Do you trust Microsoft with the Power of Denial?
See, I told you this would happen! (Hat tip to this entry at Slashdot for pointing me to the article.)
Now that academics are waking up to the problems that Microsoft’s Palladium project could create for researchers, I wonder if there will be a movement to draft a “digital bill of rights” (something like this one, but for real) with some real legal teeth to it. If the government doesn’t take some steps to ensure that users have some inviolable rights, Palladium (a term that Microsoft has apparently stopped using—perhaps because of all the bad press associated with that name?) could be used to enforce the shrink-wrapped licensing agreements de facto.
Why is that so bad? Well, because companies can write pretty much whatever they want into there licensing agreements. It’s not uncommon for companies to prohibit benchmarking their products against those of competitors, for example. It is not difficult to imagine how this could easily be carried to ludicrous extremes, but Palladium would enforce those conditions anyway—no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might be.
Oh, and forget about fair use, too. Palladium would make sure that you only get the rights the publisher/content owner grants, nothing more. The days when you actually owned what you own would quickly come to an end. Wouldn’t that be a great thing for all of the copyright holders of the world? They stand to gain the rights to sell things while still maintaining complete control over how it is to be used.
As I wrote before, giving a known monopolist the power to define your rights is a bad idea. Stop Palladium before it’s too late!
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
—Benjamin Franklin
