The right to read ... may be slipping away

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The right to read ... may be slipping away

[Tom Vogt reports on the current state of the battle
over the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) at the
HAL2001 conference in the Netherlands.
<http://www.lemuria.org/decss/hal2001.html>
Vogt is an author of the deCSS software, which allows
owners of DVDs to use them without restrictions. The
DCMA is the basis both of the civil suit by the DVD
Copy Control Association against deCSS and the Justice
Department criminal prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov. In
both cases the offense is *writing software* or even
*publicizing the existence of software* which could be
used to infringe intellectual property. Vogt concludes
pessimistically:

  We are rapidly moving towards the scenario described
  in RMS' [Richard Stallman, originator of the Gnu
  free software movement] short-story Right to Read.
  But RMS was an optimist. The real world is moving
  both more quickly and much more aggressively. Here
  is a quote from the Microsoft Surveilance System:

  "Using technology developed by Microsoft to protect
  its own intellectual property on the Internet, the
  AAP has implemented an aggressive Internet
  surveillance program, which includes an automated,
  intelligent Internet search tool that searches for
  unauthorized distribution of eBook content 24 hours
  a day, seven days a week. The information and
  evidence gathered by this tool can form the
  foundation for subsequent civil and criminal
  enforcement."

Stallman's classic story, below, may be the best
popular exposition of the issues of freedom and
property.                  -- psMod]

The Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of
Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).

(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles
about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution,
published in Luna City in 2096)

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college--
when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had
broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she
would fail her midterm project. There was no one she
dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her--but if
he lent her his computer, she might read his books.
Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for
many years for letting someone else read your books,
the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he
had been taught since elementary school that sharing
books was nasty and wrong--something that only pirates
would do.

And there wasn't much chance that the SPA--the
Software Protection Authority--would fail to catch
him. In his software class, Dan had learned that each
book had a copyright monitor that reported when and
where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing.
(They used this information to catch reading pirates,
but also to sell personal interest profiles to
retailers.) The next time his computer was networked,
Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer
owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not
taking pains to prevent the crime.

Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read
his books. She might want the computer only to write
her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a middle-class
family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone
her reading fees. Reading his books might be the only
way she could graduate. He understood this situation;
he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the
research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to
the researchers who wrote the papers; since Dan aimed
for an academic career, he could hope that his own
research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring
in enough to repay this loan.)

Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone
could go to the library and read journal articles, and
even books, without having to pay. There were
independent scholars who read thousands of pages
without government library grants. But in the 1990s,
both commercial and nonprofit journal publishers had
begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries
offering free public access to scholarly literature
were a dim memory.

There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and
Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan
had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who
had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to
skip over the copyright monitor code when reading
books. But he had told too many friends about it, and
one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward
(students deep in debt were easily tempted into
betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for
pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.

Dan would later learn that there was a time when
anyone could have debugging tools. There were even
free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable
over the net. But ordinary users started using them to
bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge
ruled that this had become their principal use in
actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the
debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course,
but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered
copies only, and only to officially licensed and
bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software
class was kept behind a special firewall so that it
could be used only for class exercises.

It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors
by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would
eventually find out about the free kernels, even
entire free operating systems, that had existed around
the turn of the century. But not only were they
illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if
you had one, without knowing your computer's root
password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support
would tell you that.

Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his
computer. But he couldn't refuse to help her, because
he loved her. Every chance to speak with her filled
him with delight. And that she chose him to ask for
help, that could mean she loved him too.

Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more
unthinkable--he lent her the computer, and told her
his password. This way, if Lissa read his books,
Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It
was still a crime, but the SPA would not automatically
find out about it. They would only find out if Lissa
reported him.

Of course, if the school ever found out that he had
given Lissa his own password, it would be curtains for
both of them as students, regardless of what she had
used it for. School policy was that any interference
with their means of monitoring students' computer use
was grounds for disciplinary action. It didn't matter
whether you did anything harmful--the offense was
making it hard for the administrators to check on you.
They assumed this meant you were doing something else
forbidden, and they did not need to know what it was.

Students were not usually expelled for this--not
directly. Instead they were banned from the school
computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their
classes.

Later, Dan would learn that this kind of university
policy started only in the 1980s, when university
students in large numbers began using computers.
Previously, universities maintained a different
approach to student discipline; they punished
activities that were harmful, not those that merely
raised suspicion.

Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to
help her led to their marriage, and also led them to
question what they had been taught about piracy as
children. The couple began reading about the history
of copyright, about the Soviet Union and its
restrictions on copying, and even the original United
States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they
found others who had likewise gravitated away from the
long arm of the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in
2062, the universal right to read soon became one of
its central aims.


Author's Note
The right to read is a battle being fought today.
Although it may take 50 years for our present way of
life to fade into obscurity, most of the specific laws
and practices described above have already been
proposed--either by the Clinton Administration or by
publishers.

There is one exception: the idea that the FBI and
Microsoft will keep the root passwords for personal
computers. This is an extrapolation from the Clipper
chip and similar Clinton Administration key-escrow
proposals, together with a long-term trend: computer
systems are increasingly set up to give absentee
operators control over the people actually using the
computer system.

The SPA, which actually stands for Software
Publisher's Association, is not today an official
police force. Unofficially, it acts like one. It
invites people to inform on their coworkers and
friends; like the Clinton Administration, it advocates
a policy of collective responsibility whereby computer
owners must actively enforce copyright or be punished.

The SPA is currently threatening small Internet
service providers, demanding they permit the SPA to
monitor all users. Most ISPs surrender when
threatened, because they cannot afford to fight back
in court. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1 Oct 96,
D3.) At least one ISP, Community ConneXion in Oakland
CA, refused the demand and was actually sued. The SPA
is said to have dropped this suit recently, but they
are sure to continue the campaign in various other
ways.

The university security policies described above are
not imaginary. For example, a computer at one Chicago-
area university prints this message when you log in
(quotation marks are in the original):

"This system is for the use of authorized users only.
Individuals using this computer system without
authority or in the excess of their authority are
subject to having all their activities on this system
monitored and recorded by system personnel. In the
course of monitoring individuals improperly using this
system or in the course of system maintenance, the
activities of authorized user may also be monitored.
Anyone using this system expressly consents to such
monitoring and is advised that if such monitoring
reveals possible evidence of illegal activity or
violation of University regulations system personnel
may provide the evidence of such monitoring to
University authorities and/or law enforcement
officials."
This is an interesting approach to the Fourth
Amendment: pressure most everyone to agree, in
advance, to waive their rights under it.


--------------------------


References

The administration's "White Paper": Information
Infrastructure Task Force, Intellectual Property and
the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of
the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights
(1995).

An explanation of the White Paper: The Copyright Grab,
Pamela Samuelson, Wired, Jan. 1996

Sold Out, James Boyle, New York Times, 31 March 1996

Public Data or Private Data, Washington Post, 4 Nov
1996. We used to have a link to this, but Washinton
Post has decided to start charging users who wishes to
read articles on the web site and therefore we have
decided to remove the link.

Union for the Public Domain--a new organization which
aims to resist and reverse the overextension of
intellectual property powers.