Status of Cryptography Research in implementation of the EUCD

[Brian Morrison]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 11:43:45 +0100, Owen Lewis wrote:

>If I lease you an idea implemented in some fashion that makes it capable of
>practical use, I need protection for my idea so that I may also sell it to
>others but you may not do likewise. After all, I only charged you for use of
>my idea by one person and not 100,000. Since my idea will have cost me a
>6/7/8/9 figure sum to conceive and bring to the point of reliable practical
>application, I can only do such work if I make a large number of sales and,
>like everyone else, I look to the law to help me in preventing thieves
>diminishing the worth of my investment by stealing profits from it for
>themselves.

It's not so much the prevention of thievery and stealing of profits
that annoys me, it is the stifling of uses that I or others can think
of for a device or product that its inventors did not conceive. This is
the DeCSS argument, the studios see it as a piracy tool because they
think it will lead to pirate copies of their media and content. The
intent of the DeCSS developers was to allow DVD playback on a free OS
that could not countenance the oppressive control the content 'owners'
demanded. It was a fair use argument, the content owners increasingly
don't want there to be fair use they want payment ever more frequently
if they can engineer techniques to extract it.

Naturally every loss of control can be used to exploit, or it can be
used to enable. Getting a fair balance for everyone should not be at
the whim of the powerful.

-- 
Brian Morrison                                       bdm@fenrir.org.uk
              do you know how far this has gone?
               just how damaged have I become?
                                      'Even Deeper' by Nine Inch Nails