Tinkerers' champion
Jun 20th 2002
From The Economist print edition
It is not just libertarians who are concerned about the restrictions caused by America's latest copyright law. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, argues that the “freedom to tinker”—the right to understand, repair and modify one's own equipment— is crucial to innovation, and as valuable to society as the freedom of speech
Unlikely freedom fighter
WHEN Edward Felten began a recent presentation in San Francisco on the weaknesses of copy-protection software, he did not get far. He had just put up his first slide when two FBI agents stormed the stage, handcuffed the stunned Princeton computer-science professor and arrested him—as Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, had been at a Las Vegas hackers' conference in July 2001. The mock arrest was the opening act of a panel at the 2002 Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, a favourite get-together for tech-savvy civil libertarians, to illustrate the chilling effects of America's latest copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Yet Dr Felten could well have had himself arrested—if he were less cautious. In January 2001, the record industry threatened to sue him when he and several colleagues wanted to talk publicly about how they had broken a copy-protection system. Now, on sabbatical leave at Stanford University's Centre for Internet and Society, he is trying to develop the theoretical basis for what he calls the “freedom to tinker”. As a result, Dr Felten embodies the growing tension between academic freedom and stricter copyright rules—a tension that could one day lead to scenes like the one in San Francisco being played out for real.
Nothing in Dr Felten's background predestined him for such a role, except perhaps that his interest in computer science was prompted by tinkering with his family's personal computer. What followed was a successful and speedy academic career: a bachelor's degree in physics at the California Institute of Technology, then a master's and PhD in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. In 1993, he became an assistant professor at Princeton and in 1999 associate professor.
His research interests appear rather theoretical: operating systems, computer security, Internet software, distributed computing. But as technology increasingly penetrates society, these topics have ever greater political and legal implications. So it was only a question of time before Dr Felten was forced to deal with such matters. “The law reached out to me,” he says, “and pulled me in.”
Up in arms
The first outreach came in the form of a call from the American government's Department of Justice. Its lawyers were looking for a witness in its antitrust case against Microsoft who could prove that it was possible for the firm to produce a version of Windows without its web browser, Internet Explorer—a key point in a case in which the software giant was accused of illegally tying the browser to its operating system. What made Dr Felten an attractive candidate was the fact that he was generally pro-Microsoft. Even today, he sees the huge software company as a rather positive force, albeit one that should behave better.
After some hesitation, Dr Felten accepted—mainly because he was interested in what it would be like to be part of such an important case. In fact, he became, as the New York Times put it, the government's “most aggressive, dogmatic and unshakeable witness”. He wrote a program that essentially took the browser out of Windows without degrading the software, thus thwarting Microsoft's lawyers, who wanted him to admit that the browser and the operating system were inextricably integrated.
Not how but why?
The experience left Dr Felten well prepared for his next encounter with the law. In autumn 2000, he and some colleagues jointly participated in a challenge to break anti-piracy systems that was sponsored by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a now virtually abandoned effort by entertainment and technology firms to develop standards that would have allowed music to be distributed online while preventing it from being freely copied. It was not the $10,000 reward that interested Dr Felten and his team, but the prospect of getting access to state-of-the-art commercial technology which is otherwise secret.
The challenge involved cracking a set of “watermarking” technologies—inaudible changes made to an audio file—which can tell a device whether or not to play a song. SDMI provided three sample files: an unwatermarked song, the same song with a watermark added, and a different watermarked song. The challenge was to create a file that sounded just like the third file, but with the watermark removed. An online “oracle”, to which entrants could send a file, decided whether they had succeeded.
“We construct the world by interacting with it, not by letting things control us.”
Dr Felten and his colleagues rendered all the watermarks undetectable—in one case, simply by the trivial exercise of adding certain differences between the first and second samples to the third sample. That was the easy part. The real problem came when they tried to present a research paper about their work at a conference. Two weeks before the event, Dr Felten received a strongly worded letter from an SDMI lawyer, warning him that publication could make him “subject to enforcement actions under federal law.” According to the DMCA law passed in 1998, it is a crime to offer the public a way to defeat copyright-protection systems.
Others might have simply presented the paper and risked the consequences. But Dr Felten chose to fight in different ways. His first attempt did not go far—at least, not in terms of getting a court to declare that the DMCA violates the first amendment of the American constitution (ie, freedom of speech). Supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online advocacy group, he and his colleagues then filed a lawsuit, seeking permission to disclose their work at another conference. But after SDMI representatives claimed they had no intention of suing Dr Felten, and no armed FBI agents appeared when he presented the paper in August, the judge dismissed the case.
Dr Felten's current work on the freedom to tinker is likely to be much more effective in preventing the law from limiting research. Today's debate, he says, is too focused on the negative aspects of tinkering in the virtual world—such as making copyright infringement possible, or developing products that unfairly compete with the original. His more positive argument is that tinkering—which he defines as understanding, repairing and modifying technological devices one owns—is a valuable activity, which is akin to free speech and should be protected as such.
In the real world, Dr Felten argues, the value of tinkering is well understood, and not just when it comes to machines. “We construct the world by observing it and interacting with it, not just by letting things control us”, he says. “You can't learn to write only by reading.” And just as tinkering with words leads to new ideas, he explains, so does tinkering with technology. It is a necessary first step to innovation. Being able to reverse-engineer software, for instance, is a necessary first step for writing better programs.
Yet, in today's digital world, the freedom to tinker is at risk, warns Dr Felten. There are, for a start, the DMCA and other laws which limit tinkering. What is more, electronics make even everyday products hard to tinker with. Today's cars, for instance, are computers on wheels, whose inner workings car makers prefer to keep secret. Worse, firms are starting to build devices that limit what users can do with them. For example, DVD players allow film studios to disable electronically the fast-forward button during commercials. As more and more of our cultural material is digitised and made available online, these technical restrictions could become restrictions on culture itself. Thus, the freedom to tinker ends up being about the freedom of culture.
Real world differences
In April, when Dr Felten presented his ideas in a talk at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, he was met by scepticism. Some said his arguments did not address the crux of the issue: that there is an important difference between tinkering in the real and the online worlds. Knowing how to tune a car engine does not allow a tinkerer to build a competing product, whereas software that cracks a copy-protection system can easily be used to distribute millions of identical copies. Dr Felten agrees. But his aim is not to solve the problem of free-riding; it is to analyse the value of tinkering.
Dr Felten is concerned about other issues, too. One is whether electronics firms should be required to make their equipment easy to tinker with. Dr Felten is undecided. A well-designed product, he says, would be susceptible to tinkering, since good design tends to be modular. Some device makers, such as Lego, a manufacturer of educational toys, encourage tinkering because it helps them to improve their products.
Another issue is licensing. Consumers assume that they own products once they have paid for them. But increasingly, they are only licensing them. This is the case with most shrink-wrapped software bought in stores and with software downloaded from developers' websites. Either you accept to license, not own, the product when you click the “I accept” button at the end of those screenfuls of legalese or you cannot use it. But the same is true for an increasing number of devices, such as Internet appliances. Suppliers of such gadgets could use licences to prohibit any tinkering. Should consumers, Dr Felten asks, be encouraged to bargain away their freedom to tinker?
Dr Felten is the first to admit that his arguments are not yet focused enough. He intends to write a book about the topic when he is back at Princeton. The treatise on tinkering is certain to find avid readers—especially among the millions who spend countless hours playing with their computers, cars and cameras.
It would be a surprise if they did not put up a fight. Many are preparing to do so already. Protests are being voiced with increasing vigour against a bill recently introduced in Congress by Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, on behalf of Disney and other media giants, requiring a piracy-detection system to be built into all digital entertainment devices. If the legislation passes, critics warn that personal computers would become nothing more than a costly but entirely dumb machine for playing DVDs.
The bill could also criminalise open-source software, such as the increasingly popular operating system, Linux. Copy-protection systems usually come with proprietary software that is hidden or cannot be altered—something that no self-respecting open-source hacker would integrate into a program. No wonder all those who care about innovation—the freedom to tinker and create new ways of doing things—are up in arms.
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