Archive for June, 2006

Digital Rights Management and Culture

Monday, June 12th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is all the craze these days, as companies are vying for ever more control over how we consumers use their products. Imagine those non-skip-able parts on your new DVD movie. You know them: the anti-copying schtick, the promotional advertisements for other movies you probably don’t want to watch, because you’ve already seen them a dozen times. Now imagine it was illegal to get a player that allows you to skip them. That is part of what DRM is about.

The world of television is soon moving to digital broadcasting, where those same DRM rules will apply. Let us presume that the broadcasting companies get a special flag added to the digital stream that says “you must not change channel now” and use this flag while sending commercials. This means that if you got a digital TV that allowed you to change channel despite of this flag then you would potentially be violating DRM laws. Philips has already sought a patent for doing exactly this.

In the audio world, CD publisher Sony was happily distributing a DRM system with some of their newer CDs to make sure that their CD wasn’t copied. It did this by adding what is called a filter driver to your CD-ROM device, among other things. This filter driver, apart from containing bugs, was always active, regardless of whether your Sony CD was in the drive or not. So what does it do? It tries to interfere with burning software so you might find yourself unable to burn that CD with your backups because you listened to a Sony CD sometime earlier. Apart from this there was no indication of this software, nor any way to uninstall it. Worse, this DRM that kindly allows Sony to “protect” their interests contained a bug that allowed any website to execute arbitrary code on your machine. In human terms that means Sony just opened a door for a hacker to control your system. After public outcry over this how was this corporation punished? Oh wait, they weren’t. They magnanimously promised customers who contacted them about their DRM CDs to get free non-DRM CDs. That was it.

The games industry has been doing this for year with various copy protections. One of the worse ones is the StarForce DRM software that in many cases renders the system completely unstable. Most people just attribute it to Windows being bad.

These are just a few examples of DRM things that have come up in recent years, and this will just be the beginning. We are moving to a world where it is not the laws of your country that defines what you are allowed to do. No, in the future it may very well be companies who can define how you may use your digital equipment: you may not use a CD burner once you’ve listened to this CD, you may not watch this DVD on two different players, you may not copy the song you bought online to another device than your iPod.

Do we really want companies to be able to control in detail how we may use what we buy? Would it be alright if publishers told us that it was illegal to lend a book to a friend? Let the laws define what we may, not the corporations, and don’t let the corporations write the laws. Our culture is too important to be turned into nothing more than profit on the bottom line.

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Propagandising the audience

Sunday, June 11th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

You may think of me as you please, but I have always been a fan of the Hollywood action movies like Die Hard, I, Robot, The Rock and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the Pitt and Jolie version), to name a few. Tonight we were taking a break from our studies and put on Mr. and Mrs. Smith to watch, and what pops up first? A propaganda movie by the MPA(A). A propaganda movie that you cannot skip as it utilises the non-skip-able DVD setting (which was conveniently added to the format). Of course, there are players that allow me to skip past these things, but let us leave that for another time. Let us, rather, look at the contents of this rather educating production.

We are greeted with the message that You would not steal a purse, You would not steal a movie. And finally what this property theft appeal leads up to: Downloading a pirated movie is stealing. So they’re saying that copying a movie is the equivalent of stealing property from someone, rather than what it really is: copyright infringement. Now, copyright infringement is, according to the current laws in most places, of course, also illegal, but it is not the same thing as property theft. In property theft one party gains something and another one loses it. With copyright infringement one person has something, and now the other person has it too. It’s rather like ideas in that respect. Copyright protection is basically a protection of the collective ideas represented in your work. So what is this that the movie industry is trying to insinuate? That copyright infringement should be punished as property theft? What they’re doing is feeding us falsehood. Oh but it was only meant as an allegory would be a plausible defense on their part. An allegory indeed.

Over the past centuries these interest organisations have lobbied for longer and longer copyright periods. Copyright was originally An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned set down by the British in Statute of Anne and enacted from 1709/1710. This statute provided content providers (publishers in this case) 28 years protection of their works from being copied and thereafter the work would pass into what is known as the Public Domain. Since then content providers have lobbied governments to give them longer and longer copyright protection. So what started as 28 years is now up to (hold on to your hat and loose appendages) the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. The now more liberal Statute of Anne has allowed things like Project Gutenberg to exist. Imagine we would have to wait an average of 150 years until works become available for the encouragement of learning. All there is today is encouragement for companies to make money, unfortunately.

All this comes down to, of course, is whether the laws are made in the interest of the prosperity of the people, or in the interest of the prosperity of the corporate interests that donate money to our law-makers. The interest organisations for the music, software and movie industries are all trying to change the model of copyright, not into something we get (a CD, a program, etc.), but something we lease/rent from them. Something to which we have no rights. Something where we have to pay them money for each distinct place that we use it. This will, of course, be very interesting to these people as that will make them a lot of money. To make things a bit more concrete let us imagine that I want to buy the new Evanescence CD that is coming out in October. Now, I lease this once to be able to play it on my computer. But I also want to be able to listen to it at the stereo, so I have to pay again. Oh, and I’d like to put it on my MP3-player too, so I will have to pay again. This is the content provider’s dream. Imagine all the money they will get from those pesky consumers! The losers will, of course, become the consumers. The consumers would be you and me.

Now, I am not only saying this because I am a consumer and I think what the interest organisations are doing is immoral and against the benefit of society in general. I am also a content provider. I write books and papers. I have recorded music. I would get the same benefits. The difference is that I see no need to extort my fellow people of their every penny in order for them to be allowed to read my material. Imagine if publishers from 1710 had been given the right to lifetime plus 400 years. There would be no Project Guternberg. There would not be an encouragement of learning. The public domain would contain few of the great masterpieces of this world.

This made it into a fairly long post, which I had not intended, but I think society, and in particular our politicians, need to learn that copyright is a system that gives incitement for the content providers to invest money in providing content and at the same time, providing society with an enrichment of their culture, an encouragement of learning. There will be precious little new material for anyone to learn from for a long time with lifetime plus 70 years. We are hoarding our cultural legacy from ourselves by allowing these laws to be passed. I find it sad that interest organisations and politicians run free to ruin culture like this for some more money. Sad. Fortunately I am not alone in my perspective, in particular Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is working hard in favour of returning to a copyright statute in spirit with the Statute of Anne. Limited protection for the content provider and cultural enrichment after this. Let us not sign away our culture to provide added revenue for a select group. Please?

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William Gibson

Sunday, June 4th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

Ever since I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, I have been hooked by the truly artistic writing style. His penchant for portraying a plausible, dystopian society in a setting not unlike present-day Earth, is envious. But we should not forget that his books are for the most part a commentary about contemporary issues, but you can, of course, ignore this aspect when reading them, though it does give the books an interesting other dimension to them.

A while back I took to rereading the books I had by him, and also picked up a few new ones. The long-standing classic, Neuromancer is, of course, the thing that really gathered readers for Gibson’s novels, and he hasn’t quite managed to write something that good for a long while. That is, until his latest book, Pattern Recognition, that I picked up recently. It is unique for a William Gibson book in that it is the first of his book that takes place in a contemporary setting, interweaving actual events such as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center in 2001. In the book we follow Cayce Pollard, who has an affliction that’ll make my lactose intolerance seem benign: she has allergic reactions to succesful brandings like the Michelin man. Cayce has found an avenue to exploit her curious allergy: high-level marketing consultancy. If she gets an allergic reaction, the customer has a good design.

Cayce does, of course, suffer from this allergy, so she lives in her own world, stripped of any style or fashion. She has only one hobby: the footage. The footage is mysterious segments of video that are released seemingly at random on the internet. As it has a lot of people interested one of her less-than-appealing clients, Bigend, wants to figure out who is behind the footage, and he wants Cayce to figure it out for him. Reluctantly Cayce is forced into it and is swept across Europe in a chase where it isn’t always apparent who is being chased. It is a classic William Gibson novel in style with Neuromancer where layer upon layer is added with no apparent connection, only to be completely unravelled at the end, bringing all the parts together in one big whole. One of my most-recommended Gibson books, by far.

Another William Gibson book I return to often is the short-story collection, Burning Chrome, which contains a long palette of fascinating stories. Some with more action than others. The two favourites of mine in the book are Fragments of a Hologram Rose by Gibson and The Belonging Kind that Gibson co-authored with John Shirley.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose is a meandering tale of a breakup, painted with words. It’s not that the story is great, it is actually rather benign, but it is just told in this very fascinating style that makes me reread the short-story again and again.

The other story, The Belonging Kind, is more atypical of Gibson as in it is set in what could be contemporary America or Europe. It is a fascinating tale of a rather boring and altogether uninteresting social interactions professor who hasn’t got the foggiest clue how to interact socially himself. To alleviate the boredom he visits nondescript pubs in the evenings where he drinks with himself, until, one day, he discovers something else pubcrawling a varied range of places. He discovers the belonging kind.

I still haven’t picked up a couple of the intermediaries like Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. I will have to rectify that sometime soon.

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Prince of Fire

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments

I have blogged earlier about Daniel Silva’s books, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin and The Confessor, so it was with great anticipation I picked up Prince of Fire at the bookstore last week. It continues shortly after A Death in Vienna, which I regrettably haven’t gotten my hand on yet, but once more we follow the Israeli spy Gabriel Allon as events unfold in the grander scheme of Israeli-Palestine intrigues involving the both loved and hated leader Yassir Arafat.

Once more Ari Shamron arrives to meet Mario Delvecchio, Gabriels alternate identity, and he has to flee his beloved Venice and journey home to Israel. Something he has tried not to do from the moment we first met him. Once more evil Palestine terrorists threaten the Israeli state and the prodigal son has to lead the investigation into these threats. This will be a race through history, memories and relationships throughout the history.

Despite portraying some of the transgressions committed by the Jews then this story reads somewhat more one-sided as the earlier books involving the Israeli-Palestine conflict as being almost completely pro-Israeli. This is, of course, fine in works of fiction, but it does peel off some of the Gabriel in conflict that I found very fascinating in the other novels I’ve read. This will, of course, not keep me from having a look at A Death in Vienna and the sequel The Messenger as I really enjoy Daniel Silva’s writing style. The portrayal of a spy world where not everything is pure glamour, where everything isn’t black and white, where moral superiority hardly ever belongs to anyone, where unspeakable truths are put before your eyes and you’re forced to consider whether these things might give you moral justification to do what will be done. It is quite thought provocative at any length.

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