[om-list] John Gilmore on Digital Copy Protection

[Mark Butler]

You may not realize the pervasiveness of the requirement being
demanded by Hollywood.  A friend of mine is planning to build digital
speakers (he's an EE who builds his own speakers).  Just as carrying
an analog signal to a video monitor over a cable degrades it, analog
speaker cables also degrade the signal.  Sending the audio to the
speakers digitally would carry the signal more faithfully, and it's
cheap these days.  It has other advantages: you could plug all of your
speakers into your house Ethernet, with little selectors on them to
pick which packets each speaker would listen for.  Then you wouldn't
have to run separate pairs of wires from your stereo to each room;
you'd just feed each room an Ethernet connection.

If the BPDG mandate goes through, digital speakers would have to
include copy-protection IN EACH SPEAKER.  If they didn't, they could
not be used to play the sound from HDTV or DVDs (or SDMI or whatever
comes next).  Each speaker would need two-way communication, so that
the copy-protection could negotiate keys.

If someone made digital headphones, you'd need a little cop, I mean a
little copy-prevention chip, in each HEADPHONE.

If someone made hearing aids that could receive wireless digital sound
(a godsend in concert halls or meeting rooms), you'd need a little
censor in each EAR.

To get these censorship chips, or the technical info needed to build a
speaker with them, my engineer friend would have to sign
nondisclosure, and sign a 50-page contract promising never to build
them into a system that could ever be used to copy music.  And the
technology in the chips would probably have a feature that would let
record companies later "self-destruct" the chip if anyone ever
discovered how to get the digital music out of it.  That is, as a
result of some teenager somewhere in the world cracking the chip's
scheme, a record or movie company would release hidden codes in their
products that when played would cause my friend's custom home-made
speakers to stop working -- permanently.

After reading a letter-to-the-editor in the Washington Post, sent by a
doctor who opposes the Hollings bills, I realized that many people
think that passing the "you must honor the 1-bit HDTV copy prevention"
measure would somehow make the world better than if the Hollings bill
was passed.  It won't.  Here's the letter:

> Hold On There a Minute, Jack!
> In response to Jack Valenti's May 1 editorial-page commentary "Stop Digital
> Piracy the DVD Way": I don't give a hoot whether or not digital video can be
> downloaded over the Internet, either now or in the future. What I do care
> about is that the computers I use in my medical laboratory practice continue
> to be designed by engineers and programmers rather than by government
> bureaucrats working as surrogates for copyright holders.
> The legislation introduced by Sen. Hollings that Mr. Valenti supports is
> arrogant and audacious, requiring the general public to both pay for and
> suffer performance degradation in order to reconfigure computing technology
> to serve the needs of the entertainment industry.
> Furthermore, it vastly exceeds the constitutional authority given Congress
> with regard to copyright regulation.
> Donn Fishbein, M.D., Ph.D.
> Coldwater, Ohio

Even if the Hollings bills die ugly deaths, but the BPDG mandate is
created by FCC and/or Congress, you'll see the exact same effect on
medical laboratory computers.  Computer monitors will only come with
copy prevention circuitry, because if they didn't, you couldn't plug
them in to computers that do copy prevention on their video outputs.
Computers will come with copy prevention on their video outputs,
because if they didn't, you wouldn't be able to plug in a PCI-bus
board to get HDTV (or play DVDs or etc).  Hard drives will come with
copy prevention, because if they didn't, software couldn't record local
TiVo-like copies of HDTV shows, for the consumer to view later, or save
because they want to see it again.

The whole system has to be seamless to implement even the SMALLEST
grain of protection ("honoring that copy prevention bit in HDTV
signals").  If the components allowed themselves to interoperate with
other components that have open interfaces with no prevention, then
the sacred bits could escape!

It's possible that mfrs would build two kinds of computers and
monitors and hard drives -- but only if people actively insisted on
buying NON COPY PREVENTED computers.  You would effectively have two
separate product lines.  The catch is that you could plug copy
prevented outboard subcomponents into an ordinary computer, and it
would work (e.g. a copy prevented monitor WILL play unencrypted
video).  But you could never plug any ordinary outboard component into
a copy prevented computer (e.g. an ordinary monitor WON'T display
video from a copy prevented video card -- the card will refuse to
talk to it).

When mfrs have to decide which product line to drop to cut costs, which
one will they drop -- the ordinary ("incompatible") one, or the copy
prevented ("compatible") one?

	John Gilmore

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/gilmoreintel.txt