Fri, 21 Feb 2003

Rights Management

Lot's of news all over the place about this Microsoft White Paper on Rights Management Solutions.

It struck me as I was reading over the stories and comments that what's really changing on the 'intellectual property' front is the enforcement mechanism. We're strengthening the laws, to be sure, but we're also adding technical impediments to copyright violation in a way that's never been attempted before.

Obviously, this kind of technology would have tremendous benefits to places like law firms, hospitals, government agencies and other businesses that need to maintain some degree of secrecy and/or privacy. But rather than placing the onus on the legal system to sniff out and find infringing parties, these new measures aim to make the infringement itself impossible.

Why could this be a bad thing? Well, if the Pentagon Papers had been protected in this manner, chances are they would never have seen the light of day. And who knows where that would have led the country.... what about the other "whistle blowing" cases, famous and infamous, like Enron, Brown and Williamson, RJR Nabisco to name a few?

My point is that sometimes the public's need to know trumps the public's right to know. The proper way to sort this out is with a finely tuned legal system, not with the blanket application of strong cryptographic technology to "manage rights".

That phrase - "manage rights" makes me about as uncomfortable as "human resource". Human beings are not resources, and rights do not need management.

/Copywrongs | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time