Xbox key defended by more than just length

Posted Jan 10, 2003 13:47 UTC (Fri) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
Parent article: Xbox key defended by more than just length

However much I agree with legal, moral, truthful and decent attacks against the MS monopoly this is one which I feel is plain wrong for the same reason that spam should be made illegal, i.e. that it involves forgery and deception (spam always has forged addresses to make complaints to the origin more difficult).

In what sense could it be OK to forge a digital signature to pretend to be someone different from one's true identity, when it isn't OK to forge a handwritten signature ?

I think to combat the monopoly implications of the reasonably exclusive right to use a signature, we need to consider the principles behind the old IBM versus Teletype Corporation suit, which eventually forced the monopoly to open up the market for peripherals. If access to the Microsoft private key is the issue to running a Linux distribution on unmodified Xboxes, it would seem to me more appropriate for a Linux distributor, project or consortium to sue Microsoft for refusal to sign a Linux boot loader for use on XBox hardware as an Xbox program on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Presumably once a suitable small and generic boot loader had been signed, any free software could be run.

Whether a free society should allow a hardware manufacturer with a position to establish a monopoly, legally to charge for use of a signature required in order to run any software on unmodified hardware is another and very relevant question.