[Anti-drm] DRM: Defectis Repleta Machina (pt=?=en==>es)

Mar Ene 16 17:37:44 UTC 2007

Hola,

Como dice el ultimo boletín, Fernanda y yo escribimos un articulo
sobre DRM que pasó por intensa revisión por el consejo de FSFLA, y
ahora nos gustaría publicarlo en los sitios de FSFLA y de la campaña
Entretenidos y Controlados.

¿A quién le gustaría ayudar a traducirlo?

Envío aquí la traducción al inglés.  Después, en otro mensaje, la
versión en portugués.

		    DRM: Defectis Repleta Machina

		 Alexandre Oliva <lxoliva en fsfla.org>
		Fernanda G. Weiden <fweiden en fsfla.org>

As you start your brand new car to go to the beach, it makes it clear
that it doesn't feel like it.  Murphy's law can often make it seem
like mechanical failures are nature's way of opposing your wishes.
But what if the car manufacturer had reasoned that, by selling you a
car that will take you to work but not to have fun at the beach, it
would be able to sell you another car specifically for beach visits?

"The Right to Read" [R2R], published in the magazine Communications of
the ACM (CACM), one of the best-regarded publications in computing,
prophesied in 1996 the indiscriminate use of software and remote
monitoring as tools to control access to knowledge and culture.  In
the article, textbooks and articles are only available electronically,
and students are forbidden from sharing them with their colleagues;
monitoring software on every computer, and severe penalties upon those
that merely appear to be attempting to circumvent it pretty much
ensure compliance.  After a mere 10 years, we may get the impression
that the author got it both right and wrong.  Access restrictions are
indeed already present in some electronic books and articles, but they
have showed up far more often in the entertainment field, limiting
access to music, movies, etc.  Are we facing a problem even bigger and
worse than the CACM article forecast?

DRM, for Digital Restrictions Management, means any technique that
seeks to artificially limit, by software, hardware or a combination
thereof, the features of a digital device with regards to access or
copying of digital content, so as to privilege whoever ultimately
imposes the technique (e.g., not the DVD player manufacturer, but the
movie industry), in detriment of whoever uses the device.  Considering
that nowadays microprocessors inhabit not only computers, but also
cellular telephones, electronic games, sound, image and video devices,
remote controls, credit cards, automobiles and even the keys that open
them, pondering that all this equipment may be programmed to turn
against you should be, at least, worrying.

What's the distance from an electronic failure that gets a Thai
official stuck in his automobile [BMW,BM2] to an anti-theft device
that deliberately imprisons inside the car anyone not explicitly
authorized, restraining her right to freedom of movement under the
pretext of stopping a potential crime?

In spite of all resources used to keep potential invaders outside
homes and cars, as far as we can tell there aren't any anti-theft
devices that keep them in, should they succeed in breaking in.  This
is due in part to respect for invaders' rights, and in part for
vendors' fear of imprisoning the device owner himself, his relatives
or friends, or of causing them other kinds of physical or moral harm.

DRM systems are portrayed by their proponents as anti-theft devices,
similar to those available for homes and automobiles.  Oddly, even
people who'd never accept an anti-theft device that could emprision
themselves seem to be willing to pay for the restraint on their
freedoms imposed by DRM systems.

Publishers sufficiently powerful to convince customers to pay for the
development and adoption of such systems also use their power to
impose upon authors the distribution of their works under such
constraints, all under the pretext of hindering unauthorized access
and copying, that cause them alleged losses.

The moral value of sharing, formerly taught at schools as something
good for society, through incentives to sharing toys taken to
classrooms, is corrupted and acquires a meaning morally equivalent to
that of high-sea ship undertakers of yore, who pillaged cargoes and
killed or enslaved crews [MIC].  The fallacy of intellectual
"property" [NIP], further elaborated in the Orwellian fallacy of
copyright "protection" [WTA], turns people's attention away from the
fact that copyright was created with the express purpose of growing
the body of works available to the whole society, using, as incentive
to creation, temporary and limited monopolies granted by society to
their authors [EPI].

As a result of these misconceptions, the Brazilian population silently
accepted the change to its copyright law, that up to 1998 permitted
the creation of complete copies, for personal use, of works covered by
copyright, so as to permit only copies of small portions [PNL].
Americans, in their turn, accepted a new delay in Mickey's entry in
the public domain, with an extension of the copyright duration for
another 20 years [CLG].  These are the first steps to the scenario
described in the CACM article [R2R].

Differently from anti-theft devices, that respect the user and enable
them to activate or deactivate the system, and respect even the rights
of transgression suspects, DRM takes a far more aggressive posture,
regarding as a criminal even the owner of the device, without room for
presumption or even proof of innocence.  DRM takes control of the
system away from the users' hands, since, just like the defective Thai
car, it doesn't offer an option to turn the system off.  Since, in the
DRM case, the defect is deliberate [DlD], the control remains in third
parties' hands, who use the devices you pay for to promote not your
interests, but their own.  In fact, for DRM, you are the invader.  But
since you pay their bills, they want to keep you not outside, but
rather inside, entertained and controlled [EeC].

DRM does not hesitate in trampling over your rights; not only
international human rights [HRD,DlD,ADR], but also those guaranteed by
copyright laws throughout the world, even restrictive ones like
Brazil's [RDA].  Some examples of rights trampled over by DRM are:

- copying a work that has fallen in the public domain;

- copying a work, in full or in part, for personal use, study,
  criticism, legal proof, parody or accessibility;

- participating in cultural life of the community, enjoying the arts
  and sharing in scientific advancement and its benefits;

- being presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a
  public trial with all guarantees necessary for the defense;

- holding opinions without interference and expressing them freely;

- seeking, receiving and imparting information and ideas through any
  media and regardless of frontiers;

- having one's privacy respected and protected by law against
  arbitrary interferences.

In fact, these systems often collect information and send it to a
remote controller, interfering arbitrarily with the user's privacy.
In at least one of these cases, that got widely known, a DRM system
author did not hesitate in infringing third parties' copyrights to
create a spying program, that installed itself, silently and
automatically, in a computer in which a music CD containing it was
loaded, and enabled the computer to be remotely controlled, without
any option to remove or deactivate it [SNY].  Is it legitimate to
disregard others' rights to try and seek bigger profits?

DRM systems are implemented by combining software and hardware.  There
are several techniques; we cite but a few examples:

- brutal quality degradation of video cassette recordings made out of
DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) reproductions;

- cryptography that prevents the reproduction of a DVD in any player,
requiring multiple licenses to be able to play the same content
anywhere in the world;

- violation of the CD (Compact Disc) specification so as to make it
difficult or impossible to play the songs in it on several CD players
and general-purpose computers;

- file formats that are secret or regulated by patents to limit the
performance of the content to software or devices with
artificially-restricted functionality;

- authentication mechanisms between digital devices that prevent the
propagation of high-quality digital signal to unauthorized devices
[WVC], such as from the new high-definition DVD and digital TV
standards to analog TVs and VCRs, or even more modern digital devices
that refuse to restrain their users' freedoms.

As ways to work around these artificial restrictions become public,
enabling people to exercise their rights guaranteed by law, new
ever-more-restrictive efforts take their place, in an attempt to avoid
alleged losses that disregards actual losses imposed on society, not
only because of the increased direct and indirect costs of equipments
due to the imposition of unfair restrictions [WVC], but even more
importantly because of the unfair restrictions themselves.

Some of these efforts are in the legislative front: USA's Digital
Millennium Copyright Act criminalizes the mere distribution of devices
or publication of knowledge that enable working around or disabling
mechanisms that restrict access or copying.  USA have tried to impose
similar legislation to other countries with whom they sign "Free"
Trade Agreements [TLC].  Laws that strengthen DRM turn its proponents
into private legislators, with powers to unilaterally change
contracts, restricting access conditions even after licensing.

Other efforts are in the judiciary front: associations that claim to
represent the interests of musical authors, but that in fact represent
the interests of record labels, have spread fear by suing regular
people, accusing them, without proof, of illicit acts related with
copyright violations [RLS,MdM].

The technical front doesn't linger behind: a security architecture
based on a combination of software and hardware, formerly called
Trusted Computing, has been co-opted to serve not the interests of
computer owners, but rather those of DRM systems [TCM], the reason why
we prefer to call it Treacherous Computing [TcC,CTr].  This technique
can be used to stop installation or execution of software, against the
user's will, or even the creation or correction of such software; to
selectively prevent the creation, access or preservation of certain
files [IRM].  That is, to prevent a general-purpose computer from
obeying user's commands, turning it into a limited entertainment
platform, that puts on third parties' hands the decision on what, when
and how the user can use or consume.  Somewhat like the car programmed
to not go to the beach, or the electronic books stored in computers in
the CACM article.

All these techniques do a lot to make law-abiding regular citizens'
lives difficult, but they can't stop those who run their businesses
based on commercialization of unauthorized copies.  For the latter,
the investment needed to work around the restrictions pays off, so all
these restrictions end up missing their goal, while they limit and
disrespect freedoms of most of the population.

This disrespect is not new and, in fact, it has made room to make DRM
techniques effective.  Free Software [FSD], that respects users'
freedoms to inspect the program, modify it or hire third parties to do
so, and run the original or the modified program, without
restrictions, when used to implement DRM techniques, renders them
ineffective, since the user would have the power to disable artificial
restrictions or add features that had been left out.

Software patents [SPE,NSP] are another threat to freedom that a few
developed countries are trying to impose upon other countries.  A
legally-valid software patent, issued in a country that allows such
patents, gives the patent holders the power to block, in that country,
the development and distribution of software which implements the
patented feature.  If the companies in a DRM conspiracy have patents
on some aspects of the decoding process, they can use these patents as
another means to block software that can access the same works but
without the restrictions.

It shouldn't be surprising that the Free Software Foundation [FSF] and
its sister organizations all over the world denounce the risks of
these limitations to individual freedoms [DbD,DRi,EeC], even when they
don't apply strictly to software, and at the same time update the most
widely used Free Software license in the world [Gv3,GPL,Gv1], such
that it better defends software users' and developers' freedoms
against these new threats.  The GNU GPL is the license used by most
components of the GNU operating system, and by the Linux kernel, the
most common kernel used with the GNU operating system.  So much so
that many people have come to know the operating system by the name of
this kernel, and unfairly or unknowingly call the combination Linux,
instead of GNU/Linux [YGL].

Anyone who seeks knowledge or culture in digital formats has her
rights threatened by DRM.  In fact, the impossibility to preserve
society's knowledge and culture in face of all these artificial
limitations may cause our civilization to be seen in the future as a
dark age, since, unless we can help it, all of our knowledge will have
been stored in formats that, instead of ensuring its preservation, in
the perfect conditions enabled by digital storage, seek to ensure its
unavailability.

  "If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works,
  we've already failed," -- Peter Lee, an executive at Disney [Eco]

When you see the acronym DRM in a product's ad, remember that it's not
a feature, it's a warning label.  Remember that DRM stands for
Defectis Repleta Machina, or Defect-Ridden Machine.  So, when you get
to make a choice, while purchasing movies, songs, electronic books,
games, etc, between a form limited by DRM and an unlimited one, prefer
the unlimited form, unless you can work around the DRM techniques.
When there isn't such a choice, reject monopolized and restricted
content, as well as the legal mechanisms, the equipment and the
techniques that support them.  Use your freedom of choice today,
avoiding short-sighted decisions that empower interests that, should
they prevail, will restrain any possibility of choice in the future.
Spread the word on the risks and support campaigns that do it
[DbD,DRi,EeC,BDV].  Join us in the Latin-American anti-DRM campaign,
Entertained and Controlled, in the FSFLA [FLA] mailing list [A-D].

This article is a revised version of the one published in the
ComCiência magazine [ORG].

We thank Richard M. Stallman, Eder L. Marques, Glauber de Oliveira
Costa and Fernando Morato for their reviews and suggestions.

[R2R] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

[BMW] http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.73.html#subj4

[BM2] http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,39130270,00.htm

[MIC] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

[NIP] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml
(see also the discussion on Intellectual Property on the [WTA] page)

[WTA] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Protection

[EPI] http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/128#1

[PNL] http://www.petitiononline.com/netlivre

[CLG] http://www.cartacapital.com.br/index.php?funcao=exibirMateria&id_materia=3446
(in Portuguese)

[DlD] http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/101

[EeC] http://www.entretidosecontrolados.org/

[HRD] http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm

[ADR] http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/107

[RDA] https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Leis/L9610.htm, articles 46
to 48 (in Portuguese)

[SNY] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Sony_BMG_CD_copy_protection_scandal#Copyright_violation_allegations

[WVC] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt is a
good article overall, even if it falls prey of the "content
protection" fallacy [WTA] and it mistakes Linux for an operating
system name [YGL].

[TLC] http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/117

[RLS] http://info.riaalawsuits.us/howriaa.htm

[MdM] http://overmundo.com.br/overblog/inaugurado-o-marketing-do-medo
(in Portuguese)

[TCM] http://www.lafkon.net/tc/, with subtitles at
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/TC_derivatives.html

[TcC] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html

[CTr] http://www.dicas-l.com.br/zonadecombate/zonadecombate_20061106
(in Portuguese)

[IRM] http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601781

[FSD] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[SPE] http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat

[NSP] http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/dangers/index.html

[FSF] http://www.fsf.org/

[DbD] http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

[DRi] http://drm.info/

[Gv3] http://gplv3.fsf.org/

[GPL] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

[Gv1] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html

[YGL] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html

[Eco] http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4342418

[BDV] http://badvista.fsf.org/

[FLA] http://www.fsfla.org/

[A-D] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-drm

[ORG] http://www.comciencia.br/comciencia/?section=8&edicao=20&id=216
(in Portuguese)

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
entire document without royalty provided the copyright notice, this
permission notice and the URL below are preserved.

http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/???

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}