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Have Developers Become the New Police?

Princeton professor Edward Felten discusses freedom to innovate

By David Worthington

March 15, 2007 — (Page 1 of 5)
The entertainment industry has wrestled with illegal file-sharing since the late 1990s. It often seems diametrically opposed to anything but the most rigid restrictions on digital media. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was born out of that environment, and though time has passed, the effects of the DMCA are still felt.

There are even some unforeseen externalities: Some Web 2.0 developers have taken on the role of the police, making sure that content published on their services does not violate copyright laws. The DMCA has even affected developers in segments other than digital media: Programmers attempting to make software interoperable have found themselves in the courtroom.

In a recent example, BnetD.org was targeted by Blizzard Entertainment because its “BNETD” game server interoperates with Blizzard video games, and cell phone carriers have sued cell phone “unlocking” services.

We sat down with Edward Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, to discuss developers’ freedom to innovate, the DMCA and what responsibility developers have to ensure that their products are compliant. Felten publishes the Freedom to Tinker Web Blog and is an associate of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

SD Times: What topics compel you to speak out?

Edward Felten: I have been writing a bunch lately about AACS [Advanced Access Content System], the next-generation DVD copy protection and e-voting. The broader issue here is about copy protection technology—attempts to use software to enforce legal rules—that’s part of the issue.

The other thing going on with AACS is standardization. AACS is the result of a security standardization process. We can learn things about how these efforts turn out and the kind of mistakes they make. The big picture things we have learned in the context of AACS is what happened with DVDs. There, they had a security standard that was pretty terrible.

For example, they invented their own encryption method; that was not a smart thing to do and easily broken. Studios made a lot of money [on DVDs] and may not even have needed copy protection. It was a technical failure.

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