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how to deal with net piracy
Friday, March 22 2002
The chief problem with politicians and judges is that when they do something entertainingly idiotic, we often end up living with the result. People actually had (or still have) to live under laws such as Prohibition, the Indiana State Law Declaring Pi Equal to Three, and the DMCA. Of those just mentioned, the Indiana law is the standout simply because it doesn't appear to address any compelling societal or corporate need. Instead it reflects the folksy conservative earnestness one normally associates with Indiana, a state that also gave us Dans Quayle and Coats and more than its fair share of anti-evolution (and perhaps even flat-Earth) legislation.
As comic and ill-fated in its goal as any of those laws is Fritz Hollings' new bill, the CBDTPA (Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act), which hopes to criminalize all technology capable of duplicating copyrighted work. It's a classic example of the sort of monsters that can incubate in the slime of soft-money political contributions, in this case the money indirectly given by the media and entertainment industry to Hollings' political campaigns. (Because of strong big-media support for this bill, we can expect to hear nothing about it on the evening news.)
With the passage of the CBDTPA, suddenly all digital equipment in this nation will be legally required to contain anti-piracy technologies. In the case of general-purpose digital equipment such as computers, the law mandates that such equipment may only run software adhering to certain anti-piracy conventions. This means, in effect, that you, the consumer, must abstain from using certain software or from writing software yourself that does certain things. The penalties for violating these rules, as usual, are multi-thousand-dollar fines and many many years in prison.
If you're a guy with a hammer, problems all start looking a lot like nails.
Understandably, then, legislators come to believe that anything can be accomplished through legislation. But, powerful as it can be, legislation isn't the same thing as magic. Pi can be decreed equal to three, but who wants to fly in a rocketship built in Indiana?
For its part, the CBDTPA seems to place an unusual faith in the power of legislation. But its flawed thinking, contradictory logic and failure to grasp the new technologic reality are evident even in a shallow reading.
We need the CBDTPA, we are told, because the honor system has failed us. Without technological restrictions, people simply copy stuff for free even if they know that doing so is wrong and that they could go to jail for their crimes. But then, after ratcheting up the penalties a few ticks short of lethal injection, the CBDTPA goes on to rely on the honor system anyway, prohibiting people from running un-CBDTPA-approved software on their own computers. Remember, two realities weaken the CBDTPA enormously: it only applies within the United States, and the internet isn't going away. How hard will it be for someone to just go and get whatever technologies they want from overseas, CBDTPA be damned? And if the CBDTPA forbids Google from showing people where to look, then people will use other search engines to find what they need. And once people have the copyrighted works they wish to share, they can wrap them in millions of different ways to conceal their nature before sending them anywhere they please. And if any steps in this process are difficult, someone somewhere will write the free and easy-to-use tools that automate it completely. Then, as happened with Napster, someone will come along and write some meta-tools enabling an entirely unforseen breed of piracy to ride along on top of that. The motivation to do so will be strong, the motivation to send a big fuck you out to all the people who want to run the internet like a home for delinquent youth.
If I may be so bold, I would like to propose a number of alternatives to the CBDTPA, each of which will accomplish the CBDTPA's objectives far better than the CBDTPA itself.
- Make piracy a crime punishable by death, and enforce the DMCA in the same way America's drug laws are enforced. Under the the "Digital Information Protection and Societal Happiness Insurance Through Surveillance Act," everyone is a criminal! Police can do anything they want to anyone, assured that the chance of any particular person not being a law breaker is low. What with all the money Hollywood will collect from fines, confiscated estates, lawsuits, and fees for watching unpirated programs, they will have the funds necessary to produce three times as many Chuck Norris movies per year.
- Criminalize the entertainment industry. Hey, it worked for the Taliban, didn't it? In a world without entertainment, there will be nothing to copy. The Napster revolution will soon whither and die.
- Repeal all copyright legislation and allow anyone to copy anything. Statistical analysis can be performed periodically on the logs of Kazaa.com and those artists who created the files most heavily-traded are awarded a proportionate fraction of an excise tax levied against the sale of entertainment devices.
I also wish to make a few comments about the Church of Scientology's use of lawyers to coerce Google into delisting anti-Scientology sites from its index. In terms of degrees of frightening, I find the manipulation of search engine results among the very highest on the list, especially when it's done by the most popular search engine on the web. In some ways, a search engine listing makes the difference between whether a site exists or doesn't exist. It is, after all, the thing that connects interested people with the information they seek. When a search engine responds favorably to the pressure of censors, its results, its reason for being immediately comes into question.
But there is a silver lining to this story. The moment people discover that they'll be missing some things by using a certain search engine, they start using other search engines. This is the slippery slope already followed by former search-engine grand dragons Altavista and Infoseek. Perhaps Google thought it could quietly delist a site and make the crazy Scientologists lawyers go away (after all, Yahoo managed to get away with it). But it didn't work that way this time. Wired wrote a big story about it and even closed their article with a summary of one of the more embarrassing "secret scriptures" of Scientology:
75 million years ago, an evil galactic overlord named Xenu solved the galaxy's overpopulation problem by freezing excess people and transporting the bodies to Teegeeack, now called Earth. After the hapless travelers were defrosted, they were chained to volcanoes that were blown up by hydrogen bombs -- and their disembodied spirits continue to haunt mankind today.
This isn't any crazier than Noah's Flood or the resurrection of Jesus, I suppose, but still...
In the end, the pressure on Google was too much and they re-listed parts of the anti-Scientology sites. This is my judgement:
Freedom of the Web: 2, Scientology: 0, Google: 0.
Work on my Flash-based chat continued today with a number of straightforward successes (as opposed to the usual: agonizing hours of unexplained phenomena interspersed with frustrating debugging). I managed to build a color palette using code originally written in Javascript for drawing HTML color palettes on the fly. In the process, I learned yet more about the intricacies of Flash, including movie attachment and trans-movie variable referencing.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020322 feedback
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