Ernest Miller, who has written lots of great stuff for LawMeme, now has his very own blog at importance.typepad.com.
Archives for October 2003
SunnComm's Latest
October 14, 2003 by
SunnComm is now taking yet another position regarding Alex Halderman’s paper – that the paper is just “political activism masquerading as research”. (The quote comes from SunnComm president Peter Jacobs, responding to a question from Seth Finkelstein.) Jacobs had expressed the same sentiment earlier, on an investor discussion board, in this vitriolic message, which he apparently tried to retract later.
[I can’t resist pointing out how hilariously wrong Jacobs is when he says that nobody affiliated with the EFF has ever produced any digital content worth selling. There are many counterexamples, starting with the three founders of EFF (Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore) who all became rich and famous by producing copyrighted works.]
As far as I can tell, what Jacobs is arguing, essentially, is that even though Halderman’s paper does not make any political argument, the paper might affect the public policy debate about DRM. What I don’t understand is why that’s a bad thing. It seems to me that an accurate, truthful research report has more merit, rather than less, if its results are relevant to a public policy debate.
To put it another way, Halderman stands accused of relevance, which can be a dangerous tactic for an academic to follow.
SunnComm Says It Won't Sue Halderman
October 10, 2003 by
SunnComm, which had previously said it planned to sue Alex Halderman for publishing a critique of SunnComm’s CD anti-copying technology, has now backed off. According to Josh Brodie’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian, SunnComm president Peter Jacobs has now said the company has changed its mind and will not sue.
SunnComm is to be commended for deciding not to interfere with Alex’s right to speak. I hope SunnComm decides to join the debate now. If SunnComm wants to add anything, or to challenge anything that Alex said in his paper, I for one would like to hear from them.
SunnComm Responds
October 7, 2003 by
Hiawatha Bray’s story in today’s Boston Globe reports on SunnComm’s response to Alex Halderman’s dissection of SunnComm’s CD copy-protection technology.
”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a legal way to make copies for personal use, not to stop large-scale piracy.
This is hard to square with SunnComm’s previous assertion that the technology offers “an incredible level of security”, that it “met the toughest standards”, and that it passed tests in which the “security level offered by the MediaMax technology was pushed to the limit.”
It’s also worth noting that if your goal is indeed “to give honest music lovers a legal way to make copies for personal use, not to stop large-scale piracy”, you can achieve this goal perfectly by offering ordinary, unmodified CDs.
UPDATE (Oct. 10, 10:50 AM): Don’t miss this satirical “story” at Kuro5hin.
Fixing Trusted Computing
October 7, 2003 by
The EFF has posted a very nice piece (apparently written by Seth Schoen) on “trusted computing” systems. The piece makes two important contributions to the debate. First, it gives the best simple introduction to trusted computing technologies that I have seen. Second, it suggests “owner override,” a technological tweak that would largely eliminate the downside of trusted computing (i.e., our loss of control over our own computers), while preserving most of trusted computing’s security benefits.
