At Mon, 1 May 2006 03:20:50 +0200, Pierre THIERRY <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [1 <multipart/signed (7bit)>] > [1.1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>] > I agree with you that behind Trusted Computing and DRM, there are very > dangerous ideas like the one that hardware should be the essential > enforcer of rules that are otherwise enforced by the society, which > creates and interpret them. > > But there is something very strange, an assumption that you make, in > your arguments: why should I own what I use in a computer? > > In the real world, I use many tools that I have no right to dispose of. > If I rent a car, I have limited rights on it's use, idem for my > appartment. > > In the use case of a program that the author doesn't want to disclose to > me, I'm just renting it. That's not schizophrenic at all. That's plain > normal.
Renting _is_ a form of schizophrenic ownership. However, note that we also have protection in laws with regard to renting. For example, in Germany, it is not easy for a house owner to kick you out of his house. Anyway, I did not even talk about ownership of the program. I talked about ownership of the storage that contains the program. The peculiar thing is this: Once you run DRM software on your computer, the computer does not any longer belong to you in full. Let's look at embedded devices, for example hard disk video recorders. If these come with a DRM-restricted software, so that you can not update the software on the machine, you do not fully own it. Yes, you could throw it away, or even put a couple of nails into it. But if you want to modify it in a way that is meaningful to you, it will stop working. You paid the full price for the device, but it only serves you as one that you rented under restricted conditions (no modifications). If this happened to me, I would feel betrayed. However, it doesn't even stop at this point. Imagine you could not buy anymore paper, but you were only allowed to rent paper under very restrictive conditions, and the papers would only work with xerox copying machines of the same company that produces the paper, and they would have many restrictions on what you can do. Would you feel comfortable with that? This is exactly what Bill Gates has in mind for Word documents. This is a much bigger opportunity for him than restricting the distribution of movies or music. So, the matter to me is not even the ownership of the content, although that is also a concern. However, you can only enforce rules about the ownership of digital data if you can enforce rules about some aspects of control over the machines that process is. This is a struggle about free hardware, about who controls the bits of data that flow through _your_ (for now) computer. Or look at it this way: Say you own some land. Then somebody comes along, takes away our land and then is so kind to rent it back to you for a fee. What do you think about that? We are not this far yet with computers. However, that's not for lack of trying of some interest groups, who want to make all non-DRM-encumbered computers illegal. The issue at stake is dispossession. Big industry would *love* you to possess nothing, and rent everything. For them, this means fat dollars, because they can bill you by the zip, by the minute, by the tick, by the impulse (and get an extensive profile of your behaviour at the same time). > > Trusted computing and DRM impose not rules about property of items. > > They impose rules about property of digital data. > > How will TC impose anything? For the moment, we discussed uses of the TC > were it gives a (morally objectionable) power to the user (i.e. > certification of privacy-related properties of the system). DRM imposes rules that in effect commoditize data by bundling these rules with the ability to use the data. I am not sure I understood your question, though, so maybe clarify. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
