Intellectual Property Manifesto for the UK

feepcreature writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for a balance in Intellectual Property rights between the interests of users, creators and publishers. There are 6 key recommendations, including: DRM should not override users' statutory rights; analogue rights should apply to digital media; and copyright terms should not be extended without evidence that this would be good for society. There is also part of the debate on the UK Government's Gowers review of Intellectual Property, due to report in the Autumn."

Comments

Re:DRM in the UK

[Ngwenya]

It's also aimed squarely at the boot system: a Trusted Computing enabled chipset on the motherboard can prevent the booting of any kernel, or bootable device, without an appropriate vendor signature. You'd better believe Microsoft wants this to prevent "Trusted Computing" hardware from booting non-authorized operating systems.

I'm sure they would like such a system. But they can't have it. A BIOS which issues a TPM_Startup command is still under the control of the platform owner (which is why the TPM primitives have the operation of "Take Ownership"). I take your point about adding to complexity if the user wishes to install another OS - but the disk is still under user control. It may be that an OS which the owner does not register cannot have the chain of trust built - and therefore cannot attest that the device should be trusted. It should still boot up, however (at least under the HP and IBM BIOSes that I've looked at it will)

Another thing though - the BIOS checks the signatures generated by the TPM - not the OS vendor. In other words, it's up to me as the platform owner to certify a particular device as my approved configuration. Now, it may that various h/w and OS vendors may give out a default configuration, but that absolutely can be reset by the platform owner (it's a requirement of the TCG). In a corporate environment, the platform owner will probably be the IT department; in a home environment, it will be the purchaser of the system, in all likelihood.

Don't get me wrong. I can see all sorts of stupid abuses of the TPM system which will (in effect) stop the use of a personal computer per se. Trusted Connect is one of these things which could be abused by ISPs to ensure only Windows boxes connect to their networks, which would be disastrous. My only point is that TPM has some really solid uses for F/OSS - it's not just the tool of the Great Satan to take away our digital freedom.

--Ng