[Ernie the Attorney] had started a discussion about copyright and Professor Lessig, which is extremely important considering the Supreme Court hearing coming up, and some special interest legislation to change the fabric of our computer society. There are several different professional specialities at work here and there is a large element of what seems to me to be deliberate confusion, like the role of the accountants in the Wall Street scandals.
What society needs, in Al Macintyre opinion, is an even more basic for dummies clarification even than Ernie calls for. The powers that be, who vote to change the rules, need to get a distinction between what is being proposed and what can be done, and to what degree that distinction is colored by the proposers desires for something other than what they claim. People propose stuff that seems ridiculous for reasons that sound suspicious. Technologically speaking, can we get protection against piracy without locking down an entire genre of entertainment? I think that is feasable.
There needs to be some clarification of what can be done in the computer security area to protect all interests. As far as I am concerned the problem is not whether fans can continue to enjoy whatever they want, with copyright owners properly compensated, but rather how is the development of that to be financed. I doubt that the competing interests can come together to solve the problem in the absense of a crisis.
Open Source can have some standards of identifying copyright ownership, delivering a code into the data objects showing royalties paid, when permission to use expires, and renewal arrangements, with software being certified as having met the copying of copyright materials artist compensation standards.
But that is extra work for people writing software for Windows, much simpler to close the door on any copying. Ditto hardware development.
Some Open Source was born out of an alternative to abuses of Commercial Software, where some Open Source philosophers have been rather outspoken on the inappropriateness of copyright in software that has many contributors constantly making improvements to a body of code. People, outside of software development, can rightfully misconstrue those strong views to be from a special interest that cannot be trusted to manage copyrights, especially when we also have an overlapping community of digital product users who appear to favor piracy.
The market can make demands of suppliers of hardware and software, but that is no good when legislation has authorized draconian solutions to the piracy problem.
This is the Y2K of copying.
A panic is apparently needed to mobilize a solution.
The difference between what we have today, and the Y2K of a few years ago is who is behind the panic. I am a Computer Professional who first found out about the Y2K problem (it was not called that then) in 1970, and it was old news even then. We were unable to get responsible action through channels, so we had to go to the general public to avert a general disaster.
I don't have a good handle on the forces behind today's panic, nor if what is being painted in the communications clearly explain their motives, but it does seem extremely ominous calling for excessive drastic action to get a solution, out of proportion to the problem. Comparable to stopping automotive speeding by issuing WW II weaponry to the police in which it does not matter if there are lots of casualities to other vehicles on the road.
QUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]
DRM for Dummies (i.e. people like me) - the discussion below (which I guess I started) about the Lessig article has prompted many interesting responses, including one from the good professor himself (boy do I feel like I'm back in law school). Anyway, after reading all of the responses my brain started heating up like an over-clocked CPU. I like things to be simple, and I don't like to tax my brain so I'm looking for a simple model to understand Lessig's point.
Lessig (if I understand his point) says something like: Palladium is better DRM because at least it's not a blanket system that disables all copying of, say, music CD's. I guess there are other examples, but I don't know enough to come up with some good ones. (Professor Lessig, can you offer us a sampler platter of examples?) Anyway, if all of the examples involve locking down an otherwise-routine computer function like copying then, call me crazy, but that's not "digital rights management." It's digital rights censorship. Now, if there is a system that lets me use a routine computer function, but only if I meet certain conditions, well now...at least that's "management" of my digital rights. So that's how I understand it now, and I think that my brain can handle that.
And so now I can load that model into the "big picture" of DRM. From what I can see, basically, we're talking about which StormTrooper we'd prefer to have watch over us: the really mean one that never lets our computer do anything that might trip over someone's copyright golden goose, or the sort-of mean one that will let our computer do some things, if we have permission from The Empire's duly appointed representative. Yeah, I did misunderstand Lessig. I apologize for branding his description as "optimistic." And I hope that my lackluster class participation will not count too heavily against my final grade.
UNQUOTE [Ernie the Attorney]
Ernie
I have worked on several different kinds of Computer Operating Systems in my career and seen many different Computer Security models, much more sophisticated than what I think is needed to solve this crisis. For security reasons, the end computer user was generally told nothing about how the security operated. Often many software developers not allowed to work with the security area. This has meant that computer security is often like a separate interface between Operating System and Application Software, not well understood by developers who should be using it properly.
My best suggestion to you is much the same as one I made some time ago on Homeland Security. We have people in different professions with specialized know how that is really needed by other professions in our world of evolving challenges. I think we need briefings across professions. What do we _____ (profession A) think that people in _____ (profession B) ought to know about _____ (topics C D E F), from our perspective, so as to get the best possible solution?
I have written about computer security several times several places with links to where you can find professionals far more knowledgeable than I to help you understand what our realistic options are, with nonsense replaced by clarity, most recently Aug 29 and Aug 15 on topics of Computer Security Myths explained for Dummies, with annotated key links to Computer Security Authoritative information like
http://www.pentasafe.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/e-com-sec/
http://www.ifccfbi.gov
http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/epl-by-vendor.html
I think most reasonable people will agree that we have a bad problem in our society with computer piracy, and one way the problem could be solved would be to ban computers, but that would be a ridiculous solution. A lot of what I am seeing, as proposed solutions to a bad problem, are what I would label as a ridiculous solution.
What the copyright owners seem to be asking for is to throw the baby out with the bath water. There is a serious problem with intellectual property rights piracy, so lock down on what used to be legitimate entertainment, similar to in Greece where they have so much trouble stopping Gambling, they now banned many other kinds of games such as On Line Chess. More details on that here.
I like to play some computer games. There are swap stores where we can take in the box that has all the materials associated with that product, to trade in, and we swear that we have taken it off of our PC. Nothing to put our signature to, and no independent verification that we have done so. It is like the 2 for 1 used book places. The opportunities for people to steal here, in the same way that video rentals could be copied while in customer homes, seem like obvious risk of piracy.
I was not much into copying music until my Sister cut her own stuff and offered to send me what she had composed the music, written the words, performed the whole thing, and now had it in a form that could be sent as an e-mail attachment. I am struggling to understand if she as the copyright owner of this artistic creation even has the right under the new regime to share her work that way. It seems to me that artists are not allowed to be independent of publishers, like authors would not be allowed to get their work to their readers except going through publishers who will own all copyrightable material. Now I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that is the way this kind of legislation is headed.
9:46:30 AM 
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