This is from the February 7, 2007 program of CNBC's Morning Call.

CNBC On Why DRM Should Go Away (Quicktime - 16 MB)

CNBC On Why DRM Should Go Away (MP3 - 8 MB)

This story was inspired by Steve Jobs' recent
campaign to kill Digital Rights Management (DRM) in iTunes.

The argument supporting this position was best described when the commentator started off saying:
"Mr. Sherman, your anti-piracy software doesn't work anyway. What's the point?"

Long story short:

-DRM is only a hassle for consumers. Real "pirates" hack it anyway.

-DRM doesn't need to exist for new business models - there are numerous subscription services already without DRM.

-For this reason, a subscription service that doesn't let you move your music around between your different devices is already "broken" (while also depriving you of your fair use and first sale rights to make legal copies of media you've purchased legally).

Here is the full text of the entire article linked to above about Steve Jobs (in case the link goes bad):
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1551759/20070207/index.jhtml

Apple's Steve Jobs Ready To Scrap iTunes Copy Protection
With label cooperation, Apple would sell DRM-free music 'in a heartbeat,' CEO says.

By Gil Kaufman

Steve Jobs is great at making lusted-after shiny tech objects, but the Apple Inc. CEO could use a lesson or two in the fine art of blogging. Regardless of his failure to keep it brief and breezy, though, the man who brought you the iPod and iTunes posted a lengthy, fascinating open letter on the Apple site on Tuesday in which he surprisingly stated that he'd be OK with scrapping the Digital Rights Management software that prevents songs downloaded from iTunes from being played on competing MP3 players.

Jobs, who has defended DRM in the past, said he's asked the four major labels (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group) to remove the software that prevents the copying of music files. As of now, songs bought on iTunes will only play on Apple's own iPods, and music bought from other download sites have their own DRM systems that work for competing music players.

"When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied," Jobs explained in the letter about the big four, which control rights to more than 70 percent of the world's music. "The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices."

Part of the deal, he added, is that if Apple's DRM was compromised at any time and the music downloaded from iTunes could suddenly be played on unauthorized devices — hackers have worked hard at finding some work-arounds for the iTunes DRM — the company had only a "small number of weeks" to fix the situation or face the withdrawal of the record company's entire catalog from the iTunes store. Jobs decried the need to employ secret codes in Apple's FairPlay DRM in order to stay a step ahead of hackers in the "cat-and-mouse game" to repair challenges to FairPlay's security.

"Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly," Jobs predicted. He proposed three solutions to the problem:

» "Continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own "top to bottom" proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft's Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony's Connect store will only play on Sony's players; and music purchased from Apple's iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

» "The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company's players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players."

» "The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."

Why would the big four agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect them, Jobs asks? The simple answer, he wrote, is "because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

"Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That's right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player."

Jobs argued that if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, why would they bother saddling the small remaining percentage of their sales with a DRM system that doesn't work?

"If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM-protected music," he wrote. "If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies."

Andrew Leonard makes some relevant statements about what's wrong with all the different "legal" music services developing, and how, by not embracing the universal MP3 format that made Napster so damn great, they all kind of suck.

Musical snares
Is Apple's iTunes service nirvana for music fans -- or just the start of a file-format nightmare that will drive us all nuts?
By Andrew Leonard for Salon.

The quality of my life has improved. But iTunes for Windows is not perfect, and my music consumer utopia is still an unrealized dream. Despite its vaunted half a million songs, I want plenty of albums and acts that are not yet available. I am greedy. I want everything. Let me buy it now. I'm also not crazy about the iTunes library organizing software. But what alarms me the most is the flip side of Apple's success -- a looming battle over file formats that, at least in the short term, is going to force consumers to make hard choices.

Because iTunes won't play my Windows Media music files. And the Windows Media Player won't play songs purchased from the iTunes store.

That's not the future I want to pay for. In the 21st century era of late capitalism, the consumer is supposed to be king -- my every desire is supposed to be reflected by marketplace offerings. Instead, the market is ordering me to get Steve Jobs' smirking grin tattooed on my butt, and while that may be an improvement on being branded with a Microsoft iron, I'd still rather keep my skin as it started, unblemished.

Right now, there are several options for compressing music files into sizes where it becomes feasible to download them online. Tunes purchased from the iTunes Music Store come in the AAC format. Tunes bought from most other commercial services have aligned themselves with Microsoft's WMA format. Then there's the original MP3 standard, which is aligned with no single company, and there's even a free software alternative called Ogg Vorbis.

This is not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of the relative merits of the different formats. Suffice it to say that about a year ago I committed an egregious error. When I finally purchased my first computer with a CD burner, I was so excited about being able to make my own CD mixes that I unthinkingly went ahead and used the Windows Media Player to rip all my favorite CDs to my hard drive. The Windows Media Player allows users to encode their songs only in the WMA format, which (like iTunes' AAC format) comes with various digital rights management capabilities built in.

Now I have all this music that iTunes won't play, and a bunch of songs purchased from iTunes that the Media Player won't play. So, at the moment, I am prevented from burning a CD that has songs from both libraries. There are converters available that will transform WMA files into AACs and eventually there will no doubt be converters that perform the reverse service, but the process is a hassle that may end up downgrading the overall sound quality. I would have been far better off if I had ripped all my CDs to MP3s to begin with, because iTunes and the iPod will play MP3s. (And even, better, the iTunes software will allow me to rip my CDs into MP3s.)

I should have known better, because now I'm sitting exactly where Microsoft wants me, facing a significant "switching cost" if I want to adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. It takes time to rip CDs -- and I have a lot of 'em...

I have a friend who has about 30,000 songs on a hard drive. There's nothing to stop me from hooking his computer to mine with a USB cable and slurping all that music at once. Sure it's illegal, and I'm not going to do it, but the RIAA would never know if I did, unless I did something stupid and put that server online for everybody on the Net to grab.

All over the world, even as Hollywood tries to push copy-protection legislation and sue individual file traders, music lovers are accumulating larger and larger collections of songs on their hard drives. Eventually, we'll be able to go to our local flea market, and the guy who right now is selling freshly burned copies of Eminem is going to be selling us DVDs with 4.8 gigabytes of music, also for a few bucks. Even worse, the swap meets will soon be featuring swappable drives that will contain everything the Beatles ever recorded, or all the pop music from the '60s, or the entire Warner Bros. catalog. Cheap.

I don't know how the record companies are going to stop it. I do know that if one day I'm staring at hundreds of gigabytes of music files on my own computer that I paid for that aren't playable on the newest piece of hardware or best available piece of music software, I'm going to be sorely tempted to head down to the flea market. And even if I refrain, that doesn't mean everybody else will.

Wouldn't it just be better to give me what I want, right now? Please don't make the consumer angry! Or he'll bite.

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2003/10/28/itunes/index.html

Musical snares
Is Apple's iTunes service nirvana for music fans -- or just the start of a file-format nightmare that will drive us all nuts?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Andrew Leonard

Oct. 28, 2003 | I downloaded my first MP3 file in February 1998. The process was convoluted to the point of absurdity. I used one program to rip a song from a CD I owned, another program to convert that into a compressed MP3 file, and a third program to upload it to an FTP site that required visitors to donate their own MP3s first before any downloading would be permitted. To complicate matters further, just finding that FTP site required lurking in seedy chat rooms where file traders exchanged passwords to sites that might be open only for a few hours in the dead of night.

And yet, there was something so obvious and right about playing music on my computer, on simply desiring a particular track and then going and getting it, that I knew that something fundamental had changed about my relationship to recorded music. When my Rage Against the Machine track blasted out of my computer speakers, I was transfixed by a vision of music-consuming utopia: Some day, everything ever recorded would be one or two clicks away. Every bootleg, every B side, every studio outtake. This is what the Internet was good at: connecting me with the objects of my desire. I want; therefore I get to have.

Questions of cost were not meaningful to me. I am no fan of record companies or overpriced CDs, but I am also not one who believes that all intellectual property should be free. I was, and am, plenty willing to pay a fee for a desired service. Indeed, when Napster ushered in the era of instant music gratification in 1999, I always felt a little uneasy with the justifications that file traders made for the morality of their copyright violations. To me, the success of Napster and then Kazaa demonstrated that there was a gaping market opportunity, and the longer the record companies took to get their act together, the longer they would stoke the flames of piracy.

So while waiting for an online music service that was right for me, I contented myself with ripping my own CDs to my hard drive and burning compilation mixes for my own amusement and as gifts for friends. And then came iTunes.

Like millions of other Windows users, I was excited when iTunes was finally made available to the non-Macintosh world two weeks ago. At the original debut of iTunes' online music store, it seemed clear that this was best legally sanctified option so far -- and not just because I lusted after an iPod. Steve Jobs and Apple ("Rip. Mix. Burn.") understood that instead of resisting music consumers, it was time to aid and abet them. I downloaded the software within hours of its being made available and bought my first songs within minutes of installation.

The quality of my life has improved. But iTunes for Windows is not perfect, and my music consumer utopia is still an unrealized dream. Despite its vaunted half a million songs, I want plenty of albums and acts that are not yet available. I am greedy. I want everything. Let me buy it now. I'm also not crazy about the iTunes library organizing software. But what alarms me the most is the flip side of Apple's success -- a looming battle over file formats that, at least in the short term, is going to force consumers to make hard choices.

Because iTunes won't play my Windows Media music files. And the Windows Media Player won't play songs purchased from the iTunes store.

That's not the future I want to pay for. In the 21st century era of late capitalism, the consumer is supposed to be king -- my every desire is supposed to be reflected by marketplace offerings. Instead, the market is ordering me to get Steve Jobs' smirking grin tattooed on my butt, and while that may be an improvement on being branded with a Microsoft iron, I'd still rather keep my skin as it started, unblemished.

Right now, there are several options for compressing music files into sizes where it becomes feasible to download them online. Tunes purchased from the iTunes Music Store come in the AAC format. Tunes bought from most other commercial services have aligned themselves with Microsoft's WMA format. Then there's the original MP3 standard, which is aligned with no single company, and there's even a free software alternative called Ogg Vorbis.

This is not the place to engage in a detailed discussion of the relative merits of the different formats. Suffice it to say that about a year ago I committed an egregious error. When I finally purchased my first computer with a CD burner, I was so excited about being able to make my own CD mixes that I unthinkingly went ahead and used the Windows Media Player to rip all my favorite CDs to my hard drive. The Windows Media Player allows users to encode their songs only in the WMA format, which (like iTunes' AAC format) comes with various digital rights management capabilities built in.

Now I have all this music that iTunes won't play, and a bunch of songs purchased from iTunes that the Media Player won't play. So, at the moment, I am prevented from burning a CD that has songs from both libraries. There are converters available that will transform WMA files into AACs and eventually there will no doubt be converters that perform the reverse service, but the process is a hassle that may end up downgrading the overall sound quality. I would have been far better off if I had ripped all my CDs to MP3s to begin with, because iTunes and the iPod will play MP3s. (And even, better, the iTunes software will allow me to rip my CDs into MP3s.)

I should have known better, because now I'm sitting exactly where Microsoft wants me, facing a significant "switching cost" if I want to adopt iTunes as my music-management software of choice. It takes time to rip CDs -- and I have a lot of 'em.

Sometime soon, I will start the laborious process of re-ripping all my CDs into MP3 files so they will play nice with iTunes. But the more I think about it, the more antsy I get about my decision to back the iTunes camp. What if, after I spend thousands of dollars on iTunes, Rhapsody or Buymusic.com or the new Napster rolls out a new version of a service that offers access to 5 million songs instead of just five hundred thousand? What if some new programming genius comes up with a compression format that uses even fewer bits but delivers better sound? Then won't I have achieved little more than exchanging one digital music tyrant for another?

I am confident that the marketplace is going to steadily deliver a progression of options that benefit me in some way: a wider selection of songs, lower prices, easier-to-use software. But I'm not confident that I won't be endlessly posed with a series of ever more onerous switching costs. Perhaps, once hard drives and bandwidth get big enough, we'll be able to do away with compression formats altogether, but companies like Microsoft and Apple are still going to strive to lock users in to their software/hardware platforms as long as they can. And that is decidedly not an example of the marketplace serving my consumer desires.

Then again, the music industry had its hands forced once, when widespread piracy made it clear that the studios faced the prospect of losing their customers entirely if they didn't offer customers a way to get what they wanted. The whole dynamic could easily repeat itself, should consumers ever get too frustrated with the available offerings.

I have a friend who has about 30,000 songs on a hard drive. There's nothing to stop me from hooking his computer to mine with a USB cable and slurping all that music at once. Sure it's illegal, and I'm not going to do it, but the RIAA would never know if I did, unless I did something stupid and put that server online for everybody on the Net to grab.

All over the world, even as Hollywood tries to push copy-protection legislation and sue individual file traders, music lovers are accumulating larger and larger collections of songs on their hard drives. Eventually, we'll be able to go to our local flea market, and the guy who right now is selling freshly burned copies of Eminem is going to be selling us DVDs with 4.8 gigabytes of music, also for a few bucks. Even worse, the swap meets will soon be featuring swappable drives that will contain everything the Beatles ever recorded, or all the pop music from the '60s, or the entire Warner Bros. catalog. Cheap.

I don't know how the record companies are going to stop it. I do know that if one day I'm staring at hundreds of gigabytes of music files on my own computer that I paid for that aren't playable on the newest piece of hardware or best available piece of music software, I'm going to be sorely tempted to head down to the flea market. And even if I refrain, that doesn't mean everybody else will.

Wouldn't it just be better to give me what I want, right now? Please don't make the consumer angry! Or he'll bite.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Andrew Leonard is the editor of Salon's Technology & Business department.

A number of distinguished organizations sponsored the Law and Technology of DRM conference that took place February 27 - March 1, 2003.

This presentation by Ed Felten is a real mind blower. The public is expected to tolerate the use of black box technologies in situations where doing so cannot possibly be in our best interest to do so, such as electronic voting machine systems.

The stills below explain a bit about this, but you'll really want to listen to the whole thing for yourself. Please do. It's really important that we all start taking this stuff very seriously so that we can start making our representatives aware of the current intolerable situation.

Ed Felten - Part 1 of 2 (Small - 10 MB)
Ed Felten - Part 2 of 2 (Small - 8 MB)

Ed Felten - Complete (Small - 17 MB)

Ed Felten - Complete (Hi-Res - 226 MB)

Audio - Ed Felten - Complete (MP3 - 12 MB)

Here's a transcript.

This work is dedicated to the
Public Domain. (Take it and run, baby!)

Fair use under assault
EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow argues the case against DRM
By Steve Gillmor for InfoWorld.

InfoWorld: What is the message that you feel needs to be made about DRM?

Barlow: I think that anybody who cares about the future of technology --
anybody who cares about the future, period -- ought to be awfully
concerned about this. But people who work in technology have been
agnostic on the subject so far. They need to recognize that they're
going to be faced with a fairly stark choice, which is a gradual
concentration around certain trusted platforms that cannot be broken
out of and are filled with black boxes that you can't code around and
can't see the inside of.

You have to get politically active and stop it from happening, because
Congress has been bought by the content industry. The choice is being
made at a very complex and subterranean political level. It's being
done in standard settings, with the FCC, in amendments to obscure bills
in Congress, in the closed door sessions to set the Digital Broadcast
Standard. It has very significant long-term effects [for] the technical
architecture of cyberspace, because what we're talking about embedding
into everything is a control and surveillance mechanism for the purpose
of observing copyright piracy, but [it] can be used for anything...

InfoWorld: You obviously feel strongly as an artist about the need to
protect fair use of content.

Barlow: We can't be creative without having access to other creative
work. [If] I have to make sure that the rights are cleared every time I
download something or somebody wants me to hear something, it's going
to cut way back on what I hear, which is going to cut way back on my
capacity to create. Imagine what it would be like to write a song if
you'd never heard one. Fair use is essential. But it is under assault.

Here is the full text of the entire article in case link goes bad:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/01/24/030124hnbarlow_1.html

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the EFF (Electronic Frontier
Foundation), and an outspoken advocate for fair use of content. In an
interview with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Barlow
discusses his opposition to DRM (digital rights management),
intellectual property law, and copyright extension.

InfoWorld: What is the message that you feel needs to be made about DRM?

Barlow: I think that anybody who cares about the future of technology --
anybody who cares about the future, period -- ought to be awfully
concerned about this. But people who work in technology have been
agnostic on the subject so far. They need to recognize that they're
going to be faced with a fairly stark choice, which is a gradual
concentration around certain trusted platforms that cannot be broken
out of and are filled with black boxes that you can't code around and
can't see the inside of.

You have to get politically active and stop it from happening, because
Congress has been bought by the content industry. The choice is being
made at a very complex and subterranean political level. It's being
done in standard settings, with the FCC, in amendments to obscure bills
in Congress, in the closed door sessions to set the Digital Broadcast
Standard. It has very significant long-term effects [for] the technical
architecture of cyberspace, because what we're talking about embedding
into everything is a control and surveillance mechanism for the purpose
of observing copyright piracy, but [it] can be used for anything.

InfoWorld: Don't you think it's ironic that the computer industry is
going along with this?

Barlow: I think it's unfathomable. But Microsoft and Intel are going to
make their pact with the Hollywood devil and they're going to create a
huge, trusted platform that's going to be the institutional platform.
Apple, every Linux publisher, AMD, Motorola, Transmeta, and various
different hardware manufacturers are not going to sign on, and there's
going to be another open platform. But there are efforts under way to
make that unlawful. There's a bill being proposed that would forbid the
United States government to use anything that was under a GPL [General
Public License]. That's significant, and it's obscure. ... I'm not
saying the GPL needs to be protected, but I think if you're going to
have critical mass, technological mass around a set of standards, that
not being able to have the United States government as a customer for
those standards is a significant matter.

InfoWorld: You obviously feel strongly as an artist about the need to
protect fair use of content.

Barlow: We can't be creative without having access to other creative
work. [If] I have to make sure that the rights are cleared every time I
download something or somebody wants me to hear something, it's going
to cut way back on what I hear, which is going to cut way back on my
capacity to create. Imagine what it would be like to write a song if
you'd never heard one. Fair use is essential. But it is under assault.

InfoWorld: Why is it a difficult proposition to make this case?

Barlow: It's a difficult proposition because the content industry has
done a marvelously good job of getting people to believe that there's
no difference between a song and a horse, whereas for me, if somebody's
singing my song, I think that's great. They haven't stolen anything
from me. If somebody rides off on my horse, I don't have anything and
that is theft. Otherwise intelligent people think that there's no
difference between stealing my horse and stealing my song. [The content
industry] has also managed to create the simplistic and basically
fallacious notion that unless we strengthen dramatically the existing
copyright [regime], that artists don't get paid anymore. First of all,
artists aren't getting paid much now. Second, making the institutions
that are robbing them blind even stronger is not going to assure
[their] getting paid more. And it's going to make it very difficult for
us to create economic [and] business models that would create a more
interactive relationship with the audience, which would be good for us
economically and good for us creatively.

InfoWorld: Do we have to wait for an artist to do this?

Barlow: We need to start giving people a mechanism that they can use to
compensate the artist themselves.

InfoWorld: Which is?

Barlow: I think there are a variety of ways. They're doing it already
[with] the performance model, which I don't think is perfect but it's
actually better than it's given credit for being. Think about it: $17
billion in CD sales last year [and] of that the artists themselves got
less than 5 percent. There was $60-some billion in concert proceeds
last year, and of that the artists got closer to 35 or 40 percent. ...
There is already a system of compensation that's working, and I think
that there will be other systems of compensation that can work. ... We
have the assumption that unless you're selling 200,000 units of work,
you're not successful. Well that's true -- under the current
conditions -- because it takes at least that much before [the artist]
ever sees a dime. But if you're not dealing with this piratical
intermediary, you can do just fine with an audience of 5,000 or 6,000.

InfoWorld: Demonizing the record companies is easy to do but it doesn't
seem to have much effect.

Barlow: It's gradually having an effect. New artists don't
automatically want to go out and find a manager; there's a huge
defection. The guy who I'm writing songs with at the moment, [he's] in
a young band; they have nothing to do with the record industry. They
sold out Radio City Music Hall two nights running in August, so they're
doing quite well. They've got their own record company, [which] sells
direct on the Web [and] does quite well but will never make a Billboard
chart. But they get the whole proceeds. So it's working.

InfoWorld: Why do you see .Net and Web services as another one of the
dominos being lined up as DRM points of control?

Barlow: .Net is full of stuff to guarantee that the message that's
[being] passed does not have a copyright flag set on it. All those Web
services are built to watch what's going through the service. They have
the capacity to analyze the nature of the material that's passing
through.

InfoWorld: Why not create an additional flag that's set at the
discretion of the artist?

Barlow: I think that would be great. [And] I think that the industry
would fight it to the death and they'd have the money to win.

InfoWorld: Wouldn't they have a hard time fighting a free flag?

Barlow: No, they wouldn't.

InfoWorld: But isn't that what the battle is about?

Barlow: No, the battle is [about] who makes the most contributions to
Congress. It's that simple.

InfoWorld: Then why are we talking about this, if it's that cut and
dried?

Barlow: Because we have to figure out either a way to come up with a
pool of political contributions in defense of the creative common or we
have to come up with an organized and massive system of civil
disobedience. We need to start organizing boycotts, and one of the
first things that needs to be boycotted is copy-protected CDs. I don't
think anybody should buy one.

InfoWorld: How can the EFF make a difference in this?

Barlow: We're actually at the table for these discussions on the
Digital Broadcasting [Standard]. And we're fighting copyright
extensions, which we believe have reached a point where there's no
possibility of fair use. The problem with intellectual property law is
that it tries to take something that is extremely difficult to define
and put hard definitions around it. It's not a system that we want to
try to embed in cyberspace in the early days of this development. ...
We're creating the architecture, the foundation for the social space
where everybody in humanity is going to gather. And if we jigger the
foundation design to suit the purposes of organizations that will
likely be dead in 15 years, how shortsighted is that?

Steve Gillmor is director of the InfoWorld Test Center. Contact him at
steve_gillmor@infoworld.com.

Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media
By Robert X. Cringely for PBS.

Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think...

Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.

That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.

This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.

My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021128.html

Resistance is Futile
How Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Is Likely to Change Big Media

By Robert X. Cringely

Maybe you saw the story this week about a paper from Microsoft Research analyzing peer-to-peer file sharing networks with the conclusion that they can't be stopped -- not by the law, not by the movie studios and record companies, not even by mighty Microsoft and its Palladium initiative for trusted computing. Swapping songs and maybe movies is about to reach some critical mass beyond which it simply can't be stopped, or so the kids in Redmond think. The story is interesting, that it came from Microsoft is even more interesting, though the authors carefully disassociated themselves from their employer in the paper.

But this all pales in comparison to the implications of their conclusions. These are smart folks, taking a stand that is surely not popular with their company, so I think there is a pretty strong reason to believe they are correct. If so, then what does it mean? Are record companies and movie studios doomed? Am I doomed, as a guy whose work is regularly ripped-off, too? And will the print publishers go away, leaving us with only weblogs to keep us warm? I don't think so, but the world is likely to change some as a result.

Maybe it would help to deconstruct what publishers and broadcasters and movie moguls do that makes them significant contributors to our culture. They take financial risks by backing talented people in the hope of making money. Publishers and broadcasters and film makers and record executives have taken the time and spent the money to build both a commercial infrastructure and a brand identity. The most extreme version of such financial risk-taking is spending tens of millions -- sometimes hundreds of millions -- to make a movie.

Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.

Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.

Peer-to-peer movie piracy is practical only in the manner that any organized crime is practical: it works only as long as the host remains strong enough to support the parasite. Tony Soprano can't run New Jersey because then everyone would be a crook and there would be nobody to steal from except other crooks. No more innocent victims. Same with movie piracy, which needs a strong movie industry from which to steal. If the industry is weakened too much by piracy, the pirates begin to hurt themselves by drying-up their source of material. It is very doubtful that this will happen simply because the pirates, too, want to go to movies.

But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road.

And text, well, text is even worse because it is easiest of all to steal. My columns are published in newspapers and websites and handed-in as college essays all over the world and there is almost nothing I can do about it because tracking down the perps costs me more than does their crime. From the perspective of the established publishers, there is also the horrible possibility that people might actually come to prefer material they find for free on the Internet -- not just pirated material but even original material. This column, after all, is free, and my Mother claims to find some value in it from time to time.

So movies, while they may be hurt by peer-to-peer, won't be killed by it. But print publishing and music recording could be seriously hurt. Maybe this is good, maybe it is bad, but probably, it is inevitable.

Of course, the recording and publishing executives, who often work for the same parent company, aren't going to go without a fight. We are approaching the end of the first stage of that fight, the stage where they try to have their enemy made illegal. But the folks at Microsoft Research now say quite definitively that legal action probably won't be enough. That's when we enter stage two, which begins with guerrilla tactics in which copyright owners use the very hacking techniques they rail against to hurt the peer-to-peer systems. This too shall pass when bad PR gets to the guerrillas. The trick to guerrilla or terrorist campaigns is to not care what people think, but in the end, Sony (just one example) cares what people think.

That's when the record companies and publishers will appear to actually embrace peer-to-peer and try to make it their own.

This will be a ruse, of course, the next step in the death of a corrupt and abusive cultural monopoly. They'll say they will do it for us. They'll say they are building the best peer-to-peer system of all, only this one will cost money and it won't even work that well. There is plenty of precedent for this behavior in other industries.

My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother if searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop.

Remember that Kuwait is smaller than Rhode Island, and not only is it sitting atop more than 60 billion barrels of oil, it has places where oil has been known for more than 3,000 years to seep all the way to the surface. Yet Anglo-Persian was able to fulfill its contract with Gulf and keep two oil rigs continually drilling in Kuwait for 22 years without finding oil. To drill this many dry wells required intense concentration on the part of the British drillers. They had to not only be NOT looking for oil, they had to very actively be NOT LOOKING for oil, which is even harder.

Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

But they won't die altogether because of the record company back lists of music, because peer-to-peer doesn't do a very good job of self-organizing, and indicating what is important, and because people won't take tablet computers with them to the bathroom.

So we will have little movies and little records and little magazines on the Internet because the Internet is made up of so many different interest groups. For the larger population, there will still be Brittany Spears and Stephen King singing and writing for big labels. And that will only start to change when the first really big artists jumps from old media to new, trading 15 percent of $30 times 100,000 copies for 100 percent of $0.50 times 1 million copies.

The Grateful Dead showed that it is possible to make a great living even in competition with some of their audience. This is a lesson all old media must learn in time.

Either that, or die.

In the "go stand in the corner and hit yourself until you understand what you did wrong" department, the producer of Star Wars decides to makes an ass of himself by comparing movie piracy to terrorism.

I wonder how much money he'll make from P2P networks, once he stops trying to fight them and realizes what a potential cash cow they are.
(via BoingBoing)

Access Denied II
Hollywood wants to gain remote control over HDTV. Will it succeed?
By Stephen A. Booth

The content owners - read "Hollywood studios" - insist on stringent controls and are reluctant to let their most popular films be broadcast in high-definition without them. If the practice of making digital copies at home and then "sharing" them over the Internet caught on, the studios would stand to lose a lot of money on DVD and tape sales.

On the other side, consumer-electronics manufacturers and consumer advocates contend that these kinds of controls would deny viewers the right to make fair-use copies of legally purchased content. The U.S. Supreme Court established that right with the landmark 1984 decision that prevented the studios from blocking sales of Sony's Betamax VCR. The court ruled that viewers can make video recordings of programs for personal use. Americans have become accustomed to time-shifting favorite TV programs, and we're not likely to give up that right without a fight just because we've arrived in the digital age.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/hot_topics/articledisplay.asp?ArticleID=151

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Access Denied II
Hollywood wants to gain remote control over HDTV. Will it succeed?
By Stephen A. Booth

Illustrations by Sandra Shap

You're all set to record a pay-per-view movie through the digital set-top box your cable provider installed just hours ago. But when you program it to record, your DVD recorder flashes a cryptic message indicating that the show can't be copied. Must be the usual screw-up by the cable company, you reason. No big deal: you'll just watch it live and call service in the morning. Then the program comes on, but the crisp, filmlike picture you've come to expect from high-definition TV just isn't there. It doesn't look much better than what you get on DVD. Come to think of it, the movie you recorded on DVD for the kids last week wouldn't run on the hand-me-down player in their bedroom. By now, your suspicions about the cable installation have spread to the store that delivered and set up your home theater.

Something is obviously wrong - but don't blame the hardware or the store that sold it to you. Welcome to "Access Denied II," the sequel to April's "Access Denied," which explored how the recording industry is trying to protect copyrighted music through draconian copy-prevention schemes built into CDs and CD recorders.

In this latest nightmare scenario, you can't record a movie or even see it at full resolution because the cable company is using the digital rights-management (DRM) system being demanded by the Hollywood studios. Since the digital age has made it so easy to dub a perfect copy of a movie and then endlessly clone it, copyright owners have been desperately looking for safeguards like these to protect their intellectual property. But just how much protection should be applied has become a major issue, with powerful and determined forces lined up on each side of the question.

The content owners - read "Hollywood studios" - insist on stringent controls and are reluctant to let their most popular films be broadcast in high-definition without them. If the practice of making digital copies at home and then "sharing" them over the Internet caught on, the studios would stand to lose a lot of money on DVD and tape sales.

On the other side, consumer-electronics manufacturers and consumer advocates contend that these kinds of controls would deny viewers the right to make fair-use copies of legally purchased content. The U.S. Supreme Court established that right with the landmark 1984 decision that prevented the studios from blocking sales of Sony's Betamax VCR. The court ruled that viewers can make video recordings of programs for personal use. Americans have become accustomed to time-shifting favorite TV programs, and we're not likely to give up that right without a fight just because we've arrived in the digital age.

The U.S. government also has a hand in this game, primarily because a lot of money is riding on it. The transition from analog to digital TV (DTV) is supposed to be completed by the end of 2006 so the analog frequencies can be auctioned off for other communications uses. The big bucks from that spectrum sale have already been earmarked to fund future Federal budgets.

So it's not too surprising that Congress has taken a keen interest in getting DTV up and running. The legislators reckon that more high-def programming will spur demand for digital TVs, which will in turn cause economies of scale to kick in, leading to lower prices. Congress has been pushing the studios and hardware manufacturers to reach an agreement that will satisfy Hollywood's desire for a secure way to deliver its content while preserving the viewer's right to display programs with unimpaired quality and to make copies for private use.

Waving the Broadcast Flag

If the scenario outlined at the beginning ever comes true, the losers will be the electronics industry, fair-use advocates, and - of course - the average viewer. In early June, the chairman of the House Commerce Committee, Billy Tauzin (R-LA), called upon the studios and the hardware manufacturers resolve their differences over DTV copy protection and issue a report by midsummer to guide legislators in reaching an agreement. Tauzin resorted to this approach after previous "carrot and stick" efforts failed to drive the warring parties to a voluntary agreement.

The "stick" was the proposed "Consumer Broadband and Digital TV Promotion Act of 2002" (S-2048), sponsored in March by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Fritz Hollings (D-SC). The act threatens to impose copy protection on DTV broadcasts if the two sides can't agree on a mutually acceptable system within a year of its passage. The responsibility for developing and imposing the rights-management and copy-protection standard for digital broadcasts and digital TVs, set-top boxes, and recorders would fall on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The "carrot" was the opportunity for the two camps to avoid government intervention and work out a deal on their own. Although the Hollings bill has little chance of passage this year, if ever - Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over copyright issues, has already proclaimed it dead - it prompted Hollywood and the consumer-electronics, computer, and cable-TV industries to establish a working group to settle the issue. Ceding to Hollywood's demands, the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) agreed on the implementation of a "broadcast flag" - a code-bit embedded in a digital broadcast that would instruct devices to either allow unrestricted copying (Copy Freely), permit a single copy to be made (Copy Once), or prevent copying altogether (Copy Never).

But that's about as far as it went. While the group agreed that there should be flags, there was no consensus on how the hardware would respond to them. And though the group's report reaffirmed the consumer's right to fair-use recording, it didn't specify which copy restrictions would be used for which kinds of programs.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

That these digital rights-management and copy-protection rules are still being negotiated this late in the game is a frightening prospect to the million-or-so "early adopters" who own HDTV sets. But everything at the moment indicates that the negotiations won't render their TVs obsolete. Current sets use analog inputs to receive high-def content, but the copy-protection debate applies to digital-to-digital connections between digital TVs, set-top boxes, recorders, and PCs. Existing HDTVs wouldn't even see a broadcast flag.

"Current-generation digital TV products are not looking for the broadcast flag, so there would be no reason for them to respond to this information," said Dave Arland, spokesman for RCA parent Thomson Multimedia. "Obviously, there is great temptation to use this broadcast flag discussion to jam a bunch of other things down the pike. That's why we're working to insure that the delicate balance between content ownership rights and consumer expectations is kept intact." The broadcast flag could be used to trigger a digital rights-management system called Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), which could execute copy-protection commands. "The broadcast flag has no impact on existing digital products, and in the future, if implemented, products with a digital IEEE 1394 [FireWire or i.Link] connector and DTCP will have no trouble [displaying the DTV signal]," said BPDG co-chair Robert Perry, whose company, Mitsubishi, has been pushing FireWire connections for digital TVs. "What the flag will affect is products with Internet-type connections, such as Ethernet. They won't be able to move that content."

Michael Ayers, president of the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator, which represents the developers of the DTCP rights-management scheme, agrees that the broadcast flag won't affect existing digital products. But he conceded that it could prevent any of the 30-million current DVD players from playing recordings made on future "compliant" DVD decks.

Given his company's stake in the DVD recorder market, it's not surprising that within days of the BPDG's report, Philips CEO Lawrence Blanford issued a tirade condemning its implications. The copy-protection technologies discussed in the report could allow content providers to "remotely disable large quantities of devices that are recording movies or other programs in consumers' homes," including new DVD recorders, he said. "Millions of consumers would have to replace their DVD players to watch digital TV programs that they have digitally recorded" - presumably because the players wouldn't have the circuitry to decode the encryption or authentication information on recorded discs. Perry of Mitsubishi was also concerned about backward compatibility of recordings made on future DVD recorders. But he took issue with Blanford's assertion that the installed base of players would have to be replaced, pointing out that today's DVD players would still be able to play prerecorded DVDs and recordings made on currently available machines.

The Conditional Future

Although the studios have pledged to respect the fair-use recording rights of viewers to time-shift programs, hardware manufacturers are wary of what kinds of copy restrictions the studios might place on such recordings. The two copy-protected digital connection standards currently being implemented in HDTVs, digital set-top boxes, and digital recorders certainly give Hollywood the means to restrict those rights. Here's a quick run-down of what they are and what they would do.

l DTCP The 5-Company (5C) Group of Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, and Toshiba developed this system, which has been provisionally endorsed by the major Hollywood studios. Primarily, the DTCP system interprets the Copy Never flag to prevent recordings on removable media, such as tapes or discs, of some pay-per-view or video-on-demand programming. But you would still be able to make recordings on hard-disk digital video recorders such as ReplayTV or TiVo systems, within certain limits, such as how long you can pause a program before returning to watching it.

l HDMI The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), which uses a single connection to transport high-def video and multichannel digital audio among devices, also satisfies Hollywood's copy-protection demands. HDMI is being developed by Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson, and Toshiba.

The new connector builds on the existing Digital Visual Interface (DVI) standard, which has already appeared in a number of HDTVs and high-def satellite receivers. DVI shuttles uncompressed digital signals among devices, and it can also include the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) system developed by JVC, which is called D-Theater in JVC's digital VHS recorders and on prerecorded D-VHS tapes. Because the signal is uncompressed with HDMI as well, there is no processing or degradation. This ensures that the content is sent from the source to the display with the highest possible resolution.

Quality aside, the size of the uncompressed HDMI digital signal would make it difficult to record and transmit it over the Internet - Hollywood likes that. It takes 24 hours to upload 30 minutes of uncompressed HDTV programming, even with a broadband connection, according to Thomson's Arland. But since compression methods and telecommunications technology are constantly evolving, the studios also want copy protection for uncompressed signals. JVC's HDCP provides that by encrypting the uncompressed content.

What Lies Ahead

The negotiations over the broadcast flag and other digital rights-management issues only concern over-the-air HDTV broadcasting. What the satellite and cable-TV companies decide to do is subject to different policy procedures - and debate.

The DirecTV and Dish Network satellite services already have pacts with the studios to protect their programming. Their digital signals are encrypted, and both services have long been able to use Macrovision copy protection to keep people from making VCR and DVD recordings using a satellite receiver's analog output.

The cable industry, feeling competitive pressure from the satellite services, wants to offer the studios similar protection for its premium programming. But cable wants to use "selectable output controls" that would give the cable operator the option of remotely manipulating the set-top box to block content to various devices or to pass only lower-quality signals, reducing high-definition picture resolution to DVD quality levels. This specter of Big Brother has raised the ire of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and other industry groups (for more on this, see "HDTV's Cable Conundrum" below). Both the CEA and the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) assert that selectable output controls on cable boxes could deny HDTV programming to some subscribers as well as limit the capability of devices like digital video recorders. At press time, the CEA and HRRC were preparing counterfilings with the FCC and other campaigns to block cable's actions.

Will HDTV be allowed to spread out to the masses, or will it be caught up in a tangle of copy-protection and digital rights-management issues? Both current HDTV owners and prospective buyers want to know the answer. Also, will viewers be allowed to freely record and time-shift programs in the new digital era? Everyone will be watching the deliberations for positive signs, but with the deadline to cease analog TV broadcasting just a few years away, let's hope they wrap things up soon.

Copy Protection Robs The Future
By Dan Bricklin.

I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their "owners" (if they are still in business). We know from history that what's popular at any given time is no certain indication of what will be valuable in the future. Without not-copy protected "originals", archivists, collectors, and preservers will be unable to maintain them the way they would if they weren't protected. (Many of these preservers ignore fashion as they do their job, because they see their role as preservers not filters.) We won't even be able to read media in obsolete formats, because the specifications of those formats will not be available. To create a "Rosetta Stone" of today's new formats will be asking to go to jail and having your work banned.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

Dan Bricklin's Web Site: www.bricklin.com
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Copy Protection Robs The Future
Copy protection will break the chain of formal and informal archivists who are necessary to the long-term preservation of creative works.
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Introduction
The other day I wanted to listen to a song I remember from my youth. I took the old vinyl record out of its sleeve and put it on my aging turntable. I gently dropped the needle onto the appropriate track, and out came the music, but it was way too fast. It seems my turntable broke, and now plays everything at exactly 45 rpm instead of 33. Bummer! It was a slow song and I wanted it slow. Luckily, I found I had another copy of the same song that the record company that owned the rights to the song had released (the CD was "Greatest Folksingers of the 'Sixties"). Much nicer. Unfortunately, they had only included that one song -- I couldn't play any of the others I wanted from the original album. I'll have to try to fix my turntable.

This got me to thinking about preserving old works of composers, musicians, authors, and other creative individuals. How does that preserving come about and will today's works produced on digital media last into the future?

How are works preserved through the generations?
As human beings, we benefit greatly from the works of others. Artists, thinkers, scholars, and performers create works that we all enjoy, learn from, and are inspired by. Many works are timeless. Either standing alone or in the context of their time or other times, they are valuable periodically years after they are created. We often hear of authors, artists, or composers who only become popular or have their greatest impact after their death, sometimes many years later.

How are these works passed down through the generations? It usually isn't the direct result of the efforts of the original creator. Other people make it their job to preserve the works and pass them on. These jobs are either formal, like librarians and curators, or informal, like enthusiasts and hobbyists. There are additional other people who find interesting works and bring them to the attention of new generations. These may be scholars doing research, or a collector who develops a strong passion.

How are the actual works preserved? Sometimes just storing the work is sufficient, but in most cases a change in environment is needed. The artist's original location may be sold for another use. The work may be created in a material that is affected by air and water, and must be kept in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room. To preserve unique items, we often need to go to extremes, even to preserve them for just a few hundred years. According to a professional preserver, the Archivist of the United States, the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence are stored in an encasement "...made of pure titanium, high-strength glass, and specially treated aluminum to encapsulate these aging, fragile documents in argon, an inert gas, for their long-term preservation..."

For some works, it's enough to just preserve the words themselves. For these and others, copies are what we preserve, such as recordings of performances, or microfilm copies of newspapers. We produce the copies in more stable media, or ones that are easier from which to reproduce. (In a way, this is a form of "changing the environment".) The practice of constantly producing new copies before the old copies wear out has worked well. To increase the likelihood of long-term survival for a work, such as a religious text, producing many copies and keeping them in diverse places has also worked very well.

With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable.

The most famous example of that type of translation information was an inscribed slab of rock from 196 BC found in 1799. It contained a decree written in Greek that was also written in two forms of Egyptian. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It let scholars finally read ancient works in hieroglyphics that they had physical possession of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded). Cuneiform, a form of writing used by many ancient civilizations, was similarly opaque to scholars until they found a text in multiple languages carved into a cliff -- the Behistun inscription.

Cuneiform writing that I photographed in 1966 at a NYC museum
A well known example of preserving a work for many years is the Dead Sea Scrolls. These 2000-year old scrolls contain copies of Biblical and other writings. Thanks to the unusual environmental conditions of where they were stored (Qumran), they survived relatively intact. They were mainly written in the same Hebrew letters used today. I was fortunate to visit some of these at an exhibit in the United States in the mid-1960's. I took pictures of some of those that I saw at the request of one of my teachers for his research. I found those old negatives a few days ago, and, though you can't read such tiny negatives with your naked eye, my made-in-2001 film scanner can read them 35 years later. Looking at those images, I can read them now (I know modern Hebrew) and found that I photographed what looks like a variant of Psalm 136:

Dead Sea Scroll, still readable 35 and 2000 years later. It starts: "...Key Tove, Key L'Olam Chasdoh -- ...for He is good, for His mercy endures forever."
This is an example of many types of preserving: Repeated copying of the Psalms for hundreds of years from their original authoring until the days of the people at Qumran, good preservation of their copy for 2000 years, independent preservation of the language, sharing of the work by the current preservers with the help of institutions like museums, having a copy made yet again for an enthusiast (by me for my teacher), preserving those copies (me and my parents who saved them at home for many years with my other negatives), today's film scanners being able to read the old film which was created before the idea of digital scanning, and finally, me being able to read it and then share yet another copy with you through the Internet. If you show it to someone who knows Hebrew, they should be able to read most of it. Quite a long, unbroken path. Let's hope we can continue to preserve things so well through so many steps.

Enter copy protection
There are things happening that make me worry that the future may not be bright for preserving many of the works we create today. For example: Companies are preparing to produce music CDs that cannot be copied into many other formats (something allowed by law as "fair use"). Most new eBooks are copy protected. A new bill may be heading to Congress that will require all digital devices to enforce copy protection schemes for copyrightable material. An existing law makes it a crime to tell people how to make copies of protected works.

I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their "owners" (if they are still in business). We know from history that what's popular at any given time is no certain indication of what will be valuable in the future. Without not-copy protected "originals", archivists, collectors, and preservers will be unable to maintain them the way they would if they weren't protected. (Many of these preservers ignore fashion as they do their job, because they see their role as preservers not filters.) We won't even be able to read media in obsolete formats, because the specifications of those formats will not be available. To create a "Rosetta Stone" of today's new formats will be asking to go to jail and having your work banned.

This is different than encryption or patent protection. With encryption, as long as the keys for reading survive, and a description of the method of decryption, you can recreate the unprotected original. It's even better -- you can prove authenticity. Patent protection just keeps you from creating and using your own unlicensed reader for a limited period of time. After that, the legal duty of the patent is to teach you how it works so you can make your own. For long-term preservation of works (as opposed to short-term quick advancement in some fields) patented techniques are good because they discourage secrets and eventually put things in the public domain.

Let me give you another personal example, this time about copy protection.

One of the most popular parts of this web site is a copy of the original IBM PC version of VisiCalc. Actually, that's not exactly true. It's not the same exact program you could buy. The original VisiCalc was only shipped on 5 1/4" copy protected diskettes. Part of the program checked that the diskette it was loaded from had the special copy protection modifications. Despite the fact that I have an old computer with a 5 1/4" diskette drive, I still couldn't make a copy that would run that I could distribute. I received permission from the current copyright holder to distribute the copies, but VisiCalc hadn't been produced for years and they lost track of any original masters they had owned. (Companies usually don't have reason to maintain and catalog old, non-profitable material for too long, especially through mergers and acquisitions.) Luckily for me, an employee of Software Arts, my company that created the original program, kept a "test" copy we had used internally that was created without the copy protection code. He was not one of the original authors, but is an informal "collector" of things. He ended up at Lotus, the next owners of the rights. He left Lotus years later, and gave me a copy he had moved ahead from system to system after that (he produced the copy for me on a Windows NT machine). Thanks to Lotus' permission (which I wouldn't need in the far future when the copyright expires), I was able to post a copy on the Web, and now many tens of thousands of people have their own copies. Thanks to those not-copy protected copies, and the documentation available about the original IBM PC, it is much more likely now that future generations will be able to learn about early PC programs by running VisiCalc. If only the original diskettes could be passed down, then after they deteriorated they would not be useable, and until then, only people with special obsolete equipment could run them.

The IBM PC VisiCalc diskette with "Copy Protected" warning
Conclusion
Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so.

If you are an artist or author who cares more than about the near-term value of your work, you should be worried and be careful about releasing your work only in copy protected form. Like the days when "art" was only accessible to the rich, two classes will probably develop: Copy protected and not copy protected, the "high art" and "folk art" of tomorrow.

Artists and authors need to create their works and still make a living. Copy protection is arising as a "simple fix" to preserve business models based upon the physical properties of old media and distribution. Our new media and distribution techniques need new business models (perhaps with different intermediate players) that don't shortchange the future. Trying to keep those old business models in place is as inappropriate as continuing to produce only 33 rpm vinyl records.

Help us Apple. Your our only hope.

Dan Gillmor: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel

Meanwhile, Apple is holding fairly fast to the real compromise position. It's encouraging honor, but not locking us down in ways that prevent innovative uses of the gear it sells.

Maybe Apple will cave, too. If it does, it will betray customers and principle. So far, however, so good.

I really hope Dan's right about Apple.

I just made the decision a few weeks ago to buy a Mac instead of a PC for my video editing system because I did not want to commit to the Windows DRM in XP that would then own all of my video files from now until eternity.

For me, choosing a Mac was like choosing freedom. (Don't think I don't know how silly that sounds.)

This was sure the first time I've ever felt that way about buying a PC or a Mac before. And it's a pretty crummy feeling actually, realizing that we live in a world where we have to make privacy and security decisions like that while in the process of buying a video editing system.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4193833.htm

Posted on Tue, Oct. 01, 2002 story:PUB_DESC
Dan Gillmor: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

Intel's doing it. Advanced Micro Devices is doing it. Microsoft is doing it.

Apple Computer isn't.

What's Apple not doing? It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel.

Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn't asserted the right to remote control over users' operating systems.

The era of Digital Rights Management, commonly called DRM, is swiftly moving closer, thanks to the Intels and AMDs and Microsofts. They're busy selling and creating the tools that give copyright holders the ability to tell users of copyrighted material -- customers, scholars, libraries, etc. -- precisely how they may use it. DRM, in the most typical use of the expression, is about owners' rights. It would be more accurate to call DRM, in that context, ``Digital Restrictions Management.''

But Apple has taken a different tack in its rhetoric and its technology. As I said in an introduction to a panel I moderated Tuesday at a conference in Santa Clara, Mac OS X, Apple's modern operating system, is becoming, whether by design or by accident, a Digital Rights Management operating system where the rights in question are the user's rights -- and they are expansive.

Now, the music and movie industries have been attacking Silicon Valley and the technology companies for some time. But they've reserved particular venom for Apple among the major computing-platform organizations, and have been witheringly contemptuous of Apple's ``Rip, Mix, Burn'' advertising that describes the process of converting music CDs to MP3 files, which can be loaded on CD-ROM disks and, of course, Apple's own iPod MP3 player.

The company's ``Digital Hub'' concept has been one of its major selling points. The Mac is becoming the hub of a digital lifestyle, in which you move data between a Mac and various devices around the home, such as digital cameras, MP3 players and the like.

Apple does admonish users not to infringe the copyrights of others, as it should. And the company built a small speed bump into the iPod, which basically lets users share MP3s between one computer and the handheld player. But it took little time for a third-party programmer to come up with software that let users move MP3s to other machines, too, and as far as I can tell Apple hasn't said a word.

I recently discovered that Apple's DVD Player software, which came with my Powerbook G4 laptop, gives me flexibility in a way I hadn't expected. Sometimes I like to watch a movie while I'm on a plane, but the DVD drive in my machine drains my battery too quickly. So before I leave home, I copy a movie -- note to Hollywood: I do not do this with rental DVDs, only ones I own -- to my hard disk. The DVD Player software reads it from the disk, which uses less power than the DVD drive.

I wonder, now that I've published this, whether an upcoming version of the DVD Player will remove this user-friendly feature. Which leads me into some other questions:

Can Apple's distinctly pro-customer approach continue in the face of Hollywood's ire and the entertainment industry's clout in Congress?

Will the manufacturers of the chips that Apple uses for the central brains of its computers build in what Intel and AMD are now promising? They've embraced an idea known as ``trusted computing,'' which sounds better than it may turn out to be. Trusted computing could give us more faith that an e-mail we send to someone else will get there intact and in privacy, but it's also the perfect tool for the copyright cartel, not to mention future governments that care even less for liberty than the current one, to lock down PCs from officially unauthorized uses.

An Intel senior executive vehemently disputes my characterization of his company as a toolmaker for the control freaks. He wants me to see trusted computing as an innovation.

Sure, it's an innovation -- and could have some positive uses. But it inevitably will be used against us by the people who crave control.

Meanwhile, Apple is holding fairly fast to the real compromise position. It's encouraging honor, but not locking us down in ways that prevent innovative uses of the gear it sells.

Maybe Apple will cave, too. If it does, it will betray customers and principle. So far, however, so good.
Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (www.dangillmor.com). E-mail dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
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Universal Music Faces Lawsuit Over PIN on Bon Jovi Album
By Lingling Wei for the Wall St. Journal

At issue is a promotional program, called "American XS," that was announced on Sept. 16 by Universal Music in connection with the Bounce release -- scheduled for Oct. 8 in the U.S. The plan is based around a unique PIN code, or serial number, that will come with every album shipped.

The buyer of the CD can type in the number at the band's Web site (www.bonjovi.com). Then, after providing personal information including age, gender and location, the owner will be registered as a member who will be regularly notified by e-mail of "Bon Jovi exclusives," which may include the opportunity to chat with the band.

While Universal Music didn't mention DownloadCard in its announcement of the "American XS" plan, DownloadCard contends the plan is "precisely the program created by DownloadCard ... and offered to" Universal Music for the Bounce release. Universal Music, though, said in July it wouldn't use the technology for the album release, according to DownloadCard's court filing.

Here is the text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1032999816716012593,00.html

Universal Music Faces Lawsuit
Over PIN on Bon Jovi Album
By LINGLING WEI
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

NEW YORK -- Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group is being sued by a New York technology company for allegedly infringing upon its antipiracy technology, setting up a potential roadblock for the release of the new album "Bounce" by the band Bon Jovi.

DownloadCard Inc., a provider of antipiracy services, on Wednesday asked a federal court judge in New York to enjoin the world's largest music publisher from engaging in any promotion or marketing efforts that use what DownloadCard says is its proprietary technology.

At issue is a promotional program, called "American XS," that was announced on Sept. 16 by Universal Music in connection with the Bounce release -- scheduled for Oct. 8 in the U.S. The plan is based around a unique PIN code, or serial number, that will come with every album shipped.

The buyer of the CD can type in the number at the band's Web site (www.bonjovi.com). Then, after providing personal information including age, gender and location, the owner will be registered as a member who will be regularly notified by e-mail of "Bon Jovi exclusives," which may include the opportunity to chat with the band.

While Universal Music didn't mention DownloadCard in its announcement of the "American XS" plan, DownloadCard contends the plan is "precisely the program created by DownloadCard ... and offered to" Universal Music for the Bounce release. Universal Music, though, said in July it wouldn't use the technology for the album release, according to DownloadCard's court filing.

"The case is based on misappropriation of trade secret and theft of idea" said Stephen Kramarsky, an attorney at Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky LLP who represents DownloadCard. Mr. Kramarsky said the company has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in this anti-piracy technology.

The case will be heard next Thursday in front of Judge Charles Haight Jr. in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York.
"If he determines that the CD release uses the DownloadCard technology, which we think he will, he'll issue a preliminary injunction on the release," Mr. Kramarsky said.

A spokeswoman at Universal Music declined to comment.

In addition, DownloadCard is also seeking compensatory damages from Universal Music. The amount will be determined at trial and could be more than $750,000, according to the suit.

Write to Lingling Wei at lingling.wei@dowjones.com
Updated September 25, 2002 10:15 p.m. EDT

Universal Music Faces Lawsuit

David Coursey, AnchorDesk's Senior Editor, explains why:
The fatal flaw inside MS's new Media Center PCs.

This really gets to the heart of the matter: since when did making copies of music to play on your other devices become piracy?

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2879600,00.html

DavidCoursey
David Coursey The fatal flaw inside MS's new Media Center PCs
David Coursey,
Executive Editor, AnchorDesk
Monday, September 9, 2002 Talk back!

If Microsoft's handling of digital-rights management in its new Media Center PCs is any indication, Redmond is perfectly happy to sell out its customers to keep the entertainment industry happy.

What I'm talking about are features built into Windows XP Media Center Edition that let some next-generation PCs act like TiVo-esque personal video recorders (PVRs). The first Media Center machines, due before Christmas from HP, also come with a DVD burner. That combination means you can copy TV programs you've recorded using the PVR features from your hard drive to DVD.

THAT'S WHERE the catch comes in: The DVDs you burn can only be played on the same machine on which they were recorded.

I'll pause now to let you reread that last sentence because you couldn't believe your eyes the first time through.

Click Here!
Microsoft says it's designed the Media Center this way to block the "wholesale" copying of copyrighted material. But--stop me if I'm wrong--I always thought "wholesale" referred to one person making a million copies of something and selling them, rather than a million people copying a single program for their own private use.

LET'S SAY I record The West Wing on my Media Center PC, but don't have time to watch it at home. Wouldn't it be great to burn the program and maybe a few others onto a DVD to watch on my laptop while I'm on an airplane? Or take it over to a friend's house, so we all can watch?

My TiVo lets me dub programs to videotape so I can carry them around. Why shouldn't my PC's DVD burner give me the same flexibility?

Microsoft says that making DVDs viewable only on the machines that burned them will help Hollywood see the PC not as a threat, but as an ally. But in so doing, the software giant could really be encouraging customers to see Media Center PCs as, well, useless.

Why is MS willing to make this trade-off?

I THINK the real goal here is to convince Hollywood that Microsoft itself--forget PCs!--isn't a threat, which will in turn make it easier for Bill Gates to cut preferential deals with the entertainment moguls. If solving Hollywood's piracy problems is what it takes for Bill to ink those deals, who cares what consumers want?

Or maybe Microsoft is trying to do to the entertainment business what many people believe the company did to the desktop software industry--helping potential competitors sail to their own doom. It's possible that Microsoft is acceding to Hollywood's wishes in order to let Tinseltown anger customers and make a fool of itself. Then Microsoft can say, "We tried doing it their way and look what happened!"--and then proceed into the digital-entertainment business as it pleases.

Whatever Microsoft's motives really are, I think that eventually consumers will inflict their wrath upon both MS and Hollywood. The entertainment industry needs to find new revenue models that reflect the realities of digital media and consumer preference. By kissing up to the Hollywood powers, Microsoft is only delaying the inevitable and siding with the bad guys against its own customers.

THE CHALLENGE IS for Microsoft to solve the rights-management problem in a way that consumers will accept (hint: lots of "fair" use), yet prevents thieves from getting rich off someone else's intellectual property. For example, Microsoft could have designed the system so that DVDs burned on Media Center machines could play on any DVD player, but be impossible to copy.

(Or maybe it won't really be impossible to copy Media Center DVDs: When I asked an HP rep about the DVD "problem" I was told--with a wink--that his company didn't think consumers would worry too much about the copy protection. Which I interpret as: "Easily downloadable hacks available everywhere soon!")

But if the Media Center PC's copy-protection scheme is an example of Microsoft's best thinking in this area, Redmond is off to a really lousy start.

What do you think? Was it wrong for Microsoft to build copy protection into the Media Center PC? How else could MS have prevented unwarranted copying while preserving fair use? TalkBack to me, and take my QuickPoll below!

Was it wrong for Microsoft to build copy protection into the Media Center PC?
Yes
No

Next Story

Digital copying rules may change
by Noel C. Paul for the Christian Science Monitor.

In a few years, Americans may not be able to copy a song off a CD, watch a recorded DVD at a friend's house, or store a copy of a television show for more than a day...

...Currently individuals can legally record TV shows, make digital audio files of CDs, and lend books to friends. Such activity is protected under a federal "fair use" statute, which takes into consideration most consumers' need for flexibility.

New regulations being discussed significantly erase fair-use rights in the name of piracy prevention. Ultimately, the entertainment industry hopes to charge consumers for what they now do free of charge.

"The only way they can charge you, they realized, is to first take away your legal right, and then sell that right back to you," says Joe Kraus, president of DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0819/p14s01-wmcn.html

from the August 19, 2002 edition

Digital copying rules may change
By Noel C. Paul
In a few years, Americans may not be able to copy a song off a CD, watch a recorded DVD at a friend's house, or store a copy of a television show for more than a day.

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission approved regulations that would require television manufacturers to include anticopying technology in the next generation of televisions. The technology would identify programs that broadcasters do not want consumers to copy without first paying a fee.
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And in Congress, lawmakers are considering a bill that would require all digital devices, and the software that runs them, to include a copyright protection system. The system would make it impossible for consumers to make unauthorized copies of music, movies, and television programs.

Such protections, proponents say, would give Hollywood an incentive to offer more entertainment in digital format, thereby spurring consumers' adoption of such technologies as high-definition TV and broadband services.

"The entertainment industry historically has been very, very slow to embrace technology because of concerns about piracy," says Mark Kersey, a broadband analyst with ARS, a market research firm in La Jolla, Calif.

Millions of consumers, for example, already watch pay-per-view movies and undoubtedly would pay for the ability to download digital movies onto their set-top boxes. But consumer advocates argue that the flood of digital entertainment for the home would come at a high cost, both in terms of money and consumer flexibility.

Currently individuals can legally record TV shows, make digital audio files of CDs, and lend books to friends. Such activity is protected under a federal "fair use" statute, which takes into consideration most consumers' need for flexibility.

New regulations being discussed significantly erase fair-use rights in the name of piracy prevention. Ultimately, the entertainment industry hopes to charge consumers for what they now do free of charge.

"The only way they can charge you, they realized, is to first take away your legal right, and then sell that right back to you," says Joe Kraus, president of DigitalConsumer.org, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

If certain antipiracy measures pass in Washington, Mr. Kraus says consumers may have to pay extra to play a CD in more than one player; be no longer able to transfer music from a CD to an MP3 player; and be unable to watch a program recorded onto a DVD on a separate machine.

Allowing consumers access to media, but restricting them from adapting it is similar to teaching people to read but not allowing them to write, says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University. "To say we must make a device that does not do one of those functions is saying that the device is no longer a computer any more," says Mr. Shirky.

The entertainment industry's greatest concern is that the proliferation of digital technology and high-speed Internet access may let consumers download a movie, for example, and send it to thousands of users before it even exits the theaters.

According to Viant, a Boston-based market-research firm, 400,000 to 600,000 films are illegally downloaded from the Internet each day. "[These films] are innocents in a jungle, ready to be ambushed by anyone," says Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, a trade association in Washington.

Mr. Valenti believes consumers should still be able to record copies of films from television onto VHS and DVD formats. He is primarily concerned with consumers making additional copies of films, even if just for a neighbor.

"It is not legal to make a copy of a DVD now. Everything people are doing legally today, they'll be able to do legally tomorrow," says Valenti.

Looks like you can't just uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box after all (see the gif on my "more" page -- i'm still dinking around with images in Movable Type)

I just happened to have to reinstall Windows Media Player 7.1 over the weekend (due to my Real One player expiring on me for no apparent reason...More on that experience later in perhaps far too much detail...)

So I took a gander at the EULA while I was installing WMP 7.1 and took a screen grab of the window that wouldn't let me uncheck the Windows Media Rights Management box (and also states very clearly in writing that Rights Management is a requirement, not an option).

Also, this paragraph of the EULA seems pretty darned relevant. How the heck did "security" get grouped in with "digital rights management" and my having to agree to allow Microsoft to install DRM updates on my computer that might "disable my ability to...use other software on my computer"??:

* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

Full text of Supplemental Eula:

SUPPLEMENTAL END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE ("Supplemental EULA")

IMPORTANT: READ CAREFULLY - These Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft") operating system components, including any "online" or electronic documentation ("OS Components") are subject to the terms and conditions of the agreement under which you have licensed the applicable Microsoft operating system product described below (each an "End User License Agreement" or "EULA") and the terms and conditions of this Supplemental EULA. BY INSTALLING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE USING THE OS COMPONENTS, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE APPLICABLE OPERATING SYSTEM PRODUCT EULA AND THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY OR USE THE OS COMPONENTS.

NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALIDLY LICENSED COPY OF ANY VERSION OR EDITION OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 98, MICROSOFT WINDOWS MILLENUM EDITION, MICROSOFT WINDOWS 2000 OPERATING SYSTEM OR ANY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THOSE OPERATING SYSTEMS (EACH AN "OS PRODUCT"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.

Capitalized terms used in this Supplemental EULA and not otherwise defined herein shall have the meanings assigned to them in the applicable OS Product EULA.

General. The OS Components are provided to you by Microsoft to update, supplement, or replace existing functionality of the applicable OS Product. Microsoft grants you a license to use the OS Components under the terms and conditions of the EULA for the applicable OS Product (which are hereby incorporated by reference, except as set forth below) and the terms and conditions set forth in this Supplemental EULA, provided that you comply with all such terms and conditions. To the extent that any terms in this Supplemental EULA conflict with terms in the applicable OS Product EULA, the terms of this Supplemental EULA control solely with respect to the OS Components.

Additional Rights and Limitations.

* Reproduction. If you have multiple validly licensed copies of the applicable OS Product, you may reproduce, install and use one copy of the OS Components as part of such OS Product on all of your computers running validly licensed copies of the applicable OS Product provided that you use such additional copies of the OS Components in accordance with the terms and conditions above. For each validly licensed copy of the applicable OS Product, you also may reproduce one additional copy of the OS Components solely for archival purposes or reinstallation of the OS Components on the same computer as the OS Components were previously installed. Microsoft retains all right, title and interest in and to the OS Components. All rights not expressly granted are reserved by Microsoft.

* Digital Rights Management (Security). You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management ("Secure Content"), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a web site explaining the update.

IF THE APPLICABLE OS PRODUCT WAS LICENSED TO YOU BY MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARIES, THE LIMITED WARRANTY (IF ANY) INCLUDED IN THE OS PRODUCT EULA APPLIES TO THE OS COMPONENTS PROVIDED THE OS COMPONENTS HAVE BEEN LICENSED BY YOU WITHIN THE TERM OF THE LIMITED WARRANTY IN THE OS PRODUCT EULA. HOWEVER, THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA DOES NOT EXTEND THE TIME PERIOD FOR WHICH THE LIMITED WARRANTY IS PROVIDED.

IF THE APPLICABLE OS PRODUCT WAS LICENSED TO YOU BY AN ENTITY OTHER THAN MICROSOFT OR ANY OF ITS WHOLLY OWNED SUBSIDIARIES, MICROSOFT DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE OS COMPONENTS AS FOLLOWS:

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS PROVIDE TO YOU THE OS COMPONENTS, AND ANY (IF ANY) SUPPORT SERVICES RELATED TO THE OS COMPONENTS ("SUPPORT SERVICES") AS IS AND WITH ALL FAULTS; AND MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS HEREBY DISCLAIM WITH RESPECT TO THE OS COMPONENTS AND SUPPORT SERVICES ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY (IF ANY) WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF OR RELATED TO: MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, LACK OF VIRUSES, ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF RESPONSES, RESULTS, WORKMANLIKE EFFORT AND LACK OF NEGLIGENCE. ALSO THERE IS NO WARRANTY, DUTY OR CONDITION OF TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, QUIET POSSESSION, CORRESPONDENCE TO DESCRIPTION OR NONINFRINGEMENT. THE ENTIRE RISK ARISING OUT OF USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE OS COMPONENTS AND ANY SUPPORT SERVICES REMAINS WITH YOU.

EXCLUSION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL AND CERTAIN OTHER DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR: LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF CONFIDENTIAL OR OTHER INFORMATION, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, PERSONAL INJURY, LOSS OF PRIVACY, FAILURE TO MEET ANY DUTY (INCLUDING OF GOOD FAITH OR OF REASONABLE CARE), NEGLIGENCE, AND ANY OTHER PECUNIARY OR OTHER LOSS WHATSOEVER) ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE OS COMPONENTS OR THE SUPPORT SERVICES, OR THE PROVISION OF OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES, OR OTHERWISE UNDER OR IN CONNECTION WITH ANY PROVISION OF THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA, EVEN IF MICROSOFT OR ANY SUPPLIER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY AND REMEDIES. NOTWITHSTANDING ANY DAMAGES THAT YOU MIGHT INCUR FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ALL DAMAGES REFERENCED ABOVE AND ALL DIRECT OR GENERAL DAMAGES), THE ENTIRE LIABILITY OF MICROSOFT AND ANY OF ITS SUPPLIERS UNDER ANY PROVISION OF THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA AND YOUR EXCLUSIVE REMEDY FOR ALL OF THE FOREGOING SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNT ACTUALLY PAID BY YOU FOR THE OS COMPONENTS OR U.S.$5.00. THE FOREGOING LIMITATIONS, EXCLUSIONS AND DISCLAIMERS SHALL APPLY TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, EVEN IF ANY REMEDY FAILS ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

Si vous avez acquis votre produit Microsoft au CANADA, le texte suivant vous concerne :

SI LE PRODUIT OS APPLICABLE VOUS A ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉ SOUS LICENCE PAR MICROSOFT OU PAR L'UNE QUELCONQUE DE SES FILIALES À 100%, LA GARANTIE LIMITÉE (SI ELLE EXISTE) APPLICABLE EN VERTU DU CONTRAT DE LICENCE UTILISATEUR FINAL (" CLUF ") RELATIF À CE PRODUIT OS S'APPLIQUE AUX COMPOSANTS SYSTÈME D'EXPLOITATION DE MICROSOFT Y COMPRIS TOUTE DOCUMENTATION " EN LIGNE " OU SOUS FORME ÉLECTRONIQUE (LES " COMPOSANTS OS "), À CONDITION QUE CEUX-CI VOUS AIENT ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉS SOUS LICENCE PENDANT LA DURÉE DE LA GARANTIE LIMITÉE DU CLUF RELATIF AU PRODUIT OS APPLICABLE. LE PRÉSENT CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE N'A PAS POUR EFFET DE PROROGER LA DURÉE DE CETTE GARANTIE LIMITÉE.

SI LE PRODUIT OS VOUS A ÉTÉ CONCÉDÉ SOUS LICENCE PAR UNE ENTITÉ AUTRE QUE MICROSOFT OU QUE L'UNE QUELCONQUE DE SES FILIALES À 100%, MICROSOFT EXCLUT TOUTE GARANTIE RELATIVE AUX COMPOSANTS OS COMME CELA EST STIPULÉ CI-APRÈS :

EXCLUSION DE GARANTIE. DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE, MICROSOFT ET SES FOURNISSEURS VOUS FOURNISSENT LES COMPOSANTS OS, AINSI QUE, LE CAS ÉCHÉANT, TOUT SERVICE D'ASSISTANCE RELATIF À CES COMPOSANTS OS (LES "SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE"), " COMME TELS ET AVEC TOUS LEURS DEFAUTS ". EN OUTRE, MICROSOFT ET SES FOURNISSEURS EXCLUENT PAR LES PRÉSENTES TOUTE AUTRE GARANTIE LÉGALE, EXPRESSE OU IMPLICITE, RELATIVE AUX COMPOSANTS OS ET AUX SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, NOTAMMENT (LE CAS ÉCHÉANT), TOUTE GARANTIE: DE QUALITÉ, D'ADAPTATION À UN USAGE PARTICULIER, D'ABSENCE DE VIRUS, DE PRÉCISION, D'EXHAUSTIVITÉ DES RÉPONSES, DES RÉSULTATS OBTENUS, DE FABRICATION Y D'ABSENCE DE NÉGLIGENCE. EN OUTRE, IL N'Y A PAS DE GARANTIE DE PROPRIÉTÉ, DE JOUISSANCE PAISIBLE, D'ABSENCE DE TROUBLE DE POSSESSION, DE CONFORMITÉ À LA DESCRIPTION OU D'ABSENCE DE CONTREFAÇON. VOUS ASSUMEZ L'ENSEMBLE DES RISQUES DÉCOULANT DE L'UTILISATION OU DU FONCTIONNEMENT DES COMPOSANTS OS ET DES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE.

EXCLUSION DE RESPONSABILITÉ POUR LES DOMMAGES ACCESSOIRES, INDIRECTS ET CERTAINS AUTRES TYPES DE DOMMAGES. DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE, MICROSOFT OU SES FOURNISSEURS NE POURRONT EN AUCUN CAS ÊTRE TENUS RESPONSABLES DE TOUT DOMMAGE SPÉCIAL, ACCESSOIRE, INCIDENT OU INDIRECT DE QUELQUE NATURE QUE CE SOIT (Y COMPRIS, MAIS NON DE FACON LIMITATIVE, LES PERTES DE BÉNÉFICES, PERTES D'INFORMATIONS CONFIDENTIELLES OU AUTRES INFORMATIONS, INTERRUPTIONS D'ACTIVITÉ, PRÉJUDICES CORPORELS, ATTEINTES À LA VIE PRIVÉE, MANQUEMENT À TOUTE OBLIGATION (NOTAMMENT L'OBLIGATION DE BONNE FOI ET DE DILIGENCE), NÉGLIGENCE, ET POUR TOUTE PERTE PÉCUNIAIRE OU AUTRE DE QUELQUE NATURE QUE CE SOIT), RÉSULTANT DE, OU RELATIFS A, L'UTILISATION OU L'IMPOSSIBILITÉ D'UTILISER LES COMPOSANTS OS OU LES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, OU LA FOURNITURE OU LE DÉFAUT DE FOURNITURE DES SERVICES D'ASSISTANCE, OU AUTREMENT EN VERTU DE, OU RELATIVEMENT A, TOUTE DISPOSITION DE CE CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE, MÊME SI LA SOCIÉTÉ MICROSOFT OU UN QUELCONQUE FOURNISSEUR A ÉTÉ PRÉVENU DE L'ÉVENTUALITÉ DE TELS DOMMAGES.

LIMITATION DE RESPONSABILITÉ ET RECOURS. NONOBSTANT TOUT DOMMAGE QUE VOUS POURRIEZ SUBIR POUR QUELQUE MOTIF QUE CE SOIT (NOTAMMENT TOUS LES DOMMAGES ÉNUMÉRÉS CI-DESSUS ET TOUS LES DOMMAGES DIRECTS OU GÉNÉRAUX), L'ENTIÈRE RESPONSABILITÉ DE MICROSOFT ET DE L'UN QUELCONQUE DE SES FOURNISSEURS AU TITRE DE TOUTE STIPULATION DE CE CLUF SUPPLÉMENTAIRE ET VOTRE SEUL RECOURS EN CE QUI CONCERNE TOUS LES DOMMAGES PRÉCITÉS NE SAURAIENT EXCÉDER LE MONTANT QUE VOUS AVEZ EFFECTIVEMENT PAYÉ POUR LES COMPOSANTS OS OU 5 DOLLARS US (US$ 5,00), SELON LE PLUS ÉLEVÉ DES DEUX MONTANTS. LES PRÉSENTES LIMITATIONS ET EXCLUSIONS DEMEURERONT APPLICABLES DANS TOUTE LA MESURE PERMISE PAR LE DROIT APPLICABLE QUAND BIEN MÊME UN QUELCONQUE REMÈDE À UN QUELCONQUE MANQUEMENT NE PRODUIRAIT PAS D'EFFET.

La présente Convention est régie par les lois de la province d'Ontario, Canada. Chacune des parties à la présente reconnaît irrévocablement la compétence des tribunaux de la province d'Ontario et consent à instituer tout litige qui pourrait découler de la présente auprès des tribunaux situés dans le district judiciaire de York, province d'Ontario.

Au cas où vous auriez des questions concernant cette licence ou que vous désiriez vous mettre en rapport avec Microsoft pour quelque raison que ce soit, veuillez contacter la succursale Microsoft desservant votre pays, ou écrire à : Microsoft Sales Information Center, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052-6399.

A guy reformatted his hard drive and then found out none of his Windows Media files would work. Turns out that Windows Media Player turns the "copy protection" (copy prevention) on by default when it rips CDs, so when he reformatted his hard drive the player thought he was trying to play the copy protected files on a computer other than the one they had been licensed for.

Let me say this another way: when you rip CDs on a Windows machine using Windows Media Player, it makes a unique identifier for your computer (that has privacy implications, yes, but I'm trying to make another point here).

That unique identifier is associated with a license that is stored separately from the file itself that will only let those files be played back on the one single computer that matches the unique identifier. No other devices. Ever.

(Without a lot of hassle anyway -- Without having to backup and restore your licenses on the other computer -- or use Microsoft's Personal License Migration Service (PLMS) -- two processes that, to date, have performed less than dependably -- according to many a sad music collector....)

And it turns out there is a solution: turn it off! Change the settings on your player for now, and say "no" when it asks you about wanting copy protections (fair use copy preventions) in the future.

See the Guardian story by Jack Schofield:

When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.

Text of article in case the URL goes bad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4477138,00.html

Ask Jack

Send your questions and comments to Jack.Schofield@guardian.co.uk
Published letters will be edited for brevity but please include full details with your original query

Jack Schofield
Guardian

Thursday August 8, 2002

Catch WMP
I have been collecting music using Windows Media Player to copy from CDs. When I needed to reformat my hard drive, I copied all my files to CD-R, re-installed my operating system and copied them back, only to find my music would not play.
Rowan Burgess

Jack Schofield replies: Microsoft's web site says: "By default, Windows Media Player [7.x] is configured to protect content that is copied from a CD to your computer from unauthorized use by using Personal Rights Management. When this feature is enabled, each track that is copied to your computer is a licensed file that cannot be played on any other computer unless you backup and restore your licenses on the other computer."

Reformatting the hard drive has made your PC, in effect, a different computer. Since you did not back up and restore your licenses, there is no obvious way to play the protected files. However, Michael Aldridge, lead product manager in the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft in Seattle, says: "There is still a way to get these licenses back and it is pretty easy using our Personal License Migration Service (PLMS), [which] was designed to address the exact situation you outline. The customer just has to be connected to the internet, then they can automatically restore their licenses just by playing the music files in question.

Windows Media Player will recognise that the music had a license and will go out on the web and update their music files with new licenses. All this service does is note these files once had a license and provides a new one. No internet connection is required for playback after that. "If the reader is connected to the internet and this is still not working, it is most likely because they created their music collection with an earlier version of Windows Media Player (7.0) and then upgraded on top of that collection. We did anticipate this scenario and developed a tool to help them update their licenses: the Personal License Update Utility. This must be run before they upgrade their system or transfer their music files to a new PC.

If they don't use this utility they will need to re-create (re-copy) their music CDs into their music library on their PC. Find out more information about this process at www.microsoft.com/ "You can also choose to turn off copy protection when you create your music collection, which can be done easily in any version of [WMP7.x or later].

When you first run Windows Media Player, it will ask if you want to keep copy protection on, and you can turn it off if you wish. If you missed that dialog box, it is still easy to turn off copy protection by going into the Tools|Options menu. Click on the Copy Music tab, and under Copy Settings, uncheck the 'Protect Content' box. In previous versions, this box was called the 'Enable Per sonal Rights Management' check box." Turning off copy protection would seem the best idea.

The MPAA's latest weapon against online piracy comes at the expense of your system's security -- wink wink, nudge nudge, all in the name of protecting the 5% revenue loss claimed by the industry that's currently under investigation for misrepresenting those numbers anyway...

Theoretically, Ranger is scouring the Internet looking for filenames it believes to belong to pirated files -- although its only source of information for the names of those files is a list it gets from the MPAA.

Meanwhile, I wonder what else is the MPAA and Ranger Online might decide to do with all of that private information that its collecting from "peer-to-peer sites" (user's hard drives) without obtaining permission? Hmmm...

More about Ranger Online and what the hell that's all about and how it appears that the Motion Picture Industry is about to be taken on the most expensive snipe hunt in its history later, but I thought you'd want to check out this rather informative article (despite its being an obvious-tool-of-mpaa hype-and-propaganda) from the Washington Post:
'Ranger' Vs. the Movie Pirates .

Ranger takes the titles and, "like a bloodhound," Valenti said, sets out on the Internet, looking for those films on Web sites, in chat rooms, on peer-to-peer sites. It is an automated software, speeding across the Internet. When it finds a movie title, it marks the location, decides whether the movie is being used in a way that infringes on its copyright, then moves on. Jeremy Rasmussen, Ranger Online's chief technology executive and founder, won't disclose exactly how his software manages this, except to say: "The challenge is 'How do you cover a lot of area without having to visit every page?' That's part of the intelligent way we scan."

Ranger Online provides the data to the MPAA and prepares cease-and-desist letters. The MPAA reviews the data and decides which letters to send. Last year, the group sent 54,000 letters; this year, it is on pace to send 80,000 to 100,000. Typically, the letters are sent to the Internet service provider hosting a site or user that the MPAA has deemed to possess ill-gotten films. The ISPs take down the offending site 85 to 90 percent of the time, Valenti said. Ranger then checks back periodically on the offending site to make sure it hasn't begun pirating again.

If the letters don't work, then the MPAA may contact local authorities, asking them to seize computer servers storing the pirated films. MPAA action recently led to a server seizure in the Netherlands.

Ranger sells itself to the MPAA and other clients based on its global scope, speed and thorough analysis. But a recent suit questions Ranger's precision.

From the EFF's BPDG blog -- Hollings: Broadcast Flag Now, By FCC Mandate:

EFF was advised that Sen. Ernest Hollings has written a letter to the FCC advocating immediate implementation of a broadcast flag mandate -- even without additional legislation. Hollings apparently claimed that the FCC already has, under existing statutes, the authority necessary to require that all manufacturers comply with BPDG rules.

Here's the LawMeme discussion along with a nice synopsis by Lisa M. Bowman for CNET:
File-traders in the crosshairs.

From CNET article:

Jennison thinks the RIAA will target people in their late 20s or early 30s who are making available massive numbers of files that are current and popular. The RIAA may also look for people who could otherwise afford to buy CDs but instead choose to play the free-swapping game, she speculated.

Others suggest that the industry would pursue, as University of Wisconsin's Vaidhyanathan called them, "hacker types," or people who look like they might spell trouble to mainstream Americans. Already, similar tactics have been put in play by the movie industry, which successfully convinced several judges that the operators of hacker publication 2600 aided copyright infringement by providing links to code that could be used to crack copyright protections on DVDs.

The record industry also could lean on law enforcement to do its dirty work for it, said P.J. McNealy, a research director at Gartner. "One of the problems with file-sharing right now is consumers aren't afraid of police knocking in doors and seizing computers," he said. However, criminal copyright charges, which usually must involve monetary losses or an intent to make money, often are hard to prove in cases involving individuals.

Springsteen Protects His New CD's Online in an Old-Fashioned Way
by Chris Nelson for the NY Times.

The EFF has submitted comments on the BPDG's recommendations (as manipulated by its co-chairs, apparently).

You can get the EFF's comments as a text, PDF or Word document, but the BPDG recommendation is not available to for public view and you can check out the drafts for yourself.

The BPDG "process" has been rife with acrimony, arbitrariness and confusion, to an extent that cannot be fully ascribed to mere haste. EFF believes that the failings of the BPDG process stem directly from BPDG's efforts to cloak a inter-industry horse-trading exercise in the trappings of a public undertaking, with nominal participation from all "affected industries." In reality, the representatives were hand-picked by the conveners of the BPDG to minimize any dissent, as is evidenced by the high degree of similarity between the original proposal brought to the group by its conveners and the final report that the co-chairs unilaterally present herein as the group's findings.

Throughout the process, the absence of any formal charter or process afforded the co-chairs the opportunity to manipulate the rules of the group to suit their true purpose while maintaining its illusory openness, as when the scope of the group's discussions was summarily expanded to encompass all unauthorized redistribution of feature films, as opposed to unauthorized redistribution over the Internet.

Cory Doctorow has written an editorial for tha SJ Mercury News that provides the best explanation I've seen so far at what the hell is going on with this BPDG thing:
Hollywood wants a stranglehold on your digital technology.

The people who fought tooth and nail to keep VCRs off the market will have a veto over all new digital television devices, including digital television devices that interface with personal computers. The next generation of home entertainment systems will include only features that don't inspire Hollywood's dread of infringing uses, no matter what the consequences for you, the owner of the device. With today's VCR, you can record an episode of "The Simpsons'' and bring it over to a friend's house to watch. This "feature'' won't be included on the digital VCRs and DVD recorders of tomorrow until and unless Hollywood executives decide you deserve it -- until they decide that the technical means of allowing neighbor-to-neighbor sharing of video won't open the gate to the Internet piracy bogyman.

The EFF has started a weblog, Consensus At Lawyerpoint, that covers the ongoing "open" activities of the Copy Protection "Technical" Working Group.

What is the BPDG?

The BPDG is a coalition of Hollywood studios and technology companies that are ready to control our technological future, in the name of digital television, if you let them.

How might they control our technological future? By insisting upon airy fairy "standards" that can only be complied with via business deals when the entertainment monopolies decide that the price is right.

Celine Dion must really hate her fans to let her latest CD be released containing such harmful copy prevention technologies on it.