When we’re not busy writing tasty blog posts, the five of us betaboys are students at Olin College. Today Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing held a seminar entitled “0wned — How Hollywood plans on making the future subservient to the past”. Apart from being probably the first seminar in the Olin Seminar Series to start with a numeral, Cory’s talk introduced and otherwise played preacher to Olin’s proverbial choir on the anti-DRM cause.

A history of technology vs. existing content

“Companies today are fighting the future,” Doctorow started. He went on to cover the turbulent but generally positive history of mainstream content production, starting with the battle between sheet music publishers and player piano reel producers up through the battle between the Motion Picture Association of America and VCRs. Repeatedly throughout history short-sighted content holders have complained that some new technology will destroy their ability to maintain a profit and supply the public with new high-quality creative works.

Each time, Congress stepped in and allowed the new technologies to be sold unfettered for the most part, allowing users to do things with media that had never been imagined before while developing special forced licensing schemes that protect the original copyright holders without tons of litigation. As a result we can listen to Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” on the radio as we drive to Blockbuster to rent Waterworld.

If it’s not in the manual, don’t do it

The same battles crop up today as everything goes digital. But as Doctorow pointed out, in the past, new functionality led to cases of potential patent infringement that were decided on by the court system. Today, on the other hand, the content owners push for laws and regulations that limit new functionality before users have the chance to explore the boundary of fair use and blaze new grounds of cultural advancement. Devices themselves are effectively play judge and jury over what I can or cannot do with them.

Hollywood lobbyists have pushed through laws and regulations and even international treaties that restrict a user’s ability to create new and modify existing hardware and software to process protected data like that on DVDs. Even talking about how to break into copy protection systems can get you prosecuted. Doctorow, raised by Trotskyist parents, likened the situation to Lysenkoism, the Stalinist policy of ignoring scientific evidence that a new agricultural program wasn’t helping at all. Only this time, the Russians have the advantage over the US.

What will the kids of tomorrow tinker with?

At this point in the talk, I perked up a little, as I have grown up doing a bit of tinkering with everything from old video game systems to turntables and audio equipment to electronic toys. It’s really no wonder I’m studying Electrical and Computer Engineering here at Olin.

At stake is the ability of my generation and US engineers in general to do the basic kinds of exploratory investigation and play with our devices to learn how they work and come up with ideas that push humanity into entirely new worlds. You wouldn’t be reading this right now if engineers hadn’t decided to toy around with everything from electricity to computers to the Internet. Doctorow pointed us to Freedom to Tinker, a blog on fighting for this basic human practice.

Conversation is king

As Doctorow pointed out, the mantra that “content is king” is quickly being taken over by the idea that “conversation is king“. Sites like The Facebook and MySpace prove that a lot of money can be made just by facilitating open communication and getting out of the way. That’s true for notes to your friends as much as it with clips of free music as I mention in my previous blog post, video on YouTube, and photos on Flickr.

So what to do? I’m just a lowly engineering student about to head off into the real world. Well, the kids at Olin, always thinking, pressed him to describe what it was about the different stakeholders that could cause something like DRM to happen in the first place. What exactly does it take for the circle of digital rights restrictions to stay together?

The players

As Doctorow put it, it all comes down to game theory. The content holders have one unified goal, protecting the massive libraries of content that they have amassed from any form of copying that could prevent even one sale. The technology companies have no such alliance to existing content. A company will do whatever it can to make sure that its products stay at the forefront and support popular content, and will gladly support their own systems while fighting those of their competitors. And politicians? Doctorow was quick to point out that keeping the television on and unrestricted keeps voters happy. Who wants to be politically associated with passing a law that prevent people from using their TiVos for anything useful?

Where to go from here

So the strategy is divide and rule. As long as the companies are pitted against each other and politicians know who pays their paychecks, the users can rise up and make sure their voice is heard before any damaging legislation passes. The benefits go for the common man as much as they help small businesses. As Doctorow rightly pointed out, these issues are neither liberal nor conservative, they just make sense.

More views

For more on Cory Doctorow’s views on DRM, read his speech to Microsoft on the same issue at http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt.

alwaysBETA’s Brian Shih also gives his take on the Google/China issue after Doctorow brought it up over lunch.

Our very own Brendan Doms follows up with a look at how companies are offering products now with fewer features.