DRM More Important Than Life or Security?

An anonymous reader writes "Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has an interesting writeup regarding how copyright holders are still having serious objections to the built in exceptions of the DMCA even when it might threaten lives or national security. From the article: 'One would have thought they'd make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn't threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.'"

Comments

Critical Infrastructure

[Indy Media Watch]

Systems which are considered mission critical or whose loss/damage/downtime could endanger human life fall into a category of their own. This category tends to have failsafe design safeguards built from the ground up.

There is a reason air traffic control systems don't run Windows XP.

For the same reason, I expect such systems would have a large sign hanging off the front of them saying "Do NOT use this system for playing your new Britney CD".

I accept the argument he is making, however I believe the scenario is unlikely.

Re:Critical Infrastructure

[khakipuce]

One of the big issues with infrastructure kit is obsolescence. Twenty or thirty years down the line there are no spares available for the hardware, and the company that made it may have folded (and it is expected to go for this long and no it isn't PCs).

So one solution is to write an emulator for the equipment that needs replacing and possibly run this on a rack mount "industial" PC. What's inside the PC? pretty much standard stuff, and in a few years I guess this may be forced to include DRM chips. Which either means ruling out this as an option, or doing extra validation to prove that the DRM hardware does not lead to unexpected results.

I've seen this done with PC's to replace teletypes, PCs to replace tape drives, PCs to replace hardware montiors ...

Re:Critical Infrastructure

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

There is a reason air traffic control systems don't run Windows XP.

Yes, because they run Windows 2000.

Re:"Copyright holders" don't give a fuck ...

[khakipuce]

If you every created anything, you too are a copyright holder. I believe that's the whole point of "copy-left" type licenses - i.e. they make it ok for you to copy my work, otherwise it would not be ok. And if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions. I do agree with your sentiment though, the big publishers never create anything themselves and yet seek to protect copyrights so that they get their large slice of someone else's talent

It's fairly simple

[petrus4]

Some of the people who want this technology (most of them in fact, I'd guess) are people who do literally value money more than life itself. They're the type who haven't learned what Cal Hockley did when he tried to buy a place on one of the lifeboats during the sinking of the Titanic; namely, that money isn't some kind of miraculous cure-all that can make them completely impervious to problems.

So yeah...Money to them is more important than anything else. More important than longevity, more important than having edible food or breathable air, more important than people. (Including, if they were honest, their own loved ones)

Reminds me of a businessman I heard about once who was interviewed about the cancer risk from mobile phone use. He said that even if there was a risk of brain cancer from using a mobile phone, he still would, because it was too important for, you guessed it, making money.

That's the type of mentality we're dealing with here...the type that thinks that having money is literally more important than being alive to spend it.

Re:"Copyright holders" don't give a fuck ...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

if you are a creative person there is nothing wrong with trying to make a living from your cretions.

Of course there is.
It would be obviously wrong to point a gun at someone and make them pay for a copy, "or else."

My point is that there is nothing wrong up to a point and then there is wrong.

The debate is about where that point is when it goes from right to wrong. Some people believe that point is just short of pointing the gun, and some people believe that the point is all the way back at simply publishing the creation. A lot of people don't really know where they think the point is, just somewhere in between those two extremes and thus you get the constant debate, rehashing the same ideas over and over again.

Re:"Copyright holders" don't give a fuck ...

[ultranova]

The most "successful" diseases are those that merely inconvenience their host, such as for instance, the common cold.

Actually, the most succesfull parasites are those that figure out how to not only do no harm to their host, but to actually benefit it. Your stomach bacteria are a good example: a human will try to get rid of flu (by resting), while a human will try to keep his stomach bacteria healthy - since if he doesn't, his body will work worse than it does with them.

The most succesfull parasites are those who stop being parasites and become symbiotes. Especially when we are talking about an intelligent host species, which might figure out how to get rid of inconvenient freeriders, but won't bother with things that won't bother them.