Great (non) Nerd Reading #3

From time to time, I offer you the opportunity to read pieces written by others that either explain complicated situations beautifully so that "non-nerd" people can finally understand them, or show off new ideas/directions/explorations of technology that excite and hold great promise for the future.

Today's Great (non) Nerd Reading recommendation takes the thorny meeting of technological and moral quandries most of us simply refer to as "the RIAA versus Napster mess" and shines the harsh light of Truth on both parties, with startling results. If you've ever wondered what all the fuss was about regarding Napster, why the RIAA seem to work so hard when they've not made even a tiny dent in music piracy,* and why the so-called "copy-protected CDs" are not only not proper CDs, they also aren't uncopyable.

*Eminem's new album is #2 on the "most listened to" web charts, and it isn't even out yet.

So what, you might think to yourself. Doesn't affect me, you might think. Wrong. The technology they employ won't stop piracy, but it will harm your rights as a law-abiding consumer far more severely than you think, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

You need to read this article.

From the get-go (and in several past postings to this blog and elsewhere around the Net) I have said that the goal of the RIAA isn't really to stop piracy, it's to completely re-define what rights the consumer actually has.

This Mathew Ruben fellow has boiled it down and summed it up far better than I could have possibly hoped for. He eloquently and concisely shows that both "sides" of this debate are up to their ears in hypocrisy, and and that it is this hypocrisy itself that is rapidly deteriorating the situation, and consumer rights are caught in the crossfire. Sony, the corporation that went to court on behalf of consumers being allowed to use copies of broadcast material as they saw fit in 1983, now takes the exact opposite agenda:

It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.

Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.

And believe me, as Ruben goes on to reveal Sony's (and the other members of the RIAA's) ultimate ambition, your hair will stand on end. But don't say I didn't warn ya.

After you're done reading that article, move on to this one, written by noted indie film director Alex Cox. He questions who the pirates really are, and I think makes the point beautifully.