Tag: DRM

David Weinberger explains the value of “leeway,” or small decisions not to enforce the rules in cases where enforcement wouldn’t be reasonable. Imagine that your mother were visiting your apartment, and she got sick, so you let her stay overnight because she wan’t well enough to travel home. If this happened, no reasonable landlord would…

Seth Schoen raises two interesting issues in his response to Richard Stallman’s essay on “trusted computing.” (To see Seth’s posting, click here and scroll down to the “Trusted computing” heading.) Stallman says [Trusted computing] is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Schoen responds: Neither of these concerns is applicable at…

Alex Halderman, a senior here at Princeton, has written a very interesting paper entitled “Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs.” Here is the paper’s abstract: Several major record labels are adopting a new family of copy-prevention techniques intended to limit “casual” copying by compact disc owners using their personal computers. These employ deliberate data…

Seth Finkelstein and Eric Albert criticize my claim that the fallacy of the almost-general-purpose computer can best be illustrated by analogy to an almost-general-purpose spoken language. They make some good points, but I think my original conclusion is still sound. Seth argues that speech (or a program) can be regulated by making it extremely difficult…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…