Check this out: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html
Here's some highlights:
There is a downside too. There will be remote censorship: the mechanisms designed to delete pirated music under remote control may be used to delete documents that a court (or a software company) has decided are offensive - this could be anything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.
The Palladium announcement implies that the Microsoft product will support this: you will be able to configure Word so that it will encrypt all documents generated in a given compartment on your machine, and share it only with other users in a defined group. Corporations will be able to do this too, to make life harder for whistleblowers. They can arrange that company documents can only be read on company PCs, unless a suitably authorised person clears them for export. They can also implement timelocks: they can arrange, for example, that all emails evaporate after 90 days unless someone makes a positive effort to preserve them. (Think of how useful that would have been for Enron, or Arthur Andersen, or for Microsoft itself during the antitrust case.)
Here's some highlights:
There is a downside too. There will be remote censorship: the mechanisms designed to delete pirated music under remote control may be used to delete documents that a court (or a software company) has decided are offensive - this could be anything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders. Software companies can also make it harder for you to switch to their competitors' products; for example, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor.
The Palladium announcement implies that the Microsoft product will support this: you will be able to configure Word so that it will encrypt all documents generated in a given compartment on your machine, and share it only with other users in a defined group. Corporations will be able to do this too, to make life harder for whistleblowers. They can arrange that company documents can only be read on company PCs, unless a suitably authorised person clears them for export. They can also implement timelocks: they can arrange, for example, that all emails evaporate after 90 days unless someone makes a positive effort to preserve them. (Think of how useful that would have been for Enron, or Arthur Andersen, or for Microsoft itself during the antitrust case.)
Last edited:
.
