Outreach Volunteers Needed - Content Control is a Dead End

Seth David Schoen schoen at loyalty.org
Sat Sep 1 11:55:35 EDT 2001


Dan Geer writes:

> [ Pardon the delay; my e-mail home
>   base of record is disintegrating
>   plus I travel for a living. ]
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks to all who remarked on-list or off.
> 
> Yes, I am being simple but I think not simplistic, and I will
> be as brief as I can.
> 
> Information can and must be owned as property.  If we depart on
> that point, we should be debating philosophy rather than
> mechanism and you should stop reading here.
> 
> My information about me is mine, i.e., I own it modulo fine
> distinctions at the fringe like whether I own my name.  If we
> depart on that point, we should be debating philosophy rather
> than mechanism and you should stop reading here.

I disagree about both of those things, but doesn't what you wrote last
time, about having to choose both or neither of privacy and copyright,
implicate mechanism?

Were you saying that people who believe in privacy are obliged to
believed in copyright, in order to be logically consistent?

Or were you saying that it isn't possible to enforce privacy without
mechanisms which are also suitable for enforcing copyright, and it
isn't possible to enforce copyright without mechanisms which are also
suitable for enforcing privacy?

I still think that "owning information as property" -- as a general
principle -- is mistaken not only philosophically but also in blurring
important details in enforcement mechanisms.  Lawyers are always
complaining that people confuse copyrights, patents, trademarks, and
trade secrets (although, as Richard Stallman says, this confusion may
come from the fact that all of these things are often referred to as
"intellectual property").  And then there are rights of privacy and
publicity, in civil law, and consumer privacy rights, and privacy rights
against the government in searches and seizures, and marital privacy
rights, and legal privileges against compelled disclosure...

Now, all of these things are _somewhat like_ what it would be like to
own information, and yet they're very different.  A copyright is not
the same as an attorney-client privilege, which is not the same as a
trade secret, which is not the same as your legal rights when dealing
with a credit card company.

Later in your message you mentioned the need for

> containers that encapsulate content,

in order to enforce control of information.

On the technological side, privacy-protecting technologies include
remailers, proxies, e-mail encryption, file encryption, stream/session
encryption, steganography, and so on.  Copyright-protecting
technologies so far mainly include watermarks and DRM (and you might
want to include spiders which try to find illict copies).  But it's
silly to think that PGP is like Adobe eBook Reader, even though both
of them try to use technological measures to enforce somebody's policy
about how certain information ought to be used.  Now, some publishers
may think that _every single attempt to enforce any policy is
equivalent to any other attempt to enforce any other policy_, but
philosophically, legally, and technically, a claim like that seems
bizarre to me.

Even if all "containers" worked properly, they wouldn't be enough to
enforce certain kinds of rights.  For example, PGP-encrypted e-mail
with your lawyer is not enough to enforce your attorney-client
privilege.  A secure intranet is not enough to enforce your trade
secrets, and cryptography not enough for consumer privacy (although it
can help by reducing the amount of information that has to be given
out in the first place in order to complete a transaction).

The general encapsulation of information into boxes that do only what
their owner wants is a pipe dream.  These boxes are useful in certain
contexts, but (per Schneier's _Secrets and Lies_, for example), we have
to remember the contexts.  Some of the biggest information-related
offenses in history (espionage, misappropriations of trade secrets,
infringements of copyright, invasions of privacy) were accomplished with
a piece of paper and a pencil, or with a mechnical printing press.  The
intermediate step was a human mind, in the role of mens rea.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org> | Its really terrible when FBI arrested
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | hacker, who visited USA with peacefull
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF) | mission -- to share his knowledge with
     http://www.freesklyarov.org/      | american nation.  (Ilya V. Vasilyev)



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