I love this analogy. From Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram:

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Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. “How will authors and artists get paid for their work?” they ask me. Truth be told, I don’t know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: “How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?” I’m sorry, but I don’t know that, either.

I am a scientist, and I explain the realities of the science. I apologize if you don’t like the truth, but the truth doesn’t change because people wish it would be something else. I don’t know how authors and artists will make money in a world of easy copyability. I’m an author myself, personally concerned about protecting my own copyright, but I still don’t know. I can tell you what will and won’t work, technically. You can argue about whether my technical analysis is correct, but it just doesn’t make sense to bring social arguments into the technical discussion.

If I had to guess, I believe companies will find a way to make money despite the prevalence of digital copying. Television stations figured out how to make money despite having to broadcast their programming to everyone. There are lots of financial models that don’t require selling individual units to make money: advertising, patronage, pay-for-performance, pay-for-timeliness, pay-for-interaction, public funding. I started Crypto-Gram when I was a consultant; I gave the newsletter away and charged for my time. The newsletter was free advertising. The Grateful Dead gave away concert recordings but charged for live performances. Stephen King kept writing chapters of his electronic book as long as a sufficient percentage of his readers paid him to.

I don’t know what model will become the prevalent one in the digital world. But I do know that technical methods to prevent digital copying are doomed to fail. (This is not to say that social methods, or legal methods, won’t work.) Those companies that have business models that accept this reality are more likely to succeed than those that have business models that reject it. Complain all you like, but reality is reality.

My original analysis:
http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0105.html#3

I liked this post on a slashdot thread about Dimitry Skylarov’s case:

It seems to me that in this whole debate, we need to make clear the difference between COPYright and ACCESSright. That’s the real rub about the DMCA, it legally transforms copyright into accessright, and gives the copyright holder new controls not previously granted.

It is supposedly about preventing unauthorized copying. But in reality does little to prevent it and puts the publishing industries in the driver’s seat in a new way.

The REAL fear here is if we get to the point where all ‘media player devices’ (not necessarily related to Microsoft media player) play only DMCA-encumbered media – where you can’t even play non-access-controlled media if you wanted to. Then free speech and discourse necessary for democracy are in deep trouble

As seen on I, Cringley:

Here’s another guy with a fix I couldn’t find fault with. “My TCP skills are somewhat rusty, but isn’t the biggest problem with raw sockets that people can masquerade as some other IP address, and become untraceable? Wouldn’t it much simpler to program the routers not to accept packets generated from an IP address out of range? For instance, (the place where I work) uses an address range starting with 35.8.x — I’m pretty sure in the last year we have added a filter so that we don’t send any traffic from some other range. It seems like we could legislate that every ISP has to be a good citizen and only send out packets from its own IP addresses for a quick fix to the problem.”

Now why didn’t I think of that?

This article from the 30 July 2001 NY Times:

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Jail Time in the Digital Age
By Lawrence LessigDmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe’s electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail.Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone’s copyright. What his program did was to enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for Adobe’s reader might have imposed. Adobe’s eBook Reader, for example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov’s program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use ElcomSoft’s program to listen to a book. The problem from Adobe’s perspective, however, is that the same software could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book otherwise readable only with Adobe’s reader technology — then sell that copy to others without the publisher’s permission. That would be a copyright violation, and it is that possibility that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr. Sklyarov in jail — the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.

Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.

Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough. Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.

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From the 23 July 2001 issue of the “Rapidly Changing Face of Computing”:

In 1995, according to the June Gilder Technology Report , all the computers in all the world contained a total of 200 terabytes of storage. This month — just six years later, the advent of commodity ($300) 100-gigabyte drives means that just 2,000 PCs could contain the world’s storage of 1995. (There are about ten exabytes of storage overall all at this point in time — “half-a-millionfold growth in less than a decade.” IDC estimates that the data stored by companies is growing at 80% per year.)

Looking forward, considering IBM’s projections for 0.4-terabyte “Pixie Dust” drives in 2003, it will then take a mere 500 PCs to match all the storage, in all the world, of just eight years before. And we can expect that trend to continue.

Below is a “Talkback” response to a 13 June 2001 commentary by Patrick Houston of Anchordesk regarding the tensions between copyright owners and librarians.

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Name: Stephen Wheeler
Email: wheeler_stephen@hotmail.com
Location: Basking Ridge NJ
Occupation: ConsultantPatrick,

Isn’t it time to recognise that copyright is broken? Copyright is a social tool and, as you mentioned, is promoted as the best way to ensure that those who create, or apply original thought, can be rewarded.

Take a step back. Is that really true? Is copyright the best way to reward (and therefore encourage) people who attempt to make new contributions to society?

I read your personal take – the archetypal ‘struggling artist/writer’ is commonly used by everyone who gains from copyrights. Are all their motives as pure as yours?

For an excellent history of copyright link to: http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html

As you will see, copyright is only three hundred years old – and the nature of copyright has changed dramatically in that time. A key moment in the history of copyright is this extract from 1909: In addressing new categories of materials available for copyright the Congress addressed the difficulty of balancing the public interest with proprietor’s rights.

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I liked this essay by John Gilmore. When asked what’s wrong with access control technology (aka copy protection) if consumers don’t seem to mind, John’s answers included:

What is wrong is when people who would like products that simply record bits, or audio, or video, without any copy protection, can’t find any, because they have been driven off the market.

What is wrong is when companies who make copy-protecting products don’t disclose the restrictions to the consumers.

What is wrong is when scientific researchers are unable to study the field or to publish their findings.

What is wrong is when competitors are unable to build competing devices or software, vying for the favor of the consumers in the free market. [Because of the threat of harassing lawsuits from corporate content owners]

What is wrong is when the controls that are enacted to protect the rights reserved under copyright are used for other purposes.

What is wrong is when social policy is created in back rooms, between movie/record company executives and computer company executives, not by open public discussion, by legislatures, and by courts.

What is wrong is when the balance between the rights of creators and the rights of freedom of speech and the press is lost.

What is wrong is that a tiny tail of “copyright protection” is wagging the dog of all communications among humans.

What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity [digital encoding on computers], but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity.

A full copy appears below:
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I love this site: http://www.dizzycity.com/

Why go to New York when you can visit it from your mouse?

The more things change, the more they stay the same. From the July 1901 issue of Scientific American:

The inexplicable conservatism and arrogance of the Turkish customs authorities was recently shown by the prohibition of the importation of typewriters into the country. The reason advanced by the authorities was that in the event of seditious writings executed by the typewriter being circulated, it would be impossible to obtain any clew by which the operator of the machine could be traced. A large consignment of 200 typewriters was lying in the custom house at the time the above law was passed, and will have to be returned.

Hmm, so the Turkish gov’t bans typewriters because they might be used to do something illegal. Sound like anything the current US gov’t is doing? (think DeCSS…)

I laughed at this .sig from a slashdot post by Mr. Flibble:

Come on, try to hack my 31337 firewall!