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Hard times for software highs
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Hackers have it. The industry wants to take it away. And someone's got to win. But who really has the right to code?
by MICHAEL CITROME
When most people encounter a flaw or a problem with a piece of technology, they see it as an annoyance to be avoided. When a coder, engineer or other technologically proficient follower of the hacker ethic runs into the same snag, they see it as a challenge to be conquered.
Whether it's a computing device that needs more memory than what it comes with out of the box, or a DVD drive that doesn't support Linux (the hacker OS of choice), a homebrewed solution is in order.
Normally, this is all well and good, basement-developed technologies have been the coal in the furnace of the information age. But recently and increasingly these same innovations have been causing both commercial and legal problems for industries that previously would have had nothing to do with a computer geek in his bedroom lab.
From basement to big time
The reason for this is twofold. First, computing has advanced to a point where other industries--primarily entertainment, whose bread and butter are creating content, whether it's music, movies or video games--are suddenly dependent on the same technologies that coders and other geeks have perfected. And they aren't willing to give up any control of their product or distribution mechanisms.
The other reason is that the technologies, mostly software programs that the "geeks" have created are, via the Internet, far more easily distributed and used than ever before. This results in the average person being able to do things with computers they've never been able to do before. And since many of these programs lend themselves well to piracy--like MP3s--it's easy to see how the entertainment industry is up in arms.
But rather than only going after the people actually pirating their product, the entertainment industry has been prosecuting companies and individuals creating software that have legitimate, or at best harmless uses, because they don't want people using them for piracy.
This is a bit like suing manufacturers of tape recorders because their products could be used to copy records, which actually happened. The availability of tape recorders should be proof enough to see who won.
Yet the industry, armed with titanium lawyers, has been suing altruistic programmers, who rarely if ever get paid for their efforts--Napster excepted--and seeking to remove their creations from distribution. So far, each ruling has created more questions than answers. But still, one main question remains. Who has the right to code?
Case in point: DeCSS
Nobody's calling DVD a bad format for video. That's not what the debate was about. It's pretty much accepted that DVD is great--so great, in fact, that the people running Linux wanted very much to be able to watch DVD movies on their computers. DVD movie software was available for Windows and Mac OS, so why not for Linux, they asked.
The reason lies in the DVD encoding structure. DVDs are copy protected, so not just anyone can make an exact copy. This is accomplished using an encryption key assigned by the DVD Consortium, the industry group that regulates the DVD standard. Without getting into boring technical details, you need a key to play back DVDs, and you have to be an authorized DVD manufacturer to get one. The bottom line is that unless you're authorized to make DVD hardware, you can't get a key, and no one was making DVD playback software for Linux.
So one inventive hacker got hold of a key that was foolishly left unencrypted by a DVD manufacturer, and created a program that strips DVD video of its encryption, allowing it to play using software freely available for Linux. This software, called DeCSS, after the CSS encoding scheme used for DVD, worked very well.
In fact, it worked a little too well, because suddenly people were ripping off video from DVDs and sending it to their friends, something that wasn't possible before.
This was a pretty bitter taste of their own medicine for the DVD Consortium, which includes several major movie studios.
Because they ignored the market segment most likely to be able to get around copy protection schemes, they suddenly had the potential of large-scale video piracy on their hands. So they did all they could do. They sued.
The industry sought an injunction against the distribution of DeCSS, and they got it, at first. Not that it would make any difference. In the age of the Internet, trying to stop a small freeware program from being distributed is like trying to not think about polar bears. Once it's out there, there's no stopping it.
Meanwhile, lawsuits are going out against anyone with a copy of DeCSS on their Web site, including venerable hacktivist Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600.com, an important site devoted to the science and culture of computer hacking.
Case in point: peer-to-peer file sharing
An idea as old as the Internet, but simplified greatly by recent software ideas, peer-to-peer file sharing can be a very frightening concept to anyone who creates content for a living.
Here's a system where content--music, movies or anything else--can be distributed among many people, quickly, and with no central source to shut down. This type of system existed in a user-friendly form for a long time as a program called Hotline, which has a dedicated following among Mac users and many PC fans as well, and a Web site called scour.net. But it only achieved major notoriety with a dorm-room-toy-gone-commercial-phenomenon called Napster.
A lot has been written about Napster and, depending on whom you believe, it's either the death rattle or the horn of plenty of the music industry. But that's Napster, the "industry sensation." We're concerned with Napster, the software program.
Napster is really a very simple, but brilliant piece of software. It's basically a file-sharing tool. You send a list of your files to a central server, and so does everyone else, and you can search that server for the file you want. It then connects you to the person who has what you need. This exists in real life too; it's called the Yellow Pages.
But Napster is enhanced with some MP3-specific features, such as the ability to display the length, bit rate and, of course, artist and song title of any particular file. That's where things got complicated.
Of course, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the major industry group of the music biz, wouldn't have gotten involved if it was just a bunch of nerds trading Devo bootlegs in their MIT dorm rooms. Napster is easy enough to use that anyone could be proficient with it, and soon it wasn't just nerdy esoterica being flung through the ether, it was N' Sync singles and Eminem albums, the bread and butter of the big record companies.
It was this lost potential revenue that made bigwigs like Univeral's Edgar Bronfman Jr. refer to Napster as being "like the Old World principle called slavery" in a speech at Real Conference 2000 last May in San Jose. This wasn't an ethical issue.
Napster's many tangles with the court are well known. Founder Shawn Fanning has received the rock star treatment, appearing on magazine covers alongside the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bill Clinton.
All this over software that really didn't do anything new, just put a new spin on existing technology, because it threatens the distribution model the record companies have been building since the invention of the phonograph at the turn of the last century.
Case in point: emulators
Emulators are one phenomenon where the industry, in this case the big video-game companies, Nintendo, Sega and Sony, have a bit of moral higher ground. In order to emulate their video-game systems, programmers have to lift bits of code from their machines.
Now, no argument can be made that Nintendo is losing money by having people emulate their defunct NES platform, nor by copying Gameboy games that haven't been on the market since 1991, but they do have a right to their code.
Emulator authors have gotten around this problem by designing their programs to only run when a "system ROM," a file that contains the operating instructions for a video-game console, is placed in the folder with the emulator. The idea being that using this technique, the emulator code is free of anything created by the original designers of the game system.
The result, however, is that sites have the system ROMs and often hundreds of games available for download right next to the emulators, with only a disclaimer stating something like, "Do not download unless you own the original system or cartridge" as warning.
Most companies have backed off of emulation sites, not caring that these games, which represent no new revenue, are being distributed, or glad that someone still cares enough about the old games to keep their memory alive. Still, the occasional lawsuit emerges, especially with companies like Nintendo or Sega, who want to keep their intellectual property safe. They may not care about the old games, but they certainly don't want anyone appropriating Mario or Sonic The Hedgehog.
Future litigations
What can be expected from the future? New technologies, certainly, followed by new ways of subverting them, whether for good, evil, or just mischievous hacker curiosity.
The entertainment industry knows that no matter how good their copy-protection schemes are, they'll always be broken. So rather than working harder, they've hired more lawyers.
What remains to be seen is whether the right to code will be preserved, or if court rulings will create a government-backed thought-police that will tell us not only where to listen to the next Backstreet Boys CD, but also how.
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