Chained melodies
Copyright-holding corporations are pushing new laws and computer-crippling
technologies in their war on piracy. But can anything keep geeks from
copying the music and movies they crave?

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By Damien Cave
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/13/copy_protection/print.html


March 13, 2002 | A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed
through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie
soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the
first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days
of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found
a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.

Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested
in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing
networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a
pirate. But he did want to play songs from the album on his MP3 player. "I
was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and
subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only
hard drives," he says.

At first, his worries proved justified. When he put the CD in his computer
and fired up AudioGrabber, a software program that converts CD tracks into
MP3s, the CD locked up the program. But after rebooting his computer, he
discovered that the protection was easy to thwart. The copy protection
worked by introducing a false value for the start time of the CD --
Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero,
and then was able to encode the music without a glitch.

"My original plan was to buy the CD and then cause a fuss at the store and
demand they refund my money when I couldn't play it on my car stereo," he
says. "But it turned out to be such a trivial workaround I didn't even
bother."

Cianessi's trick turns out to be far from the only way to defeat the
various forms of copy protection currently debuting on CDs all over the
world. (Running a digital output cord from a CD player to a computer, for
instance, is also becoming a popular form of circumvention.) But even as
crackers continue to prove how easy it is to set information free, the
backlash against intellectual property violation is continuing to swell.

Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic
in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL
Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment
distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard
drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some
form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital
entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won't be able to make
any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able
to move, for example, a recorded version of "The Simpsons" from the digital
VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.

Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to
failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is
bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late
1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection
schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.

But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not
only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated
technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or
even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last
month, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another
bill -- the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) --
that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all
digital devices.

Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological
advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens
when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer
behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of
every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is
precisely the showdown that looms.

Consumers of entertainment have long taken advantage of whatever technology
is at hand to make copies of their favorite obsessions. Likewise, content
creators have long struggled to resist this tendency. Copyright law,
originally intended to balance the needs of both consumers and producers,
existed in a middle ground between the two sides. But the advent of the
Internet, which makes copying anything digital, anywhere, absurdly easy,
vastly increased the stakes of the struggle. In response, the content
companies have used their lobbying clout to aggressively redefine copyright
law in their own interest.

"Over the past 10 years, many have come around to the view that, in a
networked digital world, limitations on copyright owners' control of their
works are no longer desirable," writes Wayne State law professor Jessica
Litman in her book "Digital Copyright." Intellectual property laws, she
adds, have taken on a new meaning. No longer a balance between public and
corporate rights, "Copyright is now seen as a tool for copyright owners to
use to extract all the potential commercial value from works of authorship,
even if that means that uses that have been long deemed legal are now
brought within the copyright owners' control," she writes.

As a result, if the content companies continue to have their way, the
once-freewheeling Net will be reduced to a glorified form of top-down
broadcasting: "a digital multiplex and shopping mall," in Litman's words;
"cable television on speed," as Lawrence Lessig phrased it in "The Future
of Ideas."

Hollings' bill, whether or not it passes, will likely accelerate the pace
of change. Some of the world's biggest technology companies are already
scrambling to come up with forms of protection that keep content safe. The
industry dwarfs Hollywood in size -- domestic spending on technology goods
and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures,
while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion -- but companies such as Intel
are still wary of letting Congress dictate their hardware designs.

They're developing technology out of "a fear of legislation," says David
Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and
frequent critic of the DMCA. "Better to negotiate something they can live
with than have something imposed on them unilaterally by clueless senators"
in Hollywood's thrall.

Other factors are also in play: Broadband providers and consumer
electronics companies are worried that without copy protection they won't
have access to the kind of entertainment that would drive consumer adoption
of new technologies. Software industry titans such as Microsoft stand to
benefit both from enhanced protection of their own products, and from the
sale of security services.

It appears unquestionable that hard-wired copy protection is on the way.
But will any of it work the way its backers want? Touretzky notes that in
the 1980s, copy protection "really pissed off customers, who found they
couldn't make backups, or recover easily after a disk crash." Will the new
push for protection be any different?

Hollywood will get what it wants, says Talal Shamoon, executive vice
president of InterTrust, one of the first companies to pioneer
copy-protection strategies for digital audio and video. Cable television,
he notes, prevents consumers from accessing content they haven't paid for;
the future of digital entertainment will be equally secure. Get ready for
what is increasingly being called "trusted computing."

Several different approaches are in the works. The "broken media" method
discovered by Cianessi on his "More Fast and Furious" CD is one example.
Watermarking -- incorporating a kind of digital label in a song or TV show
or movie that uniquely identifies the copy -- is another. There's also the
idea of "protection bits," a tool currently used in digital audiotapes,
which only permits users to make a copy of an original, and not of another
copy.

The leading lockdown candidate combines several of these older software
fixes with emerging technologies that focus on hardware. The Copy
Protection Working Group (CPTWG), a Hollywood high-tech body charged with
developing protection for digital television and other forms of video
distribution, wants to make it possible for a broadcaster to physically
stop users from sending a digital stream of, say, "Star Wars" to a VCR.

"There are two technologies that create secure connection devices," says
Shamoon. "One is called 5C," named after the five companies that created it
-- Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba. "Then there's another
technology from Thomson Multimedia called "SmartRight."

Both work by embedding a chip that has the power to shut down specific
functions in a given entertainment device; such a chip would be able to
instruct the device that sending digital output to another device is
forbidden.

"Digital rights management" software takes over from there. "There will be
something called a broadcast flag, which will be embedded in the digital
symbol," says Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation who has attended several CPTWG meetings. "It
will identify the content as copy once, copy always, copy never. TV
receivers or set-top boxes will read the flag and comply. So if it says
copy it will turn off our digital outputs."

Media players in a personal computer could also be set to read similar
"flags," both for audio and video. And, says Touretzky, everything will
likely be encrypted. "For example, instead of sending analog signals to
your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the
decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker," he
says. "Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module
built right into the monitor, so you can't bypass the encryption by tapping
into the monitor cables. Disk drive encryption is built into the drive
itself, etc., etc."

There are advantages for both consumers and owners with this scheme, says
Shamoon. "It supports the copy/no copy commands but it also lets you buy
the movie you just watched at the end, or send it to 10 friends," he says.

The new techniques, promises Shamoon, will be both secure and painless.
"Having been around the block a few times, we've learned a lot," says
Shamoon, who once worked for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, creators
of a vaunted protection scheme that was defeated in October 2000. "Our new
products are as easy as buying something on Amazon, except you don't have
to wait for UPS to show up."

But just as Shamoon overestimated the strength of SDMI, some experts argue,
Hollywood and the digital rights management industry have failed to realize
that the search for secure content is a Sisyphean exercise.

Today's copy-protection technologies are less frustrating than those of the
past, but they still threaten to enrage and alienate consumers. Take the
case of Microsoft Office XP. The copy-protected software is full of
problems, says Tom Cramer, 21, a server technician for Compaq in Colorado
Springs, Colo.

"I have a licensed copy and I've had to call Microsoft to reactivate it
several times," he says. "When I reformatted my laptop, it didn't pick up
that it was the same machine. I've since changed laptops; and the license
says that I can have it on one laptop and one desktop but when I bought a
new laptop, I had to call again."

"If this is the kind of protection that gets into a digital device, I'm
going to be upset," he adds. "If I have to call a record label to say, hey,
my MP3 player broke, give me another license, I'm not going to buy the
device."

Even the tightest and smoothest forms of protection promise to be not just
annoying, but also beatable, say experts. History is on the hackers' and
crackers' side. Every attempt to handcuff content -- even cable and
satellite TV -- has failed. And the reason is simple: If you can see or
hear the content once, you can find a way to copy it. Episodes of "South
Park" may originally only be legally available to cable television
subscribers, but they're also easily available via the Net. One digitized,
uploaded copy opens Pandora's box.

If users can't decrypt the stream, reset the index of the CD or recode the
television to allow for digital output, they'll simply record another way,
notes Touretzky. "People don't care all that much about the superior
quality of digital content, compared to price and convenience issues," he
says, pointing out that MP3s became popular even though they sound worse
than CDs. "So, if people can't grab the digital data stream, they'll just
set up a microphone next to their speakers and take the one-time analog
quality hit in order to rerecord the data in an unprotected format.
Granted, this is a lot less convenient than ripping CDs is now, but they'll
do whatever it takes."

Ultimately, Touretzky and others argue, copy protection and the Net are
technologically at odds, magnets repelling each other in opposite
directions. "It's the nature of the Net to pass information from anywhere
to anywhere," says Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who
was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for planning to
give a paper on how to reverse-engineer SDMI. "It's the same with PCs: They
can handle and process information in any way that you like. Copyright
protection is the opposite."

Society must either give up on copy protection or the general-purpose PC
and the Net, says Felten. And no matter how hard Hollywood tries, Felten
argues, society will eventually choose the latter because "the sheer value
of the Net and computers is so much greater than any value that copy
protection can provide."

Not even Hollings' Security Systems Standards and Certification Act will
keep Hollywood's content safe, some argue.

"Congress may as well legislate that water has to run uphill," says Dan
Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University. "All the
legislation in the world can't change the fact that you have this content
and if you listen to it or see it, then you can copy it."

"[New technologies and laws] won't work any better than the Federal
Prohibition Bureau for curbing illegal alcohol use during prohibition,"
says Cianessi. "Society will continue to slowly evolve around legislative
obstacles, just as it always has."

But if the technology that Hollywood favors is defeatable, why are people
like Wallach and Cianessi so worried? Why are geeks fighting so
passionately against the shift toward copy protection?

The technology is not what bothers them -- it's the criminalization of the
act of copying, and even worse, of the act of discussing copying, that
critics find most alarming. Is it really in the public interest to
continually increase the level of corporate ownership of ideas and
expression? Who should Congress serve?

The DMCA -- which has already been used to sue Felten and to prevent Web
magazines from linking to at least one program deemed illegal by Hollywood
-- and the so-called Sonny Bono Act, which extended the length of copyright
protection by 20 years, forcing some Internet publishers to take down
content that was once available in the public domain, are the leading legal
offenders.

Both laws, say legal scholars, show how willing Congress is to comply with
entertainment industry demands.

"In the 1970s and the 1980s, there were a substantial number of members of
Congress who responded with skepticism when the movie or record business
insisted that the threat of widespread unlicensed copying required new
laws, and copyright owners who sought the legislation needed to draft it
narrowly and make a persuasive case it was actually necessary," Litman
says. "That's why, despite [MPAA chairman] Jack Valenti's claim that VCRs
spelled the end of the U.S. movie industry, Congress did not enact any of
the videotape-recorder/copy-protection bills introduced in the 1980s.

"Twenty years later, thanks in large part to the massive increase in
lobbying money spent by the entertainment industries, most members of
Congress would agree that more copyright protection is always better than
less," says Litman.

The SSSCA fits squarely within this trend. The bill has yet to be
introduced, but the draft that leaked to the Net last year would make it
illegal "to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise
traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize
certified security technologies."

Hollings, who has received $264,534 in campaign contributions from the TV,
music and movie industries since 1997, has attempted to argue that
standardized copy protection is the key to encouraging the continuing
rollout of broadband Net connectivity. According to this theory, customers
won't sign up for DSL or cable Internet access if they can't get top-notch
entertainment via their computers. But Hollywood won't make that content
available unless it is confident it won't be pirated.

"This is what he sees as one of the critical problems -- the piracy of
digital content," says Andy Davis, a Hollings spokesman. "And this is the
method he sees as a solution for that."

But by outlawing any device that doesn't comply, the SSSCA would
potentially make, for example, software that moved your hard drive's
contents to a remote computer illegal. It would also make possession of
devices and software already on sale a punishable offense.

Furthermore, argues Litman, the theory that broadband adoption is dependent
on copy protection just doesn't hold water. The entertainment and
information industries made the same argument in the early '90s as part of
their lobbying for the DMCA, she notes, pointing out that they were wrong
then, and are wrong now.

"In 1993, the White House was interested in developing what it first called
the Information Superhighway and then the National Information
Infrastructure," says Litman. "Entertainment and information industries
argued that unless they were given stronger copyright protection, they'd
refuse to make their content available over the NII, and therefore nobody
would want to use it, so nobody would build the network. The administration
actually endorsed this position in 1994 and 1995 reports, and introduced
legislation designed to respond to it. Meanwhile, of course, the Internet
was growing by leaps and bounds. Despite the absence of Hollywood movies,
Random House books and BMG records, the Internet enjoyed the steepest
adoption trajectory of any comparable technological innovation, becoming
common in the majority of U.S. households within a decade."

Contrary to Hollywood's claims, the battle is not over broadband -- it's
over business models. Though VCRs, DVDs and other new technologies have all
added to Hollywood's bottom line, Hollywood is convinced that the world of
digital downloads and streams will cost more than it brings in to corporate
coffers. And so it has turned once again to Congress.

The legislature's willingness to listen cuts across political lines. The
debate doesn't fit neatly into a liberal/conservative framework, says
Lessig. It's "controlled vs. free," he writes in "The Future of Ideas," or
"old vs. new."

Even Shamoon admits that we're in the midst of an "ugly transition period."
Everyone is dreaming of a time "when content exists in the air and follows
you around," he says. "I want to be able to walk into a hotel room and have
it realize it's me and let me watch my movies from home."

But that ideal seems a long way off, and in the meantime, despite Congress'
eagerness to do Hollywood's bidding, there's no clear sign yet as to who is
going to win the intellectual-property wars.

Brian Cianessi figures that his CD will end up looking like some sort of
omen -- perhaps the thin end of the wedge that marks the end of the golden
age of Net file-trading. But he's not sure what will emerge.

"We currently exist during a turning point that will be considered
historically significant to coming generations," he says. "I can only hope
that when they look back to this time they can see the stand we took on
copyright as the fulcrum for the shift of power back to the people and away
from big corporations."


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About the writer
Damien Cave is a senior writer for Salon