Daft Idea Of The Week: Giving People Copyright In Their Faces

Copyright maximalism has proceeded along two axes. The first is the term of copyright, which has been steadily extended from the basic 14 years of the 1710 Statute of Anne to today's life + 50 or 70 years, depending on the jurisdiction. The other is the scope of copyright, where there are constant attempts to make yet more fields of human endeavor subject to it – for example fashion or food. 

On Techdirt.

The Great ID FUD

When will they ever learn?

Unlike traditional forms of identification, the VeriChip can’t be lost, stolen, misplaced, or counterfeited.

That's what the human-implantable RFID VeriChip site says. And this is what happened at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 6 conference:

two presenters demonstrated the electronic equivalent of making a copy of an implanted RFID or radio frequency ID chip.

The point was to show just how easy it is to fool a detection device that purports to uniquely identify any individual.

So let's just do a quick recap: which technologies are available for establishing identity unambiguously these days?

Irises: nope
Faces: nope
Fingerprints: nope
DNA: nope
Implanted RFID: nope

So, tell me Mr Blair, how exactly you were going to implement this ID card system in a way that it can't be spoofed to hell?