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.'"

Comments

What's the issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Palladium, like computers and any other bit of technology, is a technology that can be used for good or evil. The people pushing it are only pointing out the good. The people against it are only pointing out the evil. In the end, if it doesn't work people will shun it like it's the latest version of TurboTax.

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.

Re:What's the issue?

[supabeast!]

I agree. Capitalism should have no problem eliminating overzealous, opressive DRM. There will be other companies producing hardware without Palladium. There will be software that does not use Palladium's DRM. There will be audio and video that is not tied down by Palladium.

All we have to do is accept that, and stop giving money to the rest. Unfortunately, the leaders in the movement against DRM are hypocrites like the Slashdot editors, men who attack companies like AOL/TW, Microsoft, Blizzard, Disney, etc, and then purchase and promote these companie's products with their next breath. These men have plenty of talk but no moxie. Until these idiots can stop buying a copy of Windows XP to play Warcraft III on while watching a "Fellowship of the Rings" DVD, they are just supporting the technologies they complain about, and doing NOTHING to stop the problem.

Re:Excuse me, but

[retards]

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.

Re:=[ sad

[Tim C]

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.

Re:Correction

[kfg]

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

Re:This is both good, and neccessary.

[EricWright]

Those mp3s on your hard drive aren't fair use. Those divx copies of lord of the rings aren't fair use either.

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...

Re:=[ sad

[Tim C]

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...

The real problem is interoperability

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why the problem?

[mcrbids]

"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...

Re:What's the issue? (WHAT?!)

[gosand]

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.

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.