Transcript of SFP#1 on Day Against DRM with Cory Doctorow
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WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:18.280 Welcome to the first episode of the Software Freedom Podcast. 00:18.280 --> 00:21.920 Starting with this episode, we will talk once a month with people who have inspiring 00:21.920 --> 00:23.960 ideas about software freedom. 00:23.960 --> 00:27.080 This podcast is presented to you by the Free Software Foundation Europe. 00:27.080 --> 00:30.800 We are a charity that empowers users to control technology. 00:30.800 --> 00:34.200 My name is Matthias Kirschner, and I'm the president of the FSFE. 00:34.200 --> 00:35.720 And my name is Katharina Okun. 00:35.720 --> 00:39.880 I am a writer and digital rights activist, bass, and Berlin. 00:39.880 --> 00:44.840 When we were planning the first episode, we exchanged some ideas for possible guests. 00:44.840 --> 00:49.400 And when I heard that the day against DRM will this year take place in October, I directly 00:49.400 --> 00:54.160 thought we have to get Cory Doctoro as our first guest, and we have to talk with him 00:54.160 --> 00:56.400 about digital restriction management. 00:56.400 --> 01:01.180 I think they are just very few people that inspired so many people from our community like 01:01.180 --> 01:02.180 Cory did. 01:02.180 --> 01:07.200 For those listeners who don't know him, Cory Doctoro is a British-Canadian writer and 01:07.200 --> 01:11.800 political activist, and he is the co-editor of Boeing Boeing Net. 01:11.800 --> 01:17.000 He is a prominent supporter of the idea of software freedom, and he is fighting for a less restrictive 01:17.000 --> 01:18.560 copyright law. 01:18.560 --> 01:22.480 His books are published under Creative Commons licenses. 01:22.480 --> 01:27.240 These science fiction novels of Cory are all strongly connected to the debates on technology 01:27.240 --> 01:28.680 and regulation. 01:28.680 --> 01:32.880 What I like about his books is that they address complex issues such as software freedom, 01:32.880 --> 01:38.000 copyright, digital restriction management, or privacy in an unconventional way. 01:38.000 --> 01:43.720 So even someone who has never thought about these topics before, they can follow him. 01:43.720 --> 01:47.680 And at the same time as someone who is active in those fields for a long time, you always 01:47.680 --> 01:51.720 find interesting ways how to explain these topics better to others. 01:51.720 --> 01:55.960 As a privacy activist, my favorite book of Cory is, of course, Little Brother. 01:55.960 --> 02:02.320 The book was published in 2008 and tells the story of four teenagers from San Francisco 02:02.320 --> 02:07.400 who experience how society is more and more transformed into a surveillance state after 02:07.400 --> 02:09.200 a terrorist attack. 02:09.200 --> 02:14.200 Together with our friends, these teenagers start an underground campaign for defending 02:14.200 --> 02:17.880 civil liberties against the Department of Homeland Security. 02:17.880 --> 02:23.440 I don't want to spoil you, but I like the end very much. 02:23.440 --> 02:26.480 What do you like most about the book? 02:26.480 --> 02:31.440 Definitely the way how Cory described how the protagonists of a story circumvent surveillance 02:31.440 --> 02:34.360 technology were very simple hacks. 02:34.360 --> 02:38.760 For example, right in the beginning, there is a passage where they explain how to trick 02:38.760 --> 02:45.040 an intelligent surveillance camera that can recognize people based on how they walk. 02:45.040 --> 02:49.880 They simply put small stones in their shoes in order to change their walking patterns. 02:49.880 --> 02:54.280 And by the way, did you know that at what's known, had a copy of Little Brother prominently 02:54.280 --> 02:59.400 placed in his hotel room in Hong Kong when he did his first interviews for the documentary 02:59.400 --> 03:00.800 Citizen Four? 03:00.800 --> 03:04.160 I guess this was his way of telling the world. 03:04.160 --> 03:07.840 If you want to understand why I did this, please read this book. 03:07.840 --> 03:10.560 And you definitely should read this book if you haven't read it already. 03:10.560 --> 03:12.600 It's a fantastic book. 03:12.600 --> 03:13.600 What's your favorite book? 03:13.600 --> 03:14.600 I like Little Brother. 03:14.600 --> 03:19.360 I like Homeland, but at the moment, it's unauthorized spread his new book. 03:19.360 --> 03:25.280 And in this book, Salima, who's a refugee, she lives in the U.S. and she's in the situation 03:25.280 --> 03:30.520 that her toaster refuses to toast her bread for her one morning. 03:30.520 --> 03:35.520 She finds out that the company, the manufacturer of the toaster, they went bankrupt and their 03:35.520 --> 03:37.040 servers are down. 03:37.040 --> 03:42.680 So the toaster, which before always checked if you can toast this bread or not, which is 03:42.680 --> 03:45.520 authorized or not, those others aren't there anymore. 03:45.520 --> 03:51.280 So she's not able to toast the bread, which is authorized as well as any other toast. 03:51.280 --> 03:54.280 Oh my God. 03:54.280 --> 03:55.280 She doesn't stop there. 03:55.280 --> 04:00.200 So she continues to investigate and finds out that there are others with the same problem 04:00.200 --> 04:05.620 and that they fleshed other software on those toasters and then they could toast any 04:05.620 --> 04:06.920 bread they want. 04:06.920 --> 04:10.680 So she also does that and enjoys this new freedom. 04:10.680 --> 04:16.160 And she helps other people in this building and shows them how they can modify their devices 04:16.160 --> 04:21.480 and they all enjoy buying bread they want or baking bread and toasting it. 04:21.480 --> 04:25.440 So she's very happy about this development, how she can help others around her to also 04:25.440 --> 04:27.880 benefit from modifications there. 04:27.880 --> 04:31.760 Later, it turns out that well, what she did was illegal. 04:31.760 --> 04:35.920 They are not allowed to make changes to the software there on those devices in the building 04:35.920 --> 04:38.080 and there are legal threats about this. 04:38.080 --> 04:39.840 And I don't want to spoil you too much. 04:39.840 --> 04:46.360 So read the book, but this part it reminded me about when we at the FSFE helped others 04:46.360 --> 04:51.840 in our free Android campaign to flesh software on their mobile phones. 04:51.840 --> 04:56.000 So use free software there and get rid of some restrictions they had on their mobile phones 04:56.000 --> 04:57.000 before. 04:57.000 --> 05:02.120 Seeing how people react towards that and how happy they are with those devices, but on 05:02.120 --> 05:08.120 the same hand also seeing that modifying software on devices is getting harder and harder 05:08.120 --> 05:10.200 in some areas. 05:10.200 --> 05:14.360 What do you think makes Corrie's story so special? 05:14.360 --> 05:19.880 For me, it's that he has those role models in his books like in Little Brother, you have 05:19.880 --> 05:24.160 Marcus and Angela who don't accept that technology just restricts them. 05:24.160 --> 05:30.120 They get active themselves and they make changes to technology and defend civil liberties. 05:30.120 --> 05:36.160 And now with an authorized bread, the special part there is that Salima is a refugee. 05:36.160 --> 05:39.560 She's in a bad situation there, but she doesn't accept that. 05:39.560 --> 05:44.960 She changes things and tries to improve her situation for herself and for others. 05:44.960 --> 05:50.640 It's very important that you have such role models for younger people in our society, 05:50.640 --> 05:53.000 for underprivileged people in our societies. 05:53.000 --> 05:56.400 So that's why I like this book a lot and the characters in there. 05:56.400 --> 06:02.520 So I hope you all understand now why we instantly agreed on Corrie Dockro as the perfect guest 06:02.520 --> 06:05.760 for the first episode of the software freedom podcast. 06:05.760 --> 06:10.360 We are very excited to have them with us today and talk with them about this new book 06:10.360 --> 06:14.000 and digital restriction management. 06:14.000 --> 06:15.000 Welcome, Corrie. 06:15.000 --> 06:17.360 Thank you very much for being with us today. 06:17.360 --> 06:23.200 So you want said that the idea for your book, an authorized bread was based on an article 06:23.200 --> 06:27.480 you wrote back in 2015 for the Guardian. 06:27.480 --> 06:31.160 The title was, if dishwasher were iPhones. 06:31.160 --> 06:35.120 Can you explain what this article was about? 06:35.160 --> 06:41.000 For many years, I'd heard from people to say that it was no real imposition for Apple 06:41.000 --> 06:47.400 to have created this world garden business model where in order to use a device they sold 06:47.400 --> 06:51.200 you, you had to also let them decide which software you could use. 06:51.200 --> 06:53.840 And they made all kinds of arguments about why this was legitimate. 06:53.840 --> 06:55.600 They said it kept you safe. 06:55.600 --> 07:00.440 They said it protected software authors from copyright infringement. 07:00.480 --> 07:05.480 They said that it simplified the paradox of choice and so on. 07:05.480 --> 07:10.120 And it seemed to me that if all of that was actually true, then they could have just 07:10.120 --> 07:15.480 had a little tick box that said, actually, I'd prefer to choose my own software rather 07:15.480 --> 07:19.480 than relying on Apple to make that choice for me. 07:19.480 --> 07:24.760 And it also seemed to be belied by the fact that Apple had tightened the screws many 07:24.760 --> 07:25.760 times. 07:25.760 --> 07:28.800 They had changed the guidelines about what kind of apps you could have. 07:28.800 --> 07:34.960 So they had unilaterally decided that some software authors expression was not lawful 07:34.960 --> 07:37.560 for inclusion in the app store. 07:37.560 --> 07:43.280 We had most notoriously someone who'd made an app that kept track of drone strikes that 07:43.280 --> 07:49.400 the US government launched and specifically the civilian death count from those drone strikes. 07:49.400 --> 07:53.080 And Apple had repeatedly excluded that from the app store. 07:53.080 --> 07:57.080 And so it seemed to me that if this was something people really liked, they would have just 07:57.080 --> 07:58.080 opted for it. 07:58.080 --> 08:02.120 But instead, you know, between the drone strikes and the people who kept trying to create 08:02.120 --> 08:06.120 independent software stores and the users who kept trying to drill jailbreak their phones, 08:06.120 --> 08:13.000 it was pretty clear that actually software vendors and software authors and iPhone owners 08:13.000 --> 08:16.760 were many of them not very happy with this at all. 08:16.760 --> 08:20.760 And the common rejoinder was, well, then why are they in the iPhone ecosystem? 08:20.760 --> 08:23.960 They should be choosing a different platform. 08:23.960 --> 08:26.600 And that argument all seemed very inadequate to me. 08:26.600 --> 08:30.240 And so I thought, you know, there are plenty of other appliances that you could make this 08:30.240 --> 08:31.480 argument about. 08:31.480 --> 08:37.080 And specifically, dishwashers are a really good example because the most dangerous thing 08:37.080 --> 08:40.280 you can do really is eat bad food. 08:40.280 --> 08:44.520 Foodborne illness has killed more people than anything else in the history of the world. 08:44.520 --> 08:48.400 And certainly there's a lot of people who make their living from coming up with independent 08:48.400 --> 08:53.960 dishware designs who then have to contend with copycats who clone their dishes and so 08:53.960 --> 08:54.960 on. 08:54.960 --> 08:58.800 And I thought every one of these arguments would apply equally well to dishwashers. 08:58.800 --> 09:05.880 And so I wrote this little fake letter from Steve Jobs like CEO to his customers explaining 09:05.880 --> 09:11.880 why they should stop trying to put non authorized dishes in their special fancy dishwashers. 09:11.880 --> 09:17.040 And how these special fancy dishwashers had been exquisitely calibrated to reduce water 09:17.040 --> 09:23.520 wastage and ensure that foodborne illnesses were eliminated and to reward people who made 09:23.520 --> 09:29.960 dishes and to give them, you know, the incentives they needed to continue to innovate in flatware 09:29.960 --> 09:31.640 and dishes and so on. 09:31.640 --> 09:37.200 And I wrote this essay and what was interesting to me about it at the in the moment was just 09:37.200 --> 09:44.480 how many iOS users failed to get the joke and instead acted like an affronted religious 09:44.480 --> 09:49.280 minority whose sacred texts had just been mocked. 09:49.280 --> 09:54.760 And then subsequently, how close that rhetoric ended up hewing to internet of things device 09:54.760 --> 09:55.760 companies. 09:55.760 --> 10:00.200 So, you know, if you listen to the rhetoric from the likes of the, you know, the founder 10:00.200 --> 10:06.040 of juice, Sarah, which is the company that made the juice squeezers that use DRM to fruit 10:06.040 --> 10:11.360 or the rhetoric from other IoT companies, you know, they all made essentially those arguments. 10:11.360 --> 10:17.320 You know, this is pose law that satire is indistinguishable from reality and in undermodern 10:17.320 --> 10:18.520 conditions. 10:18.520 --> 10:23.960 And so, you know, that turned into unauthorized bread or at least the proximate instigation 10:23.960 --> 10:25.360 for writing unauthorized bread. 10:25.360 --> 10:30.480 This idea that there really wasn't any reason given the internet of things not to turn 10:30.480 --> 10:36.480 everything into an iOS style app store for the clothes that a wash in your washing machine 10:36.480 --> 10:41.880 and the dishes that a wash in your dishwasher and the bread that will toast in your toaster. 10:41.880 --> 10:46.000 This month's stay against the RM focuses on ebooks. 10:46.000 --> 10:50.320 What does the difference between a book and an ebook with DRM? 10:50.320 --> 10:55.240 Well, a book is something that actually has a somewhat nebulous definition. 10:55.240 --> 11:00.320 If you think back on the history of books, all of the things that we might say would be, 11:00.320 --> 11:07.360 you know, critical to defining a book actually are not present in some pretty important examples. 11:07.360 --> 11:10.960 So for example, we might say that a book has to have a spine. 11:10.960 --> 11:15.480 It has to be a codex that is to say shaped like a book as we know it today. 11:15.480 --> 11:19.360 But you know, the Torah, which is one of the first and most widely published books in the 11:19.360 --> 11:24.240 history of the world, originally was a scroll that didn't have a spine and we still call 11:24.240 --> 11:25.240 it a book. 11:25.240 --> 11:29.120 Or we might say that a book needs to have writing or pictures in it, but we have blank 11:29.120 --> 11:30.120 books. 11:30.120 --> 11:34.720 So we might say that a book has to cost something, but you know, the most widely available 11:34.720 --> 11:39.040 books in the world are free, you know, Bibles and copies of the little red book and so on. 11:39.040 --> 11:41.200 So book is a pretty expansive category. 11:41.200 --> 11:45.640 Certainly electronically, we've expanded the definition of books by blowing up some 11:45.640 --> 11:49.680 of the physical constraints that were associated with them, you know, Wikipedia I think qualifies 11:49.680 --> 11:51.320 as an electronic book. 11:51.320 --> 11:57.480 And so do, you know, I just downloaded a PDF last week for Dungeons and Dragons, Game Masters 11:57.480 --> 12:01.800 who want to ensure that they have consent from their players for situations that might 12:01.800 --> 12:03.920 be emotionally difficult for them. 12:03.920 --> 12:06.280 And that book was eight pages long. 12:06.280 --> 12:09.480 And it's hard to imagine a printed book that's eight pages long. 12:09.480 --> 12:14.200 And so we've eliminated the length constraints, we've eliminated some of the media constraints, 12:14.200 --> 12:17.080 we have books with moving images and audio and so on. 12:17.080 --> 12:22.920 But once you add DRM, something really changes, because although books are very ancient 12:22.920 --> 12:28.560 and although books are seriously something that is part of our cultural heritage and how 12:28.560 --> 12:33.240 we identify as a culture, you know, when when you want to show a civilization that's 12:33.240 --> 12:37.400 falling apart, you just show pictures of books on fire, you know, anytime someone piles 12:37.480 --> 12:41.560 up a bunch of books and sets them on fire, you can be pretty sure that nothing good is 12:41.560 --> 12:42.960 going to come of that. 12:42.960 --> 12:49.800 But a lot of that covenant that goes around books, that is that is critical to what we think 12:49.800 --> 12:53.440 of when we think of a book, is not present in an ebook. 12:53.440 --> 12:57.760 So books are older than copyright and they're also older than commerce. 12:57.760 --> 13:01.120 And they're certainly older than the idea of the unitary author. 13:01.120 --> 13:07.080 The first books were conglomerates of text by multiple authors bound up together. 13:07.080 --> 13:11.640 And the way that you would contribute to authorship was by, you know, copying out some of those 13:11.640 --> 13:15.640 passages and then adding some of your own or finding other passages that seem relevant 13:15.640 --> 13:17.120 to you and so on. 13:17.120 --> 13:23.920 All of those things are part of the ancient compact that makes books so valuable, so important, 13:23.920 --> 13:25.760 so so enduring. 13:25.760 --> 13:30.640 But once you add DRM to a book, those things that were historically part of the natural 13:30.640 --> 13:34.560 life of a book, whether that's having the book read aloud or being able to give away 13:34.560 --> 13:40.000 the book or being able to lend the book or being able to tear passages out of a book 13:40.000 --> 13:43.400 that offend you, all of those things just disappear. 13:43.400 --> 13:49.120 And instead, what you end up with is a book that is regulated first by legal code, usually 13:49.120 --> 13:54.000 by a license agreement that sometimes even longer than the book itself, especially when 13:54.000 --> 13:58.000 you factor in the sub license agreements associated with the e-reader and the operating 13:58.000 --> 14:02.280 system and so on, you might end up with 100,000 words of legal use that you're expected 14:02.280 --> 14:07.160 to understand in order to operate the book within the confines of the law. 14:07.160 --> 14:11.320 And then you have technical strictures that actually prevent you from deciding which 14:11.320 --> 14:14.920 e-reader you're going to read the book on, from deciding whether or not you're going 14:14.920 --> 14:20.600 to transfer the ownership of that book to your children or give it away to a local school. 14:20.600 --> 14:25.240 All of those things that are part of the bargain of the book just go up in smoke as soon 14:25.240 --> 14:27.680 as you add DRM to the book. 14:27.760 --> 14:32.560 My feeling is that people would often never accept the same restrictions, they accept 14:32.560 --> 14:36.960 with their e-books for their normal books. Why do you think this is the case? 14:37.760 --> 14:42.960 That was kind of the point of the, if dishwasher's were iPhones and an authorized bread, 14:42.960 --> 14:49.840 that we have been put in very slowly boiling water, like the analogy of the frogs and boiling 14:49.840 --> 14:56.000 water. And we haven't noticed, it's kind of crept up on us that the rights that we value 14:56.080 --> 15:00.320 in our books have been taken away from us one at a time very slowly. 15:00.320 --> 15:06.560 And you know, this isn't just because we weren't paying attention, it's also because a lot of 15:06.560 --> 15:11.760 these problems are a long way away, right? Like what you do with the book at the end of your life 15:11.760 --> 15:18.640 is for the average book owner a long way off. And it's also hard to learn from that lesson 15:18.640 --> 15:25.760 once you're dead. And so you kind of have to witness say your beloved parents beautifully, 15:25.760 --> 15:31.840 curated library being vanished in a puff of smoke, thanks to a license agreement, 15:31.840 --> 15:37.680 or because the company that made the DRM server for it decided to take that server down 15:37.680 --> 15:42.160 in order for you to learn the lesson and revisit your own choices about what you buy. 15:42.160 --> 15:48.560 And you know, in general, we rely not on people learning lessons the hard way, a long way off. 15:48.560 --> 15:53.760 In order to keep us safe, we often ask states to intervene by say declaring certain business 15:53.760 --> 15:59.520 practices illegal or certain contractual terms to be unenforceable. And neither of those are 15:59.520 --> 16:04.960 on our horizon at the moment when it comes to DRM. When Microsoft closed their bookstore, 16:04.960 --> 16:10.000 users could not access the books anymore they had bought. Do you know other examples? 16:11.280 --> 16:16.480 Yeah, well Walmart did the same thing I think in 2007, but the Federal Trade Commission actually 16:16.480 --> 16:21.280 intervened at that point and ordered them to keep the DRM servers running. I don't know if they're 16:21.360 --> 16:28.160 still up and going, but you know, Amazon is what, 20 years old. And I'm literally sitting next to 16:28.160 --> 16:33.200 a bookshelf full of books that are four, five, and six times older than that. So the idea that we're 16:33.200 --> 16:40.240 going to just rely on Amazon to never get bored of running its DRM servers or never be say financially 16:40.240 --> 16:45.280 engineered into bankruptcy as so many companies have in recent years, including companies that are 16:45.280 --> 16:53.520 hundreds of years old, seems completely unrealistic. I mean, one of the arguments is often that 16:53.520 --> 16:59.760 artists cannot make any money with our digital restriction management. Now as an author yourself, 16:59.760 --> 17:06.160 what do we say about this argument? Well, it's very hard to parse that argument out. So one of the 17:06.160 --> 17:13.040 things that makes DRM so pernicious is that it's protected under the law in the EU article 6 of the 17:13.040 --> 17:21.120 2001 copyright directive. And in the US section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17:21.120 --> 17:28.480 both prohibit bypassing DRM even for a lawful purpose. And whenever, you know, I've been in 17:28.480 --> 17:36.640 policy forums, whether that's at Weipo or in Brussels or in Washington, DC or in standards bodies 17:36.640 --> 17:42.960 like DVBCPCM or the broadcast flag body, the broadcast protection discussion group. And I've 17:42.960 --> 17:52.560 proposed that we make it lawful to bypass DRM for lawful purposes. The answer has been that if we 17:52.560 --> 18:00.640 don't maintain the illegality of bypassing DRM, that DRM will be defeated by users. And then I say, 18:00.640 --> 18:06.240 but isn't DRM the technical countermeasure that stops people from copying it? And when you dig 18:06.240 --> 18:12.080 into it, what you find out is that nobody who makes DRM believes that DRM stops users from 18:12.080 --> 18:20.080 making copies. What they think is that it allows firms to invoke the law to prohibit otherwise 18:20.080 --> 18:26.480 lawful conduct, right? It doesn't stop pirates in other words, but it stops competitors. You know, 18:26.480 --> 18:33.040 if you want to pirate DVDs and watch them on your computer, it's not hard to rip them. But if you 18:33.040 --> 18:39.600 want to make a gadget that allows you to say, watch out of region DVDs or to rip them to put them 18:39.600 --> 18:44.080 on your computer and you want to sell them in a store, right? If you want to sell a product that 18:44.080 --> 18:51.120 does lawful things, the fact that you have to bypass the DRM to do it allows the company to invoke 18:51.120 --> 18:57.840 the law to shut you down. So if you're an author and you think that what DRM is going to do is stop 18:57.920 --> 19:03.600 the people who don't want to pay from your books from getting copies them for free, the very people 19:03.600 --> 19:08.640 who make the DRM for those books will tell you that it has no connection with doing that. If you 19:08.640 --> 19:13.040 kind of pin them down, you have to wrestle them for a bit. But then they'll admit it. And sometimes, 19:13.040 --> 19:19.040 you know, they'll fall back on this argument that, oh, well, it's a speed bump. But nobody pretends 19:19.040 --> 19:25.520 that speed bumps stop racers, boy racers from racing down the street. Or they'll say that it keeps 19:25.680 --> 19:31.200 the honest users honest that when you encounter the DRM and it tells you, I'm sorry, you're not allowed 19:31.200 --> 19:37.040 to do that. That if you're honest, you'll go, oh, well, I didn't realize that that was prohibited. 19:37.040 --> 19:44.480 But of course, if you're honest, doing things that are lawful is not dishonest, you know, buying a DVD 19:44.480 --> 19:50.000 or an ebook from one supplier and then watching it on a device made by another supplier is neither 19:50.000 --> 19:55.200 dishonest nor unlawful. It's just bypassing the DRM that's unlawful. So this is how Ed Felton, 19:55.200 --> 19:59.600 who's now, I believe with the Federal Trade Commission, used to be a Princeton came to coin the 19:59.600 --> 20:05.360 memorable phrase that keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. That what 20:05.360 --> 20:10.640 the honest user is doing is by definition honest. That's what makes them an honest user. And so if your 20:10.640 --> 20:16.640 DRM gets in their way, you are prohibiting them from doing something honest. So really, what it ends 20:16.640 --> 20:25.280 up doing is it ends up locking you the rights holder, the creator, into the platform of the company. 20:25.280 --> 20:30.320 And the company is not on your side, right? Amazon does not exist to enrich creators. Amazon's 20:30.320 --> 20:37.280 goal is to minimize its costs everywhere that it's possible to do so and maximize its profits. 20:37.280 --> 20:43.360 And you see them doing this relentlessly in every business that they enter. And so while it may be 20:43.360 --> 20:49.040 true that Amazon offers some kind of teaser rate for you to do a Kindle original or to allow them 20:49.040 --> 20:54.880 to put Kindle DRM on your books or to go into Audible, which is their audiobook platform, which controls 20:54.880 --> 21:00.240 90% of the market and doesn't allow you to opt out of their DRM. That once they have control over 21:00.240 --> 21:04.240 that market, they're going to do what every other firm does when they gain control over their 21:04.240 --> 21:09.760 suppliers. They're going to squeeze the supplier. And that's you. And so, you know, if you decide 21:09.760 --> 21:14.000 later on that you don't want to be an audible author because someone else like Google Play or 21:14.000 --> 21:23.120 Libro.fm or downpour is offering you a better price. You have to not only pull your books from Amazon. 21:24.080 --> 21:32.560 You also have to bet that your listeners or your readers will throw away the books that they've bought 21:32.560 --> 21:41.120 and buy them again on the new platform or maintain two separate non-interoperable libraries of books. 21:41.120 --> 21:46.320 So you effectively increase the switching costs for your customers to follow you to any platform 21:46.320 --> 21:52.160 that offers you a better deal. So, you know, it's like if you were a musician and you released all 21:52.160 --> 21:57.600 of your records in a format that only Sony devices could play. And then later on Universal offered 21:57.600 --> 22:02.560 you a better deal, you would have to trust that your listeners were willing to throw away all the 22:02.560 --> 22:07.760 records you sold them. Well, that is not a good bet. And not many musicians would be in a position 22:07.760 --> 22:13.280 to make that demand on their customers. And so, over time, you're just making yourself more and more 22:13.280 --> 22:20.240 indebted to these big, rapacious corporations that only everyone to figure out how to get more 22:20.240 --> 22:26.800 money for themselves and less money for you from the creative labor that you do. You know, if someone, 22:26.800 --> 22:31.760 as I've said before, someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and then won't give you 22:31.760 --> 22:38.800 the key, that lock is not there for you. That lock is there for them. And you know, if you go to 22:38.800 --> 22:45.520 Amazon and say, I don't want to sell my audiobooks with your DRM anymore, they'll say go find someone 22:45.520 --> 22:52.080 else to carry your audiobooks because we only sell audiobooks that are locked to our platform 22:52.160 --> 22:56.240 so that every customer that you bring to us becomes our customer instead of yours. 22:56.880 --> 23:01.840 I mean, this sounds really absurd. If you build DRM systems, you have to treat your customer 23:01.840 --> 23:07.760 as a potential attacker of your system. What is the impact of DRM on the security of our devices? 23:08.560 --> 23:14.560 Yeah, so this is the other issue here. One of the things that arises from this law, 23:14.560 --> 23:23.200 Article 6 of the EUCD and Section 121 of the DMCA, is that because they make it both a civil 23:23.200 --> 23:32.640 and potentially criminal offense to help people bypass a DRM system, they also have the side 23:32.640 --> 23:41.040 effect of making it illegal to publish full security analyses of these products. If you find a 23:41.120 --> 23:48.720 defect in a system with DRM in it and in order to do your proof of concept code and describe the 23:48.720 --> 23:55.360 defect so thoroughly that the manufacturer can't deny it because manufacturers are very, very prone 23:55.360 --> 24:00.960 to simply denying it or minimizing it when they're called out on their security mistakes because 24:00.960 --> 24:06.000 they don't want to be embarrassed in public and they don't want their products, reputations to suffer. 24:06.000 --> 24:12.480 So if you want to publish the industry standard for a security report, which is to 24:13.280 --> 24:18.480 enumerate the defect and provide proof of concept code so that other people can replicate your work, 24:19.040 --> 24:26.160 then you potentially face both criminal and civil liability for revealing those defects. 24:26.160 --> 24:33.120 So effectively, although DRM starts off as a means to control customers' behavior by controlling 24:33.120 --> 24:40.000 what products competitors can manufacture, it becomes a means for controlling critics as well, 24:40.000 --> 24:46.080 for controlling people who discover mistakes that you made in implementing your technology 24:46.080 --> 24:51.840 and who want to warn your customers that the device that they have, which inevitably does more 24:51.840 --> 24:58.160 than entertain them, inevitably it has sensors and it has lots of personal identifying information 24:58.960 --> 25:03.840 and it has ways to access your local network and the other devices on it and so on, 25:04.640 --> 25:09.600 that if you want to warn people about the defects in that device, you have to be willing to brave 25:10.480 --> 25:15.920 retribution, legal retribution from the company whose products you are criticizing. 25:16.480 --> 25:22.000 And you know, I am enough of a free speech purist to think that telling the truth about defects in 25:22.000 --> 25:27.680 products should always be legal, but even if you disagree with me and you think that there might be 25:27.680 --> 25:33.040 some legitimate restrictions on when defects in products can be revealed so that manufacturers can 25:34.400 --> 25:40.320 patch the bugs before the bugs are made public say. I think most reasonable people would agree 25:40.320 --> 25:47.120 that companies that stand to lose from true reports of defects in their products 25:47.120 --> 25:54.080 are not good custodians of that bad news. And one of the things that's happened as a consequence 25:54.560 --> 26:01.200 of the expansion of DRM and to other devices, which is itself a consequence of the expansion 26:01.200 --> 26:05.440 of software and to other devices. Once you have software and a device, you can add DRM to it. 26:05.440 --> 26:10.160 Once you add DRM to it, the log gives you the right to stop your competitors from removing that 26:10.160 --> 26:15.760 DRM or tampering with that DRM to let your customers get more out of their lawfully acquired property 26:15.760 --> 26:20.960 is that the constellation of devices that are also off limits to full security audits keeps on 26:20.960 --> 26:28.320 growing keeps getting bigger and bigger. And that means that we are at an ever greater risk 26:28.880 --> 26:36.000 of the security defects festering in these devices until they're so widely exploited that finally 26:36.800 --> 26:41.760 the manufacturer can no longer pretend that they don't exist by which point it's far too late. 26:41.760 --> 26:47.520 So we've already seen this happen. The most notorious example was in 2005 when Sony BMG music 26:48.160 --> 26:56.640 6 million CDs comprising 51 audio titles that had a secret DRM system on them that maliciously 26:56.640 --> 27:02.800 and covertly changed your operating system so that it could no longer see certain programs 27:02.800 --> 27:08.080 and could no longer terminate them when they were running any program that had the string dollar 27:08.080 --> 27:13.520 sign sys dollar sign at the start of its file name would be invisible to both the file and process 27:13.520 --> 27:19.600 managers. And then what they did was they wrote anti CD ripping programs to your computer that would 27:19.600 --> 27:24.960 start automatically at start up time that started with the string dollar sign sys dollar sign so 27:24.960 --> 27:30.480 that you couldn't run CD ripping programs. The thing is that as soon as this was discovered in the 27:30.480 --> 27:35.120 wild but before it was reported to the general public as soon as as independent researchers started 27:35.120 --> 27:40.000 to discover this including independent researchers who made malicious software malicious software 27:40.000 --> 27:45.520 started to emerge that had the same string at the beginning of a dollar sign sys dollar sign. 27:46.560 --> 27:53.040 And so now we had malicious software running on computers that couldn't be detected or shut down 27:53.040 --> 27:58.880 by anti virus software and by the time the researchers who discovered this finally came forward 27:58.880 --> 28:03.600 because there was a three month delay between the initial discovery and then coming forward by the 28:03.600 --> 28:09.280 time they finally came forward this malicious software was present on 200,000 government and 28:09.280 --> 28:14.240 military networks in the U.S. alone. And so all of those computers had been exposed to this risk. 28:15.200 --> 28:21.680 And all of those use those paid for being attacked. Yeah I mean talk about adding insult to injury. 28:21.680 --> 28:28.160 I mean we sometimes hear this this cry that you can't compete with free and so you know how can 28:28.160 --> 28:34.160 a legitimate product compete with the pirate edition. And I think the reality is that however hard 28:34.160 --> 28:38.800 it might be to compete with free it's much harder to compete with free if your product is much 28:38.800 --> 28:44.720 worse than the free product. After all when you pirate your ebooks or movies or games you get 28:44.720 --> 28:49.440 exactly the same game you just don't get the restrictions. And so that is always going to be a 28:49.440 --> 28:55.600 better product than the product that comes with the DRM on it. And some years of rich vacuum cleaner 28:55.600 --> 29:01.520 and coffee machine might be connected to the internet. What rules do we need for the so-called 29:01.520 --> 29:06.560 internet of things to make sure that technology will empower us instead of restricting us? 29:07.280 --> 29:12.960 You know I think we can define this problem as being in two parts. So the first one is 29:12.960 --> 29:20.320 what do we need to get rid of to help people, companies, cooperatives, researchers and others 29:20.320 --> 29:25.920 solve the problem. And the other is what rules should we have so that the problems don't come up. 29:25.920 --> 29:31.360 And the rules that we should have they're kind of hard to pin down because these devices will 29:31.360 --> 29:36.000 have a wide variety of characteristics and a wide variety of use cases and models. 29:36.000 --> 29:41.840 But what we shouldn't do is actually a lot easier and also easier to agree on more broadly 29:41.840 --> 29:47.440 and therefore easier to implement because you know it should be much easier to get consensus on them. 29:47.440 --> 29:53.520 So I think at like a bare minimum we should say that it should always be lawful to report defects 29:53.520 --> 30:00.080 in devices under every circumstance. That telling the truth revealing true facts about defects 30:00.080 --> 30:05.760 in devices or services should 100% of the time be lawful. I think the second one 30:05.760 --> 30:10.880 is that it should always be lawful or that there should be an absolute defense in law 30:11.680 --> 30:19.680 for interoperability and for repair which is a subcategory of interoperability. So in other words 30:19.680 --> 30:25.840 you should be able to defend yourself against any legal claim by showing that you are making a new 30:25.840 --> 30:30.720 product or service that connected to the old product or service to allow the users of that 30:30.720 --> 30:36.880 product or service to get more value out of them. So if someone brings a patent claim or 30:36.880 --> 30:42.320 a terms of service claim or a cybersecurity claim or a torsious interference contractual claim 30:42.320 --> 30:49.040 against you you should be able to say I made a product that improved the lives of the people who 30:49.040 --> 30:55.600 used this a grief parties product. I should therefore be immunized from any legal liability and 30:55.600 --> 31:01.360 courts should be able to assess that defense and if it is a bona fide defense should dismiss 31:01.360 --> 31:08.080 any case against you civil or criminal. I think that's really really important because it allows 31:08.080 --> 31:15.520 us to imagine a device that has the positive features of a DRM device and whose negative features 31:15.520 --> 31:22.480 or whose anti features get removed by users or by the experts that the users nominate to act on 31:22.480 --> 31:29.760 their behalf whether that's a competing company or an open or free software project or cooperative 31:29.760 --> 31:36.240 or just a repair shop or a neighbor who reconfigures their device for them. So in other words the problem 31:36.240 --> 31:40.560 with Facebook for example is not that everyone you know has been made easy to find so that you can 31:40.560 --> 31:46.560 have a conversation with them. The problem is that Facebook has hostages not users and so if we 31:46.640 --> 31:52.640 made it legal to make a new service that went and got all the messages waiting for you on Facebook 31:53.200 --> 31:58.400 and filled them in into this new service so that you could reply to them there without having to 31:58.400 --> 32:03.200 be a Facebook user so you could stay in touch with all your old friends and we immunized you against 32:03.200 --> 32:07.840 all the claims that Facebook might bring against you under patent or terms of service or contractual 32:07.840 --> 32:14.000 interference or torsious interference or what have you then the people who were on Facebook because 32:14.000 --> 32:18.080 they liked it could stay there and the people who are on Facebook because the people they wanted to 32:18.080 --> 32:23.040 talk to were stuck there could leave and still stay in touch with their friends. We wouldn't necessarily 32:23.040 --> 32:27.200 have to mandate that Facebook follows some kind of interoperability standard although that might be 32:27.200 --> 32:34.000 good too we could in addition to whatever floor we put on Facebook's interoperability make sure that 32:34.000 --> 32:38.240 Facebook wasn't allowed to put a ceiling on that interoperability make sure that Facebook wasn't allowed 32:38.240 --> 32:43.760 to say well you know we're adhering to this interoperability standard we let these three companies that 32:43.760 --> 32:48.880 we don't think of as competitors interoperate with us in ways that we don't view as harmful to our 32:48.880 --> 32:54.400 bottom line therefore we are interoperable instead you could you could have an unlimited ceiling 32:54.400 --> 33:00.720 for interoperability provided that it was in the service of helping users get more out of their 33:00.720 --> 33:06.480 experience and you know this is something that we call adversarial interoperability not just interoperability 33:06.480 --> 33:13.520 with cooperation from an existing firm or service but interoperability despite the objections 33:13.520 --> 33:20.080 and bypassing the countermeasures of an existing product or service so adversarial interoperability 33:20.080 --> 33:25.760 and an absolute defense for adversarial interoperability are both really important as is being able 33:25.760 --> 33:31.120 to tell the truth about defects now in terms of what rules we might impose on firms there's been a lot 33:31.760 --> 33:37.120 work around this you know we've seen things like right to repair legislation we've seen rules 33:37.120 --> 33:45.040 that require firms to hand over clear texts of files for people of disabilities or people who work 33:45.040 --> 33:51.280 in archival or educational context in order to allow them to make lawful uses that are enshrined 33:51.280 --> 33:56.240 in copyright law to avail themselves the limitations and exceptions of copyright law and I think 33:56.240 --> 34:01.680 those are important too I just think that in very concentrated industries that it's likely that 34:01.680 --> 34:06.480 they will figure out ways to game that and so we have to make sure that these affirmative rights 34:06.480 --> 34:12.800 that we grant to people to have certain interoperability standards in the products that they use or 34:12.800 --> 34:17.680 consumer rights in the products that they use not become the the maximum but instead that they 34:17.680 --> 34:24.240 remain the minimum that companies are required to do one question I had this your few about if you 34:24.240 --> 34:30.080 think that DRM is mainly a problem for poor people you know I think with every technological idea 34:30.080 --> 34:35.920 with every bad technological idea you can't just roll it out all at once because some people when 34:35.920 --> 34:42.480 they complain they get listened to right some people's complaints have real social currency so you 34:42.480 --> 34:48.640 know things that you do to rich powerful people are harder to get away with than things that you do 34:48.640 --> 34:53.920 to poor people or people who lack power and so when we have a terrible technological idea one of the 34:53.920 --> 34:59.840 ways that we normalize it and also that we figure out how to make it more palatable to people is we 34:59.840 --> 35:05.760 start by imposing it on people who don't have social power so we start by imposing it on refugees 35:05.760 --> 35:13.680 children poor people prisoners mental patients immigrants students blue collar workers gig economy 35:13.680 --> 35:19.760 workers and then once it's been normalized and once the roughest edges have been sanded down 35:19.760 --> 35:25.280 then we roll it out to everybody I call it the bad technology adoption curve and you know you 35:25.280 --> 35:30.720 can see it at work for example with with home automation so you know 20 years ago if you were 35:30.720 --> 35:35.760 eating your dinner and there was a camera over the table watching you eat it was because you were 35:35.760 --> 35:40.640 in a super max prison but today it's because you bought Google Home or Apple Home or Amazon 35:40.640 --> 35:47.520 home automation systems and so we've gone from the most powerless people in our society to the 35:47.520 --> 35:52.080 most powerful people in our society in less than a generation and so I don't think science 35:52.080 --> 35:55.280 fiction is a great predictive literature I think science fiction is a great way to understand 35:55.280 --> 36:00.640 the present but not the future but if you do want to get a glimpse at what the future likely holds 36:00.640 --> 36:06.160 for you should everything else go on in terms of your technology use just look at what we're doing 36:06.160 --> 36:12.960 to poor people and then that's what we're going to do to you in 10 or 15 years science fiction literature 36:13.040 --> 36:20.080 always had a strong impact on how society sees technology yet the most successful science fiction 36:20.080 --> 36:26.640 books that connect to present developments are dystopian stories do we maybe need more positive 36:26.640 --> 36:33.360 stories about how technology could improve our lives you know I am neither a dystopian nor a 36:33.360 --> 36:40.320 utopian I'm which is to say I'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist I think that in the words of 36:40.320 --> 36:46.960 Michael Weinberger when he wrote this classic white paper on copyrights patents and 3D printing 36:46.960 --> 36:52.000 this will all be so great if we don't screw it up I often say that that's what I want written 36:52.000 --> 36:58.400 on my tombstone you know although my wife and I have actually secretly agreed that my tombstone 36:58.400 --> 37:04.480 is going to say if a man lies six feet underground rotting and dead and his wife isn't there to tell 37:04.480 --> 37:10.240 him he's doing it wrong is he still wrong and her tombstone is going to say yes he is but but 37:10.240 --> 37:16.240 failing that my tombstone is going to say this will all be so great if we don't screw it up and I 37:16.240 --> 37:22.800 think that it is important in science fiction to write about how terrible it will be if we screw it 37:22.800 --> 37:27.920 up and it's also important to write about how great it can be if we if we seize the means of 37:27.920 --> 37:33.440 computation so you know you ask me about my my new book radicalize which has the story on authorized 37:33.440 --> 37:41.040 bread in it and you know those are stories for the most part not just about the dystopian notion 37:41.040 --> 37:48.960 of having your technology do to you instead of doing for you but they're also about the real 37:48.960 --> 37:54.800 marveling glory of being in charge of your own technology of being able to decide what the 37:54.800 --> 38:01.920 technology does of being able to reconfigure it to do what you want when you want it to and you know 38:02.000 --> 38:07.440 I think that both of those are really important and I think that it's a mistake to say that just 38:07.440 --> 38:15.760 because just because a story has dystopian themes or depicts the dystopian nature of having the 38:15.760 --> 38:21.440 technology work against you instead of on your behalf that therefore the story is dystopian what 38:21.440 --> 38:27.200 really matters is what the characters do in the face of that if they go on to seize control then 38:27.200 --> 38:33.360 that's rather a utopian story and so I I'm of the view that there's nothing wrong with having a 38:33.360 --> 38:40.160 story who's starting premise is that the technology's control is taken away from us particularly if 38:40.160 --> 38:47.200 it's also a story about how wonderful it is once you reverse that situation thank you very much 38:47.200 --> 38:54.320 Corey for being with us today for this first episode okay thank you feeling drunk give my 38:54.320 --> 39:01.200 love to everybody there thanks for the work you're doing thank you for your time all right bye bye 39:02.400 --> 39:07.120 if you want to get active on this topic you can support the day against DRM which takes place 39:07.120 --> 39:12.080 every year this campaign is organized by the free software foundation or assist organization 39:12.080 --> 39:18.480 based in the US if you want to receive more information please visit defectivebydesign.org 39:18.480 --> 39:23.840 on this website you'll also find a list of DRM free platforms for books videos and audio files 39:24.720 --> 39:30.560 this was the first episode of the software freedom podcast if you like this episode please 39:30.560 --> 39:34.720 recommend it to your friends and subscribe to make sure you also get the next episode 39:35.760 --> 39:40.320 this podcast is presented to you by the free software foundation job we have a charity that 39:40.320 --> 39:44.800 works on promoting software freedom if you like our work please consider supporting us with 39:44.800 --> 39:51.920 the nation you find more information on my.fsfe.org slash donate thanks for listening to the software 39:51.920 --> 39:57.040 freedom podcast looking forward to next month bye bye