The American Bar Association sent around a newsletter to its members yesterday with a report from the Committee on New Information Technologies about the future of WiFi.
This is one of the most clueless documents I've ever read. It appears that the Bar Association believes that WiFi networks are essentially tools for infringing on copyright, with a grudging admission that offices find them useful sometimes.
They conclude that 802.11 should be redesigned to accomodate DRM (which they sometimes call "DMR"), though they don't really understand how DRM works. My co-worker Seth Schoen characterized the report as reading like it was cut-and-pasted from DRM-vendors' press-releases, and it draws nonsensical conclusions about incompatible technologies, which he says "is like saying 'to protect the environment, we should get recyclable toner cartridges for our manual typewriters.'"
Best of all is the conclusion that WiFi radios should tag all the information somewhere in the protocol with rights-management info — essentially, the Bar Association want the Internet redesigned to ensure that copyright can't be infringed upon, even though you'd think that a bunch of lawyers would have some idea of how impractical that is.
Where content providers have developed digital asset management systems to identify their digital goods and services, including specialized metadata and related rights management technology, the tracking of such good and services may be important for owners of intellectual property rights. Several concepts used in 802.11 may require reassessment to accommodate this development. In particular, the medium access control (MAC) management capability is an example of an 802.11 specification that may require adjustment. For example, as described in the IEEE 802.11 Handbook by Bob O'Hara and Al Petrick (1999), at page 101, "dot11StationID is a 48-bit attribute that is designed to allow an external manager to assign its own identifier to a station, for the sole purpose of managing the station." Where an access point or "station" is an element in a distributed information management system, either entity could come within the meaning of the 802.11 standard, or parts of it could be relegated to the status of an 802.11 higher level protocol. From a content viewpoint, various software capabilities now typically treated as higher level protocols in the IEEE 802.11 standard could also be viewed as part of the access point or station in 802.11 terminology.
