Digital rights management - we're all grilled and toasted

SOME SAY THE classic PC is dead. Certainly if the digital rights management crowd - led by the infamous Redmond crime family, the McSofties, manage to replace the independent PC the computing world will certainly change. Critics of the "freedom-to-compute-anything" PC would like to replace it with a box that only serves users with products that vendors of software and intellectual property(IP) permit, and get paid for. So the good old general purpose computer under the absolute control of the end-user may not be long for this world.

For most folks who just use their computers for convenience, utility and game play, this won't seem like such a big deal, because you'll still get to send and receive e-mail, kill aliens, and calculate your income taxes. But the unseen consequences are mammoth.

. A PC today is very much like a general purpose tool. You can look upon it in many different ways, but let's use a kitchen metaphor for a change - it's like a range-top grill. You can cook just about anything you want with it. Such a grill can really cook anything you like - from steaks to soup - as long as you have the right utensils go get the job done. But just as literacy in the kitchen is sadly lacking in our fast-food societies, most people who own computers employ them strictly and unimaginatively to grill white bread, and make toast... metaphorically speaking.

Thus when the next generation appliance comes out looking more like a bread-slice toaster than a grill, most folks will find their thin-sliced white bread still seems to fit into the machine, so what's all the fuss? After all e-mails, word processing, and accounting programs still work, and aliens still get killed. Where's the beef?

The old model of the general computer that we still enjoy today is for the most part beholden to no-one. Generally speaking our computers answers to no vendor or manufacturer, and the entity accountable to third parties is you - the user. You are the contact, the purchaser, the user, the employer of the technology. Metaphorically speaking you can grill a steer a slice at a time as effectively as you can grill bread, and your grill is a private tool - with no-one able to see you work on your secret recipes. The new computer toasters though, are something completely different.

Bad - if the future of computing follows McSofties vision, not only will you be restricted to grilling bread, any bread you choose may be rejected if the toaster doesn't recognise it - because the toaster's operating system get's a kickback from their relationships with the bakeries.

Worse - your new computer/toaster will require ready access to the Internet, by which it will be able to dialogue with toaster central - to protect the rights of the bread makers.

Worst - by the resulting abandonment of the general purpose model of the personal computer the world will suffer from a decline in the ability of the general population to freely engage in general purpose computing innovation.

The Inescapable Bell Curve
As with any general distribution, the users of personal computers can be classified in their creativity and innovativeness by a bell curve.

With the e-mail and browser users on the far left, and the office application users and gamers increasing in their literacy and aggressive use of technology, until we drop off in numbers into the diminutive right end of the curve with innovators, explorers, and hackers. Intimidating as it may seem to the bureaucratic minded, the dangerous folk at the far end of the creative and hence dangerous end of the bell curve are perhaps the most useful to the future of society.

After all, innovation fuels progress from which most of today's Western societies draw their economic fuel. The new computer toaster designs through are neatly drawn up and designed to deny access to the persons operating on the far right of the bell curve - hence stifling innovation, and robbing the future to line the pockets of past innovators, and magnate owner interests of IP and commercial art and craft.

Political Criticism?
Don't make the mistake of confusing the criticism of an specific economic model of computing with general Western economics. Secure next generation computing doesn't have to rely on the big brother model of the next generation computer toaster being floated today by the McSoftie families.

Secure computing needs to follow a person, and be portable as a person, along with any supporting media. Any authentication devices should be highly portable - vendor independent, and fit in your wallet. By contrast, the secure computing, next generation personal computer technologies proposed today reduce the role of individuals to that of a wallet, and create legal and technological arrangements between an introducing vendor like McSoftie, and your toaster, with the end user license agreements (EULAs) reading like a seven year contract for a diabolic favour. "Agreements" that effectively see your interests pitted against a stable of lawyers that even Heracles couldn't clean up after.

Two futures
A decade or two from now we are either going to be lamenting the onset of the secure new toaster/PC appliance, or reminisce how we narrowly avoided that bullet. McSoftie has already been busy seducing Chip and Chimp-zillas though, and we are further down the smelly path than most realize.

Eventually after enough fiascoes bruise our sensibilities, we may come out with some constitutional protections for privacy, that historically weren't necessary before the Internet, but until the general populations learn about the pitfalls of compromised privacy, and demand protections in law, all will be increasingly vulnerable to new predations against their digital persons.

Oddly though, there is a tremendous economic potential to managing digital rights in a manner more mindful of personal freedoms and privacy, but as yet no large economic interests appear to be voicing a vision openly challenging to the proposed McSoftie monopoly. µ