Author: Ed Felten
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Schoen: Palladium Can Have an "Owner Override"
Seth Schoen argues that “trusted systems” like Palladium can have a sort of manual override that allows the owner to get all of the data on a machine, even if it is protected by DRM. As Seth points out, the main implication of this is that it is possible to build a system like Palladium…
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Give Us Analog. No Wait, We Meant Digital.
Remember when Hollywood wanted to ban digital outputs on media devices? The rationale was that digital outputs were uniquely copyable. Here’s Jack Valenti addressing a congressional hearing back in April: But it is digital piracy that gives movie producers multiple Maalox moments. It is digital thievery, which can disfigure and shred the future of American…
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White House Cybersecurity Czar Urges DMCA Reform
Today’s Boston Globe reports, in an article by Hiawatha Bray, on comments made at a “town meeting” yesterday by Richard Clarke, the head of the White House’s Office of Cybersecurity: At the town meeting, Clarke responded to a question about the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The act makes it illegal to publicize the existence…
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Fritz's Hit List #19
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: audio greeting cards. Greeting cards of this type either play a prerecorded audio track, or record an audio track for later playback. Because the recorded track is stored in digital form, these cards qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any newly…
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Seth Schoen Makes a Doubleplusgood Point
Following up on Arnold Kling’s observation about non-general-purpose languages, Seth Schoen reminds us that Orwell’s 1984 featured a language called “Newspeak,” in which it was supposedly impossible to express subversive thoughts. Seth offers this quote from 1984: Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc,…
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Kling: The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Language
In a previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer,” I asked readers for help in finding a way to explain to non-techies why non-general-purpose computers are so vastly inferior to general-purpose ones. Many readers responded with good suggestions. But Arnold Kling’s explanation is by far the best: Trying to design a limited-purpose computer is…
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Fritz's Hit List #18
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: the Kung Fu Fighting Hamster. This six-inch hamster doll dances, swings a tiny nunchuck, and sings “Kung Fu Fighting” in an annoying voice. Because it plays a copyrighted recording (presumably from digital storage), it qualifies for regulation as a “digital media device” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes,…
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Report from Agenda 2003
Dan Gillmor notes my posting on almost-general-purpose computers, and says Felten would have been rolling his eyes yesterday at the Agenda 2003 conference, where three members of the Hollywood establishment proved their absolute cluelessness about technology while confirming the prevailing Washington “wisdom” – the notion that we can somehow stop one kind of copying without…
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Washington Post on Tech Regulation
Today’s Washington Post quotes Fred von Lohmann of the EFF as saying that putting Hollywood in charge of technological progress would be like “putting the dinosaurs in charge of evolution.” The Post article also includes this artfully constructed paragraph: Hollywood wants to add a “digital flag,” or identifier, to coming digital television broadcasts, that would…
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Don't Blame "The Government"
Some people have interpreted my previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer” as saying that the U.S. government views general-purpose computers as a threat. That’s not quite what I meant to say. What I meant to say was that in Washington law/policy/lobbyist circles, the proposition that general-purpose computers might be too dangerous is now…