I'm Here Because Of The Facts...
** To quote, The Economist article,"Digital rights and wrongs," pg. 75, "Intellectual property law "cannot be patched, retrofitted or expanded to contain digitised expression," wrote John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online lobbying group, in an influential essay. "Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition... The bottle was protected, not the wine."
"It now looks as if he was wrong. A lot of people still want to protect their electronic wine. More than a dozen companies are rolling out so-called digital-rights-management systems to do just that. These systems are complicated pieces of software that could, if widely deployed, not only establish property rights in the digital domain, but also strengthen the power of publishers."
"Some firms focus on only one form of intellectual content. AT&T, Liquid Audio and Microsoft are offering protection for online music; NextPage's Folio and Xerox's ContentGuard protect electronic documents. But, other companies, such as IBM, Intertrust Technologies, Softlock, and Wave Systems, have developed systems designed to protect an even wider range of digital works."
(......)
"Digital-rights management systems are built around a concept that Mark Stefik, principal scientist, at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, calls "trusted systems." The term refers to computers that can be relied upon to follow the rules set up by a publisher. If the copying of digital works is not allowed, for instance, such a device will refuse to make a duplicate."
"The best way to do this is control both the software and the hardware..."
"One primitive example of such an arrangement is the digital audio tape recorder, which will not make copies from copies..."
"... many people do not want to buy specific bits of hardware for particular applications. They would rather rely on a general-purpose and, from a copyright holder's point of view, highly untrustworthy device: the personal computer."
"Protection from PCs is what designers of digital-rights management systems see as the "killer application" for their technology."
(.......)
"All of which sounds excellent news for brain-workers who wish to sell the fruits of their labours. Whether it will turn out that way, however, depends on two groups: customers, who may have got used to the current, lax regime, and techno-anarchists, who think that all software should be free."
(.......)
"If rights management software can truly be made secure, customers may have no choice but to stump up. The issue will, in any case, be fought out in the marketplace. But, that security is by no means guaranteed. Hackers love a challenge, and hacking into such software is just the sort of challenge that many of them like best. And because of their belief in freedom-of-software, their solutions will, no doubt, be made freely available."
"That, according to Dr. Stefik, means that rights-management systems based purely on software are, in the end, unlikely to be sufficient. He thinks extra hardware will be needed, too. This will probably be built into future generations of PCs in the form of a so-called copyright chip such as the one developed by Wave Systems. This is a hard-wired, and therefore tamper-proof substitute for some of the software in more orthodox systems. But, since the (c) chip will not actually be a separate piece of the kit, customer resistance should be reduced. That, with luck, will eliminate the freeloaders."
(........)
** Now, for reference, here's a link to the FACTS about a trusted system as referred to in the article above:
europe.hp.com
Oh, and just a little something extra for flavor from Bob Metcalfe,
the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. This from his Infoworld column...
infoworld.com
** Thinking that folks will never adopt a pay-as-you-go approach to the Web? Here's a link to another, older Infoworld article by Bob Metcalfe, a man, who I dare say is a bit brighter and more respected than Claugus The Befuddled (an analyst whose six-year track record was eclipsed by several WAVE investors in a matter of mere months):
infoworld.com
** I read the chapter devoted to Wave Systems in George Gilder's book, The Future of Television. (Because he suggested it when he popped in on this thread one evening.) Mr. Gilder is, again, a rather bright man. And has proved to be rather good at identifying winning stocks in the "telecosm."
** All of the above would be only so much "brain hockey" if WAVX had not been assembling a first-rate value chain of partners and suppliers including Atmel, Sigma Designs--the leader in MPEG encoding and decoding technology, and others. And now with the N*Able acquisition, we will expedite our time-to-market and have new doors opened to us.
** And all the while, the quiet partner, IBM, of whom Steven Sprague said, "We work with them on a daily basis", has been doing some slogging of its own. The Economist article mentions their Cryptolope technology: in essence, a bottle for the wine. The Cryptolope division of IBM folded a while back. But, the technology, I gather, is very much alive.
** And even then Wave Systems might not be very viable. I mean, there are and will be competing solutions. Which is why it is important that we have enforceable patents (which we do). And, perhaps even more important, that we offer a solution that is (or can be made to be) interoperable with all flavors of software. Meaning that we can and do (with Versecure, for example)feature that best-of
both-worlds solution alluded to in The Economist piece, combining hardware and software.
** And what of customers? Will they like a tremendous variety of content offerings, scalable to their wallets, small or large? Will they like options like renting to own or try before you buy? Yes. Will they care one wit about the chip inside a computer... as long as the computer is produced by HP or NEC (another announced partner)?
No. And what if this little WaveMeter which could, conceivably, track my information exhaust as you traverse the Web? For a moment, disturbing. But, no more disturbing than knowing that MasterCard knows that I purchased access to some interesting jpg's
a while back. (Oops.) And if that WaveMeter means I get access ON MY TERMS--without worrying about my credit card number getting pilfered as it was recently from AOL--to extremely cool content, I think that's a tradeoff I can live with.
** George Gilder has cautioned us that it (meaning the company's arc) is going to be a "slog." You know what? I like that. I like the fact that a member of the board of directors is advising me to moderate my near-term expectations. It's anti-touting. It builds credibility. One step at a time. The sloggernaut is painstakingly slow... and sometimes painsgivingly slow. It's like building something, you know? It was said of the craftsmen who built the Medieval Gothic (a disparaging term applied afterwards) cathedrals that they didn't have to rest on Sundays as the church advised. Because they prayed with the work of their hands. No, Wave, ain't building a church. But, they are building. Momentum.
** Lastly, but in order of importance, foremost, I am here because a very decent guy named Weby--a guy I've never met--prodded me into investing in WAVX. He didn't have to share his knowledge or good fortune. But, he did.
Best Regards,
c m
|
