There were two competing visions at the dawn of the modern digital era: in one camp, you had people who saw computers as a way to empower people to push back against corporate and state control; in the other camp, there were the people who wanted to use computers to transfer power from the public to corporations or governments.
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I've always been baffled by the technologists who pursued control over liberation: surely their own formative experiences were of the liberatory power of technology. After experiencing that power, how could these Vichy nerds lend their skills to the project of forging digital shackles?
https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/12/redeeming-hackers/#origin-stories
And yet, there they were, from the earliest days.
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Back in 2017, Redditor /u/vadermeer was browsing a Seattle thrift-shop and unearthed a trove of early internal documents from #Apple's #SSAFE project, an early, doomed DRM project from 1979:
The files (now hosted at the @internetarchive) are a chronicle of the battle between technologists pursuing user liberation and technologists who want to use computers to control their users.
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@internetarchive There are some great cameos from Woz:
https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject
SSAFE bombed, but the fight raged on for decades and rages on still. I've been in the thick of it for more than 20 years - literally. My first day on the job for @eff, back in 2002, was spent attending the inaugural meeting of the #BroadcastProtectionDiscussionGroup (#BPDG), an inter-industry conspiracy to put all computers in chains, forever:
https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-i-3395769891b0
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The BPDG's mission was to create a standard for a #BroadcastFlag a single bit that would be included in the headers for video files. If the flag was present, any device that encountered the video would have to restrict its playback, checking to see whether and under what circumstances that playback could occur.
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In order to make this work, the group - an alliance of giant corporations from consumer electronics, IT, broadcast/cable/satellite and movies - would get a friendly lawmaker (Billy Tauzin, one of the dirtiest Congressmen who ever held office) to pass a law that required anyone building a video-capable device to seek out and respond to the flag.
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As part of this proposal, all video-capable devices would also need to be "resistant to end-user modification" - that is, they'd have to have enough #DigitalRightsManagement (#DRM) technology to trigger #Section1201 of the #DigitalMilleniumCopyrightAct (#DMCA), which banned removing copyright locks on penalty of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.
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Strip away all the acronyms and obfuscation and here's what that meant: if this group got their way, every computer would only run proprietary software (no #FreeSoftware/#OpenSource allowed) and if you tried to reverse-engineer it to change it to do your bidding *in any way*, you could be sent to prison for five years.
Under this system, whatever restrictions the manufacturer imposed on the use of their computer-enabled products would be the final word.
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It would be a felony for a rival to make a tool that plugged into their system and let you do stuff the manufacturers blocked, even if that stuff was perfectly legal.
For example, under this system, distributing ad-blockers would be a felony.
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If the manufacturer designed a computer - any computer, whether or not it was used for video; the standard was video-*capable* not video-*intended* - so that the browser used the OS's DRM to prevent ad-blocking, bypassing it would be a crime.
At the time, we warned that giving manufacturers the power to restrict how you configured your own digital products would lead them to abuse that power - not to prevent copyright infringement, but to shift value from you to them.
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The temptation would be irresistable, especially if the companies knew they could use the law to destroy rivals who fixed the anti-features in their products.
Sometimes, this was dismissed as fearmongering, with company insiders insisting that they knew their colleagues to be good and honorable people who wouldn't ever abuse this power. I expected that: no one is the villain of their own story, and we are all prone to inflated assessments of our power to resist #MoralHazard.
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But there was another response to our activism, one that was far more telling: "Yes, we are going to take away all the features you get with your digital media and sell them back to you one click at a time. So what?"
These people were in thrall to a specific ideology: the neoliberal doctrine that markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources, and anything that isn't a market can be improved by turning it into one.
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That's the brain-worms that leads "entrepreneurs" to flood the entire IRS switchboard with thousands of auto-dialers and then auction off the right to be bridged into a call when someone picks up:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq
It's the same species of brain-worms that causes "entrepreneurs" to make apps that let people vacating a public parking spot to sell off the right to park there next:
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It's the same species of brain-worms that causes "entrepreneurs" to make fake bookings for every hot table at every restaurant in town and then auction off the right to dine:
https://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-person-in-san-francisco-for-a-day/
In the case of digital media, these brain-worms manifested as the certainty that we get *too many rights* when we buy or subscribe to digital media. The argument goes:
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* When you buy a book or movie or song or game, you may not want the right to sell it on the used market, or give it away, or re-read or re-watch or re-listen to it;
* Because the only way to get media is to buy it outright, you might be paying more than you need to for that media;
* Perhaps the seller would offer you a discount on a book you could only read once, or Christmas movie you could only watch in July;
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* The blunt instrument of sale means that there are lots of discount offers that never get made, so there are lots of people with less money to spend who are excluded from the market.
Put that way, it sounds reasonable, and indeed, in the margins, there have been some successes from the ability to transform an unconditional sale to a conditional license.
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You can "buy" streaming movies on Youtube for $10, or "rent" for $3; you can pay $10/mo for ad-free Spotify, $5/mo for Spotify with some ads, or $0/mo for ad-heavy Spotify.
But these are exceptions. Most of the pre-digital offers aren't available at any price: you could buy a DVD and keep it forever, even if you never went back to the store again. If you "buy" a video on Prime or YouTube and then cancel your subscription and delete your account, you lose your "purchase."
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If you buy a print book, you can lend it out or give it away to a friend or a library or a school. Ebooks come with contractual prohibitions on resale, and whether an ebook can be loaned is at the mercy of publishers, and not a feature you can give up in exchange for a discount.
For brain-wormed market trufans, the digital media dream was our nightmare. It was something I called "the #UrinaryTractInfection #BusinessModel."
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With non-DRM media, all the value flowed in a healthy gush: you could buy a CD, rip it to your computer, use it as a ringtone or as an alarmtone, play it in any country on any day forever.
With DRM, all that value would dwindle from a steady stream to a burning, painful dribble: every feature would have a price-tag, and every time you pressed a button on your remote, a few cents would be deducted from your bank-account ("Mute feature: $0.01/minute").
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Of course, there was no market for the right to buy a book but not the right to loan that book to someone else. Instead, giving sellers the power to unilaterally confiscate the value that we would otherwise get with our purchases led them to do so, selling us less for more.
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The Broadcast Flag was actually adopted by then-FCC chairman Michal Powell, so we sued him, along with our allies at Public Knowledge and the American Library Association, and kicked his ass, and the Broadcast Flag died in 2005:
https://www.eff.org/cases/ala-v-fcc
But the dream of the Broadcast Flag never died. All the streaming apps on your phone come with the same restrictions that the Broadcast Flag would have imposed on over-the-air videos.
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EFF established that the FCC and Hollywood don't control your TiVo - you do. The FCC's "broadcast flag" mandate would have given copyright holders and the government a veto over development and use of digital television tuners. Only technologies crippled by copy protection would have been legal. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded, as EFF and a coalition of public interest groups had argued, that the FCC lacked authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal.
It's *much* worse on your big screen. Your cable receiver is a gigantic, energy-sucking, wallet-draining piece of shit; the average US household spends $200 on these clunky, insecure devices, and every attempt to #UnlockTheBox has been thwarted by Hollywood and the Copyright Office:
The UTI business-model didn't take hold in most markets, but it's alive and well in your cable box.
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Months of aggressive lobbying by the MPAA and its allies at the Copyright Office gave them the result they desired Update: a timeline of events based on the Copyright Office e-mails is here. In the current debate over cable set-top box competition, content and cable industries worked together to...
That box is *mandatory*, and modifying it runs afoul of DMCA 1201, meaning you can go to prison for five years for helping someone unfuck their cable box.
Back when PVRs like Tivo entered the market, viewers were as excited about being able to skip ads as broadcasters and cable
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operators were furious about it. The industry has treated ignoring or skipping ads as a form of theft since the invention of the first TV remote control, which was condemned as a tool of piracy, since it enabled viewers to easily change the channel when ads came on.
The advent of digital TV meant that cable boxes could implement DRM, ban ad-skipping, and criminalize the act of making a cable box that restored the feature.
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But early cable boxes didn't ban ad-skipping, because the cable industry knew that people would be slow to switch to digital TV if they lost this beloved feature.
Instead, the power to block ads was a sleeper agent, a Manchurian Candidate that lurked in your cable box until the cable operators decided you were sufficiently invested in their products that they could take away this feature.
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This week, Sky UK started warning people who pressed the skip-ad button on their cable remotes that they would be billed an extra £5/month if they fast-forwarded past an ad. The UTI business model is back, baby - feel the burn!
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/sky-warns-customers-charged-5-25644831
This was the utterly foreseeable consequence of giving vendors the power to change how their devices worked after they sold it to you, under conditions that criminalized rivals who made products to change them back.
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Britons ever ever shall be slaves. What a country.
Cory Doctorow
Kevin Russell