Off the record

LAST WEEK WAS ONE of those weeks where I had a number of off-the-record conversations. This is not unusual, mind you. As InfoWorld Test Center director, I am often under nondisclosure agreements about products and technologies. As author of Ahead of the Curve, I’m often buttonholed on future-looking projects, ideas, and rumors not ready for prime time.

IDG’s Agenda 2003 conference is off the record. The general idea is that speakers have the opportunity to discuss issues of the day freely and frankly. But there’s a big loophole at Agenda — the conversations in the hallway are on the record.

Here’s how we play the game: Let’s say the topic of one of the panels is DRM (Digital Rights Management). The abstract is on the Agenda Web site: “Hollywood Speaks Out — In the Lion’s Den” with J. Scott Dinsdale, executive vice president of digital strategy at the Motion Picture Association; attorney Matthew D. Berger, a partner at Morrison and Foerster; Ronald C. Wheeler, senior vice president of content protection at Fox Entertainment Group; and moderator Tom Morgan, executive producer at IDG’s Digital Spectrum.

Let’s assume the session was controversial and spirited, full of the polarized ships-in-the-night “dialogue” between the Hollywood content owners onstage and the tech crowd in the audience. As soon as the session ends, all concerned make a beeline for the lobby adjoining the grand ballroom.

Now the trick is to ask panelists to essentially repeat what they said onstage or, failing that, to ask other attendees if they heard it right when so-and-so said such-and-such. Thus the content passes from protected to unprotected. It is typical of the DRM conundrum that the panel’s copy protection could so easily be circumvented.

So it was with novelist and director Michael Crichton, who gave a lighthearted and blunt talk before dinner. At least that’s what I confirmed on former IBM Vice President of Internet Technology John Patrick’s Weblog. “[Crichton’s] tolerance for software that doesn’t work well or is hard to use is low,” Patrick reported ( https://patrickweb.com ).

Patrick blogged the conference via 802.11b, a technology first made easy to use by Apple at a time when wireless was considered a consumer product. “About three years ago, the whole market was saying, ‘The next big thing is home networking,’ ” Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president of product marketing, recalls in an interview.

“Compaq was starting to promote power-line networking. Intel was investing a lot in phone-line networking, and they brought out a whole bunch of any-point products. We looked at it and thought, ‘These are really stupid ideas.’ ” Power-line networking won’t work in schools, a critical Apple market, nor will there be phone lines to each desk.

“If you step back, what do people want? It was obvious to us, but not to the market at the time,” Schiller continues. “We had a bunch of people on standards bodies and they told us that there was this thing called 802.11 that no one has noticed yet and that we should bet our money on it.”

“So we decided, really fast track, to make consumer hardware, base station cards, to write the software, to change the physical design of all of our products to include antennas and card slots and to make a complete holistic solution to make 802.11 come out [and] we call it Airport.”

Step back a minute and Schiller could be talking about a movie project. “We have a very creative process — a very collaborative process — we just all decide to do something and it moves very quickly, which is why we’re able to do something like an Airport in eight months.” Three years later, Microsoft is emulating the Apple Wi-Fi strategy with its own branded 802.11b hardware.

Apple is not emulating Microsoft on its DRM strategy, however. “Our attitude has always been you’ve got to protect the content owner’s right and the consumer’s rights,” Schiller says. “We fundamentally think that an attempt to create an unbreakable system is foolish … Microsoft has more than almost anybody tried to build encryption schemes into DRMs. And as we saw with the last version of Windows Media, it was broken before it shipped.”

Apple’s OS X chief architect Avi Tevanian weighs in. “The reason that many people ‘steal’ things over the Net [is] because it’s so easy to do, and it’s the easiest way to get the things. Imagine if it were easier to pay a fair fee and get the thing,” he suggests. “So with the iPod, there is no DRM on it. There’s nothing that keeps you from using it, for example, as a hard drive, which could let you shuttle music.”

In fact hackers are doing just that, flushing the contents of their development systems onto the iPod and carrying it with them as they move from home to work to client sites. “But the normal customer,” Tevanian points out, “will encode in iTunes, automatically sync it down to their iPod, and the software in the iPod won’t let you see that on the hard drive into the iPod. It’s just hidden.

“It won’t let you sync to two computers; you couldn’t use the automatic software built in as a shuttle to move music around,” Tevanian continues. “So the normal user … won’t find a simple way to steal and copy music. Yet they’ll find a way to rip and listen to all of their music whenever they want.”

Apple is Philippe Petit performing a high-wire act to preserve fair use and a fair price. Digital ease of use exacerbates both creation and copying.

Michael Crichton may have had it right when he summed up the Hollywood Shuffle as we turned to our main course. Referring to video sanitizing software, he warned: “The smart move is to make bowdlerized versions yourself. The dumb move is to fight it.”

Too bad it was off the record.