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Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time.
So, ladies and gentlemen.
A person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English,
there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm one of nature's fast talkers.
When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization,
I was known as the "scourge" of the simultaneous translation corps.
I would stand up and speak and turn around and there would be window after window of translator and every one of them would be doing this.
So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this, and I will slow down.
So, tonight's talk...
Tonight's talk is not a copyright talk.
I do copyright talks all the time.
Questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them.
If you want to hear freelancer writers like me *** on about what's happening to the way we earn our living,
by all means, go and find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube.
But, tonight, I want to talk about something more important.
I want to talk about general purpose computers.
Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding.
So astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them.
To figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them.
Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.
Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us
about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose computer are important.
In the beginning, we had packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet.
So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes,
hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines.
And they were eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely,
and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.
Enter DRM 0.96.
They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia
which the software could check for: dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols
that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals
that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons.
First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software
to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched.
The legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports
to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals
when they wanted to run their software.
And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication.
Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise
of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse engineer the software
and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated.
While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn't.
Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in *** floppy disk media
were both core skills for computer programmers, and were even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks
and the rough-and-ready early days of software development.
Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread.
Once we had BBSes, online services, USENET newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people
who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software
and passed around as little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased,
the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.
Which gave us DRM 1.0.
By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen.
We were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was.
They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information.
Now, information technology makes things efficient,
so imagine the markets that an information economy would have.
You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro,
and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second.
You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on.
The fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation
of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation
of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.
But none of this would be possible unless we could control
how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them.
After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video,
or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device.
But how the hell could you do that once you'd given them the file?
In order to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers
from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes.
For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user
to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.
But as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.
You also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear,
and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys,
because if the user finds the keys, she'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.
And now you have three problems, because now you have to stop the users who figure out
how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users and now you've got four problems,
because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs
from telling other users how to do it too and now you've got five problems,
because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets
from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were.
That's a lot of problems.
But by 1996, we had a solution.
We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization,
which created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs,
and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media cleartexts
from the unlocking programs while they were running,
and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs,
and created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets
and all with a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet
without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap.