It wasn’t exactly the message that the studios wanted to hear. At a Thursday panel at this year’s RSA Conference, John Worrall of RSA Security Inc. said something that I wish were obvious to everybody. Cryptography, Worrall said, is “good at some problems, such as
transmitting data so it can’t be eavesdropped or even authentication, but
it can’t solve the content protection problem. If people have legitimate
access to content, then you can’t stop them misusing it.” Worrall is quoted making this and other helpful comments in a short article in The Register.

Think about it, and you can see Worrall’s point: If you’re a Hollywood content producer and you’re making your content available on DVD or through cable or broadcast television, you’re delivering content into the home to an audience you can’t control, over equipment that is largely not under your control, and making the content “public” that way. Cryptography is good at keeping secrets, but less good at control of stuff that, once encrypted, is now displayed in the open for end-user consumption. In short, if you and your friends can view it, you can almost certainly find a way to copy it.

There is another way to address the content-protection problem, but it isn’t pretty — it involves requiring manufacturers to build computers and consumer-electronics devices with huge built-in mechanisms that hobble ordinary users (in other words, folks like you and me). That’s what Andy Setos of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group wants, according to the Register article, although he doesn’t quite put it the way I do:

Andy Sentos, president of engineering and technology at Fox Entertainment
Group, argued that device manufacturers need to recognise the requirements
of the movie industry in the design of their products. “There’s a value in
both content and functionality but there has to be a balance,” he said.

Setos (not “Sentos” as The Register would have it) is one of the content industry’s advocates who is most hostile to open-architecture technologies (because they lack what he calls “balance”). He’s also the architect of the Broadcast Flag scheme, which Public Knowledge is challenging in court. (Oral argument for our case is scheduled next week.) You can find an early debate between me and Setos about this issue at the Cato Institute website here. (Real Video or Real Audio required.) It seems clearer to me now even than it did a couple of years ago that the Broadcast Flag scheme and related regulations are designed in large part to institute limits on open-ended technologies such as the personal computer. In my view, such limits threaten to kill the computer revolution altogether.

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