Fighting fire with fire

[ciphergoth]

A beautiful story of a simple and brilliant move laying waste to the plans of a powerful and evil conspiracy.

Update: I had this a bit wrong. Fixing it now.

You may have heard about two very similar new initiatives, Palladium (Microsoft) and TCPA (HP and others). They claim it's to meet all sorts of needs, but it's pretty clear that one purpose is in the driving seat: stopping you from pirating music and movies.

Technical detail: the idea is that every new computer includes a small piece of tamper-resistant hardware on the motherboard, which stores some secret keys. When you boot, you can choose to let this bit of hardware know what you're booting, and it can attest to remote authorities that you really did boot that. It can also decrypt things only if it's satisfied that the appropriate software is requesting the decryption.

Microsoft want this because they don't want anyone to have a reason to have another computing device in their house: they want absolute control over it all, so making your computer be your DVD player is essential for them, and the MPAA et al won't get burned again this way until they feel they have rock-solid piracy resistance. But it's worth noting that Microsoft themselves don't make movies, or music, for the most part. They make software.

Will Palladium or TCPA include measures to protect against software piracy? Microsoft have stated very publically that the thought simply never crossed their minds. Palladium is for content, not for software.

And this is where the real stroke of genius comes in. The well-known cypherpunk Lucky Green responded to Microsoft and HP as follows: "What, you hadn't thought to use it for software DRM? Well, I can see a dozen ways to use it for that. And since they's original, I filed a patent on it them this morning."

M$ will have an interesting time persuading one of their implacable opponents to licence his patent to them...

Lucky's original post regarding his filing

Lucky Green Palladium patent FAQ

Truly, my heart is warmed by this story.

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

But the burden isn't on them to demonstrate that they don't think Microsoft thought of it. The burden is on Microsoft to show that they *had* thought of it. In order to do so, they have to stand up in court and say "we lied to the public to make them adopt our technology".

I expect that this is the course M$ will take. It's not as if they aren't already totally discredited with everyone who understands what's going on.

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's a brilliant piece of petard-hoisting, but everybody who understands technology and doesn't have a financial interest in Microsoft's success already knows that they're a bunch of lying, thieving weasels. It's something that has been documented time after time. (I give people who work for Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're self-deluding, rather than evil.)

I actually think that Microsoft's implicit testimony as to the novelty of the patent would be given quite a bit of credibility by the Patent Office. That's one of the problems with patents...