Episode: 3407
Title: HPR3407: Software Freedom Podcast
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3407/hpr3407.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:50:12

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3407 Fortusity, the 24th of August 2021.
Today's show is entitled Software Freedom Podcast and is part of the series podcast recommendations
that is the 190th show of Ken Felon and is about 57 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is a sample episode of the free software foundation Europe podcast.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Felon, you're listening to another episode of HPR15.
Today a podcast recommendation for you, a podcast released under the CCBISA license.
It is the free software foundation Europe podcast, one that I have not heard or listened to myself.
But I thought I'd throw it into the feed as we're short of shows.
So if you've got any shows out there, please add them to the queue. That would be awesome.
However, having interviewed these guys multiple occasions, I'm sure this is a podcast we will
want to be listening to. Information about the web page, the opus feed, the RMP3 feed,
and of course a link to our own sister project free culture podcasts, now available and
clean HTML is available for you in the show notes.
So back, relax and enjoy the show.
Welcome to the first episode of the software freedom podcast.
Starting with this episode, we will talk once a month with people who have inspiring ideas
about software freedom. This podcast is presented to you by the free software foundation Europe.
We are a charity that empowers users to control technology. My name is Matthias Kirschner
and I'm the president of the FSFE.
And my name is Katharina Nogun. I am a writer and digital rights activist based in Berlin.
By new planning, the first episode, we exchange some ideas for possible guests.
And when I heard that the day against the RM will this year take place in October,
I directly thought we have to get Cory Doctoro as our first guest and we have to talk with him
about digital restriction management. I think there are just very few people that inspire so many
people from our community like Cory did. For those listeners who don't know him, Cory Doctoro
is a British Canadian writer and political activist and he is the co-editor of Boeing Boeing
He is a prominent supporter of the idea of software freedom and he is fighting for a less restrictive
copyright law. His books are published under creative comments licenses.
Designs fiction novels of Cory are all strongly connected to the debates on technology and
regulation. What I like about his books is that they address complex issues such as software
freedom, copyright, digital restriction management or privacy in an unconventional way.
So even someone who has never thought about these topics before, they can follow him.
And at the same time as someone who is active in those fields for a long time,
you always find interesting ways how to explain these topics better to others.
As a privacy activist, my favorite book of Cory is of course Little Brother.
The book was published in 2008 and tells the story of 14 ages from San Francisco
who experienced how society is more and more transformed into a surveillance state.
After a terrorist attack. Together with her friends, these teenagers start an underground
campaign for defending civil liberties against the Department of Homeland Security.
And I don't want to spoil you, but I like the end very much.
What do you like most about the book? Definitely the way how Cory described how the
protagonists of a story circumvent surveillance technology were very simple hacks.
For example, right in the beginning there is a passage where they explain how to trick
an intelligent surveillance camera that can recognize people based on how they walk.
They simply put small stones in their shoes in order to change their walking patterns.
And by the way, did you know that at what's known, had a coffee of Little Brother prominently placed
in his hotel room in Hong Kong when he did his first interviews for the documentary Citizen 4?
I guess this was his way of telling the world.
If you want to understand why I did this, please read this book.
And you definitely should read this book if you haven't read it already, it's a fantastic book.
What's your favorite book?
I like Little Brother, I like Homeland, but at the moment it's unauthorized spread, his new book.
And in this book, Salima, who's a refugee, she lives in the US.
And she's in the situation that her toaster refuses to toast her bread for her one morning.
She finds out that the company, the manufacturer of the toaster, they went bankrupt
and their servers are down.
So the toaster, which before or with checked, if you can toast this bread or not,
and which is authorized or not, those others aren't there anymore.
So she's not able to toast the bread, which is authorized as well as any other toaster.
Oh my god.
She doesn't stop there.
So she continues to investigate and finds out that there are others with the same problem.
And that they fleshed other software on those toasters and then they could toast any bread they want.
So she also does that and enjoys this new freedom.
And she helps other people in this building and shows them how they can modify their devices.
And they all enjoy buying bread they want or baking bread and toasting it.
So she's very happy about this development, how she can help others around her to also benefit
from modifications there. Later it turns out that well, what she did was illegal.
They are not allowed to make changes to the software there on those devices in the building.
And there are legal threats about this.
And I don't want to spoil you too much.
So read the book.
But this part it reminded me about when we at the FSFE helped others in our free Android
campaign to flesh software on their mobile phones.
So use free software there and get rid of some restrictions they had on their mobile
phones before seeing how people react towards that and how happy they are with those devices.
But on the same hand also seeing that modifying software on devices is getting harder and harder
in some areas.
What do you think makes Corrie's story so special?
For me it's that he has those role models in his books like in Little Brother you have
Markus and Angela who don't accept that technology just restricts them.
They get active themselves and they make changes to technology and defend civil liberties.
And now with unauthorized bread, the special part there is that Salima is a refugee.
She's in bad situation there but she doesn't accept that.
She changes things and tries to improve her situation for herself and for others.
It's very important that you have such role models for younger people in our society,
for underprivileged people in our societies.
So that's why I like this book a lot and the character's in there.
So I hope you all understand now why we instantly agreed on Corrie Doctoral
as the perfect guest for the first episode of the Software Freedom Podcast.
We are very excited to have him with us today and talk with him about his new book
and digital restriction management.
Welcome Corrie, thank you very much for being with us today.
So you won't set that the idea for your book unauthorized bread was based on an article you
wrote back in 2015 for the Guardian. The title was if dishwasher were iPhones.
Can you explain what this article was about?
For many years I'd heard from people to say that it was no real imposition for Apple to have
created this world garden business model where in order to use a device they sold you,
you had to also let them decide which software you could use.
And they made all kinds of arguments about why this was legitimate.
They said it kept you safe. They said it protected software authors from copyright infringement.
They said that it simplified the paradox of choice and so on.
And it seemed to me that if all of that was actually true,
then they could have just had a little tick box that said actually I'd prefer to choose my own
software rather than relying on Apple to make that choice for me.
And it also seemed to be belied by the fact that Apple had tightened the screws many times.
They had changed the guidelines about what kind of apps you could have.
So they had unilaterally decided that some software authors expression was not lawful
for inclusion in the app store.
You know, we had most notoriously someone who'd made an app that kept track of drone strikes
that the US government launched and specifically the civilian death count from those drone strikes.
And Apple had repeatedly excluded that from the app store.
And so it seemed to me that if this was something people really liked,
they would have just opted for it.
But instead, you know, between the drone strikes and the people who kept trying to create
independent software stores and the users who kept trying to drill jailbreak their phones,
it was pretty clear that actually software vendors and software authors and iPhone owners
were many of them not very happy with this at all.
And the common rejoinder was well then why are they in the iPhone ecosystem?
They should be choosing a different platform.
And that argument all seemed very inadequate to me.
And so I thought, you know, there are plenty of other appliances that you could make this argument
about. And specifically, dishwashers are a really good example because the most dangerous
thing you can do really is eat bad food.
Foodborne illness has killed more people than anything else in the history of the world.
And certainly there's a lot of people who make their living from coming up with independent
dishware designs who then have to contend with copycats who clone their dishes and so on.
And I thought every one of these arguments would apply equally well to dishwashers.
And so I wrote this little fake letter from a Steve Jobs like CEO to his customers explaining
why they should stop trying to put non authorized dishes in their special fancy dishwashers.
And how these special fancy dishwashers had been exquisitely calibrated to reduce water wastage
and ensure that foodborne illnesses were eliminated and to reward people who made dishes and to give
you know, the incentives they needed to continue to innovate and flatware and dishes and so on.
And I wrote this essay and what was interesting to me about it at the in the moment was just how
many iOS users failed to get the joke and instead acted like an affronted religious minority whose
sacred texts had just been mocked. And then subsequently how close that rhetoric ended up
hewing to internet of things device companies. So, you know, if you listen to the rhetoric from
the likes of the, you know, the founder of Juicero, which is the company that made the juice squeezers
that used DRM to fruit or the rhetoric from other IoT companies, you know, they all made essentially
those arguments, you know, this is Poe's law that satire is indistinguishable from reality
in under modern conditions. And so, you know, that turned into unauthorized bread or at least the
proximate instigation for writing unauthorized bread. This idea that there really wasn't any reason
given the internet of things not to turn everything into an iOS style app store for the clothes that
a wash in your washing machine and the dishes that a wash in your dishwasher and the bread that will
toast in your toaster. This month's stay against DRM focuses on ebooks. What is the difference between
a book and an ebook with DRM? Well, a book is something that actually has a somewhat nebulous
definition. If you think back on the history of books, all of the things that we might say would be,
you know, critical to defining a book actually are not present in some pretty important examples.
So, for example, we might say that a book has to have a spine. It has to be a codex that is to say
shaped like a book as we know it today. But, you know, the Torah, which is one of the first and most
widely published books in the history of the world, originally was a scroll that didn't have a spine.
And we still call it a book. Or we might say that a book needs to have writing or pictures in it,
but we have blank books. Or we might say that a book has to cost something, but, you know, the most
widely available books in the world are free, you know, Bibles and copies of the little red book
and so on. So, book is a pretty expansive category. And certainly, electronically, we've expanded
the definition of books by blowing up some of the physical constraints that were associated with
them. You know, Wikipedia, I think, qualifies as an electronic book. And so do, you know, I just
downloaded a PDF last week for Dungeons and Dragons game masters who want to ensure that they have
consent from their players for situations that might be emotionally difficult for them. And
that book was eight pages long. And it's hard to imagine a printed book that's eight pages long.
And so we've eliminated the length constraints. We've eliminated some of the media constraints. We
have books with moving images and audio and so on. But once you add DRM, something really changes,
because although books are very ancient and although books are seriously something that is part of our
cultural heritage and how we identify as a culture, you know, when when you want to show a civilization
that's falling apart, you just show pictures of books on fire, you know, anytime someone piles up
a bunch of books and sets them on fire, you can be pretty sure that nothing good is going to come of
that. But a lot of that covenant that goes around books, that is that is critical to what we think
of when we think of a book, is not present in an ebook. So books are older than copyright. And they're
also older than commerce. And they're certainly older than the idea of the unitary author. The
first books were conglomerates of text by multiple authors bound up together. And the way that you
would contribute to authorship was by, you know, copying out some of those passages and then adding
some of your own or finding other passages that seem relevant to you and so on. All of those things
are part of the ancient compact that makes books so valuable, so important, so enduring. But once
you add DRM to a book, those things that were historically part of the natural life of a book,
whether that's having the book read aloud or being able to give away the book or being able to
lend the book or being able to tear passages out of a book that offend you, all of those things
just disappear. And instead, what you end up with is a book that is regulated first by legal code,
usually by a license agreement that's sometimes even longer than the book itself, especially when
you factor in the sub license agreements associated with the e-reader and the operating system and
so on, you might end up with 100,000 words of legalese that you're expected to understand in order
to operate the book within the confines of the law. And then you have technical strictures that
actually prevent you from deciding which e-reader you're going to read the book on, from deciding
whether or not you're going to transfer the ownership of that book to your children or give it
away to a local school. All of those things that are part of the bargain of the book just go up
in smoke as soon as you add DRM to the book. My feeling is that people would often never accept
the same restrictions they accept with their e-books for their novel books. Why do you think this
is the case? That was kind of the point of the, if dishwasher's were iPhones and an authorized
bread, that we have been put in very slowly boiling water, like the analogy of the frogs in boiling
water. And we haven't noticed. It's kind of crept up on us that the rights that we value in our
books have been taken away from us one at a time very slowly. And this isn't just because we weren't
paying attention. It's also because a lot of these problems are a long way away, right? Like,
what you do with the book at the end of your life is for the average book owner a long way off.
And it's also hard to learn from that lesson once you're dead. And so you kind of have to witness
say your beloved parents beautifully curated library being vanished in a puff of smoke thanks to
a license agreement or because the company that made the DRM server for it decided to take that
server down in order for you to learn the lesson and revisit your own choices about what you buy.
And you know, in general, we rely not on people learning lessons the hard way a long way off.
In order to keep us safe, we often ask states to intervene by say declaring certain business
practices illegal or certain contractual terms to be unenforceable. And neither of those are on
our horizon at the moment when it comes to DRM. When Microsoft closed their bookstore, users could
not access the books anymore they had bought. Do you know other examples? Well, Walmart did the same
thing I think in 2007, but the Federal Trade Commission actually intervened at that point and
ordered them to keep the DRM servers running. I don't know if they're still up and going. But you
know, Amazon is what 20 years old. And I'm literally sitting next to a bookshelf full of books that
are four or five and six times older than that. So the idea that we're going to just rely on Amazon
to never get bored of running its DRM servers or never be say financially engineered into bankruptcy
as so many companies have in recent years, including companies that are hundreds of years old,
seems completely unrealistic. I mean, one of the arguments is often that artists cannot make any
money without digital restriction management. Now as an author yourself, what do we say about this
argument? Well, it's very hard to parse that argument out. So one of the things that makes DRM
so pernicious is that it's protected under the law in the EU article six of the 2001 copyright
directive. And in the US section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, both prohibit
bypassing DRM even for a lawful purpose. And whenever, you know, I've been in policy forums,
whether that's at Weipo or in Brussels or in Washington, DC or in standards bodies like DVVCPCM
or the broadcast flag body, the broadcast protection discussion group. And I've proposed that we
make it lawful to bypass DRM for lawful purposes. The answer has been that if we don't maintain the
illegality of bypassing DRM, that DRM will be defeated by users. And then I say, but isn't DRM
the technical countermeasure that stops people from copying it? And when you dig into it, what you
find out is that nobody who makes DRM believes that DRM stops users from making copies,
what they think is that it allows firms to invoke the law to prohibit otherwise lawful conduct,
right? It doesn't stop pirates in other words, but it stops competitors. You know, if you want to
pirate DVDs and watch them on your computer, it's not hard to rip them. But if you want to make
a gadget that allows you to say watch out of region DVDs or to rip them to put them on your
computer and you want to sell them in a store, right? If you want to sell a product that does
lawful things, the fact that you have to bypass the DRM to do it allows the company to invoke the
law to shut you down. So if you're an author and you think that what DRM is going to do is stop the
people who don't want to pay from your books from getting copies them for free, the very people who
make the DRM for those books will tell you that it has no connection with doing that. If you kind of
pin them down, you have to wrestle them for a bit. But then they'll admit it. And sometimes,
you know, they'll fall back on this argument that, oh, well, it's a speed bump. But nobody pretends
that speed bumps stop racers, boy racers from racing down the street. Or they'll say that it keeps
the honest users honest that when you encounter the DRM and it tells you I'm sorry, you're not allowed
to do that. That if you're honest, you'll go, oh, well, I didn't realize that that was prohibited.
But of course, if you're honest, doing things that are lawful is not dishonest, you know, buying
a DVD or an ebook from one supplier and then watching it on a device made by another supplier is
neither dishonest nor unlawful. It's just bypassing the DRM that's unlawful. So this is how Ed
Felton who's now I believe with the Federal Trade Commission used to be a Princeton came to coin
the memorable phrase that keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall,
that what the honest user is doing is by definition honest. That's what makes them an honest user.
And so if your DRM gets in their way, you are prohibiting them from doing something honest.
So really what it ends up doing is it ends up locking you the rights holder, the creator,
into the platform of the company. And the company is not on your side, right? Amazon does not
exist to enrich creators. Amazon's goal is to minimize its costs everywhere that it's possible
to do so and maximize its profits. And you see them doing this relentlessly in every business
that they enter. And so while it may be true that Amazon offers some kind of teaser rate for you
to do a Kindle original or to allow them to put Kindle DRM on your books or to go into Audible,
which is their audiobook platform, which controls 90% of the market and doesn't allow you to opt out
of their DRM, that once they have control over that market, they're going to do what every other
firm does when they gain control over their suppliers. They're going to squeeze the supplier. And that's
you. And so you know, if you decide later on that you don't want to be an audible author because
someone else like Google Play or Libra.fm or downpour is offering you a better price, you have to
not only pull your books from Amazon, you also have to bet that your listeners or your readers
will throw away the books that they've bought and buy them again on the new platform or maintain
two separate non-interoperable libraries of books. So you effectively increase the switching
costs for your customers to follow you to any platform that offers you a better deal. So
you know, it's like if you were a musician and you released all of your records in a format that
only Sony devices could play and then later on Universal offered you a better deal, you would have
to trust that your listeners were willing to throw away all the records you sold them. Well,
that is not a good bet. And not many musicians would be in a position to make that demand on
their customers. And so over time, you're just making yourself more and more indebted to these
big repacious corporations that only everyone to figure out how to get more money for themselves
and less money for you from the creative labor that you do. You know, if someone, as I've said
before, someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and then won't give you the key,
that lock is not there for you. That lock is there for them. And you know, if you go to Amazon and
say, I don't want to sell my audiobooks with your DRM anymore, they'll say go find someone else to
carry your audiobooks because we only sell audiobooks that are locked to our platform so that every
customer that you bring to us becomes our customer instead of yours. I mean, this sounds really
absurd. If you build DRM systems, you have to treat your customer as a potential attacker of your
system. What is the impact of DRM on the security of our devices?
Yeah, so this is the other issue here. One of the things that arises from this law article six
of the EUCD and section 121 of the DMCA is that because they make it both a civil and potentially
criminal offense to help people bypass a DRM system, they also have the side effect of making
it illegal to publish full security analyses of these products. If you find a defect in a system
with DRM in it and in order to do your proof of concept code and describe the defect so thoroughly
that the manufacturer can't deny it because manufacturers are very, very prone to simply denying it
or minimizing it when they're called out on their security mistakes because they don't want to
be embarrassed in public and they don't want their products, reputations to suffer. So if you
want to publish the industry standard for a security report which is to enumerate the defect and
provide proof of concept code so that other people can replicate your work, then you potentially
face both criminal and civil liability for revealing those defects. So effectively, you know, although
DRM starts off as a means to control customer's behavior by controlling what products
competitors can manufacture, it becomes a means for controlling critics as well for controlling
people who discover mistakes that you made in implementing your technology and who want to
warn your customers that the device that they have, which inevitably does more than entertain them,
right? And inevitably it has sensors and it has lots of personal identifying information in it
and it has ways to access your local network and the other devices on it and so on,
that if you want to warn people about the defects in that device, you have to be willing to brave
retribution, legal retribution from the company whose products you are criticizing.
And you know, I am enough of a free speech purist to think that telling the truth about defects
in products should always be legal, but even if you disagree with me and you think that there
might be some legitimate restrictions on when defects in products can be revealed so that
manufacturers can, you know, patch the bugs before the bugs are made public say. I think most
reasonable people would agree that companies that stand to lose from true reports of defects in
their products are not good custodians of that bad news. And one of the things that's happened
as a consequence of the expansion of DRM into other devices, which is itself a consequence of
the expansion of software into other devices. Once you have software in a device, you can add DRM
to it. Once you add DRM to it, the log gives you the right to stop your competitors from
removing that DRM or tampering with that DRM to let your customers get more out of their
lawfully acquired property is that the constellation of devices that are also off limits to full
security audits keeps on growing, keeps getting bigger and bigger. And that means that we are at an
ever greater risk of the security defects festering in these devices until they're so widely
exploited that finally the manufacturer can no longer pretend that they don't exist by which point
it's far too late. So we've already seen this happen. The most notorious example was in 2005
when Sony BMG music shipped six million CDs comprising 51 audio titles that had a secret DRM
system on them that maliciously and covertly changed your operating system so that it could no
longer see certain programs and could no longer terminate them when they were running. Any program
that had the string dollar sign sys dollar sign at the start of its file name would be invisible
to both the file and process managers. And then what they did was they wrote anti CD ripping programs
to your computer that would start automatically at start up time that started with the string dollar
sign sys dollar sign so that you couldn't run CD ripping programs. The thing is that as soon as this
was discovered in the wild but before it was reported to the general public as soon as as independent
researchers started to discover this including independent researchers who made malicious software
malicious software started to emerge that had the same string at the beginning of a dollar sign
sys dollar sign. And so now we had malicious software running on computers that couldn't be detected
or shut down by antivirus software. And by the time the researchers who discovered this finally
came forward because there was a three month delay between the initial discovery and then coming
forward by the time they finally came forward this malicious software was present on 200,000
government and military networks in the us alone. And so all of those computers had been exposed
to this risk. And all of those users paid for being a tech. Yeah, I mean talk about adding insult
to injury. I mean we sometimes hear this this cry that you can't compete with free. And so you
know how can a legitimate product compete with the pirate edition. And I think the reality is that
however hard it might be to compete with free it's much harder to compete with free if your product
is much worse than the free product. After all when you pirate your ebooks or movies or games
you get exactly the same game you just don't get the restrictions. And so that is always going to
be a better product than the product that comes with the DRM on it. In some years of rich or
vacuum cleaner and our coffee machine might be connected to the internet. What rules do we need
for the so-called internet of things to make sure that technology will empower us instead of
respecting us? You know I think we can define this problem as being in two parts. So the first one
is what do we need to get rid of to help people, companies, cooperatives, researchers and others
solve the problem and the other is what rules should we have so that the problems don't come up.
And the rules that we should have they're kind of hard to pin down because these devices will have
a wide variety of characteristics and a wide variety of use cases and models. But what we shouldn't
do is actually a lot easier and also easier to agree on more broadly and therefore easier to
implement because you know it should be much easier to get consensus on them. So I think at like a
bare minimum we should say that it should always be lawful to report defects in devices under
every circumstance that telling the truth revealing true facts about defects in devices or services
should 100% of the time be lawful. I think the second one is that it should always be lawful
to or that there should be an absolute defense in law for interoperability and for repair which is a
subcategory of interoperability. So in other words you should be able to defend yourself against
any legal claim by showing that you are making a new product or service that connected to the
old product or service to allow the users of that product or service to get more value out of them.
So if someone brings a patent claim or a terms of service claim or a cybersecurity claim or
torsious interference contractual claim against you you should be able to say I made a product that
improved the lives of the people who used this a grief parties product. I should therefore be immunized
from any legal liability and courts should be able to assess that defense and if it is a bonafide
defense should dismiss any case against you civil or criminal. And I think that's really really
important because it allows us to imagine a device that has the positive features of a DRM
device and whose negative features or whose anti features get removed by users or by the experts
that the users nominate to act on their behalf whether that's a competing company or an open
or free software project or cooperative or just a repair shop or a neighbor who reconfigures
their device for them. So in other words the problem with Facebook for example is not that everyone
you know has been made easy to find so that you can have a conversation with them. The problem is
that Facebook has hostages not users and so if we made it legal to make a new service that went and
got all the messages waiting for you on Facebook and filled them in into this new service so that you
could reply to them there without having to be a Facebook user so you could stay in touch with all
your old friends and we immunized you against all the claims that Facebook might bring against you
under a patent or terms of service or contractual interference or torsios interference or what have
you. Then the people who were on Facebook because they liked it could stay there and the people
were on Facebook because the people they wanted to talk to were stuck there could leave and still
stay in touch with their friends. We wouldn't necessarily have to mandate that Facebook follows some
kind of interoperability standard although that might be good too we could in addition to whatever
floor we put on Facebook's interoperability make sure that Facebook wasn't allowed to put a ceiling
on that interoperability make sure that Facebook wasn't allowed to say well you know we're adhering
to this interoperability standard we let these three companies that we don't think of as competitors
interoperate with us in ways that we don't view as harmful to our bottom line therefore we are
interoperable instead you could you could have an unlimited ceiling for interoperability provided
that it was in the service of helping users get more out of their experience and you know this is
something that we call adversarial interoperability not just interoperability with cooperation
from an existing firm or service but interoperability despite the objections and bypassing the
countermeasures of an existing product or service so adversarial interoperability and an absolute
defense for adversarial interoperability are both really important as is being able to tell the
truth about defects now in terms of what rules we might impose on firms there's been a lot of work
around this you know we've seen things like right to repair legislation we've seen rules that require
firms to hand over clear texts of files for people of disabilities or people who work in archival
or educational context in order to allow them to make lawful uses that are enshrined in copyright
law to avail themselves the limitations and exceptions of copyright law and I think those are
important too I just think that in very concentrated industries that it's likely that they will
figure out ways to game that and so we have to make sure that these affirmative rights that we
grant to people to have certain interoperability standards in the products that they use or consumer
rights in the products that they use not become the maximum but instead that they remain the minimum
that companies are required to do one question I had this your few about if you think that DRM is
mainly a problem for poor people you know I think with every technological idea of every bad
technological idea you can't just roll it out all at once because some people when they complain
they get listened to right some people's complaints have real social currency so you know things that
you do to rich powerful people are harder to get away with than things that you do to poor people
or people who lack power and so when we have a terrible technological idea one of the ways that we
normalize it and also that we figure out how to make it more palatable to people is we start by
imposing it on people who don't have social power so we start by imposing it on refugees children
poor people prisoners mental patients immigrants students blue collar workers gig economy workers
and then once it's been normalized and once the roughest edges have been sanded down then we roll
it out to everybody I call it the bad technology adoption curve and you know you can see it work
for example with with home automation so you know 20 years ago if you were eating your dinner
and there was a camera over the table watching you eat it was because you were in a super max prison
but today it's because you bought google home or apple home or amazon home automation systems
and so we've gone from the most powerless people in our society to the most powerful people in
our society in less than a generation and so I don't think science fiction is a great predictive
literature I think science fiction is a great way to understand the present but not the future
but if you do want to get a glimpse at what the future likely holds for you should everything
else go on in terms of your technology use just look at what we're doing to poor people and then
that's what we're going to do to you in ten or fifteen years science fiction literature always
had a strong impact on how societies use technology yet the most successful science fiction books
that connect to present developments are dystopian stories do we maybe need more positive stories
about how technology could improve our lives you know I am neither a dystopian nor a utopian
I'm which is to say I'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist I think that in the words of Michael
Weinberger when he wrote this classic white paper on copyrights patents and 3d printing
this will all be so great if we don't screw it up I often say that that's what I want written
on my tombstone you know although my wife and I have actually secretly agreed that my tombstone
is going to say if a man lies six feet underground rotting and dead and his wife isn't there to tell
him he's doing it wrong is he still wrong and her tombstone is going to say yes he is but but
failing that my tombstone is going to say this will all be so great if we don't screw it up and I
think that it is important in science fiction to write about how terrible it will be if we screw it
up and it's also important to write about how great it can be if we if we seize the means of
computation so you know you asked me about my my new book radicalized which has the story on
authorized bread in it and you know those are stories for the most part not just about
the dystopian notion of having your technology due to you instead of doing for you but they're
also about the real marveling glory of being in charge of your own technology of being able to
decide what the technology does of being able to reconfigure it to do what you want when you want
it to and you know I think that both of those are really important and I think that it's a mistake
to say that just because just because a story has dystopian themes or depicts the dystopian nature of
having the technology work against you instead of on your behalf that therefore the story is
dystopian what really matters is what the characters do in the face of that if they go on to seize control
then that's rather a utopian story and so I I'm of the view that there's nothing wrong with
having a story who's starting premise is that the technology's control is taken away from us
particularly if it's also a story about how wonderful it is once you reverse that situation
thank you very much Corey for being with us today for this first episode okay thank you feeling
gunk give my love to everybody there thanks for the work you're doing thank you for your time
all right bye bye bye if you want to get active on this topic you can support the day against DRM
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