maximize best case, worst case, or average case? (TCPA

[Ryan Lackey]

Quoting Joseph Ashwood <ashwood at msn.com>:

> The same argument can be applied to just about any tool.
> 
> A knife has a high likelihood of being used in such a manner that it causes
> physical damage to an individual (e.g. you cut yourself while slicing your
> dinner) at some point in its useful lifetime. Do we declare knives evil?

There is a difference between a general purpose, if potentially very evil,
tool, like, say, handcuffs, or firearms, and a tool which has a very specific
intended purpose and very few possible other purposes.

If someone constructed a special machine which would check fingerprints,
positively identify someone as me (and only me), and then kill me, I would
feel it my self-interested obligation to destroy that device and anyone
associated with it.  It's a selfish cost-benefit analysis which I would
expect everyone to undertake on his own.
> 
> DRM is a tool. Tools can be used for good, and tools can be used for evil,
> but that does not make a tool inherently good or evil. DRM has a place where
> it is a suitable tool, but one should not declare a tool evil simply because
> an individual or group uses the tool for purposes that have been declared
> evil.

At some point a technology goes beyond being a general purpose tool and becomes
a specialized implement of policy.  Particularly when there are already
laws passed to leave an implement-sized hole, which once filled by
a specific implementation of technology, can accomplish great evil,
particularly when assisted by laws already on the books.

A device which makes drug testing of people at a distance completely
trivial to undertake would probably be "evil" in my opinion.  Certainly
the underlying technology and science is interesting, but once assembled
into the "police-o-matic drug tester" with integrated execution module,
it's evil.

I don't really believe in "good and evil", but evil is a useful shorthand
for certain classes of things.  Ultimately, DRM is anti-science (in that
laws like the DMCA will prohibit exploration) and anti-freedom (in that
it will ultimately of necessity lead to the end of general purpose computing).

Evil really means "counter to my ideals sufficiently that I will take
arbitrarily arduous action to eliminate it".  The nation-state is Evil.
Stovepipe jams are annoying, but not evil.  (I would take action to
eliminate bad-but-not-Evil, but wouldn't go so far as to hack off a limb
or whatever).

I consider the nation state to be evil.  While I'm perfectly happy to pirate
media, I would not consider purely technical means of preventing this to
be evil, until and unless the nation state becomes involved in supporting
those technical means.  Since the laws (DMCA, specifically) are already in
place to support DRMs, they are already officially Evil.

I assume there are enough people who are either (or both, but not necessarily)
anti-government and pro-hacking-as-discovery that they would consider DRM
either Evil or just bad.  If the people who just find them slightly bad
protest DRM technologies in the early stages, they are welcome to 
withdraw from the debate when it escalates to an all-out battle to 
preserve general purpose computing hardware in private hands (although
hopefully osmosis would cause them to feel DRM is actually Evil, too)



>                         Joe

-- 
Ryan Lackey [RL7618 RL5931-RIPE]        ryan at havenco.com
CTO and Co-founder, HavenCo Ltd.        +44 7970 633 277 
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