Overcoming the potential downside of TCPA

[bear]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, John S. Denker wrote:

>OK, that's part of the story, but not the whole story.
>
>1) The conversation over the last many days seems like the
>classic blind men + elephant story.  Different people have
>emphasized different parts of a complex issue.

Is that the one where the first elephant decides that
blind men are flat and squishy, and all the other elephants
check the blind men after he's done, and they agree?

>2) The conversation has been greatly impeded by extremism.
>People have been talking in black-and-white terms when
>shades of gray are needed.

I would say that it has been more impeded by misrepresentation.
The spec is designed to be hard to read and M. AARG, the
one who has been talking about the advantages of the proposal,
has been (hmmm) either terribly naive or deliberately
misleading.  As people actually work through the spec and
find the things s/he's been claiming aren't there or couldn't
be done with it, the odds of his/her being a mere paid shill
increase and his/her credibility decreases in direct
proportion.

Yes, there has been some extremism.  The forum has a high
incidence of paranoia and distrust of authority -- but there
are few fora where people *KNOW* as many good reasons to be
paranoid and distrust authority as the posters to these
lists, having seen backpedaling, power grabs, and outright
misrepresentations and lies beyond counting as regards
security.  The distrust you see from the extremists here
has been well earned by those whom they distrust.  You
should expect extremism -- including mine.

But in the end, if a point is wrong, regardless of whether it
was made out of extremism, paranoia, or a deliberate will to
mislead, the truth comes out as people work through the
spec and find out what the heck is actually there.  No shill
can mislead people who are actually willing to go to source
documents and do the work, so putting a paid shill here is
just a waste of money.  In other words, the "Extremists"
will do the work to back up their points for free, whereas
the shill, if his/her points are wrong, cannot no matter how
much s/he is paid.


>need to be clear about threat models.  The current TCPA stuff
>must be rated somewhere between "amateurish" and "preliminary"
>because it doesn't clearly articulate what threat(s) it is
>meant to address.  (Not to mention lying about what threats it
>is meant to address. :-)

Precisely.

>In this case, as the creator of the intellectual property, I didn't
>much care if you "looked inside" the cartridge.  The main thing
>that mattered to me was preventing rampant copyright infringement.
>
>I don't want to start a holy war about copyrights _per se_.  Probably
>nobody thinks that current copyright laws are ideal from a public-policy
>point of view.  But I do think that there ought to be _some_ way to
>make sure authors and performers get paid.

Shakespeare couldn't possibly have produced his body of work
if copyright laws had been in effect.  All the characters would
have "belonged" to someone else.  I'll go with patents about
technical things, although I think the duration is maybe too
long, but art, poetry, music, words -- they properly belong to
the public and I applaud the amateur writers, artists, and
musicians who do what they do because they love it instead of
doing what they do to get paid.  The professionals certainly
aren't producing work that's any better than the best amateurs
any more - and I doubt they ever have.

I am an extremist.  That's me under the banner that says

"Real Artists Have Day Jobs and Real Computers Can Copy Files."

			Bear




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