It’s been a long time since I last wrote an Instructable, but as I’ve resolved that 2009′s going to be a year where I start making things again (2008 involved a lot of sitting, reading and annotating, and in 2007 most of what I made was for clients, and thus confidential), I thought I’d write up a brief (10 minute) fun little bodgey project which has, very marginally, boosted everyday productivity: the One-Touch Keypad Masher.

Wasting valuable seconds typing in a code every time you need to open the door?

This little ‘device’ streamlines the process by pressing the right keys for you, and can be hidden in your palm so you simply mash your hand against the keypad and – apparently miraculously to anyone watching – unlock the door in one go.

Time to make: Less than 10 minutes
Time saved: About 30 seconds per day in my case; your mileage may vary.
Payback time: 20 days, in this case

(There’s a (weak) correlation with some of the Design with Intent topics, since it could be seen as a device which allows a user to interact with a “What you know” security measure using a “What you have” method. At some point in the near future I’ll be covering these on the blog as design patterns for influencing behaviour.

It’s also a kind of errorproofing device, a poka-yoke employing specialised affordances. If used, it prevents the user mistyping the code.)

The Instructable is also embedded below (Flash), but for whatever reason there are a few formatting oddities (including hyperlinks being ignored) so it’s easier to read in the original.

Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes.

From Artraze commenting on this Slashdot story about the levels of DRM in Windows 7.

I think it maybe needs some qualification about not using your things to cause harm to other people, but it’s an interesting idea. See also Mister Jalopy’s Maker’s Bill of Rights from Make magazine a couple of years ago.

This delivery note from Springer informs me that the book I’ve bought “must not be resold”. Good luck with that. So have I bought it or not? Or have I bought a licence to read it? What if I give it away?

Many companies would love to be able to control what users can do with things they buy, or with information after someone’s learned it. We know that, and we know that, fundamentally, it’s not going to work. You can try and shape behaviour, to guide users into helping themselves, but nonsense such “end-user licence agreements” for books has no mechanism of enforcement, and offers no benefit to the reader if he/she obeys it anyway.

How valid, legally, are any of these “post-purchase conditions”, anyway? Surely the first-sale doctrine or its equivalents allow users to re-sell items they buy with impunity?

But I digress. A lot of the fascination comes from seeing a different way to explain a concept to someone else: a structured, alternative form of learning or understanding a problem, which is, somehow, immensely satisfying. There’s always the glint of a possibility that if we could find different ways to explain difficult or complex subjects, more people might be able to understand and appreciate them.

Sarah Burwood, a graduating Industrial Design student showing her work at Made in Brunel this week, has created Tumble Sums, a ‘Child’s Mechanical Visual Calculator’:

Helping children understand fundamental mathematical principles, Tumble Sums is a calculating tool which visually shows a child how an answer is being reached. Calculations are solved in a physical way, based solely on mechanical operations. Tumble Sums focuses on an understanding of the way children think, their mathematical understanding and the psychology behind these aspects.

It looks to be beautifully machined from acrylic sections, and that height alone makes it extremely imposing. Imagine one of these at the back of every primary-school classroom!

This concept of making hidden processes visible in order to aid the construction of the user’s mental models is something that will, I think, be an important component of lots of more advanced interfaces in the years ahead, particularly in areas where, fundamentally, we’re bad at understanding the consequences of our actions (environment, health, finances). It’s maybe allied to constructionism, though by no means the same idea.

*Incidentally, the morning I first turned up at Brunel again as a PhD student, I sat in the wonderful garden John Crank had created, reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, waiting for the doors to the building to be unlocked.

We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system.

Usually these systems are about locking out the public, or removing freedoms in some way (a lot of organisations seem to fear photography), but a few ‘fightback’ devices have been produced, aiming to empower the individual against others (e.g. Hewlett-Packard’s ‘paparazzi-proof’ camera) or against authority (e.g. the Backflash system intended to render a car number plate unreadable when photographed by a speed camera). The field of sousveillance – lots of interesting articles by Régine Debatty here – is also a ‘fightback’ in a parallel vein.

Taking the fightback idea further, into the realms of everyware, Miquel Mora’s IDentity Protection System, shown last month at the RCA’s Great Exhibition (many thanks to Katrin Svabo Bech for the tip-off), aims to offer the individual a way to control how his or her image is recorded – again, Régine from We Make Money Not Art:

With IDPS (IDentity Protection System), interaction designer Miquel Mora is proposing a new way to protect our visual identity from the invasion of ubiquitous surveillance cameras. He had a heap of green stickers that could stick to your jacket. Or anywhere else. The sticker blurred your image on the video screen.

“With the IDPS project I wanted to sparkle [sic.] debate about all the issues related to identity privacy,” explains Miquel. “Make people think about how our society has become a complete surveillance machine. Our identities have already been stored as data in many servers ready to be tracked. And our self image is our last resort. So we really need tools to protect our privacy. We need tools that can allow us to hide or reveal our visual image. We must have the control over it.”

“For example in one scenario a girl is wearing a tooth jewellery with IDPS technology embedded. So when she smiles she reveals it and it triggers the camera to protect her. With IDPS users can always feel comfortable, knowing that with a simple gesture like smiling, they are in control. The IDPS technology could be embedded in all kind of items, from simple badges to clothes or jewellery. For the working prototype I’m using Processing to track the stickers and pixelate the image around when it founds one.”

Image from Miquel Mora’s website

While the use of stickers or similar tags (why not RFID?) which can be embedded in items such as jewellery is a very neat idea aesthetically, I am not sure what economic/legal incentive would drive CCTV operators or manufacturers to include something such as IDPS in their systems and respect the wishes of users. CCTV operators generally do not want anyone to be able to exclude him or herself from being monitored and recorded, whether that’s by wearing a hoodie or a smart black hat with maroon ribbon. Or indeed a veil of some kind.

Something which actively fought back against unwanted CCTV or other surveillance intrusion, such as reversing the Georgia Tech system in some way (e.g. detecting the CCD of a digital security camera, and sending a laser to blind it temporarily, or perhaps some kind of UV strobe) would perhaps be more likely to ‘succeed’, although I’m not sure how legal it would be. Still, with RCA-quality interaction designers homing in on these kinds of issues, I think we’re going to see some very interesting concepts and solutions in the years ahead…

But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the trap of trying to restrict public engagement rather than make it easy. Yes, someone specified the old ‘right click disabled‘ policy:

Screenshots of this page, launched from this page.

Now, the image in question – here’s a direct link – which happens to be an engraving of the former Datchet bridge**, in 1840 according to this page (with a colour image) is, even taking English Heritage’s “1860-1922” suggested date range, surely out of copyright, so presumably there cannot be any ‘legal’ question over ‘letting’ people save a copy (which is easiest to do by right-clicking on the most common operating systems and browsers). Using Javascript to remove the browser toolbars and menus also hides the ability to print the image for most users, presumably also deliberately.

Yes, of course, many (most?) readers of this post will know how to get around the no-right-click architecture of control, but you’re reading a technology blog; think of whom the site is presumably aimed at. It is supposed to be a resource to encourage public engagement with history and heritage. Most users will be computer-literate enough to know how to search and probably familiar with right-clicking, but not to mess round with selectively disabling Javascript. Why should they have to? Incidentally, if you do disable Javascript entirely, you can’t even view an enlarged image at all:

What actual use to the public, other than for momentary on-screen interest, is a photo archive website where nothing can be ‘done’ with the images? What is a child doing a local history project supposed to do? Order a print at £18.80 for each photo and then scan it in? Does English Heritage really think that the ability for someone to save or print or e-mail a low-resolution 72 dpi image is going to devalue or compete with the organisation in some way?

It’s ridiculous: such a short-sighted, narrow-mindset policy removes a significant proportion of the usefulness of the site. I don’t know whether the site developer did this with or without English Heritage’s instruction or cognizance (and it was in 2002, so perhaps different thinking would apply today), but it seems that no-one bothered to think through what an actual user might want to get from interacting with the site.

In fact, regardless of the fact that this particular image (as with many others on the site) is in the public domain, even the images which are still under copyright (or “© English Heritage.NMR” as the site puts it, NMR being the National Monuments Record) should, of course, be freely downloadable, printable, and do-whatever-you-want-able. Their acquisition, preservation and cataloguing were paid for by the public, and they should all be available as widely, and easily, as possible. As it is, I would call the website a waste of public money, since it does not appear to offer what most intended users would expect and need.

Still, at least the site’s not one giant bundle of Flash. That would make it marginally more hassle to extract the images.

*Partially funded by the Big Lottery Fund, and thus not entirely directly taxpayer-funded, unless one regards the National Lottery as an extra tax on the hopeful and desperate, which some commentators would.
**Almost exactly the spot where I’ve been testing a prototype radio-controlled toy for a client this very afternoon, in fact, though the bridge is long gone.

So this sign available from ACID (Anti-Copying In Design) made me laugh with astonishment, and cringe a little:

Image from an ACID leaflet, “You wouldn’t say that copying was the sincerest form of flattery if it cost you your business”. The sign doesn’t seem to be shown on ACID’s Deterrent Products online store.

I understand what ACID is trying to do, and unlike most anti-copying initiatives, ACID is set up specifically to protect the little guy rather than enormous intransigent oligarchies. ACID’s sample legal agreements and advice for freelancers on dealing with clients, registering designs, etc, are great initiatives and I’m sure they’ve been a fantastic help to a lot of young designer-makers.

But a sign ‘banning’ photography at exhibitions? At design exhibitions where new aesthetic ideas are the primary reason for most visitors attending? That seems hopelessly naïve, akin to a child defensively wrapping his or her arm around a piece of work to stop the kid at the next desk copying what’s being written, but then pleading with teacher to put it up on the wall.

And I would have thought, to be honest, that “with phone cameras your ideas… [being] sent globally within seconds” is more likely to lead to instant fame and international recognition for the designer on sites such as Cool Hunting, We Make Money Not Art, or Core77 than (presumably unauthorised) “mass production”. But maybe I’m wrong: I’m sure you’ll let me know!

Most young designers are desperate for exposure. I know every design exhibition I’ve shown stuff at (not many, to be fair), I’ve been delighted when someone photographs my work. ACID’s sign also raises the question, of course, whether when someone displaying the sign actually sells a piece of work, it comes with a label attached telling the purchaser than he or she may not photograph it, or show it to friends. Wouldn’t that be a logical extension?

P.S. We’ve looked before at actual technologies to ‘prevent’ photography, such as Georgia Tech’s CCD-blinder and Hewlett-Packard’s “remote image degradation” device (in the wider context of “plugging the analogue hole”). As I replied to a commenter on the Georgia Tech story:

It won’t be too long (20 years?) before photographic (eidetic) memory and computers start to overlap (or even interface), to some extent, even if it’s only a refinement of something like the Sensecam. What’s going to happen then? If I can ‘print out’ anything I’ve ever seen, on a whim, why will I worry about what anyone else thinks?

Some developments in – and commentary on – digital architectures of control to end 2006:

This is what Töshöklabs’ website looks like in Firefox:

And this is what it looks like in Internet Explorer (with a close-up of the text):

I came across this site via an interesting piece at 3.7 crea.tv:

“While I understand the frustration many designers have when dealing with making a site IE compatible, and I absolutely love the idea of more users browsing with Firefox, we have an obligation to make sure the IE version of a site looks just as good as its Gecko counterpart. It is, after all, the most common browser in use hands down… It wasn’t until I saw this “IE incompatible site” that I realized how bad this trend has spread… The designers outright do not let you browse their site if you are on IE. They shut out 80% of the Internet without batting an eye. This is no different than the painful old trend of stating how the web page should be viewed, IE: “Best viewed in 800×600 on IE 3.2″.”

The thing is, the Töshöklabs site is not actually ‘IE incompatible’ at all. The site is deliberately made unusable in IE by showing a hidden layer, invisible to Firefox (and Opera) users:

This is a clever trick; I’m not quite sure what my reaction should be. Are the site’s creators saying “IE users aren’t the sort of people we want using our site”, or just “Get educated“? It’s surely the latter, but they perhaps forget that many possible visitors are stuck in offices where they’re just not permitted to install Firefox (or other alternatives), or are using other types of specialised browsers*, screen-readers, etc. Not everyone is able to make a choice about the software he or she uses.

I understand exactly what Töshöklabs are trying to do, and the aim of spreading the message of alternative software is a laudable one (as is their giving away DRM-free music), but the implementation is only one step away from MSN’s deliberate anti-Opera behaviour. It would be better from a usability point of view to have that “We see you’re using Internet Explorer…” message as part of the homepage, large enough to catch visitors’ attention but not take control away from them.

*e.g. here’s what it looks like in Lynx – not a very intelligent script, then!

Maybe an OGG version will be available for the next in the series?

Update: OK, they’ve now added the mp3 link to the post! Good on them!

“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.”

Slashdot on ‘A working economy without DRM?’ – same debate as ever, but some very insightful comments

Slashdot on ‘Explaining DRM to a less-experienced PC user’ – I particularly like SmallFurryCreature’s ‘Sugar cube’ analogy

‘The Promise of a Post-Copyright World’ by Karl Fogel – extremely clear analysis of the history of copyright and, especially, the way it has been presented to the public over the centuries

(Via BoingBoing) The Entertrainer – a heart monitor-linked TV controller: your TV stays on with the volume at a usable level only while you keep exercising at the required rate. Similar concept to Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes

Via Dave Farber’s Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony’s continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn’t go too well):

“A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too many” back-up copies of its CDs…

Sony’s latest idea is to place a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times the disc was copied and prevent further recordings once it reached the limit. The device could also be fitted to DVDs. Whether Sony will turn the patent idea into reality remains to be seen.”

Of course this will require new CD players and CD-ROM drives with the ability to read, write to and act on the signal from the RFID chip – which means its impact may not be very significant.

It’s not clear whether the “permitted” copies have to be made onto “chipped” Sony-authorised discs (otherwise the technology seems rather pointless, as people will just make copies of the un-protected copies instead of repeated copies of the original) – if this is the case, then is this not just a sly “razor blade model” or “PRM” (in Ed Felten’s phrase) attempt to make Sony CD-writers require the purchase of Sony chipped blank CDs in order to copy music?

And would this break the Orange Book standard for CD-Rs?

At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to help enforce copyright law (and defeat ‘illegal pirates’) to the current stirrings of DRM’s being explicitly acknowledged as a tool to facilitate discrimination and lock-in — and the apparent ‘benefits of this’:

“First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination — business models that charge different customers different prices for a product — and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms.

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate, or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals.”

As noted by some of the commenters, that unmooring also unmoors the DRM debate from being presented as an ‘honest content providers vs illegal pirating freeloaders’ one. Price-fixing, lock-ins and so on are difficult to defend, and I find it hard to think of convincing examples where “price discrimination benefits society” or “lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms”. If customers are locked in to a platform, there is no incentive to innovate for the locker-in, and much higher barriers for competitors to draw them away. Path dependency is rarely good for companies, and rarely good for society, and lock-ins would seem to be a major contributor to path dependency. The argument that “Apple wouldn’t have developed the iPod (and the record companies wouldn’t have let Apple develop iTunes) if DRM didn’t exist to lock customers in” is specious: there were plenty of portable music players before they came on the scene, and surely most 40GB music iPods were always intended to be largely filled with music acquired from somewhere other than iTunes.

Ed goes on to talk about the trend “toward the use of DRM-like technologies on traditional physical products.” (Long-term followers – if any! – of my research might remember this is very similar to the phrase “Architectures of control: DRM in hardware” which Cory Doctorow used to link to my original web-page on the subject), and uses the example of printer cartridge lock-ins (see also here):

“A good example is the use of cryptographic lockout codes in computer printers and their toner cartridges. Printer manufacturers want to sell printers at a low price and compensate by charging more for toner cartridges. To do this, they want to stop consumers from buying cheap third-party toner cartridges. So some printer makers have their printers do a cryptographic handshake with a chip in their cartridges, and they lock out third-party cartridges by programming the printers not to operate with cartridges that can’t do the secret handshake.

Doing this requires having some minimal level of computing functionality in both devices (e.g., the printer and cartridge). Moore’s Law is driving the size and price of that functionality to zero, so it will become economical to put secret-handshake functions into more and more products. Just as traditional DRM operates by limiting and controlling interoperation (i.e., compatibility) between digital products, these technologies will limit and control interoperation between ordinary products. We can call this Property Rights Management, or PRM.”

Not too sure about that term myself, as I feel the affordances the technology is controlling are moving further and further away from actual ‘rights’. DRM is bad enough as a catch-all term for technology which in many cases is denying users rights they may legally hold in some countries (e.g. fair use or backup copies). I think “technology lock-ins” or “technology razor-blade models” might be a more descriptive label than ‘PRM’. (Or ‘architectures of control’, of course, but my definition of these is much broader than simply lock-ins).

Ed gives three examples of possible future extensions of technology lock-ins, none of which seem at all unlikely; in fact they’re all easily possible right now:

“(1) A pen may refuse to dispense ink unless it’s being used with licensed paper. The pen would handshake with the paper by short-range RFID or through physical contact.

(2) A shoe may refuse to provide some features, such as high-tech cushioning of the sole, unless used with licensed shoelaces. Again, this could be done by short-range RFID or physical contact.

(3) The scratchy side of a velcro connector may refuse to stick to the fuzzy size unless the fuzzy side is licensed. The scratchy side of velcro has little hooks to grab loops on the fuzzy side; the hooks may refuse to function unless the license is in order [hence my photo at the top of this post! - Dan] For example, Apple could put PRMed scratchy-velcro onto the iPod, in the hope of extracting license fees from companies that make fuzzy-velcro for the iPod to stick to.

Will these things actually happen? I can’t say for sure. I chose these examples to illustrate how far PRM might go. The examples will be feasible to implement, eventually. Whether PRM gets used in these particular markets depends on market conditions and business decisions by the vendors. What we can say, I think, is that as PRM becomes practical in more product areas, its use will widen and we’ll face policy decisions about how to treat it.”

The comments on both posts (Part 1 | Part 2) go into some extremely interesting discussion of the ideas and examples, with the ‘pen/licensed paper’ one being conclusively noted as ‘baked’ with Bill Higgins explaining the Anoto* technology.

(*And no, I don’t think the “www.anotofunctionality.com” of that link is deliberately in the same league as “www.powergenitalia.com,” “www.expertsexchange.com,” etc, but it’s still oddly apposite given the “no to functionality” with which so many lock-ins shed users when they’re fed up with paying over the odds for replacement parts.)

I look forward to the third part of Ed’s talk summary: this is a fascinating area of discussion which is central to much of the ‘architectures of control’ phenomenon.

Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic innovation!” (as Hal Varian or Eric von Hippel might put it), and indeed that was probably my own instinctive reaction.

It’s not clear, though, that this is a standard architectures-of-control-enforced-razor-blade-model of the kind we’ve seen with printer cartridges. Most phone owners surely don’t ever replace their batteries during the life of the phone, so I can’t believe that selling owners batteries can be a major part of the business plan for a new phone. I’ve never bought new batteries for any phone I’ve owned. A friend did, though by that time his phone was six or seven years old and he had to resort to eBay to find the correct type.

No, the promulgators of battery authentication claim that battery authentication is all about ensuring consumer safety:

“Battery-pack authentication is necessary because the lithium-ion cells that are the building blocks of all such packs are changing, and, although they still may have the same physical dimension, their input charging voltage and required charging rates are changing and fragmenting across markets. If the cells charge at the wrong voltage or too quickly, they may explode.“

My reaction, as a design engineer, would be: Why not standardise those characteristics, then? Standards don’t “fragment across markets” without someone causing that fragmentation. (It is true, though, that advancing battery technology does make charging patterns much more important to the life of the battery.)

“Vendors can ship their products with the proper battery pack, only to find that customers go the after-market route to replace or back up battery packs because after-market packs are easy to find and usually cheaper. Counterfeit battery packs pose a threat to user safety.”

Make the ‘proper’ packs cheaper and easier to find, then. Surely that’s cheaper and easier than developing a 64-bit key code battery authentication system, and keeping “its secret key in an 8×8-ft vault with 3-ft-thick walls, [with] only two people in the company hav[ing] vault keys,” as described in the EDN article?

Also, quit using the term ‘counterfeit’ to mean ‘all non-manufacturer-approved parts’. That’s a slippery slope to Newspeak. If I buy Fujifilm for a Kodak camera, is that film ‘counterfeit’? Of course not. It would be if it were being passed off as Kodak film, but that only seems to be the case with some of the batteries mentioned in the article (the Kyocera and LG ones near the start). If that’s the real problem – counterfeit batteries with the manufacturer’s logo on them – then be honest about it.

Greater, cheaper availability of the correct, manufacturer-approved batteries would be beneficial for the manufacturer in terms of aftermarket sales. If it means selling them with reduced margins in order to drive other manufacturers out of the market, then so be it. If the other manufacturers really are counterfeiters, passing off their products with the phone manufacturers’ logos, and the batteries really are dangerous as claimed, then there’s (potentially) a lot of brand damage going on.

The problem of exploding lithium batteries clearly isn’t insignificant – the following images are from a US Army/Naval Surface Warfare Center presentation [PDF] linked in the MAKE post:

Images from http://proceedings.ndia.org/5670/Lithium_Battery-Winchester.pdf

But, as commenter ‘unterhausen’ points out on the MAKE post:

“The risk of Li-poly batteries is independent of the manufacturer to a large degree. The problems come when they are damaged, shorted, overheated, or overcharged… Any Li-poly of the current generation will have the same problems… The chips are anti-competitive nonsense.”

This is an interesting area of debate, and likely only to become more prevalent as energy storage technology becomes more advanced. Will fuel cells for vehicles have authentication ICs built in? You bet.

How will ‘they’ do it with hydrogen fuelling stations, though? Will the pumps/dispensers themselves have a chip which ‘handshakes’ with the vehicle? Will you have to use ‘Toyota’ branded hydrogen for your Toyota to start?

The opportunity’s there, in a way that it never was for standard batteries, petrol, etc, in the past. Few people were naïve enough to buy solely Duracell batteries for their Duracell-branded torch (flashlight) because they thought it ‘would work better’, but when it comes to a device which only works when the manufacturer’s own branded batteries are used

It does make me wonder, though, why Henry Ford never got into the gas station business – was it just antitrust legislation that would have prevented it? General Motors and Standard Oil apparently colluded, and GM also co-owned the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation that held patents for the tetra-ethyl lead added to fuels from the 1920s onwards – which surely provided a large degree of economic lock-in (more GM cars sold = more TEL sold = even more money for GM) – but there was no technological lock-in.

Today we have technology that does allow technological lock-in, and it’s becoming cheaper and cheaper to deploy.

The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, but:

“The biggest issue is digital rights management. At the moment, acting as an honest broker between the public interest and the individual rights holders is incredibly difficult. Much more so than with printed material that is physically deposited on your site. Many electronic property holders lease material and specifically prohibit copying for preservation purposes. The law, as it stands, is on their side. The rights holders are terrified – rightly so in my view – that once it’s in the public domain it can be copied any number of times illicitly without any redress.”

Masters makes the “rightly so in my view” comment, but doesn’t make the point that if the same attitude had been taken to preserving books in the first place (“we can’t put them in a public library, someone might copy them!”), there would be no public libraries and no British Library.*

As I see it, as a member of the public, if my tax money is going to be spent in any way upholding copyright, I want that benefit for rightsholders to come with a benefit for the public interest, i.e. that the rightsholders must permit copies to be made for the public interest, with no DRM or other technical restrictions in place.

* In the UK, as far as I know, it is an obligation for all publishers to send copies of anything they publish to the ‘legal deposit libraries’ (British Library, University of Cambridge, Bodleian, Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin). I’ve done it; I don’t think I was permitted to send the books with the pages glued shut, so why should electronic media creators be allowed to submit DRM’d material?

“Your Digital Rights and Why They’re Important to You

Throughout the history of technology, Hollywood has fought innovation at every turn. Even technologies that benefit the studios, and that we take for granted, exist only because someone fought the studios for their very existence

…

The more such legislation [e.g. Analog Hole Bill] gets passed, the less innovation consumers will see, and the fewer options you will have for enjoying your content

….

There are two opposing forces at odds here. On the one hand, there are exciting new technologies that offer more and more choices for consumers to access and enjoy digital media when and where they want it. On the other, there is Big Media and a few of its powerful allies working behind the scenes to limit consumer choices to when and where they want it. How this all plays out will depend on how the rest of us respond in the coming days, weeks and months.”

The statement even exhorts customers to get involved with the EFF and to get in touch with their elected representatives, which is again a great initiative.

This is just the kind of intelligent engagement by product designers & engineers with the political implications of – and influences on – their work for which I’ve been looking throughout the ‘Architectures of Control’ project. Whether it meets the kind of criteria proposed by Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is Design Political?‘, I don’t know, but by standing up for users’ rights in such an open and frank way, and indeed structuring its business around that philosophy, Neuros seems a lot closer to real user-centred design than the vague waffle so often promulgated as such.

Impressive.

Via EFF DeepLinks, details of the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2, a product specifically designed to allow users to break through the arbitrary architectures of control imposed by other video devices and formats, and hence make the most of the content you own:

“[It] digitizes analog video output and records it to a CF card or a memory stick in MPEG4 format. The video can then be put on your computer, burned to DVD, moved to your video iPod, or slotted right into your Sony PSP. You can also output video to a display device from the R2.

In turn, the R2 helps you make legitimate use of your media and lawfully escape DRM restrictions…

* Free your recorded TV content: TiVo and other PVRs restrict moving recorded video to other devices. The DMCA limits removing these DRM locks, and, if the broadcast flag proposal passes, these restrictions will get even worse. Regardless, you can lawfully use the R2 to create a DRM-free copy, recording straight from your TV or TiVo.

* Free your DVDs: DVD ripping software is widely available, but using it to rip a film to your computer and video iPod may violate the DMCA. The R2 gives you a legal (albeit more cumbersome) alternative. Similarly, though region-free DVD players are available, you can use the R2 to help create a region-free copy of the movie itself.

* Free your VHS tapes: You’ve probably faced the unhappy choice between rebuying your VHS collection on DRM-restricted DVDs or lugging around a legacy player. The R2 helps you liberate your movies from their VHS chains.”

Of course, the R2 device’s legality – as a video analogue-to-digital converter – is threatened by proposed US legislation aimed at ‘plugging the analogue hole‘, hence its ‘endangered gizmo‘ status applied by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This would seem to be a case where a device really has been designed with the users’ needs and convenience uppermost in mind, yet it may be ruled out of existence by a legislature which listens more to (certain) corporate lobbying than to its own citizens.

Via Boing Boing, ‘Researchers develop prototype system to thwart unwanted video and still photography’, news from Georgia Tech of a system that scans and finds the CCDs of digital imaging equipment and shines bright light (or a laser) into them in order to flood them with light and prevent usable images being recorded.

“Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras. A Georgia Tech camera-neutralizing prototype could soon be used to stop movie piracy and other forms of unwanted digital-camera photography…

The prototype device, produced by a team in the Interactive and Intelligent Computing division of the Georgia Tech College of Computing (COC), uses off-the-shelf equipment — camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer — to scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras…

…the small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings — for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken…

Once a scanning laser and photodetector located a video camera, the system would flash a thin beam of visible white light directly at the CCD. This beam – possibly a laser in a commercial version – would overwhelm the target camera with light, rendering recorded video unusable. Researchers say that energy levels used to neutralize cameras would be low enough to preclude any health risks to the operator.*”

Luckily for those of use who still value our freedom to use technology,

“Current camera-neutralizing technology may never work against single-lens-reflex cameras, which use a folding-mirror viewing system that effectively masks its CCD except when a photo is actually being taken. Moreover, anti-digital techniques don’t work on conventional film cameras because they have no image sensor.”

Regular readers of this blog will be able to guess how I feel about the prospect of the device described in the article, and indeed the moral motivation of the engineers and designers working on it.

This technology is designed expressly to remove the rights of the public by imposing arbitrary control architectures on public space. If something is being publicly displayed, I believe I should be free to photograph it, whether that be with a film camera, a digital camera, or eidetic memory.

Just because someone wants to prevent amateur photographers (read: everyday members of the public) getting a snapshot of their kids with Santa in a shopping mall, in order to sell them an overpriced ‘official’ photo, it doesn’t mean they should be allowed to do so. If it is permissible to operate a device in public which interferes with the operation of lawful imaging equipment, then presumably it will be permissible for a member of the public to shine lasers into the cameras used in the detection system?**

I really cannot mask my distaste for this device, and for the mindset that has created and funded it. It is the thin end of a wedge which has the potential to destroy so many of the freedoms technology has brought us. If I’m wrong, please let me know, but just think for a minute: what might a couple of the consequences be, ultimately, if this kind of technology becomes widespread?

Overall, the distasteful corollary following from widespread use and legitimisation of this kind of device is, simply, the death of amateur photography, as both a recreation and an artform. When arbitrary bodies can extract rent from me for photographing whatever they decide, I’m not going to bother recording the world around me any more, and neither will hundreds of millions of others. The next generation of kids will grow up not knowing the right to photograph what you want, just as the next generation of kids may well believe that music has to be bought over and over again for every device you want to play it on.

It is this embedding of arbitrary controls in the architecture of our society, working outside the law to enforce ‘rights’ with little legal basis, and intentions which are in no way in the public interest, which scares me a great deal.

Norms can be changed by technology without any law needing to change. We need to keep an eye on that, and the eye had better be wearing protective goggles.

*Wouldn’t it be awful if, say, I took a whole load of CCDs with sticky pads on the back into a cinema and scattered them all over the place? I can’t believe the system can dazzle 100 cameras at once. Or if I just happened to be wearing retroreflective sunglasses with similar characteristics to the CCD, and after being “almost blinded” by the device shining into my eyes (not really, of course), was able to make damn sure the device could never be used anywhere again?

**Oooh, what about all those CCTV cameras that film me everyday? Am I allowed to shine a laser into them? What if I live across the street from one? Can I train a laser on it permanently?

EDIT: There are some parallels here with the ‘analogue hole prevention’ mechanisms I looked at in Architectures of control in the digital environment, most notably Hewlett-Packard’s patented ‘paparazzi-proof’ camera-phone image inhibitor system.

EDIT (20.vi): The BBC has now picked up on the story – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5097774.stm – no new details but – oh look! – the claim about potential use to stop amateur photographers of shopping-mall-Santas has been left out. The story focuses on the uses to stop ‘pirates’ in cinemas, and not the potential uses ‘in the wild’. Remember, when presenting a potentially distasteful idea as something positive, leave out the bits that relate to everyday life. Make it seem as if you’re only targeting extremes, and then gradually shift the boundaries of what’s ‘extreme’. Martin Niemöller taught us that pretty well.

The BBC is reporting that the All Party Internet Group (APIG), a cross-party group of MPs, has made some intelligent – and interesting – recommendations about explaining DRM more fully to consumers:

“The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

This would ensure that it was “crystal clear” to consumers what freedom they have to use the content they are purchasing and what would happen if they do something outlawed by the protection system.

The same labelling systems would also spell out what happened in the event of a maker of DRM technology going bust, if a protection system became obsolete or if gadgets to play the content are replaced.

…

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems [e.g. the Sony-BMG nightmare].”

I wonder what the proposed labelling system will entail? Will it be very simple, or will it need to spell out to consumers the rights the law gives them in order to them point out how this particular DRM’d CD or download is restricting them?

In short, do we need a programme of educating consumers about their rights before a labelling system will be useful?

The Open Rights Group‘s Suw Charman is quoted in the BBC story:

“”The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold.”

…

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

“We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought,” she said.”

APIG’s group secretary is the Earl of Erroll, an insightful quote of whose I blogged about a few months ago. It’s worth repeating in this context, as APIG’s work here goes some way to remedying the problem he highlights:

“If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.”

Hopefully APIG can continue their work in educating politicians, as well as the public, about the implications of restrictive technology.

*Not owning any DRM’d music, I used a recent CD purchase, the excellent Great Days of Sail (now Yo Zushi) album, for the mockup image. An alternative style of label might be those distributed by Downhill Battle and RIAA Radar:

Image from Downhill Battle.

“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. I get a lot of email that accuses me of being a Chicken Little that overblows the situation by saying the sky is falling. Well, the sky is falling and if those folks want to live in denial, that’s their problem.”

Some of the examples are more straightforward cases of sloppily designed DRM implementations leading to security problems, such as the Sony Rootkit case; examples of ‘DRM switcheroo’ (what I’ve previously called feature deletion or external control on this blog) also abound.

Real-life anecdotes of users who have lost all their (legally acquired) music due to DRM errors or licensing changes – as I discussed in ‘Consumers’ reactions to DRM‘ – are perhaps one of the best ways of driving the message home to consumers (for example the examples discussed here).

The ‘DRM train wreck’ tag is a great initiative. I guess in time it would be good if DRM’d content acquired a stigma from consumers’ point of view, clearly seen as undesirable and worse than second-best, a format to avoid.