Projects like Defective by Design are doing a public service by informing people of the rather sinister machinations of the confluence of content and technology companies out to rob consumers of their freedoms to dispose of lawfully purchased digital content. While I appreciate and support the goals of these projects, there's a lot of misinformation that's not getting corrected.

At the core of the criticism is DRM - Digital Rights Management, also known among critics not inaccurately as Digital Restrictions Management. This is the generalized practice of trying to implement digital content controls in software, but does not necessarily refer to any specific protocol, code, or technical API. The Trusted Computing Group (formerly known as the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance), has published a Trusted Computing specification. The most important thing to note, however, is that while Trusted Computing is a necessary component of a DRM system, Trusted Computing itself isn't DRM. Like almost all technology, it's features are neutral, and how one evaulates their uses depends entirely on how people agree to use them in practice.

Continued... | Comments — Nato Welch 2006/12/01 23:53