My suggestion: Forget copy protection. Use piracy as free advertisment. Make a special "pirate edition" of the software that will lack some functionality (by lacking functionality I really mean conditional compilation of the underlying code but keep the disabled interface widgets in place) and display information about where to buy the full version.
Better yet, bake some important core logic into the USB stick. This way, even if the encryption is discovered, the contents of the USB stick remain relevant.
Yes, the USB stick will remain relevant, but the company and its product will become irrelevant on the market.
Atheism, by contrast (and imho), is reviled not because a lack of faith is seen as inherently wrong by modern religious types, but because a disproportionate amount of outspoken Atheists are inflammatory jerk-offs with some misguided superiority complex (see Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al).
Right, because there are surely not thousands of outspoken religious inflammatory jerk-offs for each atheist one.
No, he's not. Atheists don't believe that the answer to "Is there any supernatural force that could be called 'god'?" is "Yes." Agnostics on the other hand believe that the question can never be answered for certain. Agnosticism is completely independent of the answer. It's a statement about possible certainty of answering the question.
Better yet - ACTA, SOPA and PIPA are the digital equivalent of trying to legislate water to flow uphill. You can try as hard as you want but it just won't happen.
Those laws will have no effect whatsoever on the actual copyright monopoly infringements. Pirates will simply abandon sharing technologies vulnerable to enforcement and take better care of covering their tracks. Technology and will of individuals to break stupid laws always beat the law. Communists in Central and Eastern Europe tried to crush rock music by force in 1960s and 1970 and they failed miserably despite much harsher penalties for live performance and distribution of records. They failed miserably.
What makes you think that the almighty US of A can win the very same war on culture? Because that's what it is. Sharing is what creates culture out of individual works of art.
When you watch the latest action packed scifi movie years from now with your grandkids, you will still be able to point out which ideas first came from Star Trek or Star Wars.
No they haven't. It has been argued time and time again on this very site that the idea of "intellectual property" is nonsense and that the loss of data does not deprive you of anything real. If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
The discussions you're referring to were about making more copies of the data. This discussion is about taking offline servers with copies, many of which were probably the last accessible to the original uploader. This is akin to BBC scraping its archives in the 1970s. Good luck getting the surviving copies back from those who downloaded them before server shutdown.
Everybody agrees that we need to battle online piracy of movies, books, TV shows and such. If piracy spreads, nobody will create anything because their work will be pirated as soon as it is finished.
Nonsense. And I'll show you why in the next paragraph.
None of us wants to kill off artistic creation. Each of us realizes that by abusing the system to get the goodies for free, we risk eliminating the goodies.
The communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe tried exactly that in 1960s and 1970s. To be more specific, they tried to kill off Rock & roll and Rock music by force. And they failed miserably. The fact that there was no way to buy records of western or even domestic rock music legally meant only one thing - people circulated illegal bootleg copies and composed and played their own songs. You can read more details on Wikipedia.
Allow me to introduce to you Dr. Richard Alley. To quote the most interesting part from the video:
The basis for global warming is physics. It's physics that've been known for more than a century, it's physics that was really worked out by the Air Force. And the Air Force was not doing global warming. They're communicating, they're operating and in WW2 they say "Hey, we better understand the atmosphere and understand how energy works in the atmosphere." And then they said "You know, the hot exhaust of that enemy bomber is a target for a heat seeking missile. And I'm gonna need a sensor that sees the heat of that. And if I make that sensor look in a wavelength where water vapor or CO2 are active, I can't see it! Because they're in the way." And they got a bunch of physicists who said "You know, CO2 and water vapor block some things and they stop energy from moving around. And once they and the Navy and... Ford and some scientists from academia said "You know, if it's blocking energy from a hot enemy bomber, it's blocking energy from the Earth too, it probably means something." And that's really the basis of global warming.
I thought one of the fundamental aspects of modern empirical science is that, unlike a religion, it is ALWAYS open to revision and dispute. That's the whole point of the scientific method. Whether there is a significant modern consensus or not, I think it goes against the core spirit of scientific inquiry to EVER say "This matter is settled and no future scientist may ever question it."
I think you've missed the little detail that elementary and high school students are not scientists. And neither are the vast majority of their teachers. They are not qualified to do the questioning properly without falling into some fallacy trap.
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor? You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
Even if we go for the sake of argument with the ridiculous idea of rights to the fruits of one's own labor, the argument for copyright still falls flat on its face. Because copyright doesn't secure that. What it does secure is a special status of one particular obsolete related service at the expense of all other possible ways to profit from the actual valuable labor. Why should we grant special status to some related service and burden everything else with tons of pointeless paperwork?
That was the situation for centuries, and copyright was not introduced because of some moral imperative -- in England (whose laws served as the basis for American and Canadian laws), copyrights were introduced to improve the public's access to written works.
Wrong. Copyright originated as a tool of censorship. When the censorship expired, the same measures were repackaged and reintroduced (sans government oversight of book content) as the copyright we know today under heavy lobbying of publishers who most profited from the monopoly warranted by government oversight. Comparison to copyrightless 19th century Germany shows that copyright did the exact opposite of improving public's access to written works.
Why is the technological infrastructure, or rather, a particular group of people's vision for how the infrastructure should work, more important than people getting paid for their work?
You're missing the minor detail that the work for which somebody should be paid is creating the work in question. Current technology makes copying so cheap that it's almost free, thus obsoleting an ancient business model. Why should we keep paying for some expensive obsolete related service done by obsolete middlemen instead of paying those who do the real still valuable work? That's what upholding copyright monopoly (that's right, it's not a property right, it's a special purpose monopoly!) is all about - paying for obsolete related service instead of the actual valuable work.
The important point is that you have a right to stop people making a copy of your work, at least the law the way it is now, but you don't have a right to expect the Internet to work a particular way.
And does that "right" to stop people from copying something overrule others' right to privacy? Does that "right" overrule the freedom of speech? Does that "right" overrule others' rights to physical property? There's no differentiating between "real" and "on the Internet" anymore. The Internet IS real.
It's not about coding being difficult, on the contrary. Coding is so simple to pick up that most people get the "I'm the best coder in the world" mentality early on. But the real problem is what comes afterwards. You have to write (and especially READ) several million lines of code. You have to run into every single beginner mistake to understand that it's a mistake and figure out how to do it right next time. Each mistake has to literally bite you in the ass or you won't notice it's there. A year is not enough by a long shot.
Pretty much yeah. Learn enough to be a software developer in a year? Not a chance. You might learn some programming language pretty well in a year but there's no way you can learn the essential skills for professional software development - debugging and breaking down even simple problems to elementary tasks. That takes years of practice because it requires your brain to rewire to allow completely new way of thinking. After a year, you won't be qualified even to work as an assistant to a code monkey, much less a real software developer.
Slashdot Mirror
ugly bags of mostly water
Different episode but FTFY anyway.
My suggestion: Forget copy protection. Use piracy as free advertisment. Make a special "pirate edition" of the software that will lack some functionality (by lacking functionality I really mean conditional compilation of the underlying code but keep the disabled interface widgets in place) and display information about where to buy the full version.
Better yet, bake some important core logic into the USB stick. This way, even if the encryption is discovered, the contents of the USB stick remain relevant.
Yes, the USB stick will remain relevant, but the company and its product will become irrelevant on the market.
Too bad that patents only last 20 years. You'll only get paid once.
We know it's irrelevant, that's why the protests scheduled for this saturday will proceed as planned.
Atheism, by contrast (and imho), is reviled not because a lack of faith is seen as inherently wrong by modern religious types, but because a disproportionate amount of outspoken Atheists are inflammatory jerk-offs with some misguided superiority complex (see Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al).
Right, because there are surely not thousands of outspoken religious inflammatory jerk-offs for each atheist one.
No, he's not. Atheists don't believe that the answer to "Is there any supernatural force that could be called 'god'?" is "Yes." Agnostics on the other hand believe that the question can never be answered for certain. Agnosticism is completely independent of the answer. It's a statement about possible certainty of answering the question.
Typical science news cycle in progress...
My point is that option two won't work no matter how hard you keep whacking. When so many people break a law, the law cannot be just.
Not really, Cory Doctorow had a brilliant talk on the subject recently. Even a non-techie should be able to understand the most important points.
With SOPA/PIPA, copyright organisations could kill ten of them with a single letter - the only way to whack the moles quickly enough.
Justice is not a game of Whac-A-Mole.
Better yet - ACTA, SOPA and PIPA are the digital equivalent of trying to legislate water to flow uphill. You can try as hard as you want but it just won't happen.
Those laws will have no effect whatsoever on the actual copyright monopoly infringements. Pirates will simply abandon sharing technologies vulnerable to enforcement and take better care of covering their tracks. Technology and will of individuals to break stupid laws always beat the law. Communists in Central and Eastern Europe tried to crush rock music by force in 1960s and 1970 and they failed miserably despite much harsher penalties for live performance and distribution of records. They failed miserably.
What makes you think that the almighty US of A can win the very same war on culture? Because that's what it is. Sharing is what creates culture out of individual works of art.
When you watch the latest action packed scifi movie years from now with your grandkids, you will still be able to point out which ideas first came from Star Trek or Star Wars.
Except they didn't.
No they haven't. It has been argued time and time again on this very site that the idea of "intellectual property" is nonsense and that the loss of data does not deprive you of anything real. If it's a legitimate argument for people who download music and movies, then it's a legitimate argument in this case. Or else it's inaccurate in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
The discussions you're referring to were about making more copies of the data. This discussion is about taking offline servers with copies, many of which were probably the last accessible to the original uploader. This is akin to BBC scraping its archives in the 1970s. Good luck getting the surviving copies back from those who downloaded them before server shutdown.
Everybody agrees that we need to battle online piracy of movies, books, TV shows and such. If piracy spreads, nobody will create anything because their work will be pirated as soon as it is finished.
Nonsense. And I'll show you why in the next paragraph.
None of us wants to kill off artistic creation. Each of us realizes that by abusing the system to get the goodies for free, we risk eliminating the goodies.
The communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe tried exactly that in 1960s and 1970s. To be more specific, they tried to kill off Rock & roll and Rock music by force. And they failed miserably. The fact that there was no way to buy records of western or even domestic rock music legally meant only one thing - people circulated illegal bootleg copies and composed and played their own songs. You can read more details on Wikipedia.
Nonsense. If they are performing science, then they are scientists.
Yeah, right. Except that most of them thinks that "performing science" means wearing a lab coat and playing with some test tubes containing brightly colored smoking liquids. (BTW, enjoy your Wiki Walk.)
Allow me to introduce to you Dr. Richard Alley. To quote the most interesting part from the video:
I thought one of the fundamental aspects of modern empirical science is that, unlike a religion, it is ALWAYS open to revision and dispute. That's the whole point of the scientific method. Whether there is a significant modern consensus or not, I think it goes against the core spirit of scientific inquiry to EVER say "This matter is settled and no future scientist may ever question it."
I think you've missed the little detail that elementary and high school students are not scientists. And neither are the vast majority of their teachers. They are not qualified to do the questioning properly without falling into some fallacy trap.
Think of it as "if opposition fails in USA, coming soon to your country as well".
So, in your philosophy, authors have no rights to the fruits of their own, individual labor? You maintain that they should just be humbly grateful that you deign to enjoy the products of their labor, with no obligation on your part to provide quid pro quo?
Even if we go for the sake of argument with the ridiculous idea of rights to the fruits of one's own labor, the argument for copyright still falls flat on its face. Because copyright doesn't secure that. What it does secure is a special status of one particular obsolete related service at the expense of all other possible ways to profit from the actual valuable labor. Why should we grant special status to some related service and burden everything else with tons of pointeless paperwork?
That was the situation for centuries, and copyright was not introduced because of some moral imperative -- in England (whose laws served as the basis for American and Canadian laws), copyrights were introduced to improve the public's access to written works.
Wrong. Copyright originated as a tool of censorship. When the censorship expired, the same measures were repackaged and reintroduced (sans government oversight of book content) as the copyright we know today under heavy lobbying of publishers who most profited from the monopoly warranted by government oversight. Comparison to copyrightless 19th century Germany shows that copyright did the exact opposite of improving public's access to written works.
Why is the technological infrastructure, or rather, a particular group of people's vision for how the infrastructure should work, more important than people getting paid for their work?
You're missing the minor detail that the work for which somebody should be paid is creating the work in question. Current technology makes copying so cheap that it's almost free, thus obsoleting an ancient business model. Why should we keep paying for some expensive obsolete related service done by obsolete middlemen instead of paying those who do the real still valuable work? That's what upholding copyright monopoly (that's right, it's not a property right, it's a special purpose monopoly!) is all about - paying for obsolete related service instead of the actual valuable work.
The important point is that you have a right to stop people making a copy of your work, at least the law the way it is now, but you don't have a right to expect the Internet to work a particular way.
And does that "right" to stop people from copying something overrule others' right to privacy? Does that "right" overrule the freedom of speech? Does that "right" overrule others' rights to physical property? There's no differentiating between "real" and "on the Internet" anymore. The Internet IS real.
So let me ask you this: What's your biggest past coding mistake that you're aware of and how long did it take you to stop making it?
It's not about coding being difficult, on the contrary. Coding is so simple to pick up that most people get the "I'm the best coder in the world" mentality early on. But the real problem is what comes afterwards. You have to write (and especially READ) several million lines of code. You have to run into every single beginner mistake to understand that it's a mistake and figure out how to do it right next time. Each mistake has to literally bite you in the ass or you won't notice it's there. A year is not enough by a long shot.
Pretty much yeah. Learn enough to be a software developer in a year? Not a chance. You might learn some programming language pretty well in a year but there's no way you can learn the essential skills for professional software development - debugging and breaking down even simple problems to elementary tasks. That takes years of practice because it requires your brain to rewire to allow completely new way of thinking. After a year, you won't be qualified even to work as an assistant to a code monkey, much less a real software developer.