[A2k] Paris TACD Meeting: Draft 2 on RMI and TPMs

[Ludovic Pénet]

Le dimanche 11 juin 2006 à 22:45 +1000, Peter Eckersley a écrit :
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2006 at 08:32:16AM -0400, James Love wrote:
> > I have a general concern about RMI, outside of entertainment goods
> > like music performances, movies and computer games.  It seems to me
> > that the tracking of access to works, as well as copying and
> > forwarding of works, presents one set of public policy/social issues
> > in the area of entertainment goods, and other in the context of other
> > literary works like fiction, memorandums about the Iraq war, EC/
> > Pharma position statements on the medical R&D treaty, Pfizer's
> > internal strategy memos, US State Department cables to Thailand,
> > educational materials about HIV, and a million other areas where it
> > is quite dangerous for society to introduce (as we are) technologies
> > to track the movement of knowledge goods, not to mention the impact
> > of such technologies on Berne/TRIPS three step tests in terms of
> > pushing pay for use paradigms.
> >
> > Isn't this a big problem?   If we want to push one approach in music,
> > do we end up with something that we don't want outside of music, that
> > is far more important?  How can we express or deal with this issue?
>
> I don't think the line between "entertainment" and "non entertainment" go=
ods
> is that clearly drawable.  A taste for radical political movies or music =
can
> be telling.
>
> If access to a work is going to be tracked, I believe it needs to be done=
 in a
> pseudonymous fashion.  That is, you can be certain that someone, perhaps
> someone from a controlled sample population, accessed the work - but you =
can't
> tell who it was.
>
> Again, this is the same problem as voting: you want to be certain that th=
e people
> who voted for a candidate were on the electoral role, and you want to be
> certain that nobody can find out who they were.
The problem is quite similar, but it has important differences.

To share a global contribution, we can afford missing some data, as long
as the statistics on the global exchange is ok. There are lots of copies
and exchanges that we will always miss. So, I think that we can afford
saying that RMI should not mandatory send data to a collecting system.

What seems important to me is that the work can be uniquely identified,
so that a user can choose to allow automatic data sending in order to
process statistics (and also deactive it in specific cases), and so that
an automatic statistic system can anonymously track some exchanges and
compute statistics. But this unique identification should not be too
strongly protected, or we shall also target people burning songs to
legacy formats, like CD.

This data sending could be deactivated by default. I am sure merchants
will find ways to make this data transmission attractive...

Best regards,

Ludovic