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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Pity the standards wonks: Exceptionally intelligent, extraordinarily focused, and (usually) diplomatic to boot, the people who form the committees that define and maintain the formal rules that let our hardware and software inventions work together have little power outside their own highly politicized worlds. They may define protocols and behaviors worldwide, but they can't force managers to buy into them, or cajole engineers to implement them properly.
And they're rarely allowed to speak publicly for their employers, except to utter canned scripts like "Standards are good" or "My employer is a leader committed to standards in our field."
Take them to dinner, and they'll follow hilarious one-liners about their colleagues by recanting, with a firm "Don't quote me on that!" But getting them to talk about Hollings' bill requires only a sincere promise not to rat them out by name or organization. Then the truth comes out: "Hollywood people know just enough about technology to be dangerous," one groans, rolling her eyes.
"How many times do we have to tell them? You can't rely on a hard-coded solution," says another, waving his chopsticks dangerously close to my nose for emphasis.
Playing devil's advocate, a thick-skinned journalist can say Hollings' heart is in the right place, and a nationwide copy-protection standard could help turn the economy around. Assuming a copy-protection mandate is inevitable, what do standards experts think is specifically wrong with CBDTBA? None of them agree on the details. But three common themes emerge:
1) It puts the Federal Communications Commission in charge of a complex hardware/software standard. On this, criticism has been out in the open. "It's no secret that the federal government has difficulties creating standards for cutting-edge technology," said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, in a public statement. "The bill would be more accurately titled the 'Content Owners Market Promotion Act.'"
2) It may focus on watermarking. Digital rights management (DRM) experts say Hollywood still has hopes for watermarking systems that don't require the user to identify herself with a security key or password. But watermarking schemes are doomed to failure. In watermarking, the decision is made by software inside the player. A watermark detector inside the player looks at the content and tries to find the watermark, then decides whether or not to play the content. As demonstrated by security researchers like Princeton's Ed Felten, it's easy to remove or add a watermark to content, fooling the player. More simply, frustrated consumers could create a market for bootleg players that don't check for watermarks at all, like the current rush on DVD players that ignore geographic restriction codes burned onto the discs. The decision to play or not to play must be made by the content, not the player, DRM experts warn. It's tricky, but they'll get to it -- if the industry isn't forced to accept a compromise standard first.
3) The standard will be a compromise geared toward serving mass-market movies and music. The bill insists the mandatory technologies be "reliable, renewable, resistant to attack, readily implemented, modular, applicable in multiple technology platforms, extensible, upgradable, not cost prohibitive," and that "any software portion of such standards is based on open source code." Sounds like a bill drafted by the free-software geeks at Slashdot -- but will the result let me protect and promote essays on my weblog just as Sony does its movies, music and games? If not, it would undermine years of work toward global DRM solutions for copyright holders of all kinds, from street poets to operating-system makers.
The music and movie people -- and to a lesser extent, e-book publishers -- seem convinced that technology companies are just avoiding building an unbreakable content lockbox for them. But to the security experts and the standards-committee members who've dedicated their careers to finding solutions, drafting a law ordering the problem to be solved isn't the "wake-up call" Hollywood is calling it. It's just the latest Beltway foolishness. Next, they'll float a bill extending Moore's Law -- to benefit consumers, of course.
