TCPA / Palladium FAQ

[Adam Back]

I'm still not seeing how any of the TCPA stuff prevents copy once use
everywhere.  A TCPA machine has to support existing formats, MPEG4,
MP3 etc so all that is required is one person to first re-digitize
from analog output or capture digital stream somewhere on the chain to
the monitor or inside the TCPA monitor and re-encode in MPEG4, and
you're away.

So then we have this Document Revocation List (DRL) idea where they're
going to send around a digest of forbidden documents.  As the poster
below noted this is trivial to break -- his break works just fine,
just flip a few bits and the DRL digest won't work anymore.  The
watermark if any was in the original in addition to the TCPA
encryption will be long gone due to the re-encoding.  All it takes is
a little patch to Kazza / Limewire or whatever is being used by then
to stir re-encoded documents to make the DRL fail to work.

Adam

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 03:47:09PM +0100, Ian Miller wrote:
> >How does the owner of this machine plan to persuade their TCPA-compliant CD
> >burner to touch the file?
> It has to have been possible to get the file onto the machine in the first
> place, or it wouldn't be there to be remotely deleted.  So presumably at
> some time in the past it wasn't embargoed, and at that time it would be
> possible to burn it onto a CD, unless of course TCPA forbids all making of
> back-ups.
> 
> Even if a file is embargoed it will be possible to pass around encrypted
> copies of it, just not do anything with the plaintext on a TCPA machine (,
> unless of course TCPA forbids all encryption it cannot decrypt).  Indeed
> trying to destroy such encrypted copies is precisely the sort of thing that
> the remote deletion might be used for.
> 
> I think at least part of the rationale for remote deletion is the hope that
> most variants of rogue-content can be eliminated entirely so they don't
> have to have permanent entries in the Index of Forbidden Files, which will
> otherwise grow indefinitely.  Writable-CDs (indeed any write-protectable
> backup media) means this won't happen.  It just needs a few sophisticated
> pirates who give every copy they sell a different watermark to have the
> IoFF growing very fast indeed.
> 
> I think TCPA would provide a whole range of new opportunities for serious
> IPR-pirates as it will more or less eliminate the competition from amateurs
> and small scale pirates.  I don't give TCPA the proverbial snowflake's
> chance of being effective against them.  I would add organised crime as one
> of the likely beneficiaries of TCPA.