"For as long as I can remember, I've loved to take things apart to see how they work, and as a kid I'd take things apart and put them back together again over and over. That was my hobby. Take it apart; put it back together again," writes Raymond Magliozzi of the beloved radio show, "Car Talk."
The story is as American as apple pie or the Model T. Children and adults love to tinker. For Mr. Magliozzi it was cars, and he and his brother built a business out of it called Hacker's Haven, a DIY car shop where other hackers could come, rent space and tools, and work on cars.
Tinkering is so ingrained in our way of life that it has become part of the American entrepreneurial spirit and spawned giant industries from model planes to custom motorcycles and generic medicines. Duane Reade contact solution is the result of tinkering.
I remember the first thing I took apart. It was an analog clock, and I reversed the action of the gears to see if time went backwards. It didn't, but I was hooked and so are millions of other Americans with a do it yourself attitude.
What Raymond Magliozzi and I do is take apart something we own to gain a better understanding of its workings and hopefully improve upon its function. In the digital age for digital objects, however, this is illegal. For Dmitry Sklyarov, it meant jail (he is now free). How did it come to this?
Digital technologies are by definition comprised of bits of code traveling back and forth, relaying commands and enabling certain actions to occur. Cracking that code, or understanding why double clicking an icon launches an application is analogous to dissecting the ignition system of the modern combustion engine. If you own a car nothing is stopping you from hacking away.
The same is not true of most software programs.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) today protects most programs. DRM is technology that enables content providers to (hypothetically) completely control the method with which their content is used. DRM is like a lock on the hood of a car, where access to the engine is prevented. It seems benign enough, maybe even logical. If you're an artist or a content creator/provider, shouldn't you have the right to completely control the way your content is used?
What I wish to argue is not whether complete control is right, but rather why DRM is bad; bad for consumers, content owners, content providers, businesses, and more importantly bad for innovators and society.
Buy any DVD and you'll notice it is region specific. In fact, if you buy or rent a foreign DVD and play it on an Apple computer, you'll notice there are restrictions on the number of times you can watch the movie. So let's say you buy "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" in New York, which is Region 1, and bring it to watch in Paris on a friend's Region 2 player -- you are out of luck. Here DRM does nothing but punish, forcing the consumer to purchase additional copies of the movie or an entirely new player. Imagine if you were asked to do the same for books.
For businesses, DRM is a death knell. DRM creates an unnecessary and arguably illegal barrier to entry for new and existing businesses. DRM gives content creators the right to veto new technologies and limit access to their material. As Cory Doctorow explains in his now famous talk at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond,
"It used to be illegal to plug anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They claimed that this was for the safety of the network. When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to cordless handsets to headsets."
The side effects of DRM can be disastrous as well. Recently, Sony embedded certain CDs, including music by My Morning Jacket, Trey Anastasio, and Dave Matthews Band among others, with DRM code called "rootkit." Once the CD was played on a listener's PC, a program installed itself onto the hardrive. The program, hidden from view, was used as a major exploit by hackers to penetrate and install malicious viruses on listeners' computers. The fall out from the Sony debacle left those artists with substantial CD sales loss and an incredible amount of PR damage for Sony.
DRM is bad for consumers, bad for business, and bad for artists, but its most pernicious legacy may be the one left on society and the spirit of innovation. Let's revisit the idea of tinkering. The history of generic drugs is predicated on the ability of scientists to tinker and reengineer compounds by examining their fundamental structure. The advent of generic drugs according to the Congressional Budget Office, "save consumers an estimated $8 to $10 billion a year at retail pharmacies. Even more billions are saved when hospitals use generics."
If medicine, cars, motorcycles, clocks, and other everyday objects are meant to be tinkered with without restrictions, why should digital technologies be any different? If implementation of Digital Rights Management continues and its circumvention is illegal as it is today, we are asking the current and coming generations not to do what we did: learn.
Published in Pop + Politics dot com, January 11, 2006