I would like you to imagine a scenario: It is several decades in the future, and you are a cartoonist. You'd like to start selling your work on the open market. Unfortunately, several decades in the future the only viable field for doing business is on the Internet, where technical restrictions guarantee you will be locked out from entering the field without the assistance of a publisher.

The first hurdle is in manufacturing the digital comics files. In this scenario, Marvel and DC had watched as other media moved their product online, and wanted in on the act. Collaborating, they hired programmers and constructed both digital comics packaging software and a new file format, called ".cmc" files. They began distributing the reader portion of the software to the public (free at first, then later for a modest fee as the idea of digital comics caught on), and released all of their most popular comics in this new format, cutting deals with the manufacturers of etext devices to ensure that they would read their format exclusively. Other formats, after all, offer no such level of publisher-approved encryption schemes.

Soon, buying and collecting digital comics in this format became second nature to consumers who, with the advent of digital distribution, had finally begun reading comics again. Since a strict copyright management regime is being enforced along all channels of distribution (thus preventing less copyright-compliant, open-source formats from being sold or viewed), this new format has become entrenched in such a way that not publishing in it is no longer an option - and while the reader software is still so cheap as to be almost free, the encryption software needed to make these files is another matter altogether.

In the scenario I have asked you to imagine, encoding comics files yourself isn't an option. Paranoia over the reverse engineering of encryption technologies has ensured that the cost of the software runs to tens of thousands of dollars; more than you could ever afford on your salary. Hell, even most professional cartoonists aren't able to afford it!

This scenario is too cynical you say? Unfortunately, this is the market that film, music and book publishing corporations are right now working steadily towards; even now, the entertainment industries are moving to ensure that they will define how the business of mass-produced art will be conducted in the coming decades. The stakes are high. In theory, the communications revolution has set the stage for a market where artists can sell their work directly to their audience, unmediated by middlemen. In reality, those middlemen are working diligently to turn that theory to fantasy, once and for all.

In this essay, I'd like to compare two battles currently being waged for the future distribution and control of different media - music and film - and speculate a bit on how the way these battles are being waged could affect our own corner of the artistic spectrum.

The War to Own Music

If any industry deserved to first get caught in the new information paradigm, it would be the music industry. Think of the music industry as a sharecropper plantation. New artists signed to contracts are given a substantial sum of money, but not nearly enough to pay for what is expected of them in return: a professionally produced string of albums, videos and tours, manufacturing costs, fees for marketing and promotion, salaries and royalty percentages for the army of middlemen employed for all of the above - the list goes on and on. In exchange, the labels retain rights to recordings, the artists themselves receiving a fraction of the profits labels make from sales. Bearing most of the costs and almost none of the rewards for their work, the vast majority of recording artists complete their contracts under a punishing cloud of debt.

The member companies of the Recording Industry Association of America, accustomed to steamrolling any competition they might encounter for market dominance, had long used their fundraising muscle in Congress to stifle anything that might change the rules of the distribution game. After an unsuccessful political and public-relations war to curtail the release of audiocassette technology, for example, they were able to convince the U.S. government to institute a "tax" on stereo cassettes that would ensure monetary returns on sales, regardless of whether the cassettes were used for the taping of albums.

To many following the music industry, the emergence of MP3 as a viable means of distributing music over the Internet must have been seen as karma in action. Developed by the Fraunhofer-IIS Group in 1994, MP3 was portable; with MP3 audio requiring one-10th to one-12th the storage space of traditional CDs, a song could be downloaded from the web in a matter of minutes or less. Suddenly, music could be easily transferred from point to point and still retain the same basic level of recording quality.

MP3 had almost a year and a half to gain acceptance as a file standard before outsiders heard of it. When reports of file trading began to surface in the media in 1996 and 1997, the reaction of artists who recorded under this system were varied. Many saw just another drain on their already pitiful royalty checks; music legend Johnny Cash, for instance, appeared before Congress complaining that he'd been informed of a pirate website in Czechoslovakia which was offering his song "Ring of Fire" free of charge.

Other artists saw a means of escape from the one-sided contracts they had until then been dependent on for survival. If you can set up a website and sell your work directly to your fanbase without worrying about manufacturing costs, why would you possibly want to cut a deal with a distributor, especially one who asked you to surrender all rights to your work and handed you a pittance in return? Soon artists from Robert Fripp to Public Enemy to They Might Be Giants had begun experimenting with distribution over the World Wide Web, using a variety of methods and with varying degrees of success.

Alarmed at the prospect of losing artists, the RIAA's member companies responded by demanding control over their artists' website domain names and stifling artists' attempts to use the Web to promote themselves. For an encore, in November of 1999 a congressional aide named Mitch Glazer inserted a rider into a seemingly unrelated bill which redefined all audio recordings as work-for-hire; Glazer was shortly thereafter hired as the RIAA's top lobbyist to Congress. A coalition of artists led by musician Don Henley waged a bitter campaign to alert other musicians as to what had been happening, and the RIAA backed down.

The labels also responded with legal threats and lawsuits towards a variety of others, of course, but it was already too late; the nature of the technology stymied them at every turn. The first portable MP3 player to see public release, the Diamond Rio, survived court challenges to find a place for itself in the marketplace.

While other formats have been introduced, none have managed to catch on with listeners. Adding to the futility is the record speed with which the "copy protection" of each would-be contender is cracked. The time between Microsoft's introduction of its "Windows Media Audio" in August of 1999 and the appearance of the first program to crack its encryption (the pointedly named "unfuck.exe") could easily have been measured in hours. The industry's own in-house attempt at a secure format, SDMI ("Secure Digital Music Initiative") has still not been seen by the public after several years, despite periodic target dates for release. (What has been seen has been dubious - when SDMI's backers issued a challenge to hackers to test their encryption schemes they were all broken within weeks.) SDMI has also been reported to give the industry excessive control over how consumers would be able to use the music they purchase that go far beyond mere anti-piracy protections.

Thus MP3 managed to become the de facto standard for digital music, despite the hostility it induces in some record executives and musicians, and despite the increasingly desperate attempts to create a rival format which comes with some form of copyright management. Meanwhile more artists, faced with an industry increasingly unconcerned with any artist who doesn't achieve megastar status, find themselves trying their own hand at digital promotion and distribution.

MP3 is a textbook example of a democratically accessible format, open to all and uncontrollable by corporate interests. Once SDMI does finally get off the ground, it'll be interesting to see whether the RIAA will at last be able to use their market dominance to crush the perceived threat coming from the Internet; common wisdom at this point is that any SDMI-compliant device that doesn't accommmodate MP3 will likely die on the shelves. Like it or not, the music industry may yet have to learn to play in a level field, attracting artists by providing real services and paying more than lip service to artists' rights.

It's a lesson the film industry is determined to avoid at all costs.

How an Operating System Led to "DVD Piracy"

To understand the argument between the film industry and the Open Source movement, it's useful to know a few things about Open Source. Open Source is the principle by which software is released with the source code - the programming code that makes up a given piece of software - available unencrypted to all interested parties, allowing for modification and bug-fixing. When coordinated with others interested in a given project, Open Source can result in faster improvements, more reliable results, and software that will thrive long after the original programmers have left the project. By necessity, Open Source software groups tend not to be so concerned with copyright issues, save perhaps in avoiding them whenever possible.

Much of the internet is based around Open Source software, be it the TCP/IP protocols that determine how your computer connects to the Net, the DNS system that allows you to find webpages, or even the software that runs the server that keeps your webpages online.

Linux is the purest expression of the Open Source ethos; Linux is an operating system released under what's known as a "general public license" that authorizes its users to study its core mechanisms and make changes and improvements as they see fit, requiring only that they not claim the rights to any changes they make in the code, and that they report any interesting changes back to the other users for consideration of inclusion in later releases. It is reported to be more efficient than commercial software, due to the thousands of user-programmers who work with each other to improve and expand its capabilities and functions.

Did I mention that it's also free?

This "free" aspect can sometimes cause complications, of course. To say that the film industry is concerned with the unauthorized sale of its films is an understatement: costs for motion pictures can sometimes exceed the hundred million dollar mark, given several top-draw stars and an ambitious slate of special effects. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that even with years of vigorous enforcement, a full 10% of the videocassette business involves bootlegs.

So when the Japanese company Matsushita first developed the basic technology for DVD, the film industry was leery. Digital media that can be endlessly copied without loss to sound or picture quality? It sounded like a piracy nightmare. The result was the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, an encryption protocol which required two separate "keys" to unlock a given movie: one in the player (or player software), and another in the DVD itself. Take away either of these keys, and the DVD would be unplayable.

Unfortunately, such encryption was also saddled with an Achilles' Heel: U.S. export laws classified encryption technology as "munitions" and forbade exports in algorithms larger than 40 bits. While there were exemptions for copyright-control mechanisms, it has been suggested that the film industry dared not take advantage of this due to Japanese law, which contained no such exemptions. By the time DVD was introduced for mass consumption, 40-bit encryption was already easily crackable.

DVD drives had been available for computers for some time, but the DVD Copy Control Authority had initially refused for the obvious reason to license the technology to groups wishing to make Linux players: as an open-source programming language, a Linux player could be easily hacked. Nonetheless, there were plenty of Linux users who had both legally purchased DVDs and held a desire to play them on their computers. The result was the LiViD Project, or "Linux Video and DVD," an attempt to break the CSS encryption standard and use the resulting knowledge gained from it to write a Linux DVD player program.

It is not clear who first broke the code. The first program to do so is reported to have been the "DOD (Drink or Die) Speedripper" released in September of 1999. A month later Jon Johanson, a 16-year-old Norwegian, told readers of the LiViD mailing list that a friend of his was working on a similar hack, and might be willing to release the source code to Linux developers. Shortly thereafter, DeCSS was released. When executed, the DeCSS program displays a dialog box and two buttons: "Select Folder' and 'Transfer.' One button reads CSS-scrambled content from a DVD-ROM, and the other drops unscrambled video files to the user's hard drive. Using this kind of program, a Linux DVD player program becomes a possibility.

It is important to note here that DeCSS was not intended to "pirate" DVDs. First, the software creates copies that are just as big as the DVD files themselves, too large to download over an Internet connection, thus making Internet DVD piracy impossible. Second, with the right equipment, DVDs can be easily copied without hacking the encryption in the first place: since the encryption only becomes active when the contents are played, a copy which duplicates the original will duplicate the encryption as well, and the end result will be fully functional in its own right. DeCSS isn't necessary for DVD piracy, and by and large isn't used for such purposes.

None of which has stopped the MPAA from claiming otherwise. "The intent of these websites is clear," MPAA president Jack Valenti wrote in a Los Angeles Times editorial, "Break the encryption. Steal the product. The posting of the hacking code is akin to mass producing and distributing keys to a department store. The keys have only one real purpose: to allow a thief to open a locked door to steal the goods he targets."

The MPAA began sending cease-and-desist letters almost immediately after DeCSS was made available. To date, dozens of people have been taken to court for posting the DeCSS software on their websites, even for linking to a site that had the software posted.

Once it became clear to the Linux developers' community that the film industry was committed to erasing DeCSS from the Web, mirror sites which offered the program for download began appearing. It's what hackers like to refer to as the "whack-a-mole" strategy: if ten new mirror sites go up for every one that the MPAA shuts down, there'll soon be too many mirrors to deal with effectively. Moreover, they didn't stop with websites; the DeCSS code has been printed on everything: mugs, t-shirts, picture files, MP3s of a person reading the code aloud. As the MPAA began dragging the first wave of litigants into court, the code was spreading far and wide.

The strategy seems to be working; a mirror site containing the DeCSS program is easily accessible through any search engine, and the film industry is no closer to eradicating DeCSS than it ever was. In February of 2001, a working beta version of the LiViD DVD player program for Linux was released to the public - free, of course.

Looks like the film industry may have to learn the music industry's lesson after all.

Strategies for the Impending Battle

So, what lessons can cartoonists draw from the wars over digital formats on the Internet, and how can those lessons be most profitably applied to ensure that cartoonists will not have to pay outrageous fees to enter their chosen artform?

1. Develop your file format early, and defend it. If you want an open and accessible standard for e-comics, waiting for a large company to develop it for you is a strategy for disaster; the temptation for such an outfit will be to develop expensive software. If an open standard is not introduced soon, and given time to find fan popularity, a closed, proprietary standard meant to benefit the few will surely be introduced later.

2. Be suspicious of standards that promise copy protection capabilities. No such standard has ever withstood a full assault by curious hackers, which means that those who try to beat the odds are merely closing their format and wasting money. Further, many such proposed schemes require consumer inconvenience, which reduces the chances that your format will succeed in the marketplace. If Public Enemy and They Might Be Giants can figure out how to use MP3s to promote themselves, surely a business model can be found to do the same with comics.

3. Beware of standards meant to benefit corporations. They are more likely than not meant to benefit such companies at your expense.

4. Don't forget the consumers. The music industry ignored consumer demand and lost the ability to dictate the terms of the marketplace, while the movie industry ignored Linux demands for a DVD player and lost control of their format.

And finally:

5. Be nice to hackers and programmers. They can break you.

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