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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?"
and after i got a usb watch for xmas last year, i have gotten into the habit of archiving all of my company email every 3 monhhs, and walking out with the archive on my wrist
i always wondered about the constitutionality of that... it's not really MY email, even though, for all practical purposes, the content of it is more important to me than my company (records of who said what to whom, my ideas, my code, etc.)
we live in a day and age where corporate rights encroach on individual rights more and more
i think we should all do our best to fight that, in big ways and small
walking out with "corporate intellectual property" on my wrist is my way of doing that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I seem to remember reading that some organization was setting up servers on abandoned oil rigs in international waters for just such a purpose. I don't know what happened to them. Something about a giant squid maybe?
This place was referred to in the Wiki article via the link to HavenCo. HavenCo sounds like it's free of any type of outside infringement. Cool.
Reminds me of South Korea.
;-)
The copyright laws there are pretty much non-existant.
For example you can purchase a jacket or article of clothing, and they will embroider it with just about anything you want, including emblems/logos that in America are Trademarked (Starter, Nike, etc).
You can also buy fake oakley sunglasses (AKA Foaklies/Oakies) in many parts of the world for $5 a pop.
The rest of the world doesn't always play by America's rules. But we're working on that.
Slashdot = ((Technology + Politics) / Trolls) % Grammar Nazis
Plus, going to Mexico isn't all that cost-effective. I'm betting you can find someone who will run anything through his copier as long as you pay him as easily in the USA as in anywhere in the world.
It's ludicrous. This semester, I spent $350 on books for three classes. All of these classes got new editions of the text this year. In addition, after last semester I had only one textbook that the bookstore would take back, because all the others were being replaced!
Also, these days a ton of textbooks come with these stupid "learning aid" CDs and access to super-secret "study aid" websites to justify jacking up the price by another 50 bucks.
Most of the time, comparing two editions of the same textbook side by side reveals very little differences. Often they'll change the order of the exercises in the book, without actually changing any of them, just so you'll have to have the new edition or you'll end up doing the wrong problems for homework.
I'm not american so I don't understand this: what kind of books are you supposed to buy? I'm in college and all the books I would ever need are available at the library (In fact, all my courses are done without books). I only bought two crypto books (Schneier and Zémor) because I told my teacher I wanted to have fun at home.
As a young(er) Master's student in Computer Science back in 1996, I noted that many of my international colleagues (grad students) photocopying their textbooks and sharing the copies from semester to semester and student to student.
I brought this up at a department meeting I was a student-rep for, and the grad program chair said something like "why should we care?"
I was shocked at this attitude and lack of concern about the actions of those doing the copying. Yes, it is/was illegal and something should have been done/said about it. However, since I knew that several tenured professors didn't care, me saying anything to anyone wasn't going to change the situation. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have alerted the book companies.
You're completely wrong. Universities are forced by the publishers to force new editions on students every (approx.) 2 years. The biggest differences between the editions are that the problems are rearranged. Try getting through a class with a second hand modern edition when all of the problems are different, and the homework is graded. Try getting through calc 4 when the brand new book you bought 2 years ago containing the exact same content isn't the required reading, but instead you have to buy another brand new book to do the homework. I don't blame anybody who photocopies textbooks. The publishers are ripping off people who are already struggling through their educations. I openly admit to taking advantage of my campus bookstore's 7-day return policy for "borrowing" a book for a test or assignment, or to go to the library for some copies. So you may think it's a troll, but I'd like to see you spot the differences between the 7th edition from 2 years ago and the 8th edition the school is currently using, except those problems you must do to pass. Troll to you, a big rip off to me.
There are lots of legitimate businesses and parties who need strong crypto, offsite data for protection against raids etc - journalists in many countries, unpopular but legal organisations who will be raided just to put them out of business by the powers that be (or by the powers that be on behalf of their paying customers like the IPR businesses)
One of the cutest I've seen was RAID5 over network block device (encrypted) with the disks all in different legal jurisdictions.
NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!
So what did I do?
Right.
I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki