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February 03, 2003

Hijackers Are Worse than Pirates

Seth Johnson has sent around a message alerting us to a page where we can write and send messages to AMI and Transmeta protesting their recent decisions to build into their chips the capabilities required to work with Microsoft Palladium and other "trusted computing" and "digital rights management" systems. Here's what I wrote to AMI:

Notably absent in your recent meetings to decide the fate of the digital marketplace of ideas were the voices of the customer. Had I, as an AMI customer, been allowed to speak, I would have said that I will not buy a computer that has been hardware-enabled for "DRM" since it gives the creators of content the right to control how I use that content, a right we have not allowed in any other medium.

I ask you to have the guts to announce that bullying customers is not what AMI is about. Back away from the one-sided agreement. I would like to be able to buy AMI-based computers in the future, but I will not if by so doing I am enabling Hollywood to hijack my computer.

Here's Richard Stallman on Palladium and "Trusted Computing." Where's Linus Torvalds on the issue? (That's a question, not a poke.) I can't find anything in a quick googling, but since he works for Transmeta and since there's been serious discussion of the effect of DRM on Open Source, I'm surprised links are not leaping off the results page.

Posted by D. Weinberger at February 3, 2003 10:03 AM

Comments

I actually asked Linus about this at the linux.conf 2003 Q&A session. More from a "Can this be a force for good rather than evil" angle than a Chicken Little tone. His response was basically, customers will hate it, ignore it and it will go away. But he thinks HW accelerated crypto is cool.

Posted by: Daniel Smith | February 6, 2003 04:29 AM

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