Content-Protection Standard Hits Ballot

After much public debate, and the withdrawal of a prominent proposal, it's now time for a vote on a controversial standard that prevents the copying of protected content onto removable media devices.

Wednesday the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) shipped paper ballots to all 24 members of its T13 technical committee; results are due April 2.

The ballots give all members of the committee an opportunity to vote on whether to adopt a proposed standard submitted by Phoenix Technologies at a committee meeting last week in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Technologies surprised the committee with its proposal, which it presented as an alternative to the one submitted by IBM.

IBM withdrew its Copy Protection Feature Proposal without any discussion after Curtis Stevens of Phoenix Technologies formally recommended the alternative to the 14 members present at the Austin meeting, says Maryann Karinch, spokesperson for NCITS (pronounced "en-sites"). A majority of the members present voted for the proposal; under NCITS rules a two-thirds majority is required.

Using paper ballots to poll all the committee members is a procedural step spelled out by NCITS to find out if there's enough support for the proposal, Karinch says. The organization will release the results April 2.

4C Entity Stirs Controversy

IBM, along with Intel, Matsushita Electric, and Toshiba, touched off a controversy in January when the group they formed, called the 4C Entity, tried to persuade the T13 technology committee to incorporate its new code into the next Advanced Technology Attachment standard. This standard dictates the way a PC communicates with its hard drive and other drives.

The 4C Entity wanted to introduce base-level instructions in ATA that would let device manufacturers implement a technology called Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), an algorithm that is also compliant with a secure digital music initiative supported by the big music companies.

The original proposal IBM submitted referenced the CPRM, but it was rejected in October, Karinch says. However, subsequent IBM reversions to the proposal, including the one withdrawn last week during the Austin meeting, came from the CPRM.

Proponents say the changes that the 4C Entity wanted to make were generic and would let vendors incorporate any type of content protections, not just CPRM. Plus, they argue, CPRM would apply only to ATA-driven removable devices, such as Zip drives and flash memory, not hard drives.

Opponents claim CPRM would lead to content protection on hard drives and even difficulties in creating backup files.

Karinch says the committee backed the alternative proposal because it incorporated a more generic functionality approach.

"There was a sense that what Curtis [of Phoenix Technologies] was proposing made a lot of sense," Karinch says. "If you were going to do something with open commands, you would want to do it with generic functionality."

Not Everyone Is Pleased

John Gilmore, cofounder and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called Phoenix Technologies' proposal a "smoke screen."

"If they really wanted to support arbitrary 'generic' functionality, they should design something that would handle more than a single custom function per disk drive," Gilmore wrote in an e-mail response to questions. The e-mail went on to refer to the T13 meeting as equivalent to the 4C Entity companies gathering in a smoke-filled room to define their own set of exclusionary copy-protection specifications.

"They need to pretend they're meeting to define a standard in an accredited standards organization like T13," Gilmore wrote.

The Phoenix Technologies representative who submitted the proposal did not return calls. Karinch says the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sent a representative to the Austin meeting, is welcome to participate in the T13 committee.

"It doesn't do any good to play it out in the media," she says. "That is not going to influence anyone on this committee."