"Palladium" and TCPA

[Axel H Horns]

On 29 Jun 2002, at 20:04, Markus Kuhn wrote:

> There is nothing devious or dangerous about this. It is an essential
> ingredient in any practically useable content protection mechanism,
> and it would have been foolish for the designers not to add a
> revokation mechanism for content keys.
> 
> > This will clearly get used to suppress porn,
> > then libel, then goodness knows all what
> 
> How? Neither TCPA nor Palladium contain any mechanism whatsoever
> preventing you from photographing yourself or Tony naked and posting
> the result here on the list. You know as well as I do that such
> technology is well beyond the state of the art ...

Markus,

Hmmm... on the level of pure hardware technology you are right, IMHO.

The political key point might, however, be a different one.

Software (including OS) mandatory requiring a TCPA-augmented hardware
surely can be used to enforce questionable functionalities beyond
those of the TCPA per se.  

As long as the users effectively have a free choice between a 
software not requiring TCPA and other TCPA compliant software there
would be less worries.  

It might, however, well be that TCPA is the entry point to a world of
mandatory hardware augmentation - either statutory by law or de-facto
because of relevant content is available on the market for TCPA-
compliant systems only. On the long run this might mean that the
ordinary user has effectively no choice but to buy a downgraded
computer system composed of a general-purpose TCPA compliant hardware
(which per se is not to be considered as downgraded) together with a
certain software with mandatory TCPA requirements, this software
imposing numerous restrictions on the user with regard to the
operations for which it can be used - not only copyright justified
restrictions but also other restrictions as imposed by the government
under any laws which might be applicable in future or any other
restrictions simply governed by economic considerations of the
software vendor.    

Here the political dimension of that matter begins to appear.

The basic question is: Should the ordinary citizen of the information
society be entitled to possess unrestricted universal computers (seen
as composed systems of hardware plus software) and freely use the
enormous power thereof for any purpose at will (of course, afterwards
being liable for any wrongdoing) or should a general regulation exist
aiming to prevent any potential malpractice in advance by certain
mandatory technical measures?  

For example, lobbyists of youth protection laws might perhaps come to
love regulative ideas requiring that each and every computer linked to
the internet has to authenticate itself as TCPA-compiant. Then, the
government might define by statutory law which software
functionalities of such system are allowed / required.  

Restrictions imposed by the software vendor due to economic 
considerations might even prevent the user from executing 
functionalities which are perfectly legal.  

The power emerging from the definition of such requirements would be
enormous; remember "Code is Law" by Lessig. Can such power effectively
be controlled by democratic bodies in times of ever degrading civil
rights?  

It might well be that the two decades from 1985 to 2005 will later be
seen by historians as "glorious decades" when an exceptional society
had existed allowing free use of unrestricted universal computers.  

Again, of course, the mere existence of TCPA does not mean that it
will come to the worst. But extreme caution should be exercised to
prevent the worst.   

Other technologies like automotives are already heavily regulated and
obviously in general this regulation seems to be of some overall
benefit. But none of these things seem to be so closely related to our
freedom of information as unrestricted universal computers are. Hence,
any regulation of the free use of unrestricted computer technology is
much more sensitive than any regulation of, say, automotives.
Regulation of possession and use of unrestricted universal computers
would be much more related to the regulation of printers in the
Gutenberg era than to the regulation of automotive technologies.      


Axel