Klaus wrote: > That should be interesting! > If that thing ever gets put together and M$ thinks it is illegal I would > love to see a court battle over that in an european court. Who in the > hell are those people that think they can tell me I can't construct a > marslander out of a ford taurus? Or use a piece of hardware I bought and > paid for to what I want it to do? This is ridiculous.
The key here is to give the lawyers an alternative. If backed into a corner, they will do the ridiculous thing in order to protect corporate profits. However, I believe that if an alternative is provided, then this move would not be taken. The issue is not the modification of the hardware, per se, but rather the data that can then be pirated after the modification is made. Therefore, the one alternative is to limit piracy. In order to do that, strict policing of data streams is necessary. So that is your choice: give up freedom to modify hardware, or submit all data moving in and out of your control to public scrutiny. Since the former is both distasteful and fundamentally impossible to enforce, the later is inevitable, IMHO. Encryption makes subjecting data to scrutiny difficult. So it is likely that anti-encryption, anti-obfuscation laws would be passed along side any scrutiny laws. Pick your poison: inability to modify the container, or have every bit of information you generate or consume scrutinized. Personally, I think that the former is the lesser of two evils, by far. From an enforcement point of view, I think that corporate America would agree. (E.g. it is much less expensive to enforce hardware modification laws than police all data conduits). (I will mention the third option, which is to not worry about enforcing data ownership at all. This policy simply will not, and cannot fly in this economic, legal or political environment. There is a small class of data which can still be sold in this context, namely that which the buyer has no incentive to share, or cannot share effectively. Three examples that come to mind are data that describes the buyer, data that is expensive to share, and data that is time-sensitive. (Of course, the seller never has an incentive to share)) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]