Re: Bad ideas from Microsoft et al

From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 12:10:55 MDT

  • Next message: Charles Hixson: "Re: POLITICS: Neo-Conservative policies and power"

    > (Hal Finney <hal@finney.org>):
    >
    > Are you saying that a system which allows people to voluntarily agree to
    > bind themselves to restrictions on the exchange of information is evil?
    > Like, using Palladium to prove that I am running Windows Media Player,
    > as a condition for downloading some music? Which of us is being evil:
    > the server who will only download data to people who are running WMP;
    > the person who runs WMP and downloads data, accepting limitations on
    > its use; the person who designed and sold this technology?

    This is really the core of the issue, and it's a very hard question.
    As a libertarian, certainly the knee-jerk response should be to allow
    more choices. But I think the choices here are illusory. One cannot
    separate the rights to use content from the content itself. A movie
    that I can view once on one machine is a very different product from
    a movie that I own and can view anywhere, any time, and analyze, and
    take clips from, etc. But the truth is that even if I agree to buy
    only the former product, the latter one still exists for the same
    price for those people who have technology to break to lock--and there
    will always be such technology. It simply isn't physically possible
    to fully control use of the content.

    Since I can assume that copying technology will exist, and that full
    rights-enabled content will be available to me whether I agree to the
    restrictions or not, why would I agree to the restrictions? The only
    reason would be if the /law/ prevented me from using the rights-enabled
    content, as it might be argued that copyright law does (although even
    there, it's not clear; do the"fair use" provisions allow me to show
    clips to a film class even if I have to crack encryption to do so?)

    So the only way for the rights-limited content to have any value is
    for the law to recognize the author's rights to restrict access to
    his creations, and for the many reasons I've outlined on this forum
    and elsewhere, I don't support such laws. This technology legitimizes
    those laws: it makes the assumption that the author has the right to
    control access to information made public, and provides a means of
    enforcing that assumption. But it wouldn't be valuable without the
    laws behind it, and it's the laws I really object to.

    So there's the clearer answer, I hope: I don't object so much to the
    technology itself, but I object to the /laws/ that are required to
    make the tecnology useful. I object to the very concept that authors
    have the power to do what this tecnology purports to enable.

    -- 
    Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
    "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
    are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
    for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 08 2003 - 12:19:51 MDT