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Gilmore, Hedrick differ on anti-CPRM gameplan

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17230.html


Gilmore, Hedrick differ on anti-CPRM gameplan

By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 28/02/2001 at 08:57 GMT

Opinions are diverging on how to fight CPRM, the stealth copy control mechanism that promises to "firewall Napster at your PC", in the words of a Sony executive.

IBM withdrew its proposal to the T.13 hard drive standards committee last week, and Phoenix's generic proposal was introduced and rejected. It's on the agenda for the next T.13 ATA committee meeting in April.

Yesterday, EFF co-founder John Gilmore, whose call to arms did much to galvanise users against CPRM on hard drives issued his analysis of the Phoenix proposal.

Gilmore wants members of the public to join the T.13 standards committee. And while acknowledging that the Phoenix proposal is innocuous ("there is nothing controversial in this new proposal - there is nothing in at all,") it may be a Trojan Horse for "secret" standards, he writes.

But Linux ATA driver guru and T.13 committee member Andre Hedrick, who has watched CPRM for several months, strongly disagrees.

His concern is to ensure that CPRM doesn't go underground, he says, into the nether world of undocumented "Vendor Unique" commands used by manufacturers, which are far more difficult to identify and that could criminalise attempts to break it. He wants it above ground, identified, and where folks can see it.

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