[274] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Hollywood's Anti-Piracy Gift to Hackers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Fri Sep 21 21:15:42 2007
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Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:27:20 -0700
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Hollywood's Anti-Piracy Gift to Hackers
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000294.html
Greetings. The New York Times today notes the continuing progress of media
"fingerprinting" systems to identify copyrighted works on file sharing
sites, networks, and services such as YouTube. Apparently the quality of
these detection systems is getting better with far fewer missed or false
hits than earlier technologies.
I for one feel that it's perfectly within the entertainment industry's
rights to use such systems in conjunction with Web sites who wish to protect
themselves from copyright-related litigation.
However, if attempts are made to extend this technology to ISPs generally --
perhaps via deep packet inspection of subscribers' Internet traffic,
Hollywood is likely to trigger an enormous backlash. Similarly, any effort
to mandate such systems for inclusion in common operating systems, media
playback software, or consumer hardware, could set off an awe inspiring
backlash.
Outside of the obvious efforts that will be made to bypass the
fingerprinting system itself, this technology push is also likely to
accelerate the trend to encrypt and move underground those sites that trade
in copyrighted materials, making them even more difficult to track. The push
will probably also inspire hacking just on a revenge basis, even by persons
who actually have no real interest in the copyrighted materials themselves.
To the extent that the entertainment industry is seen to be treading farther
into restricting what have been traditionally considered to be fair use
applications, the risk of significant shadowy (but intelligent and powerful
in their own right) forces dedicated to disrupting their anti-piracy systems
rises greatly.
If the entertainment industry isn't careful, if they attempt to extend
controls too far, they may find themselves winning a short-term battle but
triggering a technology war the likes of which we haven't seen before, and
that they might very well lose.
Perhaps this is something well worth considering, before too much mutual
back-patting fogs their long term perspective.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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