Announcements have been made recently by online publishers that the first few time-restricted books have been made available. This new business model is based on the purchase of a key that lets you decipher an electronic book and read it for, say, 10 hours. After this time has elapsed, you can no longer read the book. In this editorial, I will try to demonstrate that this has terrible implications for the worlds of Free software and free speech.

Black Boxes

Building a reader for time-restricted books may sound to some like a very stupid thing to do. First, you need to decipher the book using a secret key. Then, you also need to make sure the user cannot do anything with it. You need to keep it from being printed, cut and pasted, etc. Above all, you need to make your program tamper-proof. Because the book reader is the guardian of the book's content, if crackers reverse-engineer it and publish a time-unrestricted reader, your whole business model is lost. What you need to build is a black box.

A black box is a piece of software, hardware, or both that takes encrypted content and optionally a key as its input, and outputs unencrypted data (music, text, video, etc.). A black box must be tamper-proof, to protect the content from being distributed in a non-encrypted form.

When you think about it, there is no obvious way to keep users from turning pages, taking screenshots, and using optical character recognition software, so our black box must be as large and all-encompassing as possible. The ideal black box would plug into your modem, and include a monitor and a pair of speakers, so you could not copy the content in a trivial way.

Breaking the Box

Imagine some evil cracker manages to break that nice black box and distributes a player that converts encrypted movies into unencrypted MPEG files. Such files will only need to be converted (and paid for) once for all the pirates in the world to publish them. Thanks to the stunning efficiency of Internet-based distribution and peer-to-peer software, the good old Free Software paradigm will turn into "crack once, use everywhere".

Some movie publishers may not be all that happy with this, but the only way for them to stop "terrorist hackers" from violating "intellectual property rights" would be to ban the diffusion of all video content.

Actually, assuming any black box can be broken somewhere, any widespread non-black box device that lets you read the same content as a black box makes that black box useless. For example, the existence of ogg vorbis players makes encrypted music file formats obsolete. In a way, CDs were the ultimate black box; there was no obvious way to get the music from a CD deck to a computer, but since MP3 and CDROM players were created, they have proven completely useless in preventing piracy.

In that regard, Free Software is the ultimate black box killer. The mere existence of Free Software that does what a black box does makes it easy to circumvent the black box and the whole distribution network that feeds it.

Weak Boxes

Today, it is fairly hard to guarantee that a black box really is tamper-proof. While hardware black boxes require expensive equipment and rare expertise to be broken, few people would really believe in any software-enforced black box. The heroic times of copy-protected games should make that obvious enough to all of us.

Now comes the era of hardware black boxes. Music decoder chips are to be embedded into soundcards, and even CDROM writers are not transparent, since they build the TOC by themselves, making it impossible to do bit-per-bit copies of CDs.

Then there's video. IBM has announced that it is developing a new chip to encrypt the signal that travels between the video card and the monitor. That means that if your video card detects that you replaced your monitor with a video-recording device, it will automatically downgrade the image quality. What this effectively does is put the monitor inside the black box.

Another trend is the development of electronic book readers. These notepad-like electronic devices have a nice LCD panel, a network connection, and a touchscreen. They have no keyboard; their only job is to let you read electronic books in a convenient manner. The side effect of their high level of integration is that they may become very opaque. Who wants to hack on a piece of hardware that doesn't have a keyboard, let alone a compiler?

The consequence of all of this is that in order to keep stupid teenagers from shuffling around tons of books, movies, and MP3s they wouldn't have paid for anyway, the industry will be pushing for a ban of technological means for diffusion of any content. No writing your own DVD-Video disks, no publishing self-authored audio recordings (without expensive "professional" hardware), and security through obscurity for all.

When we will know we've lost

The development of black boxes seems to be a very dark thing for the worlds of Free Software, free speech, and interoperability. This is not new, as Free Software and open standards have been opposed to secrecy since their dawn a few decades ago.

However, if the business model of time-restricted books develops, we will be surrounded by content that is conceptually incompatible with openness. Yet another industry will have a strong incentive to oppose interoperability.

Many may agree that lobbying is one of the worst things that have happened to Free Software and freedom of speech because it short-circuits democratic control; large companies have used it to hinder the public interest for the sake of short-term profit. The MPAA, the RIAA, software patent advocates, nuclear power advocates, and many others have shown how little they cared for our rights, whether on American soil or abroad.

I say the last thing we want is yet another lobby on our back. If technologies that require black boxes for text diffusion become mainstream, yet another industry will have a strong incentive to arrange for these black boxes to become ubiquitous. This will mean sacrificing freedom of speech and outlawing Free software. That is not quite what I want for my children.

If we don't want to get into the world described by Stallman's "The Right to Read", time-limited books are the last thing we need. We should boycott them and spread the word about the danger they represent. We should also strive to offer valuable content freely, either as free content or under such business models as the Street Performers Protocol. By relying only on Free Software and freely available content, and by refusing to use pirated music and programs, we will be proving to the world that it can be done. I encourage you to seek and produce freely available content. Cheap is not enough when our Freedom is at stake.

Author's bio:

Thomas Tempé is a computer engineering student at INSA de Lyon, France. In addition to being a Free Software advocate and LUG leader, he likes to eat well, to spend time with his Chinese fiancée, and to start a bunch of projects that he knows he will never have time to finish.

 Comments

[»] OpenCulture (+ your wording)
by Jonas Bofjall - Oct 28th 2001 04:34:55

I think you should save words like "reverse-engineering" and OCR- and video capture-description to the journalists. (Better just say "debugging" and "ripping" respectively.) What you describe is not very likely, not even in a worst-case scenario. Today's copy protection is not even as hard to bypass as games were ten years ago.

The reason is simple: software has become de-blackboxed. This is because of the customer pressure towards modern, memory-protected, operating systems. The toughest games used to run in what today is kernel space. Today everything is pure user space, making it much easier to debug. Of course, you can still use any of the classic anti-debugging techniques, but this has never been effective against a determined debugger.

What I really wanted to say was that this is a good place to mention the first serious implementation of the Street Performer Protocol. It's called OpenCulture, and seems to be good although they haven't published anything yet.

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[»] NOT Free Software is the ultimate black box killer
by Peter - Oct 28th 2001 03:43:15

You wrote in your article:

>Free Software is the ultimate black box killer

This is a dangerous sentence. Anyone from the other side of this battle may read this and say: "Hey! Stop Free Software and protect intellectual property!"

I know what you mean, but others may misinterpret, thus I ask you to formulate such sentences with great care!

Rather not Free Software (you even wrote it capitalized that may mislead reader to think about the organization) but human nature, curiosity, willingness to break anything that may restrict personal freedom is the ultimate black box killer. True that these are the features of human nature that leads to free software. However these and not free software itself is the core killer.

Stopping free software would not eliminate information stealing (copying copyrighted music, text, video) if possible at all.

I truly believe that they will loose this battle. Formerly publishers had a single resource to produce the physical entities delivering the information (music, video etc). This is monopoly and led to extra profit. As technology changes this extra profit is slowly removing. They battle to retain this profit, which they will not be able to. The harder they fight the slower the industry changes, but it will change.

I am sure that the publisher industry should not change abrupt. That would cause disaster, loosing jobs, crashing firms. But while they seek legal and technical tools to protect the profit that comes from their old business model there should be a research investigating what the new business model is. The question is: what are the services they provide.

Selection of content purging the invaluable ones? Yes, for sure.

Delivery of content? Not anymore, Internet does it.

Creation of content? Yes, this is really something they add. Writer write the book but it also has to be proof read and formatted. This is really a service.

They have to find a business model to cover these services, but not more. They should adapt to technology changes and not fight technology changes. Stopping technology was never successful, and I believe it will not ever.

Regards,
peter.verhas.com

[reply] [top]

[»] i like timerestricted books...
by Yannick Versley - Oct 27th 2001 08:25:22

...at least when theyre free and when i can make copies of selected pages.

But I don't think anybody in the Intellectual Property-scene will like public libraries as much as I do

(yes, it's a bit offtopic, but the point is that timerestriction in itself is not what is terrible in these black-box-schemes)

[reply] [top]

[»] One other way
by piman - Oct 27th 2001 00:46:01

There's one other way to show our distate for time-limited ebooks - buy from companies that use open formats (my personal favorite is Fictionwise since they specialize in scifi/fantasy).

Many online retailers use the Palm DOC format, which is an open format, readable by the GPLd reader CSpotRun, and able to be created by the excellent (and also free, I think GPLd) Pyrite Publisher PalmOS software. The more support and downloads open formats (Palm DOC) get versus closed formats (MS, GemStar) make it less likely that online publishers will stop supporting these formats.

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