On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, Jay Sulzberger wrote:
To deal with the tiny bit of truth in the claims of AARG! that some capabilities of DRM might be beneficial to me: Yes, of coures, there are few things that have zero benefits. But this is hardly relevant. A more relevant question here is: Can we get the benefits in a better way? And of course, we can. For the purposes of this narrow and hypothetical discussion, DRM might just be considered as a dongle forced on every home computer in the world. The claims of benefit depend on this dongle being usable by me to make sure that you do not do certain things with my program/data when it is running on your computer, e.g., distribute the movie I send you. Well, why must the dongle be on the whole computer system? Why cannot it be simply a dongle that goes in a slot in a special TV screen/speaker system? Now this is a "product"!, why we'll sell 'em the screens and we'll sell the dongle separately, etc.. Of course, the Englobulators have no interest in making and selling such dongles. Indeed, were Phillips to start making and selling such, somehow a legal cause of action against Phillips would be discovered and the suits would commence.
I think this is what it boils down to. If I want a dongle for an arbitrary suite of products I should be able to go to some store and buy it. There's no reason it has to be built into the motherboard. the Microsoft X-box can have a built in dongle chip, it's purpose is to ensure that only MS certified games run on the box. I don't see any problem with that. And I don't see any problem with Hollywood (or Bollywood either) selling HDTV's with their own dongles. As an argument to congress we need to stress that TCP's are fine as isolated devices for specific purposes. There is *NO NEED* to make general purpose computers TCP's. Where there is a market for TCP's, I'd expect companies to want the ability to put their own keys into the dongle, not some outside manufacturer who they might not trust. TCP's and DRM is useful to some people, and those people should be able to buy it. But there's really no need to force it on everyone, and that's the point we need to get congress to understand. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike