Digital Rights Management (DRM) doesn’t work. Also: draft California law mulls mandatory DRM to preserve image provenance metadata, breaks Signal Messenger
15-20 years ago we had a reasonable, common understanding that making data tamperproof or copy-resistant by law and/or to enforce artificial scarcity, was problematic. Identity credentials or basic copyright, fine, but Digital Rights Management (DRM) locked people out of their stuff, added friction to both legitimate & illegitimate usage, and hampered open source; now it’s back to save us from AI, and it’s bad.
For context: broadly I think that it’s better to add metadata to authentic things to prove their authenticity or provenance, rather than to do something silly like demand that fake things should be labelled as “fake” — simply because there are so many more fake things in the world than authentic. However: labels are labels, we don’t need to get into that argument right now.
But — whatever happens — we wouldn’t legally forbid people, platforms and products from removing those labels. After all, the important thing is that an authentic thing can eventually be checked for authenticity if/where necessary, correct?
You wouldn’t want to reinvent legislative DRM, right?
AB 853: California AI Transparency Act
Nope. California says “more DRM please!”. Apparently yet another well-intended-but-actually-goofball piece of legislation, the draft California AI Transparency Act (extract below) says, if I am reading this right:
- if your app or your platform serves more than 2 million (distinct? globally?) people per year
- then you are not permitted to strip-out C2PA provenance manifests and any other provenance tags that MAY be included in shared images
- so to stay legal you therefore MUST register your app with The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) in order to be issued with secret per-app cryptographic keys that enable “legal” mutations (such as image resizing) to be performed and noted in the C2PA manifest
- …and, of course, you’ll have to work out how to stop people futzing with those keys in open source clients, maybe even prevent them sending content which has had the tags stripped, and/or obligate addition of tags before content is shared
What about Signal, then?
“Adding metadata to images” is likely something which Signal will never do, and I can’t imagine that it would alternatively be very happy about being forced to swallow and send full-sized images from user to user by default — images which in pursuit of speed and performance are currently heavily resized and recompressed.
God knows what would happen to video, I have no idea.
There’s also an interesting sop in the legislation re: personal information. Clearly someone has had a go at making it okay to strip personally identifiable information from images:
A large online platform shall not … strip any … data that is not reasonably capable of being associated with a particular user and that contains EITHER information regarding the type of device, system, or service that was used to generate a piece of digital content OR information related to content authenticity, … or digital signature from content uploaded or distributed on the large online platform AND IT … shall not … retain any … provenance data that contains EITHER personal information OR unique device, system, or service information that is reasonably capable of being associated with a particular user … from content shared on the large online platform
And the text is clearly aimed at centralised platforms like Facebook without end-to-end encryption being an issue:
- it’s not requiring personal information to be stripped, but it’s preventing the big central platform from retaining any of it — potentially a problem for child-abuse investigations…
- …but also: what does “retain” mean in the context of a user-to-user end-to-end encrypted app? Are those now obligated to strip personal data?
- …and: you’re only permitted to strip nerdy techy metadata if it’s “not reasonably capable of being associated with a particular user” — the problem being that nerdy techy metadata is HIGHLY UNIQUE IN COMBINATION and READILY TRACKABLE, so much so that the UK had to pass laws to try and prevent people from doing it, which is not actually an effective fix.
- not to mention: any image produced by the camera may yield a trackable identity, but that’s beyond the scope of metadata.
Summary
This draft law is broken-as-designed.
- It makes metadata-avoidant apps (e.g. Signal) break the law
- It forces proliferation of likely (if unobviously) trackable data, even in privacy-forward apps
- It messes with application architecture, burdening apps with secrets management / user hostility / protecting data from the user, and hampers open-source tools (mastodon, anyone?)
Grade: D- you should know better than this.
Postscript / Update
As somebody on Reddit observed: you also need to contemplate the contents of your feed and observe how much of it actually comprises cropped screenshots from other platforms. This will entirely break the chain of trust which is held in the manifest, and thereby remove any signals of AI.
This is why it is important to expect the manifest to prove the authenticness of the authentic original, rather than to expect it to act as a label of fakeness that will somehow be meaningfully propagated from platform to platform.
Hence: this bill is attempting to close the wrong stables door after the elephant has bolted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1n1ak7j/comment/naxievw/
References
https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab853
Bill Text
SEC. 2.Section 22757.3.1 is added to the Business and Professions Code, to read:22757.3.1.
(a) A large online platform shall do both of the following:
(1) Use a label to disclose any machine-readable provenance data detected in content distributed on the large online platform that meets all of the following criteria:
(A) The label indicates whether provenance data is available.
(B) The label indicates the name and version number of the GenAI system that created or altered the content, if applicable.
(C) The label indicates whether any digital signatures are available.
(D) The label is presented in a conspicuous manner to users.
(2) Allow a user to inspect any provenance information in an easily accessible manner.
(b) A large online platform shall not do any of the following:
(1) Strip any system provenance data or digital signature from content uploaded or distributed on the large online platform.
(2) Retain any personal provenance data from content shared on the large online platform.
…and…
SECTION 1 …
…
(h)Large online platform means a public-facing social media platform, content-sharing platform, messaging platform, advertising network, stand-alone search engine, or web browser that distributes content to users who did not create or collaborate in creating the content that exceeded 2,000,000 unique monthly users during the preceding 12 months.
…
(m)(1) Personal provenance data means provenance data that contains either of the following:
(A) Personal information.
(B) Unique device, system, or service information that is reasonably capable of being associated with a particular user.
(2) Personal provenance data does not include information contained within a digital signature.
(n) Provenance data means data that is embedded into digital content, or that is included in the digital contents metadata, for the purpose of verifying the digital contents authenticity, origin, or history of modification.
(o) System provenance data means provenance data that is not reasonably capable of being associated with a particular user and that contains either of the following:
(1) Information regarding the type of device, system, or service that was used to generate a piece of digital content.
(2) Information related to content authenticity.
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