Une décade de DRM

[Francois Poulain <fpoulain AT metrodore.fr>]

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/decade-in-drm

The Decade in DRM: 2000-2009

(Including four pre-2000 events that helped set the stage for the years to
come.)

February 1997: Richard Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" published.
It imagines a future in which book sharing is criminalized and prohibited
through technological controls. That future would not be long in coming.

October 28, 1998: The DMCA. US President Bill Clinton signs the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act into law. The DMCA criminalized DRM circumvention
as well as the creation and spreading of anti-DRM tools. Many nations went
on to pass similar so-called "anti-circumvention" laws.

March 31, 1999: Tivo ships a TV timeshifting device using free software
under the hood, but the hardware imposes a restriction on running user
modified versions of the software. The freedom of free software becomes an
illusion, unless the restriction is broken--something that is now illegal
thanks to the DMCA. "Tivoization" is born.

October 1999: DeCSS for DVDs. Just before the start of the decade, Jon Lech
Johansen, aka DVD Jon, and two anonymous collaborators release

DeCSS, which defeats the DRM on DVDs. After a judge prohibits distribution
of DeCSS code, advocates of technological freedom distribute DeCSS code in a
plethora of formats, including songs and poetry.

March 2000: GNU Free Documentation License 1.1 is published. The license
prohibits DRM and was later adopted by Wikipedia for all its articles.

July 16, 2001: Programmer jailed! FBI arrests visiting Russian programmer
Dmitri Sklyarov for helping write a program that stripped DRM from Adobe
ebooks. He is detained for almost a month, and not allowed to return home
until December.

November 28, 2001: 2600, sued for merely linking to the DeCSS code, loses
its appeal.

May 2002: CD DRM schemes defeated by drawing on the disc with a magic
marker. Other CD DRM schemes crash the computer playing the disc, inspiring
this rant.

December 2002: First Creative Commons copyright licenses released. Creative
Commons's licenses encourage sharing of creative works, and prohibit
licensees from imposing "technological measures on the Work that restrict
the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights
granted to that recipient under the terms of the License," as a blocking
maneuver against DRM. By decade's end, hundreds of millions of works would
be so licensed, proving that authors, artists and musicians oppose DRM too.

January 2003: Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom becomes the
first novel released under a Creative Commons license. Doctorow becomes one
of the decade's most outspoken voices against DRM, both in his work with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and on his blog Boing Boing; his 2004
Microsoft DRM talk was especially influential.

April 2003: Apple launches the iTunes Store, selling music with the
oxymoronic "FairPlay DRM".

September 8, 2003: RIAA sues 261 file sharers, kicking off a massive lawsuit
campaign that would reach more than 30,000 lawsuits by decade's end. See The
War on Sharing.

September 13, 2003: John Walker publishes The Digital Imprimatur: How big
brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle,
identifying DRM as one of the technologies that will lead to restrictions of
liberty on the Internet.

November 2003: FairPlay cracked. DVD Jon releases QTFairUse, the first
program to circumvent Apple's FairPlay DRM.

January 22, 2004: All legal proceedings against DVD Jon related to DeCSS are
dropped.

October 31, 2005: Sony Rootkit discovered. In one of the greatest DRM
fiascos of all time, when certain Sony CDs were played on computers, Sony
secretly installed a "rootkit" (software that compromises your computer) as
part of a DRM system called SecuROM. Among other things, the rootkit let any
web page execute code on the infected machine, like forcing the machine to
reboot. Sony's DRM rootkit also contained GPL-covered code distributed in
violation of the GPL. Sony was not prosecuted for either of these felonies.

December 1st, 2005: Rootkit lawsuits against Sony/BMG gain class action
status.

December 26, 2005: Sony settles rootkit lawsuit.

2006: Peter Gutmann's "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"
memorably concludes "The Vista Content Protection specification could very
well constitute the longest suicide note in history." The article ignites
public awareness of the new DRM malfeatures in Windows Vista.

May 23, 2006: First Defective by Design action launches. DRM Protestors
Crash Vista Party: "As Microsoft developers gathered in Seattle to hear Bill
Gates's keynote speech on the future of Microsoft and the coming release of
its updated operating system Vista, protesters wearing bright yellow Hazmat
suits swarmed the entrance of the city's convention center, delivering an
unsettling message to the corporation: your product is defective and
hazardous to users."

Defective by Design continues to identify DRM-crippled products, aiming to
cast DRM as an anti-social technology, and to abolish DRM as a social
practice.

October 3, 2006: First Day Against DRM. Thousands of emails were sent, one
hundred and fifty thousand stickers were distributed, and more than two
hundred organized meet-ups to get the message out. Some dressed up in Hazmat
suits and educated shoppers and commuters, others blogged about anti-DRM
activities, many submitted amazing photos. In Paris activists, handed
themselves in to police for breaking French DRM laws.

Summer 2006: DRM-free eMusic becomes the second-largest digital music
service.

2007 and 2008: Microsoft announces various plans to abandon PlaysForSure
DRM. Though some of these plans are rolled back, music customers are
outraged at the possibility of losing music collections. Microsoft helps
make it clear that DRM sellers cannot be trusted.

February 6, 2007: In an open letter, Steve Jobs says that "DRMs haven’t
worked, and may never work..." He encourages DRM opponents to ask major
record labels to license music DRM-free to Apple and other music
distributors. But by the end of the decade Steve Jobs had shown his real
colors by leading the charge to impose maximal DRM on Apple users.

April 2007: AACS key for HD DVDs published, breaking the DRM on all released
discs. The key, a short hexadecimal series, is widely posted and widely
censored, thanks to site owners' fear of the DMCA. Digg users rebelled when
Digg administrators tried to ban posting of the key, leading the site to
eventually bow to the wishes of its users.

June 29, 2007: Version 3 of the GNU General Public License is released. It's
author Richard Stallman says, "GPLv3 ensures you are free to remove the
handcuffs. It doesn't forbid DRM, or any kind of feature. It places no
limits on the substantive functionality you can add to a program, or remove
from it. Rather, it makes sure that you are just as free to remove nasty
features as the distributor of your copy was to add them. Tivoization is the
way they deny you that freedom; to protect your freedom, GPLv3 forbids
tivoization."

September 25, 2007: Amazon starts selling DRM-free MP3s.

July 11, 2008: Apple's App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch opens.

All the software on the device and in the store is DRMed, even the software
that doesn't cost any money or whose authors would actually prefer to share
it. The DRM gives Apple control over what applications can and can't be
installed on any device. The App Store's numerous and arbitrary App Store
rejections become a running joke.

September 2008: The DRM-encrusted game Spore is overwhelmingly negatively
reviewed on Amazon, with thousands giving it one star because if its use of
DRM.

February 27, 2009: Amazon uses its remote control over the Kindle device to
yank the text-to-speech feature from many Kindle books, letting publishers
decide which books the device can read aloud. Advocates for the blind
responded by protesting at the offices of the Author's Guild, which had
pushed for the measure.

April 7, 2009: Apple announces DRM-free versions of all songs in iTunes
Store. While music DRM appears nearly dead, Apple keeps DRM on movies, TV
shows, audiobooks and applications.

July 11, 2009: Amazon deletes purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 from Kindle
e-book readers, making clear who ultimately controls these devices, igniting
a general uproar, and a DbD petition for the right to read.

Conclusion

It's interesting that the decade opened and closed with battles over ebooks.
Years before Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from users'
Kindles, a visiting conference presenter was actually jailed for
understanding and publishing Adobe's ebook DRM, a hint at the draconian
direction we were headed in. Richard Stallman identified the hypothetical
threat to our books in "The Right to Read", but now some of the biggest tech
companies in the world (including Amazon and Apple) are making this
nightmare scenario a reality.

So, if we're going to create a world that is DRM-free through this final
transition away from physical media (as CDs, DVDs, and maybe even printed
books become obsolete), anti-DRM activists must be vigilant. We hope
everyone reading this will participate in this year's International Day
Against DRM on May 4th. If you want to follow the action or be involved,
contact info AT defectivebydesign.org or sign up here. Let's keep writing
history!

-- 
François Poulain <fpoulain AT metrodore.fr>