[sldev] Re: property rights in distributed systems

[Ben Byer]

On Sep 8, 2007, at 9:06 AM, Dale Glass wrote:

> On Saturday 08 September 2007 17:54:45 Ben Byer wrote:
>> Nope.
>>
>> All three examples you just named are cases where the operating
>> system is enforcing some rules for the benefit of the user (owner) of
>> the system.  Accordingly, all can by bypassed in some way by a local
>> user.
>
> Never used a multi-user Linux system?

I think I read about that somewhere.

> Shared hosting, parents managing a system for their children, etc work
> exactly this way: You're subject to somebody else's will. If the admin
> doesn't want you to read /etc/fstab then you can't and there's no  
> way you
> can bypass it (excluding explots, but that's a different topic).

... but that's not what I'm talking about ... (read on)

>> The "DRM" or property rights issue is the complete opposite -- it's
>> my computer trying to prevent me from doing something I might want to
>> do (copy objects I didn't create).
>
> But it's not "your computer". In SL it's LL's asset server, on a  
> shared
> hosting system is the provider's server, in a family it'd be the  
> parents'
> computer.

I was specifically trying to address the P2P scenario mentioned  
earlier in this thread -- where there is no central asset server, and  
instead every computer gets to peek at every bit of data, and  
therefore it *is* "your computer".  In that case, you can't prevent a  
hacked client from copying the data.