Hi, at the risk of embarrassing myself due to bad prose, here are some allegorical thoughts on the issue of TC, DRM and non-trivial confinement, all of which can be taken as synonymous for a special computer technology, which allows to enter into a contract of access and control over a computer resource that is fundamentally schizophrenic in nature.
This is the meaning of ownership: You own something if you have the exclusive right to access, control and dispose it. Note: If you are not patient with bad prose, skip the dreams. They are not essential. <dream> Say you own a diary. The diary is green. The diary is your property. It is your possession. You enjoy it, you control it. You are the only one allowed to modify it. You are the only one allowed to determine who can read it. You are the only one who is allowed to rip out pages and throw them away. This pink diary is your property. Say you own a diary. It is a blue diary. This diary is a bit strange. You are the only one who can access it. You are the only one who can read it. You are the only one who can write into it. In fact, the diary feels very much like the pink diary, so for a long time you notice nothing. Then you try to rip out a page. You find it doesn't come off. You pull very hard, but the page resists. You throw away the whole diary. The next day, it is back under your bed. Eventually, you give up and start to use the diary again. Then, one day, all of a sudden, your diary vanishes. You can't find it anymore under the bed, on your desktop, or on the board with all the other books. Something happened to your diary. It's gone. It's disposed of. It is unrecoverable. You know it wasn't you. This diary is a bit strange. Somebody else, not you, had the ability to destroy it, to dispose it, to make it go away. This blue diary is not your property. Say you own a diary. The diary is yellow. This diary is a bit strange. You can always find the diary, it does not go away by itself. But, sometimes the diary is locked, and you don't have a key. When the diary is open, you can only read it some pages of it, the other pages feel like they are glued together. You can not just skip to the end of it, either. The pages you can read contain stories that tell about a life that is not yours. One time you decide that you have enough. You throw the diary away. This seems to work. The diary is gone. You have the right to dispose of it. The yellow diary is a bit strange. You can not access it, you can not control it. But you can dispose of it. This yellow daiary is not your property. Say you have a blue or a yellow diary, and somebody comes along and asks you this question: "Is this your diary?" What do you answer? </dream> Ownership is the exclusive right to access, control and dispose of a property. If these rights are not all given, then ownership is diluted, diffused. Trusted computing separates ownership of _data_ in access and control on the one hand, and disposal on the other. This is reflected in non-trivial confinement: One program creates the constructor and determines its content and access to it. The other program provides the resources to run it. This is schizophrenic, and it creates a conflict of interest between two parties that previously was not manifest in the item (the program) itself. Of course, ownership in the real world is not as clear cut as the common definition makes it sound. For example, if you own a painting of a certain cultural value, you are not allowed, by law, to destroy it. If you own land you are not allowed to poison it. If you own an animal you are not allowed to torture it. If you own an illegal picture that compromises your neighbour you may not be allowed to disclose it. However, these rules are not put into the property itself. They are rules that are build into the structure of society, not into the structure of property. They are rules that allow interpretation, and change. They are rules based on mutual agreement and understanding. In short: they are part of the social contract. Trusted computing and DRM impose not rules about property of items. They impose rules about property of digital data. They are one more step in the continued attempt to reverse history, and to turn digital information, the substance of ideas, into tangible objects. They are rules built into the objects themselves, which do not allow interpretation or change. They are rules that can only be enforced by seizing control over the property that people use to access and modify digital information, computers. Computers have become too powerful, and the industry is looking for a way to reduce this power by making computers less useful, by owning a part of the computer of their customers. Because digital information is the substance of ideas, this attempt to control somebody elses computer is analogous to any other attempt to control somebody elses mind. So, let me finish with one last weird dream: <dream> Say you have a thought. It's a green thought. You endulge in it. You expand on it. You remember it when you feel like you want to have a green thought. Then, some day, you decide to let lose. You forget the green thought. This green thought was your thought. Say you have a blue thought. It's an interesting thought. You are inspired by it. You expand on it. Then, one day, somebody presses a button and it's gone. You can't remember it anymore. You know you just thought about it a minute ago, and you can not possibly have forgotten it. But it's gone. On the request of somebody else. This blue thought was not your thought. Say you have a yellow thought. It's not your thought. Apparently you are thinking somebody else's thought. You try to think of something different, but you can't. The thought occupies your whole mind. You can not think of anything else. Then, you concentrate very hard, and can push the thought out of your mind. However, you can not allow yourself to think of something else. Everytime you try, the yellow thought comes back. This yellow thought was not your thought. If you want to own your thoughts, make them green. Die Gedanken sind frei. </dream> Because my prose is really bad, I will include below some quotes from a keynote Eben Mogeln held at the Wizards of OS 3 conference in Berlin, 2004. I whole-heartedly recommend to read the whole keynote, which is available here: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html However, one particular excerpt I urge you to read more than any other: "We must have the ability to make our various arts collaboratively out of what we have already done by adding imagination untaxed to what already is. This is a promise for an acceleration of education throughout the globe. Billions of minds hungering for knowledge and for beauty, to whom everything can now be given. In a world where everything is a bitstream, where the marginal cost of culture is zero, where once one person has something, everything can be given to everybody at the same costs that it was given to its first possessor, it is immoral to exclude people from knowledge and from beauty. That is the great moral problem that the 20th century has be bequeathed to the 21st. We can eradicate ignorance at the expense of a few. We have to do it. We cannot permit the voluntary starvation of most of the minds on the planet. We have a duty; we have a joy; we are bringing to our colleagues, the human race, everything we know and everything we love; there is no higher pleasure than delivering what we love to those with whom we wish to share it, there is also no deeper moral obligation." Thanks, Marcus More from the Eben Moglen keynote: "The 20th century knew information as physical artifacts, stuff, that costs money to make, move and sell. More than at any moment in the prior history of human beings, die Gedanken sind nicht frei, by necessity because the stuff had costs. Thomas Edison made it possible for music, which had been for the whole history of human beings an act of communion, a thing inherently shared, that music turned into a product, an object, a commodity. And from the commoditization of art grew the belief that art could be owned. Which made sense even when art was bumps on a thin piece of tin foil in a plastic disc. But art has returned to the formlessness from which it came. It has returned to being what it was throughout the history of human beings until Edison: it has returned being something that must be shared to exist. The technology of the late 20th century reversed the conditions of power that made it. This is not the first time that that system of social production called capitalism has had that effect. When I wrote a little thing called "The dotCommunist Manifesto" some while ago, I was doing it in order to show that a form of social analysis characteristic of those searching for freedom in the 19th century might bear some recognition in the 21st. Not as a matter of normative political analysis but as a comment on the actualities of the day. The struggle of Burgeoise technology towards ever greater functioning such that it undermines its own conditions of existance was an observation made by shrewd onlookers a hundred and fourty years ago, and we live in the fullfillment of its truth. Ownership struggled to reduce its costs, to hold down the costs of making the commodity, in order to free itself to greater profit. And in the end, as was so shrewdly noted in the 1860s: "All that was solid melted into air, and air was something that we all knew we could freely breath." And so we found ourselves confronting a system of power based upon ideas of property relations that the technology of the owners was already making obsolete. It is not possible for industrial organizations to do a better job of distributing music than 12 year-olds can do. Hence the world in which the music industry confronts the children on the barricades, attempts to jail them, fine them, control them, and loses. The same is true for all the other forms of art given to us by the 20th century and being freed by the very technology that the controllers of artists hoped would control art even further. This, like the adoption of movable type printing at the end of the 15th century, constitutes a moment at which the powers of control have adopted technology which transforms their conditions of existance, will they, nil they. They do not will it but it happens to them anyway. And the technology that they have freed, like the sorcerer's apprentice, finds itself overwhelmed by its own implications. The free software movement, with which I have had some slight association, the free software movement is the beginning of the recognition of the implications of the technology. A recognition based not on the idea, "I could write better software if I could share it with other people," but rather, as Mr. Stallman made clear from the beginning, a political recognition: Freedom is a good in itself. Inhibiting sharing, prohibiting people from teaching what they know to others, and from learning what they want to know themselves is wrong. The free software movement was not a technology movement; it was the face of the struggle for freedom of thought in technological guise. It took advantage of technological reality to bring about a deeper scrutiny of political possibilities. And we are here today because those political possibilities have sunk in. There is not a government on earth any longer which fails to comprehend the social possibilities of the freedom of software as a development strategy for an economy, as an education strategy for a population, as a reassertion of the public's right to get what it pays for, in the public servants, whom it employs to think and devise and to improve the infrastructure of social life. There is not an enterprise on earth in the technology industries which fails to recognize the enormous constructive power of unleashed creativity in individual people. This very week, an organization, SUN Microsystems, which has shown in the past a belief that great software could be made in secret behind closed doors, has decided to reconsider that proposition with respect to the most important software asset that it possesses. There is not a culture business on earth which is unaware of the competition in which its distribution arm now finds itself with freedom as its most dire competitor. Once upon a time that this was a political movement for freedom was a secret. I knew it. Stallman knew it. You knew it. It's not a secret anymore. Everybody knows it now. What we are struggeling for is clear. There are days of course upon which we prefer not to say it too loudly. We are engaged in negotiations, quiet please. We are respectable today. We are wearing suit. But we have not forgotten what we meant to do. We meant to make freedom and we are making it. This puts us---happily in my case, I hope happily in yours---in contention with power. Some of that power is the power of monopoly. It is Mr. Gates and his billions. Some of it is contention with habit. It takes a lot of trouble to get people to change the word processing program that they use. [Applause] Some of it is contention over principle: is it free when it is "freedom from", or is it free when it is "freedom to?" Which words should we use? We struggle with one another as the movement for freedom of thought always does. We are divided internally over phraseology. We sing slightly different versions of the same song to slightly different music. And it's dissonant and it jars us. The contention is good. The struggle for freedom of thought is a struggle. It has, I regret to say, even casualties. Though the good news for us is that there will be no guillotines, no blood in the streets, no commune, and no suppression of the commune. Because freed of the burden of utopian assumptions, liberated from the need to dream of what has never been, we are able to pursue our struggle relentlessly and remorselessly on the basis of what there already is today and what we with our own hands can make out of it tomorrow: proof of concept plus running code equals revolution." _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
