Slashdot Mirror
Gilmore On Hardware-Restricted Content
An unnamed reader links to John Gilmore's explanation of just why it's a bad idea to let companies (Intel in particular) cave to industry demands for so-called content protection in hardware. The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.
Isn't that what they are after?
A machine to play your cd's/dvd's, a machine to do mail/web/stuff, a machine to do games..
Hell, it would be a lot easier for them, no OS-es to worry about, no copieing to worry about, and more to sell to everybody!
-=- I heard rumours about an OS called "Social Life", heard of it? Is it stable? -=-
Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
I would like to see a 3rd amendment challenge to this.
The sad fact of the matter is that as long as a product does at least the minimum requirements, people don't care. That's why eBay can get away with pop-up ads. That's why people buy software with EULAs which take away their right to fair use. That's why we cave in and sign up just to read NYTimes articles. That's why we put up with BFAs and inane copyright restrictions on slashdot. It's why Microsoft gets away with charging people over and over for the same operating system, just because they buy a new computer.
Computers, the internet, the world could be so much better. But people constantly settle for mediocrity.
Companies like AOL Time Warner, Disney etc have been calling for this for ages. They're terribly worried that their huge back library of movies, songs etc will produce a lower and lower income each year as people illegally copy things rather than buy them at (inflated) prices.
Video Game cheats, hints a
The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.
What does that quote above have to do with the article? How is that an upshot? In the end of the article it says that if copy prevention is placed into computers what's probably going to happen is that no one will buy these as non-lamed systems will still be more flexible in working with other systems.
Of course this may not be true as many people and companies buy from outfits like Dell, which already makes only Intel, how long before the RIAA gets Dell to sign a license that makes them copy protect every computer they make? No one'll stop buying Dell because its -dell-
Still, I can't see anyone who rolls their own ever going for this. I know that you can't digitally drive speaker elements there must be an analog signal going to the coil inside of each speaker it'd be trivial to cut open the speaker and solder those wires to a standard male plug, plug them into your audio in on the sound card and hit record...
Disclaimer:The "Human" attached to this account is unresponsible for anything unless it wants responsibility.
This one IS appropriate for the YRO section. You should have the right to buy any computer, with or without copy protection in hardware. Of course, this is not a right that's very well protected by the Constitution.
.NET runtime included, or if AOL wanted to madate inclusion of AOL software(Ironically, MS, Sun, and AOL have been pretty successful at distribution of their clients, even without legislation).
Efforts to force inclusion of hardware copy protection are simply the work of a special-interest group. It's as if Microsoft or Sun wanted a law that mandated that every computer have the Java or
That's what Hollywood is trying to accomplish, to use legislation to build their distribution channel. Get off your asses and figure it out yourselves.
You need to do some more homework- Intel started this secure environment initiative when they found out that AMD was already working with Microsoft on their own secure environment initiative. Intel has been playing catch-up to AMD.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
And who ends up paying for the technology to allow them to restrict content? We do.
Ideas like encrypting audio between playback device and speakers, HDTV copy protection and any other method they come up with will eventually get to market. Ask questions and know before you buy.
Don't buy your own set of shackles.
The only way this will fly is through legislation. Intel has a few smart cookies working for them. I don't think they will do this unless they are forced. For two reasons: You can't alienate your customers. More than a few corporate suits and home users would be a little miffed about this. Two: Something like this will probably cost quite a bit of money.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I'm not sure how likely the hardwired "content protection" scenario is... but, a pessimist by nature, I think we should start preparing as though it is going to happen. :)
The simplest version is if Intel unilaterally decided to cave in to Disney, AOL/TW, RIAA etc. and build its own hardware with little censor chips in them. In this case, the response is straight-up economic. Turn to alternative hardware vendors. I don't just mean in your personal purchases. Slashdot readers who are sysadmins or IT specialists at corporations should start preparing their explanations of why the company really should move away from the risks inherent in having unintelligent censorware control the use of potentially mission-critical data. If large corporate clients start abandoning Intel as a result of content-control, you can guess which product-line will get scrapped pretty quick.
The two other scenarios are legislation and regulation that will prevent anyone from seeking out alternatives, by making those alternatives illegal. This is more problematic, because slashdotters punch well below their weight politically. However, in both cases there will be a political "hook" - in the case of legislation, one can write one's congresscritter (for whatever good that will do), and in the case of FCC regulation, there will be a notice-and-comment period. So take notice, and make comments
As a penultimate line of defense, there is always the courts. In addition to the obvious first amendment claims, there could be an interesting "restraint of trade" (antitrust) claim based on denial of "essential facilities" (computing services).
In the long run, however, I think the answer to content protection is, "fine, go take away your ball and go play with it by yourself. I have a better game now." When all manner of content (not just free software) is made without any desire to restrict it, and when that content is both quantitively and qualitatively superior to restricted content, there will be no point to having hardwired censors. Even if people all use "approved" monitors and computers, they will be using them to view "free content" (free as in free speech, not free beer). So the "oligarchy" will wither, and there will no longer be any significant force pushing Intel to continue making hardwired censors...
How likely is that end-scenario? *shrug* Ask yourselves.
The idea of patent and copyright law is that if you allow someone a limited-time monopoly on inventions/publications then they will be able to make money on it. This encourages people to come up with wacky new ideas and thereby helps society in general.
:)
This makes sense to some extent. However, I don't buy that preventing anyone from copying this comment for 99 years after my death is going to help society a whole lot. (Especially since I don't plan on dying for a long time.)
To prove my dedication, I hearby release this comment into the public domain.
Prove that those companies that produce the music, videos, whatever actually have lost money. Guess what, you only have access to the number they feed you, so you can only prove what they want to show you.
The music industry losing money? Amazing how many albums are still going platinum, double platinum, etc. even with music pirating. Movies? Spider-Man made $114 million in it's first weekend. How much more will it make before it's done? But, oh wait, those movie studios are losing money. (Among these same movie studios claims is the one that Titanic lost money or barely broke even.)
Okay, diatribe aside, yes, they might actually be losing money. I'll feel bad about it later. Really, I will. The same instant that the music industry stops pushing the pop-crap that seems to be on every station, and the same time the movie studios stop pushing things like a live-action version of Scooby-Doo. (My god, who comes up with these ideas?)
Of course, I play Nethack, so I guess I am not the most unbiased person when it comes to free software/games vs. crap like EQ.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
...and all new hardware required, and implemented horrifically draconian anti-copy-anything protection which both took away the ability to copy for reasonable use, or took away nick the l337 h4X0r's ability to copy 'stuff', ancient second hand hardware, free hardware, is going to become rather desirable. Best start warehousing a few spare boxies.
:D
OK, that's tongue in cheek, but it's one end of an extreme where computers are pushed to being made less and less useful. When I look at it bringing about such strong change like that, it feels it can't happen. Am I being too optimistic?
Besides - if all your old hardware gets too slow - buy a few more and beow.... you get the idea
a grrl and her server
Well, the way I interpreted it, and we all know interpretations can vary among people, was that without the PC, Roberta Williams and her game design compatriots can no longer make those shitty "Adventure" games which are more of "guess the obtuse logic some crazy chick came up with" style game.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I've said this before, but it's important and needs saying. The most important part of what Gilmore is saying is the bit about 'A mandate from all concerned parties' without consultation of consumers. You just know that the 'content industry' would argue that consumers are /never/ going to ask for their rights to be curtailled, but that's exactly the point.
The *essence* of copyright is that all the people got together and said 'Let's curtail our rights, let's say that if any of us wants to copy something that someone else wrote, they have to pay for it, for a limited period of time'. They did this to promote the public domain - to get more stuff written by allowing authors a temporary monopoly on their works.
But the point is, the moment the public mandate for copyright is gone, there can be **no** justification for copyright. It's not a moral right. It's not a natural right. This isn't like saying that we shouldn't kill people. The point is that it's a mutual agreement on the part of a population, for their own gain. And the moment society decides it doesn't get anything from copyright any more copyright is defunct. You can't argue 'But copying is *wrong*'. It's not. All that is wrong, and all that would make copying wrong, is if everyone in society has decided to take on this copyright burden, and a few people decided they would be freeloaders.
As it is, I think that time has come. Clearly people no longer thing there's anything to be gained from copyright. I'm inclined to agree. Once, it took a long time to copy a book, and if you 'published' something, copyright was your only protection from other people selling it. But as it is now, the moment you start selling a book, a CD or whatever, you can publish so many copies that there would be no point in others trying to sell the same thing. Once a book is on the store shelves, nobody is going to type up the whole book, lay it out, and print it - there just wouldn't be any point. The person that got their first would be such an advantage due to having a head-start that they'd make tons of money anyway...
I won't buy a harddisk where I am not in 100% control of what is on there, no way no how. I will never allow a company to buy it, as it more than likely will affect the business negativily (not being able to make proper backups, harddisks refusing to copy files, compiles going down the drain, servers fucking up).
The day I notice that I have bought a CD that I can't play in my computer or portable CD player I will go back and raise hell, I will refuse to ever buy that crap.
Why oh why do they have to punish people who want to buy quality versions of CDs/DVDs etc. Give me great quality and great price and I will buy, make me WANT to buy your products, give me a reason. Bullying me will piss me off. Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you get pissed too.
Also, the 2nd ammendment says each citizen has the right to own weapons to fight tyrannical governments, if necessary. In the 18th century this meant rifles, today we may need digital weapons as well.
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do."
(Robert Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", 1966)
I am not sure anyone could "bury" a general purpose architecture as the PC has become; no one piece "defines" it any longer, nor is irreplaceable, right?
I define a PC as a computing device with these qualities:
The irreplaceable part is a BIOS that will try to load any kernel you throw at it without complaining that the kernel is not signed by the hardware vendor. Otherwise, you merely have an embedded system.
Will I retire or break 10K?
and all new hardware required, and implemented horrifically draconian anti-copy-anything protection which both took away the ability to copy for reasonable use, or took away nick the l337 h4X0r's ability to copy 'stuff', ancient second hand hardware, free hardware, is going to become rather desirable.
You're not the first to think of "pre-ban computers" along the lines of "pre-ban assault rifles." If you're interested in this line of thought, read more: Google pre-ban cbdtpa
Will I retire or break 10K?
The original item is dated November 2000. Intel announced their chipset for "secure monitors" somewhat before that. As far as I know, though, no monitors with that technology ever shipped as products.
Gilmore's main points:
1) The costs of copy protected systems aren't paid by the "content" holders -- they are paid for by consumers. Essentially, you will end up paying more for a less capable computer, while Disney laughs its way to the bank.
2) For a copy protected computer to work, every peripheral -- from monitors to speakers -- must have copy protection built in. Think you're having trouble getting your Wintel box to behave now? You ain't seen nothing yet.
3) This is all being decided by government, so that no rogue manufacturers can ship non-protected computers. If that weren't the case, Apple might skip imposing copy protection, and we'd see 75% of Wintel users buying Macs so that they could avoid copy protection.
Gilmore seems puzzled by the fact that Intel isn't telling the content companies to cram it. Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in their best interest to side with the content guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been answered.
It seems the pivotal question here is: will the Hollings bills require all manufacturers to build end-to-end protection throughout their computers and peripherals? If not, what degree of protection does the bill require?
A wrinkle in this that nobody has thought of. Suppose end-to-end encryption is required. Each company's protection would be a little different, as we're talking about hundreds of components from various vendors. It might turn out that Apple or AMD sort of messes up their encryption (oops!) -- and by that "mistake" captures 75% of the computer market. After all, would you rather own a machine with rock-solid protection, or one that has a huge chink in the armor?
I know I'd want to buy my computer from the supplier who was most competent at designing machines and least competent at providing 100% protection of content.
Want to start a successful computer company? Just hire designers who don't know or care about ensuring robust protection.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
it was there to protect ideas so others would innovate
That's why the Constitution only grants those rights to Authors and Inventors. Thoday, the holders of copyrights and patents are, almost always, corporations.
Another distortion of the basic idea came when they started granting copyrights to people who performed the works. Actors are not authors, singers are not authors. They are just doing a job, and should be paid - just once - for doing it, like all other workers. Why should Britney Spears or any other singer be paid millions for singing a song that someone else, probably a 9-to-5 office worker, wrote?
If the intent of the Constitution were to be applied, only people who wrote something, be it books, plays, screen scripts, music, watever, would be entitled to own copyrights.
Why are people switching from old videotape to DVD? It's the addons - no degredation of quality over time, extra interviews, a smaller disc, you can play a DVD on your computer, or whatever else it is that Joe Consumer happens to like. Laserdiscs didn't have as nice a "feature set" as DVDs, and we can see how few people actually have laserdisc players...
If the content industry wants people to use rights-management hardware, they have to make the hardware desirable (or pass a law banning everything else...). And if they don't make the hardware SIGNIFICANTLY better than the stuff we all have already - our boxes, our DVD players, etc., then the market is going to drop "rights management" like a hot potato.
And if the content industry actually DOES create a better product, and gets the market, I say more power to them! Then, and only then, are they actually working in a capitalist economy. But I don't see that kind of creativity on the part of the content industry, or whoever else wants "digital rights management."
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
I'm reminded of the Apex DVD player in which the engineers "forgot" to remove the "loopholes" menu which enabled switching NTSC/PAL, setting region, and disabling Macrovision. I immediately bought one.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Spare me the crap. Since when are the media businesses failing? I have yet to see a major media outlet come remotely close to bankruptcy _ever_.
Piracy as a term is a joke anyway. There are numerous reasons why it's good.
1. Try before you buy.
2. Equalization of overpricing.
3. And most importantly, free movement of expressions and ideas, the way things should be.
The society in which we live that is, in effect, fairly unchangable by any one person, needs to change. We can not possibly hope to better ourselves as a species while we're squabling over our paychecks.
A money-less society is of course utopian but if we can't go all the way lets at least try to make it some of the way. I'm not saying the people that create music and movies and other forms of entertainment shouldn't be compensated. I'm saying they shouldn't be grossly compensated, as a majority of them are.
And it's only common sense that the industry middlemen are jokes in suits. To those people: stop leeching off of other people's talent and whining when you don't have enough cash to buy that island you want.
To those people that their rebuttal will be: "Stop pirating! You're the leech". I find that comment silly, I profit in no way from any piracy. I may not have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have the artists' (and in some instances, others' like the government) make an impression on me and keeping me from being bored for an hour or two. But face it, if you do pay the outrageous prices they ask, you're part of the problem.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I hope this bill gets passed. The REAL upshot of it will be that peeps outside of the US will buy equipment from Asia & the EU (that will circumvent copy protection messures) and avoid US manufacturers altogether. And many within the US will import and still keep rippin and warezin.
As it is the USA has garnered a lot of bad feeling interneationally since Bush came to power, and I for one am sick of the USA attempting to thrust its legislation down my throught. Dont get me wrong - America is a great country with many fine people - but your politics SUCK!!
Go ahead, do it - see if the rest of the world gives a shit as the US economy goes into a nose dive!!
Scope
This document sets forth requirements to be imposed on certain products that receive unencrypted digital terrestrial broadcast content to protect such content against unauthorized redistribution [outside of the home or personal digital network environment].2 The document assumes that the requirements will apply in the United States, although it is anticipated that the requirements could be modified, as necessary, for use in other jurisdictions.
Got that? The conspiracy knows that it's going to have to extra-territorialize if its going to acheive its ends, and it's rarin' to go.
I don't agree with piracy (and I think the whole Napster thing was a bigger SETBACK than anyone realizes). BUT, no system is perfect. There are losses and inefficiencies involved in any kind of market conduit, and the digital realm is no exception. That having been said, I think there's a difference between taking measures to minimize piracy, and extracting every possible nickel and dime from your revenue nodes (formerly known as customers). The proposed methods are particularly insidious, because they shackle the vast majority of those who are honest. This has already become more trouble than it's worth for me (which is why I don't buy, rent, or steal CDs, videos, or DVDs), and with any luck, mor people will begin to see the light. There IS life on the other side.
Ummm....computer hardware manufacturers and retailers already do this. ...and it may become difficult to figure out who to support (assuming enough of the public will care). They could make the "copy protected" components work with existing "unprotected" ones--then in phase two ease in the components that no longer work with anything that is "unprotected." The consumer wouldn't be able to tell which components were "unprotected" or "protected" in the phase one way.
The only reason this hasn't happend is that it hasn't been in the interest of the manufacturers--legislation, lawsuits, FCC mandates, or making it so that DRM is the only way to access the MPAA/RIAA's "content" would change this. IMO the latter is the best hope as decent people could make their own "content" and the stupid would just buy the MPAA/RIAA machines, however the MPAA/RIAA members don't want this because they know they'd lose massive marketshare. Their real goal is to get one of the first three going so they have the capability of controling the entire market like they have in the past...
The thing is the hardware already has a justifiable existence--even if computers could only browse the web and do wordprocessing. Hollywood doesn't care, congresspeople don't care, all they care about is how much money/power they can milk out of the situation.
This one IS appropriate for the YRO section. You should have the right to buy any computer, with or without copy protection in hardware. Of course, this is not a right that's very well protected by the Constitution.
... one with virtually no rights and few liberties, and one we are now going to be very hard pressed to change.
It is a right very well protected by the constitution. Any powers not explicitly granted the federal government by the constitution are reserved for the states, for municipalities, or for the people (10th amendment).
The Federal government has been granted no explicit authority by the constitution to regulate the sale or construction of computers.
The problem is that the government hasn't been abiding by the constitution for at least 70 years now, so we really can't expect it to start now.
Instead, for the sake of expediency over constitutional law, the courts routinely misuse the so-called commerce clause to extend the federal government's powers into all kinds of areas it is constitutionally barred from, but are nevertheless popular with the people to regulate anyway (War on Drugs, Child Pornography, etc.). By diluting the power of the constitution with these causes, irrespective of their legitemacy, we are now in a situation where real social and political pressures are coming to bear on our way of government (the Copyright Cartels' attacks on our most basic freedoms, the War on Terrorism and many of the unconstitutional methods being used to wage it domestically, not to mention the recent election debacle), and we no longer have a strong constitutional foundation to fall back on.
We sold it cheap in the name of "the children" to wage our War on Drugs, our War On Pedophiles, now our War on Terrorism and, comming soon to a computer near you, Our War On Copyright Violators.
The future is no longer terribly bright. Indeed, by selling out our most fundamental values for a perceived short term societal gain (who wouldn't want child pornographers jailed?) we've now insured that the future is a dark, bleak, ugly place
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Actually, the whole Napster thing woke me up to how sleazy the entertainment industry is. The debates surrounding the issue of Napster were also formative in my understanding of intellectual property and how it is a fundamentally wrong concept that's against human nature and harmful to vertical mobility and society in general. Before Napster, I sympathized with the RIAA's position. Now, I see them for the anti free marketers they are. I'll never buy a CD or DVD while the proceeds of the sale is being used to lobby my freedom away. So, at least in my case, the Napster debacle served a usefull purpose.
This raises only one question in my mind:
What would it take to deny Hollings the democratic nomination in his next election bid? This is really the only way to stop him (others of his ilk will respond when they see him die a thousand deaths).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The 'content' companies like Disney etc. are trying to use legislation and technology to stop progress and allow them to keep making profits. This is such a short sighted view.
As a (hypothetical) example, take music CDs. A new CD costs £15 over here, and before I buy it I can hear maybe one song off it on the radio if I'm lucky. That's a big investment for something I might only listen to once. So I don't buy many CDs, and I rip oggs of other peoples' music.
But what if the music companies offered different versions of CDs? A cheap one, with just a paper sleeve and the name on the front for a three or four pounds, and a 'premium' edition with extras, proper case, lyric sheet etc at full price?
The fans will buy the full price disc anyway, and everyone else will buy the cheap one. Thus, more sales, less copying(why bother copying when you it doesn't cost you much to get a proper copy?). Greater listening audience means more fans in the future, leads to more sales of the premium version.
I get the music I want without breaking the law, the music industry gets to make its profits still. Everyone is happy. Or is this a dangerous communist anti-american view that will have FBI agents trying to get me extradited?
if I can see it or hear it then I will have it in a form that is not controlled by them. They cant stop it and they never will short of creating laws that have the death penalty attached to it. Even then I dont see it stopping. Documents,movies,video,music,audio,art. it will exist in open and unrestricted forms in greater numbers and shared rampantly no matter what they do or what they try.
Why? because the general populace will never be stupid enough to believe that when they buy a CD or DVD they didn't buy anything but are only holding a delicate license to view it a limited number of times until the morther company wants to revoke it for any reason. The general public wont put up with it... and we dont.. looking at how "protected cd's" get ripped and on Gnutella,kazza,opennap,etc... minutes after release is proof enough.
Hey Movie companies, recording companies, writers, actors, musicians.. Thanks for the entertainment, but try and tell me how to enjoy it? then you can go straight to hell and
It's time we all stand up and collectivally flip off anyone that is for content control.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
if cars are made so they don't exceed the speed limit. We can just blame it on the speeders.
Interesting how thousands of Americans die yearly due to excessive speed, and yet, no bill is ever introduced into Congress suggesting this. Yet, let corporate profits be endangered by copying and all sorts of legislation is introduced to limit the machines responsible.
Even if people all use "approved" monitors and computers, they will be using them to view "free content" (free as in free speech, not free beer).
One of the nasty features of this sort of hardware "rights protection" is likely to be the tagging of any content WITHOUT DRM as "pirated". This is because the media companies know that no encryption scheme is crack-proof, and if they can't prevent cracking, they have to instead prevent anyone playing the cracked content. This has the added benefit of crushing smaller indy content producers who don't have the $$ or desire to use DRM. Surprise! Your "free content", distributed without DRM technology, won't play. Too bad, go rent "Men in Black III" instead.
Freedom: "I won't!"
It would regulate only devices capable of receiving digital television broadcasts.
That's funny, my PC receives digital television broadcasts.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.
How the fuck is that an 'upshot'!?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actually, sorry, but you're completely wrong. *Sure*, if people decide copyright is no longer relevant, and start copying movies so that studios can't afford to make the number they do we'll have fewer movies. But who says that we have to have as many movies as are made now? Why *should* we have computer games that people spent 2 years making? That's the point I'm making.
There's no reason why people have to support these sorts of things in perpetuity. There will always be bands who can make enough off live gigs, and films that don't waste so much money on special effects that they can survive on box office profits of the first printing of reels. So perhaps these things will become more expensive. So what? If society as a whole decides that copyright is no longer relevant, these are the sort of things that they decide along with it. But you can't just say 'Wah, they won't make 300 million dollar movies anymore' - perhaps society as a whole is willing to accept this.
My point, simply, is that if society does decide that, there is *no way* that the 'content industry' can protest about it. They can try to point out to consumers what they'd be losing, but there's no moral argument above social agreement to back it up.
Your property rights argument is a very good parallel. Clearly there is no reason why I can't walk off with your chair, except that we've all agreed that we don't like that, and want people to keep things where they are. We also have the power to make people who don't agree with us toe the line, but if everyone decides that property rights aren't relevant anymore, nobody can claim we have essential property rights (except maybe Ayn Rand). If society choose communism, that's as valid a choice as capitalism, and you can't argue with it if the society is agreed.
And yes, I think there's quite a bit of evidence that people don't terribly respect copyright anymore. The idea that Britney would be penniless if we didn't have copyright is ridiculous - official merchandising would always make her millions, even if the exact same thing was available but could have the 'official' label because of Trademarks.... Not, of course, that that's a good thing!
Okay, let's assume this becomes U.S. law. Now, is the rest of world going
/billion/
to say: Hey, look at this new technology invented by the U.S. government
that will let U.S. industry control our computers and stereos and CD
players to protect the interests of giant U.S. media corporations. Wow!
What a fantastic idea! Let's adopt it!
I think not.
I don't see the Germans buying computers with U.S. mandated content control
chips for their parliament, or Sony putting in U.S. designed chips into the
CD players they sell in Tokyo, or the Russians forcing all tape decks off
their market that haven't been approved by some U.S. media consortium. The
idea that the U.S. can force the rest of the world to implement what will
be immediately seen as a U.S. designed and controlled crypto system into
every machine that blinks, beeps, or boots is so brain dead that you just
know it can only come from a member of the U.S. Congress.
This is the Clipper Chip all over again.
When it comes down to it, the rest of the planet doesn't give a rat's ass
if their citizens aren't cooperating when 20th Century Fox, Microsoft, or
AOL-Time-Warner try to make the next billion Dollars so that these
<I>American</I> companies can get richer, give that money to their <I>American</I>
stockholders and top <I>American</I> executives and maybe even pay <I>American</I>
taxes that help finance <I>American</I> infrastructure, or, to put it bluntly,
the <I>American</I> military machine. They'd rather see their citizens spend
their money on local bratwursts, sushi, or vodka: That way it gets fed back
into the local economy.
their citizens rip, copy, and burn anything out of America they possibly
can. If you are a Chinese CS student, you can either spend money on a
Windows license, which means that your Yuan would join those 40
Dollars that Microsoft is stockpiling to buy Iceland and turn the whole
place into a ski resort for their top executives. Or, you can pirate the
Windows CD, and spend that money on, say, a Chinese book on C programming
at your local Beijing book store and kick those running imperialist
pig-dogs with Red Flag Linux. China is interested in getting their economy
on an information age footage, and they need operating systems for that,
the less expensive, the better. Why should they want machines that prevent
that?
No, what will happen if that law is passed - and remember, we're talking
about the country blissfully that is ignoring the fact that the rest of the
world has basically adopted one common mobile phone standard (not to
mention the metric system), still transfers money by sending slips of paper
in the mail, and who live with a television standard that is aptly named NTSC
- Never The Same Color - is that those people in Taiwan and Korea will
happily produce hobbled computer, CD, radio, TV, DVD and other parts for
the U.S. market, while continuing to ship the free technology to the rest
of the world. Hey, it's a global economy with billions of people hungry
for computers, and only about 270 million Americans who's computer market
is saturated anyway. What would you do?
Now because Content Controlled America is getting specially made parts,
they immediately miss out on the price cutting effects of mass production.
In other words: Hardware and electronics prices in the U.S. skyrocket,
because the other 5.75 billion people on the planet are using the old,
free, trusted, mass produced hardware, while Americans effectively have to
have every chip custom built. What we have after a few years of this is a
/hardware fork/ - the U.S. goes off into one direction, the other countries
in the other.
In the mean time, U.S. customs has started rectal searches of all
long-haired males coming back from Paris, France to make sure they aren't
smuggling free RAM into the country. You can't buy a CD in Britain because
they won't run on your content controlled player - just like the DVD
regional codes, but for real. And your TV station doubles the number of ads
during the next Olympics because they had to pay for those signals to be
transfered into U.S. content controlled format...
Great idea, guys.
Well, on the one hand, there's M$'s apparent eagerness to get into the anti-piracy club. Their patent on a DRM OS, the WinXP activation nonsense, etc.
On the other hand, there's their historic ineptitude in matters involving security.
So yeah. Microsoft will dominate the market. But get this: they will do so for the exact opposite reasons that they dominate the home PC market today. Right now, they own it because they have the most features and ease of use and this unfortunately results in poor security. Post-SSSCA, they'd have poor security fortunately resulting in the greatest allowance of features and ease of fair use.
Dyolf Knip
What is your problem with allowing people to use CD's/movies they legally own in the way they want to. It's far more convient to me to have all my CD's in Ogg format on my hard drive than have to switch cd's all day.
> Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in
> their best interest to side with the content
> guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been
> answered.
They probably hope to snag an exclusive license from the content providers.
About 40,000 people a year die in auto accidents. 10% would still leave thousands, wouldn't it? Anyway, www.legallawhelp.com says that 29% of fatalites involved speeding.
There you go.
Effectively, yes, you did violate the copyright. Mainly because it's probabilistically impossible to configure millions of random bits into a James Brown song, given the currently forseeable future of technology.
Tech people love to throw the "but it's all just bits" argument into a copyright debate. But the problem is that, NO, it's not all bits. It can be represented as bits, but it requires an analog (creative!) input to begin with. Since creativity is valued in our society, we give artists protection for a time.
The current law is ridiculously biased in favor of media giants, but we shouldn't throw copyright completely out because of that.
-Stu
I am not a consumer. I am a citizen. I both consume and produce goods, intellectual and otherwise.
If I am a consumer with my rights of authorship and fair use stolen from me, then so are you.
But no-one's complaining about not having to be a computer scientist to record TV shows so let them encrypt all they want in hardware.