Ralph Wallis wrote:

On Monday, 17 Dec 2001 at 07:58, Michael Motyka <mmotyka@lsil.com> wrote:

...

Could someone who knows more than I do explain to me why this MS "IP" is anything other than making the owner of a PC unable to have root access to their own hardware/OS? If so it seems to be an idea unworthy of protection from lawyers and men with guns.

A more correct analogy is with speed limiters on cars.

On your own roads. And the car maker tells you where you can go to. And which route you have to take. And where you can end up. And then forces you to pay for a map. If the patent hasn't been picked up by the courts yet, then why not? *If* the SSSCA were to come into effect (and I have heard little about it for several months now... biding its time?), then surely all other OSes (subject to legal boundaries) would be prevented by the patent from implementing the requirements in the bill? ...and to appease the pedanty, it's hard to have a /more/ correct analogy when there was no analogy in the first place. There, got it out of my system... .g -- "Sometimes I use google instead of pants."

SSSCA is far from dead, it may have a good chance of enactment according to Mike Godwin's essay today, "Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet:" http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-net-mg.htm Here are his opening paragraphs: "If you have a fast computer and a fast connection to the Internet, you make Hollywood nervous. And Tinseltown is nervous not because of what you're doing now, but because of what you *might* do -- grab digital Hollywood content with your computer and broadcast it over the Internet. Which is why Hollywood, along with other content companies, from book publishers to the music industry, has begun a campaign to stop you from ever being able to do such a thing -- even though you may have no intention of becoming a copyright "pirate." That campaign has pitted corporate giants like Disney and Fox against corporate giants like Microsoft and IBM, but the resulting war over the shape of future digital technology may end up with us computer users suffering the "collateral damage." As music-software designer and entrepreneur Selene Makarios puts it, this campaign represents "little less than an attempt to outlaw general-purpose computers." Let's get one thing straight -- when I say there's war looming in cyberspace over copyright, I'm not talking about the struggle between copyright holders and copyright "pirates" who distribute unlicensed copies of creative works for free over the Internet. Maybe you loved Napster or maybe you hated it, but the right to start a Napster, or to infringe copyright and get away with it, is not what's at issue here. And in a sense it's a distraction from what the real war is. What I'm talking about instead is the war between the content industries (call them "the Content Faction") and the information-technology industries -- call the latter "the Tech Faction." That faction includes not only computer makers, software makers, and related digital-device manufacturers (think CD burners and MP3 players and Cisco routers). Allied with the Content Faction are the consumer-electronics makers -- the folks who build your VCRs and DVD players and boomboxes. The Tech Faction, which makes smarter, more programmabale devices and technologies than the consumer-electronics guys do, may count among their allies many cable companies and even telephone companies. But what's the "collateral damage," exactly? Perhaps the most likely scenario is this: at some near-future date - perhaps as early as 2010 - individuals may no longer be able to do the kinds of things they routinely do with their digital tools in 2001. They may no longer be able, for example, to move music or video files around easily from one of their computers to another (even if the other is just a few feet away in the same house), or to personal digital assistants. Their music collections, reduced to MP3s, may be moveable to a limited extent; unless their digital hardware doesn't allow it. The digital videos they shot in 1999 may be unplayable on their desktop and laptop computers -- or even on other devices -- in 2009. And if they're programmers, trying to come up with the next great version of the Linux operating system, for example, they may find their development efforts put them at risk of criminal and civil penalties if the tools they develop are inadequately protective of copyright interests. Indeed, their sons and daughters in grade-school computer classes may face similar risks, if the broadest of the changes now being proposed becomes law."

I think Mike is trying to describe the worst case scenario to arouse opposition. Bear in mind that the Content Faction (and maybe the Tech Faction) want to control the world, not just the US. All countries are targets for SSSCA and DMCA through copyright treaties and other control regimes. Just a few days ago the last country needed to enforce the WIPO Copyright Treaty signed on. WIPO is the global version of DMCA. And the Hague Convention is meeting shortly to set up the legal framework to enforce the various global treaties on protecting intellectual property. Sure, there will continue to be gray and black markets in software but criminalization of circumvention devices will put some youngsters (and oldsters) in jail, as we see looming from the recent warez raids. I'm optimistic that Mike is too pessimistic but he knows how to arouse by avoiding rosy ending scripts. The MPAA and co-conspirators are dirty fighters and nobody should expect to merely ignore them, thinking that loosening of crypto controls is a model. They know that precedent and are determined to do what governments could not. Question is, as ever, what about the programmers within the factions who are needed to carry out the wishes of the bosses. In this, crypto could be a bellweather, for showing how the technicians learned to outwit the others. But are technical folks more susceptible these days to bribery of swell life styles than the crypto-rebels were? Or better, are there well-endowed, smarter than most, Factioners who do not want to be part of hegemonic putridity? We'll see what the Factions offer the liberators to keep them hard at work, happy to be protected intellectual property slaves. None of whom would waste a second here except to pick up intelligence for blowing upholes.

On Wednesday, 19 Dec 2001 at 00:38, Graham Lally <scribe@exmosis.net> wrote:

Ralph Wallis wrote:

...

On Monday, 17 Dec 2001 at 07:58, Michael Motyka <mmotyka@lsil.com> wrote:

...

Could someone who knows more than I do explain to me why this MS "IP" is anything other than making the owner of a PC unable to have root access to their own hardware/OS? If so it seems to be an idea unworthy of protection from lawyers and men with guns.

A more correct analogy is with speed limiters on cars.

On your own roads. And the car maker tells you where you can go to. And which route you have to take. And where you can end up. And then forces you to pay for a map.

If the patent hasn't been picked up by the courts yet, then why not? *If* the SSSCA were to come into effect (and I have heard little about it for several months now... biding its time?), then surely all other OSes (subject to legal boundaries) would be prevented by the patent from implementing the requirements in the bill?

...and to appease the pedanty, it's hard to have a /more/ correct analogy when there was no analogy in the first place. There, got it out of my system...

pedanty isn't a word, and the original poster mentioned "denying root access", which is an analogy. Your understanding of patent law is flawed.