Random access: have you been burned by fearful technology companies? - Professional Resources

American Music Teacher, August-Sept, 2002 by George F. Litterst

Imagine that your day starts like this: The alarm goes off at the usual time. You stumble out of bed, and to use your electric toothbrush; however, it refuses to run. Why? Because it was not authorized to operate in your mouth! Yesterday, your spouse "authorized" the electric toothbrush for his or her mouth. Even though you are using your personal brush attachment, the device refuses to run.

After reverting to the old-fashioned manual toothbrush, you head downstairs to the kitchen and throw a couple Pop-Tarts into the toaster. The toaster refuses to warm up. Why? Its internal sensors note that you have not inserted specially constituted bread (marketed by the toaster company) for which the toaster was designed and authorized.

Then you go to the refrigerator. Of course, the door won't open until you punch in your sixteen-digit serial number that proves you actually purchased the refrigerator from an authorized dealer.

It is a little tricky to enter the code correctly this early in the morning, but after the third try, the door opens. At last, something is going right!

Fact or Fiction?

This may seem a bit absurd, but it represents the beginning of a typical day if most companies followed the same policies and procedures that are commonplace in the technology field.

When I purchase and start to use a new piece of music technology, I often am amazed to find that my new purchase both empowers and limits me! Worse, I often find the limitations are not limitations of the technology itself, but are the result of deliberate attempts by the manufacturer to cramp my use of its product.

My Personal Experiences with the Dark Side of Music Technology

With borrowed money and great enthusiasm, I purchased my first computer in 1984. Although it enabled me to do little more than type, edit and work with simple, black-and-white graphics, I felt empowered! As each new business or music software program became available, I felt my professional activities had been given new wings. Then, one day, I ran into the first of many technology companies trying to limit my use of its product.

The time was the late 1980s. Apple Computer had introduced the LaserWriter printer. As a result, word processing had finally reached near professional levels for the average person. Shortly after the introduction of the LaserWriter, a company specializing in high-resolution text fonts created a high-quality font consisting of music symbols. The introduction of this font marked the beginning of the new era in personal desktop publishing for music.

I was excited and quickly acquired a copy. Then, to my horror, I discovered there was a catch: You could only use your copy of this font with a single printer! Believe it or not, the creators of this font actually had come up with a scheme that locked your use of this font to the first printer with which you used it!

The moment that I realized this, I became incredulous. As best I can recall, the LaserWriter printer cost well over $4,000, and very few people in my situation could afford to purchase their own. Most of us had to rely on laser printers to which we had access at schools or service bureaus. In many cases, people like me would end up printing on different printers from one day to the next. How could we afford to use this new music font if we had to purchase a new copy each time we printed to a different printer?

Shortly after discovering this dilemma, I came up with a successful scheme for defeating the built-in copy protection that came with the font.

The font came on a copy-protected floppy disk. When you downloaded the font to the printer for the first time, the downloading program required you to insert the floppy disk containing the font into the computer in an unlocked condition. Then, the downloader program wrote an invisible piece of information to the disk, forever tying one's use of the disk to that particular printer.

Although I could make a copy of my original, uncorrupted disk, the font downloading program was smart enough to know the disk on which the font resided was actually a copy and refused to use it if I started the process from the copy. However, I discovered there were many steps to the download process; I could start with the original disk, remove it from the disk drive at a crucial moment and then substitute my copy without this obnoxious program realizing what I was doing. At that point, the downloader program wrote its invisible information to the copy and left my original disk in its pristine condition.

Fortunately, this stupid copy-protection idea did not last. The company making the font discovered it could not build its business by severely crippling its customers and abandoned this scheme within the next year. In fact, the entire computer industry subsequendy began moving away from copy-protection schemes--except the music companies and many of the game companies.

My next, nasty encounter with a company trying to limit my legitimate use of its product actually resulted in public embarrassment for the company. The company in question made a sequencing program for the computer. To run the program, you had to use the original floppy disk to install the program and an invisible key file onto your hard drive. Once you installed the program and key file, you could not install either on another computer without uninstalling the key file from the first computer. Alternatively, you could run the program from the floppy disk using any computer if you kept the floppy disk unlocked and inserted into the disk drive.