p2pnet - rss feed: The Analog Hole
p2p news view / p2pnet: The entertainment industry says there’s a thing called the Analog Hole through which millions of people around the world - their erstwhile customers - would rob them blind, only given half a chance. Every man, woman and child with a computer and online account is, after all, a potential thief, say the music and movie cartels.
The Analog Hole is, "the practice of converting analog content into digital format without embedded copy-protection instructions," said Tech Daily’s Sarah Lai Stirland recently, and Hollywood is, "concerned about the potential for mass online redistribution of entertainment programming via the hole".
And it must be real. How else would the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have been able to stage (and we use the word advisedly) a demonstration?
Enter the Analog Hole law, "the first of the MPAA/RIAA’s Horror Triple Feature to be introduced into Congress," as the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Danny O’Brien describes it. "The others are the Broadcast Flag and technology mandate for digital radio."
Professor Ed Felten (right) thinks the Analog Hole may, however, be useful as a teaching aid >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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The Professional Device Hole
By Ed Felten - Freeedom to Tinker
Any American parent with kids of a certain age knows Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, and the movie made from it. It’s set somewhere in the Texas desert, at a boot camp for troublemaking kids. The kids are forced to work all day in the scorching sun, digging holes in the rock-hard ground then re-filling them. It seems utterly pointless but the grown-ups say it builds character. Eventually we learn that the holes aren’t pointless but in fact serve the interests of a few nasty grown-ups.
Speaking of holes, and pointless exercises, last month Reps. Sensenbrenner and Conyers introduced a bill, the Digital Transition Content Security Act, also known as the Analog Hole Bill."
"Analog hole" is an artfully chosen term, referring to the fact that audio and video can be readily converted back and forth between digital and analog formats. This is just a fact about the universe, but calling it a “hole” makes it sound like a problem that might possibly be solved. The last large-scale attack on the analog hole was the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) which went down in flames in 2002 after its technology was shown to be ineffective (and after SDMI famously threatened to sue researchers for analyzing the technology).
The Analog Hole Bill would mandate that any devices that can translate certain types of video signals from analog to digital form must comply with a Byzantine set of design restrictions that talk about things like “certified digital content rights protection output technologies”. Let’s put aside for now the details of the technology design being mandated; I’ll critique them in a later post. I want to write today about the bill’s exemption for “professional devices”:
PROFESSIONAL DEVICE.—(A) The term‘‘professional device’’ means a device that is designed, manufactured, marketed, and intended for use by a person who regularly employs such a device for lawful business or industrial purposes, such as making, performing, displaying, distributing, or transmitting copies of audiovisual works on a commercial scale at the request of, or with the explicit permission of, the copyright owner.
(B) If a device is marketed to or is commonly purchased by persons other than those described in subparagraph (A), then such device shall not be considered to be a ‘‘professional device’’.
Tim Lee at Tech Liberation Front points out one problem with this exemption:
“Professional” devices, you see, are exempt from the restrictions that apply to all other audiovisual products. This raises some obvious questions: is it the responsibility of a “professional device” maker to ensure that too many “non-professionals” don’t purchase their product? If a company lowers its price too much, thereby allowing too many of the riffraff to buy it, does the company become guilty of distributing a piracy device? Perhaps the government needs to start issuing “video professional” licenses so we know who’s allowed to be part of this elite class?
I think this legislative strategy is extremely revealing. Clearly, Sensenbrenner’s Hollywood allies realized that all this copy-protection nonsense could cause problems for their own employees, who obviously need the unfettered ability to create, manipulate, and convert analog and digital content. This is quite a reasonable fear: if you require all devices to recognize and respect encoded copy-protection information, you might discover that content which you have a legitimate right to access has been locked out of reach by over-zealous hardware. But rather than taking that as a hint that there’s something wrong with the whole concept of legislatively-mandated copy-protection technology, Hollywood’s lobbyists took the easy way out: they got themselves exempted from the reach of the legislation.
In fact, the professional device hole is even better for Hollywood than Tim Lee realizes. Not only will it protect Hollywood from the downside of the bill, it will also create new barriers to entry, making it harder for amateurs to create and distribute video content — and just at the moment when technology seems to be enabling high-quality amateur video distribution.
The really interesting thing about the professional device hole is that it makes one provision of the bill utterly impossible to put into practice. For those reading along at home, I’m referring to the robustness rulemaking of section 202(1), which requires the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to establish technical requirements that (among other things) “can only with difficulty be defeated or circumvented by use of professional tools or equipment”. But there’s a small problem: professional tools are exempt from the technical requirements.
The robustness requirements, in other words, have to stop professional tools from copying content — and they have to do that, somehow, without regulating what professional tools can do. That, as they say, is a tall order.
That’s all for today, class. Here’s the homework, due next time:
(1) Table W, the most technical part of the bill, contains an error. (It’s a substantive error, not just a typo.) Explain what the error is.
(2) How would you fix the error?
(3) What can we learn from the fact that the error is still in the bill at this late date?
Also See:
demonstration - MPAA demos Analog Hole, January 6, 2005
describes it - The Analog Hole bill, December 18, 2005
January 14th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Our ears and eyes are analog. Plugging the “Hole” is impossible.
January 15th, 2006 at 12:23 am
I know one thing…there are plenty of holes at the RIAA and MPAA…
ASSholes, that is.
January 15th, 2006 at 2:57 am
This would seem to me to be a clear violation of free speech under the following scenario : Let’s say I wish to post a political opinion (or anything else for that matter) on the web in digital format. So I record it on a small tape recorder as I think of it during the day. When I want to post it, I play it back and convert it to MP3 or whatever on my computer. But I can’t because I’m not a professional and so I can’t have the sort of computer that allows me to do this. Clear FS violation?
Hmmmm - I guess this would also mean computers would be outlawed as well. I still have my old 166MHz laying around here somewheres. As for new ones, GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT, BOYS !!!
But seriously, this is all rather disturbing. It’s the kind of thing I expect to see when the people running the show have no clue how the show actually runs. Just ask Brownie.
January 15th, 2006 at 4:09 am
Our ears and eyes are analog. Plugging the “Hole” is impossible.
What about Ear Plugs?
January 15th, 2006 at 5:28 am
Maybe in the future people will be forced to wear hearing aids all their lives that are surgically implanted at birth, that block restricted content from reaching their natural ears.
January 15th, 2006 at 5:34 am
As you point out old technology will be more valuable than new technology, which is restricted. As an example the FCC banned radios from receiving frequencies in the 800 mhz range. That was done so that people couldn’t listen in on analog cell phone calls. But old TVs can still pick up those frequencies on the UHF channels.
January 15th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
The really worrisome thing about these trends in general is that it seems to me that rather than choosing to compete on a level playing field, the entertainment companies are choosing instead to institute protectionist measures in an attempt to stifle competition. This is one thing when they do it from a private standpoint, but by making these things the law of the land they pull us into it as a country. Historically, those who compete freely over the long term will prosper over those who do not.
“Still, it moves.”
January 16th, 2006 at 4:04 am
The mindset we have now is one of restriction, protectionism, and entrenchment, when it comes to legistaltive actions. This and the one of making a troll a criminal offense is in the same line of thinking. Neither will truely be effective for its’ intent.
This is interesting from other aspect. Recolorising old movies, which Turner Broadcasting did with some of the old black and white movies raised all sorts of stink with modifing the original format. This was rather short sighted of the industry as a whole. None of the younger generation is interested in the black and white and to them, who grew up in the colorized generation are willing to watch such in B&W. It is through this and other technological measures that such become possible and that new sales might be realized through modified older movies, giving them both longer economic life and renewed interest from a newer generation of customers.
Tomorrow or the next day might again reveal another new process that could once again revive the process into a brand new repeat money maker. However with the present day protectionism attitudes, none of this will likely be present in the future with the direction things are going now. Not only will looking at a movie with the idea in mind of changes be legal, but the very act appears on the verge of being an illegal act. That is far too much restriction and it looks for all intents and purposes that the media cartels have laid to rest their personal demon of the Fair Use Act.
It may be the only way they will sell this, it’s not the way I as a customer will accept it though. I refuse to pay the price of owning for rental stipulations. Now Hollywood may push this to the very edge but I fail to see where making products so restrictive that for the average customer it is more problems to use the purchased product than it is worth, will increase sales. In fact it smacks of making the buying experience to own ever harder to justify. Customer dissatisfaction is the quickest way I know of to lose sales.
Lastly, all this protectionism is only restricting what we have as choices in the market place. I for one won’t buy a new player till my old one dies. If that means I don’t see the latest greatest, so be it. It still won’t get me to the store any faster to encorporate some new idea the industry wants the marketplace to buy into. They haven’t even agreed on industry wide standards yet. Tomorrow a new golden boy may be the idea of the day to push and I don’t want that. I want something that I buy once and use from then on out till that equipment dies. They aren’t meeting my demands as to what I wish for either equipment, nor standards, nor product. As such, I won’t spend to buy what I don’t see a future in or a questionable product of limited lifespan.
January 16th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
As most people know, most actors and actresses are anti-”Republican.”
Pointing out to these folks that this technology can be used by the Bush or whover’s administration who happens to be in power at the moment to stifle their opinion. If people inside the lamescream “entertainment” industry see how this type of technology can be used “against them,” maybe they will wise up and join the fight on our side.
Any new technology designed specificaly to restrict (whether it is in making fake state ID’s, counterfeiting, or filesharing) peoples’ freedom will always be defeated in a short period of time by a determined hacker. Hacking makes people free.
January 16th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
you forgot the third, have George pass a law requiring permits for sight and hearing, and give the cartels the ability to remove them.
January 16th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
I thought this was already covered under the Patriot Act Extension?
–TG
January 16th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
sorry, must have missed that sun section!
January 16th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
I ment to say sub section….damn fingers get in the way of my typing
January 17th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
I wonder why organisations and governments persist with the belief that introducing more laws somehow gives them more control over human behaviour. I mean, if the “more laws” rule hasn’t stopped a population from committing murder etc, why on earth would it stop them doing something that is considered reasonably harmless, such as breaking copyright laws and sharing media.