Two additional TCPA/Palladium plays

[Lucky Green]

[Minor plug: I am scheduled to give a talk on TCPA at this year's DEF
CON security conference. I promise it will be an interesting talk.
http://www.defcon.org ]

Below are two more additional TCPA plays that I am in a position to
mention:

1) Permanently lock out competitors from your file formats.

>From Steven Levy's article:
"A more interesting possibility is that Palladium could help introduce
DRM to business and just plain people. It's a funny thing," says Bill
Gates. "We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that
e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains."

Here it is why it is a more interesting possibility to Microsoft for
Palladium to help introduce DRM to business and "just plain people" than
to solely utilize DRM to prevent copying of digital entertainment
content:

It is true that Microsoft, Intel, and other key TCPA members consider
DRM an enabler of the PC as the hub of the future home entertainment
network. As Ross pointed out, by adding DRM to the platform, Microsoft
and Intel, are able to grow the market for the platform.

However, this alone does little to enhance Microsoft's already sizable
existing core business. As Bill Gates stated, Microsoft plans to wrap
their entire set of file formats with DRM. How does this help
Microsoft's core business? Very simple: enabling DRM for MS Word
documents makes it illegal under the DMCA to create competing software
that can read or otherwise process the application's file format without
the application vendor's permission.

Future maintainers of open source office suites will be faced with a
very simple choice: don't enable the software to read Microsoft's file
formats or go to jail. Anyone who doubts that such a thing could happen
is encouraged to familiarize themselves with the case of Dmitry
Skylarov, who was arrested after last year's DEF CON conference for
creating software that permitted processing of a DRM-wrapped document
file format.

Permanently locking out competition is a feature that of course does not
just appeal to Microsoft alone. A great many dominant application
vendors are looking forward to locking out their competition. The beauty
of this play is that the application vendors themselves never need to
make that call to the FBI themselves and incur the resultant backlash
from the public that Adobe experienced in the Skylarov case. The content
providers or some of those utilizing the ubiquitously supported DRM
features will eagerly make that call instead.

In one fell swoop, application vendors, such as Microsoft and many
others, create a situation in which the full force of the U.S. judicial
system can be brought to bear on anyone attempting to compete with a
dominant application vendor. This is one of the several ways in which
TCPA enables stifling competition.

The above is one of the near to medium objectives the TCPA helps meet.
[The short-term core application objective is of course to ensure
payment for any and all copies of your application out there]. Below is
a mid to long term objective:

2) Lock documents to application licensing

As the Levy article mentions, Palladium will permit the creation of
documents with a given lifetime. This feature by necessity requires a
secure clock, not just at the desktop of the creator of the document,
but also on the desktops of all parties that might in the future read
such documents. Since PC's do not ship with secure clocks that the owner
of the PC is unable to alter and since the TCPA's specs do not mandate
such an expensive hardware solution, any implementation of limited
lifetime documents must by necessity obtain the time elsewhere. The
obvious source for secure time is a TPM authenticated time server that
distributes the time over the Internet.

In other words, Palladium and other TCPA-based applications will require
at least occasional Internet access to operate.

It is during such mandatory Internet access that licensing-related
information will be pushed to the desktop. One such set of information
would be blacklists of widely-distributed pirated copies of application
software (you don't need TCPA for this feature if the user downloads and
installs periodic software updates, but the user may choose to live with
application bugs that are fixed in the update rather than see her unpaid
software disabled).

With TCPA and DRM on all documents, the application vendor's powers
increase vastly: the application vendor can now not just invalidate
copies of applications for failure to pay ongoing licensing fees, but
can invalidate all documents that were ever created with the help of
this application. Regardless how widely the documents may have been
distributed or on who's computer the documents may reside at present.

Furthermore, this feature enables world-wide remote invalidation of a
document file for reasons other than failure to pay ongoing licensing
fees to the application vendor. To give just one example, documents can
be remotely invalidated pursuant to a court order, as might be given if
the author of the document were to distribute DeCSS v3 or Scientology
scriptures in the future DRM protected format. All that is required to
perform such an administrative invalidation of a document is either a
sample copy of the document from which one can obtain its globally
unique ID, the serial number of the application that created the
document, or the public key of the person who licensed the application.
(Other ways to exist but are omitted in the interest of brevity).

--Lucky Green