My new Information Week column is called “High-Definition Video — Bad For Consumers, Bad For Hollywood” and it explains the way that HDTV has become a Trojan horse for smuggling DRM into your living room — and how the broadcast industry doesn’t know how to make a decent HD show:

The new HD technologies include anti-user nasties like “renewability” — the ability to remotely disable some or all of the device’s features without your permission. If someone, somewhere, figures out how to use your DVD burner to make copies of Hollywood movies, they can switch off *everyone’s* burner, punishing a limitless number of innocents to get at a few guilty parties.

The HD DRM systems also include gems like “selectable output control” — wherein? some programs will refuse to be played on some devices. As you flip up and down the dial, parts of your home theater will go dark. Creepier still is “authorized domain” — the ability to flag content so that it can only be played within a “household,” where the studios get to define what is and isn’t a valid living arrangement.

On top of these restrictions are the punishing “robustness” regimes that come with HD DRM systems. These are the rules manufacturers have to follow to ensure that the anti-user stuff in their devices isn’t compromised. It’s a requirement to add expensive armor to products that stop a device’s owner from opening up her device to see what’s inside, and make changes. That’s bad news for open source, of course, since open source is all about being able to look at, modify and republish the code that runs a device.

The SciFi Channel’s Sci-Fi Weekly has just public a long interview with me about science fiction, copyright, and the future:

What were you trying to accomplish by naming your story after Asimov’s famous story collection?

Doctorow: I was trying to do couple things with the title. I hope that it served a lot of different purposes. First of all it’s not Asimov’s title; I, Claudius is the title, then it was Eando Binder’s title, then Asimov’s title, and now it’s my title.

I certainly wanted to make it explicit that I was talking about Asimov. I’d done an assignment for Wired Magazine on the movie, and I’d gone back and reread all of the Robot books. At the time that I [first] read them, I hadn’t really noticed how thin the social stuff was, how thin the socioeconomics stuff was, that there is this given that somewhere some wise men in white coats had figured out what robots should do and shouldn’t do. And that apparently they figured out to impose their will on everyone else for a period lasting millennia. So I wanted to call out to that.

And finally there has been a controversy in science fiction about whether or not appropriating titles was or wasn’t cool that arose out of Ray Bradbury’s critique of Michael Moore calling his movie Fahrenheit 9/11. He argued that it was rude. You know, I don’t think John W. Campbell asked Eando Binder if he minded if Asimov’s collection would be called I, Robot, and certainly all of the Nightfalls out there didn’t come with permission. I think it’s far from rude; I think it’s the essence of free expression that we take our ideas and build atop them. There was a great passage in Judy Merrill’s … Hugo Award-winning autobiography in which she talks about how [she and her writer friends] all used to live in this big geek house together, and they would write each other’s stories. They would write under the same pseudonym and borrow ideas from each other and build on each other rapidly. When you look through the history of the field, that’s really a big piece of it, and I wanted to be a part of that tradition of stealing from the best.

Last February, I gave a keynote on copyright and DRM at the LIFT conference in Geneva, joining speakers like Euan Semple, Hugh Macleod, Robert Scoble, Bruce Sterling, Regine Debatty, Jasmina Tesanovic, and many others. The videos from all the talks have just been posted on Google Video,
including mine — some good viewing there.

Aki Kyozoku, a fan of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has converted the entire text of the book to a poster that depicts the type and graphics from the book’s cover. By shading the type and inserting spaces in it, Aki was able to use the type itself as pixels in a giant bitmap that you can print on your favorite large-format printer and stick on your wall. Man, that’s cool!

628K PDF Link

Michael Ayers, the Toshiba lawyer who negotiates their DRM deals, will give a free public talk at the University of Southern California next Tuesday at 7PM. Michael started out as an engineer and switched to law. He was there when the anti-copying standards were set for DVDs, DVD audio, digital TV, Secure Digital cards, and he is the president of the DTLA consortium, which licenses out the DTCP control-ware from Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony, and Toshiba.

Michael is the chair of the “Business Group” for AACS, the technology that controls users of Blu-Ray and DVD-HD.

Your home and life are increasingly full of devices that seek to control, rather than enable you, and Michael is part of the negotiations for how those devices will function. As the representative of a technology company, he usually bats for the user, but we’re still getting devices with more and more restrictions.

Michael has generously agreed to speak to my class and then give a public lecture, and I’m really grateful to him for it. He’s always been candid, reasonable and level-headed in the DRM negotiations I worked with him at, and even when we’ve come down on opposite sides of the debate, I’ve been impressed with his honesty and flexibility.

When: September 19, 7PM-9PM
University of Southern California, Annenberg School, 3502 Watt Way
Room 207