Tuesday, 1st Week: On DRM and all that

This came out of a conversation I was having on IM last night. Thought I'd share it with the world, as it's quite close to my heart. Firstly, the conversation, minus any names.

(22:49:54) ###########: :P i like windows media player. i find it easy to use for my purposes

(22:50:47) James@SJC.Linux: Yes, but under the hood there's a lot of stuff I disagree with on a lot of levels. I think a lot of what they're doing ("they" being MS, as well as the major record/media companies) is very wrong. *I* want to control what I can and can't watch or listen to. I don't want some major company doing that for me. If I buy a DVD, why shouldn't I be able to watch it how I want?

(22:52:19) ###########: that doesn't really bother me, but i don't have the 'under the hood knowledge' like u do

(22:52:52) James@SJC.Linux: If you pay money to buy a Westlife CD, you have the right to listen to it. Agreed? (The whole issue of why you'd pay money to listen to Westlife is another matter!) ;-)

(22:53:37) ###########: :P yes, i have the right to listen to it

(22:54:13) James@SJC.Linux: Exactly. Not, "I have the right to listen to it on a particular CD player", or "I have the right to listen to it for thirty days from date of purchase and then it will wipe itself". Or even worse, "I have the right to listen to it on a particular *company's* CD player". Do you see where I'm coming from?

(22:55:33) ###########: yes, but still, i don't experience that problem, or any equivalent problem

(22:56:23) James@SJC.Linux: Not yet, but that's where we're headed. The capability is just about there, it's just when they decide to start using it. And there's a lot of legislation going through the EU right now. I don't want that to be the future of digital media. If you could only play Sony/EMI CDs on Sony CD players, [Sony employees] would get a lot more commission but people would complain in a big way. And we could very well see exactly that happen with computers very soon.

I really do have some grave concerns about the future of digital media. The scary thing is - most people, like the very good friend I was talking to tonight, have little or no knowledge of what "Digital Rights Management" (or, as it has been frequently termed, Digital Restrictions Management) could mean. A very scary thing is that people don't care. They don't care because right now, it just works. They can download music, video, play it on Windows Media Player, or in iTunes, maybe move it to their iPod or Pocket PC, and they see no problem.

I think the Sony CD analogy above is quite a representative one. For the people who own Sony CD players, there's no problem. They expect (rightly) any CD they buy can be played in their Sony hi-fi. They do not care about the issue because they do not see an issue. (This is not an attack on Sony or their customers!)

I'm on the other side of the fence. As you can probably tell from the above, I don't run Microsoft Windows, but a Linux distribution, Kubuntu. (To use the CD player analogy: I don't use Sony, I use a CD player made by a small, independent company.) One of the problems, and it's digital rights related, is this: technically, it could be illegal for me to watch my DVDs on my computer.

I'll explain. Most DVDs use a copy-protection device, an encryption so that it can be viewed but not copied. The trouble is, you need to decrypt the disc in order to watch it. On Microsoft Windows, and as far as I know on Mac, this isn't a problem: you have WinDVD, PowerDVD, or whatever (commercial) program to watch DVDs with. No problem so far. But, the code used to decrypt a DVD for watching can also be used to decrypt it for copying. With commercial software, that's not a problem; the company writing the software buys the right to use the decryption code (essentially) and includes it in their program. The end user (viz. you and me) never see the source code, so the decrypt is quite safe.

Most Linux programs are open-source. This means that, unlike with commercial programs, you can actually download a copy of the programming code used to create that software. You can also (if it's released under the GNU Public License) actually rewrite as much or as little of that program as you want. Use bits of its code in your own projects. You can see the issue here: if you release the DVD decryption code as open-source, then anyone can get their hands on it and the encryption is useless.

Thing is: I need to be able to install a copy of that decryption code to be able to watch my DVDs. This I have done. libdvdcss is the name of the package that is essential to watching DVDs, and you won't find it in any Linux distribution. In order to protect themselves from possible legal action, the big players in the Linux world (understandably) do not include this library in their packages. You instead have to download it from elsewhere. This is, possibly, illegal.

Wait, wait - back up there. "In order to protect themselves from possible legal action" - for letting their users watch their own DVDs? What's gone wrong?

Microsoft's WMA and WMV formats, and Apple's AAC format - probably many more - all contain code that only allows certain devices or software to play the file. Again - if you use Windows Media Player for all your video and audio, not a problem for you. But not exactly fair competition, is it? If you just so happened to want to use software from someone other than Microsoft (say) - what if that software can't play your files, because of this DRM blocking? (And there is a high likelihood that software that can play it has used reverse engineering at some point - again, a legal grey area.) It's not just stifling competition - it's removing it. Windows Media Player comes installed by default on probably 98% of home PCs sold in Britain today - maybe higher. Why bother to install anything else, now you've put your favourite air guitar album on to your PC? If it won't work with other programs - why go to the effort?

And that, in my book, is not fair on the competition; and inevitably, bad for competition means bad for consumer. We've already seen this: the lack of real competition for over a decade to Microsoft's Windows OS has resulted in Windows XP. Sure, it has some good features. OK, the default settings make it look like it was designed for a three-year-old (or maybe by one?) and the focus on tasks, rather than tools, is not to my liking - I like to be able to control options, not just click a button and have something come out close to what I want. But that's not the point.

Since XP was released, there have been countless security updates. Googling for 'xp security updates' returns about 18,900,000 pages (that's pages not updates - not even Microsoft could be that bad!) If anyone has a definite count, please let me know. And that's just the security updates - not the non-security updates that maybe you need to stop your computer from crashing every five minutes.

When you bought XP (if you did - and if you bought a new computer with it preinstalled, you did), you were supposed to be buying a finished product. Coded, compiled, packaged, and on the shelf ready for you to buy. I bet you didn't think it would be delivered in instalments.

Some updates are inevitable. But if you bought a new car, and you had to take it back to the garage about once a month (if not more) for them to tweak something; replace one of the instruments on the dashboard; change how you unlock the car; suddenly discover that if you're doing 50mph and you turn left too hard, the roof falls off... etc, would you be happy? According to the AA website, the Ford Mondeo has had 17 recalls in ten years. XP could probably clock up that many in a fortnight.

This isn't all Microsoft's fault (shock!). For a decade, there has been no real effective competition to their vision of the home computer (and it is a whole vision, not just an OS). PC users rarely cross over to Macs - will this change with the new Intel-driven Apples? Linux - of which, you will have picked up, I am a great fan - is still too fiddly for the average user who's grown up on Windows and used to everything being done for them. I have great respect for those few who find their way to the Kubuntu forums, switching from Windows to Linux - and, when things don't work exactly as they want, rather than throwing a tantrum and going back to MS, actually try and learn a bit about how things work in Linux, how to set it up the way they want. Those who persevere, rarely regret it.

But for many users they simply do not perceive a choice, nor the need to have one. The thing is, unless we work hard to make sure there is a choice - that digital media remains free - we won't have a choice but to follow with Bill Gates' vision of the digital home: your Windows PC streams WMV to your Windows Media Center (sic) box, which acts as your television (even though at present it's broadcast driver architecture (BDA) - the bit that lets it act as a TV, in essence - is completely messed up - and that's not just my opinion). Your Windows Pocket PC can get WMA audio streamed to it as well. Then maybe, one day, someone will say - "Hang on - surely there's a way I can do this?" And there won't be. Because it wasn't in Bill's vision (or it was coded badly and never works, more likely).

This vision of the future scares me. A future where, unless you follow a single company's way of doing things, you won't be able to listen to your CDs, watch your films, watch television. But the vision of the present - the present where this is happening, and nobody seems to notice or even care - that vision scares me more.