A couple of nice machining suppliers images I located:
A Bitcoin You Can Flip
Image by jurvetson
My son has grow to be fascinated with bitcoins, and so I had to get him a tangible a single for Xmas (thanks Sim1!). The public key is imprinted visibly on the tamper-evident holographic film, and the private essential lies underneath.
I too was fascinated by digital money back in college, and much more specifically by the asymmetric mathematical transforms underlying public-important crypto and digital blind signatures.
I remembered a technical paper I wrote, but could not find it. A desktop search revealed an essay that I totally forgot, anything that I had recovered from my archives of floppy discs (while I nevertheless could).
It is an write-up I wrote for the college newspaper in 1994. Ironically, Microsoft Word could not open this ancient Microsoft Word file format, but the free of charge text editors could.
What a fun time capsule, beneath, with some option naivetés…
I am trying to reconstruct what I was thinking, and asking yourself if it tends to make any sense. I think I was arguing that a bulletproof framework for digital money (and what far better testing ground) could be utilized to secure a digital container for executable code on a rental basis. So the expression of an notion — the distinct code, or runtime service — is locked in a safe container. The notion would be to avoid copying rather of punishing following the reality. Micro-currency and micro-code appear like equivalent exercises in regulating the single use of an issued quantity.
Now that the Bitcoin experiment is underway, do you know of anybody writing about it as an option framework for intellectual property?
IP and Digital Money
@Normal:
Digital Money and the “Intellectual Property” Oxymoron
By Steve Jurvetson
Many of us will soon be working in the details solutions or technologies industries which are currently tangled in a bramble patch of intellectual home law. As the law struggles to discover coherency and an internally-consistent logic for intellectual house (IP) protection, digital encryption technologies might offer a much better remedy — from the point of view of lowering litigation, exploiting the inherent rewards of an data-primarily based company model, and preserving a free economy of ideas.
Bullet-proof digital cash technology, which is now emerging, can supply a protected “cryptographic container” for intellectual expressions, thereby preserving conventional notions of intellectual house that shield particular instantiations of an thought rather than the thought itself. For example, it seems affordable that Intuit need to be capable to safeguard against the widespread duplication of their Quicken application (the expression of an concept), but they must not be capable to patent the underlying thought of single-entry bookkeeping. There are sturdy financial incentives for digital cash to develop and for those methods to be adapted for IP protection — to develop a protected container or expression of an idea. The speedy march of information technology has strained the evolution of IP law, but rather than patching the law, details technologies itself may possibly offer a much more coherent remedy.
Info Wants To Be Totally free
Presently, IP law is enigmatic due to the fact it is expanding to a domain for which it was not initially intended. In building the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson argued that suggestions should freely transverse the globe, and that tips were fundamentally different from material goods. He concluded that “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of home.” The troubles surrounding IP come into sharp focus as we shift to being much more of an data-primarily based economy.
The use of e-mail and local Tv footage assists disseminate details about the globe and can be a force for democracy — as observed in the Television footage from Chechen, the use of modems in Prague in the course of the Velvet Revolution, and the e-mail and Television from Tianammen Square. Even Gorbachev employed a video camera to show what was taking place after he was kidnapped. What seems to be an inherent force for democracy runs into issues when it becomes the subject of home.
As larger-level programming languages grow to be much more like organic languages, it will grow to be increasingly hard to distinguish the thought from the code. Language precedes believed, as Jean-Louis Gassée is fond of saying, and our language is the framework for the formulation and expression of our suggestions. Restricting software program will increasingly be indistinguishable from restricting freedom of speech.
An economy of ideas and human attention depends on the continuous and cost-free exchange of concepts. Because of the associative nature of memory processes, no notion is detached from other folks. This begs the query, is intellectual home an oxymoron?
Intellectual Home Law is a Patch
John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder (with Mitch Kapor) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that “Intellectual home law can not be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitized expression… Faith in law will not be an efficient strategy for higher-tech organizations. Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technologies advances in lunging jerks. Real-globe situations will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, much more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.”
From its origins in the Industrial Revolution where the invention of tools took on a new significance, patent and copyright law has protected the physical conveyance of an concept, and not the thought itself. The physical expression is like a container for an concept. But with the emerging info superhighway, the “container” is becoming far more ethereal, and it is disappearing altogether. Regardless of whether it is e-mail these days, or the future goods of the Info Age, the “expressions” of tips will be voltage situations darting about the net, very significantly like thoughts. The fleeting copy of an image in RAM is not quite different that the fleeting image on the retina.
The digitization of all forms of information — from books to songs to photos to multimedia — detaches information from the physical plane exactly where IP law has often identified definition and precedent. Patents can not be granted for abstract concepts or algorithms, however courts have lately upheld the patentability of application as lengthy as it is operating a physical machine or causing a physical outcome. Copyright law is even a lot more of a patch. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 calls for that operates be fixed in a durable medium, and where an idea and its expression are inseparable, the merger doctrine dictates that the expression can not be copyrighted. E-mail is not presently copyrightable due to the fact it is not a reduction to tangible form. So of course, there is a proposal to amend these copyright provisions. In current rulings, Lotus won its case that Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet copied components of Lotus 123’s appear and feel, yet Apple lost a related case versus Microsoft and HP. As Professor Bagley points out in her new text, “It is tough to reconcile beneath the total idea and feel test the results in the Apple and Lotus instances.” Provided the inconsistencies and financial significance of these troubles, it is no surprise that swarms of lawyers are studying to practice in the IP arena.
Back in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates wrote an inflammatory “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in which he alleged that “most of you steal your software program … and need to be kicked out of any club meeting you show up at.” He presented the economic argument that piracy prevents correct profit streams and “prevents very good computer software from becoming written.” Now we have Windows.
But seriously, if we continue to believe that the worth of details is based on scarcity, as it is with physical objects, we will continue to patch laws that are contrary to the nature of details, which in several instances increases in worth with distribution. Small, fast moving organizations (like Netscape and Id) shield their ideas by getting to the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who base their protection on fear and litigation.
The patent office is woefully understaffed and unable to judge the nuances of application. Comptons was initially granted a patent that covered virtually all multimedia technology. When they tried to collect royalties, Microsoft pushed the Patent Workplace to overturn the patent. In 1992, Computer software Marketing Corp received a patent for “displaying and integrating commercial ads with computer software.” That’s like patenting the concept of a radio industrial. In 1993, a DEC engineer received a patent on just two lines of machine code typically utilized in object-oriented programming. CompuServe announced this month that they plan to collect royalties on the extensively utilised GIF file format for images.
The Patent Office has issued properly more than 12,000 software program patents, and a programmer can unknowingly be in violation of any them. Microsoft had to spend 0MM to STAC in February 1994 for violating their patent on data compression. The penalties can be costly, but so can a patent search. Many of the application patents don’t have the words “computer,” “software,” “program,” or “algorithm” in their abstracts. “Software patents turn every single selection you make while writing a plan into a legal threat,” says Richard Stallman, founder of the League for Programming Freedom. “They make writing a huge system like crossing a minefield. Every single step has a little likelihood of stepping on a patent and blowing you up.” The really notion of seventeen years of patent protection in the quickly moving software market seems absurd. MS-DOS did not exist seventeen years ago.
IP law faces the further wrinkle of jurisdictional issues. Exactly where has an Web crime taken location? In the nation or state in which the laptop server resides? Many nations do not have the same intellectual house laws as the U.S. Even inside the U.S., the law can be challenging to enforce for instance, a group of music publishers sued CompuServe for the digital distribution of copyrighted music. A complication is that CompuServe has no understanding of the activity because it happens in the flood of bits transferring in between its subscribers
The tension noticed in creating digital copies revolves around the concern of home. But as opposed to the theft of material goods, copying does not deprive the owner of their possessions. With digital piracy, it is significantly less a clear ethical issue of theft, and much more an abstract notion that you are undermining the company model of an artist or computer software developer. The distinction among ethics and laws often revolves about their enforceability. Ahead of copy machines, it was challenging to make a book, and so it was apparent and visible if someone was copying your function. In the digital age, copying is lightning quickly and tough to detect. Offered ethical ambiguity, comfort, and anonymity, it is no wonder we see a cultural shift with regard to digital ethics.
Piracy, Plagiarism and Pilfering
We copy music. We are seldom diligent with our footnotes. We wonder exactly where we’ve seen Strat-man’s PIE and the four slices ahead of. We forward e-mail that may contain text from a copyrighted news publication. The SCBA estimates that 51% of satellite dishes have illegal descramblers. John Perry Barlow estimates that 90% of individual tough drives have some pirated application on them.
Or as last month’s Red Herring editorial points out, “this atmosphere of electronic piracy appears to have in turn spawned a freer attitude than ever toward good old-fashioned plagiarism.” Articles from significant publications and WSJ columns seem and circulate extensively on the Internet. Laptop Photographs magazine replicated a full post on multimedia databases from New Media magazine, and then publicly apologized.
Music and voice samples are an increasingly common art kind, from 2 Reside Crew to Negativland to regional bands like Voice Farm and Consolidated. Peter Gabriel embraces the shift to repositioned content “Traditionally, the artist has been the final arbiter of his perform. He delivered it and it stood on its personal. In the interactive globe, artists will also be the suppliers of info and collage material, which men and women can either accept as is, or manipulate to develop their personal art. It’s part of the shift from talent-primarily based function to selection-making and editing operate.”
But many traditionalists resist the adjust. Museums are hesitant to embrace digital art because it is not possible to distinguish the original from a copy according to a curator at the New Museum of Modern Art, “The art planet is scared to death of this stuff.” The Digital Audio Tape debate also illustrated the paranoia the music sector 1st insisted that these DAT recorders had to purposely introduce static into the digital copies they created, and then they settled for an embedded code that restricted the number of successive copies that could be made from the a master source.
For a healthier reaction, appear at the phenomenally productive company models of Mosaic/Netscape and Id Software program, the twisted creator of Doom. Just as McAfee built a organization on shareware, Netscape and Id encourage widespread free distribution of their product. But as soon as you want help from Netscape, or the greater levels of the Doom game, then you have to pay. For industries with robust demand-side economies of scale, such as Netscape web browsers or Safe-TCL intelligent agents, the creators have exploited the economies of information distribution. Software items are especially susceptible to growing returns with scale, as are networking merchandise and most of the information technology industries.
However, the Software Publishers Association reports that 1993 worldwide losses to piracy of enterprise application computer software totaled .45 billion. They also estimated that 89% of software program units in Korea have been counterfeit. And China has 29 factories, some state-owned, that press 75 million pirated CDs per year, largely for export. GATT will impose the U.S. notions of intellectual property on a globe that sees the issue quite differently.
Clearly there are robust economic incentives to protect intellectual house, and affordable arguments can be produced for software patents and digital copyright, but the complexities of legal enforcement will be outrun and potentially obviated by the reasonably rapid developments of an additional technology, digital money and cryptography.
Digital Cash and the IP Lock
Digital cash is in some approaches an extreme instance of digital “property” — given that it can not be copied, it is possessed by one particular entity at a time, and it is static and non-perishable. If the methods for safeguarding against pilferage and piracy operate in the domain of money, then they can be utilized to “protect” other properties by becoming embedded in them. If I wanted to copy-shield an “original” work of digital art, digital cash tactics be used as the “container” to protect intellectual home in the old style. A bullet-proof digital cash scheme would inevitably be adapted by these who stand to acquire from the existing system. Such as Bill Gates.
Several organizations are building technologies for electronic commerce. On January 12, numerous High-Tech Club members attended the Cybermania conference on electronic commerce with the CEOs of Intuit, CyberCash, Enter Television and The Lightspan Partnership. According to Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit, the motivations for digital money are anonymity and effective modest-transaction World wide web commerce. Anonymity preserves our privacy in the age of increasingly intrusive “database marketing” based on credit card purchase patterns and other personal details. Of course, it also has tax-evasion implications. For Web commerce, money is more effective and less complicated to use than a credit card for little transactions.
“A lot of people will commit nickels on the Net,” says Dan Lynch of CyberCash. Banks will soon exchange your current money for cyber-tokens, or a “bag of bits” which you can devote freely on the World wide web. A competitor primarily based in the Netherlands called DigiCash has a Web web page with numerous articles on electronic money and completely functional demo of their technology. You can get some free of charge money from them and commit it at some of their allied vendors.
Digital cash is a compelling technologies. Wired magazine calls it the “killer application for electronic networks which will modify the worldwide economy.” Handling and fraud expenses for the paper funds technique are increasing as digital color copiers and ATMs proliferate. Donald Gleason, President of the Intelligent Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services argues that “Cash is a nightmare. It fees cash handlers in the U.S. alone roughly billion a year to move the stuff… Bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent.” Even a Citibank VP, Sholom Rosen, agrees that “There are going to be winners and losers, but everyone is going to play.”
The digital cash schemes use a blind digital signature and a central repository to safeguard against piracy and privacy violations. On the privacy situation, the techniques used have been mathematically confirmed to be protected against privacy violations. The bank cannot trace how the cash is becoming utilized or who is using it. Embedded in these schemes are effective digital cryptography tactics which have lately been spread in the industrial domain (RSA Data Safety is a leader in this field and will be speaking to the Higher Tech Club on January 19).
To safeguard against piracy calls for some extra operate. As quickly as I have a digital bill on my Mac hard drive, I will want to make a copy, and I can. (Several companies have busted their picks attempting to copy protect files from hackers. It will never ever perform.). The distinction is that I can only invest the bill as soon as. The copy is worthless. This is possible due to the fact every bill has a special encrypted identifier. In spending the bill, my computer checks with the centralized repository which verifies that my distinct bill is still unspent. As soon as I spend it, it cannot be spent once more. As with a lot of electronic transactions right now, the security of the technique depends on the integrity of a centralized personal computer, or what Dan Lynch calls “the big database in the sky.”
One particular of the most important limitations of the digital money strategies is that they are tethered to a transaction between at least 3 parties — a purchaser, seller and central repository. So, to use such a scheme to shield intellectual home, would demand networked computer systems and “live” files that have to dial up and verify in with the repository to be operational. There are many compelling applications for this, like voter registration, voting tabulation, and the registration of digital artwork originals.
When I asked Dan Lynch about the use of his technology for intellectual home protection, he agreed that the bits that now represent a bill could be utilised for any quantity of things, from healthcare records to photographs. A digital photograph could hide a digital signature in its low-order bits, and it would be imperceptible to the user. But those bits could be utilised with a registry of appropriate image owners, and could be utilized to prove misappropriation or sampling of the image by others.
Technology author Steven Levy has been researching cryptography for Wired magazine, and he responded to my e-mail inquiries with the reply “You are on the correct track in pondering that crypto can preserve IP. I know of numerous attempts to forward plans to do so.” Digital money might supply a “crypto-container” to preserve traditional notions of intellectual house.
The transaction tether limits the short-term applicability of these schemes for software program copy protection. They will not perform on an isolated personal computer. This definitely would slow its adoption for mobile computer systems given that the wireless networking infrastructure is so nascent. But with Windows ’95 bundling network connectivity, quickly most computer systems will be network-ready — at least for the Microsoft network. And now that Bill Gates is acquiring Intuit, rather of dollar bills, we will have Bill dollars.
The transaction tether is also a logistical headache with present slow networks, which may hinder its adoption for mass-market applications. For instance, if an individual forwards a copyrighted e-mail, the recipient may possibly have to have their computer do the repository check ahead of they could see the text of the e-mail. E-mail is slow sufficient right now, but in the close to future, these tactics of verifying IP permissions and paying suitable royalties in digital money could be background processes on a preemptive multitasking pc (Windows ’95 or Mac OS System eight). The digital money schemes are consistent with other trends in software program distribution and improvement — specifically software program rental and object-oriented “applets” with nested royalty payments. They are also consistent with the document-centric vision of Open Doc and OLE.
The user of the future would start working on their stationary. When it’s clear they are doing some text entry, the word processor would be downloaded and rented for its existing usage. Digital pennies would trickle back to the men and women who wrote or inspired the various portions of the core program. As you use other application applets, such as a spell-checker, it would be downloaded as needed. By renting applets, or potentially finer-grained software objects, the licensing royalties would be automatically tabulated and exchanged, and software piracy would require heroic efforts. Intellectual property would become precisely that — property in a marketplace economy, beneath lock by its “creator,” and Bill Gates’ 1975 lament more than software program piracy could now be addressed 20 years later.
——–end of paper———–
On additional reflection, I have to have been considering of executable code (where the runtime needs a cloud connect to authenticate) and not passive media. Verification has been a pain, but possibly it is seamless in a internet-solutions future. Cloud apps and digital cash depend on it, so why not the code itself.
I don’t see it as particularly beneficial for nevertheless images (but it could confirm the official owner of any special bundle of pixels, in the sense that you can "own" a sufficiently huge quantity, but not the essence of a work of art or derivative works). Frankly, I am not certain about non-interactive content in general, like pure video playback. "Fixing" software IP alone would be a huge adequate accomplishment.