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DRM and the Regulatory Ratchet

March 17, 2003 by

Regular readers know that one of my running themes is the harm caused when policy makers don’t engage with technical realities. One of the most striking examples of this has to do with DRM (or copy-restriction) technologies. Independent technical experts agree almost universally that DRM is utterly unable to prevent the leakage of copyrighted material onto file sharing networks. And yet many policy-makers act as if DRM is the solution to the file-sharing problem.

The result is a kind of regulatory ratchet effect. When DRM seems not to be working, perhaps it can be rescued by imposing a few regulations on technology (think: DMCA). When somehow, despite the new regulations, DRM still isn’t working, perhaps what is needed is a few more regulations to backstop it further (think: broadcast flag). When even these expanded regulations prove insufficient, the answer is yet another layer of regulations (think: consensus watermark). The level of regulation ratchets up higher and higher – but DRM still doesn?t work.

The advocates of regulation argue at each point that just one more level of regulation will solve the problem. In a rational world, the fact that they were wrong last time would be reason to doubt them this time. But if you simply take on faith that DRM can prevent infringement, the failure of each step becomes, perversely, evidence that the next step is needed. And so the ratchet clicks along, restricting technical progress more and more, while copyright infringement goes on unabated.

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Online Porn and Bad Science

March 14, 2003 by

Declan McCullagh reports
on yesterday’s House Government Reform Committee hearings on porn and
peer-to-peer systems. (I’m sure there is some porn on these systems,
as there is in every place where large groups of people gather.)
There’s plenty to chew on in the story; Frank Field says it “sounds
like a nasty meeting.”

But I want to focus on the factual claims made by one witness. Declan writes:

Randy Saaf, president of P2P-tracking firm MediaDefender, said his
investigations of child pornography on P2P networks found over 321,000
files “that appeared to be child pornography by their names and file
types,” and said that “over 800 universities had files on their
networks that appeared to be child pornography.”

But MediaDefender, and one of the government studies released on
Thursday, reviewed only the file names and not the actual contents of
the image files. A similar approach used in a 1995 article [i.e., the
now-notorious Rimm study – EWF] that appeared in the Georgetown
University law journal drew strong criticism from academics for having
a flawed methodology that led to incorrect estimates of the amount of
pornography on the Internet.

Characterizing a file as porn based on its name alone is obviously
lame, if your goal is to make an accurate estimate of how much porn is
out there. (And that is the goal, isn’t it?)

It’s no excuse to say that it’s infeasible to sample 321,000 files
by hand to see if they are really porn. Because if you actually care
whether 321,000 is even close to correct, you can examine a small
random sample of the files. If you sample, say, ten randomly chosen
files and only five of them are really porn, then you can be pretty
sure that 321,000 is far wrong. There’s no excuse for not doing this,
if your goal is to give the most accurate testimony to Congress.

UPDATE (8:30 AM, March 18): According to a Dawn Chmielewski story at the San Jose Mercury News, a government study found that 42% of files found on Kazaa via “search terms known to be associated with child porn” were actually child porn.

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Too Late

March 13, 2003 by

Julian Bigelow, who was chief engineer on the IAS computer (the architectural forerunner of today’s machines) died about three weeks ago at the age of 89. Today I learned where he had lived.

For the last seven years I sat at the breakfast table each morning and looked out at the red house behind mine. I never knew – until it was too late – that the man who lived there was one of the pioneers of my field.

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Grimmelmann on the Berkeley DRM Conference

March 12, 2003 by

James Grimmelmann at LawMeme offers a typically insightful and entertaining summary of the recent Berkeley DRM Conference. Here’s my favorite part:

And thus, the sixty-four dollar question: Is any of this [DRM technology] really going to work? The question tends to come up about once per panel; most of the panelists do their best to avoid dealing with it. The techies are split. The ones who go to great pains to say that they don’t speak for their companies say “no, DRM is a pipe dream.” The ones who don’t include these disclaimers either avoid the question or say “well, we’re doing our best.” The content industry reps treat effective DRM as almost a foregone conclusion. It must exist, because if it doesn’t, well, that would be too horrible a future to contemplate.

The lawyers in attendance, strangely enough, don’t seem to care whether DRM can work. I would have thought that the technical feasibility of effective mass-market DRM was the critical threshold question, but apparently not. I suppose it’s because they’re so accustomed to speaking in hypotheticals.

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Reader Replies on Congestion and the Commons

March 11, 2003 by

Thanks to all of the readers who responded to my query about why the Internet’s congestion control mechanisms aren’t destroyed by selfish noncompliance. Due to the volume of responses, I can’t do all of you credit here, but I’ll do my best to summarize.

Jordan Lampe, Grant Henninger, and David Spalding point out that “Internet accelerator” utilizes (like these) do exist, but they don’t seem to come from mainstream vendors. Users may be leery of some of these products or some of these vendors. Wim Lewis suggests that these utilities may work by opening multiple connections to download material in parallel, which probably qualifies as a way of gaming the system to get more than one’s “fair share” of bandwidth.

Many readers argue that the incentive to cheat is less than I had suggested.

Aaron Swartz, Russell Borogove, and Kevin Marks argue that it’s not so easy to cheat the congestion control system. You can’t just transmit at full speed, since you don’t want to oversaturate any network links with your own traffic. Still, I think that it’s possible to get some extra bandwidth by backing off more slowly than normal, and by omitting certain polite features such as the so-called “slow start” rule.

Aaron Swartz, Wim Lewis, Mark Gritter, and Seth Finkelstein argue that most congestion happens at the endpoints of the Net: either at the link connecting directly to the server, or at the “last mile” link to the user’s desktop. These links are not really shared, since they exist only for the benefit of one party (the server or the user, respectively); so the bandwidth you gained by cheating would be stolen only from yourself.

Carl Witty and Karl-Friedrich Lenz argue that most of the relevant Net activity consists of downloads from big servers, so these server sites are the most likely candidates for cheating. Big servers have a business incentive to keep the Net running smoothly, so they are less likely to cheat.

Mark Gritter argues that most Net connections are short-lived and so don’t give congestion control much of a chance to operate, one way or the other.

All of these arguments imply that the incentive to cheat is not as large as I had suggested. Still, if the incentive is still nonzero, at least for some users, we would expect to see more cheating than we do.

Russell Borogove and John Gilmore argue that if cheating became prevalent, ISPs and backbone providers could deploy countermeasures to selectively drop cheaters’ packets, thereby lowering the benefit of cheating. This is plausible, but it doesn’t explain the apparent lack of cheating we see. The greedy strategy for users is to cheat now, and then stop cheating when ISPs start fighting back. But users don’t cheat much now.

Wim Lewis and Carl Witty suggest that if we’re looking for cheaters, we might look first at users who are already breaking or stretching the rules, such as porn sites or peer-to-peer systems.

Finally, Mark Gritter observes that defections do happen now, though in indirect ways. Some denial of service attacks operate by causing congestion, and some protocols related to streaming video or peer-to-peer queries appear to bend the rules. Perhaps the main vehicle for cheating will be through new protocols and services and not by modification of existing ones.

Thanks to all of you for an amazing demonstration of the collective mind of the Net at work.

Ultimately, I think there’s still a mystery here, though it’s smaller than I originally imagined.

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