--- begin forwarded text X-Sender: hutchinson@click.ncri.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 6 Nov 1997 14:52:30 -0500 To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> From: hutchinson@ncri.com (Art Hutchinson) Subject: Re: Hughes Markets? (Was Re: Copyright commerce and the street musician protocol) Cc: dcsb@ai.mit.edu Sender: bounce-dcsb@ai.mit.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-To: hutchinson@ncri.com (Art Hutchinson) Robert Hettinga wrote:
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. Regards, - 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/>