Current mood:

aggravated

Nic Garnett on DRM et al.
At http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/complaw/ there were two keynote speakers this morning. The first, Prof Michael Geist (http://michaelgeist.ca/) is well known to copyfighters as a battler in the trenches in his native Canada and on the international scene. The second was Nic Garnett, former IFPI (http://www.ifpi.org/) chief, who negotiated the WIPO Copyright Treaty (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wct/) and Performances and Phonograms Treaty (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/wppt/) on their behalf. I must first congratulate Nic for being willing to step into the lion's den, before proceeding to snack upon him, along with my colleagues at the conference (http://lexferenda.com/ : http://www.lexferenda.com/?p=139, http://nic.suzor.com/ : http://nic.suzor.com/2006-09-garnett-tpm_regulation, http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/ : http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/2006/09/understanding-wipo.html).

Nic no longer works for the copyright middlemen directly. Instead he has switched to working for developers of DRM (see key below) software. He now works for Media Rights Technologies (http://www.mpb.tv/), and previously for a company he founded called Interight (http://www.interight.com/) on whose description page (http://www.interight.com/about.html) he is described as "lawyer and technologist".

Nic was presenting thoughts based upon his work for WIPO in writing a report for their Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. The title of the report is Automated Rights Management Systems and Copyright Limitations and Exceptions (http://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/sccr/en/sccr_14/sccr_14_5.doc).

As Ian Brown pointed out in the questions/comments section after the presentation, Nic's technical expertise is sadly lacking in someone producing such reports. Nic's claim that he is only a lawyer and doesn't understand the technical details seems rather at odds with the Interight website claim about being a "lawyer and technologist". Various claims in both the report and the presentation simply sit there and beg to be blown apart. In fact, the presentation and report seem almost like a straw man set up to show the naivety and/or FUD of the pro-TPM/pro-DRM/copyright maximalist groups.

Nic dismissed the Sony/BGM rootkit fiasco (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html) as a storm in a teacup, ignoring, amongst other issues, the fact that Sony settled a lawsuit brought by the EFF on behalf of customers seriously inconvenienced by the obviously illicit nature of the rootkit (http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/Sony-BMG/settlement_faq.php). He then claimed that Sony's understanding of the nature of TPM/DRM was deeply flawed, promoting his own company's approach which is, he claimed, based on the concept of delivering an encrypted content file, by any suitable distribution method, and then separate delivery of a key which allows the interpretation of that file as sound (and, one assumes video) data, but which allows for time limitations on the file. Now, this in itself is perfectly feasible, although the time-limitation element is technologically simple to circumvent by messing around with system clock time (an always-running DRM program MIGHT include its own timer program which measured the passage of time that the machine was switched on and running...) The weakness of this idea is that once the file is decrypted for use (i.e. interpreting it into some form of sound file that can be sent to the sound card driver) then it is vulnerable to interception. He claimed that Media Rights Technologies' software would prevent "stream rippers" from capturing this digital information and that this would prevent re-encoding. The concept of high quality digital recording from the output of the computer soundcard (in either digital or analogue form) seems to have escaped their attention, as do many other ways around this - rolling one's own sound card driver, running the DRM restricted decryption and playback system in a virtual machine running Windows and using Linux software to intercept the digital signal between the virtual soundcard and the linux hardware driver, or even the old standby of an old-fashioned microphone placed near a speaker in a quiet room.

Nic also claimed that Media Rights Technologies had a patent on the "separate provision of encrypted content file and decryption key". I'm sure this wold come as a surprise to many, not least Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir and Adelman. Surely a candidate for the EFF's patent busting programme (http://www.eff.org/patent/).

Another interesting element was Nic's worries about Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/). Given his claim that he no longer sees the world as a representative of the recording industry, his worries seemed rather strange. Why would someone claiming to be interested in a balanced view of the world of copyright find CC at all worrying? After all, the goal of CC is to give copyright owners more flexibility in offering their content under variable conditions ("some rights reserved" rather than "all rights reserved"). The explanation for this lies in the report itself, which demonstrates Nic's fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons for, and purpose of, the Creative Commons project. To quote from the report:

"Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001. Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman of Creative Commons, started the organization as an additional method of achieving the goals of the case Eldred v. Ashcroft,1 which was adjudicated by the United States of America Supreme Court. The initial set of Creative Commons licences was published on December 16, 2002."

The prosecution rests that not only does Nic not understand technology, but that his background as chief strong-arm for the copyright maximalists have led to an inability to view the world of copyright as anything less than an IP-maximalist apologist at best.


Key:

TPM: Technological Protection Measures, the phrase used in the WIPO CT to describe DRM software and encryption of content-bearing files.
DRM: Digital Rights Management, a broad term including formal languages for expressing licensing terms through to software interfering with the noral operation of a computer in processing digital information to prevent perfect digital copying of that information, or systems restricting interpretation of digital files to "authorised" software and/or hardware.