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Don’t tread on my digital rights

Its soap box time boys and girls, gather ‘round and listen to me preach about things beyond my control. Consider this foreshadowing to my days in the distant future where I will aimlessly wave newspapers at children in my front lawn calling them whipper-snappers. Yes, I’m 22 now and though the gray hair has yet to set in I am already passionate about my ever diluting rights as an American.

GWB and Afghanistan aside, tonight I’d like to rant about “Digital Rights Management”. What is digital rights management? And since when did my digital rights need to be managed, and by whom? Simply put, digital rights management is the new wave of control put on us all by “The Corporations”. In its early roots you may remember the format wars of yesteryear between Sony’s Betamax and VHS. Of course VHS won because of licensing issues with Betamax and video pornography, but smut aside it is the betamax case that interests us.

Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (Docket Number 81-1687), also known as the Betamax case, was a pivotal point in defining our Fair Use rights. Universal sued Sony alleging that because Sony/Betamax were manufacturing a device that could potentially be used for copyright infringement, they were liable for any infringement that occurred. The Supreme Court of the United States found that making of individual copies of complete television shows for home use is considered fair use, and that the manufacture of devices, such as Betamax or VCRs, to facilitate that is legal. The decision was announced on January 17, 1984, and for that reason we can all enjoy what is known today as Timeshifting, or rather, recording General Hospital while you are at work so you can watch it that night. Score one for consumer rights, and 1984 wasn’t quite like 1984.

Fast-forward to 2004 and Blockbuster is making a killing on VHS and DVD rentals. In fact movie studios make as much if not more on video rentals than in theater tickets so Universal should have kept their mouth shut. Anyway, the Internet is upon us and with it comes stupidiotic computer and software patents, like patenting double-clicking, or one-click-shopping, but I’ll leave software patents to another rant. The Internet is here and we all enjoy flash animations that make fun of our political candidates, or cartoon characters wearing boxing gloves answering emails. Life is good, or is it? While just about everything has gone digital, such as Music to MP3 and video to DVD, corporations struggle to hold on to old business models that do not work in the digital world. Napster (RIP) allows millions of Americans to swap tunes, violating copyrights and making the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) go crazy. Sure, copyright infringement = bad, you don’t need a rocket scientist to figure that one out. If the RIAA cant make an honest buck on their artists work, how are they going to fund the next scantly-clad pop star? RIAA goes on the offensive and calls this copyright infringement “Piracy” and “Theft”.

While nobody is going to argue how much fun it is to walk around with a patch on your eye and grunt phrases like “Arrg matey, fancy a mug of Grog ye little bilge rat”, labeling someone who infringes on copyright over the Internet is far from Piracy. And Theft is also inaccurate as digital files are not “stolen”, merely copied. If I took a copy of a document on your computer you would still have it. If only there were a way to make exact duplicates of real world objects, al la Star Trek replicaters, but I digress. I’m not advocating “piracy”, a term I suppose we must accept, akin to “hackers” now depicted as criminals breaking into networks and “stealing” data for their own evil ends, rather than basically nerds who like to write computer programs. I blame the media.

Anyway, now that every corporation under the sun is spinning around freaking out that the Internet is going to break its business model, like buggy-whip manufacturers when the automobile hit the scene, we the people get hit with these digital restrictions. At this point I would like to cite example A.

After watching a recorded episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart I decided it would be fun to read his book titled America the Book so I hit amazon.com and found that they had a deal with audible.com for first time buyers and I could get the audio book for $10. Not bad I figured, and since I just finished reading two books by Wil Wheaton I, as you may be by now, was tired of those pesky word things. I needed some stimulating audio to listen to now that I’ve practically given up on television as a passive entertainment experience. Long live television series on DVD and weekend season marathons. So I signed up at audible.com and purchased a copy of the book. I was excited, thrilled about becoming a member of such a cool site, and looked forward to hearing the brilliant satire of John Stewart. I became very discouraged after hunting around for a download link only to find that in order to download the audio book I just paid for I needed to first install their software. Well, why you couldn’t just send me an MP3 file is beyond me but I’ll bite. I download the software and login to my account and am pleased to find the audio book waiting in my queue. I’m given a choice of download format ranging from telephone quality to MP3. I choose the MP3 as it is the best quality. The download process begins and I wait eagerly watching the pretty blue progress bar. The download finishes and I’m left wondering what to do next. Where is my download? I see the play button on the toolbar, but I don’t want to use your stinkin’ program, I’m a Winamp guy and nothing is going to change that. Eventually I find the audio file and am shocked to find out that it is not an MP3 file as advertised. The file contains the .aa extension and will not play in my beloved MP3 player. I quickly hit up Google for some answers and find myself pouring through a message forum full of people like me, wondering why they cant play the .aa file in Winamp, or any other portable media player. The solution is to download yet another program, one which is limited to 30 days of use before it quits working and requests money. Annoyed that I had paid ten bucks for a proprietary audio file I download the program and convert the .aa file to .mp3. Now I can listen to the audio book, and next time I’ll be shopping elsewhere.

I understand that audible.com is concerned that if they sent me a standard format MP3 file I could pass it off to one of my friends and they would lose a sale. No big deal, I’m not trying to share the book, simply listen to it on my preferred audio player, and as a tech-savvy consumer I can find ways around the restrictions. Yes, restrictions are the word of the hour. DRM, in the eyes of the consumer, stands for Digital Restrictions Management, because you don’t trust us, your bread and butter, the consumers that keep your business alive, with an unencumbered media file. That’s ok, I don’t get offended by Apple when they sell music through itunes.com using a form of DRM called FairPlay, because their DRM is fair. I’m able to listen to the file on my preferred media player, copy it to my iPod, burn it to a CD, listen to it on another computer, and just about anything within reason. I can’t distribute the file out to millions of people over the Internet, but that’s ok, that’s not my intent, I simply want to listen to my music while at home, or driving, out for a walk on my portable. The DRM I cant seem to wrap my head around are things like the broadcast flag.

The broadcast flag refers to a copy prevention method for digital television. FCC rule 47 CFR 73.9002(b) basically says that flagged content may only be recorded by authorized methods, which may include tethering of recordings to a single device. This means that if I wanted to record a show, burn it to DVD, and watch it at a friends place I potentially couldn’t if my device or the television show was not authorized. Last time I checked it was under fair use rights that I could record a show on VHS and take it to a friends place, why now that television is digital must these artificial restrictions be put in place?

I wish this were only the beginning, but a quick Google on Microsoft’s palladium technology reveals that soon digital restrictions management may be hard-coded to your next computer. Microsoft’s trusted computing initiative will keep consumers content thinking their computers are safe from terrorists, while open source projects like Linux and Open Office are shunned because they are not “trusted”. I don’t know about you but I don’t need a computer chip telling me what I can and cannot do with my hardware.

I sincerely hope the day does not come when I have to explain to my grandkids what it was like being able to run free software, or record the super bowl without paying royalties to the NFL.

Ok, rants over, I’m tired.