Re: DVD legal maneuvers (fwd)

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:06:17 -0600 (CST)
From: Randall Farmer <rfarmer@HiWAAY.net>
Subject: Re: DVD legal maneuvers (fwd)

...
> I don't care about anonymous's utopian dream.

I don't care either, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking good notes.
Descriptions of the unattainable are, as usual, important because the reader
uses them to infer things about reality. Ideals expressed in utopian worlds
generally suggest that the reader should work towards the ideal. If I can show
that working towards the ideal would involve getting into a state with some
particularly bad characteristic (i.e., we don't have Mixish remailers and
privacy tools), that strongly suggests that the ideal needs some debugging.

[ I'll have to disagree strongly. It is one thing to try to take examples
  and reduce them to the minimal needed. In every, without exception,
  uptopian fantasy I've ever seen the basic laws of physics or psychology
  are always violated. This one is no exception.

  No, little if anything comes from such studies, they're just too
  different from the real world. It's like the crypto anarchists who
  don't want 3rd party conflict resolution but also maintain that the
  reason the neighbor shoots his other neighbor is not becuase he's
  pissed off and that is what he wants to do but rather because somebody
  says it's against the law. Silly, twisted, and circular. ]

Yes.

[ No. Under my interpretation your thesis is silly and unrealistic. It's
  a good exercise for problem solving skills. Offers nothing to the real
  world or solving its problems.

  It was your supposition and failure to follow the logical conclusions. ]

Anonymous offered those precepts, and, as I said last message and earlier in
this one (hope I'm not getting repetitious... :), my argument was intended for
application to the real-world situations that could result from working towards
Anonymous's dream. Applying them to the dream itself does not yield especially
useful results. If you want to apply it to the utopia anyway (need to pass the
time or something...) the argument can be applied to a world with a trust,
respect, and mutual agreement, though you're then playing with a moot point.

[ You can't work toward it in the real world because people don't behave
  that way. It assumes that we can somehow get everyone to get up one
  morning and they will all automagicaly share some commen bit of culture.
  Unfortunately they don't and it won't (happen that is).

  I can see the attraction if you already believe the basic precepts and
  then are trying to convince others. It's a very tight and
  self-referential. ]

Enforceability is independent of the necessity of enforcement. For comparison:
if I make an agreement with some people that prohibits all of them from having
a particular thought, it's not enforceable even if they are nice enough to
follow it anyway, or even if they're so nice that making an agreement would be
silly.

[ Is it? If there is never an incidence of anyone taking anything then
  enforcability isn't an issue. In fact, for anyone to take your
  argument as real world (as you would have us apply it) you must then
  demonstrate this dichotomy. So far you haven't.

  The reality is that we must have enforcability mechanisms outside of
  the major parties in the activity because there is always a real live
  human who doesn't want to go along. In fact, a goodly number of them
  are more than happy to beat one about the head and shoulders if left
  to their own devices.

  So people invinted police. Not because people might renig on their
  agreements but rather because a good number will renig. It's a fact as
  solid as the sun will set tomorrow morning.

  Under current technology such an agreement would be unenforcable because
  there isn't a way to verify compliance with the terms of the contract.
  It won't always be that way. ]
 
I'm not sure what you mean here; "culpability" has me befuddled. I checked with
Merriam-Webster and WordNet, and they point towards "culpability" meaning
"blameworthiness" as a less-fiery version of "guilt." Of course the blameworthy
are still blameworthy when anonymous, but that doesn't affect the
enforceability of the agreements whose violations make them blameworthy. Do you
mean a different word or is my interpretation off some other way?

In any case, the remailers that would have to go are the Mixish ones; the
reverse engineer could use that kind of to untraceably do what MoRE did.

[ Culpability, not as in guilt which implies a crime, but rather the
  primary decision making agent driving the activity. Responsibility,
  one of the primary synonym for this word.

  If that anonymity is uncrackable then it would be relevant when/if the
  contract were to be broken by either party. It'll take more than a
  simple anonymity scheme to support anonymous transactions.

  I appreciate the relevance of remailers to anonymity, they're not
  immediately relevant here. At least not on the same level of
  discussion. ]
 
>   With respect to your second argument, you have yet to demonstrate a
>   link between the use of crypto and anonymity being driven in a significant
>   way by the fear of reverse engineering.

It is the contrapositive of the first statement, not another argument -- the
first statement implies the second. I haven't shown that anything relating to
reverse engineering causing anything about crypto/anonymity in the present
world, but I don't need to do that to show that if there are enforceable
anti-reverse-engineering provisions, there aren't remailers. (If people did
push sufficiently hard for the enforceability of anti-reverse-engineering
provisions, they would presumably find out that their goal would be
achievable only with the elimination of at least one of {Mixish strong
anonymity, privacy assured with crypto/soft TEMPEST protection/etc.}; if they
achieve their goal, it would be by carrying out the elimination.)

[ Not only do you have to demonstrate it, but with your further
  clarification I see you've a bunch of more implied axioms you'll need to
  delineate further as well as show additional cause and effect links.

  And no, simply anonymity won't drive the world as you claim because
  people don't behave this way. Demonstrate the falsity and quite trying
  to bury the point in debate mumbo-jumbo such as 'contra-positive'.
  Demonstrate its derivation (hint: you can't cause it ain't; apples
  and oranges). ]

think fear of reverse engineering motivates crypto/anonymity research.

[ Tell that to the DVD folks. Say that next time you enter your PIN in
  the ATM. ]

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