fyi: Content Protection for Recordable Media -- Jeffrey B. Lotspiech

[Bill Frantz]

At 2:06 AM -0700 4/4/01, Ian BROWN wrote:
>Jeffrey B. Lotspiech trailed his seminar as:
>>Recently, articles have appeared in the press that CPRM will be
>>standardized on all PC hard drives. This has fueled Orwellian
>>mages of a Big Brother chip on your PC that will decide whether
>>your files are worthy of being copied. This is complete nonsense.
>>CPRM would never be standardized, nor have we ever proposed such
>>a thing. CPRM strength is portability and interchangeability and
>>it is mismatch for fixed hard drive. It is completely passive,
>>requires no hardware, and can only be exploited by newly-designed
>>applications. It cannot possibly affect existing files or
>>applications. How these myths came about, and persist, was an
>>object lesson for a media-naive researcher.
>
>The *real* object lesson is probably yet to come: how little the content
>industries let technical reality affect their plans of Content Control
>Everywhere...

I went to the talk.  The basic scheme is to build a system where everything
in it is covered by intellectual property law (patents), so legal users can
be bound by license agreement to implement things a certain way, and not
implement other things.  Unlicensed uses will be confronted in the courts,
and sites distributing them will be ordered to remove the offending items.

Following this philosophy, they have their own cypher, vetted by in house
cryptographers, and outside consultants.

It looks like there is at least one interesting sociological attack on it.

Cheers - Bill


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