Title Fight: Sec. 6


	Holding On To The Title

A story goes that when John Dillinger was asked why he robbed banks his answer was: "Because that's where the money is." As long as counterfeiting remains lucrative, it will be practiced, and DVD could be the grand-daddy of them all. Criminal law enforcement authorities are concerned that if profit-potential goes any higher, organized crime could start investing the sort of energy used for the drug trade toward counterfeiting, instead of treating it as a sideline. For established title-holders, this would surely be too high a "cost-of-business" to tolerate.

Does this mean DVD should be avoided? Should movie studios stop releasing laserdiscs just because pirates use them to master counterfeit videocassettes? Collective action is the answer, not collective cowardice or complacency. There is no need for DVD to go the way of DAT and negate consumer sales (especially since audio pirates use DAT anyway). Crime has to be forcefully discouraged and security precautions must be put in place. An obvious factor would be for companies to impose greater scrutiny on their distribution downline, since this is where leaks generally occur.

Equipment manufacturers are not particularly adverse to a superior standard of content protection. Any thriving consumer electronics line will mean more sales. Short of the world's biggest RSA computation, manufacturers can modify their specs to accommodate almost any form of data manipulation. But unless title-holders get their act together, hardware manufacturers cannot be expected to do more than sympathize and comply with the demands contingent to market entry. One of the realizations that our founding fathers (analogous to today's intellectual property holders) came to during the revolutionary war was that everyone would either hang together or they would be hanged separately. Military history contains several annals of victory against a superior foe - Britain versus the Spanish Armada, Nelson at Trafalgar or Wellington at Waterloo against Napoleon. Several common threads interleave all of these battles:

advance planning;
the right personnel at the right place;
communication between divergent elements on the same side;
deviation from the strategy was never an issue.

It's not the job of manufacturers to solve the content protection problem by themselves. Legislators are also ill-equipped to be effective in this high-technology area. The victims must protect themselves. They must organize and fight. The movie industry, the recording industry, the computer software industry, are all based on protection for artists, which was unthinkable until after the Industrial Revolution. Unless content protection is made part of the DVD age, the profitability of the arts may be reduced to no more than a fragment of history.

While every effort has been made not to sacrifice objectivity, our perspective has benefited by reviewing the design of ZOOM TV (who have sponsored this writing, ref. contact info). Without giving partisan bias to the ZOOM TV solution, these insights have assisted us in sketching out the elements required for the prevention of commercial piracy of optical media. DVD's status as a newly-developed format, capable of replacing VHS/VCR playback technology, offers a window of opportunity for these or similar suggestions to be applied.

Element 1 - Strong Encryption

Popular misuse of the term "encryption" has applied it to any measures that make analog or digital data more difficult to duplicate. But as explained above, encrypted data is like a digital lock which can only be opened by a specific key.

Element 2 - Secure Key Handling

Hanging the key next to the lock invites break-ins. Most of the defeated encryption schemes of the recent past met their fate because the keys were not adequately protected. Digital data provision on telephone lines direct to the set-top box is one of several possible techniques.

Element 3 - Renewable Security

In the worst-case scenario, every digital security scheme has a life span which is unlikely to extend beyond two years. Therefore the fundamental decryption strategy must be designed with the evolution of replacements in mind. It must be dynamic, not static.

Element 4 - Diseconomic Pricing

Past manufacturing practice has caused most intellectual property to be sold with a personal lifetime buyout of rights, e.g., you may view your videocassette for as long as it lasts. The new media provides the opportunity for pricing in smaller increments, so that even a permanently-owned disc could only be viewed once, several times, or during a fixed period of time, which is more like buying a ticket to a movie theater. Selling a smaller slice of the intellectual property for a smaller sum of money makes selling counterfeit discs a far less enticing prospect for commercial pirates.

Element 5 - On-Line Interdiction

Whenever a degree of connectivity allows, illicit copies must be detected and rendered impossible to transmit or open.

Element 6 - Legislation-Friendly,
Not Legislation-Reliant

However crude regulatory efforts may be, software providers and electronics manufacturers will have to comply with them. So any solution must be able to operate within a compliance framework, although its effectiveness must be able to go far beyond the measure of protection that statutory code is capable of offering.

Although the will to embark on such an approach to data piracy may not emerge for some time, it seems probable that these six elements will be included in any eventual solution.

end of paper's main text

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written April 1996 -- please send comments to veyr@primenet.com
© ZOOM TELEVISION, INC. 1996, all rights reserved