On November 1, a story broke about certain copy-protected Sony BMG Music music CDs surreptitiously installing software on the hard drives of Windows computers. This software, intended to control the number of copies a legitimate user of the CD was allowed to make of the original (an increasingly common practice in the intellectual property business), used a strategy known in the computing world as a "rootkit" to hide the location and presence of this installed software. Rootkits are typically considered to be devious mechanisms for computer processes and files to be "cloaked" from the operating system itself, and therefore most software tools which might be utilized to detect such undesirable organisms as viruses and "Trojan Horses."
The rootkit was discovered by a Windows consultant who posted his discovery of the rootkit (using special rootkit detecting software) on his weblog on October 31.
The special music CDs (not conventional audio CDs, but CDs which require installation of a software "player" on a Windows computer to be played) did not disclose to the purchaser that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software was being installed on their computer. Furthermore, it appears that the rootkit process uses a small but tangible amount of processing time whether the music CD is being played or not - essentially costing the user some computing power.
Within days, malicious virus authors exploited the rootkit's already-hidden nature for their own purposes, cloaking their viral mechanisms on computers already "infected" with the Sony DRM software (actually written by a British company, First 4 Internet).
The backlash has been enormous.Sony released free software to detect the presence of the rootkit on November 2. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against Sony, citing damage to users' computers, poor consumer disclosure and deceptive trade practices among the allegations.
Sony had been distributing these CDs for at least 8 months. Friday Sony announced that it will terminate production of the CDs. Microsoft has announced that it will update its malicious and spyware detection tools to detect and eliminate the rootkit.
DRM issues will continue to intrude upon our lives. I've been commenting for a couple of years now that just as we enter a technological era when consumers could have the best media experience of all time (consuming, making and distributing print, audio and video), that very nature of this digital revolution (especially that media can be perfectly duplicated and rapidly distributed) is so upsetting content distributors and producers that we can expect only to have hobbled tools and media.
As disturbing are legal trends, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998. This law challenges, and in many cases, explicitly prevents "Fair Use" of many activities, such as making a backup copy of a software or music CD which a user has legitimately purchased, or simply recording a program from the television to watch at your convenience. In many cases, this actiivty is specifically illegal under the DMCA. "Fair Use" activities, such as making a recording of a television program to give to a friend or relative to view, are becoming increasingly threatened as we enter the age of digital tape and disc recorders.
Recorder manufacturers are already being pressured by organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or distribution studios into making consumer recorders into incorporating such tactics as which only allow playing of discs recorded by the purchaser of the DVD recorder on that same machine. More frightening is that its possible for content providers to, for example, subsequently decide that a recording that a consumer made of a show aired on television will no longer play. So a program you recorded yourself, on a recordable disc for which you paid money, would simply stop working. This information identifying what recordings could or couldn't play might be received into your DVD player via phone call or embedded in television signals. Let's say in this fictional example that a weekly automatic phone call from your DVD recorder (our TiVo makes phone calls for programming info) downloaded a database which indicated which programs it could and could not play. Your unplugging that phone cord to prevent that database from updating - in order to extend the time that your programs might play, and therefore circumventing a DRM mechanism - might just be in violation of the DMCA, and therefore a Federal felony.
As ill-conceived as the DMCA is the Federal Communication Commission's " Broadcast Flag" mandate. This provides television providers a mechanism to "flag" any program (by embedding a tiny "bit" within the digital television stream) with viewer permissions. The FCC could (and has already) mandate that any newly manufactured recording devices (hard disk, DVD, digital tape) sold in the U.S. incorporate the mechanisms which honor these flags. Here are some possible attributes - some of which I've heard, some which I'm speculating:
-inhibit recording of any kind on any device honoring Broadcast Flag
-allow playback for a limited number of times
-allow playback for a limited duration after the initial air date
-allow playback for a limited duration after the initial playback
-allow only standard-definition recording, even if the program is in high-definition
-delete from hard drive at an arbitrary date provided by broadcaster
-allow one recordable disc copy only - the disc will not duplicate
Note that for the last item to be enforced, both "set-top" DVD recorders and computer-based DVD "burners" would have to support Broadcast Flag infrastructure, so that copies could be "serialized." Furthermore, I've seen mention of uniquely IDed recorders being used to control whether copies were being used by the original owner or distributed to others. This suggests that all future media recorders will be uniquely identifiable as being recorded on a mechanism. Furthermore, evidence suggests that this "fingerprint" of the original recorder could be encoded into subsequent copies, leaving a "breadcrumb trail" in every copy ever made. Which means that you, the consumer, might be held personally responsible (and possibly in violation of a Federal Law) if a copy of something recorded in your home ends up in the wrong place. Pretty scary stuff.
But as scary as that stuff is, I'm extremely annoyed that in order to "protect" themselves from (perceived or real) piracy issues, content providers are prepared to take us 30 years into the past and prohibit consumers from "time-shifting" - or recording a program to watch at our convenience. On a hard-drive based recorder such as a TiVo - where there might be no normal way to extract the program from the hard drive (though there are many hobby hacking solutions), broadcasters think it makes sense to prevent TiVo users from recording programs. I can tell you that as TiVo users, less than 5 per cent of the television we watch is live. We have no idea when the programs we watch even air. If broadcasters prohibit us from recording their shows, we just won't see them. And this isn't just a threat - the FCC made a ruling in July that it was illegal to manufacture a Digital Television (DTV) tuner which did NOT have support for this kind of DRM. Thankfully, special interest groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation rallied to fight this FCC ruling, and got DC Circuit Court of Appeals to unanimously overturn the ruling, arguing that: "the FCC lacked authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal."
http://www.eff.org/
There's a truth here that honest citizens will be inconvenienced or even lose some personal freedoms as a result of these attempts to protect commercial interests. That part of the (worldwide) population which is responsible for massively profitable piracy will NOT be thwarted by measures such as the DMCA or Broadcast Flag - there are clever people on the dark side as well as the light. Ideas about how media content makes money will have to change - perhaps by a radical change in the purchase/pricing model, or by providing some unique value to legitimate purchasers. There will always be people who want and get something for nothing. Penalizing those citizens who are willing to pay for their content isn't the answer.
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