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Elizabeth Book and Ely Rosenstock of ebizQ.net called yesterday to alert me to the controversy that made May 1 of this year “Digg/DRM Day” instead of the traditional celebration of the first day of summer. Or the traditional day to celebrate socialism and past labor reforms. Or the day to do whatever just to get outside on what is statistically likely to be one of the first warm days in the temperate part of the northern hemisphere. [That was not true here on Cape Cod but all of you who come here in July and August fail to realize that the same thing (the ocean all around us) that makes it 10 degrees cooler here in those months also make it 10 degrees cooler and rainy here in the spring.]

Any ways, if you didn’t hear about the controversy, in short, the industry-standard hexadecimal encryption code that Blue-ray and HD-DVD makers use to protect their content from copying had started appearing on the web about five months ago. This hadn’t caused much notice because unless you are real hacker there’s not much you can do with the code. Hackers could copy the HD-DVD and watch the copy on their HD TV instead of watching the original. Or they could stand on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan in a long coat and sell pirate copies of movies to the .00000001% of the world population that has HD TVs. Or presumably they could send what must be fairly large files out over the Internet to others who have paid $3000-$5000 for a television set.

Sarcasm and HD TV envy aside, the encrypted high-definition movies can also be played on PCs and laptops (and that play-back device in the back of my daughter’s minivan that she uses to keep my grand kids quiet). But why? Does the definition matter when you’re three feet from a 17-inch screen?

The answer of course is that it is the principle of the thing. The administrator of the code, the Orwellian sounding “Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACSLA)” had informed a few sites to cease and desist from reproducing the code based on a legality called "trafficing in circumvention devices" (the same reason you're not supposed to be able to buy one of those things cops, car thieves, and the AAA use to open locked cars). So on Tuesday, Digg said it would honor the cease and desist request for the same seemingly reasonable legal reasons other sites had (that is, because the copyright or patent owner—the aforementioned AACSLA—asked them to). In protest, Digg devotees almost overwhelmed the popular social networking news site by posting and “digging” (popularizing the posts to the front page if, like me, the term has to be explained to you) the hexadecimal code. The “Digg” attack almost shut down the site. Later the same day, the owners of Digg relented. They dramatically stated that the AACSLA could put them out of business if need be.

If you have been asking yourselves what the heck this has to do with open source software (OSS), there it is. The protestors say they won against Digg in the name of “free speech, not free beer,” the classic mantra of the Free Software Foundation. The new version of the General Public License (GPL) is also against Digital Rights Management. As I read it, the FSF is basically saying directly that if you develop some code, copyright it and publish it into the OSS community under the GPL, some one else can’t take it and add it to their software and encrypt it (or at least can’t charge for the encryption code). That's OK. It's their license and it's their choice.

But indirectly, an FSF ghost organization called Defective by Design rails against Digital Rights Management and intellectual property rights as represented by the hexadecimal code. The FSF is saying don't encrypt anything, apparently because it precludes "fair use" (your making a copy of a couple of pages of a book at the library) but actually because the FSF is against choice.But according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (another DRM basher), that’s not what the AACSLA was doing. It was demanding cease and desist on the car thief device rule.

I am conflicted (I never thought I would say that). I am giving away my intellectual property by posting this essay; that is my choice. And I have no problem with the FSF choosing to help software developers give their intellectual property away as long as it respects others intellectual property rights to encrypt things. The AACSLA was not giving away its movie content under any “open source” like arrangement and they shouldn't be forced to.

Any ways, according to the great masked AACSLA behind the screen it looks like there is a fairly easy fix for the content providers and manufacturers. The hackers will soon get to try again.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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