Re: Do patents really foster innovation?

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 23:47:16 MST

  • Next message: Spudboy100@aol.com: "RNAi"

    Rafal writes:

    > This is a very interesting line of thought that I have been recently
    > coming closer to. If the producer of a piece of information (be it music
    > or knowledge embodied in a physical object) was really able to protect
    > his property while allowing wide access to it, but without having a
    > state-enforced monopoly, this might be actually better than the current
    > situation. Persons unwilling to accept the terms set out by the owner
    > would be free to compete by coming up with comparable information on
    > their own, which would provide incentives to produce useful information,
    > identical to the incentives in the production of other commodities. Still,
    > not knowing enough about technology, I wonder if it would be really
    > possible to protect information ownership rights without some significant
    > restrictions on the devices used for the transmission and reading of
    > information. How does Palladium work?

    Basically Palladium attempts to let the computer user prove to a
    remote computer what program he is running locally. It achieves this
    through a rather complex system involving cryptography, secure
    hardware, and special extensions to the operating system.

    Perhaps the remote server will download some data to the user, but only
    to a program which it knows will observe the Digital Rights Management
    (DRM) rules built into that data. The user can use Palladium to prove
    to the remote system that he is running one of the programs which will
    follow the DRM rules. In this way the transfer can go forward on terms
    which are mutually acceptable to both parties.

    Of course no system is perfect, and it remains to be seen how well
    Palladium can implement this somewhat idealized model.

    Hal



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