Intel to include DRM in new Pentium 4 series processors

[Matthew Astley]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 09:40:35PM +0100, Graham wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 Sep 2002 5:35 pm, John Sullivan wrote:

> > It still needs Palladium to work - so OpenSource we go!

I see a clear need for a "Do not feed the animals" sign across Intel's
cage. If the hardware companies get burned on this, it might go away
for a while. Software has to be cheaper than hardware, so Intel is
taking the risk here.

Unless AMD are putting it in Hammer too, it's a good reason to support
them. Given the way the not-exactly-a-cartel works, we could be stuck
with the Athlon/Pentium3 instead.

IMHO there should be a nice opportunity for someone with some capital
to start stockpiling "obselete" technology. It's either that buy
non-crippled hardware on the black market from Taiwan.

I wonder how much Holly$oft can afford to subsidise this hardware?
Would that be legal? It seems to work nicely for set top boxes and
cable modem installation.

> [...]

> Secondly, most Open Source relies on the GPL as its legal basis.  
> Palladium and TCPA COULD (and I stress *could*) make it irrelevant.
> 
> Does anybody know the legal basis of the GPL in the UK and has it ever 
> been tested in Court?

I believe TCPA is more of an end run around GPL that a legal attack on
it, so this isn't particularly important in this instance.

Quoting from the bottom of the relevant question on Ross Anderson's
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

| People believed that the GPL made it impossible for a company to
| come along and steal code that was the result of community effort.
| This helped make people willing to give up their spare time to write
| free software for the communal benefit. But TCPA changes that. Once
| the majority of PCs on the market are TCPA-enabled,

For an entire OS this presumably means the BIOS or bootloader being
picky about it will allow you to boot. Otherwise for Windows, or a
even TCPA compliant Linux or BSD, it's going to be down to which ever
megacorp has the keys to sign the binaries.

| the GPL won't work as intended.

I understand this as "sure you can copy that GPL'd work. You can
compile it too if you like. You'll have to find somewhere else to run
it though."

| The benefit for Microsoft is not that this will destroy free
| software directly. The point is this: once people realise that even
| GPL'led software can be hijacked for commercial purposes, idealistic
| young programmers will be much less motivated to write free
| software.

One can only hope that if it _does_ come to this, the Stuckist Net (a
phrase coined by The Register I believe) will have enough idealistic
or rebellious programmers, and hardware, to survive.


Matthew  #8-)