IP: The Microsoft DRM Patent and Our Freedom to Speak and Think

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 05:04:33 -0500
> From: Seth Johnson <seth.johnson () realmeasures dyndns org>
> Organization: Real Measures
>
>
> The Microsoft DRM Patent and Our Freedom to Speak and Think
>
> by Seth Johnson
> Committee for Independent Technology
> December 14, 2001
>
> In his November 6 essay "You're Free to Think,"
> (http://davenet.userland.com/2001/11/06/youreFreeToThink),
> Dave Winer comments that whatever else happens in the ongoing,
> increasing trend towards policing of the public's right to use
> information and information technology, we are still left with the
> freedom to *think* for ourselves.  He seemed to me to be offering this
> comment as a bare source of solace against the government's increasing
> intent to control the prospects of communications technology.
>
> Microsoft's favorable treatment of late caused him to wonder what kind
> of deal Bill Gates must have worked out with the Bush Administration.
> He wondered what Microsoft might have given the government in return for
> the highly favorable terms of the settlement that's currently on the
> table in the court proceedings against the company, for monopoly
> practices in the operating systems arena.
>
> He commented specifically on the current ramifications of Microsoft's
> increasing position of power in the operating systems market:
>
> > Now, they have to get people to upgrade to
> > Windows XP -- that's the final step, the one that
> > fully turns over the keys to the Internet to them,
> > because after XP they can upgrade at will, routing
> > through Microsoft-owned servers, altering content,
> > and channeling communication through government
> > servers. After XP they fully own electronic
> > communication media, given the consent decree,
> > assuming it's approved by the court.
>
> Now, it has just come to light that Microsoft has been awarded a
> software "patent" for a "Digital Rights Management" operating system.
>
> This development shows us exactly where we stand now.  Microsoft doesn't
> have to offer anything to the government; it has only to hold possession
> of a patent covering the "DRM" elements of its latest OS, thereby
> providing an almost absolutely assured trajectory toward establishing
> the terms by which the public's ability to communicate digital
> information will be controlled.
>
> Please see the message I am posting below, from the CYBERIA email list,
> which quotes from the patent.
>
> The real kicker is right here:
>
> > The digital rights management operating system
> > also limits the functions the user can perform on the
> > rights-managed data and the trusted application, and
> > can provide a trusted clock used in place of the
> > standard computer clock.
>
> The ability to use information freely is now going to be policed at the
> most intricate level, in the name of exclusive rights and to the
> detriment of the most fundamental Constitutional principles of our
> society.
>
> Whereas the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution assures that every
> American citizen has the full right to freedom of speech, we see here
> the ultimate legislative and technical trappings by which the public
> will be demarcated as mere information consumers.
>
> Facts and ideas are not contraband and may never be copyrighted or
> otherwise constrained under the terms of intellectual "property,"
> whether they are bound up in an expressive work or not; and the computer
> is a *logic* device that now sits on nearly every citizen's desktop --
> it is *not* a consumer appliance.  From both the standpoints of speech
> and thought, so-called digital "rights management" is a utterly desolate
> *dead end.*
>
> Whether we speak of the constituent pieces of expressive works, or the
> nature of the computer itself, so-called digital "rights management"
> marks the beginning of a grand rollback of the means by which the
> promise of our participation in and advancement of civil society have
> lately been greatly augmented.
>
> Rather than facing the simple, plain truth that the power given in the
> U.S. Constitution for Congress to grant (or deny) to authors and
> inventors "exclusive right" to their works, was intended to cover
> products that do not intrinsically bind up the very means of
> communication and of our participation in civil society, we instead are
> experiencing a social condition wherein monopoly interests exploit the
> fluidity of logical products to evade the very terms of antitrust law
> and to assure that the public's ordinary rights do not gain purchase
> against their interests.  Antitrust law is all about competition in a
> particular product, but software is as amorphous in its possibilities as
> our own vaunted power to think.  Thus Microsoft easily maintains it is
> not in the browser market, competing with Netscape; it is, rather, in
> the market for "innovative operating systems."
>
> We are now seeing just how "innovative" that operating system can really
> be.
>
> If we do not confront the ludicrousness of the idea of holding a patent
> of this nature, and the outrageousness of our courts' failure to
> confront the truth about what holding market power in the field of
> informatin products really means, we will soon be free to speak and
> think -- only so long as we don't use our computers to do it.
>
> Thus, in the name of exclusive rights, Microsoft is serving old world
> publishing interests, acting by means of legal fictions to assure that
> citizens who seek to further the prospects of information technology,
> will be inexorably locked into the role of information consumers,
> blocked from exercising their own tools in full accordance with the
> rights that our Constitution supposedly guards.
>
> We are *all* information producers, whether we manifest this as a
> routine, inalienable part of the ordinary rights we exercise in our
> everyday lives, or whether we engage ourselves in the present,
> increasingly desperate and furtive struggle to guard commercial
> interests by restricting the use of information delivered in digital
> form.
>
> We have always been information producers, and we must not accede to the
> interests of those who do not regard the public at large as full and
> equal citizens, but rather as mere consumers.
>
> Seth Johnson
> Committee for Independent Technology
>
> Information Producers Initiative:
> http://RealMeasures.dyndns.org/C-FIT
>
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:18:08 -0800
> > From: John Young <jya () PIPELINE COM>
> >
> > Microsoft's patent for a Digital Rights Management
> > Operating System was awarded yesterday:
> >
> >   http://cryptome.org/ms-drm-os.htm
> >
> > Abstract
> >
> > A digital rights management operating system protects
> > rights-managed data, such as downloaded content, from
> > access by untrusted programs while the data is loaded
> > into memory or on a page file as a result of the
> > execution of a trusted application that accesses the
> > memory. To protect the rights-managed data resident in
> > memory, the digital rights management operating system
> > refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while
> > the trusted application is executing or removes the
> > data from memory before loading the untrusted program.
> > If the untrusted program executes at the operating
> > system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights
> > management operating system renounces a trusted identity
> > created for it by the computer processor when the
> > computer was booted.  To protect the rights-managed data
> > on the page file, the digital rights management
> > operating system prohibits raw access to the page file,
> > or erases the data from the page file before allowing
> > such access.  Alternatively, the digital rights
> > management operating system can encrypt the
> > rights-managed data prior to writing it to the page
> > file.  The digital rights management operating system
> > also limits the functions the user can perform on the
> > rights-managed data and the trusted application, and
> > can provide a trusted clock used in place of the
> > standard computer clock.
> >
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