Digital Rights Management

Dr. Dobb's Journal November, 2004

By Jerry Pournelle
Jerry is a science-fiction writer and senior contributing editor to BYTE.com. You can contact him at [email-masked].
Every now and then, DRM catches my attention. The last time was a few weeks ago when I went to a convention in Jacksonville, Florida, and found myself in a limousine with Cory Doctorow, who writes about this all the time. He was headed from Jacksonville to Seattle, where he had been invited by Microsoft Research to speak on the subject. He didn't plan on telling the group much it wanted to hear. (You can find all of what he said at http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt.) The summary of his position is that:

DRM systems don't work.
DRM systems are bad for society.
DRM systems are bad for business.
DRM systems are bad for artists.
DRM is a bad business move for Microsoft.

His first statement may be key: If DRM can't be made to work, the entire issue is moot, and we wonder why there's so much shouting going on. If you can't do it, why worry about it?

His third point is much the same: If it's truly bad for business, the market will discover that. Companies that employ DRM will shrink, those that don't use it will grow, and again, why is this anything to be concerned about?

The points that interest me, as a working writer and author, are his second and fourth points. (I figure Microsoft can determine its own best interest without much help from me or Doctorow.) And on those issues, I think he has not proved his point at all. Now the situation of writers is somewhat different from the rest of the entertainment industry. We aren't dependent on others for the tools to produce our primary product. It's true we need publishers to print and distribute our works, but we don't need million dollar recording studios or sound stages to create a novel. It's different for musicians, although I note with some glee that technology is changing that. One of my friends has been a recording artist for 20 years, and during that time he has gone from total dependence on recording companies to having in his own house better recording and mixing facilities than the recording studios do. Now he can make records, and distribute them on the Internet, and apparently he makes enough that it's worth his while to do it.

For a long time, though, performing artists were utterly dependent on those with enough capital to have access to recording and manufacturing facilities, and that utter dependence of artists on the studios created a poisonous atmosphere: Most performers hate their publishers, and no wonder, because many publishers don't really pay royalties on the records they sell: They charge the artist for advertising and promotion, and when it's all over, a record can sell a million copies and never earn a dime for the recording artist. The artists are told that this is all right: They can go make money giving public performances for which they charge admission. Their records have made them famous.

I see some of those famous people, as well as once famous actresses, at conventions selling autographed photos and photo opportunities—you can get your picture taken with the actress who played Wilma Deering for only $5.00. This puzzles authors who sign books as a way to promote our work, because when our books sell, we get royalties. If I had to make a living reading my own work in public, I wouldn't write them.

On the other hand, if no one buys books because they can get them free on the Internet, that's going to change the way I make a living. For the moment, it's not all that convenient to read books on a computer; but as TabletPCs become ubiquitous, that's going to change. My TabletPC weighs no more than a hardbound book, and it's actually easier to read books on an airplane or in other places with bad lighting with the TabletPC. Given technology advances, the experience of reading a book on a PC can only get better—and the equipment will be lighter, cheaper, and have longer battery life. Once digital books become more common, there will be a strong incentive for writers to use some of their features: not just hypertext links, but maps, diagrams, even cut scenes. Games such as Medieval: Total War and Nemesis of Rome have some really wonderful battle simulations: I can see cut scenes of such battles, built on gaming engines, being inserted in novels. Imagine Ivanhoe with the tournament actually taking place on screen (instead of being narrated to the invalid hero by the heroine—a wonderful use of words, and Sir Walter Scott makes that tournament come alive, but then, so did George Sanders in the movie version). Printed books may not be doomed, but the dead trees industry is certainly in trouble.

So I, for one, see a real need for some kind of Digital Rights Management of both performed and printed works. The question is, can that be done and, if so, what are the costs?

And it's that latter that's important. Some corporate officials have concluded that Doctorow's first point—you can't do it—is correct if we're talking about technical means, so they turn to Draconian laws. Jail sentences for breaking DRM codes. Russian programmers thrown into the hoosegow and not allowed to go home for months after a speech revealing the stupidity of Adobe's copy protection scheme. (And thereby earning Adobe the undying hatred of a number of smart people I would not like to have mad at me, but that's another story.)

It seems hardly a month goes by without Senator Ernest Hollings (who will leave us shortly, Deo Gratia) trying to ram some new horror like the DMCA down our throats. Now Disney wants to regulate all devices capable of making recordings (http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/ dangillmor/archives/010675.shtml). Everyone wants the criminal law used to enforce intellectual property rights.

I point out that we haven't used criminal proceedings in copyright cases. People steal my books all the time. Some are well meaning, like the teacher who uses the photocopy machine to make copies of a short story for her class. I recall one case in which making the copies cost more than the paperback book the story came from—of course, teachers have free access to copy machines, but no budget for buying 28 copies of a paperback titled High Justice.

Our first principle ought to be that we the people are not interested in criminalizing intellectual property theft. Artists and authors need remedies, but let them be the traditional civil remedies. If that massively fails, we may need to rethink the situation but not before that; and, from my experience, it won't fail at all. WordPerfect became popular because everyone "stole" a copy, then went out to buy one. Even Microsoft Word started that way, back before "activation." Commercial thieves can be sued; jailing individuals is silly.

Second, it's an exercise in futility to regulate what can go into our machines. We all have older systems capable of copying nearly anything, and if we don't, then that kind of law will create exciting new careers in smuggling. I guarantee you that smart people who find smuggling dope morally repugnant will take positive delight in smuggling in disk drives not crippled with whatever technological horror Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Disney) and the Disney people want inserted in our machines.

Third, understand that Microsoft isn't part of the conspiracy to criminalize everything. I have spent hours talking with Microsoft's senior DRM program managers, and they're as concerned as we are about overly restrictive systems. Microsoft, after all, wants you to buy a PC for your living room and use it to control all your entertainment experiences: Play DVDs, download kid's movies, and send them off to one bedroom while streaming in more adult fare for another set in another part of the house—that sort of thing. The more restrictive devices become, and the harder they are to use, the less interested the public will be in using them.

Having spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, I see little to be excited about. Microsoft and the various publishers will spend time and money concocting software schemes to control access to intellectual property, particularly performance art. Every one of those schemes will be broken, and the algorithms for defeating them will be published. DRM teams will then devise new schemes, and the breakers will break them, and the game will continue until it's unprofitable for the DRM people—and none of that need concern most of us. I wish the DRM people more success than some do because at my age I am still writing but I don't turn them out as fast as I used to, so I have a hefty stake in continuing to get royalties from my backlist; but I'll manage one way or another, and so will most writers and artists. Movies will be made and books will be written.

We do need to be concerned about laws that criminalize intellectual activities. I don't mean actual theft: While I wouldn't make it a crime to possess thousands of pirated copies of books and movies, I wouldn't think it the end of the world if there were such laws. What I worry about is criminalizing intellectual activity: jailing someone for publishing the means for breaking coding algorithms, as did the young man (Jon Johannson) in Norway, and the Russian visitor (Dmitry Sklyarov) to the DEFCON Las Vegas security symposium. I'm not at all sure there's even a civil lawsuit feasible in those cases, and even if Adobe could find some pretext to sue for damages over the revelation that they used an insanely simple means for protecting their valuables, I'd love to argue to a jury for the defense. I'd expect the jury to award a dollar to Adobe and then make Adobe pay the court costs.

The bottom line is, we always need to watch out for people who want to use the criminal justice system to protect "fresh new rights." That's true in real criminal cases, where the definition of "hate crime," previously unknown to the law, can now make 10 to 20 years difference in a prison sentence. Bad laws are bad laws. The DMCA has a lot of bad law in it, but we've said all that before.

I also note that the criminalizers haven't been very successful recently. Hollings bleats out the wishes of his masters in MPAA and RIAA, but his colleagues don't respond. Now he's going away. We can be sure that Disney, MPAA, RIAA, and the others will buy themselves a replacement (the finest money can buy, too!) and we'll need to watch the new antics.

Eternal vigilance was ever the price of liberty. Have we forgotten that? I believe in protection of intellectual property; I believe that civil society has a duty to provide such protection; but I don't see any reason for the kind of Draconian laws that greedy publishers have suggested—and I haven't seen many creative artists, musicians, performers, writers, authors, and the like, calling for such laws either.

This sort of thing has a way of working itself out. It seems like a crisis just now because the technology is changing so rapidly. But there's no reason to have your hair on fire over it. (For a different discussion including dialogue with readers, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view315.html#DRMissues.)

Peter Glaskowsky comments on the feasibility of DRM:

Of course it can be done. The cost of even the strongest known cryptography is low today, and trending toward zero. The necessary authentication and repudiation protocols are well understood and not difficult to implement. Cory Doctorow, like others arguing against DRM, does so because he doesn't like it. This prejudice blinds him to the technical and economic facts that make DRM practical and inevitable.
Personally, I like the idea of using technology to help protect our rights, including our intellectual-property rights. I believe that if effective technical solutions are found, those draconian laws will be required only to deal with people who use force or fraud to get around the technology.

And I agree.

Winding Down

There are two games this month. First is Doom III. I don't much like shooters, but this one is really engrossing, or at least it is when played on a really good machine like Wendy, my new PC with an Intel 3.6-GHz Prescott CPU, nVidia GeForce 6 video board, and Intel built-in sound with something like Klipsch speakers. They say to play Doom III in a dark room with the lights out at full volume, and I can testify that's a scary experience.

The second game of the month is the ineptly named Nemesis of the Roman Empire (http://www.enlight.com/nemesis/). I say "ineptly named" because this is supposed to be about the Punic Wars, and Hannibal, and that all happened during the Republic. Nemesis is a "real-time strategy" game. That term now means "ultrafast tactics," there being little strategy in any of the RTS games. Still, this is not just a mouseclicker. You do need to have some tactical wits about you. Combined arms armies, used properly, do well. There's also a sort of role-playing feature. For whatever reason, I find this enjoyable.

The book of the month is Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004). I don't always agree with Jacobs, but I cannot recall ever regretting spending time reading her. I learned a lot from her The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, and earlier works, and much of what I invented in Oath of Fealty, the novel Larry Niven and I wrote about arcologies, is based on principles I gleaned from Jacobs. In the present case, she looks at what happens in a Dark Age and how it's not preposterous to think we might get there from here. Her chapter on how schools went from being places of education to factories for producing people with credentials ought to be read by every parent and school board member in the United States and Canada.

The computer book of the month is Susan Snedaker, Best Damn Windows 2003 Server Book Period (Snygress Press, 2004). I can't say the title appeals to me, but it's apt. This book is complete, and covers subjects I had been wondering about, as well as a lot of stuff I never thought to ask about. There's an excellent discussion of Active Directory that I wish I'd read a year ago. If you use or will be using Windows 2003 Server, you will want this book.

DDJ

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