Fighting the last war

STUDENTS OF HISTORY — and I’m not one of them unless it’s Beatle-related — often make note of the tendency to fight the last war. So it was that the British advanced in columns while the Americans hid behind rocks and trees. Later, the British turned the tables by writing and recording all the songs themselves while Broadway and Tin Pan Alley stood helplessly by.

Today the pendulum has swung again. The last war is now being fought by the same record companies that capitalized on the British invasion, the Elvis impersonation, and the bobby soxer rebellion. Instead of embracing the new wave of digital technologies, the content companies are stifling innovation where it grows: at the grassroots level.

It’s a new era of McCarthyism; Charlie McCarthy, that is. Instead of Edger Bergen, we’ve got Hollywood bag man Jack Valenti’s hand at the controls, throwing his voice through a collection of dummies in Congress. From Senator on-the-Fritz Hollings of South Carolina to Congressman Howard Berman (D-Disney), our representatives in Hollywood-on-the-Potomac are whistling while they work, or wreak, havoc on our digital rights.

Hollings’ proposed Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act mandates security technology for all new digital media devices, outlaws the removal or alteration of the technology or the substitution of other security technology in violation of the act’s encoding rules, and prohibits the knowing transfer or publishing of copyrighted material where said technology has been removed or altered. In other words, Just Say No for Dummies.

Berman wants to reclaim the right to blow up my machine if I engage in peer-to-peer relations over the Net. “I’m a strong believer in the beneficial potential of p-to-p networks,” Berman tells the Computer and Communications Industry Association, “but most people currently use them for unbridled copyright piracy.”

And what’s worse, Berman says, “while p-to-p technology is free to innovate new and more efficient methods of distribution that further exacerbate the piracy problem, copyright owners are not equally free to craft technological responses.” It turns out that what Berman calls technological self-help measures — electronic countermeasures used by satellite and cable companies to thwart piracy — may be illegal when used against p-to-p networks.

“Their use may run afoul of certain common-law doctrines and state and federal statutes, including the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” he reports, adding that Congress should “free copyright creators to develop and deploy technological tools to address p-to-p piracy.” The vehicle: a safe harbor from liability for using tools such as interdiction, decoys, redirection, file-blocking, and spoofs.

But don’t worry. Berman wants strict bounds on acceptable behavior by the copyright owner. “I wouldn’t want to let a particularly incensed copyright owner introduce a virus that would disable the computer from which copyrighted works are made available to a decentralized, p-to-p network,” he insists. No, he’s leaving that up to the Hollings chip.

Last week Intel President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini took the baton from Hollings and ran with it. According to the Boston Globe, “Otellini said the chip maker would include no copyright protections in LaGrande, but he acknowledged that digital publishers could use the technology with software programs such as Palladium to create their own.”

And thus we come full circle to Microsoft and Windows chief Jim Allchin. “We really haven’t done anything on the hardware side [so] that you can trust the machine integrity,” Allchin said in a keynote speech at the Windows Server DevCon in Seattle. Allchin cited Redmond’s work on Palladium with Intel, AMD, and “maybe” others: “[We believe] the processor itself will change in a way so that we can be more dependent on knowing that software isn’t tampered with.”

“Once you have that secure machine integrity,” Allchin said, “you can use it for all sorts of things — deeper types of authentications, authorizations, digital rights management [DRM].” Allchin’s thoughts began to tumble out: “Today, as you probably know, we have to use techniques to hide some of our DRM, because there’s no other way … to deal with it when the thing you’re trying to protect is the content.” Allchin took pains to assure the assembled developers of Microsoft’s good intentions. “Our current plan is for any code we put in curtaining memory [Palladium’s secure code vault] we’re going to publish the source.” Once again, the buck is passed on down the chain. Yes, it’s U.S. Government Certified lean code.

Allchin’s keynote was constrained by some code curtaining of its own. “We’re trying to get to what we call ‘life immersion,’ he revealed. “I’m not going to talk about that today.”

Then he did: “Tremendously exciting things that we’re doing there — how we’re using that rich [Yukon] storage, how we’re building more peer-to-peer infrastructure into the system, how we have a new presentation system with incredible 3-D graphics…. Most of the systems have 3-D graphics built in, but only the games use it.”

“Well, imagine if you could visualize it,” Allchin dreamed, “imagine if you didn’t have to have hard-core folders, everything was virtualized so that you could quickly build up any view that you wanted over your data. But I’m not going to talk about that.”

And I’m not going to buy a machine with one of those chips in it, either. And I’ll think twice about using software that limits my fair use of music, words, and ideas. The way it looks now, DRM will eventually outlaw the next sentence. Imagine no possessions, Jim. I wonder if you can.

To quote John and Yoko: “War is over — if you want it.”