Anonymous wrote:
The amazing thing about this discussion is that there are two pieces of conventional wisdom which people in the cypherpunk/EFF/"freedom" communities adhere to, and they are completely contradictory.
I can't agree. Strong protection of copyright is probably possible if the content owner only distributes the content to tamperproof trusted hardware. Strong protection of copyright is probably not possible if the content is available on hardware under control of untrusted parties. Where's the contradiction? Another point you seem to be missing is that there is a middle ground between perfect copy-protection and no copy-protection. This middle ground may be very bad for the public. Take, for instance, Adobe's rot13-class encryption: this offered only weak copy-protection, as any serious pirate could defeat it, but the copy-protection is just strong enough to be bad for fair use and for research, and possibly just strong enough to serve Adobe's corporate interests.
Let us suppose that this is the world ten years from now: you can run a secure OS in "trusted" mode and be eligible to download movies and music for a price; or you can run in untrusted mode and no one will let you download other than bootleg copies. This is the horror, the nightmare vision which the doom-sayers frantically wave before us.
No, it's not. Read Ross Anderson's article again. Your analysis misses part of the point. Here's an example of a more problematic vision: you can buy Microsoft Office for $500 and be able to view MS Office documents; or you can refrain from buying it and you won't be able to view MS Office documents. Do you see why this is problematic? It lets one vendor lock the world into a monopoly; noone else will be able to develop compatible MS Word viewers without the consent of Microsoft. (StarOffice on Linux won't work, because to get the session key to decrypt the Word document your viewer has to go online to microsoft.com and ask for it, but microsoft.com won't give you the key unless you've bought a "secure" "trusted" OS and purchased Microsoft Office for $500.) Now notice that the same idea can be used to inhibit competition in just about any computer market, and I hope you appreciate Ross's point. TCPA/DRM has the potential for anti-competitive effects, and the result may well be worse off than we are today.