Slashdot Mirror
John Perry Barlow On The Dangers of DRM
D4C5CE writes "In an extensive interview with one of Europe's most renowned IT publishers, EFF cyber-rights activist John Perry Barlow speaks out against attempts to bring the entire planet under the control of dangerous Digital Restrictions Management schemes overprotected by clones of the dreaded DMCA (Dumbest Mistake on Copyright in America, or something). Barlow is one of countless critics of DRM and the DMCA, including Lawrence
Lessig and many other Professors
of Law as well as Linux Kernel Guru Alan Cox and the Internet
Society. Now, are you mailing, faxing and reading these views to all of the many misguided opponents of the BALANCE Act?"
" I fear that Digital Rights Management today is Political Rights Management tomorrow. That embedding these kinds of technological controls into the very architecture of computing has the capacity to become a form of political control in the not so distant future." this is a great article that sums up some of the most importantn issues concerning our own willingness (as a culture) to trade control for convenience. even more, it highlights why this is such a dangerous idea. its true, doctor: i'm a Your Rights Online addict.
>>> John Perry Barlow: There are three things at stake. The first is, extending a monopoly to a few large organizations about what people can or cannot know and express. This is really about the control of information and it has the potential to become over time a kind of private totalitarianism. That is not an exaggeration since it has already happened in the United States. The reason that the U.S. is behaving in the completely irrational and dangerous way that it is, is because we have erected private totalitarianism and are suffering a reality distortion field that is as dangerous as the one erupted in Germany in the 1930s. But not being driven by the government, but being driven by the media. Being driven by ourselves. I fear erecting a system which highly advantages a very few corporate channels for human intellectual exchange >>>
Amen. It seems in the past 1 1/2 years more and more proposed legislation has gotten to the point where I wonder if half my representatives can even turn on a computer or work a CD player.
Look at some of the preposterous things we have been inundated with and will continue to be until we speak up to our representatives and provide them the proper information and insight into IT laws. Right now the basis of most of it is to hinder competition and prosper monopolies ala the garage door opener lawsuit[universal remotes].
Fear Breeds Knowledge
TCPA is more standards compliant and may let you do this. Yes palladium lets you lock your own word docs but it seems Microsoft would love to have an xbox like pc where only they can sign apps. This would ineffect kill competition since only Microsoft apps could get signed. This has not been confirmed and is speculation but I trust an open standard over a proprietary one.
TCPA also has a randam number generator chip which could be usefull in ecommerce applications as well as locking documents. TCPA is more of an encryption card solderied into a motherboard where as palladium uses chips in every single component including the ram and cpu in a trust relationship tamper proof nightmare. The master ssc chip has a set of master keys that it uses to unlock all the keys from all of the other peripherals.
Sadly typical ignorant and niave corporate american will believe the hype and would love to drm their word and excell files thinking it was designed for their needs in mind.
http://saveie6.com/
You're right, the term "privacy" is never written explicity in the constitution itself. However, the 4th amendment does effectively create this right, as stated:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This affirms my right to online (read: papers in electronic form) privacy (read: security). Granted, the choice of words, namely "security", is open to a degree of interpretation but I'd bet privacy is what they had in mind.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
>I would glady trade my privelege of "online
>privacy" (whatever that means) in order to live
>safely in a world free of terror.
If you give up privileges and don't get to live in a utopia, will you still have that opinion, or will you want your privileges back?
>What makes you think that you have some inherent
>right to "online privacy" or "online freedom"? I
>don't see that in the bill of rights or the
>constitution itself, do you?
I do. I see it between the lines. The very spirit from whence the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were forged is borne on the blood of a revolution against a government which had sought to supress dissent through any and all means.
>Get used to it or go somewhere else.
Or participate in the process of government? Or is that not an option, in your black and white view of the world?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Sadly typical ignorant and niave corporate american will believe the hype and would love to drm their word and excell files thinking it was designed for their needs in mind.
But I thought that DRM was exactly designed with the needs of corporate america in mind? The need to control. I want to control who does what with the portion of text you copied & pasted from the e-mail message I sent you yesterday. I want to control it, even after it is on your computer and copy&pasted into a different document. That's the point of DRM. It's exactly for corporate america. I want to control not only that piece of text, or that portion of a graphic image, but also a clipped portion of an audio or video clip. As long as I can trust all the software running on your computer, then the future promise of this will become a beautiful and wonderful reality. They can manage your rights for you. Automatically. It's quick. It's easy. No thinking required.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Would you be happy for somebody to be listening in to you dinner table conversation, just to make sure that you are not planning a terrorist attack? (If you are thinking "no way, virtual privacy is a different issue to 'real' privacy", suppose that a couple of your friends couldn't make it to the dinner party and you are having a conversation on mIRC instead)
What if the topic of that dinner conversation was a (hypothetical) "accidental" police beating of an innocent suspect? Would you feel uncomfortable having that conversation, knowing that those same people could be listening to you?
What if your dinner table conversation was about planning some kind of protest, say to confront the local mayor about some abuse of government power? Would you still have that conversation if you knew there was a liklihood that the mayor could end up with tapes of your conversation? And what if your protest was going to be mildy illegal (say, a congregation in a public place for which police permission had been denied)? You might be prepared to take the consequences, indeed the media coverage would just serve to highlight the protest, but what if your conversation could be used to prevent the protest from taking place at all? (say, by arresting you prior to the protest?) Sure, there is no one getting dragged off to the gulag here, but isn't the freedom of the public to act against injustice ultimately one of the cornerstones of Democracy? What happens when you eliminate this cornerstone?
Moving onto terrorism itself, is there any evidence that existing "online privacy" was an important factor that has enabled acts of terrorism to be successful in the past?
Is there any evidence that eliminating such privacy would stop acts of terror in the future?
Even if there is no privacy for ordinary citizens, the anti-terror squads obviously need privacy themselves. It is obviously silly to have every action of the secret police being broadcast over the intenet, indeed they will be much more effective if they have total privacy. So, there needs to be at least two classes of citizens, ordinary joes, who have no privacy, and the secret police who have total privacy. How does such a two-class system fit in with the ideal, of representative Democracy? How do you keep checks on a system that is so one-sided? Who is watching the watcher?
Even if privacy is eliminated, doesn't that at best only make it harder to plan and carry out terrorism? In what sense would it reduce/eliminate the causes of terrorism?
Indeed, what impact do you think the loss of privacy would have on people who already hate the government enough to consider terrorism? Wouldn't it just make the situation worse?
Ultimately, do you think people can/should should be trusted to hold private conversations?
Of course. But the direction we are heading is along the lines of "your ziplock bag must remain open and in view on the passenger seat at all times". In effect, bypassing the need for a warrant by eliminating privacy.
there is nothing to prevent "the dead" or any band, or any writer, or any artist, from releasing their music for free on the internet. nothing but the big fat contracts these people sign with the evil companies which sell-outs like barlow say wants to rule the world. "yeah, my stuff is valuable, but everyone else's stuff should be free." DMCA ain't the problem folks, it's how people use it. you don't like copyright - fine, don't use it. give your stuff away for free, but don't force other people to give their stuff away for free. it's failed everywhere it's been tried.
Ask the Irish. The British government wasn't the worst colonial government, but they had their share of very nasty stretches. Bear in mind also that it's entirely possible that the British decided to change their policies in response to the War for Independence. When one group of colonies decides that you're acting tyranically and launches a successful revolution to throw you out, it might be a good idea not to implement the same policies in your other colonies for fear of a repeat.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.