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all comPlex ecosystems have Parasites
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ing a simpler software ecosystem — wrongheaded, but the meth-
odology is doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free
trade zones just won’t be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted
Computing requires no less than perfect compliance.
The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The
DVB Copy Protection system relies on a set of rules for translat-
ing every one of its restriction states — such as “copy once” and
“copy never” — to states in other DRM systems that are licensed
to receive its output. That means that they’re signing up to review,
approve, and write special rules for every single entertainment
technology now invented and every technology that will be in-
vented in the future.
Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug
into your TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbi-
ters of technology approve is a recipe for turning the electronics,
IT, and telecoms industries into something as small and unim-
portant as Hollywood. Hollywood — which is a tenth the size of
IT, itself a tenth the size of telecoms.
In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the
approval of a few power-brokers who have signing authority over
the two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far
as Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks
ago, I heard the VP of Technology for Warner give a presenta-
tion in Dublin on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his
money-shot, his big convincer of a slide went like this:
“With advances in processing power, storage capacity, and
broadband
access...
EVERYBODY
BECOMES
A
BROAD-
CASTER!”
Heaven forfend.
Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the
panel that set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The
recording industry set the rates as high as they did so that the
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