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