The End of Digital8 April 2002 The CBDTPA seems more reasonable than the SSSCA on the surface. But will it actually mean the end of digital media? Our Congresscritters are at it again. Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina finally introduced his bill recently, but it was substantially different than the draft of the SSSCA that made the rounds -- and made so many people mad -- last fall. The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA, an even more tongue-twisting set of initials than SSSCA) seems much more reasonable. It seems like Hollings realized that the earlier drafts overstepped the bounds Congress can reasonably set, and that old Fritz has seen the error of his ways. It would be very easy to think that this bill is just what it purports to be, a measure to ultimately benefit consumers. Such thinking would be wrong, of course. The CBDTPA is just as pro-media, anti-consumer as the SSSCA, but it's a lot sneakier about it. It still requires that all digital electronic devices sold in the United States include a mandated form of copy protection. It does go as far as to say that while hardware DRM can remain proprietary, software-based DRM must be based on open source code. It also specifies that copy protection should be as trouble-free to the consumer as possible, but it doesn't specify any limits to that. If the media companies decide jabbing your finger for a drop of blood to test for DNA really is the "least" troublesome thing they can do to make sure you're not ripping them off, you're going to get jabbed a lot. Like the SSSCA, this bill is an expression of the media companies's unrelenting thirst for control, their bottomless greed, and their total and willing ignorance of how computers work. They honestly believe that perfect, unbreakable security is a practical possibility. Disney's Michael Eisner accused the tech industry of "finessing" him, of stonewalling on this because "piracy sells computers." Intel's Andy Grove and other tech leaders tried to explain that anything digital can be cracked, but the media companies seem to think they can "make it happen" if they just yell loud enough. What's at stake? Their ability to prop up an increasingly profitable but decreasingly practical business model. Their profit margins have been unrealistically high for years (CDs now cost pennies to produce, but the average price of a retail disc keeps going up, now $15-20 each) and they want to not only keep that going, but build on it. The RIAA, MPAA and AAP have seen the future of media, and it is pay-per-view. The CBDTPA has an interesting loophole. The encoding rules that it sets up are supposed to respect fair use rights. In theory, your right to make backup copies, excerpt short passages of content and time-shift TV shows will be respected. But like everything on Capital Hill, you have to read the fine print. In Hollings's introduction to the bill, he states, "In addition, the legislation specifies that no copy protection technology may prevent consumers from 'making a personal copy for lawful use in the home' of non pay-per-view television programming." Did you catch that? Anything transmitted as pay-per-view isn't subject to fair-use. So after the bill is approved, the media companies can transition everything to a pay-per-view model. You might be able to use a Tivo-like receiver to watch your favorite TV shows whenever you want, but you'll also have to pay every time you watch them. How much would you pay to watch an episode of "Friends"? What if NBC charged more for the season finale? You won't buy an ebook, you'll rent it for a limited time, after which it will expire. Remember Rosetta's experiment with this? Now you won't have a choice. I know what you're thinking. This loophole can be sidestepped via another loophole in the bill. That "open source" requirement for software-based security solutions, while admirable (no "security through obscurity" here), can be manipulated to remove the protection. Linux is open-source. So what if all the distributions are required to support the CBDTPA? You can just open the source code, strip out the security crap and recompile, right? Then you have a system that can access all the unprotected content you like, right? Technically, yes. There's no reason why you can't do this. But you probably don't want to. If you did, such "circumventing" of data security would put you in direct violation of the DMCA -- remember that? -- and as we saw in the Dmitri Sklyarov case, the prison terms and fines for violating the DMCA are positively medieval. Consumer choice is effectively choked off between the DMCA and the CBDTPA. Assuming, of course, the consumers stay digital. On the face of it, the CBDTPA is intended to spur the widespread consumer adoption of digital broadband media, but it might turn out to do just the opposite, and drive consumers back to analog. Imagine a day not too far in the future. Instead of channel surfing, you're sitting in a park in your hometown, reclining under a tree reading a paperback. A jogger runs by, listening to an analog tape player. On the tape are songs she taped from the audio output of her radio, or directly from a band's live performance (with the band's approval, of course). You think about going to see a movie later, but decide that $20 for a ticket (subsidizing the cost of the theater's new digital projectors) just isn't worth it. And this paperback is pretty good. You sit back, lose yourself in the book, and somewhere, deep in the back of your mind, you realize that digital media is only worth the convenience it once offered. You can live quite happily without it. If you have to. Jeff Kirvin
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