TSA Agents Outwitted By Cory Doctorow's Unlocked, 'TSA-Safe' Suitcase

from the the-skies-won't-be-safe-until-every-checked-bag-has-been-destroyed dept

Prior to the 9//11 attacks, you only had to worry about airport baggage handlers beating the hell out of your luggage or stealing your valuables. Thanks to the post-attack panic, there's a new layer of ineptitude and deceit your luggage is subjected to on its way to its destination (which may not be your destination).

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow (or rather, his luggage) was recently subjected to the brutish charms of the Transportation Security Administration.

[T]he TSA still routinely and unaccountably destroys luggage equipped with "TSA-safe" locks, just because they can. Last week, TSA inspectors at Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport pried the locks off of my unlocked, "TSA-safe" suitcase before taping it shut again and loading it onto my London-bound flight.

Here's what Doctorow's luggage looked like after the "TSA-safe" locking mechanism outmaneuvered the TSA agent in charge of crowbar-wielding and packaging tape application.


This appears to be the luggage Doctorow "submitted" to the TSA (although Doctorow's is possibly an earlier iteration), which then handled it with all the grace and skill of two male supermodels trying to retrieve files from a computer.


The TSA should have had no trouble unlocking the suitcase (using keys, rather than physically attacking it). Rimowa's site states that its luggage features "TSA combination locks."


Bypassing it with a master key was the option the TSA was supposed to use. Instead, it just forced it open, taped it back together and handed it back to Doctorow without even a shrug of bureaucratic regret.

It did, however, respond to his legitimate complaint. If you can call it a response. First, it loads up on disclaimers. (Doctorow's interjections are bracketed.)

Thank you for contacting the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Contact Center regarding damaged or missing checked baggage locks.

TSA is required by law to screen all property that goes onboard commercial passenger airlines, including checked baggage. To ensure the security of the traveling public, it is sometimes necessary for Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) to inspect checked baggage by hand. Locked checked baggage [[MY BAG WAS UNLOCKED]] may cause delays due to the need for TSOs to open locked baggage by using alternative measures, including force. Please be advised that TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes. [[HOW CONVENIENT – WHY NOT?]]

Yes. The agency takes no responsibility for breaking something that was a.) unlocked and b.) even if it wasn't, had passkeys it could have used. It inexplicably mentions this unused option while explaining why it manhandled Doctorow's luggage like the world's most inept burglar.

In cooperation with private industry, TSA implemented a system under which TSOs are able to identify, unlock, and then relock certain locks using passkey sets available to TSA screeners [[AND ANYONE WITH HALF A BRAIN AND A BIT OF GUMPTION]]. TSA-recognized locks can be opened and relocked by TSOs without force and with little delay. TSA cannot, [[WHY THIS COMMA?]] guarantee that such locks will never be damaged or lost while TSOs and airline employees handle checked baggage [[HOW CONVENIENT]].

On top of being unable to perform its job without destroying luggage, the TSA is apparently unaware that URLs can be copied and pasted, rather than carelessly typed into a response email for maximum ineffectiveness.

To learn more about damaged locks, please visit www.tsa.gov\node\1428.

Just try to do what the TSA didn't and paste that not-a-URL-at-all into an omnibox. (Well, it will be automatically converted into a real URL, but that's only because web browsers are smarter than TSA Customer Service agents.) Doctorow says this indicates some sort of DOS mindset, which is its only level of scary.

So, to recap: the TSA can break your stuff, despite having the tools to do otherwise and despite having a number of luggage manufacturers specifically making passkey-compliant suitcases to prevent this sort of thing from happening and despite the suitcase being UNLOCKED THE WHOLE TIME. And the traveler's path of recourse is a mistyped URL surrounded by "not our fault" boilerplate.

The TSA will never have to pay for broken luggage. Because terrorism.

I miss the good old days when this sort of behavior was only displayed by baggage handlers searching for valuables/setting distance records in amateur luggage-tossing competitions. At least then you could find someone to hold accountable for the damage sustained.

The TSA, however, is above even the most minimal level of accountability. If its employees are outsmarted by a "TSA-safe" lock, it's your fault for not ensuring your checked luggage was already open and dumping its contents all over the conveyor belts by the time it reached the TSA's elite group of suitcase-battering counterterrorists. This entire situation (especially the TSA's "response") cleary shows that Doctorow is the guilty party here. If he truly loved America, he'd have prepared for this eventuality… or at least just taken back the taped-together remains of his $1000 suitcase and shed a tear of gratitude for all the hard work the TSA did to ensure his flight didn't get blown up/hijacked.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, homeland security, locks, luggage, tsa

Cory Doctorow To Push For Ending DRM

from the good-day-to-announce-this dept

This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today's topic is "you bought it, you own it," -- a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA -- the You Own Devices Act -- which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the devices with the software on it without creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.

One of the biggest attacks on property rights and ownership is Section 1201 of the DMCA, better known as the Anti-Circumvention clause, that says it's against the law to circumvent any "technological measures" that were designed to block copying -- even if the underlying use is non-infringing. That is, if you break technological measures to access content that is not covered by copyright at all, you're still violating the law. This is the law that has made DRM so powerful, and which regularly removes your right to own what you bought. It's a blatant attack on basic property rights, and (even worse) has copyright maximalists pretending that their removal of property rights is actually a move in favor of property rights.

Thus, it's great to see the announcement today that Cory Doctorow is returning to EFF to help with its new Apollo 1201 Project, a plan to eradicate DRM in our lifetime.

"Apollo was a decade-long plan to do something widely viewed as impossible: go to the moon. Lots of folks think it's impossible to get rid of DRM. But it needs to be done," said Doctorow. "Unless we can be sure that our computers do what we tell them, and don't have sneaky programs designed to take orders from some distant corporation, we can never trust them. It's the difference between 'Yes, master' and 'I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.'"

Doctorow has been speaking out on this issue for years. If you haven't watched his 2012 talk at the Chaos Communication Congress on the "war on general purpose computing," it's well worth your time. It's a discussion I've gone back to many times in the two and a half years since he first gave that talk. It highlights not only the absurdity of DRM in general, but why this is an issue that goes well beyond just the idea of locking down some content to protect an obsolete business model. As his speech noted, this is a battle over the right to actually own your computer and not to open it up to censorship and surveillance. The fight over DRM on content was just the beginning:

And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, apollo 1201, apollo 1201 project, copyright, cory doctorow, dmca, drm, general purpose computing, yoda
Companies: eff

High School Principal Cancels Entire Reading Program To Stop Students From Reading Cory Doctorow's 'Little Brother'

from the you-want-to-learn-about-questioning-authority? dept

Welcome to the modern equivalent of a book burning. The principal of Booker T Washington High in Pensacola Florida has apparently cancelled the school's "One School/One Book" summer reading program all in an effort to block students from reading Cory Doctorow's (absolutely fantastic) book Little Brother. It appears he may be against the fact that one of the messages of the book is the importance of "questioning authority," and has decided to show the school what true, obnoxious authoritarianism looks like.

Little Brother had been selected and approved as the school's summer One School/One Book reading pick, and the school librarian Betsy Woolley had worked with Mary Kate Griffith from the English department to develop an excellent educational supplement for the students to use to launch their critical discussions in the fall. The whole project had been signed off on by the school administration and it was ready to go out to the students when the principal intervened and ordered them to change the title.

In an email conversation with Ms Griffith, the principal cited reviews that emphasized the book's positive view of questioning authority, lauding "hacker culture", and discussing sex and sexuality in passing. He mentioned that a parent had complained about profanity (there's no profanity in the book, though there's a reference to a swear word). In short, he made it clear that the book was being challenged because of its politics and its content.

Ultimately, the entire schoolwide One Book/One School program was cancelled.

In an attempt to... er... question that authority, Doctorow and his publisher, Tor, are sending 200 free copies of the book to the school. A school trying to ban books is almost always a stupid idea, but it seems particularly stupid in this day and age with this particular book. In the end, all it is likely to do is cause more people to actually read the book and to, you know, question authority.

Filed Under: booker t washington high school, challenging authority, cory doctorow, florida, little brother, one school one book, pensacola, reading, students
Companies: tor

Non-Luddite Alternative To The Authors Guild Launching

from the good-to-see-some-competition dept

Over the past few years, we've written more than a few times about the incredibly short-sighted and backwards looking positions of the Authors Guild, an organization that appears to (a) hate technology and (b) be almost entirely focused on protecting the business model that only allows a very, very, very small number of authors to make a living. Beyond its highly publicized fight against book scanning (which it has lost in every round so far), the Guild has lashed out at libraries, ebooks, Amazon and the internet in general. You may also remember a few years ago when the Authors Guild freaked out about an Amazon Kindle feature that would read books aloud.

The Authors Guild has shown time and time again that its main interest is in trying to hold back the tide of progress, keep out competition, and basically hope against hope that maybe, just maybe, it can bring back those days when top authors didn't have to interact with fans, and didn't have to worry about successful authors going direct. Many, many authors with more progressive views of the internet have spoken out against the Authors Guild, as they recognize that it isn't representing the interests of most authors at all.

So it's good to see that an alternative, the Authors Alliance, is about to launch, put together by law professor Pamela Samuelson and sporting a rather impressive advisory board of folks, including Larry Lessig, Jonathan Lethem, Cory Doctorow, Robert Pinsky, Brewster Kahle, Lewis Hyde, Jonathan Zittrain, Kevin Kelly, Ed Felten and many other big authors and thinkers. I'm a little disappointed that the advisory board doesn't have a Barry Eisler or Joe Konrath on the list, as it does appear to be somewhat lacking in folks who have had tremendous success outside the traditional publishing system, but it's still an impressive start.

Filed Under: authors, copyright, cory doctorow, internet, larry lessig, luddites, pam samuelson, trade groups
Companies: authors alliance, authors guild

Why NSA's Betrayal Of Internet Security Is Akin To A Massive Public Health Disaster

from the infectious-ideas dept

One of the most shocking of Snowden's revelations was that the NSA and GCHQ are deliberately weakening the Internet's security -- either by undermining standards, or by using zero-day vulnerabilities to break into systems. More recent news about the huge scale of attempts to infect computers with malware only compounds that outrage. It's hard to convey to ordinary Internet users the seriousness of what the NSA and GCHQ have done here, but in a brilliant new column in the Guardian, it looks like Cory Doctorow has done just that:

I think there's a good case to be made for security as an exercise in public health. It sounds weird at first, but the parallels are fascinating and deep and instructive.

Here's the basic insight:

If you discovered that your government was hoarding information about water-borne parasites instead of trying to eradicate them; if you discovered that they were more interested in weaponising typhus than they were in curing it, you would demand that your government treat your water-supply with the gravitas and seriousness that it is due.

Because that is precisely what the spying agencies are doing: they are intentionally withholding vital information about threats to your digital health -- the fact that programs you use are vulnerable to infections with malware, or that key security technologies you depend upon have backdoors -- regardless of the serious consequences this might have for you. If you try to imagine doctors doing the same in the case of equivalent threats to your health, you begin to get an idea of the depth of betrayal felt by computer professionals here. Doctorow goes on to point out that this is not just a matter of personal harm; the NSA and GCHQ are degrading the basic digital infrastructure of modern life:

This is the most alarming part of the Snowden revelations: not just that spies are spying on all of us -- that they are actively sabotaging all of our technical infrastructure to ensure that they can continue to spy on us.

There is no way to weaken security in a way that makes it possible to spy on "bad guys" without making all of us vulnerable to bad guys, too. The goal of national security is totally incompatible with the tactic of weakening the nation's information security.

"Virus" has been a term of art in the security world for decades, and with good reason. It's a term that resonates with people, even people with only a cursory grasp of technology. As we strive to make the public and our elected representatives understand what's at stake, let's expand that pathogen/epidemiology metaphor. We'd never allow MI5 to suppress information on curing typhus so they could attack terrorists by infecting them with it. We need to stop allowing the NSA and GCHQ to suppress information on fixing bugs in our computers, phones, cars, houses, planes, and bodies.

Doctorow is right on both counts: we can't allow the NSA and GCHQ to withhold vital information that endangers the digital fabric of society, and the way to stop them is to use this public health metaphor to get that message across to politicians and the general public.

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Filed Under: cory doctorow, cybersecurity, gchq, hacking, nsa, public health, surveillance

How The Copyright Industry Made Your Computer Less Safe

from the welcome-to-the-world-of-drm dept

I've already written one piece about Cory Doctorow's incredible column at the Guardian concerning digital rights management and anti-circumvention, in which I focused on how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws allows companies to make up their own copyright laws in a way that removes the rights of the public. Those rights are fairly important, and the reason we have them encoded within our copyright laws is to make sure that copyright isn't abused to stifle speech. But, anti-circumvention laws combined with DRM allow the industry to route around that entirely.

But there's a second important point in Doctorow's piece that is equally worth highlighting, and it's that the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws make all of our computers less safe. For this to make sense, you need to understand that DRM is really a form of security software.

The entertainment industry calls DRM "security" software, because it makes them secure from their customers. Security is not a matter of abstract absolutes, it requires a context. You can't be "secure," generally -- you can only be secure from some risk. For example, having food makes you secure from hunger, but puts you at risk from obesity-related illness.

DRM is designed on the presumption that users don't want it, and if they could turn it off, they would. You only need DRM to stop users from doing things they're trying to do and want to do. If the thing the DRM restricts is something no one wants to do anyway, you don't need the DRM. You don't need a lock on a door that no one ever wants to open.

DRM assumes that the computer's owner is its adversary.

But, to understand security, you have to recognize that it's an ever-evolving situation. Doctorow quotes Bruce Schneier in pointing out that security is a process, not a product. Another way of thinking about it is that you're only secure until you're not -- and that point is going to come eventually. As Doctorow notes, every security system relies on people probing it and finding and reporting new vulnerabilities. That allows the process of security to keep moving forward. As vulnerabilities are found and understood, new defenses can be built and the security gets better. But anti-circumvention laws make that almost impossible with DRM, meaning that the process of making security better stops -- while the process of breaking it doesn't.

Here is where DRM and your security work at cross-purposes. The DMCA's injunction against publishing weaknesses in DRM means that its vulnerabilities remain unpatched for longer than in comparable systems that are not covered by the DMCA. That means that any system with DRM will on average be more dangerous for its users than one without DRM.

And that leads to very real vulnerabilities. The most famous, of course, is the case of the Sony rootkit. As Doctorow notes, multiple security companies were aware of the nefarious nature of that rootkit, which not only hid itself on your computer and was difficult to delete, but also opened up a massive vulnerability for malware to piggyback on -- something malware writers took advantage of. And yet, the security companies did nothing, because explaining how to remove the rootkit would violate the DMCA.

Given the post-Snowden world we live in today, people are suddenly taking computer security and privacy more seriously than they have in the past -- and that, as Doctorow notes, represents another opportunity to start rethinking the ridiculousness of anti-circumvention laws combined with DRM. Unfortunately, politicians who are way behind on this stuff still don't get it. Recent trade agreements like the TPP and ACTA continue to push anti-circumvention clauses, and require them around the globe, thereby weakening computer security.

This isn't just an issue for the "usual copyright people." This is about actually making sure the computers we use are as secure and safe as they can be. Yet, in a world with anti-circumvention provisions, that's just not possible. It's time to fix that.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, copyright, cory doctorow, dmca, drm, security, sony rootkit

DRM Is The Right To Make Up Your Own Copyright Laws

from the why-anticircumvention-laws-are-a-problem dept

We've written about the problems of DRM and anti-circumvention laws since basically when we started way back in 1997. Cory Doctorow has been writing about the same stuff for just about as long (or perhaps longer). And yet, just when you think everything that can be said about this stuff has been said, Doctorow comes along and writes what may be the best column describing why DRM, combined with anti-circumvention laws, is so incredibly nefarious. Read the whole thing. It's so well done, and so important, I'm actually going to write two posts about it, because there are two separate issues that deserve highlighting.

The first concerns just how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention is effectively a way that the content industry (and many other industries since) have been able to void the limitations on copyright law. Here's the key paragraph, which follows a discussion of the Reimerdes case, which more or less said that breaking any DRM is illegal in itself, even if the circumvention is done for legal reasons. And, because of that, we've taken copyright out of the law, and put it into the DRM:

Ever since Reimerdes, it's been clear that DRM isn't the right to prevent piracy: it's the right to make up your own copyright laws. The right to invent things that people aren't allowed to do – even though the law permits it -- and to embed these prohibitions in code that is illegal to violate. Reimerdes also showed us that DRM is the right to suppress speech: the right to stop people from uttering code or keys or other expressions if there is some chance that these utterances will interfere with your made-up copyright laws.

This is an important point summarized so perfectly that it deserves to be repeated over and over again. Because any circumvention of DRM is considered illegal, even if the purpose of the circumvention itself is legal, it basically gives not just "the copyright industries" but pretty much any industry the road map to stop people from making, say, fair use of copyrighted works. Or, worse, preventing them from tinkering with products they own. It allows them to wipe out fair use and other important user rights -- by just writing into code that it's not allowed, and even though that code is easily breakable, making that code breaking itself a form of "infringement."

In short, DRM with anti-circumvention restrictions lets industries simply route around the aspects of copyright law that are designed to protect the user's rights.

And, because of that, Doctorow wonders if there's a chance go to back and revisit the Reimerdes case, and bring back freedom to the public. As we've noted in the past, fair use is not, as some would have you believe, a "limitation and exception" to copyright, but rather a definition of the public's rights, whereby copyright is a limitation on those rights. DRM with anti-circumvention actually blocks those rights. Cory further points to another milestone case involving software, Bernstein v. US, in which it was determined that software was a form of speech, and that restricting it was a First Amendment violation. Doctorow notes that Reimerdes goes against that ruling -- and he thinks that this, plus a decade plus showing the damages done to the public's rights because of the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, open up a real opportunity to revisit the issue:

No court case is ever a sure thing, but I believe that there's a good chance that a judge in 2014 might answer the DMCA/free speech question very differently. In 14 years, the case for code as expressive speech has only strengthened, and the dangers of censoring code have only become more apparent.

If I was a canny entrepreneur with a high appetite for risk -- and a reasonable war-chest for litigation – I would be thinking very seriously about how to build a technology that adds legal features to a DRM-enfeebled system (say, Itunes/Netflix/Amazon video), features that all my competitors are too cowardly to contemplate. The potential market for devices that do legal things that people want to do is titanic, and a judgment that went the right way on this would eliminate a serious existential threat to computer security, which, these days, is a synonym for security itself.

We've seen entrepreneurs take on these kinds of high risk/high reward challenges before (Aereo comes to mind, though so do ones that ended up failing in court, such as ivi and Zediva), so this seems like a very real possibility. This would be an important ruling not just to free up innovation, but to bring back the rights of the public, and to stop an encroachment that began years ago, entirely at the behest of a legacy entertainment industry who was focused on using mechanisms of control to remove the freedoms of the public, solely to protect an obsolete business model.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, bernstein, code, copyright, cory doctorow, drm, fair use, free speech, reimerdes

Fox Uses Bogus DMCA Claims To Censor Cory Doctorow's Book About Censorship

from the but-of-course dept

Torrentfreak has discovered that News Corp's Fox studios has been sending DMCA notices taking down Cory Doctorow's latest book, Homeland, which is available under a Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs) license, and can be freely shared. The issue? Fox is trying to take down unauthorized copies of its TV show that goes by the same name. And, in its rush to take down anything and everything that might possibly be its TV show, Doctorow's authorized novel is collateral damage. The really crazy thing is that it should be obvious to any human looking over these takedowns that it's not the TV show, as all of the links tend to have Doctorow's name in them: This is not a one-off thing. It is happening over and over and over and over and over again. It's also worth pointing out that the actual takedowns are being sent by DTecNet. The same DTecNet that powers the infamous six strikes copyright alert system. I wonder if anyone's been getting any strikes for downloading Cory's novel....

When TorrentFreak asked Doctorow for comment, he joked, "I think you can safely say I’m incandescent with rage. BRING ME THE SEVERED HEAD OF RUPERT MURDOCH!" But, perhaps there's a more serious response. In response to Doctorow tweeting about this last week, Paul Levy from Public Citizen -- famous for defending people on the internet (including, at times, us) from bad things -- responded by asking Doctorow if he wanted to litigate.

@doctorow want to litigate?

— Paul Alan Levy (@paulalanlevy) April 19, 2013

Stay tuned, because this might get interesting. Considering that these takedowns are happening at a critical moment for the book, just as it's been launched, a very strong argument can be made that Fox has created tremendous damage for Doctorow and the success of the book. While the few attempts to go after those who send bogus DMCA takedowns haven't had much success, an argument could be made that Doctorow's situation presents a much stronger case.

Filed Under: chilling effects, cory doctorow, dmca, homeland

Live Video: Cory Doctorow Talking With Techdirt About Pirate Cinema, Copyright Law & More

from the book-club dept

It's been a long time coming, due to a variety of issues (mostly on my end from being quite busy working on some stuff, combined with Cory being on tour for his new book), but we're finally having our discussion with Cory Doctorow as part of the Techdirt Book Club about his book Pirate Cinema. At (about) 9am PT, Cory will be joining me in conversation, which will stream live below (barring any technical difficulties). If you're reading this between 9am and 10am (or so), you should be able to pick up the live video. After it's over, you can replay the entire thing at any time. I expect we'll be talking about the book, its inclusion in the Humble Bundle, as well as a variety of other issues that Cory has written and spoken about for years. Should be a great discussion.

Filed Under: copyright, cory doctorow, pirate cinema, techdirt book club

Disappointing: Tim Berners-Lee Defends DRM In HTML 5

from the he-should-know-better dept

We recently wrote about the truly stupid idea of building DRM into HTML5. At SXSW this week, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee was asked about this, and he surprisingly defended the decision, claiming that it was necessary to get companies to use HTML5:

During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in, people will just go back to using Flash," he claimed.

Berners-Lee is so good on so many issues (most of his talk seemed to be about the importance of openness) that this response really stands out as not fitting with his general view of the world. Cory Doctorow has responded eloquently to TBL, explaining why he should be against the DRM proposal.

What's more, DRM is wholly ineffective at preventing copying. I suspect Berners-Lee knows this. When geeks downplay fears over DRM, they often say things like: "Well, I can get around it, and anyway, they'll come to their senses soon enough, since it doesn't work, right?" Whenever Berners-Lee tells the story of the Web's inception, he stresses that he was able to invent the Web without getting any permission. He uses this as a parable to explain the importance of an open and neutral Internet. But what he fails to understand is that DRM's entire purpose is to require permission to innovate.

For limiting copying is only the superficial reason for adding DRM to a technology. DRM fails completely at preventing copying, but it is brilliant at preventing innovation. That's because DRM is backstopped by anti-circumvention laws like the notorious US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA) and the EU Copyright Directive of 2002 (EUCD), both of which make it a crime to compromise DRM, even if you're not breaking any other laws. Effectively, this means that you have to get permission from a DRM licensing authority to add any features, since all new features require removing DRM, and the DRM license terms prohibit adding any features not in the original agreement, and omitting any of the mandatory restrictions featured in that agreement.

Doctorow makes two other key points in this: (1) that the W3C (the standards setting body for HTML5) has an enormous role in keeping the web free and open -- and imposing DRM is abusing the trust it has built up and will backfire badly and (2) that the big content players who insist they "need" DRM are bluffing.

As the leading standards-setting body for the Web, the W3C has an enormous, sacred and significant trust. The future of the Web is the future of the world, because everything we do today involves the net and everything we'll do tomorrow will require it. Now it proposes to sell out that trust, on the grounds that Big Content will lock up its "content" in Flash if it doesn't get a veto over Web-innovation. That threat is a familiar one: the big studios promised to boycott US digital TV unless it got mandatory DRM. The US courts denied them this boon, and yet, digital TV continues (if only Ofcom and the BBC had heeded this example before they sold Britain out to the US studios on our own high-def digital TV standards).

Flash is already an also-ran. As Berners-Lee himself will tell you, the presence of open platforms where innovation requires no permission is the best way to entice the world to your door. The open Web creates and supplies so much value that everyone has come to it – leaving behind the controlled, Flash-like environs of AOL and other failed systems. The big studios need the Web more than the Web needs big studios.

The Big Content guys have been seeking to remake the web in their image (i.e., "TV") for over a decade now, still believing that they're the main reason people get online. They're not. There's room for them within the ecosystem, but professional broadcast-quality content is just a part of the system, not the whole thing. If the world moves to HTML5 without DRM, the content guys will whine about it... and then follow. Especially as the more knowledgeable and forward-looking content creators jump in and succeed.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, drm, html5, internet, openness, permission, tim berners-lee