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Palladium's Power To Deny
BrianWCarver writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has the most detailed article I've yet seen on Microsoft's Palladium architecture. The article discusses the potential Palladium has to give publishers power to eliminate fair use and the potential for software manufacturers to use Palladium to enforce shrink-wrap licenses. Comments from several great sources including, Ed Felten (Freedom to Tinker), Eben Moglen (pro-bono counsel for the Free Software Foundation and recent Slashdot interviewee), and Seth Schoen (Electronic Frontier Foundation) among many others. Key quotations from article: Palladium could create 'a closed system, in which each piece of knowledge in the world is identified with a particular owner, and that owner has a right to resist its copying, modification, and redistribution. In such a scenario the very concept of fair use has been lost.' 'Palladium will "turn the clock back" to the days before online information was widely available.' and 'Microsoft could decide to lock everything up.'"
This isn't where the fight should be. Instead, we should be avoiding the products of the companies that would use such technology for purposes of controlling what we can do with what we own.
'Microsoft could decide to lock everything up'
Isn't the reality that the content creators would be the ones locking everything up? Who says MS is going to for them?
Another stupid poke at MS I assume? Damn that's getting old.
Maybe by buying the patent or suing the owner of that patent until he/she is forced to sell it or capitulate. Sound familiar? It takes money to use a patent as leverage.
Well, perhaps they are just more concerned about the potential loss of life, than some computing thing that they've never heard of?
Palladium may well be very news worthy in the industry press, but trust me, almost no-one outside of the IT industry is going to have heard of it. *Everyone* has heard about Iraq.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
do not upgrade?
A lot of people use windows out there, A LOT. Open-source software et al. need to get their software to these users.
Go to the register and read many stories about just how hard it is to stay out of the upgrade-cycle-of-death that is windows software licensing
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
Lies are truth and the truth are lies.
The oldest trick in the book is to identify that aspect of your product that is going to be most harmful to your customers and spin it as a plus.
Nobody advertises 40 room mansions on 1000 acres as "spacious." That epithet is reserved for studio apartments in a "bee hive."
KFG
Bullshit. I bought those albums, so it is most certainly fair use. If I started sharing them with someone else, then it would not be. Just because I carry 10GBs of mp3/ogg on my laptop does NOT mean I have violated any law, civil or criminal.
Similarly, how is having a divx copy of LotR illegal if I bought the dvd and ripped it myself?
I can only assume you're referring to people who illegally download mp3s or make divx copies of illegally recorded theatrical showings of movies, but you need to be specific! The lack of specificity insinuates that we're all rampant filesharers, or that the only use of MPEG compression technology is piracy. Keep it up and the next thing you know, the MPEG consortium will have to disband or be incarcerated...
Two thought come to mind on this one:
First: "If you hack it, they will crack it." Go right ahead and give us DRM, because one way or another someone will find a way to circumvent it.
Second: These kinds of moves are exactly what undermine the power of the content holders. The more tightly the MPAA and RIAA squeeze content up their asses, the more energy, resources and popular attention that will go to the small-time independents who are actually doing something creative, and the more fragmented the audience will become. Fair use is what makes the world go round..
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Ah, but few people are seeing it because it's not happening all at once.
Things like this, the general population won't know about until it's implemented and is being sold to them, and then, they'll only have the positive marketing spin (and perhaps a little bit of nay-saying in the general press, but nothing technical or deep).
Things like the laws passed in the wake of the WTC attack get through, becuase
a) it makes people feel safe, and as though people are doig soemthing about it
b) "I have nothing to hide"
I do agree with you, and take some solace from the fact that I'm in (and from) the UK. Of course, where the US leads, we (blindly) follow...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
But as far as your comment goes :
WTF?A. It is hardly saddening, that the people are concerned about their gov't jumping into war.
B. Isn't smarter to protest before a war happens, than after?
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Like the article mentions, if the content provider, i.e. Word. Decides that only Word can read the article you just wrote. It means that OpenOffice can't open it (or any other competitor).
If I want to add a plugin to a program. The program, might just say: no! you need to be a plugin approved by my company, not some random plugin. You thief!
In other words, my beef with Paladium is that the security control is set at the level of the creator and not of the user. That in itself is not a problem until you realise that the control given to the creator is a lot more then simply "the right to copy and distribute" it affects the righ to interoperate between programs (in the name of being virus free).
The software industry does not have a history of being open minded, I'd suspsect that by default interoperability would be set to off.
Sad.
"I have been wondering what the issue is. If this is such a bad product, don't buy it. "
What's the problem, you say?
Microsoft==Monopoly.
Don't like the price you pay for electic power? If this is such a bad product, don't buy it.
Are you dis-satisfied with your telephone service? If this is such a bad product, don't buy it.
Are you unhappy with the performance of the latest Ford auto? If this is such a bad product, don't buy it.
Notice that this last one is much more feasible than the previous two!
Microsoft is in that position. Because of the proven anti-competitive practices of a convicted monopolist, I don't really have that choice. As a software developer, I have to account for Windows as a platform or stop making money.
And, if Microsoft decides that they EOL any non-Palladium O/S, millions will be forced to buy it, simply because they have no effective choice.
Linux (Hooray!) is becoming an option, and I'll do everything I can to get it in use, but it's not there yet. I can't yet readily make a living producing software unless I at least allow accessability to Windows users.
And Microsoft still has the power to potentially stonewall Linux adoption for a long time, and it's my feeling that Palladium is how they'll try do it.
Only time will tell...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If all that content owners were doing is "attempting to enforce their rights", then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
It's really about content owners claiming more rights than they currently have. If I buy a dead-tree book, I can't make copies and sell or distribute them. But I can still make a copy of a page for my own use, or lend or give away the original to a friend. I still control the one physical copy that I have bought. DRM takes these rights away from the consumer. It takes control away from the consumer.
I agree with you that all the people who are mooching need to stop! But I contend that DRM advocates are using the cause of preventing piracy as a smokescreen. Their real goal is to control our behavior to a much higher extent, so that they can separate us from our money quicker. Even if there were no piracy, the push for DRM will not go away, as you suggest. Because Piracy is not the reason for it, it's just the excuse.
I guess all this will do is make it so the most widespread works out there are the ones people publish free to copy and distribute. I mean, who is going to pay the kinds of prices that they are going to want to charge you once they know you can't get it elsewhere.
As an aspiring author (as a hobby, not for a living) of a fantasy novel, I have been looking at publishing recently and have decided to self publish my work and allow people to freely distribute it. Why? Well, I have a day job, and while extra money is nice, I don't really need to make money off of my novel and I don't really expect to make a living off of it either. Instead it is a hobby for me, my art if you will and I am more interested in getting it wide exposure than on some best seller list somewhere.
If my work is good, word of mouth will push it around and people will load it off my website to read. If not, it flops but I'm not really out a cent, just whatever time I put into it, which is no big loss because that time would like as not been spent playing computer games anyway.
But the advantages are, I can get widespread coverage to a large and diverse audience. I retain full rights so that if the story is considered movie material, I get to keep all of what the studio doesn't take. I can publish it anywhere at any time, for money or for free. So in a way, I don't need to worry about Palladium. If someone releases a work, no matter how good, which is locked up and expensive and pay by the bloody minute spent watching, I won't waste my time or money on it and I'm willing to bet a lot of you won't either.
As an aside to this, I wonder if a "free publishing" community will start up where people donate time and experience to writing material which goes straight into the public domain instead of locked up in copyright for life + forever. Schools, libraries and teachers would likely be happy to have such work available royalty free and aspiring writers can practice on free stuff the way coders do on open source software. After all, look what Open Source is doing to Microsoft. If the publishers get nasty, then we should be able to take them on in a similar way and have similar success. It would be great to have a library of the people, of free and public domain works which can be freely read, copied and sited without having to hunt someone down to ask permission. This isn't the same as current libraries, most works in current libraries are illegal to copy (though most people do it anyway) and sometimes you can't even site without permission. So we could use a nice library of *only* free and public domain works which can be used for whatever you wish. Better yet, it could be online and fully unlocked so Palladium be damned you could still read, copy and use such works in your own endeavors. In the end, I think everyone might benefit from such a movement.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Here's the real problem: There is no doubt in my mind experienced computer users will find a way to work around Palladium schemes. But we are only a small segment of computer users. The reality is that this technology will restrict those who aren't computer savvy. The result still will be that the computer becomes far less egalitarian. And this is the real problem. This is a very basic argument about who controls information, who creates it and who uses it. While there will be exceptions, with Palladium shifts this troika decidedly towards big business and away from consumers. That is scary, and to my mind, downright Orwellian.
Sorry, you don't own anything anymore, you license it.
While I agree with you in principle, I know that it won't work. Old saying - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The average person, which BTW outnumbers the "in-the-know" crowd by about a million to 1, will not care. If the only thing that Dell sold was Palladium computers, the public would buy them. They won't go out of their way to avoid it, they will fork over their cash because as far as they are concerned, it isn't a big deal.
Our duties as the technically literate is to make sure that things like Palladium do not happen. The (potential) cost far outweighs the (potential) benefits.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The sheeple will happily buy their latest Dell/Gateway/whatever PC hardware with TCPA and an MS Palladium OS. They will never know what they are doing.
Saying that the market will do something about it is like saying the market will reject...
- Macrovision
- Encrypted DVD's
- A tax on blank media
- DMCA
- UCITA
- COPA
- CALEA
The problem is that the market must have a choice. A word not in Microsoft's vocabulary. Oh, wait... Choice...I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I hate to be the one to site pornography and other questionable material as the driving factor in most of humanity's entertainment expression mediums (with the exception of Videogames, oddly), but with a real lockdown of media and information on the Windows platform, won't that encourage more people to transition to alternatives such as Linux and Macintosh? Considering the BSA's estimates that 2/3rds of all software is pirated, and if this turns out to be a truly effective way to stop the piracy of not just programs but also video and audio data, it seems like TCO arguments by otherwise law abiding citizens will sway towards mediums that are easier to pirate on. The Playstation, for example, was notoriously easy to pirate, and that helped drive sales as a platform. Pirating Playstations doesn't help Sony persay (although late in the life of the platform hardware sales were profitable for Sony), but a preponderance of available software does help Microsoft retain their leveraging points (and I don't mean the quality of their software).
Now, perhaps some sort of middle ground will finally be reached, between overbroad click-through agreements and overly cheap end consumers. Or perhaps many people will make a move to a system where, for example, Kazaa will still work. Or perhaps Microsoft will take the intelligent (from their business standpoint) road and setup a system which allows piracy to flourish but can protect studio-released content from seeping into that region.
Either way, this looks great for that other OS, OpenBEOS. I mean, Linux.
The ______ Agenda
Is to educate the massess. Sorry but you aren't going to legsliate something like this out of existance. Even if you could, it would kind of be a strongarm tactic on par with what the RIAA does in reverse. However the public can be convinced it's a bad thing and told not to buy it. Happened with Divx. Hollywood had decided they liked the Divx pay-to-play model and it, not DVD (it was a DVD extension) would be the next big thing. Most studios were doing Divx-first releases and some were doing no DVD releases at all.
Well people got together and educated the average joe on why Divx sucked and why they should not buy it. The acerage joe listened, Divx sold for shit, and Circut City took a bath to the tune of $100 million.
That's the real way to beat Pallidium: Convince the public it's bad and that they don't want it. Companies go where the money is, and if people won't buy Pallidium stuff, they'll stop selling it.
Palladium lets me control how my software will run on your computer. I should consider that a good thing.
However, what isn't stated is that Palladium lets you control how I use my computer. That I do not like.
Thus, Palladium is equal and symmetric, except for one thing. Given the power relationship between me and (say) a typical software company, Palladium will only be used to maintain and strengthen their power over me through abuse and control.
Thus, although it nominally gives me the ability to control others, that control will be useless to me in practice. This is much like how copyright supposedly gives band's the control over the music industry. *laugh*
Might not cost anything to defend yourself, but to defend yourself SUCCESSFULLY? That's a different kettle of fish.
Even if I were a legal genius, if I have a day job, and I spend my time in court rather than working, that costs me. Sure, you might argue that if that were so, I might be well advised to make a living practicing law, but there is an opportunity cost related to being in court rather than doing something else with your time.
So, yes, justice costs. As long as people (and judges) think that expensive suits mean credible arguments, justice costs.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!