"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