TCPA and Palladium: Content Control for the Masses
While security experts poke and jab at what bits and pieces
of the TCPA and Palladium specs they can get ahold of, they
have tended to focus on how they work and what they imply as
far as concerns such as privacy and security go, or
alternatively, in terms of how they would impact the
functionality of the general purpose logic device.  Analysts
both favorable and unfavorable have been analyzing them from
these standpoints, while paying much less attention to what
the proposals imply from the standpoint of what content
control itself really means.
The most significant problem with TCPA and Palladium is not
whether they may interfere with the power of the universal
logic device, or whether they are effectual from the
standpoint of privacy and security concerns, though these
are all very important concerns.  Rather, the fundamental
problem they present is in the political premises that they
hope to implement for the sake of the "content industries."
TCPA and Palladium are the technological realization of the
concepts embodied in the WIPO Performances and Phonograms
Treaty (WPPT), which only came into effect this past May
20th (with little public notice or fanfare, of course).  The
WPPT declares an unprecedented "moral right" of authors to
control public uses of their works.
*That's* the real game plan.
TCPA and Palladium are simply content control for the
masses.  They constitute an effort to "democratize" content
control under the concept of "moral rights," encouraging the
public to overlook the clear public interest issues raised
by the specter of content control, and to confuse these
issues with private interest issues such as privacy and
security.  They are an effort to get the public to jump on
the bandwagon without adequate consideration of what's
really on the line.
In America, we have never supported the concept of "moral
rights" which the WPPT professes.  The US Constitution
accords Congress the power to grant (or deny) exclusive
rights to works and inventions for the purpose of promoting
the progress of the useful arts and sciences, not for the
purpose of rewarding the originality of creators -- though
that result is obviously a consequence of exclusive rights
statutes such as copyright law.  Our Supreme Court
explicitly articulates this distinction, and for very good
reason.  In America, we implicitly understand the
distinction between expression, the aspect of works to which
copyright statute applies, and the facts and ideas that make
up a work, to which it does *not* apply.
The reason for this is essential and unavoidable, and must
be stated clearly and unequivocally at this juncture:
information is free.  It's not that it *wants* to be -- it
*is* and it always has been.  This fact is unassailable,
however, unless we let come to pass a world that subscribes
to "universal content control" for the sake of so-called
"moral rights" implemented at the behest of narrow content
industry interests.
TCPA and Palladium are initiatives that hope to encourage
the general public, and more specifically producers of
information products in general, to identify content control
with "moral rights," blithely overlooking the real
implications of information technology in a free society,
and the long tradition of American jurisprudence upholding
the freedom intrinsic to information, a freedom on which the
prospects of information technology crucially depend.
Seth Johnson
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