This column will be about TV, not music, but bear with me for a moment...
By now, most of you know that Steve Jobs came out with a public letter to the record labels in February, explaining that DRM has failed, that his recently renamed Apple, Inc. (fruit of settlement of a generation-long legal dispute with Apple Corps, the Beatles’ rights firm) could continue as it has, dominating the legal download business, but that everybody would be better off if DRM were abandoned.
Less noted has been the Recording Industry Association of America’s response. Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said the solution is for Apple to freely license its FairPlay DRM to the rest of the world. This is a solution that Jobs explicitly noted would not work, because losing control of the system would make it more open to hackers as well as legitimate users. Apple has great experience with this strategic understanding; it’s the great consolation prize salvaged from the loss of market share to Microsoft in operating systems.
But Apple’s argument does not impress Bainwol. He said Apple is so “sophisticated and smart” that it will be able to figure out how to make an open FairPlay secure.
STRATEGY VS. SECURITY
Bainwol ought to know how to make such complex technology work much better than Jobs does. He is a lobbyist, after all. Not only is he a lobbyist for companies with tremendous technology resources such as Sony BMG (remember the rootkit DRM they installed on your PC last year), he began his career as a budget analyst in the Reagan Administration, in the office that championed supply-side economics.
Is there such a thing as a reasonably secure and open signal security system? Of course. AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and 3DES (Triple Data Encryption Algorithm) have been around for years, and there are others. They get compromised every so often, but I, for one, have trusted them for thousands of online financial transactions for roughly a decade with no worries, so I could probably trust them for 99-cent songs.
But, as Jobs points out in his open letter, only some three percent of song sales use any DRM now. Everything distributed by the record labels on disc is in the clear. And those discs are clearly the source for most of the stuff on file-sharing networks.
So what is this argument really about? If Bainwol and the silly, xenophobic antitrust forces in several European countries were to force Apple to open up FairPlay, then Jobs’ fear of a greater likelihood of hacking would indeed be realized.
When somebody hacks a Bank of America account, for example, we all hear of it and then forget it, because the financial institution has such a strong incentive to keep its customers borrowing that it covers whatever losses it must and keeps on going. If FairPlay were to be hacked, the record labels would use it as an excuse to exact tougher terms from Jobs in their next rights negotiations. And most music would continue to be bootlegged from discs.
The engineer has been dared to make something work, so that if he succeeds life can go on as before and if he fails he can be screwed in his next contract negotiations.
THE STRAIGHT POOP
This episode got me to thinking about other examples where policy-making boobs tell technology people what they are “sophisticated and smart” enough to invent, and then disappear onward to even more lucrative work while the public at large is left to clean up their mess.
The 2004 movie Envy, starring Jack Black and directed by Barry Levinson, got lousy reviews, but I loved it as perhaps only someone who has been through this process can. Black played a marketing wiz who comes up with a brilliant concept: a dog poop vaporizer. All he’s got to do is find any old engineer who can build it.
Unfortunately, the movie falls apart when this impossible machine actually gets built. In real life, the start-up poop vaporizer company would have been lavishly funded, the engineer would have lived on very fresh sushi and fancy coffee for a while and then lost his savings—and Black would have been on to a yet larger business venture. And all the company’s customers and investors would have been left with some poop to clean up.
Looking for some more examples of poop vaporizers and open-standard DRMs from real life? Here are a few:
MXF. The “material exchange format” for digital video is so impossibly loose that multiple things can be called MXF and yet not interoperate. How do we know this is a poop vaporizer and not a relatively benign failure of standardization discussions? Let’s just say we have heard more than one exec at a technology supplier speak about the threat that open exchange poses to their business model.
DVB-H. EE Times recently reported that the mobile variant of DVB-T is turning out to be totally unnecessary. The normal terrestrial digital standard for much of the world outside of the United States doesn’t need to be tarted up with striping and caching customizing it into a different system for mobile receivers. As processors increase in power and memory gets cheaper, you can build a mobile DVB-T receiver pretty easily.
So why were engineers set on the huge DVB-H project? Maybe to justify broadcasters’ and telecoms’ demands for new bandwidth for separate mobile systems. And maybe to build enough economies of scale to make viable DVB-H systems in the United States.
ATSC. Of course, for a story of fine engineering led astray, we have our very own digital broadcast standard to cherish, and loads of products meant essentially to circumvent its core original goal of high definition. There are plenty of things about this standard and its implementation to shake your head about, but just for starters, anybody want to guess what percentage of all stations’ and cable networks’ broadcast day will originate at SD or lower quality in March 2009? How about in March 2014? By then much of it will play, at the other end of the signal chain, on consumer displays with far better than minimal HD resolution. How good will our engineering look then?
There’s a theme here I really didn’t anticipate when I started. Many of us stuck in the projects cited above could actually envy the engineer making a poop vaporizer. That poor guy was merely asked to build the impossible in order to make some money by selling it.
ATSC, DVB-H, MXF, all those fancy digital rights systems that nobody wants to use: These are all cases of vast engineering enterprises undertaken only with the expectation that they will waste some time, or convince a competitor to do something dumb, or extract resources from a government.
Finally, there are lots of products I don’t want to talk about here, because the companies selling them might not appreciate it. But you must have a few favorites. Tell me about them, please. I promise not to get you in trouble with any lobbyists.
Neal Weinstock is editor-in-chief of Weinstock Media Analysis. Contact him through www.weinstockmedia.com.
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