In 1909, the first tool for digital piracy was litigated against. It was called the piano roll. It was a system for transcoding analog music printed on sheet music to a series of zeros and ones on a long roll of computer tape and feeding them into a playback agent without any compensation for composers, artists, or publishing organizations.

John Philip Souza went to Congress to say, “These talking machines will ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left in America! The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came down from the ape.”

Well, they built the piano roll anyway. They stole from the creators of the day with a digital piracy device that deprived the music industry of the only successful business model it knew.

A few years later, after Tesla had invented the radio and Marconi had stolen credit for it, he shipped the consumer radio; people started listening to broadcasts that were stolen from performers; and the Vaudeville artists got together to bring class action against Marconi for helping to destroy the only business model that they had at the time. And Marconi didn’t say, “You’re right. The ease of listening to the radio is a bug and not a feature. We’ll help deliver you the technology that will fix the bug.” Marconi stood his ground.

Not long after, cable operators started stealing broadcasts and putting them down the wire. And when the broadcasters went to regulators and said, “This is a tool of theft of our intellectual property,” the cable operators didn’t say, “You’re right. Delivering television at higher fidelity with different business models is a bug and not a feature. We’ll find ways to make cable act more like free-to-air broadcast.”

When Sony shipped the VCR and the Hollywood studios turned up at Congress, Jack Valenti, Hollywood’s top lobbyist in Washington, said, “This is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone.” Sony didn’t say, “You’re right. The VCR makes it too easy to copy movies in your living room. We’ll design it to detect an analog broadcast flag,” that the studios had proposed, “and shut off its record button when it finds it.” They shipped the tool of piracy with great abandon and glee.

In 1995, in the National Information Infrastructure Hearings, Congress considered a proposal to redesign the Internet, to redesign TCP/IP to act more like AOL, to give them a new, radically centralized system that could detect and interdict against infringement when it occurred. They wanted tools that could successfully wire-tap the entire network. They wanted an architecture that was designed for control and not freedom. This was to be a network where, if you wanted to deliver a new application, you would have to convince a bureaucrat that it would be lawful and not too disruptive and then, with Certificate of Permission in hand, you would be free to go ahead and deliver your tool.

Congress rejected it. The industry rejected it. And we got the Internet as we know it today.

But today things have changed. A couple of years ago, on my first day on the job at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I flew to Hollywood and went to a meeting with a copy protection technical working group and its subgroup, the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group, where Intel helped promulgate a bogus consensus on the part of the tech industry that said that we want a digital television universe where any new application for digital TV must first meet with the approval of the Hollywood studios.

They said the tech industry wants a regulation where every new technology that’s integrated into a digital television not only has to be produced at the sufferance of bureaucrats and Hollywood studio executives (who after all believed that the VCR would be the death of the film industry), they also said that we wanted a television ecosystem where every bit of technology has to be designed to be tamper-resistant. That any company that attempted to reverse-engineer them, to make a free software driver, would find itself stymied.

They said that we want to engineer a digital television ecosystem where every new device has to be designed for "revocability," so that if you find a feature that’s been included is too dangerous to the Hollywood business model, it can be remotely disabled. They took this to the FCC and the FCC softened it -- a tiny bit. They said, “Well, we won’t make you dependent on Hollywood studio executives before you can deliver your applications. What we’ll do is we’ll say that anyone who can push paper successfully on the Hill and convince a media bureau staffer that your application is lawful will be able to ship your application.” And that’s somehow better. Convincing captured regulators is less damaging to your business than convincing Hollywood studio executives. This regime comes into play shortly, and a generation of technology will die a-borning.

They’re at it again. The same group has turned to another group that has the avid cooperation of a number of tech companies called the Analog Reconversion Discussion Group, or as we like to call it, "Argh." Argh is in the business of crafting a mandate that the FCC will enact, if they get their way, that will require every device capable of performing an analog-to-digital conversion to detect watermarks that say this is not a material that’s intended to be copied and, in their presence, switch them off.

So, you know, the unintended consequences of this are pretty hilarious, right? Your son’s first steps across your living room, you follow them with your camcorder, you get too close to your television’s watermark that says, “I’m a copyrighted work. You may not touch me.” And your son’s first steps are lost forever as the analog-to-digital converter in your device shuts itself off.

The latest dangerous idea to take hold of leading members of Congress is the Inducing Infringements of Copyright Act, which would criminalize companies for making any device that could “induce” a user to make illegal copies of content. Your iPod could become illegal, in other words. Hollywood and the music industry are all over it. The bill’s co-sponsors, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), have together reaped over $107,000 in campaign contributions from the movie and recording business in this cycle, putting them in the top ranks of the Senate.

Tech companies ought to be saying, “Copying is a feature, not a bug. The intention of our industry is to figure out how to take your content and put it on our Internet.” Instead, they’re saying, “Copying is a bug. Let’s figure out how to make sure that this stuff never shows up online.”

Right now, the people who think easy copying is bad have got most of Congress eating out of their hands, not only because of all the money they spend on lobbying and campaign contributions, but because they’ve stampeded them into believing that the sky will fall and whole industries will collapse if we somehow legislatively hardwire the next generation of technology and consumer products to prevent unauthorized copying and sharing.

But history teaches us otherwise. The question is when some politicians, along with some more industry mavericks, are going to show that they really get the Internet, and stand up for real freedom online.

Cory Doctorow is the author of two science fiction novels, Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, both published by Tor books and circulated for free on the Internet under a Creative Commons license (his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is also available). His day job is in London, working as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and UK Coordinator for the Creative Commons. He is also the co-editor of the popular weblog boing boing and is a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine. He is a member of the Personal Democracy Forum advisory board. He presented a longer version of this article at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on October 7. Thanks to Jason Calacanis for posting an MP3 of it, here.