From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Tue Oct 03 2000 - 17:10:03 PDT
"Lisa Dusseault" <lisa@xythos.com> writes:
> You may be onto something, Jim, though I'm not sure about the terminology.
> As I understand it, a "public good" is defined by economists to be a good
> which cannot be provided to a limited set of people for a fee; it must
> either be provided to everybody in a set/region or nobody. Thus oxygen in
> air is a public good; less pollution in air/water is a public good.
>
> Some information is a public good. Information that cannot be hidden
> easily, like how to make a pipe bomb, is a public good (or bad, depending on
> how you look at it). Copyright and NDAs and these kinds of contracts are
> the only things that keep information from being a public good.
Or encryption, and an incentive to keep it from spreading (or a
barrier). So is a broadcast TV signal a public good, but a scrambled
cable signal not one?
What if you dumped millions of something from a plane, is it a public
good then? Cause that's what Digital Convergence has done, more or
less.
Jim, you said that the hackers have decided to bypass the licensing &
treat it as a public good (or, rather, treat the function and use of
the cuecat as a public good, not just the dongle, which is what
Digital Convergence wants), but from what I've read, there hasn't been
an applicable license to bypass. Their EULA is broken.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.monkey.org/~kra/
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