Technology.talk:
Digital Choices, Digital Future

By Pat Suarez

Five years ago, the music and movie industries bought the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from their buddies in Congress.  The RIAA and MPAA claimed that this was a proportional response to the madcap file trading made possible by Napster and other peer-to-peer networking tools.

Peer-to-peer networking is technology that allows one user to send an electronic file to another user, anywhere, without needing a centralized server to make the handoff possible.

The RIAA (music industry) and MPAA (motion pictures) had sought strict control over the public's use of music and movie products from the time a commoner first transformed an analog sine wave into 1's and 0's.  The legal arguments and accusations remain head-spinning.  Overpricing of CDs.  Stiffing artists of their income.  Locking promising artists out of their industries.

The true meaning of licensing a CD.  And, of course, fair use.

The major nag about the DMCA was the virtual elimination of "fair use", a concept that means you can make a backup copy, for your own use, of something for which you fork over your money or you can copy or quote copyrighted material in corporate reports or academic papers.

DMCA's catch was this: It criminalized technology that crippled copy protection schemes.  In other words, if a company digitally locked you out of a CD or a file, employing competing technology to defeat the encryption (thereby enabling your fair use rights) constituted a felony.  So, if you wanted to exercise your right to make a backup copy of a music or software CD and you needed another tool to unlock the CD, the technology and your action were illegal.  Or, if you fired up a program that bypassed the encryption on several CDs so you could burn your own music mix for your commute to work, you committed a crime.

The backlash against DMCA was swift.  To reposition the legal situation more toward the center (no unfair advantage to either the music/movie industry or to the users), two Congressmen introduced legislation to decriminalize encryption-bypassing technology.  It's called the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act (H.R.  107), or DMCRA.

But all of this legal volleying might not matter.  Microsoft has announced its intention to include IRM, or Information Rights Management, in upcoming versions of its Windows operating system and its Office suite.

IRM decidedly tilts the table toward corporate America and away from users.

So you can keep all the names straight, let's start with Palladium, Microsoft's technology to "protect" information.  The irony of this name is not lost on those who know the definition of "palladium": A safeguard, especially one viewed as a guarantee of the integrity of such social institutions as the Bill of Rights.

Longhorn is the name of the new version of Windows that will include Palladium and other IRM tools.  Speaking of IRM, Office 2003's IRM features will create files, perhaps embarrassing or incriminating ones, that can be neither copied nor printed (nor wind up in a court of law to prosecute a future Enron).  Just think: One will be able to put their misdeeds into writing and not have them boomerang as evidence against them.

DMCRA or no DMCRA, mass acceptance of restrictive technology such as Palladium very well might make the move toward right's restriction a done deal.  If the corporate world and home users continue to slavishly flock to Microsoft for future operating systems and office suites, our collective fair use rights will vanish and RIAA's and MPAA's wildest fantasies will come true.  Will some enterprising soul create technology to disable Palladium's and IRM's tools?  You better hope so because "our side" does not have the money to buy Congress away from RIAA and MPAA.  Or, you could stop using Microsoft products and consider some alternatives (Corel Office or IBM/Lotus SmartSuite).  99% of the PC nation won't do this, of course, and Microsoft and corporate America can count on this inertia and fear of unwillingness to change to get the control they desire.

If the entertainment industry cannot keep peer-to-peer networking at bay from a technical perspective, there's another idea that ISPs are considering that would.  To keep people from inhaling and exhaling mass quantities of files, simply cap the number of bytes that flow into and out of a customer's Internet connection, charging a premium for "overuse".  This is outrageous because this approach assumes all users are guilty of stealing or of aiding and abetting.  People who enjoy streaming audio over the Web or who send lots of digital images to relatives will have to either curtail their lawful activities or pony up the premium.

Yet another irony in this mess is the recent news that new Internet use in the USA has "plateaued".  We have reached the predictable point where we now have to wait for kids to grow up and have more kids to generate "new users".

But if corporate America wants to keep the online customers it still has, it better not alienate them or they might discover that they can do without going online (and helping to generate billions in e-commerce).  Or that they could do without buying new CDs.  Or DVDs.  There are none so blind.

Mindful of all of this, and knowing full well that most of corporate America is still stuck in Office 2000 and refuses to migrate to Office XP, Microsoft is dangling some compelling new features in Office 2003, including a jazzed up interface and better antispam code in Outlook, the most-used Office software in the suite, not to mention IRM and Palladium.  Will corporate America miraculously leapfrog from Office 2000 to Office 2003?  They just might, given Office 2003's digital lockdown features over which corporate America certainly drools.

This conjures up yet another conundrum: As PCs get faster and more able to process game and movie creation code, they can handle the faster and more flexible operating systems and applications that users demand and, completing the circle, that beg for increased processing power.  But at what social cost?

This vicious circle becomes a metaphor for drug addiction, wherein satisfied pleasure masks the horrors that result from having pleasure satisfied.  To wit: We'll sell you an inexpensive PC with awe-inspiring power along with a state-of-the-art operating system and jaw-dropping applications, but you will abdicate your fair use rights, and we'll use that abdication to set a precedent to slowly bleed you of everything else we can, including your privacy.

Ultimately, as it always is, the decision about your digital future is squarely in your hands.  Will you be a digital Faust to corporate America's, the RIAA's, the MPAA's and Congress's Satan, or will you see the light and tell Microsoft, the RIAA and MPAA as well as your elected officials to take a hike?

I fear the answer.