MS Palladium Patent

Concerned Citizen writes "cryptome has Microsoft's patent for Palladium. Including such gems as: 2. The computerized method of claim 1, wherein protecting the rights-managed data comprises: refusing to load the untrusted program into memory. 14. The computerized method of claim 1, further comprising: restricting a user to a subset of available functions for manipulating the rights-managed data. And I'm sure we'll all be coerced to agree to Palliadium during a future security patch agreement."

Comments

Do you hear that too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm hearing "The Imperial March" in the background. Weird.

The Declaration of Software Freedom

[3seas]

To juxtapose the Patent against:

The Declaration of Software Freedom

(read the whole thing!) of which a subpart is:

"Current Software Commercial Organizations ...
hide source code to keep developers divided, disenfranchised and
dependent; tie inferior products to dominant ones; defiantly violate and
avoid court orders; quash promising competitive start-ups; leverage
dominant products into other, unrelated businesses; carve up markets to
eliminate real competition; utilize predatory pricing practices to
foreclose competition; commoditize and objectify their customers by making
them captive; cause developers to constantly re-invent the wheel by hiding
the source code; exercise general thuggish behavior in business dealings;
compel weak competitors to destroy their own innovative products to
protect established profitable ones; fail to respond to customer requests
and needs in a timely fashion; exploit natural "choke-holds" in the
economy for their own advantages; manipulate and delay technological
progress to maintain supremacy; hide coding bugs thereby jeopardizing
stability and security; de-humanize software developers by considering
them as "inputs" or "assets"; stifle innovation; "embrace and extend" or
otherwise pollute open standards in order to break and appropriate them;
use exclusionary contract provisions to enforce censorship over disclosure
of bugs and defects; shut-off or block channels of distribution to
legitimate competitors; announce vaporware to foreclose adoption of real
competitive products; frustrate, taunt and antagonize governmental
officials protecting the public interest; truncate choices; create
confusion and frustration in users by selling inferior code; take the
innovations developed by others as their own; practice differential
pricing to punish those that oppose them; misinform and exploit users;
use undocumented features as an anti-competitive device; suppress the
open, efficient and free nature of the scientific method by keeping the
code secret; purposefully break the code of competitors so that there are
code inoperabilities across products; prohibit friends from sharing
software with friends; coerce their users to fore-go promising competitive
technologies; use overly restrictive and exclusionary contracts against
weaker competitors; and perform other anti-social, anti-competitive and
improper acts to establish, maintain and extend their software
monopolies." ....well does this mean the above needs modification of does it mean the
Patent, being a public accessiable document, can be turn into evidence
against MS, for which they cannot remove from public access?

Yeah, but I don't think it was Microsoft...

[da cog]

I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of server processes suddenly cried out in terror, and suddenly silenced.

I feel something terrible has happened.

*** SOME TIME LATER ***

KONQUEROR: Our position's correct except... no cryptome.org.

ME: What do you mean? Where is it?

KONQUEROR: That's what I'm trying to tell you, kid, it ain't there. It's been totally blown away.

ME: How?

It's been destroyed... by the Slashdot.

KONQUEROR: The Slashdot crowd couldn't take down the whole site! It would take ten thousand people with more free time than I've...

*Alarm bell goes off* ...*** TO BE CONTINUED ***