Digital Rights Outlook: Squishy
By Brad King
2:00 a.m. Sep. 12, 2002 PDT
Media companies are singing a new song that could be called "Get Squishy With It."
The long-running debate over how much digital rights management is too much has changed. Now it's about just how much copy protection files should include, and media companies believe they have the answer: squishy security.
See also: • Fans: Music Should Rock, Not Lock
• Signs of 'Trustworthy Computing'
• Palladium: Safe or Security Flaw?
• Going After Tech, Not Tech Users
• Hear how MP3 Rocks the Web
"We need interoperable DRM products that allow people to never feel the walls (of security)," said Ted Cohen, vice president of new media at EMI, one of the five major music labels.
It's not a new idea, but it's starting to resonate with Congress. At a recent government hearing, Philip Bond, undersecretary of commerce for technology, opened the debate by saying that he wanted a world with "a consistent and reliable and predictable level of legitimate copyright protection."
That's a frightening turn for consumer advocates and technologists who argue that DRM fundamentally alters the way people use their computers, televisions and stereos.
It's the word "legitimate" that bugs consumer advocates because nobody is quite sure what that means. They argue that fair use rights -- which allow people to listen to a copy of a CD in their car, for example -- have eroded in the quest for security, even the squishy kind.
"Those who aren't for überprotection are being labeled as pro-piracy," said Robin Gross, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The concern has basis. Judges determine fair use case by case, but technology companies are being asked to develop DRM systems that determine ahead of time what people can and can't do with files. In many cases, there are no precedents for DRM companies to draw from.
"Technology implementers can only do what they are told to do, and technology can only do what it's programmed to do, and right now, they are defining a perverted version of the law, because that is all they can do," said John Erickson, systems program manager at Hewlett-Packard's research lab.
With no firm guidelines, technology companies have started looking for more squishy security measures.
The latest idea comes from Thomson Multimedia. It's a Super MP3 file with better sound quality. Next year, it will get a video component as well, allowing entertainment companies to encode a song along with a video, album cover, lyrics and other information.
The twist: The Super MP3 will come with a tracking signature -- a digital fingerprint -- that will identify the PC that made it.
"People will pay for better MP3s," said Henry Linde, Thomson Multimedia's vice president of new media business. "If the MP3 file that Brad King encodes shows up on a system, we will know where it comes from. We call it lightweight DRM, but it won't prevent you from doing anything."
It's radically different from Microsoft's solution, which comes with proactive restrictions.
The DRM debate has been contentious. Entertainment companies claim they've been losing their shirts, while technology companies say the restrictions prohibit them from creating new products.
Music and movies are flying across file-trading networks, available on demand for millions of Internet users worldwide. Napster brought the debate to the masses. The five major record labels sued Napster, which had 70 million users at the time. The Recording Industry Association of America claims $4 billion in losses, and the Motion Picture Association of America claims it's lost $3 billion -- though it doesn't quantify physical versus digital piracy.
Such figures are suspect, however, because they guess at potential losses, which haven't always held up to further scrutiny.
When the FBI cracked down on hackers in 1990 for snatching and posting a confidential technical 911 phone manual, the prosecutors put a price tag of $79,449 on the document, according to Bruce Sterling's account in The Hacker Crackdown. The figure was based on labor, hardware and software costs.
Defense lawyers countered that AT&T sold a similar document to the general public for $13.
It's true that millions of people are sharing files through networks like Kazaa and Gnutella and instant messenger programs like AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. But it's impossible to put an accurate dollar figure on how much -- or even if -- it's costing the entertainment business.
It's the staggeringly quick adoption of technology, and the speed with which it's improving, that has media companies searching for answers -- even squishy ones.
"As technology makes things easier to do, the concepts we grew up with -- sharing a tape with a friend, making a mixed tape -- turned from sharing an LP with a friend into plugging in an iPod and downloading 1,000 songs in eight minutes," said Cohen. "That may have to change."
