Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [295]
In the second place, technological fixes proved less than dependable. DRM software could be hacked, and was; encryption techniques could be cracked, andwere. Suchwas the ethos of hacker groups that thiswas likely to happen fast, and the hacks circulated quickly. (It is worth noting that the same may prove true for genetic technology too, thanks to the emerging world of garage biotechnology.) As a result, their de facto robustness in practice reflected less the power of technology than the power of the state to restrain the use of critical skills against that technology.16 Both points were publicly made as early as 2000, when the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a trade group, challenged hackers to remove its digital watermark from a music file. A Princeton computer scientist named Ed Felten and his group managed to do it in a matter of weeks. That would not necessarily have been fatal to a DRM regime -on the contrary, an antipiracy industry would presumably need such competition in order to remain in business. But it did mean that in practice it would need the buttressing of nontechnological powers - states, norms, and laws - in order to remain effective. So it was that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlawed not only the circumvention of copyright-protection software, but the circulation of code facilitating such circumvention. When Felten broke that watermark, the SDMI responded by hinting that he himself might be subject to suit under the Act. Mandated in such ways, an antipiracy technology might just possibly turn copyright into something like a physical law, unbreakable in principle within a certain jurisdiction. But that would inevitably call into question the ideals of a democratic information culture. It would turn hackers into heroes. By trying to translate local practice into universal principle the intellectual property defense industry would have fostered a new age of postmodern social bandits.17
What makes this especially ironic-to put it no stronger-is that in some cases antipiracy technologies turned out to create more problems than they professed to solve. The notorious case of Sony-BMG's XCP system is the best-known instance. A piece of code bought from a British company, XCP was circulated on some Sony-BMG music CDs. It would quietly install a root-kit-like process onto the hard drives of customers who played their CDs in their computers. Arcot kit hides a program from the computer's own operating system; it commonly does so to shield a virus, or "malware," from detection. When its existence was revealed by hackers, the XCP program aroused outrage for this reason. Not only did it resemble a virus, moreover: it also seemed to send information back to the home company, entirely unbeknownst to the user. And it created a secret vulnerability that other Internet viruses might later exploit. It even transpired that if a user tried to delete the code, it might disable the CD drive altogether. Sony rapidly withdrew the program-but with an uninstall routine that generated still more vulnerabilities, potentially leaving computers open to being hijacked from afar. At each stage the initiative had transgressed norms strongly held among the small but vociferous and influential community of computer cognoscenti. More than that, it had highlighted problems implicit in the very idea of an antipirate technology.18
The point is that those problems are not problems of intellectual property narrowly construed. They are, in fact, among the core issues of traditional political theory and practice: issues of privacy, accountability, and autonomy. That is why it was worth tracking the history of the enforcement enterprise back all the way to the seventeenth century and the origins of modern political order. Such issues have, it