DRM as a Smart Contract

jamesd at echeque.com jamesd at echeque.com
Sun Jul 7 19:22:04 PDT 2002


    --
On 8 Jul 2002 at 1:51, Anonymous wrote:
> Nick Szabo created the idea of Smart Contracts several years
> ago. http://www.best.com/~szabo.  These would be self-enforcing
> agreements that were based on technology rather than laws.  It
> all sounded cool at the time.
>
> But isn't DRM a form of Smart Contract?  If I need a special
> viewer to download some content, and that viewer enforces the
> terms of the contract which allows me to do the download, that
> enforcement happens without any laws.  It is all handled by the
> technology.  It's a Smart Contract.

Voluntary DRM is indeed a form of smart contract,

If there was no pressure from the content industry, if copyright
and patent law was not expanding lawlessly and corruptly, in
defiance of technological trends, it would not worry me.

If the smarts were in a dongle that that you attached to your USB
port, or in a program that you could run or not run, it would not
worry me.

The trouble is that this idea looks as the a stalking horse for
the policeman inside your computer.

The history of this idea is as follows:

The entertainment industry proposed and lobbied for an proposal to
stop ordinary consumers to from having any more real computers.
They wanted legislation, the SSSCA which would prohibit consumers
from buying computers that could be programmed to do whatever the
programmer desired.  The computer industry went ballistic,
foreseeing that customers would refuse to "upgrade" to these new,
crippled, computers, and the proposal appears dead in the water. 
However it is the nature of businessmen to always try to make a
deal, so any such conflict will be followed by some attempt to
make a settlement with the entertainment industry, and
palladium/DRM seems to be such a settlement.

On the one hand, if the DRM is truly voluntary, it will not hurt
upgrade sales, so the computer industry genuinely wants DRM to be
truly voluntary, just as claimed.

On the other hand, if DRM computers are acceptable to the masses,
and are usually run in DRM mode, then IF they are widely accepted,
the computer industry could accept a law mandating involuntary DRM
in all new computers without losing sales.

 Thus DRM represents a marketing feeler -- it represents the
computer industry trying to see to what extent it can make
computers acceptable to the content industry without making them
unacceptable to the user. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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