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Information Preservation and Data Havens?
tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"
It is wrong to copy textbooks....I'm not going to condone it...
But here's where I call bullshit...Why does there need to be a new edition every two-plus years on subjects that do not change at all? What new discoveries come in math? Do derivatives change at all? How bout sine and cosine? Hmm?
Anybody have an answer?
My MythTV HowTo
I like how not one legitimate use is listed among the reasons given.
Cryptonomicon. (a book by Neal Stephenson)
Wouldn't it take hours to photocopy a full textbook? Surely it'd make more sense to do something useful with your time and buy it used somewhere...
--
Are you a Chipotle Fan?
Off-site backup might help in case of an FBI raid, but what if FBI has a warranty to intercept your data prior to the raid?
So the night before raid, while you're happily doing a off-site backup, another copy has been acquired by FBI.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
If your business model suffers from the possibility of a FBI raid, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your business? Just a thought...
Off-site backups are good for other things, such as preparing for natural disasters, fires, etc...
Cash, cash, cash, cash, cash.
... ;)
When someone calls in (a lawyer) from someplace (a corporation) and says they have lost $100,000 in business, the FBI gives that one a higher priority. When the company can also produce detailed web logs, cross verified with an ISP (such as a compliant university that wants to avoid lawsuits), the issue is ranked even higher. Like everyone else, the FBI has to show results on paper to Congressional committees in order to get increased funding. And if you're an easy prosecute, or at least perceived as an easy, they're on you.
They've got you a little bit on the crypto use, since anything over 128bits is deemed e-Legal; there's been some cryptographically knowledgable Russkies that were given a tough time by the Men in Black. A large company couldn't get away with using high crypto, as they'd likely get caught. But individuals just might be able to; download it using Knoppix and a ram disk, burn it, use it, then microwave your cd/dvd's when you're done with them.
It's an interesting issue. The safest route is to limit what you learn
It is wrong ethically and ... to engage in work that is violating laws of our country and taking away from owners their hard earned rewards that they have worked and slogged days and nights to produce.
On the other hand...
Better way to address your problems are to support and develop electronic formats and buying books in these formats e.g. LaTeX, PDF etc (which don't yet prevent users from distributing) which individual writers can write and make available in formats that allow them to get returns that they would have normally gotten without going thru a publisher... And also people can print copies of that and mail it to you if you wanted a paperback version. But to not pay for somebody's hard work is akin to stealing and such is not the purpose and intent of our community.
You know how cops always have the best drugs? I wonder if FBI/NSA agents always have the best porn!
many students spend >$350 per semester in order to rent the "proper" edition of a book that has not had any significant changes made to it in years, if ever. after 3 months the students "sell" the books back to the bookstore for around 1/4 what they paid, so the books can be put on the shelf for next semester, assuming there isn't a new edition required for the class.
people tolerate it because "college is important" and you "learn valuable life skills".
but all of your concerns consider the rights and exposure of corporations
not once do you consider the rights and exposure of the individual
and that's the problem, as i see it, and as i think you fail to grasp
how am i to defend myself from unfair accusations without a backup of my communications? how am i to work in an environment where the corporation has claims on not only the whole of my production, but also any production i might do or any potential for production in any ideas i may have?
you can say i might be untrustworthy with those email records, and that is a valid concern, and you outline some valid scenarios for how i can hurt my company
but i assert to you that the corporation is no more trustworthy than i with those records, and if you claim the corporation IS more trustworhty than i am, then i can beat you to your point by noting that one way the corporation IS more trustworthy than me is that it is bound by rules about proper record retention...
well then, how can you use this as grounds for denying me the same right of record retention to earn my trustworthiness?
so your one-sided list of concerns binds me to a catch-22 situation: i can't be trusted with ownership of records which affect me as an individual, and the rules do not allow me to increase my trustworthiness by proving my fairness with the records i retain... only the corporation takes risks in your view, only the corporation has something to lose with your one-sided view of rules of data retention
then all you can say is that corporate rules about electronic records exist to increase confidence and trust in corporations, and to instill distrust and doubt of individuals
frankly, i take umbrage with your remarks because you represent the vanguard of a crisis of giving corporations more rights than individuals
at the very least, your obsession with the rights of corporations, and complete lack of concern for the rights of the individual, contributes to a very real problem
what i suggest to solve the impass is not to denigrate the rights of corporations to the level of individuals: distrusted and bound by no confidence, but to increase the rights of individuals to that currently enjoyed by corporations: allow them access to and retention of records which share infuence on the life of the individual and the corporation in equal or proportionate measure
fairness should be the whole point, and the current legal environment about electronic data is not fair to the individual, and allows corporation too much leeway for abuse
so elevate the rights of the individual, as if the individual were another corporation going into legal agreement with the corporation when they accept employment with the corporation
fairness
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why in today's tech savvy world can't we just get the E-book for a cheaper price. Printing optional. You pay your tuition to the school, they (the school) subsidise the content maker based on enrollment, you get an E-book and you can either use your computer or pay to have it printed.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Is anyone paying fucking attention to what is happening here in America? The conspiracy between the schools, the professors, the bookstores and the publishers is just one example of how America is run for and by those at the top. What I want to know is why the country of parent poster here, which apparently is a country run by the people, for the people, is able to do for him what our America, the "Greatest Country in the World" cannot do for us....
Free market, my ass....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
If you violate the AUP. And the only thing the AUP says you cannot do is violate Sealand law. The only thing Sealand law says you cannot do is have child pornography.Mbr>
All that says is that if you host child pornography, they will report you to the proper people and give them your AUP-violating material. That's it.
As long as your sensitive data isn't child porn, you'll be fine.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Ah yes, hindsight is always 20-20.. Had you indeed informed the publishers, and had there been a clampdown, there would never have been the Textbook shortage of 1999, or the hours upon hours of newscoverage on TV of literally starving authors..
We would instead have textbook upon textbook competing for the same spot, each only slightly different, new versions each year and students being forced to buy the new version (sometime authored by the professor that gives the course) because of minor differences, like the ordering of chapters..
Oh wait. There are plenty textbooks. Authors aren't starving, and they are forcing people to "upgrade" each year.
Moral outrage is all good and well, but in this case, the social contract that is copyright (and yes, that includes enforcement that is not 100% airtight, as we don't live in a police state (yet) resulting in the occasional infringement) seems to have worked out pretty well. Except from the forced-upgrade shenannigans, of course. Or professors making their own textbooks required reading. (A-holes).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
What is that supposed to teach the children? Take as much money from the masses as long as they let you?
That's the American way.
Please stop smoking weed and start drinking real coffee.
About ten years ago I worked in Silicon Valley for a company that had an affiliate in the UK.
I got assigned to back up all the hard disks once a week. One day I suggested to my boss that we make an extra back-up and send it to our English affiliate. My reasoning was that with all the:
1) Earthquakes - There was a 7.2 a few years before centered a few miles away. I remember steel tables bouncing several feet in the air off a concrete floor in the warehouse. There was a 7.4 a few months eariler in L.A. and a 7.3 south of Eureka to the north. Serious scare-the-shit-out-of-you earthquakes are not uncommon in California. The 8.4 quake of 1906 destroyed the entire city of San Francisco in only five minutes.
2) Fires - East Oakland had burned the previous summer and Malibu the summer before. People jsut love to build giant wooden houses ten feet apart and then plant trees with flammable oil in the bark all around them. One schmuck tosses a cigarette butt out the window and half the city is gone two hours later. Typical California.
3) Insurrections - In April 1993, Los Angeles erupted in a giant race riot. White cops beat a black guy with sticks on television after he drove 160 Kilometers-per-hour through many neighborhoods. The trial was moved to the most conservative city in the entire state and they were found not guilty. So the blacks burned down the Korean neighborhoods to protest the police presence in their neighborhoods (which have the highest crime rates in the country). Typical California.
4) Tsumamais - As a result of one of those earthquakes happening offshore, the beach rolls back really really far. Then it comes back up to the highest water mark on the beach, and keeps coming up and up and up. Over the beach, the parking lot, the streets, the stores, the houses, the buildings, the trees, the factory, the warehouses...
5) Incompetent back up technician accidently erasing the invaluable company data. - Uh, we won't spend much time on this one. But it's not all that uncommon. Especially when the backups are done on unpaid overtime.
When I explained all this to them as a good reason to have reasonably current set of backups out of the building, out of the city, and even out of the country, they looked at me as if I were stark raving crazy!
I seem to have read quite a few comments by people like you. I personally could care less if some starving college students are copying their overpriced books. What would piss me off would be seeing some random person in Kinkos copying those books to sell out on the street.
This is just like software piracy. Some kiddies downloading Doom3 is not going to destroy the software industry. Hell, the kids probably couldnt afford it in the first place. But when you have Joe Blow *selling* copies of a pirated game or an app, then yes, it is a problem.
P.S - Why are you such a weenie? Did you really want starving med students (who I might add could possibly save your life one day because of those books) to get fined or thrown in jail for copying a book?
Why would a university professor protect the book company's right to make a buck?
Uhh... because he wrote the book and therefore gets a cut of the profits?
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
If it's legal to bring those photocopies back over the border...
It's not. The people who copy textbooks in Mexico might not be breaking any Mexican laws, but the people who bring those unauthorized copies into the US certainly are breaking US law.
Circumvention might be a different matter though. Under US law you are entitled to make backups, but you are not entitled to circumvent copy protection. If the cicumvention takes place in another country, but you are entitled to own the resulting copy, then I think that would be all legal.
Another situation where this might make a difference is in fair use of textbooks. You are generally allowed to copy as much as a chapter of a book, but you have to make the copy yourself. If someone else, like a copy shop makes it for you then you have to pay licensing fees. Again, if you are entitled to have a copy, and the copying takes place outside the US, you might be all legal. Mexican copy shops might be able to get in on a lucrative mail-order coursepack business.
This is just my personal opinion so if you don't agree feel free.
There is a fundimental difference between information and physical property.
Information can generally be used simultainiously by multiple people without interfering with any of the other users of the information (we can all listen to the same song/hear the same joke/run the same program without 'taking away' from anyone else who 'uses' the information).
Physical property can generally only be utilized by a single person simultainiously (Only I can use my car/socks/toothbrush during a specific point in time).
This is a big fundamental difference.
It would be nice if information could fit into the physical-property category but it simply doesn't.
The reason it sorta-kinda did for so long was that the copying mechanisms were rather slow/expensive and the end result was always a physical item (paper-book, chemical-film, etc).
Now we have finally gotten to a point where the information is more-or-less 'free' from the physical information-carrier.
The major publishing-house people (those that make the physical items that are used to carry information) seem to be hopelessly trying to re-combine the physical with the informational. This isn't going to happen but they are currently causing a lot of harm in attempting to do so. The longer this 'transitional period' takes the longer all the misery is extended.
The really funny thing in my opinion is that so many people in general also buy into the concept of 'information as physical-type property'.
I would ask that you honestly think about the harm this idea causes vs the 'good' that results from it. I think that if you really truely honestly evaluate it you will see that these laws are causing much more harm than any good that they could ever do from this point forward.
I feel that slowly we are outgrowing this outdated idea just like we outgrew other ideas that no-longer worked in our society. The only real question is how long it will take and how much suffering will be caused during this transition.
In my opinion the actions of the students in this article are much more helpful than harmful. They help bring to light the fact that this system is hopelessly broken.
I flat out reject the argument that just because a law exists that it is somehow a 'moral imperitive' that it is followed. Laws have no inherent moral function. Morals in themselves are not objective but always subjective. Think about the laws on slavery that used to exist if you need a point of reference.
I would also like to state that I make my living as a software developer and physical-media artist. I think/read a lot about history and economic issues and consider myself very much a pro-capitalist strong-physical-property-rights sort of person. I am NOT any sort of socialist hippie tree-hugger type that doesn't understand how the world works and wants everything for free.
As a young(er) Master's student in Computer Science back in 1996,
It's obvious, then, that you have no idea how much college costs the average student now. Just since 2001 we've seen the largest tuition hikes ever. What's left after tuition is usually gone after the parking fees, registration fees, technology fees (?!) and everything else they nickel-and-dime you for.
Textbooks were the last refuge for the poor student. The thrifty student could usually buy them used or barter for them and then sell them at the end of the semester for a good return. That is no more. Textbook prices are hideously high. I spent nearly $200 on books for one online class in my first semester at a school that is very nearly an adult-ed community college.
Buying used books and reselling them is getting more and more rare thanks to the actions of the textbook industry. Try finding a book that doesn't have a bundled CD and product key or some other scheme to make the book far less valuable if resold. Try finding a class that doesn't require the $current_year edition of the course textbook.
Sorry, but there's just no way that 12th Edition of "Algebra I Fundamentals Explorer With New Operator Precedence Tables" cost the book company anywhere near what they're charging. Books cost quite a bit of money to make I'm sure, but there's no way they have to charge students over $100 in order to make a nice profit. And just how much have the basics of Algebra I changed over the last 12 years to warrant a new edition each year? I won't even go into all of the sleazeball tactics the publishers pull on faculty and boards to get their books into the classes.
Somebody's getting fat and it ain't the students. If I had the time and means to go down to mexico and photocopy books, I would if only to help create a little balance.
An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens.
Some people leave the country to infringe copyright, then break the spirit of a return policy to create gains. The fact that the copying may or may not break any local laws doesn't mean it's ethical. Does anyone else think this whole self-congratulatory information-anarchy thing has gone a little too far? Buy the fucking books. They're for your education, which is the one thing above all else that I think everyone here respects. The people from whom you are learning should be rewarded for their hard work. And I think that $100 financed over 10 years at 5% works out to something like $1.50 a month. That's noise compared to your cell phone bill, and it's a hell of a lot more important.
The preceding isn't meant as a flame at the submitter. For that, I'll call out that s/he labelled them "savvy", which in context I take to mean 'clever and to be admired'. For the record, the original article calls the trend "alarming".
There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls.
Yeah, and I wonder why they would ever do such a thing. I mean, it's not like they feel their livelihood threatened, or anything. [/sarcasm]
But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary?
Great, smear the rich with ad hominem attacks for the sake of playing to the crowd, then follow it up by implying P2P networks are simply for the purpose of copyright infringement, and asking if there are any other tools you can use to break the law. If you really want to get busted as some sort of civil libertarian protester, that's fine, but you're not going to do anybody any good from the safety of your computer chair. Get out there and be arrested. (In case anyone is keeping score, I feel generally the same way, but getting arrested isn't the best use of my time. For that, I started law school. I'll be spending the next three years of my life gearing up for this fight.)
For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?
Now why would the FBI have any reason to raid your company? Because you're doing something illegal maybe? If you're worried about FBI raids, you have bigger problems than off-site backups.
Mark the whole submission [-1, Does More Damage Than Good]. If you really want to do something, then do it. Take law classes, sign up for volunteer work, protest, write letters, get out there and make a difference. The EFF is looking for referral lawyers, for heaven's sake. They need all the help they can get.
-- Dave
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
My first class in college, History 106/World Civ, Professor tells us to buy the books used. His reasoning? Since the classes don't change much, everything important is already highlighted and during the dull parts of class there are always someone else's doodles to entertain you.
You used to have a really crappy sig, but then I stole it.
Grr, that thought always gets my goat. The only thing that changed was that the US got it's first taste of what it was like to be attacked at home by a foreign aggressor. It sucks. It makes you angry. It makes you hate the people who did it. The rest of us have been dealing with it for centuries. Get over it. Your solution is part of the problem.
The Iraqi's feel no different by the way. If your leaders are acting suprised by the current outcome, they are either grossly incompitent, ignorant of history, or really don't give a toss about the future of Iraq. An occupying force is only ever welcome in any country when it is dispelling another occupying force.
If your leaders are acting suprised by the current outcome, they are either grossly incompitent, ignorant of history, or really don't give a toss about the future of Iraq.
Probably all three.
You mistake what I mean when I say "9/11 changed everything".
What changed is; now American leaders have an excuse, plausible to American voters, to impose fascism. That's what changed on 9/11.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.