Keep Your Laws Off My Media Player - The Hollings Act is too broad by Lincoln D. Stein - New Architect - November 2002
It's silly season in Congress, but isn't it always? Over the past several months, U.S. legislators have introduced an array of poorly conceived bills that threaten to maim the Internet and permanently cripple this engine of creativity. It shouldn't surprise my readers that every piece of proposed legislation is designed to protect the interests of the record and movie industries and is strongly supported by the powerful RIAA and MPAA lobbies. The Hollings Act, formally known as the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, was introduced to the Senate in March 2002 by Senator Fritz Hollings and four cosponsors, and is making its way slowly through the Senate review process. The Hollings Act would require manufacturers to incorporate FCC-approved copyright protection standards into any device that can reproduce digital content. All CD readers and writers, DVD players, MP3 players, and the new breed of hybrid CD/MP3 players would have to incorporate technology that would prevent unauthorized attempts to play or reproduce copyrighted material. The bill would also cover software-only systems that can reproduce or play digital media, such as MP3 and DVD decoders, or the software used to create and play streaming media. Further sections of the Hollings Act make it a federal crime to tamper with copy protection codes embedded in copyrighted digital media, to remove the flag indicating that a work is copyrighted, or to import noncompliant hardware and software into the United States. There's also a section of the bill designed to override the landmark court case that made the Rio MP3 player legal. What's wrong with the Hollings Act? Lots. The act is directed at what it calls "digital media devices," but the term is so ill-defined that it encompasses almost the entire computer industry. The act would certainly affect the peer-to-peer networks that are widely used for file distribution, and it might even apply to more traditional file distribution protocols, such as FTP and the Web. Hard disks, Zip drives, tape drives, and floppies are all capable of reproducing digital media. Applied broadly, the Hollings Act would force manufacturers to incorporate copyright protection standards into these devices. Static images are also a form of digital media, but graphics programs that create and display JPEG and PNG images don't currently incorporate any technology to detect potential copyright infringement. Will these file formats become illegal under the Hollings Act? Even software itself is a type of digital media. In the bad old days, software makers routinely incorporated copy protection into their products, creating an antagonistic environment in which users weren't able to make backup copies of their legally purchased software. Fortunately the software industry has decided that copy protection is a losing game, and has moved to gentler means of persuasion based on registration. It will be unfortunate if the Hollings Act forces software makers to adopt copyright management standards designed with movies and music in mind. The Hollings Act has Linux developers running scared as well. At a fundamental level, open source software doesn't play well with digital rights management because DRM solutions typically rely on some part of the software being kept secret�for example, the key needed to unlock a DVD's content scrambling system. If this secret is published in open source code, it's easy for a knowledgeable developer to circumvent it, write around it, or simply to remove the copy protection code from the source. That's why DVD makers refused to share the CSS algorithms with open source developers and then tried to sue for trade secret infringement when CSS was cracked. Under the Hollings Act, it's unclear how any open source software that could copy or distribute files would be able obtain the FCC-certification necessary for legal distribution. Interestingly, the text of the Hollings Act requires that the software portion of DRM be based on "open source code." It will be difficult to reconcile this requirement with the technical realities of DRM. Most worrisome though is the dampening effect that the Hollings Act will have on future innovation. It places the federal government's heavy hand in the midst of the most fertile part of the Internet. In trying to protect the entertainment industry's interests, the federal government would require software and hardware developers, network developers, and protocol designers to comply with a mandated security standard or risk prosecution. In the face of such a threat, who will develop the next Gnutella, Blogger, Jabber, or DAV? Who, indeed, will develop the next HTTP? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lincoln is an M.D. and Ph.D. who designs information systems for the human genome project at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. You can contact him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phil Daley < AutoDesk > http://www.conknet.com/~p_daley _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
