Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2001
Honest to goodness, it's beginning to look like every outfit has a lavishly funded, over-staffed Department of Dumb Ideas that takes its job way too seriously. Take the Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) proposal, for example.
CPRM is a draft proposal from Technical Committee T13 of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS; http://www.ncits.org/). NCITS's mission is "to produce market-driven, voluntary consensus standards" in areas such as multimedia, storage media, programming languages, and the like. NCITS is accredited by and operates under rules approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). In other words, NCITS cuts the firewood and ANSI stacks it.
For its part, Technical Committee T13 (http://www.t13.org/) is responsible for standards relating to the AT Attachment (ATA) storage interface used by PC disk drives. CPRM is a copy-protection scheme cooked up by T13 members from IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba to brand individual disk drives with unique identifiers to render them "uncopyable." For content providers, this means they can attach CPRM-based copy-restriction tags to content so that it can only be copied to appropriately tagged, CPRM-compatible disk drives. For you and me, this means no more restoring backups to different physical drives or using defragmenting software. For IT departments, it means not being be able to mix CPRM-compliant and noncompliant ATA drives, or put in place uniform backup procedures. And for OEMs and software houses...Well, they can forget about using imaging software to distribute one-to-many disk images.
CPRM proponents point out that there's nothing new about the T13 proposal — it is currently implemented on DVDs and Secure Digital (SD) memory cards. However, the current proposal goes further, extending the specification to SCSI and ATA/ATAPI interfaces for both hard-disk drives and CD-ROMs.
The way it more or less works is this: The CPRM spec reserves a 16×3000 matrix — a megabyte or so of read-only memory known as the "Media Key Block" on each storage device. A unique disk identifier, called the "Media Unique Key," is then hidden elsewhere on the drive. Next, a "C2" cipher (broadcast encryption and one-way key algorithm) is implemented to prevent noncompliant devices from playing disk content. Finally, a few new ATA commands (Read CPRM, Read Media Key Block, and the like) are implemented in software. You can find a complete description at ftp://fission.dt.wdc.com/pub/standard/x3t13/technical/e00148r2.pdf.
Oddly enough, CPRM opponents include Microsoft and its OEM customers, which cut thousands of disk images every day and need to do so efficiently and economically. Others who have spoken against CPRM include the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gilmore, the Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman, and DDJ's own Michael Swaine (see "Swaine's Flames" on page 152). Face it, when Stallman and Swaine end up agreeing with Microsoft, you know there's a dumb idea afloat somewhere.
Not to be outdone in raising dumb ideas to low levels, a company called "iCopyright.com" is trying to collect fees for web links to its clients. For instance, iCopyright clients The Albuquerque Journal and The Indianapolis Star want you to pay them $50 just for linking to one of their articles. As if that isn't dumb enough, their license goes on to restrict you from saying anything derogatory about the publication, author, or the article. (Gee, if I tried that with my "Editorial," I wouldn't get any mail at all.) It's hard to know whether the problem is that iCopyright doesn't understand the concept of the Web ("it's all about linking, dummy") or it's just another dumb idea headed for the dustbin of dot-com history. If you don't want people to link to your pages, don't post your content. The real fun starts when iCopyright tries to collect on the bills it sends out for linking.
But when it comes to Really Dumb Ideas, it's hard to top the terms of service for Sprint's Broadband Direct high-speed residential Internet access. Just by signing up for the Internet access, you grant Sprint the right to enter your premises even after you discontinue service and sell the house to someone else. And forget about telecommuting or e-commerce since Sprint won't let you "engage in any commercial or business activities using a residential account." Sprint goes on to say that you can't use your system for multiuser/interactive forums or game servers, and you can't operate "an internal mail/http/ftp/irc/dhcp server to serve external connections or support multiuser interactive forums." I probably imagined it, but I swear these terms of service said something about putting up a first-born child as collateral. Check it out at http://www.sprintbroadband.com/policy/customerRes.html.
Just to be sure everything was on the up and up around here, I stopped by my boss's office to inquire about the goings-on in the DDJ Department of Dumb Ideas. Gosh, I really hope that was a smile on his face when he said things have been pretty quiet over there since their last recommendation — to hire me.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com