Ross's TCPA paper

[David Wagner]

Anonymous  wrote:
>The amazing thing about this discussion is that there are two pieces
>of conventional wisdom which people in the cypherpunk/EFF/"freedom"
>communities adhere to, and they are completely contradictory.

I can't agree.  Strong protection of copyright is probably possible if
the content owner only distributes the content to tamperproof trusted
hardware.  Strong protection of copyright is probably not possible if
the content is available on hardware under control of untrusted parties.
Where's the contradiction?

Another point you seem to be missing is that there is a middle ground
between perfect copy-protection and no copy-protection.  This middle
ground may be very bad for the public.  Take, for instance, Adobe's
rot13-class encryption: this offered only weak copy-protection, as any
serious pirate could defeat it, but the copy-protection is just strong
enough to be bad for fair use and for research, and possibly just strong
enough to serve Adobe's corporate interests.

>Let us suppose that this is the world ten years from now: you can run a
>secure OS in "trusted" mode and be eligible to download movies and music
>for a price; or you can run in untrusted mode and no one will let you
>download other than bootleg copies.  This is the horror, the nightmare
>vision which the doom-sayers frantically wave before us.

No, it's not.  Read Ross Anderson's article again.  Your analysis misses
part of the point.  Here's an example of a more problematic vision:
you can buy Microsoft Office for $500 and be able to view MS Office
documents; or you can refrain from buying it and you won't be able to
view MS Office documents.  Do you see why this is problematic?  It lets
one vendor lock the world into a monopoly; noone else will be able to
develop compatible MS Word viewers without the consent of Microsoft.
(StarOffice on Linux won't work, because to get the session key to
decrypt the Word document your viewer has to go online to microsoft.com
and ask for it, but microsoft.com won't give you the key unless you've
bought a "secure" "trusted" OS and purchased Microsoft Office for $500.)
Now notice that the same idea can be used to inhibit competition in
just about any computer market, and I hope you appreciate Ross's point.
TCPA/DRM has the potential for anti-competitive effects, and the result
may well be worse off than we are today.