Criminal code?

In his finding, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan cited United States v. Progressive, Inc. as precedent for his restraining order -- the case in which Progressive magazine intended to publish plans for a hydrogen bomb. And like a true advocate of national security, Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, vowed patriotically to keep filing lawsuits until every Web site carrying the dangerous DeCSS program has been completely suppressed.

Normally, the confident hackers who hang out at places likes Slashdot.org -- where information on where to find the program is avidly distributed -- sneer at such attempts to control the dispersal of information. Already, the code in question has been transmitted back and forth across cyberspace so many times that it would be well nigh impossible to eliminate entirely. But even the hardcore Slashdot regulars were taken aback when the MPAA reached its arms across the ocean and obtained the arrest and interrogation of Johansen and his father in their Norwegian home.

Valenti's been here before. After all, he led the MPAA in its heroic crusade against Betamax and the home videotape recorder, which frightened studios said would surely bankrupt the film industry. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, being decided in 1984 against the studios. Valenti's film industry bankruptcy failed to materialize. Companies like Blockbuster, which generate billions in revenue for the film industry, sprung up instead.

For their part, the hackers that Valenti has named "cyberthieves" are convinced that nothing less than the First Amendment right to free speech is at stake, and that their defeat will contribute inexorably to the slide of modern civilization toward police-state-style repression. To them, the DVD battle is one of the first major skirmishes since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a hotly contested law that dramatically increased the power given to copyright holders.

I've been standing on street corners handing out fliers that scream "Stop the MPAA," so you might be able to guess how I feel about the issue. It strikes to the core of how I see the role of the hacker in society.

Every day, in our increasingly networked world, our freedoms and privacy are being stolen from us. And most of us just let it happen -- most of us tend to accept our computer's workings as immutable, that we are chained to an irrational, vindictive, uncontrollable machine destined to rule over our 9-to-5 days.

But the machine is notopaque; the rules today need not be the rules of tomorrow. Hackers understand that politics follows code. We're busy writing the systems you'll be using tomorrow, and the forward-thinking among us are trying to program in the politics and culture we'd like tomorrow's computing to have. It is not by mere chance that the Internet today is uncensorable -- the engineers who built the Internet made it that way on purpose. Our concerns over protecting privacy, over fending off corporate dominance, are being reflected in the programs we're writing. Our programs don't snoop on the user; we embrace open-source software -- in which the underlying blueprints to a program are always publicly accessible -- as a way to clearly demonstrate that fact to the curious. After all, it's awfully hard to hide objectionable behavior when the whole program is readable.

We want to change the world. We're not at all sympathetic to defenders of the status quo like the Recording Industry Association of America and MPAA, two institutions vainly struggling to hold the globe in place, terrified of the changes that the digital revolution is bringing to their industries.

Traditionally our activism has been through writing code. At last week's LinuxWorld I heard repeatedly, "We're working on getting this coded before they see us coming. Once the code works they'll never be able to take it away from us."

But that's not enough. Increasingly the code-creates-politics circle has been closing as we've realized that the politics must be fixed to allow us to continue writing our world-forging code. The MPAA's case and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are the most recent examples: We can't afford to roll over; we can't afford to let the MPAA criminalize our software. DeCSS will not disappear if the MPAA wins its case, but it will dangerously shift the balance of power away from users and back to corporations. The MPAA doesn't want anyone to even know how DVD encryption works -- ideally, it wants to criminalize the very act of discussing it. That potentially makes all of us criminals, and a society where everyone is a potential criminal is a police state; when everyone is a violator the police have the power to arrest at will.

To the uninformed, the fight over DeCSS might look like the latest hacker obsession -- sure to blow over as soon as the DVD industry starts licensing DVD player technology for the Linux-based operating system. But the key issue at stake here -- corporate control versus individual freedom -- is fundamentally important. It's reason enough for me to stand on a cold New York street corner, and it's reason enough for hackers to fight.

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