January 10, 2001, 2:08 PM — Hollywood wants a piece of your hard drive.
A proposal now under consideration by a technology standards organization lays the groundwork for content protection capabilities on your next hard drive and has privacy advocates crying foul.
The group responsible for the proposal is called the 4C Entity and is led by industry heavyweights Intel and IBM. The 4C Entity submitted the proposal to the industry committee that controls the standards for hard drives as well as other removable media.
Opponents contend the plan will lead to content protection code on hard drives that will curtail the exchange of digital audio, video, and information, limiting how people can use their PCs. Some go further and claim it is the first step toward the end of free content on the Web. They argue that the strategy plays into the hands of greedy music and movie studios and that it could even hinder basic-and legal-tasks such as hard drive backups.
Proponents of the plan claim such scenarios are ridiculous and say it has nothing to do with hard drives, but rather with removable storage media such as Flash memory, microdrives, and most rewritable DVD drives. Besides, they say, it affects only protected content-not your everyday text files.
Which side's claims are accurate? It's hard to say, as the main architect of the plan, IBM's Jeff Lotspiech, has twice accepted then later declined our requests for an interview.
An IBM spokesperson says Lotspiech and representatives from the other 4C companies (which include Matsushita Electronic, parent company of Panasonic, and Toshiba) are cloistered to create a document that addresses common questions about the plan. Lotspiech won't comment until the group posts that FAQ on its Web site at an as-yet unspecified time, the spokesperson says.
It's easy to understand why this plan has caused confusion and concern: It is a tangle of awkward acronyms, base-level technologies, and industry politics. It starts with the National Committee for Information, Technology Standards, the industry body that sets the common standards upon which all PCs operate.
The subcommittee in charge of the ATA standard-which controls hard disks and other drives-is called the T13 group. This group is currently working to update the ATA standard.
The 4C Entity is lobbying the T13 group change the ATA standard, introducing base-level instructions that let device manufacturers implement a 4C-created technology called Content Protection for Recordable Media.
CPRM is basically an encryption scheme. It is compliant with the Secure Digital Music Initiative supported by the big music companies that limits reproduction of secure content.
A representative for 4C member Intel says the suggested ATA changes are generic and would allow vendors to incorporate any type of content protections-not just CPRM. Furthermore, CPRM would apply only to ATA-driven removable media such as microdrives and flash memory, not hard drives, in Intel's view.
"The scenario [opponents] put forth is hilarious," says Manny Vara, Intel spokesperson. The CPRM technology will not impact your current files, it simply doesn't work that way, he says. Besides, he adds, Intel wouldn't sanction its use in hard drives.
"This is not to be used with hard drives," he says. Using the technology to restrict what users can put on their hard drives-restricting what people do with their PCs-would be bad business for Intel, he ssays. More than 80 percent of the company's sales come from PC processors, chip sets, and motherboards, so it wants PCs to do more, not less, he says.
"We want to make sure that the PC will be able to play any type of cool new media that comes out," he says. That's why CPRM technology won't prevent you from ripping your own CDs or downloading free music from sites such as Napster. It simply will not impact today's content, he says.
So what would the technology do, exactly? According to Vara, the only time CPRM would kick in is if you downloaded CPRM-coded content, such as a song, and moved it to a CPRM-enabled MP3 player using CPRM-compliant storage.
No CPRM technology would ever reside on your hard drive, and despite its CPRM code, you could still do whatever you want with the content while it's on your hard drive, he says. But once it's on the CPRM device and media, it may stop you from replicating it further, he says.
So if you can copy the content from the hard drive, where is the security? Vara admits the system isn't foolproof, but he says it's a step in the right direction toward appeasing content owners.
