Challenge to David Wagner on TCPA

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002, James A. Donald wrote:

>     --
> On 2 Aug 2002 at 10:43, Trei, Peter wrote:
> > Since the position argued involves nothing which would invoke
> > the malign interest of government powers or corporate legal
> > departments, it's not that. I can only think of two reasons why
> > our corrospondent may have decided to go undercover...
>
> I can think of two innocuous reasons, though the real reason is
> probably something else altogether:
>
> 1.  Defending copyright enforcement is extremely unpopular because
> it seemingly puts you on the side of the hollywood cabal, but in
> fact TCPA/Paladium, if it works as described, and if it is not
> integrated with legal enforcement, does not over reach in the
> fashion that most recent intellectual property legislation, and
> most recent policy decisions by the patent office over reach.

a. TCPA/Palladium must be integrated with laws which give to the
Englobulators absolute legal cudgel powers, such as the DMCA.  So far I
have not seen any proposal by the Englobulators to repeal the DMCA and
cognate laws, so if TCPA/Palladium is imposed, the DMCA will be used, just
as HP threatened to use it a couple of days ago.  And, of course, today
there is no imposed TCPA/Palladium, so the situation will be much worse
when there is.

b. Why must TCPA/Palladium be a dongle on the whole computer?  Why not a
separate dongle?  Because, of course, the Englobulators proceed here on
principle.  The principle being that only the Englobulators have a right to
own printing presses/music studios/movie and animation studios.

>
> 2..  Legal departments are full of people who are, among their
> many other grievious faults, technologically illiterate.
> Therefore when an insider is talking about something, they cannot
> tell when he is leaking inside information or not, and tend to
> have kittens, because they have to trust him (being unable to tell
> if he is leaking information covered by NDA), and are
> constitutionally incapable of trusting anyone.
>
>     --digsig

There is a business, not yet come into existence, of providing standard
crypto services to law offices.

oo--JS.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com