks on our most basic freedoms, the War on Terrorism and many of the unconstitutional methods being used to wage it domestically, not to mention the recent election debacle), and we no longer have a strong constitutional foundation to fall back on.

We sold it cheap in the name of "the children" to wage our War on Drugs, our War On Pedophiles, now our War on Terrorism and, comming soon to a computer near you, Our War On Copyright Violators.

The future is no longer terribly bright. Indeed, by selling out our most fundamental values for a perceived short term societal gain (who wouldn't want child pornographers jailed?) we've now insured that the future is a dark, bleak, ugly place ... one with virtually no rights and few liberties, and one we are now going to be very hard pressed to change.

Time to destroy hollings

[Stephen Samuel]

This raises only one question in my mind:
What would it take to deny Hollings the democratic nomination in his next election bid? This is really the only way to stop him (others of his ilk will respond when they see him die a thousand deaths).

MPAA and RIAA are stupid

[Lumpy]

if I can see it or hear it then I will have it in a form that is not controlled by them. They cant stop it and they never will short of creating laws that have the death penalty attached to it. Even then I dont see it stopping. Documents,movies,video,music,audio,art. it will exist in open and unrestricted forms in greater numbers and shared rampantly no matter what they do or what they try.

Why? because the general populace will never be stupid enough to believe that when they buy a CD or DVD they didn't buy anything but are only holding a delicate license to view it a limited number of times until the morther company wants to revoke it for any reason. The general public wont put up with it... and we dont.. looking at how "protected cd's" get ripped and on Gnutella,kazza,opennap,etc... minutes after release is proof enough.

Hey Movie companies, recording companies, writers, actors, musicians.. Thanks for the entertainment, but try and tell me how to enjoy it? then you can go straight to hell and

It's time we all stand up and collectivally flip off anyone that is for content control.