About Gilmore's letter on IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives

[Peter Wayner]

I'm glad that John spent the time and energy to write a good summary 
of what is going on in the hard disk area. He's spot on about the 
dangers to our liberties.

But I was quite worried until I began to see the dangers for IBM and 
Intel in the scheme. This is not an easy play for them because it 
threatens much of the entire industry in these ways:

1) This is going to increase the cost of using  PCs dramatically. 
Hard disk crashes are going to go from major disasters to utter 
catastrophes. When the disks go bad, you'll need to buy all new 
copies of the software, images, movies, and what not. Backing up? 
Well, that will be another headache that won't be possible without 
the right permissions. They can wave their hands, but there's no 
getting around the fact that installing software is going to have 
plenty of new red tape.

I don't see how they will be able to distinguish between the truth 
and a lie when a guy calls up and say, "uh, my hard disk crashed. I 
need to install it on a new machine." They either authorize it or 
they don't. In fact, they'll probably have to automate the process 
because it's so expensive to have an actual human on the other end.

My mean time between hard disk failures is about 2 years, but I'm a 
heavy user. Can we really afford to create a new class of technicians 
who do special hard disk replacement for 20% of America each year?

2) This really changes the nature of the business. Right now the PC 
and software manufacturers sell you a box, wave good bye and say, 
"Good luck." Support is a joke. Actually fixing the machines costs 
too much money. Anything worth under $400 is essentially disposable.

If they put trusted hard disks in place, then there needs to be 
someone to care for these disks. They can't just keep waving good bye 
when you walk out the door. The business model needs to change to be 
something like cable television. That means hiring thousands if not 
millions of technicians who will come to your house and fix your hard 
drive.

3) This is really going to slow innovation and that's really going to 
hurt IBM and Intel. Already the hardware guys depend heavily on 
upgrades to keep people buying machines. If people can't move their 
software to a new zippier computer, then they're not going to buy a 
new zippier computer. Take a look at the cable television world. Most 
people are still using 1970's era technology. It just takes too long 
for the service technicians to go to each house and replace things. 
But that's the only way you can run the world when you have trusted 
corrals for special data. You can't just let any schmoe upgrade their 
hard disk or any schmoe is going to be able to pirate Hollywood 
movies. Gosh, that's all us proles do all day long you know. Pirate 
content.

4)  This is another opportunity for the open source community to come 
in and steal market share. If the press reports in Slashdot and other 
places are to believed, it was only a few months ago that Microsoft 
marched into the offices at Virginia Beach and asked them to produce 
the certificates for their copies of Windows. You know, those neat 
hologram embossed slips of paper. They didn't have one for each PC so 
they had to pay more than $121,000. 
(http://slashdot.org/articles/00/12/01/0532206.shtml)

This is another opportunity for Red Hat or some other Linux box 
company to walk into companies and say, "Use Red Hat, Mozilla, and 
Star Office and you'll never have license problems again. The 
hardware guys claim that they can take care of rights management 
issues for you. So can we and we cost alot less."

I think this may be the greatest thing that's come along for open 
source OSs yet. As Princess Leia said in the Hollywood content "Star 
Wars", "The harder you squeeze your fingers Vader, the more planets 
slip through the fingers." Do those content wrangling lawyers down 
there ever look at the content they protect?


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Tune to http://www.wayner.org/books/ffa/  for information on my book 
on Free Software.