Legislation chipping away at RFID

According to this LA Times article - Senate blocks mandatory ID implants in employees - the Senate of the state of California has passed legislation to prevent employers mandating that employees must have an RFID chip implanted in their bodies. The legislation was prompted by at least one company beginning to market human-ready RFID devices. I am not surprised that later in the article mention is made of at least one company requiring all employees working in a high security area to be implanted in much the same way that dogs and cats are currently chipped for ID purposes.

I find it refreshing that governments around the world are starting to recognise that indiscriminate chipping is a problem yet at the same time I find it disturbing that there needs to be legislation around this at all. This is not a privacy issue for me. Framing it as a privacy issue implies that in some way the concerns could be addressed and corporations could return to punching chips in everyone sufficiently distracted to not see the big needle coming. Instead, I see this issue as one of personal liberty.

RFID is largely used for tracking inventory and livestock with delusions of freedom (as an aside, why don't more cows escape from the paddock? I have yet to see a cattle fence that could sustain a concentrated freedom-inspired stampede. Sure, there might be casualties in the first wave, but think of the common good for all cow-kind? On the other hand, if I was put out to stud where all I had to do was eat and chase the ladies around the farm, I probably wouldn't be too keen on motivating everyone for mass break-out either). As noted in this Slashdot comment, tagging people with RFID marks them as live inventory, which returns me to cattle corralled in the paddock.

I'm sure some companies feel they have a very good reason for wanting to insert foreign bodies under the skin of their workers but my concern is: where do you draw the line? Today, it's for "security purposes" at a job that you may or may not choose to keep. Then more employers require a chip, then most employers require one. How much further does it spread? Ex-prisoners? Welfare recipients? Long stay foreign workers and international students? People who listen to ABBA? The list goes on and on.

Feature creep and requirements bloat are bad enough when it comes to software and project management. I don't see the need to expose personal liberty to the same slippery slope.

Via Slashdot

Inject your RFID tags now! originally uploaded to Flickr by Nadya Peek. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution 2.0 license.

On Apple and DRM

Steve Jobs, in his recent "low key" posting on the Apple site "Thoughts on music", set the cat amongst the pigeons. After hinting that DRM doesn't work because "there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music", he outlined three alternatives for the future:

1. status quo (everyone develops their own vertically integrated solution like the iTunes Store or the Zune Marketplace);
2. Apple could license FairPlay to other manufacturers so that songs bought through iTunes could be played on other players; or
3. abolish DRM and sell all music DRM-free and encoded in open and licensable formats.

The above is not exactly earth shattering. In my opinion, they are stating the obvious. However, Jobs then goes on to say that Apple would "embrace in a heartbeat" the DRM-free option if only the Big 4 record labels would let them (that's SongBMG, Universal, EMI and Warner). In other words, Jobs is saying "Don't blame me, blame them. We would gladly give you all what you want if they would just let us".

An important question to ask however is, why now? As has been reported on Ars Technica amongst many other places, Canada's Nettwerk Records and one of their major artists, Barenaked Ladies have been trying to convince Apple to let them sell their products through the iTunes Store as a DRM-free product, only to be told no. Of course, there are some side issues to this, including offering consumers a consistent experience (how many confused customers would complain that they could share some songs and not others, and why is the store broken?) but the fact remains that the opportunity has been there. Similarly, I'm sure many indie artists have tried to sell their songs DRM-free with the same result.

As these stories from ZDNet and CNet highlight, Apple is currently facing a number of anti-trust style lawsuits in Norway, Germany and France as European governments seek to "open up" the market currently dominated by Apple and iTunes. One of Apple's arguments against these sort of lawsuits is that, on average, each iPod has only 22 songs bought from the iTunes Store, meaning that the rest of the songs on an iPod have been obtained from other sources anyway (most likely ripped from CDs they already own - CDs being the major way music is distributed and is by and large DRM-free, excluding some reprehensible attempts from Sony with their root kits and EMI's abysmal Copy Control technology).

Similarly, another ZDNet editorial makes note that now is a good time for Apple. No DRM means no lawsuits in Europe. Even if DRM remains, Apple still owns the market. In fact, Apple is so dominant that it is probably the only company that could get away with taking a stance. The record industry is ripe for change, eager to break down Apple's stranglehold and take back some of the power they have ceded to Jobs and of course, DRM-free music is already available. The aforementioned Nettwerk already sells high bit-rate MP3s (192 kbps, as compared to 128kpbs AAC files from iTunes) from their website and eMusic has sold DRM-free tracks for many years with some success.

Not surprisingly, the RIAA appears to have missed the point. This LA Times article quotes the RIAA as saying:

Apple’s offer to license Fairplay to other technology companies is a welcome breakthrough and would be a real victory for fans, artists and labels. There have been many services seeking a license to the Apple DRM. This would enable the interoperability that we have been urging for a very long time.

I don't think anyone else in the world seriously thought that Jobs was offering to open up FairPlay (in fact, Jobs argues the opposite when he highlights that opening up FairPlay just increases opportunities for enterprising individuals to hack away at the DRM system). Whether the RIAA is making a point of its own or is just plain stupid remains to be seen.

The Economist sums it up best:

Mr Jobs’s argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.

Gratis and Libre

A quick note before I ramble on about freedom, free stuff and other related subject matter over the next two months.

For anyone not already familiar with the concept, free software (which is only one element of freedom in the context I will be posting in) comes in two forms:

1. "free as in beer" or gratis, or "freeware" which means the software is provided without charge but the software is something of a black box - you can use it but you don't have any rights to do anything else but use it (for example you can't take a look at the source code and fix a bug that's been annoying); and
2. "free as in speech" or libre, which means the software is released under a licence that also gives you access to the source code and usually means you can also make as many copies as you like to give to friends, co-workers, that guy on the street corner holding a clip board and who would "just a few minutes of your time to discuss how you can save the planet/fight the power/easily and cheaply stop them stealing your thoughts through the technology of tinfoil".

It's a small distinction, but an important one. Libre software is almost always gratis (in fact, I don't think I've ever come across libre software that wasn't). It doesn't always work the other way around.