Consumers of entertainment have long taken advantage of whatever technology is at hand to make copies of their favorite obsessions. Likewise, content creators have long struggled to resist this tendency. Copyright law, originally intended to balance the needs of both consumers and producers, existed in a middle ground between the two sides. But the advent of the Internet, which makes copying anything digital, anywhere, absurdly easy, vastly increased the stakes of the struggle. In response, the content companies have used their lobbying clout to aggressively redefine copyright law in their own interest.

"Over the past 10 years, many have come around to the view that, in a networked digital world, limitations on copyright owners' control of their works are no longer desirable," writes Wayne State law professor Jessica Litman in her book "Digital Copyright." Intellectual property laws, she adds, have taken on a new meaning. No longer a balance between public and corporate rights, "Copyright is now seen as a tool for copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have been long deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owners' control," she writes.

As a result, if the content companies continue to have their way, the once-freewheeling Net will be reduced to a glorified form of top-down broadcasting: "a digital multiplex and shopping mall," in Litman's words; "cable television on speed," as Lawrence Lessig phrased it in "The Future of Ideas."

Hollings' bill, whether or not it passes, will likely accelerate the pace of change. Some of the world's biggest technology companies are already scrambling to come up with forms of protection that keep content safe. The industry dwarfs Hollywood in size -- domestic spending on technology goods and services totaled $600 billion in 2000, according to government figures, while Hollywood receipts equaled $35 billion -- but companies such as Intel are still wary of letting Congress dictate their hardware designs.

They're developing technology out of "a fear of legislation," says David Touretzky, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and frequent critic of the DMCA. "Better to negotiate something they can live with than have something imposed on them unilaterally by clueless senators" in Hollywood's thrall.

Other factors are also in play: Broadband providers and consumer electronics companies are worried that without copy protection they won't have access to the kind of entertainment that would drive consumer adoption of new technologies. Software industry titans such as Microsoft stand to benefit both from enhanced protection of their own products, and from the sale of security services.

It appears unquestionable that hard-wired copy protection is on the way. But will any of it work the way its backers want? Touretzky notes that in the 1980s, copy protection "really pissed off customers, who found they couldn't make backups, or recover easily after a disk crash." Will the new push for protection be any different?

Hollywood will get what it wants, says Talal Shamoon, executive vice president of InterTrust, one of the first companies to pioneer copy-protection strategies for digital audio and video. Cable television, he notes, prevents consumers from accessing content they haven't paid for; the future of digital entertainment will be equally secure. Get ready for what is increasingly being called "trusted computing."

Several different approaches are in the works. The "broken media" method discovered by Cianessi on his "More Fast and Furious" CD is one example. Watermarking -- incorporating a kind of digital label in a song or TV show or movie that uniquely identifies the copy -- is another. There's also the idea of "protection bits," a tool currently used in digital audiotapes, which only permits users to make a copy of an original, and not of another copy.

The leading lockdown candidate combines several of these older software fixes with emerging technologies that focus on hardware. The Copy Protection Working Group (CPTWG), a Hollywood high-tech body charged with developing protection for digital television and other forms of video distribution, wants to make it possible for a broadcaster to physically stop users from sending a digital stream of, say, "Star Wars" to a VCR.

"There are two technologies that create secure connection devices," says Shamoon. "One is called 5C," named after the five companies that created it -- Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba. "Then there's another technology from Thomson Multimedia called "SmartRight."

Both work by embedding a chip that has the power to shut down specific functions in a given entertainment device; such a chip would be able to instruct the device that sending digital output to another device is forbidden.

"Digital rights management" software takes over from there. "There will be something called a broadcast flag, which will be embedded in the digital signal," says Fred von Lohmann, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has attended several CPTWG meetings. "It will identify the content as copy once, copy always, copy never. TV receivers or set-top boxes will read the flag and comply. So if it says 'copy never' it will turn off our digital outputs."

Media players in a personal computer could also be set to read similar "flags," both for audio and video. And, says Touretzky, everything will likely be encrypted. "For example, instead of sending analog signals to your speakers, you send an encrypted stream of digital data, and the decryption is done in a sealed module built right into the speaker," he says. "Video is done the same way: Encryption is done in a sealed module built right into the monitor, so you can't bypass the encryption by tapping into the monitor cables. Disk drive encryption is built into the drive itself, etc., etc."

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