Ctrl, Ctrl, Ctrl

Other People's Problems was the first podcast to take you inside real-life therapy sessions. I'm Dr. Hilary McBride, and again, we're doing something new. Ketamine really broke down a lot of my barriers. This work has this sort of immediate transformational effect. Therapy using psychedelics is the new frontier in mental health. Come along for the trip. Other People's Problems Season 5. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast.

It's July 16th, 2001, and the world's digital security experts are rolling into their version of Burning Man. DEFCON! Really a self-described hacker conference that happens in the desert in Las Vegas every year. And when it started, it was very countercultural. This is Seth Schoen. I'm a computer consultant and I've been involved with internet stuff for a long time. Seth was at DEF CON that year, with about 5,000 of his closest, nerdiest friends. It's good very young.

People were mostly wearing pretty dark clothing. They mostly wanted to look cool to their fellow hackers. And one of the darkly clad 20-somethings presenting that year was a Russian computer programmer named Dmitry Skilyerov. This is Dimitri in a recording of his now infamous presentation. He is sitting at a folding table in a grayish conference room. The screen of his laptop is projected on the wall behind him.

So Dimitri had gotten an invitation to speak about this technology that was used by Adobe eBooks. These were the early days of ebooks, and Adobe had just introduced a new ebook file format. It only worked with their software and only on the device that you first loaded your ebook onto.

But if you select an ebook and choose information, you could see that the document is encrypted and protected. So, let's say you bought some ebooks. Naturally, when you get a new e-reader or a new computer, you want to move your ebooks to that to that new device. Well, Adobe software wouldn't let you. There is no way which Adobe provides for transfer your book from one computer to another. But Dimitri had found a gap

in Adobe's armor. Dimitri had written a program which was able to convert some Adobe ebooks from the restricted Adobe ebook format into ordinary PDFs. which you could then use with any software that could deal with PDI. All you need to get the version of that book which could be transferred to any other computer is use our program. Now you could control your ebooks and read them on any device you chose. Problem solved. But then, Adobe found out about it.

Apparently, someone from Adobe had reported this to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying, this person is actually going to be in Las Vegas on these dates in 2001. right? He's going to be in our country. And so evidently the FBI took advantage of that and said, okay, let's arrest him and prosecute him. Officers arrested him in Las Vegas last week after he gave a presentation on software security at a hackers convention.

Russian graduate student named Dmitry Skulyarov, a 26 year old who was one of the first to face criminal charges under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Dimitri was arrested by the FBI. He became the first person charged with committing a felony under one of the main laws that governs the modern internet, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA.

Specifically, Dimitri was charged under a subsection you might never have heard of, but you experience it every time you use the internet. DMCA section 1201. The American law makes it a crime to circumvent. digital encryption. When big tech does something to unshittify a product or platform you rely on, This is the law they rely on. And if you try to make things better like Dimitri, you can get arrested like Dimitri. I'm going to tell you the story of how this law came to be.

and the role it plays in making and keeping the internet shitty. I'm Cory Doctorow, and this is Understood, Who Broke the Internet? Episode 2, Control, Control, Control.

The internet was started as a closed military and academic project. Through the 80s and early 90s it had been gathering steam on the fringes, a playground for weirdos and early adopters. but by the mid-1990s it was going mainstream. Having the internet in our home has had a great impact on our lives. Rich keeps up with the stock market and our investments, and I'm able to pay the bills in half the time it used to take me. And the kids are improving in their grades and communication skills.

I did my report on the Mississippi River all by myself. And with that increased popularity came increased scrutiny. The internet is growing like an embryonic brain at a rate of 10% a month. It's all pure, clear, free, unregulated communication, although some of the regulators are thinking about changing that. U.S. congressional hearings into the Internet begin next month. And those congressional hearings were about to change the internet as we knew it.

Okay. Remember that thing about Al Gore claiming he invented the Internet? During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. Court took flack for phrasing it that way, but you know, he wasn't exactly wrong.

In 1994, under the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore was tasked with overseeing an initiative that would write the new rules of the modern internet. These new supercomputers enable us... to use information much more effectively. So we have to be able to plug into them through these information superhighways. Infrastructure has to be thought on in a different way. They called it the National Information Infrastructure Initiative.

It included everything from hearings and legislative proposals on how the internet would be governed, to public information campaigns

And it had a number of different components to it, but one component that I paid particular attention to was about intellectual property. This is Pam Samuelson. She's a Berkeley law professor. Since the 1980s, She's been a leading legal authority on how computers and networks change, how we relate to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, all that stuff we call intellectual property or IP.

Pam's vision for the future of the internet was pretty much in line with the ethos of the phone freaks and Usenet posters who defined the previous decade. Celebrating cyberspace as a place of freedom, everybody thought that was what was going

and that was actually not what Bruce Lehman who headed the IP group that wasn't what he wanted Bruce Lehman He was the commissioner of patents and trademarks under the Clinton administration. Their IP czar. I will be honest about it. We wanted to see the content industry bloom and expand. We tried multiple times to contact Bruce Lehman through multiple avenues. All of our emails went unanswered, but that was him speaking at a conference in 2013. So he had been a lawyer.

And many of his clients were major Hollywood entertainment industry and software industry executives. And so he kind of knew what their preferences were and he knew what they were afraid of. For every excited claim about how everything would be transformed by the internet, there was an equally spittle-flecked rant about how everything would be destroyed by the internet. And Hollywood's fear was that all this freedom online

It was a little too free. Most of the 220-some years of our copyright law were times in which in order to copy someone's work on any kind of significant scale, you had to have a printing press. So it was pretty easy to crack down on people. Well, that started to erode with the photocopying machine back in the 1950s, and then it really, really accelerated big time as we got into this electronic environment.

Since time immemorial, our media had been physical. Publishers sold you books. Hollywood made you walk into the cinema and then sold you a VHS cassette. Music labels had feasted on new media formats continuously since the 1970s, as the move from vinyl to 8-track to cassette tapes to digital CDs meant that you had to buy the same music over and over every few years.

But now, with computers, all of that was going to end. What if you could digitize your VHS tapes, your cassettes, your laser discs, CDs, and LPs? The entertainment industry wouldn't be in control anymore. You would be. And that scared Bruce Layman's old clients. Once a copyrighted work got out into this environment

It would be virtually impossible to keep control of it in the way that people had historically been able to do so. Control, control, control. That was the focus at the time, right? This lack of control.

And of course the copyright industries had been concerned about control back in the 1980s. The recording industry had spent the 80s stirring up a moral panic about the tape recorder and cassettes. warning us all that home taping is killing music. Then the software industry picked up the torch with a catchy jingle entitled, Don't Copy That Floppy! Bruce Lehman took the entertainment industry's panic over losing control.

shaped it, and aimed it straight at Al Gore. His story was that he was going to save creators from internet pirates. He said, if you want to be able to see high quality content via the internet, we need to have strict copyright rules. Hollywood's not going to make their feature films available unless they can basically protect them and prevent piracy.

The thing is, he didn't need a new law to do that. It was already illegal to copy or download media you didn't own. There were perfectly cromulent copyright laws that covered all that. But those laws didn't give the entertainment industry control. And Bruce Lehman had an idea for something that would.

So we worked among ourselves and we came up with the white paper in which we outlined what we were thinking of doing. I remember actually getting it when I was at a... conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. And I was sitting in a hotel room and I read through the 250 page white paper and I thought, oh my God, this is terrible.

Layman's proposal was to create a new kind of copyright, not a copyright that protected creative works, Rather, a copyright that protected the restrictive software, the locks, that went around Creative Works. you know, encrypt the work and then made it available only to people who had agreed to a license and therefore were entitled to decrypt it. The idea was that companies wouldn't sell you an e-book. They'd sell you access to a key to unlock.

an e-book. And Bruce Lehman wanted to make locksmiths illegal. We needed to basically make it an infringement. to attempt to disable the box or open the... electronic package that the copyright owner had put their work in. That was one of the major provisions of the app and probably the most important one, I would say. This was a law that would make otherwise legal things, like moving your ebook from one computer to another, illegal if you had to break a digital lock to do it.

I do think this may be a little peculiar for some of your listeners if they're very accustomed to this kind of system by now or if they've sort of grown up with it. the idea of people being so offended by these restrictions or by the idea that you have to use a certain app in order to access a certain document. I guess we can say computing was much less like that in the past.

The thing that makes computers special, that makes them borderline magic, is that they're universal. They can run any program. Since the first days of computing, if you wanted to read some data, a file, a a song, a picture, with a program. You could just write that program. Or someone could, and then you could run it. And it could change how any other program works. One of the things that we've enjoyed as a freedom for a long time is to reverse engineer technologies that are out there and

when they wanted to stop people from reverse engineering, they didn't call it reverse engineering because they did. Nobody would go for it. Oh, no. circumventing the technical protection measure in order to engage in piracy oh bad bad bad bad Lehman wanted a world where your computer could only do what a corporation told it to do, even if you disagreed. That's what Lehman's White Paper demanded. imagine a world that was really much more proprietary, that was much more Closed gardens and...

Well, it's kinda ugly, really.

At the time, in the mid-1990s, Pam couldn't predict what the internet could grow up to be. She doesn't claim to have foreseen app stores and social platforms and big tech. But she did know that the Internet of the future would be worse under the Lehman proposal, a proposal to give corporations the legal power to override computer owners. Sitting in that hotel room in Scotland, reading this proposal for the future of the internet, Pam got fired up. I just couldn't let this happen.

without my effort to do something about it. It's like, I may not win this particular battle, but I'm damned if I'm going down without a fight. Could jailbreaking your Tesla be the best possible response to US tariffs? Hey, this is Matea Roach. I host another CBC podcast called Bookends, and that was just one of the many questions that Cory Doctorow and I dove into on my show. We also talked about his latest thriller novel, Picks and Shovels.

On Bookends, we get inside the creative minds of both emerging authors and best-selling writers. So go check it out. Find Bookends wherever you get your podcasts. In 1994, Pam Samuelson rallied a coalition to fight the Lehman proposal. You know, there are a bunch of us out there going, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, you know, do something about this. She wrote op-eds, lobbied expert regulators, spoke at conferences, and stirred up techies and investors. I said, don't let them get away with this.

It's not enough to say, oh, that's stupid. You gotta get in touch with your congressman. And it worked. Word on the street was that Al Gore's plans for the internet would proceed without Lehman's digital lock rules. Lehman's white paper was out. So Al Gore was actually, I think, a big believer and a supporter of, hey, let's make these networks and let's make the computing infrastructure really.

strong and robust and available to everybody. And that's really going to be a positive thing for the public. And then you had the IP people basically saying, hey, let's lock this stuff down and let's try to limit what people can do with it. And so they were a little bit at odds with one another.

Without Gore's support, Congress wasn't going to help with Lehman's plan. But Lehman had a plan B. He was going to go over Gore's head. He flew to the home of chocolate, alpenhorns, and melted cheese, Switzerland. Why Switzerland? Because that's where WIPO, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, is headquartered. And WIPO was in the middle of its own process of updating its treaties for the internet era.

Formally, Lehman was at WIPO to represent the U.S. in those treaty negotiations. And you'll never guess what Lehman wanted in those treaties. The draft treaty that was under consideration in 1996 was practically word for word the same as the proposal in his white paper so That's what he wanted. He wanted the diplomatic conference to adopt his thing and then for him to come back to Congress and just say, hey, you know.

You don't have any choice because we negotiated this and it's now the world standard. And since it was our idea, you can't back out of it. Now, a lot of people accused me at the time of doing an end run. around Congress by negotiating these treaties and then coming back and saying, well, now you have to do this, Congress, because we've agreed to a treaty. And I would say that they're probably right.

And sure enough, two years later, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which boasted a big, beefy Section 1201 Circumvention of Copyright Protection System. a ban on any kind of lock breaking, even when no copyright infringement takes place. That criminal offence is any person who violates 1201 will fill in for purposes of commercial advantage or private gain. shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than five years or both for a first offense.

Remember our Russian friend Dmitry? Well, that presentation of his was all about removing the digital locks from ebooks. There is no way which Adobe provides for transferring ebook from one computer to another. And that is why he was arrested and charged. with violating DMCA 1201. It was shocking. First of all, that there was an indictment, a criminal indictment, and the idea that a researcher who comes to present something at a conference is going to get arrested for violating 1201 willfully.

for private financial gain and therefore going to jail. That's outrageous. Seth Schoen remembers how he found out about it. I read people online talking about the fact that this was someone who had just spoken at the conference that I had just been at. And I was shocked and I was really concerned for him. And I was really upset that the DMCA was involved because the DMCA was something that I already had a very, very negative take on and it just felt very natural that I had to do something.

What do we want? Free Dimitri! When do we want it? Now! Seth and the free software community took to the streets. I just felt I have to do something to help this guy.

Someone had found a picture of Dimitri with his two children because he was a father and had two small children at home in russia so we had like a sign of dimitri with his kids and it's basically like you're stopping this person from going home to his family After much spirited protesting and organizing by Seth and others, Dimitri was eventually released. Prosecutors agreed to drop all charges against him if he testified against his employer, Elkomsoff.

In 2002, Alchemsoft was found not guilty of the charges under the DMCA because the alleged violations took place outside of American jurisdiction. Dmitry went back home to Russia, where he still works in security research. Dmitry Skilyarov was among the first victims of DMCA 1201, but he wouldn't be the last. More than 25 years after the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we're all stuck on an internet defined by the locks DMCA 1201 Protect.

And in 2022, two teenagers were about to find that out. All because they tried to make Instagram less shitty. Remember when Instagram was good? You saw posts from the people you actually followed. Their little crop photos were in reverse chronological order. A fun and simple way to see what was going on with friends and family. So, what is Instagram like now? Well, remember our friend Ed Zitron from the Google story? Here's what he sees when he opens the app.

an ad, then another ad. You are seeing stuff from three days ago, one hour ago, two days ago, one week ago, from an account you've never seen, presented as if it's an account you follow. It's just not a great experience. Well, in 2022, Ansh Nanda and Hardik Patil set out to fix that. They built the OG app. OG as in original gangster. Here's business commentator Steve Cypress summing it up. This was an app which was developed by a couple of teenagers who said...

Young kids are not using Instagram anymore. They don't like it. They don't like all the ads. They don't like all the suggested accounts. They just want a nice, clean Instagram like it used to be. The premise was simple. You downloaded the OG app. You used it to log into Instagram. OG app then stripped out all the unshittified nonsense Instagram wanted to hijack your feed with.

No ads. No suggested posts. No posts from three days ago being shuffled in with posts from three hours ago. You could even create custom feeds. They formally launched the OG app on September 27, 2022. It lasted exactly one day. Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, they didn't like that too much, so they had the app taken down. OG app was immediately pulled from Apple's App Store and from Android's Google Play Store not long after.

but not before racking up 25,000 downloads, according to the developers, and hitting number 50 on the App Store's charts in one day. Ansh and Hardik didn't respond to us, but they spoke to TechCrunch about it at the time. Here's their statement, read by my producer Matt. Everyone knows Instagram sucks.

We made it better, and got a lot of love from users. But Facebook hates its own users so much, it's willing to crush an alternative that gives them a clean, ad-free Instagram. Apple is colluding with Facebook to bully two teenagers who made Instagram better. The official reason that both Apple and Google gave for the OG apps' removal from their app stores was that it violated an intermittently enforced rule against apps that break anyone's terms of service.

Nobody from Meta responded to us But in 2022, when all this was going down, a meta spokesperson said that the company was, quote, aware of the OG app and was pursuing, quote, all appropriate enforcement actions. It didn't specify what that meant, but Ansh and Hardik said that in the wake of all this, their personal Facebook accounts were banned.

Not an account for OG app itself. They're personal ones that they'd had for years. And not just Ansh and Hardik. Everyone on their team. Eight people in total booted off Facebook. The big hand of big tech came down and squashed these little guys for having the audacity to offer people what they want. Meta didn't even need to take the OG app to court and challenge them with a 1201 violation. Apple and Google took care of that for them.

In fact, since the 1990s, fewer and fewer people and platforms have even tried to dissentify anything, because they know what will happen. You lose the fight before you even start the fight. I do think that it had chilling effects, but of course one of the things about chilling effects is that It's kind of hard to measure, but certainly there are many tools that could have been developed and that would have had beneficial uses for the public that really are not available because of 1201.

Digital platforms lure you in. They built good products that are convenient, affordable, and deliver real value. But the point is to trap you so they can make things worse for you to make things better for them. When they inshittify, you are defenseless. And you can't disinshittify the services you rely on, not without risking serious civil and criminal penalties.

Either you accept the inshittification or you leave, and you lose the customers, communities, audiences, family members, and colleagues who matter to you. That is, if there's even anywhere else to go. So why? Why is there nowhere else to go? Why has big tech been allowed to get so big? That's next time on Understood.

Monopoly power and its abuses are not just some abstract issue. I'm thinking, how the fuck am I going to support my family? I'm going to go out of business. I start to get into fucking panic mode. I don't think anyone was even paying attention to how much power each of these companies was amassing. Understood Who Broke the Internet is written and produced by Matt Muse, our showrunner AC Rowe, and me, Cory Doctorow.

In this episode, you heard clips from CBC and DEFCON, KPIX TV, Kids Guide to the Internet, produced by Diamond Entertainment Corporation, CNN, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, the Santa Clara University School of Law, and and the Software Publishers Association. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzielli. Our story editor is Veronica Simmons, and our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcast.