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The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual
terms became: winning a coveted spot on the “approved tech-
nology” list would be quite a burden! Once you were in the club,
there were all sorts of rules about whom you could associate with,
how you had to comport yourself, and so on.
One of these rules of conduct was “robustness.” As a condition
of approval, manufacturers would have to harden their technolo-
gies so that their customers wouldn’t be able to modify, improve
upon, or even understand their workings. As you might imagine,
the people who made open source TV tuners were not thrilled
about this, as “open source” and “non-user-modifiable” are polar
opposites.
Another
was
“renewability”:
the
ability
of
the
studios
to
revoke outputs that had been compromised in the field. The stu-
dios expected the manufacturers to make products with remote
“kill switches” that could be used to shut down part or all of their
device if someone, somewhere had figured out how to do some-
thing naughty with it. They promised that we’d establish criteria
for renewability later, and that it would all be “fair.”
But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the
worst snarls: when shouting failed, they’d lead any recalcitrant
player out of the room and negotiate in secret with them, leaving
the rest of us to cool our heels. Once, they took the Microsoft team
out of the room for
six hours,
then came back and announced that
digital video would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors
at a greatly reduced resolution (this “feature” appears in Vista as
“fuzzing”).
The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We
were headed for the real meat of the negotiations: the
criteria
by
which approved technology would be evaluated: How many bits
of crypto would you need? Which ciphers would be permissible?
Which features would and wouldn’t be allowed?
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