Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Josep L. Guallar-Esteve" <jlguallar AT maduixa.net>]

So, I'm not the only one to think that DRM is a Bad Thing (c).

But... will they listen? will the Congress listen?

Enjoy.

-----Forwarded Message-----

From: AheadoftheCurve AT bdcimail.com
Subject: STEVE GILLMOR "Ahead of the Curve" from InfoWorld.com, Tuesday, 
September 24, 2002
Date: 24 Sep 2002 12:32:04 -0500

========================================================
STEVE GILLMOR     "Ahead of the Curve"     InfoWorld.com
========================================================

Tuesday, September 24, 2002


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FIGHTING THE LAST WAR

Posted September 20, 2002 01:01 PM  Pacific Time


STUDENTS OF HISTORY -- and I'm not one of them unless
it's Beatle-related -- often make note of the tendency
to fight the last war. So it was that the British
advanced in columns while the Americans hid behind
rocks and trees. Later, the British turned the tables
by writing and recording all the songs themselves
while Broadway and Tin Pan Alley stood helplessly by.

Today the pendulum has swung again. The last war is now
being fought by the same record companies that
capitalized on the British invasion, the Elvis
impersonation, and the bobby soxer rebellion. Instead
of embracing the new wave of digital technologies, the
content companies are stifling innovation where it
grows: at the grassroots level.

It's a new era of McCarthyism; Charlie McCarthy, that
is. Instead of Edger Bergen, we've got Hollywood bag
man Jack Valenti's hand at the controls, throwing his
voice through a collection of dummies in Congress.
>From Senator on-the-Fritz Hollings of South Carolina
to Congressman Howard Berman (D-Disney), our
representatives in Hollywood-on-the-Potomac are
whistling while they work, or wreak, havoc on our
digital rights.

Hollings' proposed Consumer Broadband and Digital
Television Promotion Act mandates security technology
for all new digital media devices, outlaws the removal
or alteration of the technology or the substitution of
other security technology in violation of the act's
encoding rules, and prohibits the knowing transfer or
publishing of copyrighted material where said
technology has been removed or altered. In other
words, Just Say No for Dummies.

Berman wants to reclaim the right to blow up my machine
if I engage in peer-to-peer relations over the Net.
"I'm a strong believer in the beneficial potential of
p-to-p networks," Berman tells the Computer and
Communications Industry Association, "but most people
currently use them for unbridled copyright piracy."

And what's worse, Berman says, "while p-to-p technology
is free to innovate new and more efficient methods of
distribution that further exacerbate the piracy
problem, copyright owners are not equally free to
craft technological responses." It turns out that what
Berman calls technological self-help measures --
electronic countermeasures used by satellite and cable
companies to thwart piracy -- may be illegal when used
against p-to-p networks.

"Their use may run afoul of certain common-law
doctrines and state and federal statutes, including
the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act," he reports,
adding that Congress should "free copyright creators
to develop and deploy technological tools to address
p-to-p piracy." The vehicle: a safe harbor from
liability for using tools such as interdiction,
decoys, redirection, file-blocking, and spoofs.

But don't worry. Berman wants strict bounds on
acceptable behavior by the copyright owner. "I
wouldn't want to let a particularly incensed copyright
owner introduce a virus that would disable the
computer from which copyrighted works are made
available to a decentralized, p-to-p network," he
insists. No, he's leaving that up to the Hollings chip.

Last week Intel President and Chief Operating Officer
Paul Otellini took the baton from Hollings and ran
with it. According to the Boston Globe, "Otellini said
the chip maker would include no copyright protections
in LaGrande, but he acknowledged that digital
publishers could use the technology with software
programs such as Palladium to create their own."

And thus we come full circle to Microsoft and Windows
chief Jim Allchin. "We really haven't done anything on
the hardware side [so] that you can trust the machine
integrity," Allchin said in a keynote speech at the
Windows Server DevCon in Seattle. Allchin cited
Redmond's work on Palladium with Intel, AMD, and
"maybe" others: "[We believe] the processor itself
will change in a way so that we can be more dependent
on knowing that software isn't tampered with."

"Once you have that secure machine integrity," Allchin
said, "you can use it for all sorts of things --
deeper types of authentications, authorizations,
digital rights management [DRM]." Allchin's thoughts
began to tumble out: "Today, as you probably know, we
have to use techniques to hide some of our DRM,
because there's no other way ... to deal with it when
the thing you're trying to protect is the content."
Allchin took pains to assure the assembled developers
of Microsoft's good intentions. "Our current plan is
for any code we put in curtaining memory [Palladium's
secure code vault] we're going to publish the source."
Once again, the buck is passed on down the chain. Yes,
it's U.S. Government Certified lean code.

Allchin's keynote was constrained by some code
curtaining of its own. "We're trying to get to what we
call 'life immersion,' he revealed. "I'm not going to
talk about that today."

Then he did: "Tremendously exciting things that we're
doing there -- how we're using that rich [Yukon]
storage, how we're building more peer-to-peer
infrastructure into the system, how we have a new
presentation system with incredible 3-D graphics....
Most of the systems have 3-D graphics built in, but
only the games use it."

"Well, imagine if you could visualize it," Allchin
dreamed, "imagine if you didn't have to have hard-core
folders, everything was virtualized so that you could
quickly build up any view that you wanted over your
data. But I'm not going to talk about that."

And I'm not going to buy a machine with one of those
chips in it, either. And I'll think twice about using
software that limits my fair use of music, words, and
ideas. The way it looks now, DRM will eventually
outlaw the next sentence. Imagine no possessions, Jim.
I wonder if you can.

To quote John and Yoko: "War is over -- if you want it."

Steve Gillmor is director of the InfoWorld Test Center.
Contact him at steve_gillmor AT infoworld.com.



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MORE AHEAD OF THE CURVE           
For a complete archive of his InfoWorld columns visit   
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QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"The BPM market is not only a market poised for
growth, it is also a market ripe for merger and
acquisition activity. Aberdeen predicts that the
majority of BPM acquisitions will occur over the next
two years."

--From an Aberdeen Group report.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/09/23/020923hnbpm.xml?0924tucurve

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Copyright 2002 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

Salut,
Josep
-- 
http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/
[MaDuiXa PoWeR] http://www.maduixa.net
Linux User # 89976     Linux Machine # 38068