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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?"
You mean like Cheney being kept in an undisclosed location?
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
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.
Cryptonomicon. (a book by Neal Stephenson)
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.
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...
Anyone remember Sealand? They bought an oil rig or somesuch in international waters and started advertising as a place to store data outside the reach of governments.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I work in the mortgage industry, and in this industry, no-compete clauses are very common
Among the restrictions of the clause, there is one that specifically mentions theft of company information and not directly soliciting any of the company's clients for a period of time.
If you are in a sales position, taking the archives could represent theft of company data, which would violate privacy laws.
If you are in a customer service position, taking the archives could also represent theft of confidential information and trade secrets.
It's good that you back up your data, but if your company ever found out that you are removing it from the company, you could be subject to criminal prosecution.
An example of this would be the AOL employees that sold aol e-mail accounts to spammers. Granted, they acted on the information, but in today's litigation-happy society, they may not wait for you to act.
Not to mention, by taking the privelaged information, you are opening yourself up to a legal nightmare if the next company you work for does business with the same people/organizations as your previous company. If you don't have a list of previous clients/customers, it is much easier to deny intentionally soliciting/marketing the clients of your previous employer.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
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.
Actually, being able to recover your data after the FBI walks off with all of your hard drives is a perfectly legitimate reason. It could even be critical.
Bear in mind that the FBI often confiscates things from people who are not party to the crimes being investigated. It's called "evidence." Sometimes evidence is in the hands of third parties.
The FBI also often confiscates things without ever actually filing a charge. You may or may not ever get your drives back, but if you do it's likely to take a few years.
If you are charged with a crime it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to realize that having copies could be a critical element in preparing your defense.
Back up early. Back up often. Back up not only off site, but off the radar.
KFG
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.
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".
Because that price in Mexico includes labor.
Basically you hand them the text book and come back a few hours later to find it all nicely copied and bound....assuming, of course, that after spending the $100 you saved on drinking Coronas and dodgy prostitutes, you are able to work out where the hell it was you left the book
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Among other things you can download Orwell's complete works and The Great Gatsby.
The University of Adeliade has a slicker version of the same texts.
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
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
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.