Not a copyright talk

Doctorow opens by refusing the topic he's known for. The real subject is the general purpose computer, a machine society still hasn't figured out what to do with.

“tonight's talk is not a copyright talk”

Software in ziplock bags

Early packaged software shipped on floppies sold like candy bars. Floppies copy easily, so people copied them, and the industry panicked.

Dongles and hidden sectors

The first copy protection used physical tricks: deliberate disk defects, dongles, fat manuals you had to consult. It punished paying customers and barely slowed anyone else.

Cracking was a normal skill

Defeating those schemes needed no exotic talent. Figuring out what a stubborn program does and working around bad floppy media were everyday programmer chores.

Networks packaged the expertise

Once BBSes, Usenet and mailing lists existed, one person's crack became a small file everyone could pass around. Then bandwidth grew and the cracked disk images travelled instead.

Renting the pause button

By 1996 the fantasy was an economy that sold information by the slice: a book for a day, a film for a Euro, the pause button at a penny a second.

“you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second”

Now you have five problems

To make that work you must stop the file being saved in the clear, hide the keys, block sharing, block telling others how, and block telling them what the secrets were.

“But as they say on the Internet, "now you have two problems"”

The law as the fix

The 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty made it illegal to look inside running programs, to extract their secrets, and to tell anyone what you found. Takedowns arrived without judges.

Copying only ever gets easier

The laws made unrealistic demands and reality declined. 2011 was the hardest copying would ever be, and your grandchildren will find that funny.

“this is as hard as copying will get!”

Swallowing the spider

Like the old lady who swallows a bird to catch the spider, a popular but broken rule breeds the next rule meant to prop it up.

Lawmakers aren't the problem

Blaming stupidity or evil in power is a counsel of despair. Non-experts pass sensible laws all the time by leaning on heuristics that balance expert input.

Wheels versus hands-free phones

Nobody would redesign the wheel to stop getaway cars. Banning hands-free phones is arguable, because a car without one is still a car. Features come off special purpose tech cleanly.

The heuristic breaks here

Treat software as a feature and "build a computer that won't run spreadsheets" sounds as harmless as removing a car phone. It isn't. Turing complete and end-to-end mean nothing to most people.

Something has been done

The laws don't stop infringement, they just resemble enforcement. So every failure gets read as not going far enough, never as flawed from the start.

“something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done”

The detergent that ate clothes

Told to make clothes newer each wash, engineers used enzymes that chewed the frayed fibre ends. Clothes looked fresher while literally dissolving. The cure accelerated the disease.

An appliance is a computer with spyware

We never strip a computer down to one app. We ship a full computer with rootkits, code signing and spyware so the owner can't see or stop what runs.

“it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box”

DRM converges on malware

Sony put rootkits on six million CDs and made the kernel lie about what was running. The 3DS bricks itself on tampered firmware. UEFI lets governments decide which systems boot.

“digital rights management always converges on malware”

SOPA cites Syria

A network that can't carry infringement is a censored network. SOPA targeted DNSSEC and Tor, and the MPAA argued it would work because the same blocking works in Syria, China and Uzbekistan.

“Don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA!”

Copyright got far by being trivial

Canada tabled bill after bill without voting. Countries send water and health experts to Geneva, not copyright experts. Sectors that actually matter haven't shown up yet.

“copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone!”

A computer you put your body into

Cars, planes, radios and hearing aids are all computers now. Freedom means being able to inspect your devices and kill the processes working against you.

“Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them”