Utilizing Palladium against software piracy

Lucky Green shamrock at cypherpunks.to
Thu Aug 8 18:20:22 EDT 2002


I would like to again thank the Palladium team, in particular Peter
Biddle, for participating in yesterday's panel at the USENIX Security
conference on Palladium and TCPA.

Unfortunately I do not have the time at the moment to write up the many
valuable and informative points made during the panel discussion. I
will, however, highlight one such issue:

As Peter pointed out, while the Palladium effort was started to meet the
content protection requirements of digital video content providers, he
also pointed out that Microsoft and its Palladium group have so far been
unable to determine a method in which Palladium could be utilized to
assist in the efforts against application software piracy. As Peter
mentioned, the Palladium team on several occasions had to tell the
Microsoft's anti-piracy group that Palladium is unsuitable to assist in
software (as distinct from content) licensing and anti-piracy efforts.
Since Microsoft is not aware of a method to utilize the Palladium
environment in the enforcement of software licenses, Peter argued,
Microsoft does not intend to and will not utilize Palladium to assist in
the enforcement of software licensing.

I, on the other hand, am able to think of several methods in which
Palladium or operating systems built on top of TCPA can be used to
assist in the enforcement of software licenses and the fight against
software piracy. I therefore, over the course of the night, wrote - and
my patent agent filed with the USPTO earlier today - an application for
an US Patent covering numerous methods by which software applications
can be protected against software piracy on a platform offering the
features that are slated to be provided by Palladium.

--Lucky Green


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