Another dud silver bullet

Wired:There's an expression in computing circles born of long experience of struggling with technological complexity: "There is no silver bullet", writes  Danny O'Brien.

Put more broadly, it means that, whatever werewolf-like monsters new tech raises for us, there's rarely a simple universal antidote that will put them down again.

Somebody, I hope, will finally work out a way of explaining that to the media industries.

The music and video industries continue to buy silver bullets by the cartload - and foolishly attempt to arm well-meaning politicians with them.

Silver bullets may not work but they're still dangerous. If European politicians listen to the new solutions to the content industry's copyright woes being proposed in Brussels and Paris, we could all find them exploding in their faces. Again.

In the last few years the silver bullet was "digital rights management" (DRM), a pie-in-the-sky plan to cripple the everyday use of music and video in a futile attempt to stop it falling into the hands of file-sharers and other ne'er-do-wells.

As well as spending millions on snake-oil anti-copying systems, the old media industry also splashed out on lobbying, persuading governments across the world to back up these poor protections with the threat of criminal prosecution.

That's why we now live in a bizarre world where any teenager can still download an unprotected music file from the internet while the rest of us struggle with DVDs that can't be backed up in preparation for inevitable scratches and with iPod music that won't play on any other device.

Thankfully, the music industry these days appears to be backing away from the DRM silver bullet. Now though they have a new solution: content filtering.

At the Brussels level, the proposal has been slipped into an otherwise innocuous document on "cultural industries in Europe". There, the great and the good at the heart of the EU reprimand internet service providers (ISPs) for letting their customers practise copyright infringement and demand that they "apply filtering measures to prevent copyright and stop existing infringements [ sic]".

In France, the authorities have gone further. On attaining office, French president Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a report on internet file-sharing. A glimpse of the bio of the head of the commission will save you some time in reading its conclusions: it was led by Denis Olivennes, the head of a chain of CD and DVD stores who recently wrote a book called Free is Theft, which claimed that French culture was in deadly peril of being "demeaned" by internet pirates.

Olivennes's commission and the authors of the EU report seem to believe that in the face of potential music industry losses, it is the ISPs who should be made to subsidise their policies at the expense of the privacy of their customers.

French ISPs, under the plan, would monitor all internet traffic for copyrighted material and, if any infringing uses were spotted, deny access instantly to the perpetrator.

This would be an excellent plan except that, as a fight against copyright infringement, it would hold about as much water as a candyfloss colander.

Actual infringers would do the obvious, and easy, technical work-around - they would encrypt all their communications. It's only an accident of history (and a presumption of trust by their customers) that ISPs have any insight into how you communicate with others online at all. Encrypted communications would prevent ISPs snooping on infringers - while being forced to rifle through everyone's innocent communications.

As it happens, they would still be able to find endless supplies of unauthorised copyright infringements because everything you put down in a fixed form, from a photo to a casual e-mail, is copyrighted.

Assuming that ISPs are supposed to bias their searches for the copyrighted material of the big rights holders, they would still find their spying systems coming up with endless "false positives" - apparent infringements that are, on closer examination, perfectly legal.

As one Recording Industry Association of America spokeswoman said: "When you fish with a net, you sometimes are going to catch a few dolphins."

Some will be simply mistaken identity - filtering recognition systems are still only as good as facial recognition systems.

Others will be far more widespread and chilling. For instance, academics can quote and use copyrighted material for research and educational purposes. Will they have to build their own internet to avoid the blocks or will we need to license those who are permitted to use copyrighted material in a balanced manner?

Finally, while this huge, cumbersome system is being built, most of the copyright infringement will be moving to faster channels. As of now, on Amazon you can get a 160GB drive for less than €100.

In a few Christmases, college kids will be bringing pocket hard drives that can store more music than most people have ever bought to school. Those who don't care about the music industry's problems will be able to load up their music collections from other hard drives without using the filter-clogged nets.

This silver bullet will fix nothing except erect a pervasive surveillance system across the internet for governments and corporations to find another, less innocuous, use for.

In this December's Wired, Universal Music chief executive Doug Morris admitted that the music industry couldn't tell what was good technology or bad. "I wouldn't be able to recognise a good technology person - anyone with a good bulls***t story would have gotten past me."

It's way past time the music and video industries stopped impressing their confusions on our politicians and imposing their dangerous solutions on our essential infrastructure.