Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read the second part of "The Internet Heist," a series of three articles about the weirdest, most far-reaching, most bonkers battle of the copyright wars of the early 2000s.

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 1/

Last week, I read out Part I of the series, which told the story of the #BroadcastFlag, wherein the movie studios and TV broadcasters conspired with a corrupt Congressman to make it illegal to build a general-purpose computer unless it had DRM.

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 2/

The Broadcast Flag's notional purpose was to prevent high-def digital TV broadcasts from being captured and shared online. 3/

The idea had powerful political support, because it was seen as key to shutting off analog TV broadcasting and reclaiming its spectrum for auction to mobile carriers. 4/

In this week's installment, I explain why the most important consumer electronics and tech companies participated in the exercise: @Intel tricked them into it. Intel ran this initiative, and it was the senior member of the two largest DRM consortia (5C and 4C). 5/

Intel let it be known that there *would* be a law requiring all tech to have DRM, and threatened only Intel's DRM would satisfy the rule...*Unless* the tech and CE companies showed up and fought for their own DRM to be included. 6/

Sitting out the proceedings would doom the CE and IT companies to paying Intel for a DRM license for any products they made in future...forever. 7/

Meanwhile, that participation by the CE and IT companies provided the Broadcast Flag with the legitimacy it needed to be credible as a mandate.

But thankfully for all of us, the Broadcast Flag collapsed. 8/

First, its Congressional sponsor, Rep Billy Tauzin, got mired in scandal and quit his government job to be a $2m/year lobbyist for @Phrma, the pharmaceutical assocation. 9/

CE and tech companies began to smell a rat, and the chairs of the group created a bunch of private "subcommittees." 10/

Any time a "public" Broadcast Flag meeting (they were "public" but there was no way to find out when or where they were unless you attended the previous meeting) got derailed by tech companies balking, these "subcommittees" would swing into action. 11/

The meeting would screech to a halt and recalcitrant corporate rep would be dragged out of the main meeting room and into a private side room. Minutes or hours later, they'd reappear, looking beaten and miserable, and announce that "the objection had been resolved." 12/

Then, Intel and the entertainment companies sprung their trap on the CE and tech companies. Rather than developing "objective criteria" for mandatory DRM, the Broadcast Flag rule would say, "You must use a DRM that has been approved by a quorum of studios and broadcasters." 13/

And the only DRM that had that approval was *Intel's DRM*.

In other words, Intel had tricked the tech and CE companies into blessing a process that would make it illegal for them to do business without paying Intel royalties until the end of time. 14/

The final Broadcast Flag report is a lasting testament to the fury of the companies after they realized they'd been duped. It contains appendix after appendix objecting to the "consensus document," condemning the whole thing as a sham. 15/

With Tauzin out shilling for Big Pill, Congress was no longer an option for the Broadcast Flag. 16/

Instead the MPAA and Intel took their case to the @FCC, whose chairman, @chairmanpowell, would shortly switch sides and go to work running the @NCTAitv, lobbying for the same companies he drew a public salary to regulate. 17/

Michael Powell - son of Colin - ignored all the objections to the Broadcast Flag, *and* disregarded the submissions that argued that the FCC just didn't have the authority to regulate all computers. 18/

He granted the studios and Intel their Broadcast Flag - only to have the Second Circuit Court of Appeals *unanimously* strike it down as beyond the FCC's jurisdiction. 19/

That was the end of the Broadcast Flag (in the USA, at least; next week's installment details the @DVB_Project's ill-starred attempt to make an even stupider version for the rest of the world). 20/

But - incredibly - the Broadcast Flag wasn't the most outlandish attempt to control how computers work in the name of fighting video piracy.

No, that was the #AnalogHole. 21/

What's an "analog hole?" You are, basically. Your head is full of analog holes: your ears and eyes, to name just a few. 22/

In order for you to experience a digital TV broadcast, it must be converted to analog signals - pictures and sounds - because you do not have a digital neural interface (and Elon Musk won't give you one, he'll just mutilate a bunch of monkeys to juice his share price). 23/

The fact that every digital signal has to become an analog signal as part of its journey to a human's experience presented a problem for the content barons. 24/

They could lock down the digital outputs on every computer with a Broadcast Flag, but what would stop you from connecting a video-capture card to the *analog* outputs of your receiver? 25/

How to stop someone from creating a perfectly configured redigitization suite with a 4K screen and a locked-off camcorder?

Their answer? An "analog-to-digital converter (ADC) mandate". 26/

They had a law - sponsored by Sensenbrenner and @RepJohnConyers - that banned building an ADC unless it checked for a watermark. If the watermark was detected, the ADC would switch itself off. This was called "plugging the Analog Hole." 27/

This is a terrible idea for a *lot* of reasons. First, building an ADC is really easy. Like, high-school science-fair easy. For the Analog Hole law to work, there would have to be *no* noncompliant ADCs in circulation. 28/

Second, watermarks are a stupid way to solve this problem. The studios believed that they could make a watermark that was both robust (impossible to remove) and imperceptible. 29/

The problem is that an imperceptible watermark adds nothing to the signal that your ears or eyes can detect, so its removal takes nothing away that you care about. Imperceptible watermarks are, by definition, *not* robust.

You can make *perceptible* watermarks all day long. 30/

Stamp a giant PROPERTY OF SONY PICTURES across every frame of a movie and it will be damned hard to remove. Of course, it will also be hard to convince people to pay to watch that movie. 31/

The Analog Hole bill specified a watermarking technology that was claimed to be imperceptible and robust, a tool called VEIL. 32/

VEIL had never been deployed for this purpose: its sole user was a toy manufacturer who made a Batmobile toy that would respond to supersonic chirps in an accompanying video and race around your floor. 33/

No one was able to test VEIL to see whether its watermarks could be forged or removed. The company that made it charged $1,000 to see the documentation, and the contract included a strict nondisclosure "agreement." 34/

Thankfully, this idiotic technology did not become mandatory in analog-to-digital converters. But we did inherit a version of it: the upload filters used by Youtube and others, which the Copyright Office wants to make mandatory:

onezero.medium.com/nonstandard-me… 35/

These filters don't stop you from capturing copyrighted works, but they do stop you from uploading them to the monopoly platforms that dominate our public square. 36/

That's why dirty cops play Taylor Swift when members of the public attempt to record their interactions with them: they're betting that Youtube's filters will prevent those videos from being seen. 37/

The evolution of digital controls - from mandates governing widely used equipment to mandates on widely used platforms - reveals an important truth about the evolution of our tech policy debates. 38/

Back in the early 2000s, the entertainment industry had already undergone concentration, making it easy to form a cartel and demand restrictions on the rest of us. 39/

The tech and CE companies back then were diverse and competitive, and had a hard time conspiring to screw the rest of us over (they also struggled to fight off the attacks of the entertainment cartel). 40/

Today, both tech and content are fully cartelized and while they nominally compete, they mostly cooperate. They have interlocking boards and major shareholders, and they often speak with one voice when conspiring to take away our rights and extract our money. 41/

That's grim news. As you'll hear in next week's reading, the power to define our technology spills over into the power to structure our social relationships - right down to what constitutes a valid family. 42/

You don't have to wait for the podcast, either - the article is right here:

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 43/

Here's this week's podcast episode:

craphound.com/news/2022/02/1…

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive, they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

archive.org/download/Cory_…

And here's the RSS for my podcast:
feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca… 44/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/ext…