Thread by @doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read the final part of "The Internet Heist," my @Medium series on the copyright wars' early days, when the entertainment and tech giants tried to leverage the digital TV transition into a veto over every part of our lives.

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 1/

In Part I, I described the bizarre #BroadcastFlag project, where Hollywood studios and Intel colluded with a corrupt congressman (later @phrma's top lobbyist) to ban any digital product unless it had DRM and blocked free/open source software:

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 2/

In Part II, I recount the failure of the Broadcast Flag (killed by a unanimous Second Circuit decision), and how the studios pivoted to "plugging the #AnalogHole": mandatory kill-switches for recorders to block recording of copyrighted works:

onezero.medium.com/the-internet-h… 3/

This week's installment describes the global efforts by the studios to seize the future by creating a bizarre DRM system for the DVB digital TV standard (called #CPCM), which is used in most of the world (but not the US/Canada, Mexico, or South Korea). 4/

The centerpiece of CPCM was the "#AuthorizedDomain," a euphemism for "a family." The creators of CPCM wanted to develop a DRM that would let you share videos within your household, but not with the world. 5/

But of course, that meant that they had to *define what a real family was* and then turn that definition into a technical standard. 6/

The group - an almost all-male, all-white group of wealthy executives from some of the largest corporations on Earth - had some *very* weird ideas about what a "family" looked like. 7/

For example, they spent a lot of time figuring out how to support an Authorized Domain that included seat-back videos in a luxury SUV and a PVR in an overseas vacation home. 8/

But when I asked if they could support, say, a family whose parents lived in the Philippines, with one kid working construction in Qatar, another nursing in San Francisco, and a third as home help in Toronto, they called it an "edge case." 9/

Obviously, there are a lot more families that look like that than have luxury SUVs and French chalets for weekends away. 10/

It wasn't just poor people who got the shitty end of the stick in these standards meetings. One bizarre turn came when they contemplated how to support a joint-custody arrangement whereby a child changed households every week. 11/

The system was designed to limit how often a device could be severed from one "domain" and joined to another, to prevent "content laundering." This meant that a 12 year old who went from Mom's house to Dad's every week would find her devices locked out of one or both domains. 12/

The solution to this came from an exec at a giant software company. They explained that when their own customers tripped a fraud-detection system when entering a license key into a new installation, they were prompted to call a toll-free number to get a bypass. 13/

If you had a good explanation for why you were reusing a license key (say, you were upgrading, or reinstalling after a malware infection), the customer service rep on the other end could override the system. 14/

Let that sink in for a moment. If you're a 12 year old girl who's been locked out of your parents' digital system, all you need to do is call a strange adult in a distant land and explain the circumstances of your parents' divorce and the resulting custody arrangement. 15/

You have to do that once a month or so, until you attain adulthood or your parents get back together.

The thing is, European law (Article 6 of the #EUCD) and US law (Sec 1201 of the #DMCA) makes it a crime to bypass a DRM system like CPCM. 16/

That lets these cartels act as *de facto* legislators: if every device has DRM, and if DRM is illegal to bypass, then doing anything prohibited by the DRM is illegal. 17/

This is how the map becomes the territory. Rather than having to design a standard that conforms to all the different kinds of households people form out there in the world, you define a "family" in a standard and then all the *families* have to conform to the standard. 18/

The computer says "no," and you can't say "no" back.

Thankfully, the bad publicity and natural enmity among the coconspirators turned CPCM into a historical footnote with little uptake. 19/

But in the intervening years, mergers in entertainment, broadcasting, sports and tech have made it easier than ever for industries to conspire to constrain the lives of billions of people by coming up with private agreements about how their tech will work. 20/

Here are the podcast episodes:

Part I:

craphound.com/news/2022/02/0…

Part II:

craphound.com/news/2022/02/1…

Part III:

craphound.com/news/2022/02/2… 21/

And here are direct links to the MP3s (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever): 22/

Part I:

ia801407.us.archive.org/26/items/Cory_…

Part II:

ia801504.us.archive.org/9/items/Cory_D…

Part III:

archive.org/download/Cory_… 23/

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca… 24/

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/2022/02/22/nat…