In this February 2001 issue of Discover, musician and technology guru Jaron Lanier spins a scary scenario about where digital copyright protection could lead us.
In desperation, record companies worked with electronics concerns to create what's known as an end-to-end solution so that they could enforce copy protection all the way to the end of the chain of delivery, which in the case of music meant the audio speaker. By 2004, it was illegal to build speakers that could respond to old-fashioned analog inputs. Instead, manufacturers made speakers that responded to digital inputs so they could play only music authorized to be heard at a given time and place.
