--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: hutchinson@click.ncri.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 09:29:04 -0500 To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> From: hutchinson@ncri.com (Art Hutchinson) Subject: Content controls Cc: whgiii@invweb.net, dcsb@ai.mit.edu Sender: bounce-dcsb@ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: hutchinson@ncri.com (Art Hutchinson)
A whole bunch of people are now talking about these cash-settled recursive auction processes, and they're a direct, and now obvious, consequence of bearer (or at least instant) settlement markets for information on geodesic networks. When you add anonymity to the transaction, you pretty much have the final straw for "rights" tracking. Watermarks just tell you who the information was stolen from, for instance. So, one more industrial information process bites the dust.
Whoa! Hang on here. Sure, watermarks will tell you who information was stolen from, but they're just a stalking horse... a weak second cousin to *persistent* content control technologies (such as IBM's Cryptolopes and Intertrust's Digiboxes). These allow rightsholders to manage a wide range of parameters (including price, usage context, and any other variable for which you can imagine having a certificate). Whats fundamentally different about what are generically referred to as secure envelopes, is that they can maintain controls *indefinitely* (persistence), across an un- known, ad hoc, web of distribution over which one otherwise has no control. And yes, this can all work even in a completely disconnected environment (laptop at 35,000 feet).
They allow rightsholders, if they so choose, to *continue* being rights- holders in a highly networked, digital world, and in a wide range of new ways, based on entirely new (or old) business models, that take advantage of rich/elaborate conditions for usage (e.g. you can view this picture anonymously, but it will cost you 2X as much, and you can only get it at low resolution, and you can't view it at all unless you can prove that you don't live in the Middle East). No certificate for these conditions? Sorry, no content.
They are based the same basic stuff (public key cryptography of course) that *can* fuel wild anarchic visions of anonymous exchange. ;)
But they aren't at all deterministic of any particular economic model.
Well how exactly does one prevent data from being stolen once it has been unlocked? I pay my 2X to view the picture anonymously and now I copy it save it and distribute it worldwide. I fail to see how any encryption/watermark scheme can prevent me from doing so.
The control technologies to which I referred earlier turn the lock/unlock idea into far more than a binary choice. This is what I meant by "persistence". The content cannot be used without its accompanying control set (which again, *might* include payment). Part of the control set I may impose on anonymous viewers could include preventing them from copying or saving the content directly in digital form. This is counter-intuitive to those of us who are used to having cut/paste available at our fingertips in most applications, but its relatively trivial to disable these functions on a file by file basis. Alternatively, I might impose controls that permit anonymous users to see *only* lower reso- lution versions. (by analogy, if you're going to wear a ski mask into a jewelry store, you aren't likely to be shown the expensive stuff - if they let you in the door in the first place). If you were really determined, you could always take a photo of the screen, re-scan it, do some image enhancement to get rid of the graini- ness, re-save it and post it on your web page for all to see, (the so-called digital-to-analog-to-digital work-around), but this is darned inconvenient. Also, try doing that with music or movies.... while avoiding the roving automated net 'bots that will be out looking for illegal copies of content (these are already common). Not worth it. For most people. If it were, we'd already have massive illegal scanning operations in third-world countries, and plenty of demand for their wares. Sure, this exists, and may even grow a bit around the fringes, but this hardly proves the case for a single vision of an anarchic Robin Hood future for all content (Sell today else I rip you off tomorrow!!) As a non-disclosed third party, I'm not at liberty to discuss the 'guts' of either the Crytolope or Digibox technologies (though I have seen them) Both are covered, as you might imagine, by a fairly extensive array of active and pending patents. If you want to learn more, I'd recommend contacting them directly: www.intertrust.com (or their partner, Softbank NetSolutions) www.infomkt.ibm.com Cheers. - Art Art Hutchinson hutchinson@ncri.com Northeast Consulting Resources, Inc. phone: (617) 654-0635 One Liberty Square fax: (617) 654-0654 Boston, MA 02160 www.ncri.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Working at the intersection of business and IT strategy to help organizations embrace electronic commerce opportunities" For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help". --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>