Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

This is a near-transcript of a commentary of mine that ran on NPR's All Things Considered on April 5. You can listen to it via Real or Windows Media Player. (And please forgive my over-simplifications and overstatements.; I only had 3 minutes, which makes it tough to be subtle.)

From the begining the Web has seemed like the Wild West. But now we're being told that it's actually a looting spree, with people smashing-and-grabbing all the music and movies and copyrighted text they can, for free. The irony is that thanks to Big Content companies such as the recording industry and movie industry, big computer companies and big government, three technologies are being pulled together that may make control over ideas stricter on the Web than it ever was in the real world.

Right now, once you've loaded a song or an article onto your computer, you can do what you want with it. But digital rights management technology, the first of our trio, would change that. If, for example, Metallica's recording company will let you pay to download a song of theirs and listen to it just once, DRM would make sure that it's erased after that one play. Or maybe DRM will let you read an online book but not print more than two pages from it or copy any paragraphs out of it. That gives content companies stricter enforcement rights on line than in the real world — after you've bought a physical book, the publisher can't physically stop you from reading it a second time or lending it to a friend. DRM can. Adobe and Microsoft are beginning to build DRM into their software, and so are hardware companies, such as Hewlett- Packard.

But for DRM to enforce the content company's rights against you, it has to know who you are. That's where the second piece comes in: digital ID. It's good for online merchants and has an obvious role in homeland security, but again, it goes further than ID in the real world: In the real world to buy stuff all I need is a credit card; in the digital world, I'll also need to present the equivalent of a valid passport. I'll be less anonymous on line than I am in the real world.

But how will anyone know that the ID I'm using in fact belongs to me? That's where the third leg, "trusted computing" comes in. A trusted computer - a term I find Orwellian - has cooked into its hardware and software the ability to authenticate itself to other computers, and to keep you from running software in any unauthorized way - including that Metallica song you want to listen to a second time, you pirate you! Trusted computing gives content companies more control over your machine than you have. Microsoft has announced it's building trusted computing into the next version of Windows, called Longhorn, due in a couple of years, and major chip manufacturers such as Intel have agreed to redesign their chips to work with it. This is real, and it's on its way.