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The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention
by Bruce Schneier
Music, videos, books on the Internet! Freely available to anyone without paying!
The entertainment industry sees services like Napster as the death of its
business, and it's using every technical and legal means possible to prevail
against them. They want to implement widespread copy prevention of digital
files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can't
copy or distribute it.
Abstractly, it is an impossible task. All entertainment media on the Internet
(like everything else on the Internet) is just bits: ones and zeros. Bits are
inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly. If you have a digital file -- text,
music, video, or whatever -- you can make as many copies of that file as you
want, do whatever you want with the copies. This is a natural law of the digital
world, and makes copying on the Internet different from copying Rolex watches or
Louis Vuitton luggage.
What the entertainment industry is trying to do is to use technology to
contradict that natural law. They want a practical way to make copying hard
enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.
For these purposes, three kinds of people inhabit the Internet: average users,
hackers, and professional pirates. Any security measure will work against the
average users, who are at the mercy of their software. Hackers are more
difficult to deter. Fifteen years of software copy protection has taught us
that, with enough motivation, any copy protection scheme -- even those based on
hardware -- can be broken. The professional pirate is even harder to deter; this
is someone willing to spend considerable money breaking copy protection, cloning
manuals and anti-counterfeiting tags, even building production plants to
mass-produce pirated products. If he can make a profit selling the hacked
software or stolen music, he will defeat the copy protection.
The entertainment industry knows all of this, and tries to build solutions that
work against average users and most hackers. This fails because of a second
natural law of the digital world: the ability of software to encapsulate skill.
A safe that can keep out 99.9% of all burglars works, because the safe will
rarely encounter a burglar with enough skill. But a copy protection scheme with
similar characteristics will not, because that one-in-a-thousand hacker can
encode his break into software and then distribute it. Then anyone, even an
average user, can download the software and use it to defeat the copy protection
scheme. This is what happened to the DVD industry's Content Scrambling System (CSS).
This is how computer games with defeated copy protection get distributed.
The entertainment industry is responding in two ways. First, it is trying to
control the users' computers. CSS is an encryption scheme, and protects DVDs by
encrypting their contents. Breaks do not have to target the encryption. Since
the software DVD player must decrypt the video stream in order to display it,
the break attacked the video stream after decryption. This is the Achilles' heel
of all content protection schemes based on encryption: the display device must
contain the decryption key in order to work.
The solution is to push the decryption out of the computer and into the video
monitor and speakers. To see how this idea helps, think of a dedicated
entertainment console: a VCR, a Sega game machine, a CD player. The user cannot
run software on his CD player. Hence, a copy protection scheme built into the CD
player is a lot harder to break. The entertainment industry is trying to turn
your computer into an Internet Entertainment Console, where they, not you, have
control over your hardware and software. The recently announced Copy Protection
for Recordable Media has this as an end goal. Unfortunately, this only makes
breaking the scheme harder, not impossible.
The industry's second response is to enlist the legal system. Legislation, such
as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), made it illegal to
reverse-engineer copy protection schemes. Programs such as the one that broke
CSS are illegal to write or distribute under the DMCA. This is failing because
of a third natural law of the digital world: the lack of political boundaries.
The DMCA is a U.S. law, and does not affect any of the hundreds of other
countries on the Internet. And while similar laws could be passed in many
countries, they would never have the global coverage it needs to be successful.
More legal maneuvering is in the works. The entertainment industry is now trying
to pin liability on Internet service providers. The next logical step is to
require all digital content to be registered, and to make recording and playback
equipment without embedded copy protection illegal. All in an attempt to do the
impossible: to make digital content uncopyable.
The end result will be failure. All digital copy protection schemes can be
broken, and once they are, the breaks will be distributed...law or no law.
Average users will be able to download these tools from Web sites that the laws
have no jurisdiction over. Pirated digital content will be generally available
on the Web. Everyone will have access.
The industry's only solution is to accept the inevitable. Unrestricted
distribution is a natural law of digital content, and those who figure out how
to leverage that natural law will make money. There are many ways to make money
other than charging for a scarce commodity. Radio and television are advertiser
funded; there is no attempt to charge people for each program they watch. The
BBC is funded by taxation. Many art projects are publicly funded, or funded by
patronage. Stock data is free, but costs money if you want it immediately. Open
source software is given away, but users pay for manuals and tech support:
charging for the relationship. The Grateful Dead became a top-grossing band by
allowing people to tape their concerts and give away recordings; they charged
for performances. There are models based on subscription, government licensing,
marketing tie-ins, and product placement.
Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not
wet. The entertainment industry's two-pronged offensive will have far-reaching
effects -- its enlistment of the legal system erodes fair use and necessitates
increased surveillance, and its attempt to turn computers into an Internet
Entertainment Platform destroys the very thing that makes computers so useful --
but will fail in its intent. The Internet is not the death of copyright, any
more than radio and television were. It's just different. We need business
models that respect the natural laws of the digital world instead of fighting
them.
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