Pay To Live

There was a time when the cost of leisure was only the opportunity cost (the income forgone by not working) and the cost of your entertainment. But times have changed. The cost of entertainment is ever increasing, but not to worry, Hollywood has new ways to keep your entertainment affordable. All it’ll cost you is a little more of your precious leisure time.

The mechanism I’m talking about: CSS, the DVD Content Scrambling System. As part of the mechanism for protecting DVDs, the Copyright Control Authority added functionality to the DVD specification that would prevent users from skipping sections of playback. Typically, this is used at the beginning of the DVD to force users to watch the FBI copyright infringement warning. However, various DVD titles have started to use this feature for another purpose, a practice which I predict will only flourish: forced advertisement.

Anyone who’s gone to a movie theatre and paid for a movie knows the frustration of having to sit through advertisements for cars, Coke, and any number of other products. What a rub. I pay $12 for the movie, $10 for the popcorn, and now I have to watch advertisements in addition to the “Coming Attractions” before the movie starts?!? Welcome to the world of “consumer lock-in”. You’re a captive market, ready to be exploited. Now imagine when this intrusion comes home.

You’ve bought a DVD, hence you have the right to watch it again and again. Yet now, you’ll have to sit through the advertisements at the beginning of the DVD each and every time you want to watch the movie. Will you see the price of DVDs decrease? No. In fact, more than likely you’ll see the emergence of a new market: DVDs without advertisements. And they’re going to cost you more.

The DVD standard has refined this technology to state of the art. Not only can they force you to watch segments of the DVD, the CCA can also force you to buy a DVD title multiple times in multiple regions. Embedded in each DVD is a region code that specifies where a DVD can be played. DVD players enforce this region encoding. So, for example, a DVD you purchased in Europe can’t be played in North America. Even though you possess a valid license for the media, you can’t play the media on any North American DVD player. This technology enables media creators to practice price discrimination between regions.

Imagine if this trend extended outside the world of digital entertainment. Imagine if the manufacturers of eyeglasses decided to leverage their captive audience and embed partially transparent advertisements into the lenses of glasses they manufactured. Want a pair without the ads? It’ll cost you. The possibilities are endless. Everywhere you look or listen is another opportunity for advertisers to invade your attention. Think spam is annoying? Think again.

Just be glad this hasn’t happened to books. Yet.

Celine Dion: Hacker?

The release of Celine Dion’s newest CD this week heralded not only the singer’s hopeful comeback to the world of music, but also a potential career change for the Canadian chanteuse. With the release of her new latest album, A New Day Has Come, Dion may be preparing to undergo the unprecedented transformation from diva to hacker. Or even terrorist.

In Europe, Dion’s newest release incorporates Sony’s Key2Audio technology, a copyright protection technology that has the unfortunate effect of crashing the computers of users who insert the disc into their machines. The Key2Audio technology is designed to thwart unauthorized piracy of music using personal computers, but the methods used to achieve this end may have disastrous consequences for unsophisticated users. Though the discs carry explicit warning labels, it is probable that average users will not fully comprehend the warnings and inevitably lose unsaved data when they insert the disc into their machine.

One might wonder if the Key2Audio-protected version of the album has only been released in Europe due to its lack of comprehensive computer fraud and abuse legislation, currently only under consideration by the European Union Parliament. Had the album been released in the United States, it is likely that Dion and her record company would be in violation of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Specifically, consumers would be able to launch action under US Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, Section 1030, Subsection (a), Paragraph 5, Subparagraph (A):

Whoever knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.

Successful prosecution under this law would translate into a fine, imprisonment, or both. In fact, under the newly anointed Anti-Terrorism Act, it’s possible that either Dion’s record company or the singer herself could be prosecuted as a terrorist, something that would no doubt delight the singer’s critics.

Of course, this is all conjecture. Is it likely that a record company would fall victim to the same legislation designed to protect the American public from nefarious ne’er-do-well hackers? Probably not. Given the precedent-setting nature of such a case, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would undoubtedly mobilize its lawyers to defend its members’ right to protect their intellectual property. However, the resulting lawsuit would require Dion, her record company, and the RIAA to position themselves opposite the United States’ formidable anti-hacking laws.

If the RIAA won such a fight, it would not only eliminate its customers’ right to access music they had already purchased, it would also set a dangerous precedent that would risk crippling law enforcement’s ability to pursue criminals for unauthorized computer access. Given the United States’ desire to crack down on cybercrimes, it is unlikely that it would throw away its primary tool for battling cybercriminals just to appease the music industry. And perhaps the audacity of such an attempt would finally be enough to convince the public to put the media giants in their place.