[FYI] (Fwd) FC: Hollywood wants to plug "analog hole," regulate A-D converters

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Fri, 24 May 2002 11:27:13 -0400
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject:        	FC: Hollywood wants to plug "analog hole," regulate A-D converters
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com


---

From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei@rsasecurity.com>
To: "'declan@well.com'" <declan@well.com>
Subject: MPAA wants all A/D converters to implement copyright
protection. Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 11:17:08 -0400

My mind has been boggled, my flabbers have been ghasted.

In the name of protecting their business model, the MPAA
proposes that every analog/digital (A/D) converter - one of
the most basic of chips - be required to check for US
government mandated copyright flags. Quite aside from
increasing the cost and complexity of the devices many,
manyfold, it eliminates the ability of the US to compete
in the world electronics market.

If this level of ignorance, chuptza, and bloodymindedness
had been around a hundred years ago, cars would be
forbidden to have a range greater then 20 miles, to
protect the railway industry, and transoceanic airline
tickets would have a $1000/seat surcharge, to compensate
the owners of ocean liners for lost revenue.

I know that Tinsletown is based on dreams and fantasies
(as well as the violation of Edision's movie patents), but
someone needs to sit these people down and teach them
the lesson that King Canute taught his nobles.

Peter Trei
[The above is my personal opinion only. Do not
misconstrue it to belong to others.]

---

Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 16:06:08 -0700
Subject: Hollywood wants to plug your analog hole
From: Cory Doctorow <cory@eff.org>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>

FYI
--
http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/archives/000113.html

Hollywood Wants to Plug the "Analog Hole"

*New MPAA report reveals chilling agenda*

=The Big Picture=

The people who tried to take away your VCR are at it again. Hollywood
has always dreamed of a "well-mannered marketplace" where the only
technologies that you can buy are those that do not disrupt its
business. Acting through legislators who dance to Hollywood's tune,
the movie studios are racing to lock away the flexible,
general-purpose technology that has given us a century of unparalelled
prosperity and innovation.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed the "Content
Protection Status Report" with the Senate Judiciary Committee last
month, laying out its plan to remake the technology world to suit its
own ends. The report calls for regulation of analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific,
medical and entertainment devices. Under its proposal, every ADC will
be controlled by a "cop-chip" that will shut it down if it is asked to
assist in converting copyrighted material -- your cellphone would
refuse to transmit your voice if you wandered too close to the
copyrighted music coming from your stereo.

The report shows that this ADC regulation is part of a larger agenda.
The first piece of that agenda, a mandate that would give Hollywood a
veto over digital television technology, is weeks away from coming to
fruition. Hollywood also proposes a radical redesign of the Internet
to assist in controlling the distribution of copyrighted works.

This three-part agenda -- controlling digital media devices,
controlling analog converters, controlling the Internet -- is a
frightening peek at Hollywood's vision of the future.

=Hollywood Tips its Hand=

The "Content Protection Status Report" 
(http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/content_protection.pdf) points to
future where innovation and fair use rights are sacrificed on
copyright's altar, where entertainment companies become *de facto*
regulators of new technologies, deciding which mathematical
instructions are mandatory and which are forbidden.

The first part of the document details the efforts of the Broadcast
Protection Discussion Group (BPDG: http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/), which
will release its final standard for the regulation of digital media
technology at the end of May. The BPDG's standard would ban the
production of digital television devices that had not been approved by
three Hollywood studios. Approved devices will only interoperate with
other approved devices. The combination of legal restrictions on
digital television devices and licensing restrictions on the computer
technologies they can interface with gives Hollywood an absolute veto
over all new digital media technology without the need for unpopular,
sweeping legislation like Senator Hollings's Consumer Broadband and
Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA).

=Plugging the Analog Hole=

But the most disturbing pieces of the Status Report comes later in the
document. The second section, "Plugging the Analog Hole," reveals
Hollywood's plan to turn a generic technology component, the humble
analog-to-digital convertor, into a device that is subject to the kind
of regulation heretofore reserved for Schedule A narcotics.

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the building blocks of modern
digital technology. An ADC's job is to take samples of the strength
(amplitude) of some analog signal (light, sound, motion, temperature)
at some interval (frequency) and convert the results to a numerical
value. ADCs are embedded in digital scanners, samplers, thermometers,
seismographs, mice and other pointer devices, camcorders, cameras,
microscopes, telescopes, modems, radios, televisions, cellular phones,
walkie-talkies, light-meters and a multitude of other devices. In
general, ADCs are generic and interchangeable -- that is, a
high-frequency ADC from a sound-card is potentially the same ADC that
you'll find in a sensitive graphics tablet.

Hollywood perceives ADCs as the lynchpin of unauthorized duplication.
No matter how much copy-control technology is integrated into DVDs and
satellite broadcasts, there is always the possibility that some
Internet user will aim a camcorder at the screen, always the shadowy
fan at the concert wielding a smuggled digital recorder, always the
audiophile jacking a low-impedance cable into a high-end stereo. These
bogeymen plague Hollywood, and each one uses an ADC to produce
unauthorized copies.

Accordingly, the report calls for a regimen where "watermark detectors
would be required in all devices that perform analog to digital
conversions." The plan is to embed a "watermark" (a theoretical,
invisible mark that can only be detected by special equipment and that
can't be removed without damaging the media in which it was embedded)
in all copyrighted works. Thereafter, every ADC would be accompanied
by a "cop chip" that would sense this watermark's presence and disable
certain features depending on the conditions.

This is meant to work like so: You point your camcorder at a movie
screen. The magical, theoretical watermark embedded in the film is
picked up by the cop-chip, which disables the camcorder's ADC. Your
camcorder records nothing but dead air. The mic, sensing a watermark
in the film's soundtrack, also shuts itself down.

The objective of a law like this is to make "unauthorized" synonymous
with "illegal." In the world of copyright, there are many uses that
are legal, even -- *especially* -- if they are unauthorized, for
example, the fair-use right to quote a work for critical purposes. Any
critic -- a professor, a reporter, even an individual with a personal
website -- may be lawfully copy parts of copyrighted works in a
critical discussion. Such a person may scan in part of a magazine
article, record a snatch of music from a CD or a piece of a film or
television show in the lawful course of making a critical work.

And you don't need to be a critic to make a lawful, unauthorized copy!
You might be someone who wants to "format-shift" some personal
property -- say, by scanning in a book or transferring an old LP to
MP3 so that you might take it with you while travelling with your
computer. This is absolutely lawful, but under the "analog hole"
proposal, providing the tools to make such unauthorized uses would be
illegal.

=Unintended Consequences=

It's outrageous that Hollywood would demand a law that intentionally
breaks technology so that it can't be used in lawful ways, but the
unintended consequences of this regime are even more bizarre.

Virtually everything in our world is copyrighted or trademarked by
someone, from the facades of famous sky-scrapers to the background
music at your local mall. If ADCs are constrained from performing
analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you
might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get
within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that
refuses to store your child's first steps because he is taking them
within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera
that won't snap your holiday moments if they take place against the
copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids
on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.

As was mentioned, ADCs are fundamental, generic computing components,
found in medical and scientific equipment, computers, and a variety of
consumer electronics. Surely Hollywood doesn't mean to suggest that
geologists will have to equip their seismographs with cop-chips (lest
they should accidentally record a copyrighted earthquake)?

It seems likely that they do. The primary difference between most ADCs
is the frequency at which they run. Two ADCs of like frequency and
bitrate can be interchanged. If any "free" ADCs are allowed into the
marketplace, they will surely find themselves repurposed in
camcorders, samplers, and scanners (oh my!).

=The Scourge of P2P=

Hollywood's report to Congress includes its third legislative goal:
"Putting an end to the avalanche of movie theft on so-called
'file-sharing' services, such as Morpheus, Gnutella, and other
peer-to-peer (p2p) networks."

Here, rather than making "unauthorized" and "illegal" synonymous,
Hollywood is seeking to overturn the Betamax doctrine -- the principle
that a technology is legal, provided that it can be used to accomplish
legal ends. VCRs are legal, even though they can be used to make
illegal copies of copyrighted works, because they can *also* be used
to make legal copies of personal works and copyrighted works (in the
case of time- and format-shifting).

P2P networks -- such as the Internet -- are not infringing in and of
themselves. "P2P" describes a technology where the system's control is
largely or entirely decentralized. P2P application networks are turned
to all manner of ends, from sharing classroom materials and
independently produced media to distributing large scientific problems
associated with the search for a cure for AIDS to providing a
distributed proxy service that allows Chinese Internet users to
circumvent China's national firewall and read uncensored news. True,
they can also be used to make unauthorized -- and even illegal --
copies of copyrighted works, but the Betamax doctrine does not
establish as its standard that no illegal uses be possible with a
technology; only that a technology have some legal use.

What's more, thoroughly decentralized networks like Gnutella have no
control-point. There is no central server, no standards-body, no
exploitable point where leverage can be applied to control what is and
is not available on the network. The Internet is fundamentally
constructed to permit any two points to communicate, and as long as
this is true, Gnutella and its brethren will thrive.

Which begs the question: How will Hollywood put "an end to ... movie
theft on ... p2p networks?" Short of dramatically re-architecting the
Internet it seems inconceivable that P2P will ever controlled or
eliminated.

But dramatic redesigns of the Internet are well within Hollywood's
stated desires. In 1995, Hollywood's representatives in government
penned "The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property
Rights," calling for a neutered Internet whose functionality had been
magically constrained to "permit [rights-holders] to enforce the terms
and conditions under which their works are made public."

We can only guess at where these delusional technological speculations
have wandered in the intervening years, and this "Content Protection
Status Report" is a good and grim indicator.

=Take a Stand=

Hollywood's legislative agenda may be ridiculous, but it is hardly
unlikely. The BPDG is bare weeks away from turning over a veto on new
technologies to Hollywood. They are doing so with the cooperation of
the technology companies that are willingly participating in the BPDG
process. If just one major computer company would step forward in the
press and in Congress and object to the BPDG's mandate, the entire
rubric of a "consensus" upon which the BPDG depends would collapse.

The BPDG mandate is critical to Hollywood's legislative agenda. With
the BPDG mandate in place, an ADC control law and a radical Internet
redesign are attainable goals.

If you work for a technology company, please ask your favorite senior
manager or corporate officer to contact the EFF. We'd be delighted to
deliver a briefing on this and help make the decision to stand up.

As an individual, write to the companies you are a customer of. Take a
look at your computer and your consumer electronics: they have been
built by companies that are either willingly participating in the BPDG
or have not come forward to oppose it. Only once these companies
realize that their customers care about liberty will they find the
courage to oppose Hollywood's powerful Congressional representatives,
like Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-Disney).

Show this article to your friends and co-workers. Hollywood's perverse
obsession with plugging the analog hole must be brought to light, as
must the likely outcome of its agenda.

--
Cory Doctorow
Outreach Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation
415.726.5209/cory@eff.org

Blog: http://boingboing.net




----------------------------------------------------------------------
--- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing
list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this
notice. To subscribe to Politech:
http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is
archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs
are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--- Like Politech? Make a donation here:
http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
---

------- End of forwarded message -------


-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: debate-unsubscribe@lists.fitug.de
For additional commands, e-mail: debate-help@lists.fitug.de