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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Copyright-holding corporations are pushing new laws and computer-crippling technologies in their war on piracy. But can anything keep geeks from copying the music and movies they crave?
Mar 13, 2002 | A sense of panic, instead of anticipation, coursed through Brian Cianessi when he bought the "More Fast and Furious" movie soundtrack just before Christmas. He had heard that the CD was one of the first to be copy-protected for sale in the U.S. market. He feared his days of music ripping would soon be over; Universal Studios had allegedly found a way to keep listeners from making MP3s out of the album's nu-metal gems.
Cianessi, a 24-year-old Los Angeles computer programmer, wasn't interested in posting the songs to KaZaa, Gnutella or any of the other file-sharing networks that have sprung up in Napster's wake. He had no desire to be a pirate. But he did want to play songs from the album on his MP3 player. "I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to rip the tracks, and subsequently transfer them to my car stereo, which has no CD player, only hard drives," he says.
At first, his worries proved justified. When he put the CD in his computer and fired up AudioGrabber, a software program that converts CD tracks into MP3s, the CD locked up the program. But after rebooting his computer, he discovered that the protection was easy to thwart. The copy protection worked by introducing a false value for the start time of the CD -- Cianessi used a function of AudioGrabber to reset that start time to zero, and then was able to encode the music without a glitch.
"My original plan was to buy the CD and then cause a fuss at the store and demand they refund my money when I couldn't play it on my car stereo," he says. "But it turned out to be such a trivial workaround I didn't even bother."
Cianessi's trick turns out to be far from the only way to defeat the various forms of copy protection currently debuting on CDs all over the world. (Running a digital output cord from a CD player to a computer, for instance, is also becoming a popular form of circumvention.) But even as crackers continue to prove how easy it is to set information free, the backlash against intellectual property violation is continuing to swell.
Hollywood is on the march. Adding copy protection to CDs is just one tactic in a comprehensive onslaught. Media behemoths like Disney, Sony and AOL Time Warner are seeking full control of all methods of entertainment distribution; if their vision is realized, digital television sets, hard drives, personal video-recorders and wireless devices will all have some form of copy protection. In the most dire incarnation of the digital entertainment future, consumers of music and movies won't be able to make any copies at all without explicit permission; you might not even be able to move, for example, a recorded version of "The Simpsons" from the digital VCR in your den to the one in your bedroom.
Many critics are convinced that copy-protection technologies are doomed to failure. No system is perfectly secure, and anything that works too well is bound to annoy consumers. Veterans of the consumer industry recall the late 1980s, when many software manufacturers abandoned various copy-protection schemes as bad for business. That cycle, they argue, is set to repeat itself.
But there are signs that the digital future will not resemble the past. Not only do the content companies enjoy access to much more sophisticated technology, but they also have a new tool at their disposal: Congress. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 makes it illegal to distribute or even discuss anything that circumvents digital copyright control. And last month, Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., threatened to launch another bill -- the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) -- that will mandate the inclusion of copy-protection technology in all digital devices.
Computer-savvy geeks will likely find a way around every technological advance delivered by state-of-the-art copy protection. But what happens when the law of the land is in direct opposition to mainstream consumer behavior and desires? As the content companies accelerate the deployment of every legal, political and technological weapon in their arsenal, that is precisely the showdown that looms.
