A great post by Tom Lee. In a preceding post, he had pointed out (without getting into details) how easy it was to extract unencrypted MP3s from a couple of neat but legally-questionable music-sharing websites. He got some angry comments from folks who accused him of being a kill joy. He responds:
I don’t consider the current state of music sharing sites anything more than a temporary step in the music industry’s inevitable evolution. The point I want to make by all this is that the present state of affairs does not constitute a complete solution; we’re not done yet.
I don’t want to discount the well-made interface of Muxtape or the excellent aggregation and social features of the Hype Machine. They are both impressive sites and their creators deserve all the recognition they’ve received and more. But although these things add value, the essential underlying reason for these sites’ popularity is that they give music away for free.
Free, but not too free, that is. The digital music sharing problem was solved suddenly and completely about a decade ago, but that solution made the record companies understandably unhappy. They scrambled to put the genie back in the bottle and had some success. Now these new music-sharing sites are gingerly stepping back into the light, providing music in a way that’s pretty clearly still illegal under the existing legal regime — is anybody cutting checks to ASCAP or BMI? — but which the recording industry will tolerate because of the sites’ limited scope or promotional power or influence among elites or simply because they haven’t yet noticed them. If a site becomes too convenient or powerful it will no doubt get sued into oblivion or yoked with a crippling licensing agreement, and users will be out of luck until another plucky startup creeps under the radar and into the daylight.
I have very little patience for this ridiculous dance… Whatever’s going to happen, I think we should get on with it. At the moment a lot of media companies are adapting to the digital age by giving away content to users through their browsers, but making it really inconvenient for them to use it any other way. I think that strategy is incoherent — it’s just not compatible with how digital technologies work. Pointing that out is why I wrote these posts, and why I developed that full-text RSS tool. If making your customers’ lives less convenient is your business plan, you need to think a little harder. Or find another line of work.
Geeks tend to look at copy protection schemes the same way that grown-ups look at a blanket being sued to play peek-a-boo with an infant. To the infant, when the person’s face disappears behind the blanket, it’s a total mystery where the person went and a total surprise when it re-appears. But it would obviously be insulting to play peek-a-boo with a grown-up.
By the same token, it’s obvious to anyone who knows a little bit about the way the web works that any time a website lets you play music, it’s possible with just a little bit of effort and know-how to download that music and do what you like with it. While most of us don’t bother to do it, (and truthfully, it could take me a few days of reading to figure it out in some cases) we take for granted that it’s possible, because of some pretty fundamental characteristics of the way the Web works.
And that, in turn, makes it awfully hard to get outraged about people pointing it out, or even providing people with tools to do it themselves. The people building these kinds of “security” technologies like to pretend that they’re akin to a padlock, but they’re more like that baby blanket–it only seems like an major obstacle if you don’t know anything about how it works. I agree with Tom when he says that “I don’t think it’s healthy to expect that most people will be content to treat the web as a magical brochure that only a privileged priest class possesses the secret knowledge to manipulate.”
The other problem is that precisely the same kind of inquisitiveness that leads to the breakdown of closed systems also leads to innovation in open ones. Lots and lots of innovation has occurred because people figured out how to use an existing technology in a way that its original creator didn’t envision. The way they do that is with precisely the same kind of tinkering that Tom has been doing here: looking under the hood to figure out how it works and how it might be made to work better. The problem with these kinds of rickety copy protection schemes is not simply that they prop up untenable business models, but more importantly that they preclude the kind of casual tinkering that leads to beneficial innovation. To demand that geeks stop looking under the hood of these systems and pointing out that they’re vulnerable is also to demand that they stop looking under the hood and developing enhancements. The basic exploration process is identical, and if we allow the latter (which we should), it’s inevitable that people are going to do the former.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.