DRM technologies have a flip side as privacy-preserving technology. It's all a matter of whose data is being protected and who owns the hardware.
We generally think of DRM in cases where the data owner is large company and an individual owns the hardware. In this case, DRM stops you from copying data you paid for from your own device. Now flip the roles. You're the data owner and the large company is the hardware owner; say a cloud computing provider you lease machines from. Those same technologies can prevent that service provider from accessing your private data. Cory Doctrow has come around to this view, as he discusses in his talk "The coming civll war over general purpose computing" [1]. He's now advocating the use of Trust Platform Modules (TPMs) as a "nub of stable certainty" which you can use to verify that whatever hardware you are using is faithfully booting your own software. This is a significant departure from viewing TPMs as an anti-consumer technology, which was espoused by groups like Chilling Effects [2]. As Doctrow puts it "a victory for the "freedom side" in the war on general purpose computing would result in computers that let their owners know what was running on them". Some of the very same technologies that enable DRM could help us verify that computers are running what they should be. [1] http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html [2] http://chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/weather.cgi?WeatherID=534 On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Richard Brooks <r...@acm.org> wrote: > Obviously, these issues have been very thoroughly discussed > by Corey Doctorow and Larry Lessig. DRM has not proved to be > effective at safeguarding intellectual property. It seems > to be most effective as a tool in maintaining limited > monopolies, since it stops other companies from investing > in creating products compatible with existing products. > -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
