[ The opinions expressed by authors on Linux Today are their
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]
By Eric Raymond
DeCSS. Napster. These are two faces of a revolution —
a technological wave that is sweeping through the media industry,
theatening to upset billion-dollar business models as though they
were cockleshell boats. As with every power shift in progress,
these technologies have attracted vocal partisans and bitter
enemies.
Also as usual, the first casualty of ideological warfare is the
truth. The kids chanting “power to the people” and the corporate
executives blustering about piracy are both oversimplifying some
deep and complex issues. And both sides — yes, I said, *both*
sides — are telling some Big Lies, trying to get their propaganda
positions accepted as truth by endless repetition in tones of
righteous indignation.
Let’s look at some of those lies. Here’s our first: that the DVD
Copy Control Association’s attempt to suppress DeCSS lawsuit is or
was ever about piracy. Yes? If that’s so, why wasn’t the DVDCCA up
in arms about DVD-ripper programs eighteen months ago? It’s come
out in the 2600 trial in New York that the DVDCCA knew about these
programs perhaps as far back as that — and the rippers do exactly
what the DVDCCA says DeCSS is for, which is allow people to make
digital copies of DVDs that can be shipped over the Net and burned
into writeable CD-ROMs.
Even more to the point, if piracy is the issue why isn’t the
DVDCCA trying to outlaw pirate stamping presses instead of
software? Forget kids making one-at-a-time copies on their PCs with
DVD rippers or DeCSS or anything else; the real revenue threat to
the movie studios is factories churning out thousands of CDs a
month. The real pirates laugh at content scrambling, because they
go straight to the physical level and copy the pattern of pits and
bumps on the disk, encryption and all.
So what’s the truth? The truth is that the war on DeCSS was
never about piracy at all. What it’s really all about protecting
the DVD player monopoly — and the DVDCCA, which is run by a cartel
of consumer-electronics companies, has been playing Jack Valenti
and the Motion Picture Association of America for patsies. If the
MPAA hadn’t been grabbed by its territorial instincts and stopped
thinking, it might have figured out by now that cheaper DVD players
(and free DVD-playing software on PCs) actually mean a bigger
market for the DVDs themselves.
Yes, that’s right; content scrambling is actually *hurting the
studios’ profits*. But if they’re clueless about this, they’re at
least consistently clueless; they were wrong in pretty much the
same way about the VCR.
So much for corporate con-jobs. Now let’s look at another kind
— the kind that masquerades as populist idealism. Here’s our
second Big Lie: that Napster doesn’t rip off the artists. The
people pushing this line often claim that it’s OK because musicians
don’t make money on album sales anyway, the real money is in
concerts and tie-ins. Courtney Love gave this crowd a lot of
ammunition in a July Salon Magazine piece — a blisteringly funny
rant which dissected in detail all the scabrous scams that record
companies routinely use to rip off the bands who actually make the
music they sell.
It was all true. But it’s only half the story — and I know both
sides, because I was a rock musician once and I’ve got friends who
are still. I’ve been in a couple groups, recorded on a few albums.
I’ve been there, playing bars for peanuts and desperately hoping to
get scouted by some toothy-grinned A&R guy so we could at least
get ripped off somewhere higher up on the food chain. And you know
what? To the little guys and indie bands out there, CD and tape
sales can make a hell of a lot of difference. Like, between playing
and practicing full time or having to hack a day job. Courtney,
three platinum records later, doesn’t have to care about *that*
angle any more.
There’s a basic disconnect in the pro-Napster position. OK, so
let’s suppose the whole recording game is a total rip-off and the
artists get nothing from album sales. You’re going to fix that,
*how*? By ripping off the record companies? Excuse me, I missed
something there. Not one starving artist is ever going to get a
nickel more money because you *didn’t* pay for his album.
But even that misses the real point. The real point is that by
“sharing” without the artist’s consent, *you deprive him of the
right to control and dispose of his work*. Forget the record
companies; for this issue they are just big bloated red herrings, a
noxious excuse, a convenient distraction. The real question is
this: are you going to support the artists, or steal away the few
shreds of autonomy they might have left?
It’s almost superfluous to add that the Napster guys themselves
are monstrous hypocrites, as Lee Gomes has well described in a
recent Wall Street Journal article. Napster’s inventor, that cute
rebel kid Shawn Fanning, is basically a mascot they trot out for
photo-ops; the real decisions come from Fanning’s uncle and an
unsavory cabal of fat-cat investors — and that’s where the money
goes, too. And those are the guys who will threaten and sue you if
you feel like “sharing” *Napster’s* intellectual property — like,
say, by reverse-engineering your owner Napster-protocol client or
server.
And yes, I know that Gnutella is much cooler and will bypass the
central-point-of-suckage model that Napster has now. And I know
that Napster-like technology has lots of legitimate uses. But
still. There’s a basic difference between the ethics of DeCSS, as
it’s normally used, and Napster or Gnutella as they are normally
used. DeCSS is mainly about how you use your own property — *your*
DVD, *your* machine. Napster and Gnutella, are mainly about how you
use *other peoples’* property.
We in the hacker culture have a special responsibility, and a
special need, to be very clear about the difference. We have a
special responsibility because we are the king toolmakers of the
digital age; our work and our values will have a large part in
shaping the future of communications and media everywhere. We have
a special need because the way these intellectual-property issues
work out will come back to haunt us more than most if we get then
wrong.
One of our possible futures, if the press and the courts and the
public decide we got it badly enough wrong, is an Intellectual
Property Enforcement Association that’s a worse nightmare than the
DEA or the BATF — jackbooted thugs with no-knock warrants
battering down peoples’ doors to seize their computers on suspicion
of information theft.
Our community must speak out on the basic differences between
“our property” and “other peoples’ property”, loudly enough to be
heard and clearly enough so the press and courts and public can
understand. We must help form a new consensus that is staunch for
liberty while condemning theft. Otherwise, we may well get that
grim future — and deserve it.