Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Tuesday, 5 March 2002

An open letter to Jack Valenti and Michael Eisner

Jack, in your sneering Washington Post piece about copy protection, you refer to professors for whom ‘"innovation" is legalizing the breaking of protection codes’. Michael, in your testimony to congress you badgered an Intel exec until he told you that file copying can't be prevented, then told him he must prevent it anyway.

As you are evidently impervious to logical discussion, let me tell you a story.

This is the story of a rebel, a war hero, a persecuted homosexual, and a deep thinker. His life reads like the plot of a far-fetched movie, but if anyone fits your bogeyman image of professors who break code, it is Alan Turing.

In 1936 Turing published a paper on theoretical mathematics, in which he described the Universal Turing machine. It was a simple mechanism that could read symbols from a tape, and write back different symbols or change the tape's direction. He showed that with this general purpose machine, you could simulate any special purpose computing machine. He had invented the idea of the programmable computer.

Between 1938 and 1945, Turing worked in great secrecy on computing machines that broke codes. These were the first real computers ever made, and the codes they broke were those used by the German Wehrmacht. Without his work, it is very likely that Britain would have lost the War in Europe before Pearl Harbour.

After the war, in 1950 Turing published other famous papers that laid the foundation for modern computing, and hence all the digital gadgetry that you would like to outlaw for us (though presumably you'd keep the computers you use to edit and create effects for your movies). Turing died in 1954 by biting into an apple he had previously poisoned.

What does this story have to do with you?

Turing's Universal Machine means that you cannot have a software or hardware protection scheme that is secure. Whatever scheme you come up with can be simulated by another computer. The computer industry are not opposing your bill because they want to encourage copying, or because they are bloody-minded, they are not opposing you because of your self serving rhetoric about rewarding artists (remember Peggy Lee, Michael?), they are opposing you because what you want is provably impossible. You can only succeed by making all Turing machines illegal.

If Alan Turing had made an animated film involving a poisoned apple in 1936, it would still have copyright protection. He chose a different path, and gave the world the idea of the digital computer. I know whom I respect more.

Posted by Kevin Marks at 09:40
Labels: cinema, Geek, Turing

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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