Matt Blaze wrote:
FWIW, the precedent was set in a lesser way with CDs - there is an area that isn't writable on CD-Rs, which can be prefilled at manufacture time. AFAIK, no-one ever actually used it as a security mechanism, but it was there.Patents were originally intended, and are usually used (for better or for worse), as a mechanism for protecting inventors and their licensees from competition. But I've noticed a couple of areas where patents are also used as a security mechanism, aiming to prevent the unauthorized production of products that might threaten some aspect of a system's security.One example close to home is the DVD patents, which, in addition to providing income for the DVD patent holders, also allows them to prevent the production of players that don't meet certain requirements. This effectively reduces the availability of multi-region players; the patents protect the security of the region coding system.
On a related note, you could licence either data-only or data and music from Phillips (or is it Philips?), and they were pretty aggressive about protecting it (I know because I wrote one of the first rippers [CD-Grab] and they used to get excited about it periodically, since it worked on data-only drives).
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
