Losing by gaining
I was writing about trusted computing and the claim that trusted computing systems give you new features without taking away features you had before. This seems to be true of Palladium and TCPA (although we'll find out a lot more about TCPA later on this month when the TCPA Promoter Companies come by EFF to give us a briefing).
In particular, the suggestion is that you can run any software which you could run before. E.g. in the Palladium FAQ
"Palladium" brings additional capabilities to the PC but does not interfere with the operation of any program that runs on current PCs. "Palladium" never imposes itself on processes that do not request its services; "Palladium" features must be requested by a program. So the MP3 player you have today will still work on a "Palladium"-enabled PC tomorrow.[...] "Palladium's" security chip (the SSC) and other features are not involved in the boot process of the OS or in the OS's decision to load an application that doesn't use a "Palladium" feature and execute it. Because "Palladium" is not involved in the boot process, it cannot block an OS, or drivers or any non-"Palladium" PC application from running. Only the user decides what "Palladium" applications get to run. Anyone can write an application to take advantage of "Palladium" APIs without notifying Microsoft (or anyone else) or getting its (or anyone else's) approval.
So there seems to be a clear technical sense in which you can do what you did before and you are only gaining capabilities and not losing them.
Still, people who believe this may still believe that Palladium is not a good thing overall for many users, or will still introduce disadvantages. How can that be?
To argue that point by analogy, you'd want to find examples of where gaining something, or possessing something you didn't possess before, is a disadvantage to you in the end. Specifically, if possible, you'd want to try to find cases where gaining an ability, or having an ability is a bad thing, or cases in which you might want to have fewer capabilities.
Here are a few such examples, offhand:
- time-lock safe, employees cannot open
- having cash or keys in your possession when you are mugged
- having possession of your car keys when you're drunk
- the invention of nuclear weapons (it might be rational to acquire them once they exist, but you might be better off if nobody knew how to build them in the first place)
- having the ability to enforce an unconscionable contract (or to enter such a contract which can be enforced against you)
- similarly, a minimum wage law seems to "impair the obligation of contracts" (which might subject it to criticism by people who believe in a strong freedom of contract), but under certain conditions it will be a net benefit for many laborers
- knowing how to build St. Basil's Cathedral (because your knowledge gives Ivan the Terrible an incentive to blind you; there are other stories in history about architects being disabled or murdered to prevent them from using their skills in the future: "the counselors of the Town Hall decided to blind him to prevent him from creating another piece of art in another city")
- knowing a secret which someone "could tell you, but then" would have to kill you (because the person has to kill you)
- correspondingly, knowing who committed a crime, if other people don't know (because then the person who committed a crime has an incentive to kill you to threaten you to prevent you from testifying, even if you didn't want to testify)
- possessing a dangerous object or chemical allows you to use it, but might also put you at risk that you will injure yourself with it accidentally or that someone else will use it against you
- possessing something valuable which makes people want to rob you or extort something from you
- the story of Odysseus and the Sirens
I wrote about this before in April of 2000, and I mentioned the Sirens, the time-lock safe, an essay by Robin Hanson, and holding copyrights when you're being sued by someone who wants to censor you. The latter was the occasion for my mentioning the problem in the first place. If you hold a copyright or a trademark, someone can sue you, be awarded the copyright or trademark in a judgment or a settlement, and then use it to try to censor you and third parties. This is especially likely to happen in reverse-engineering cases where someone publishes software produced by means of reverse-engineering and is then sued.
One possible conclusion in this case is that it's better for an organization like the FSF to hold copyrights than for you, as a software author, to hold them yourself, if litigation is likely. The incentives for you as a litigation defendant will not necessarily favor the outcome which you would ideally prefer in the abstract. Faced with risks like losing your home or livelihood, you might agree to something which is not beneficial to the public or to your cause.
This is also true for personal property in litigation. If you own personal property, it can be taken from you, so owning property can be a serious disadvantage in case of litigation.
The concrete argument which I'm hinting at by analogy is that having the new "ability" to decrypt certain things only subject to conditions of someone else's devising may not be a net benefit for you, even though it's a new ability you didn't have before. And the market effects of having everyone gain this ability may particularly not be a net benefit for you.
This reminds me that some people still think the Industrial Revolution was a bad deal for the public. I find that hard to believe, but it did bring about things like industrial pollution and repetitive strain injuries, from which I'm suffering even as I type this sentence.
Speaking of winners and losers in the course of progress: In May of last year I quoted a DRM business model pitch -- since altered -- which compared the progress wrought by DRM to a genocide:
The author's second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley 1996) bought this observation into focus by pointing out that historical frontiers were typically tamed by displacing property-averse, communitarian, indigenous tribes (such as the American Indians and the Open Source movement) by property-conscious, capitalistic newcomers. Although the displacement of primitive economic systems is devastating to those displaced, the advanced economic order that follows is ultimately far more productive and capable than the primitive economic system that preceded it.
I continue to find this analogy really shocking, and perhaps its author did, too, because he subsequently took that paragraph off of his web site. (I should get a copy of Superdistribution and see whether it actually says this.)
