Politech mailing list archives
FC: Book party photos; Hard drive copyright proposal draws fire
From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 02:26:52 -0500
So I stopped by two book parties this evening; here are the photos... from Steven Levy's "Crypto": http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/steven-levy-book.html http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-4/steven-levy-2.html from John Heilemann's "Pride Before the Fall" on Microsoft: http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/john-heilemann-book.html http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-4/john-heilemann-2.html http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-4/john-wilke.html(Heilemann's book is well-written but I fear it may be of limited interest outside of politech-type circles. It's primarily the story of a trial that finished nearly two years ago, and the assorted pre-trial manuevering. And it doesn't seem as though the world is quite as obsessed about Microsoft's antitrust woes as, say, in summer and fall 1998.)
Below is a CNN article on a hard drive copyright proposal. It surfaced while I was away in Aruba, so we missed the first iteration. For background I'll include below an exchange on Dave Farber's IP list from last month.
-Declan ******** From: "Stephen Alexander" <sjalex () yahoo com>
To: <declan () well com> Subject: interesting Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 13:13:19 -0600 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 Declan, Don't know if you've heard about this but I figured it would be of some interest to the politech list. It regards a plan from the "4C Entity" to build hard drives with "content protection capabilities" which basically boils down to preventing copying of copyrighted materials. Cheers, Stephen Alexander http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/computing/01/10/hard.drive.copy.protection.idg/ index.html
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From: "Thomas Leavitt" <thomasleavitt () hotmail com> To: declan () well com Subject: Have you seen this? Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 16:46:46 -0800 http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/computing/01/10/hard.drive.copy.protection.idg/index.htmlUncool in the extreme... the music industry continues to demonstrate a head in the sand we don't get it approach...Thomas
*********
Subject: IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 13:16:03 -0800
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
The Register has broken a story of the latest tragedy of copyright
mania in the computer industry. Intel and IBM have invented and are
pushing a change to the standard spec for PC hard drives that would
make each one enforce "copy protection" on the data stored on the hard
drive. You wouldn't be able to copy data from your own hard drive to
another drive, or back it up, without permission from some third
party. Every drive would have a unique ID and unique keys, and would
encrypt the data it stores -- not to protect YOU, the drive's owner,
but to protect unnamed third parties AGAINST you.
The same guy who leads the DVD Copy Control Association is heading the
organization that licenses this new technology -- John Hoy. He's a
front-man for the movie and record companies, and a leading figure in
the California DVD lawsuit. These people are lunatics, who would
destroy the future of free expression and technological development,
so they could sit in easy chairs at the top of the smoking ruins and
light their cigars off 'em.
The folks at Intel and IBM who are letting themselves be led by the
nose are even crazier. They've piled fortunes on fortunes by building
machines that are better and better at copying and communicating
WHATEVER collections of raw bits their customers desire to copy. Now
for some completely unfathomable reason, they're actively destroying
that working business model. Instead they're building in circuitry
that gives third parties enforceable veto power over which bits their
customers can send where. (This disk drive stuff is just the tip of
the iceberg; they're doing the same thing with LCD monitors, flash
memory, digital cable interfaces, BIOSes, and the OS. Next week we'll
probably hear of some new industry-wide copy protection spec, perhaps
for network interface cards or DRAMs.) I don't know whether the movie
moguls are holding compromising photos of Intel and IBM executives
over their heads, or whether they have simply lost their minds. The
only way they can succeed in imposing this on the buyers in the
computer market is if those buyers have no honest vendors to turn to.
Or if those buyers honestly don't know what they are being sold.
So spread the word. No copy protection should exist ANYWHERE in
generic computer hardware! It's up to the BUYER to determine what to
use their product for. It's not up to the vendors of generic
hardware, and certainly not up to a record company that's shadily
influencing those vendors in back-room meetings. Demand a policy
declaration from your vendor that they will build only open hardware,
not covertly controlled hardware. Use your purchasing dollars to
enforce that policy.
Our business should go to the honest vendors, who'll sell you a drive
and an OS and a motherboard and a CPU and a monitor that YOU, the
buyer, can determine what is a valid use of. Don't send your money
to Intel or IBM or Sony. Give your money to the vendors who'll sell
you a product that YOU control.
John
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15620.html
Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive
Hastening a rapid demise for the free copying of digital media, the next
generation of hard disks is likely to come with copyright protection
countermeasures built in.
Technical committees of NCTIS, the ANSI-blessed standards body, have been
discussing the incorporation of content protection currently used for
removable media into industry-standard ATA drives, using proprietary
technology originating from the 4C Entity. They're the people who brought
you CSS2: IBM, Toshiba Intel and Matsushita.
The scheme envisaged brands each drive with a unique identifier at
manufacturing time.
The proposals are already at an advanced stage: three drafts have already
been discussed for incorporating CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable
Media) into the ATA specification by the NCTIS T.13 committee. The
committee next meets in February. If, as expected, the CPRM extensions
become part of the ATA specification, copyright protection will be in every
industry-standard hard disk by next summer, according to IBM.
However, what's likely to create a firestorm of industry protest is that
the proposed mechanism introduces problems to moving data between compliant
and non-compliant hard drives. Modifications to existing backup programs,
imaging software, RAID arrays and logical volume managers will be required
to cope with the new drives, <I>The Register</I> has discovered.
[snip --dbm] *********
From: "Gelsinger, Patrick P" <patrick.p.gelsinger () intel com>
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Dave -
As a regular reader of your IP reader, I would apprecaite you diseminating a
correction to your mailing on Dec 22.
Content protection technology misinformation generates negative web-press
coverage:
An article on The Register website "Stealth plan puts copy protection into
every hard drive" contains false information that the 4C's (Intel, IBM, MEI,
Toshiba) Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM) is to be applied to
all PC hard drives. It is misinterpreting a specification for use of CPRM
with the Compact Flash media format (which supports either semiconductor
flash memory or IBM microdrives) probably because Compact Flash uses the
same command protocol interface as standard PC harddrives. The technology
is neither intended nor licensed for use with PC harddrives and is optional
even for the supported media types (flash memory and microdrives). John
Gilmore, a noted privacy and consumer advocate, has picked up the article
and further propagated the erroneous information and mentioned Intel
"IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives". I have alerted
public relations at Intel and are disseminating accurate information within
Intel and among our industry contacts.
Pat.
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