Tag: DRM
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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…
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The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer
I was at a conference in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday. Participants included some people who are reasonably plugged in to the Washington political process. I was stunned to hear one of these folks sum up the Washington conventional wisdom like this: “The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a…
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Bricklin: Copy Protection Robs the Future
Dan Bricklin explains how copy restriction technology frustrates archiving of historically interesting works. Archivists normally preserve works by copying them; so works that can’t be copied may never be archived. Bricklin tells a sobering story about his attempts to recover an original copy of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program, of which Bricklin himself was the…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Rights"
A “right” is a legal entitlement – something that the law says you are allowed to do. But the term is often misused to refer to something else. Consider, for example, the use of “digital rights management” (often abbreviated as DRM) to describe technologies that restrict the use of creative works. In practice, the “rights”…
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Misleading Term of the Week: "Standard"
A “standard” is a technical specification that allows systems to work together to make themselves more useful. Most people say, for good reasons, that they are in favor of technical standards. But increasingly, we are seeing the term “standard” misapplied to things that are really regulations in disguise. True standards strive to make systems more…
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Lessig/DRM/End-To-End Debate: Resolved?
Larry Lessig and I had a brief blog-discussion last week about the meaning of the end-to-end principle(s), and how end-to-end applies to DRM. The discussion continued off-line, and we ended up in pretty close agreement. Here is my version of what we agree on: (1) End-to-end is not a single principle, but a cluster of…
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Ernest Miller on Lessig/DRM
Great new entry in the Lessig/DRM debate, from Ernest Miller at Lawmeme. This is starting to turn from a narrow debate about Lessig’s piece into a wider discussion of how to think about DRM and Palladium. I’m eager to see this wider discussion start.
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Network Centric DRM
Remember when I promised not to post anymore on Lessig’s DRM piece? I lied. I just have to respond to a comment from Lessig himself. He writes: … Felten is skeptical that copyprotection would be placed in the network. “From an engineer standpoint, that assumption looks wrong to me,” he says. But what if we…
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Lessig/DRM/Palladium Summary, at Copyfight
Donna Wentworth offers a pithy summary of the commentary on Lessig’s DRM piece, over at Copyfight.
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Lessig on Microsoft and DRM
Larry Lessig has a provocative piece in Red Herring on Microsoft’s plans regarding DRM and Palladium. Lessig says that Palladium is not as bad as some people say, and that Palladium may in fact benefit consumers (at least compared to the alternatives). This piece has provoked some really interesting discussion over on Copyfight, Ernie the…