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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Subject: Re: Version 3.0 - List Discussion Responses
  • Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 12:12:35 -0500

Greg London wrote:
For all those platforms that are DRM-only, but allow you to
DRM-enable content, you can get the content openly, and apply DRM
yourself and watch it on the hardware platform of your choice.

This is *another* failing of the source/binary analogy to non-TPM/TPM.

Compiling to binary from source is a complex and error-prone problem, which is difficult for the end user, and can't usually be automated in a fool-proof way. This the practical reason that there are any binary distributions of Linux at all, for example.

TPM, on the other hand, is just encryption of some kind. It doesn't involve a complex web of platform assumptions or libraries. So it *can* be automated in a completely foolproof way. Thus, there is little practical drag created by insisting that TPM is only applied by the end user (much less than for the same requirement applied to binaries).

In fact, what DRM Dave can do for Alice and Bob, if he wants free content to be easy to play, is to provide a simple tool for applying DRM to those packages (he could, for example, build it into the downloader so that the end user needn't even realize it's happening).

Mind you, this means he can still do something nasty: He can publish DRM wrappers specific to specific distributions of free content (i.e. that depend on the hash of the content). In this way, he can still keep his platform monopoly, despite the fact that the works themselves are free. That's because it's actually Alice and Bob who apply the TPM, and no distribution is involved.

(This was suggested to me by the argument put forth by Edward Macnaghten in his recent blog at
Free Software Magazine: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/1777 )

I'm afraid that's a new can of worms.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com






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