-- On 8 Jul 2002 at 1:51, Anonymous wrote:
Nick Szabo created the idea of Smart Contracts several years ago. http://www.best.com/~szabo. These would be self-enforcing agreements that were based on technology rather than laws. It all sounded cool at the time.
But isn't DRM a form of Smart Contract? If I need a special viewer to download some content, and that viewer enforces the terms of the contract which allows me to do the download, that enforcement happens without any laws. It is all handled by the technology. It's a Smart Contract.
Voluntary DRM is indeed a form of smart contract, If there was no pressure from the content industry, if copyright and patent law was not expanding lawlessly and corruptly, in defiance of technological trends, it would not worry me. If the smarts were in a dongle that that you attached to your USB port, or in a program that you could run or not run, it would not worry me. The trouble is that this idea looks as the a stalking horse for the policeman inside your computer. The history of this idea is as follows: The entertainment industry proposed and lobbied for an proposal to stop ordinary consumers to from having any more real computers. They wanted legislation, the SSSCA which would prohibit consumers from buying computers that could be programmed to do whatever the programmer desired. The computer industry went ballistic, foreseeing that customers would refuse to "upgrade" to these new, crippled, computers, and the proposal appears dead in the water. However it is the nature of businessmen to always try to make a deal, so any such conflict will be followed by some attempt to make a settlement with the entertainment industry, and palladium/DRM seems to be such a settlement. On the one hand, if the DRM is truly voluntary, it will not hurt upgrade sales, so the computer industry genuinely wants DRM to be truly voluntary, just as claimed. On the other hand, if DRM computers are acceptable to the masses, and are usually run in DRM mode, then IF they are widely accepted, the computer industry could accept a law mandating involuntary DRM in all new computers without losing sales. Thus DRM represents a marketing feeler -- it represents the computer industry trying to see to what extent it can make computers acceptable to the content industry without making them unacceptable to the user. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Fj1T7cM+dvYj4GMSBURIK+ul0L/XR5VWtbl9sy9W 2xMtrLIAKzh9iwHyUsHVLaWYcMGUbl0BDKb4uVHAf