After I read through some of Patrick Ross' comments about Tim Lee's paper on the DMCA, I felt that it was necessary to set a few things straight about DRM, since Ross seems to be oblivious to causation vs. correlation. Take this, for example:

On this issue of interoperability, the anti-market nature of this paper is truly present when the author actually complains that there are three video streaming formats -- Real, Windows and QuickTime -- and then acknowledges that Google is adding a fourth. This is a bad thing, we're told, because some content will only play on that player, and apparently open-source programmers have been frustrated in their attempts to break through these proprietary walls. How does this relate to the DMCA? "The reasons are complex, but the DMCA is clearly one of the culprits." Yes, shame on the DMCA for giving us four video formats, with providers experiencing market incentives to offer the fastest, highest-quality, most streamlined content. That's a terrible thing. Better all the standards be forced open so any open-source programmer can fiddle with them. That will produce far better products for consumers. Again, this is the Cato Institute we're talking about here, advocating the obliteration of a growing market to enable the "freedom to tinker."

These are not, I repeat, are not, DRM systems, but rather file formats. Several open source media players can, and do, support these formats in a pretty high quality fashion, not the least of which is VideoLan, which is by far the best so far. Providing interoperability here with the DRM is non-sequitor because one can provide full compatibility between open source and closed source implementations of Windows Media without even scratching at the DRM aspect of Windows Media. Relying on making it extremely difficult to reimplement a technology in order to make it secure is a piss-poor method of securing the content. The real security in the Windows Media DRM exists not in the file format, but the encryption and access controls which are independent of the actual VFW codec itself.

The DMCA, despite Ross' ignorant claim to the contrary, did not "give us four media formats." These formats predate the DMCA in one form or another. RealAudio is actually three years older than the DMCA, QuickTime is 7 years older and MPEG4, the basis of Windows Media, is the same age as the DMCA. The DMCA might have reassured uneasy record executives, but it did not create these formats because a market for them goes back far beyond the time when online distribution of music was technically feasible. There wasn't even a market for portable devices that could play back MP3 until the Diamond Rio was released in 1997, and MP3 players didn't even really become popular until the iPod. Before that, while MP3 players were gaining acceptance quickly, they were nowhere nearly powerful enough or reliable enough to form a key component of online distribution of music.

The freedom to tinker might not be important to Ross, but given the fact that he and his cohort James DeLong are lawyers, not engineers of any sort, his opinion on this is akin to a construction worker having a strong opinion on the dynamics of brain surgery. Anyone who has gone to an ACM meeting, knows that the freedom to tinker is a key part of a real technical education in Computer Science. To even seriously deride the freedom to tinker as some ivory toweresque, childish pursuit reveals a stark ignorance of how software engineers learn their trade. I can tell you this, right now Ross, there are very few good programmers who have left the bulk of their education to the sanitized curricula of most Computer Science departments. Most of my peers in college who were any bit good at programming did things ranging from mod chipping their game consoles to hacking together wifi antennas with dead Pringles cans. Other, more radical schools, had people who seriously dove into understanding how the XBox itself worked and catalogued its every technical benefit and flaw.

The freedom to tinker, Ross, is what gave you Perl, the langauge that powers Movable Type, your blog suite. Since you have such a distinct disgust with those of us who believe that the right to tinker with one's property is God-given, not government-given, do the right thing and stop using Movable Type. Switch your web servers over to Windows 2003, install IIS and get a blog suite that uses ASP.NET, not CGI. You and James DeLong are using the tools that came about as a result of those that like to tinker, yet you whine, bitch and moan about how childish it is for anyone to feel that they need to be able to tinker with software.