<nettime> Freedom to Think and Speak

["nettime's roving reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/s_johnson_2.html

Freedom to Think and Speak
By Seth Johnson


Under Microsoft's Digital Rights Management operating system, the ability
to use information freely will be policed at the most intricate level.

In his November 6 essay "You're Free to Think,"
(http://davenet.userland.com/2001/11/06/youreFreeToThink), Dave Winer
comments that whatever else happens in the ongoing, increasing trend
towards policing of the public's right to use information and information
technology, we are still left with the freedom to think for ourselves. He
seemed to me to be offering this comment as a bare source of solace
against the government's increasing intent to control the prospects of
communications technology.

Microsoft's favorable treatment of late caused him to wonder what kind of
deal Bill Gates must have worked out with the Bush Administration. He
wondered what Microsoft might have given the government in return for the
highly favorable terms of the settlement that's currently on the table in
the court proceedings against the company, for monopoly practices in the
operating systems arena.

He commented specifically on the current ramifications of Microsoft's
increasing position of power in the operating systems market:

"Now, they have to get people to upgrade to Windows XP -- that's the final
step, the one that fully turns over the keys to the Internet to them,
because after XP they can upgrade at will, routing through Microsoft-owned
servers, altering content, and channeling communication through government
servers. After XP they fully own electronic communication media, given the
consent decree, assuming it's approved by the court."

Now, it has just come to light that Microsoft has been awarded a software
"patent" for a "Digital Rights Management" operating system.

This development shows us exactly where we stand now. Microsoft doesn't
have to offer anything to the government; it has only to hold possession
of a patent covering the "DRM" elements of its latest OS, thereby
providing an almost absolutely assured trajectory toward establishing the
terms by which the public's ability to communicate digital information
will be controlled.

Please see the message I am posting below, from the CYBERIA email list,
which quotes from the patent.

The real kicker is right here:

"The digital rights management operating system also limits the functions
the user can perform on the rights-managed data and the trusted
application, and can provide a trusted clock used in place of the standard
computer clock."

The ability to use information freely is now going to be policed at the
most intricate level, in the name of exclusive rights and to the detriment
of the most fundamental Constitutional principles of our society.

Whereas the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution assures that every
American citizen has the full right to freedom of speech, we see here the
ultimate legislative and technical trappings by which the public will be
demarcated as mere information consumers.

Facts and ideas are not contraband and may never be copyrighted or
otherwise constrained under the terms of intellectual "property," whether
they are bound up in an expressive work or not; and the computer is a
logic device that now sits on nearly every citizen's desktop -- it is not
a consumer appliance. From both the standpoints of speech and thought,
so-called digital "rights management" is a utterly desolate dead end.

Whether we speak of the constituent pieces of expressive works, or the
nature of the computer itself, so-called digital "rights management" marks
the beginning of a grand rollback of the means by which the promise of our
participation in and advancement of civil society have lately been greatly
augmented.

Rather than facing the simple, plain truth that the power given in the
U.S. Constitution for Congress to grant (or deny) to authors and inventors
"exclusive right" to their works was intended to cover products that do
not intrinsically bind up the very means of communication and of our
participation in civil society, we instead are experiencing a social
condition wherein monopoly interests exploit the fluidity of logical
products to evade the very terms of antitrust law and to assure that the
public's ordinary rights do not gain purchase against their interests.
Antitrust law is all about competition in a particular product, but
software is as amorphous in its possibilities as our own vaunted power to
think. Thus Microsoft easily maintains it is not in the browser market,
competing with Netscape; it is, rather, in the market for "innovative
operating systems."

We are now seeing just how "innovative" that operating system can really
be.

If we do not confront the ludicrousness of the idea of holding a patent of
this nature, and the outrageousness of our courts' failure to confront the
truth about what holding market power in the field of information products
really means, we will soon be free to speak and think -- only so long as
we don't use our computers to do it.

Thus, in the name of exclusive rights, Microsoft is serving old world
publishing interests, acting by means of legal fictions to assure that
citizens who seek to further the prospects of information technology will
be inexorably locked into the role of information consumers, blocked from
exercising their own tools in full accordance with the rights that our
Constitution supposedly guards.

We are all information producers, whether we manifest this as a routine,
inalienable part of the ordinary rights we exercise in our everyday lives,
or whether we engage ourselves in the present, increasingly desperate and
furtive struggle to guard commercial interests by restricting the use of
information delivered in digital form.

We have always been information producers, and we must not accede to the
interests of those who do not regard the public at large as full and equal
citizens, but rather as mere consumers.






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