Research and commentary on digital technologies in public life
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: digital aircraft intercoms.
These devices, which let the pilot or co-pilot of an aircraft speak to passengers, qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any newly manufactured digital aircraft intercoms will have to incorporate government-approved copy restriction technology.
Fight piracy – regulate aircraft intercoms!
I was at a conference in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday. Participants included some people who are reasonably plugged in to the Washington political process. I was stunned to hear one of these folks sum up the Washington conventional wisdom like this:
“The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.”
(It’s worth noting that he was repeating the views of others rather than offering his own opinion – and that he had a general-purpose computer open on the table in front of him as he said this!)
If I could take just one concept from computer science and magically implant it into the heads of everybody in Washington – I mean really implant it, so that they understood the idea and its importance in the same way that computer scientists do – it would be the role of the general-purpose computer. I would want them to understand, most of all, why there is no such thing as an almost-general-purpose computer.
If you’re designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There’s no in-between.
I can tell you that this is true. And I can assure you that every well-educated computer scientist knows why it is true. But what I don’t know how to do – at least not yet – is to give a simple, non-technical explanation for it. If anybody has a hint about how to do this, please, please let me know.
Today on Fritz’s Hit List: talking pill bottles.
These pill bottles, designed as an aid to visually impaired patients, play a recorded audio message to identify themselves, so they qualify for regulation as “digital media devices” under the Hollings CBDTPA. If the CBDTPA passes, any newly manufactured talking pill bottles will have to incorporate government-approved copy restriction technology.
Fight piracy – regulate pill bottles!
Larry Lessig offers an extraordinary
post-mortem on this week’s Supreme Court arguments in the Eldred case. Lessig deserves our enduring thanks, and a long, peaceful vacation.
Dan Bricklin explains how copy restriction technology frustrates archiving of historically interesting works. Archivists normally preserve works by copying them; so works that can’t be copied may never be archived.
Bricklin tells a sobering story about his attempts to recover an original copy of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program, of which Bricklin himself was the primary author). Due to copy restriction technology, he was unable to recover a version himself. Ultimately he found that an ex-employee had kept a (probably unauthorized) unprotected copy, so he was able to recover the program and archive it. VisiCalc is only about twenty years old, and was one of the most popular computer programs of its time. An older or less popular work might well have been lost forever.
