This clause is so broadly written that merely passing on factual information about bugs in a system with DRM can put you in hot water. Doing so can land you in prison for five years and hit you with a fine of up to $500,000 (for a first offense). Under DMCA 1201, it is a felony to “traffick” in tools that bypass DRM. This is a complex law and a decidedly mixed bag, but of all the impacts that the DMCA’s many clauses have had on the world, none have been so quietly, profoundly terrible as Section 1201, the “anti-circumvention” clause that protects DRM. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. They aren’t technology companies at all - they’re legal companies. In reality, DRM vendors know that technical countermeasures aren’t the bulwark against unauthorized reproduction of their files. Anyone who has that new program can save unscrambled copies of the files they’ve bought and share those, too.ĭRM vendors hand-wave this away, saying things like “this just keeps honest users honest.” As Ed Felten once said, “ Keeping honest users honest is like keeping tall users tall.” Once one person figures out how to patch a DRM program so that it saves the files it descrambles, they can share that knowledge (or a program they’ve written based on that knowledge) with everyone in the world, instantaneously, at the push of a button. That would include (for example) a modified DRM program that unscrambles the manufacturer-supplied video, audio or text file and then, rather than throwing away the unscrambled copy when you’re done with it, saves it so you can open it with a program that doesn’t restrict you from sharing it.Īs a technical matter, DRM can’t work. Because that overseer program is running on a computer you own, you can replace it, alter it, or subvert it, allowing you to run programs that the manufacturer doesn’t like. The program that checks to see whether other programs are approved by the manufacturer is also running on an untrusted adversary’s computer (with DRM, you are the manufacturer’s untrusted adversary). When someone claims to have built a computer-powered “appliance” - say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster - that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they’ve designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.īut this is also technological nonsense. In 2011, I gave a speech at Berlin’s Chaos Communications Congress called “ The Coming War on General Purpose Computing.” In it, I explained that Digital Rights Management was technologically incoherent, a bizarre fantasy in which untrusted users of computers could be given encrypted files and all the tools needed to decrypt them, but somehow be prevented from using those decrypted files in ways that conflicted with the preferences of the company that supplied those files.Īs I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably “general purpose.” The only computer we know how to make - the Turing-complete von Neumann machine - is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. You see, I’ve spent most of my adult life campaigning against DRM, because I think it’s an existential danger to all computer users - and because it’s a way for tech companies to hijack the relationship between creators and their audiences. There was only one problem: the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Then came Audible, and I was in heaven - all the audiobooks, none of the hassle of ripping CDs. By the time iTunes came along, I’d amassed a huge collection of cassette and CD audiobooks and I painstakingly ripped them to my collection. When I was a high-school-aged page at a public library in the 1980s, I would pass endless hours shelving and repairing books while listening to “books on tape” from the library’s collection.
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