Research and commentary on digital technologies in public life
The Texas state legislature has reportedly suspended its rules today in order to consider the Super-DMCA legislation without the usually-required five days advance notice. This looks like an attempt to get the bill passed without allowing opponents a chance to properly debate it.
The legislative hearing is expected to start around 6:00 PM (Central time) today.
Cory Doctorow writes on Cruelty to Analog about an MPAA presentation to the ARDG, the group that is trying to bring Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to analog content.
The presentation talks about a “rounding problem” that arises because of an assumption that analog DRM is unable to micromanage the use of content to the same degree that digital DRM can. When a work is converted from digital to analog form, the detailed DRM restrictions from the digital domain are supposed to be “rounded off” to some roughly equivalent analog restrictions, so that “equivalence” can be maintained between the digital and analog domains. A fight is brewing over whether to “round down” (so that the analog rules are more restrictive than the digital) or to “round up” (so that the analog rules are looser than the digital).
This debate is a wonderful illustration of how far off the rails the DRM “standardization” groups have gone. Rather than worrying about the lack of any effective digital DRM scheme, or about the lack of any effective analog DRM scheme, the group chooses instead to just assume that both exist, and to further assume that the two are incompatible. They then proceed to argue about the consequences of that incompatibility. Rather than arguing about strategy for resolving a hypothetical incompatibility between two hypothetical products, why not worry first about whether analog DRM can work at all?
There is a well-known pathology in standardization processes, in which the group argues obsessively over some trivial detail which becomes a proxy for deeper philosophical disagreements. The antidote is for somebody to yank the group back to reality by pointing out all of the deployed products that operate perfectly well without accounting for that detail. But this antidote only works when there are deployed systems that are known to work well. Perhaps it is inevitable that if you try to standardize a conjectural product category, you will become hopelessly entangled in minutiae.
My Slashdot interview was just posted. Slashdot readers asked me several interesting questions about law and technology.
Most businesses know that it’s wise to honor the values of their customers. So you’ve got to wonder what Blackboard was thinking when it sued to block a conference presentation last weekend.
Blackboard’s customers are colleges and universities. As Karl-Friedrich Lenz observes, these are organizations that hold freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry as central values. Seeking an injunction against both speech and inquiry, as Blackboard did, and making that injunction so broad, has got to rub many of Blackboard’s customers the wrong way.
Blackboard’s defensive and somewhat misleading press release may be a sign of the bind it has created for itself. The release implies that each Blackboard product either is physically secure, or relies on cryptography for protection. The two students, Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith, were reportedly going to say that the product in question used neither method of security, but was basically open to abuse by anyone who could unscrew a few screws. There could have been a debate about who was right, but Blackboard wouldn’t allow that to happen. Most observers will conclude, sensibly, that Blackboard tried to block that debate because it expected to lose it.
Like most censorship attempts, Blackboad’s strategy has backfired. They have only drawn attention to the content they tried to suppress, so that more Blackboard customers know about the students’ conclusion that Blackboard’s technology is insecure. All this, plus an affront to the values of Blackboard’s customers.
Come to think of it, Blackboard may have done a small service to educators after all – by providing an instructive example of the perils of censorship.
Two of the best sources on the RIAA vs. student lawsuits come, appropriately, from other students.
Joe Barillari, a student in my “Information Technology and the Law” course at Princeton, has written an interesting analysis of the case against his fellow Princeton student Dan Peng. [Annoying disclaimer: Joe doesn’t speak for me; I don’t speak for Joe; neither of us speaks for Princeton.]
Zack Rosen, a student at Illinois, has written a primer on file sharing/searching technologies. He also describes how the “Napster-like” functionality, on which RIAA builds their contributory infringement case against the students, bears a very close similarity to search ffunctionality provided by Microsoft in Windows.
