The Future of Mobility Will Embrace Copying (and Water Won't Get
Any Less Wet, Either)

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

For MOTOFRWD

--

Start with the basics:

Phone networks are computer networks, and computer networks are
copying machines. That's what a network is: a system for copying
bits from one register to another, from one bus to another, from
one place to another. The more powerful the network is, the
better it is at copying. A good network is one that copies well.
A bad network is one that copies poorly.

Yet there are those who would have us believe that the future of
mobility is about phone networks where copying doesn't work all
the time. If you take a picture with your phone, it will
seamlessly move to another person's phone. But if you download a
Hollywood movie to your phone, its bits will be imbued with some
kind of magical huhu that keeps it from being copied to someone
else's phone.

This is ridiculous, bordering on willful stupidity. A belief in a
future where computer networks aren't as good at copying is as
ridiculous as a belief in a future where water is less wet.

The history of mobility is the history of the loss of control by
rightsholders -- and increase in revenue to rightsholders.
There's a species of blowhard who dismisses the advocates of
file-sharing as the "information wants to be free" crowd, but
that blowhard never mentions the other half of the equation:
"information wants to be expensive."

Here's how information can be both free and expensive at once:
When the commercial radio came along, the musicians of the day
decried it as a tool of piracy, one that would bankrupt them by
emptying the music halls into the living rooms, where any family
that could afford a radio would get all the music they wanted for
free by twiddling a dial. Musicians asked the radio manufacturers
to build a radio that was less good at receiving broadcasts --
one where the only listeners would be those who paid the price of
admission.

But no one built a less-good radio. A radio is a machine for
receiving broadcasts, after all. A company that built a less-good
radio and tried to compete in the marketplace would be engaged in
suicidal idiocy.

Instead, they built ever-better radios, and tried all kinds of
crazy business-models. The one they settled on is pretty freaky:
they created a new form of statistical math that was used to
figure out approximately how many people were listening at any
given moment, and they got actors with baritone voices to talk
about how good various brands of soap were, and they got Congress
to let them get around the anti-trust statutes, and when the dust
settled, this crazy system was paying a thousand times more money
to a thousand times more artists.

The information was free: any radio station could play any song
without getting permission from anyone. The information was
expensive: every airplay generated unheard-of wealth for the
composers whose work was being aired.

#

The magic anti-copying huhu trades under the technical name
"Digital Rights Management" or "DRM." DRM is a technological
pipe-dream that is utterly incapable of preventing the
indiscriminate redistribution of bits.

Here's how real security works. In real security, you have a
sender, a receiver and an attacker. The attacker is assumed to be
capable of intercepting the secret message, and assumed to be
familiar with the system used to scramble it, but the attacker is
assumed to lack the keys necessary to turn the scrambled message
into an unscrambled message. The sender and recipient have the
keys, the attacker doesn't.

In the DRM fantasy, the attacker is also the recipient. Hollywood
gives you a scrambled movie and a key for unscrambling it, but
Hollywood fantasizes that it can keep your device from getting
access to that key except on its terms. For example, it doesn't
want you to get the key to make a copy that you send to a buddy,
but it doesn't care if you get the key in order to watch the
movie on your own device.

This always fails. The device is in your possession and if you're
a bad guy you can get it to give up the keys, even if only after
bludgeoning it into submission with an  electron-tunneling
microscope. Once one person has made a copy that isn't scrambled,
she can use the network -- the copying machine -- to distribute
copies to people whose technical chops extend no farther than
googling for the cracked versions of the latest releases.

So why do companies keep sinking money into AAC, OMA, Blu-Ray,
CSS, Macrovision, FairPlay, Microsoft DRM, and the rest of the
whole damned, doomed cruftoverse of DRM technologies?

The last hundred years of technological advancement has been
punctuated at regular intervals by renditions of the battle over
radio: fights where the entertainment industry of the day argued
that it had the exclusive right to pour its old wine into
technology's new bottle; fights where brave geeks have gone
ahead, spat in the entertainment industry's eye, and poured the
wine without permission.

The entertainment industry hates this, although the outcome is
always more money for more artists and companies. They don't like
having to reinvent their businesses every time mobility gets a
little more seamless.

In 1996, the entertainment companies convinced a UN agency called
WIPO -- the World Intellectual Property Organization -- to create
a treaty called the World Copyright Treaty. Signatories to the
treaty -- these days, that's practically every industrial nation
in the world -- are required to make laws that prohibit breaking
DRM, or telling someone how to break DRM, or telling someone whom
to ask in order to find out how to break DRM.

What this means is that if the entertainment industry corks its
old wine with DRM, you can't pull the cork to pour it into a new
bottle without breaking the law. So while individuals and groups
indiscriminately trade movies and music and books without barrier
on the net, any company that tries to build a business on helping
people to unlock their entertainment product and play it on new
devices ends up in court and gets sued into a smoking hole.

That's how Apple can legally threaten Real for making a Real
player that runs on its iPod. That's how manufacturers of phone
DRM can sue any company that offers you a product that lets you
play the music from one phone on another phone, or in a car
stereo, or as a wake-up chime on your alarm clock. There's plenty
of copying going on, but precious little competition.

#

If mobility is going to be seamless, it's going to have to work
with products from every vendor under the sun, from
multinationals to three guys in a garage in Singapore or Silicon
Valley. The seamless movement of services between devices and
locations can't hinge on the capacity of device and service
companies to cooperate with one another and to swear off locking
in their users.

A mobile future is one where all your data -- the music you buy,
the photos you take, the calendar you keep -- belongs to you and
is never put away in a box to which you lack the keys.

It's easy to understand why many companies don't like this idea:
they'd rather have 100 percent of a tiny pie than ten percent of
a pie that's a thousand times bigger. They use countermeasures to
lock their competitors out of their files, and they seek
anticompetitive advantages by sucking up to technophobic
entertainment companies by offering them fantastic promises of
lock-boxes that will keep users from making free use of the music
and movies they buy.

But this is a world of utterly seamful mobility. It's a world of
lockbox after lockbox, devices that are built to keep you from
seamlessly moving a movie to a friend's phone the way that today
you might loan a friend a DVD.

All effort for seams, not one erg expended in the service of
seamlessness. The six trillion dollar telecoms industry is busily
selling out its birthright to a pipsqueak sixty billion dollar
entertainment industry. Rather than spitting in its eye, pouring
the wine and forcing it to adapt its business-models, the
"mobility" companies are weaving tethers to tie you down.

The future of mobility is a future of ever-more-perfect copying.
Water won't get drier, and networks won't get worse at copying.
People who says different are either kidding themselves or
kidding you.

If you would imagine the future, imagine the new corkscrews and
imagine the old wine, pouring into the wondrous, hungry new
bottles.

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