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This article first appeared in the March 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Remember the great scene from Capablanca in which Vichy French police Captain Renault, played by Claude Raines, is ordered by the Nazis to close down Rick's Americain Cafe? He says "I'm shocked--shocked to learn there's been gambling going on here!" On the way out, a waiter slips him his winnings. That was brought to mind on the evening of February 12, the day Napster lost its latest appeal. One of the Napster lawyers interviewed on CNN said with a straight face "We're shocked that the Court thinks our purpose is copyright violation. We've only had about 200 formal complaints." That may be true, but it's a good bet that among the hundreds of millions of files traded via Napster during the weekend before the decision, a few more than 200 were copyrighted.
Napster was sued by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade organization representing all the big record companies. Since they have no viable strategy to cope with the explosion of new technology, they're flailing about like a wounded rhinoceros, attacking anything and everything that has to do with digital music. Until they come up with a reasonable way to distribute their wares on the Internet, pirated MP3 files will be easy to find.
From a historical perspective, the RIAA seems to be spitting into the wind. Back in the 1920s, when radio stations first started broadcasting records, the record companies sued to stop them. A few years later they were paying the very same stations to get their records on the air. When home audio and video recorders hit the market, the record and movie companies sued again, and lost. (It's hard to believe, but they were different companies back then.) In fact, the landmark 1984 Sony vs. Universal Studios Betamax decision established fair use criteria for home taping that says you can pretty much copy your own records and videotapes any way you want for your own use.
The RIAA has been successful against adversaries such as MP3.com and Napster because there were big targets to sue--companies. Napster and MP3.com rely on central servers to tell people where to find the songs they're looking for. If you shut down its servers, Napster vanishes. What do you do if there's no target?
There's no target with the so-called peer-to-peer systems, that are already available. They have no central index and no company behind them. Thousands of servers are connected to thousands of other servers, sharing information about the available files. Any machine can become a server, and anyone can download files. They're a constantly changing tangled web, with uncountable numbers of machines all over the world unpredictably joining in and dropping out. The protocols are purposely constructed to obscure who's sharing what with whom.
From the RIAA's viewpoint, knocking out Napster and MP3.com was like ending World War II; you just drop a couple of big bombs in the right places, and it's over. Fighting the peer-to-peer systems will be more like Viet Nam; the enemy is everywhere and could be anyone.
Probably the most well-known peer-to-peer system is Gnutella. It started out last year as a sort of skunkworks project at a small company called Nullsoft. They planned to release the source to the public, but AOL bought the company, and quickly pulled the plug, calling Gnutella an "unauthorized free-lance project." Despite this, enough of it had leaked out for hackers to reverse-engineer the protocols and publish them for anyone to use. Soon programmers wrote Gnutella clients for all the major operating systems, and most of them are free. A pretty comprehensive list of the Mac clients is at www.gnutelliums.com/Macintosh.
Gnutella works entirely differently from Napster.
When you run the Napster client, you're connected to a Napster server that contains an index of all the songs everyone else connected to the server is offering. Searches go to the server, and it sends back a list of all the MP3 files meeting the criteria. Selecting a file for downloading grabs it directly off the machine where it lives.
When you connect to the Gnutella network, you're one member of a constantly changing group with as many as 10,000 members. This group is your horizon. There may be a million people using Gnutella, but your horizon is limited to your own local group. Everybody in the group shares and can download files. For example, as I write this is, my Mac is connected with the LimeWire client, and there are 720 in my local group right now sharing 226,000 files amounting to about 12 terabytes of data.
But how do you find out what files are available without a big server to keep track of everything?
It's sort of like a big game of telephone. You ask if anyone's got what you're looking for and word of your request just gets passed around the group from machine to machine. Anyone sharing the file tells you they have it, and you can grab it from them. With hundreds or even thousands of users in your group, there's a pretty good chance someone will have what you're looking for.
This search method is clearly a lot more cumbersome and time consuming than Napster's, and the more users there are in your local group, the more garbage traffic you see float by your own computer, and the slower searches become. With the LimeWire and Furi Java-based clients you can open a window showing the search requests passing through, and there are hundreds of them every minute. Since Gnutella isn't limited to MP3 files, but can handle just about anything, some of the requests are pretty interesting--pictures, programs, MP3s and porn--lots of porn.
It's pretty clear the RIAA will want to do something about Gnutella, and the other half-dozen networks similar to it, but it's not clear what's even possible. On top of this, Napster limited itself to MP3 files, while Gnutella lets you trade anything. Anyone who wants to control copyrights should be worried by Gnutella and its siblings.
The copyright holders are striking back, and their tactics and some of the legal consequences are often troublesome.
For example, there's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that was passed by Congress in 1998. Section 1201(a) states "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." The music industry and, more importantly, the movie industry, is interpreting this as saying that not only is it illegal to decrypt their encrypted products, but it's illegal to even try. This argument is trying very hard to do away with how most people understand fair use.
The poster child case for this viewpoint is the DeCSS legal wrangling that's been pushed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
The Content Scrambling System (CSS) is the encryption scheme used on commercial DVDs. It has two purposes. First, it scrambles the contents of DVDs so they can only be viewed on machines whose manufacturers have licensed the descrambling software. Second, there's a region code on each disk making it impossible for, say, a North American DVD player to play DVDs intended for Europe. In this way, pricing and release dates can be controlled all over the world.
In 1999, a 16 year old Norwegian Linux user, Jon Johansen, decided he wanted to watch his movies using the DVD drive on his computer. At that time, no companies had licensed the CSS software for use under Linux, so he did what any self-respecting Linux hacker would do--he wrote his own software, called DeCSS that bypassed the MPAA code. Then, he did the second natural thing for a self-respecting Linux hacker--he hung his source code out on the Internet for anyone to use.
Even though it's quite likely his program is legal in Norway, the MPAA came down on him like a ton of bricks and has been trying ever since to clean all copies of DeCSS off the Internet. It would seem they must be doomed to fail because, if a teenager in Norway could write software to get around their encryption, how many thousand other people could do it again? Besides, despite their horde of lawyers, there are dozens of sites all over the world that still offer DeCSS.
At any rate, the MPAA has been less than truthful in their public statements about the whole affair. The most well-known spokesman for the MPAA is Jack Valenti, a former advisor to President Lyndon Johnson. Whenever something needs to be said, they roll him out, prop him up and he mumbles something about illegal copying. But, the CSS doesn't prevent copying. You can copy a CSS scrambled disk and you get another CSS scrambled disk. All it prevents is fair use.
The MPAA people aren't stupid; they know all this. But, you may well be asking what does this have to do with Macintosh computers.
The MPAA people have known that the price of real DVD recorders would eventually fall to the point where ordinary people could buy them. When that happened, people could start to copy DVD movies. That time arrived last January with the new Apple SuperDrive.
For some time, the copyright owners have been preparing a scheme called Copyright Control for Recordable Media (CPRM). It's a copy protection mechanism designed right into standard ATA disk drives. One of the first drives to use CPRM is Apple's SuperDrive. According to John Gilmore of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (www.eff.org), "[Apple's description is] full of glowing info about how you can write DVDs based on your own DV movie recordings, etc. What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will."
There's probably nothing illegal about CPRM, but it does seem a bit disingenuous on Apple's part not to mention this in their press releases. Several groups are actively organizing boycotts of companies who make CPRM-enabled equipment, and IBM, at least, has made some comments about its drawbacks, so there's some hope it won't take over the whole computer industry.
The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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