Microsoft's Palladium and the "Fritz Chip"

Kicka$$gear-News (computer enthusiast site) ^ | June 28, 2002 | Dr. John

[AaronAnderson]

Good businesses will stay in business period. M$ operating systems and software are unarguably the most pirated products on the face of the planet yet they are the richest and most profitable company in the world. Why? Because they run a good business and generate demand for their products. If the RIAA wants to rally the wagons and try to stop the progression of technology to the level of the 80's, then they deserve whatever they get. Remember, the idea if intellectual properties is a compromise between the people and businesses; the people will grant the businesses the exclusive rights to a particular work in return for future inovations. The RIAA has found it easier to twist the law in their favor rather than meet consumer demand which dictates small, versatile, and portable listening. If their business methods suck, they have no rights to create laws to protect their flawed business strategies.
Lastly, for pete's sake this is America, land of the free. Whenever it gets to the point of a police state and we need Fritz and his clones on every corner to dictate to us exactly how to live our lives and throw us in the gulags when we make the slightest mistake, we might as well live in a oligarchy. I thought one of the reasons we fougth the revolutionary war was to keep the government and it's soldiers out of our homes....

[discostu]

Tours have always been where the money is for the artist, that's why the Grateful Dead became the richest band in the world inspite of not issuing a studio album for 15 years. But how do you get people to go to the shows without the big promotional machine of the music companies? How do you get the name recognition? Without the record companies there won't be a music industry. Another problem with your model is that CD-R aren't nearly as durable as regular CDs, because the business end is open to the air rather than sealed a regularly used CD-R only last a couple of years, I still listen to my first CD (Dark Side of the Moon, got it 15 years ago).

As for an honor system. Please. People don't pay for what you give them free, never happened never will.

[TechJunkYard]

.. most people have hardware that is more than sufficient. New, intentionally crippled, hardware that they don't really need might be an even tougher sell.

Doesn't matter. Intel and AMD adopt the Palladium Standard and redesign their chipsets... Microsoft builds a follow-up to XP and/or can add Palladium Support to XP... the board makers and OEMs will eventually be producing and selling only the new chipsets with the software support already installed... and sooner or later, you have to upgrade your PC. Maybe an amendment to the Fritz Bill will mandate an upgrade and provide a tax incentive.

you WILL be assimilated...

[rdb3]

Tours have always been where the money is for the artist, that's why the Grateful Dead became the richest band in the world inspite of not issuing a studio album for 15 years.

Same can be said about MAZE featuring Frankie Beverly (a soul/jazz band from New Orleans). They never had an album go #1, yet are one of the most successful and profitable touring R&B bands in history.

[discostu]

Why do we need a rich public domain? Who gives a crap about the public domain? All public domain does is provide a fancy term for "something nobody's publishing anymore", and if nobody's publishing anymore that means nobody's buying it anymore, and if nobody's buying it anymore that means nobody wants it anymore. One of the big sources trying to move copyright ownership out has been musicians, one of the reasons you saw so many best of and live albums in the 70s was to renew the copyright. If you make copyright last 6 months the industry will find a way to make that forever.

We used to go after the mass bootlegger but with MP3 stuff it's nearly impossible. One of the problems is even the bootlegger doesn't know if he's a mass bootlegger anymore. I could load one file on a server and it could catch on as everybody's favorite link and millions could download it. Or I could spend a month loading half my music library on a server and nobody could care. Which one is the mass bootlegger, the guy that loads a million files and none get DLed or the one that loads one file that gets DLed a million times.

[discostu]

As I said in my first post to you there's no such thing as a form that can't be copied by a computer. So that paragraph has no meaning. Now that we know everything can be copied what should we do about illegal copying?

MS always has controled what you can do on an MS computer. Whoever makes the OS always has and always will have that power, they make the OS, this is nothing new. I'm not "happy" with it, but having spent my life living in the real world I know how it works. It don't take but 10 lines of code in Windows and no machine with that OS will play CDs or MP3s. That's the simple fact. It's like war. He who controls the skies controls the battle field; and he who controls communication with the CPU controls the computer.

[discostu]

But part of good business is limiting theft. All companies know they have to put up with, but all companies also know that if they roll over for it they're doomed.

Actually IP is a compromise between the creator and the consumer. It's about sharing the creation but making sure that the sharing always gives credit/ payment to the creator. Businesses are just the middle man that get a percentage off the top for taking the risk to mass produce the goods so that they can be shared more quickly. Unfortunately the way contracts have been getting written the publisher has snagged a lot of the ownership that was originally intended for the creator. It's one of the reasons so many successful bands start their own label, the get the proper level of ownership then and force the distributing company back to the level it belongs.

Hey I've said over and over on this thread that I don't like Fritz. But unlike everybody else that's against Fritz my eyes are open enough to know that Fritz is trying to fix a legitimate problem. It's a terrible solution, but you can't just blow off the problem because the only solution on the table sucks. All this record company-less distribution stuff is pie in the sky and completely unrealistic (if it wasn't there'd be somebody making it work right now). The way music distribution works and has worked for a long time the album is the add for the tour. If you don't have somebody with deep pockets pushing the album out the door you're not going to have a profitable tour. Certain groups, largely ones that have been around for a while, especially those that have developed a bit of a cult can short circuit this, but they're rare and don't provide a workable model for the whole industry.

[dheretic]

gnutella exposes the ip addresses of its users in the client for public consumption. Limewire does the same. Just go all out against the users of those networks and you'll curb the usage dramatically.

[TechJunkYard]

... until there is a legislated mandate that all PC hardware be Fritz-chipped, people will reject it. And if it should ever become mandatory, watch the bootleg market...

Doesn't matter. Consumer electronics makers all over the world build primarily for the US market. When the new required equipment specs get codified and US Customs starts blocking imports, everything else will become obsolete, and no one will build the old stuff anymore. What you got is what you got, and that will eventually give out or otherwise be replaced.

There hasn't been a UHF general-coverage receiver or scanner produced anywhere for at least 10 years that will receive between 820 and 890 MHz. (the old US analog cellular band)... which is off-limits forever, on radios sold everywhere. Very few of the old radios are still around, and people have been prosecuted for using them. The law that mandated that was the Communications Act of 1986.

It won't take long...

[dheretic]

Why do we need a rich public domain?

Would you like it if you had to get permission to quote or duplicate the Federalist Papers, the 2nd treatise on civil government, the Bible, the classics, etc?

[steve-b]

Fritz is trying to fix a legitimate problem

Nonsense. The "problem" that the established industry sees is that modern tools make it possible for anyone with enough talent and willingness to sweat (admittedly somewhat rare qualities) to produce and publish work of professional quality. This is indicated by the industry's attempt to avoid addressing the issue of copyright violation the same way we address violations of every other law on the books from jay-walking to murder and insist that some novel "solution" is needed which just happens (yeah, right) as an unanticipated side effect (snort) to cripple independent media publication.

[steve-b]

All public domain does is provide a fancy term for "something nobody's publishing anymore"

Really, making statements that two seconds' thought would have revealed to be nonsensical is just going to get you dismissed as a crank, if you have not already suffered that fate.

[eno_]

Scanners are a tiny market - in the low hundreds of thousands of units per year at the most. Scanner production also was mainly in the U.S. and Japan. The scanner makers also make public saftey radio gear - a strong incentive to play nice. The PC build-rate is 10 million motherboards per month, and they are built in China, Malaysia, India, and probably Viet Nam by now, in addition to Taiwan, which is also not the most friendly place for IP protection. The installed base of PCs is bigger than any other consumer item except maybe TVs. Un-Fritzed PCs will be available and usable for several decades longer - effectively forever. By that time, the nature of personal computing will have changed to make the Fritz chip irrelevent. And speaking of irrlevent - just how do you suppose anyone will keep software-defined radios from being used to scan "illegal" frequencies? You better go Fritz all those DSPs.

[eno_]

Anyone else here think that discostu's rabid insistence that the record industry can and must be saved indicates something other than individual observer's interest in this matter?

[dwollmann]

They already have. If you run XP, every time you do an internet search, the machine connects to a server at Microsoft and stores your computer information and search terms there in a database.

If you use Microsoft software (I don't, it isn't adequate for my needs) then you'll have to bite the bullet and take what they give you. Those of us who use other solutions aren't happy with this situation, as you might imagine.

[Yeti]

The "Fritz Chip" sounds like a good idea to me.

Well, since speeding is against the law, we should build cars that turn off and won't crank back up if it has been driven faster than 70mph. Or if the wheels have turned more than 20 degrees without a preceding turn signal.

[TechJunkYard]

Un-Fritzed PCs will be available and usable for several decades longer - effectively forever.

They won't be manufactured forever, and the current supply will eventually dry up. How many '286 PC-ATs are still around? (I still have one). I would expect that the "server class" machine will be exempt from the Fritz, and you might need some kind of certification to buy one, so that's what the hobbyists would likely go to.

... just how do you suppose anyone will keep software-defined radios from being used to scan "illegal" frequencies?

It'll be done in the front-end RF hardware, far from the DSP, as it is now. The local oscillator or an IF stage will be disabled by the processor when it's instructed to tune btw a couple of limits and it's not the right personality for that band. The control circuitry is embedded in silicon to thwart tampering. Even software-defined radios have to follow the rules of Physics to capture, amplify, mix and detect RF. Some components have changed, but it still uses the same basic engineering concepts. Legal regulations can and will be enforced by the hardware.

The FCC regulates it through the Certification and Conformity processes. Since all receivers produce some RF on their own, they're all covered under Part 15. Without a Declaration of Confority from the FCC, it won't be sold... legally.

Oh sure, there will be some receivers such as service monitors used by radio techs which are exempt from the rules, but they're priced way out of the consumer's reach, and you need a ham license or a GRT to own one.

OBTW, computers are also covered by Part 15 of the FCC's rules, although purely from an RF-emissions posture. But Part 15 gets updated almost constantly as new technology continues to emerge. The Fritz Bill could charge the FCC or another agency with jurisdiction to create a new Part in the CFR to regulate DRM-technology issues.

Resistance is futile.

[discostu]

If you'll look at the title plate you'll find those printings are... copyrighted.

[discostu]

No, the problem is the massive distribution of copyrighted material without the owner of the copyright getting any money for it. Keep your eye on the ball here. When you rip a CD you're making a copy, if you don't allow that copy to be used by anyone else that's fair use, not a problem. If you give it to others that's bootlegging, that's a problem. Nothing related to this Fritz chip will stop people from turning their computer into a home studio and making and distributing those MP3s. It's trying to stop the ripping, which sucks because the ripping itself is perfectly legal, that's why I'm asking for a better answer.

[Kevin Curry]

Concern for your intellectual property does not grant you the right to lock down my computer for fear that I might infringe on your copyright.

IOW, "Concern for your personal possessions does not grant you the right to take away MY lock-pick for fear that I might let myself in your front door and steal you blind."