I'd rather have a million more Jane Doe lawsuits and investigations like this one before DRM achieves greater legal backing than (in the United States, anyway) the DMCA already gives it.
Personally I'd rather have no copyright at all and a DRM free-for-all. Then the market can decide what solution is best.
How about not giving a Designed for Windows XP certification? If I can remember correctly, it was not necessary to run under a restricted user account in order to get this certification. Its been a while since I've done WinCrap development, so the requirements may have changed.
"Designed for Windows XP" has always, AFAIK, required applications to be compatible with regular user accounts, as outlined here.
But they are easily executed. You're saying this is purely an accident?
There is a vast gulf of difference between "easily" and "automatically".
To be blunt, you're simply wrong. Of course there's a difference between these things; it's obvious to anyone reading the words that they're different. And they are also, contrary to your implication, significantly different.
How is adding an extra few (trivially completed) steps "significantly different" to adding more "are you sure" dialogs ?
There are lots of different reasons for the security crisis, but one of them is this attitude, which is unfortunately widespread: we have a horrible, horrible problem, and someone proposes a solution, but the reaction is, "Oh, no, that would only solve 95% of the problem, it wouldn't be perfect, some cases would still slip through, so we have no choice but to sit on our hands and deal with the repercussions from 100% of the problem."
Actually, no, it's more like we have a horrible problem and someone is proposing a marginal workaround, but the reaction is, "well, it's only going to help in a minority of cases and in all likelihood will make the long term situation worse as it desensitises users to the additional steps they have to take every time they want to get something working".
Oh, geez, I dunno. Perhaps by making the default Windows install have the user in an account with no admin rights? Then, application developers will realize that their apps won't run unless they design them to run in userland.
Which would have resulted in little more than a bunch of pissed-off customers and FAQs about how to add your user account into the Administrators group.
Microsoft does share the blame, and in fact they have _most_ of the blame.
I fail to see how Microsoft shares any blame, outside of any applications it has release which neeslessly require elevated privileges.
So the fault lies with M$ for shipping an OS that expects to be installed by default as an admin. If the majority of XP machines were NOT shipping this way - if these applications would break for MOST users - then these people would stop shipping these apps.
Sorry, but just because the default user is an Administrator does not in any way excuse developers from writing bad software.
Step 1: Add a "modernapp" flag that software can have/set that says "I'm approved for any user"
Stop. Your system is inherently broken because it relies on developers to do the right thing. The only reason we're even having this conversation is because developers *cannot* be relied on to do the right thing.
It is arguable that not having the default user set to Administrator would have "encouraged" developers to write LUA-friendly applications. However, this argument is tenuous. All the would have happened is
a) a flood of magazine articles, FAQs and developer support notes about how to add your user account into the Administrator group
b) a lot of pissed-off customers looking elsewhere because all the software they want to run doesn't work.
Finally, realistically, privilege separation in home machines is largely pointless. So defaulting to an Admin user for home machines adds little overall risk.
Therefore, by definition, any request for services that are not needed to perform the operation is an LUA Bug
Only if the request is permitted in contravention of the permissions actually attached to that service - and I don't see anyone, anywhere, suggesting that should happen.
The situation you are trying to say is being condoned, isn't.
As a network security specialist, I was dumfounded to (on my new machine) find that, in addition to the basic administrator account (no default password), there had to be at least one more administrator added.
Are you equally "dumfounded" (sic) that you can't configure a typical unix machine without a root user ?
I suspect one of the other big reasons for this is it's cheaper to do a bare-bones re-install when the Windows box [...]
Assuming you have decent infrastructure (networked home directories/profiles, centralised application installability, scripted OS installs and updates) it's almost always going to be quicker to do a reinstall than troubleshooting in a managed environment, regardless of platform.
I tried changing permissions, etc., on the Quicken data directory (among other things) to no avail. The only way I was able to get Quicken to run under her account was to give her back admin rights, sigh.
So why don't you use "Run As" to run Quicken and leave the normal login as a regular user ?
Mabye if M$ developers were forced to run as non-privileged users once in a while, they'd realize that there's a lot of problems with trying to get through the day on a non-admin account.
TFA is unclear whether "full admin rights" means "logged in as Administrator all the time" or "can run applications as Administrator".
These are two very different scenarios.
Windows itself handles rights failures so poorly (erroring out or worse, instead of just providing a prompt for the user to enter admin credentials).
This is not the OS's responsibility, it is the application's. The OS *should* return an access denied error and it is then the application's job to act appropriately on that error. Having the OS second-guessing apps on what they "really" meant to do is a recipe for disaster and a gaping security hole.
Why can't they "RunAs" for installs (when needed)?
Who's to say they don't ?
"Admin rights to their PCs" != "runs as Administrator all the time".
In the case of Microsoft, if they spent a lot of time working & testing as something other than "Administrator" (userid or privileges), they might get a better appreciation for their users' plights & frustrations.
99.9% of problems relating to running as a non-Admin on Windows aren't even remotely Microsoft's fault, nor anything they could realistically "fix".
The concept of UserRights made its way very slowly in Windows development expecially for cross-platform applications designed to run on WinMe and Win2000.
Microsoft have been telling developers to write LUA-friendly applications since about 1998.
And the Windows API didn't made thinks easy, with some duplicated functions or parameters ignored on Win9x,... Even if the security design of WinNT was ok Microsoft could have done something to ease the pain of cross-platform ( Win9x-WinNT ) development ! Like I don't know, patch Win9x to reproduce the same folder hierarchy like document and setting even if with only one user in it [...]
They did. Windows 98 - and I think Windows 95 OSR3 as well - duplicated the "multiuserness" of NT in terms of filesystem and registry structure.
No developer has had an excuse for not writing LUA-friendly applications since 1998.
Microsoft shares no blame in the contemporary plague of applications that needlessly require administrator privileges. They have been telling developers what to do for ~8 years now. They have had a multiuser system for ~13 years. Even the consumer version of Windows has been multiuser for ~5 years. They hacked a certain level of "multiuserness" into their single-user DOS-based Windows products from 1998 onwards to ease the transition. Yet, still, developers do *idiotic* things that mean their software needlessly requires elevated privileges. Like storing user preferences in system registry keys, or trying to open files in application directories read-write. These are not mistakes caused by difficult APIs or a lack of documentation, they are *errors* resulting from incompetence and ignorance.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if you find a Windows application requiring elevated privileges that you, the end user, can hack in LUA-compliance by fiddling with file and/or registry permissions, then that app has been written by incompetent and/or ignorant developers.
First off: the windows administrator account isn't EXACTLY root. The "System" account is the most privileged account. Of course, it is fairly easy to escalate Administrator privileges to do anything that System can (you just have to jump through a few hoops).
From a technical perspective, Windows doesn't have any equivalent to 'root'.
However, Windows has the ability to synchronize the user's profile across the network -- including the HKEY_CURRENT_USER subkey from the registry, so it's not as simple as just writing a bunch of stuff to a dotfile.
Er, yes it is. You drop a config file into %USERPROFILE% or write it to HKEY_CURRENT_USER (where you should be putting it *anyway*) and the system takes care of the rest.
By the way, the poster's use of the word "root" is a little misleading. In Windows terms, "root" is really the LocalSystem user, which has full access to everything, including \Device\PhysicalMemory and other juicy objects. The Administrator user has the ability to escalate privileges to LocalSystem, but it requires a few extra steps.
Strictly speaking, Windows has no equivalent of root, as it has no concept of a 'superuser'.
(Interestingly, one of the applications that works fine in admin access but not in non-admin access is Windows Media Player 10.)
What problems did you have ? Because while I don't use WMP frequently, I've never had a problem using it in a non-admin account.
These problems in XP aren't rare and are artifacts of an infrastructure with security tacked on in ugly layers again and again, all as afterthoughts.
The security infrastructure in NT (ie: XP) has been there from the get-go and certainly wasn't "tacked on" as an "afterthought".
I hope Vista proves better at this, but wonder how many applications will continue as problematic because of a murky and muddled and shifting security architecture.
It's got nothing to do with the architecture and everything to do with poor developers.
And, also for the record, Microsoft has the money and power to fix this once and for all. I'm sure some will defend Microsoft's incremental work on this, but for too many years my observation has been Micosoft using their money to buy additional fingers with which they point at others to blame rather than work to solve comprehensively the security and system integrity problems.
How do you propose Microsoft "fix" it ? By writing everyone's applications for them ?
Back then it was a bit of a pain, as some maintenace tasks actually required logging in as an Administrator and didn't work with "Run As". Plus, "Run As" required you to actually download and install a PowerToy, rather than being part of the context menu by default.
Nowadays pretty much everything necessary is doable via "Run As" - and the few things that aren't XP users can simply use Fast User Switching to bounce into an Adminstrator account (I use Win2k3 on my desktop which, sadly, lacks this feature). Windows 2000 users will need to start up a CMD prompt or Explorer window running as Administrator and go from there, or in rare cases actually login to an Administrator account.
The biggest hurdle is teaching "ignorant" end users the distinction between an "Administrator" and a "Regular User". Once you've achieved that, teaching them how (and when) to do stuff in "Administrator mode" is relatively easy.
Unfortunately, running as an Admin is only effective today because the vast bulk of malware is as poorly written as much consumer software and craps itself when faced with a non-admin account. As non-Admin accounts become more common - and malware writers become more competent - this will change and most of the protection offered by a non-admin account offers will evaporate.
It's not especially difficult to run as a non-Admin, assuming the user actually understands what that means, but IMHO - after having put some thought into this recently - a good set of well maintained antivirus and antispyware software will provide a level of protection as good, if not better, and do it less invasively and more sustainably. The usefulness of unprivileged accounts - particularly on the typical single-user desktop - is overstressed by people who have histories of heavily multiuser environments (or like to pretend they do) and think that the principles there translate directly into the "appliance computing" the typical PC is used for.
If the user in question will have a relatively static application load and someone to set it up for them initially, with the occasional spot of maintenance, then running as a regular user is trivial (my mum was using Windows XP in a regular user account for ~4 years until I bought her an iMac last year - I think I had to do some maintenance on the machine maybe 3 times, one of which was the SP2 install).
You claimed control "is the whole point of copyright in the first place." I claim it is not.
I hope the basis for your claim is a bit more sturdy than "if its purpose was to control who can and cannot view/listen/whatever to a creative work, it would have been called "controlright" or some other silly name."
The objective of copyright is to generate value in things that would otherwise have no value (apart from the cost of reproduction) - copies of information. Since value is essentially a measure of scarcity, the only way it can do this is by "creating" scarcity. It can only do this by restricting how copies of information can be made and distributed. Since this kind of restriction has no existence in nature, an artificial one had to be used. So someone came up with copyright laws.
Copyright is wholely and solely about the control of the reproduction of information. While it gets drssed up in flowery idealism like "improving culture" and "benefiting society", the meat and potatoes of copyright has always been about economic manipulation. All modern society - with its insatiable corporate greed and dirt-cheap, practically instantaneous methods of reproduction, distribution and communication has done, is make this more obvious.
I agree that effectively infinite copyright terms and increasingly harsh punishments for non-profit copyright violations are ridiculous, but they are not at all in conflict with the fundamental principals and concept of copyright. The main difference is copyrights are typically now held by amoral corporations driven by greed, rather than individuals just trying to make a living doing something they love.
Nonsense, it's his creation. He should be granted some level of protection to that creation.
Why should he be granted an exemption from the inherent attributes of the thing he has created ? You can't "unhear" music or "unsee" films.
Yeah, CDs are cheaper, notice the decline in the purchase of recorded music too.
Maybe if you believe music industry propoganda. Last I heard, the dramatic growth in online music distribution is vastly outstripping the decline in CD/LP/tape sales. Which is great news for the record companies, because they sell a song online for about the same price as they do on a CD, but their costs for the former are just about zero. It's not so good news for the artists, however, because they just receive the same paltry cut they always did.
If people are too cheap to support the artist via CD sales what do you think is going to happen when the most recent tour is available within hours of the performance for free?
You seem to be missing the point of a live performance, and why people go to them. Not to mention how pitiful an amount out of the cost of a CD (or online song) actually goes into "supporting the artist".
Personally, I'd be more than happy to double the amount of "support" I give the artist, if it meant paying just that amount, plus duplicate costs, for a CD. It would also mean I'd be able to afford around ten times as many CDs, as well.
But if someone hears the recording of a current tour?
I have never heard or seen two identical live performances.
I think some people would stop being as generious with their concert funds.
I see no reason to think that. Neither in rational argument, nor historical precedent.
Again, your whole theory hinges on the assumption that if people can obtain likenesses of the music being performed at a live show for less than the cost of said show, they won't go to it. The simple fact that live music hasn't gotten any less popular, despite the fact that CD, LPs, etc have pretty much always had a lower cost than live shows, basically blows that assumption out of the water.
Not to even go back to my original thought that someone shouldn't have to tour to make money.
Why ? Why shouldn't people have to work to earn a living ? Why should "artists" be given the extraordinary privilege of receiving recurring payment - effectively forever - for one piece of work ?
While it's certainly understandable why people benefitting from this grossly one-sided system wouldn't want it to stop, that doesn't make that system even a little bit fair.
When someone produces a work of art they should have rights over that work, if they decide it's ok for you to copy and redistribute that's fine, don't act like it's your God given right to do that tho.
"God" - if you choose to believe in such an entity - has already demonstrated everyone has a "right" to do that by setting the base attributes of information. If "God" had intended for the "creators" of information to be able to control its every reproduction, then "He" wouldn't have made it so trivial to reproduce in the first place, nor made reproduction an inherent requirement of learning. "He" probably also would have had copyright law written into the Ten Commandments, as well, rather than invented as a legal construct a mere few hundred years ago.
People got to eat, this includes musicians.
What makes you think good musicians won't be able to earn enough to eat ? Why should bad musicians have their food bills subsidised by a broken system in the name of corporate greed ? Which other people are you thinking of who get their food paid for multiple times from a single piece of work ?
Sure there is. It's the read only, can't write to the disk, can't create/save any files with executable privs security level. You can achieve this simply via a CD/DVD only boot machine sans HD, or via a well secured system. Even windows can be secured at this level, although you won't be able to run much on it, especially no MS software.
That's not OS security, it's physics.
Not to mention, it still doesn't stop the user deliberately executing malicious code. It just stops that malicious code from infecting the system.
If what you say is true, the current problem is utterly inevitable and utterly unfixable.
Pretty much.
I'm not talking about Flash or Word docs. Those have their problems too, but they're generally bugs that can be fixed. I'm mostly talking about.exe's. Are you saying that the vast majority of users require the ability to send untrustworthy.exe's back and forth, and execute them automatically?
I don't believe any current software automatically executes.exe files _by design_. But, certainly, users value the ability to quickly and easily send each other this weeks silly little game, or self-installing set of screensavers, mouse pointers, smiley faces, "internet toolbards", etc, etc and run them straight away.
There are a lot of plausible steps in between draconian central signing authorities (which, no, would not be workable) and the just about completely unfettered, promiscuous, ridiculously insecure situation we have today.
Most of which are little more than dialog boxes saying "This is a bad idea, are you sure ?". Having to chmod +x a file is no different to such a dialog box. Having to copy a file into a location that isnt mounted noexec is no different to such a dialog box. Having to specifically grant permissions to something the user runs is no different to such a dialog box.
To be blunt, if you want to retain the ability for a computer to run arbitrary code, then closing the "user is able to run arbitrary malciious code" hole is impossible. As long as the decision whether or not to run malicious code is left in the hands of people unable to make an appropriate choice, they will continue to run malicious code.
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Personally I'd rather have no copyright at all and a DRM free-for-all. Then the market can decide what solution is best.
Maybe you should consider the ideal situation for the "windows way":
1. User goes to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Add New Programs.
2. User selects application, clicks "install".
And of course, let's not forget how problematic unix applications can be when the dependency hell prevalent amongst OSS software breaks out.
"Designed for Windows XP" has always, AFAIK, required applications to be compatible with regular user accounts, as outlined here.
There is a vast gulf of difference between "easily" and "automatically".
To be blunt, you're simply wrong. Of course there's a difference between these things; it's obvious to anyone reading the words that they're different. And they are also, contrary to your implication, significantly different.
How is adding an extra few (trivially completed) steps "significantly different" to adding more "are you sure" dialogs ?
There are lots of different reasons for the security crisis, but one of them is this attitude, which is unfortunately widespread: we have a horrible, horrible problem, and someone proposes a solution, but the reaction is, "Oh, no, that would only solve 95% of the problem, it wouldn't be perfect, some cases would still slip through, so we have no choice but to sit on our hands and deal with the repercussions from 100% of the problem."
Actually, no, it's more like we have a horrible problem and someone is proposing a marginal workaround, but the reaction is, "well, it's only going to help in a minority of cases and in all likelihood will make the long term situation worse as it desensitises users to the additional steps they have to take every time they want to get something working".
Which would have resulted in little more than a bunch of pissed-off customers and FAQs about how to add your user account into the Administrators group.
I fail to see how Microsoft shares any blame, outside of any applications it has release which neeslessly require elevated privileges.
So the fault lies with M$ for shipping an OS that expects to be installed by default as an admin. If the majority of XP machines were NOT shipping this way - if these applications would break for MOST users - then these people would stop shipping these apps.
Sorry, but just because the default user is an Administrator does not in any way excuse developers from writing bad software.
Step 1: Add a "modernapp" flag that software can have/set that says "I'm approved for any user"
Stop. Your system is inherently broken because it relies on developers to do the right thing. The only reason we're even having this conversation is because developers *cannot* be relied on to do the right thing.
It is arguable that not having the default user set to Administrator would have "encouraged" developers to write LUA-friendly applications. However, this argument is tenuous. All the would have happened is
a) a flood of magazine articles, FAQs and developer support notes about how to add your user account into the Administrator group
b) a lot of pissed-off customers looking elsewhere because all the software they want to run doesn't work.
Finally, realistically, privilege separation in home machines is largely pointless. So defaulting to an Admin user for home machines adds little overall risk.
Only if the request is permitted in contravention of the permissions actually attached to that service - and I don't see anyone, anywhere, suggesting that should happen.
The situation you are trying to say is being condoned, isn't.
Are you equally "dumfounded" (sic) that you can't configure a typical unix machine without a root user ?
Assuming you have decent infrastructure (networked home directories/profiles, centralised application installability, scripted OS installs and updates) it's almost always going to be quicker to do a reinstall than troubleshooting in a managed environment, regardless of platform.
No, it's because of broken applications. None of the criticisms you have voiced here have *anything* to do with the design of Windows.
You find this unusual ?!
So why don't you use "Run As" to run Quicken and leave the normal login as a regular user ?
You appear to have a deep misunderstanding of both the Windows and OS X security models.
TFA is unclear whether "full admin rights" means "logged in as Administrator all the time" or "can run applications as Administrator".
These are two very different scenarios.
Windows itself handles rights failures so poorly (erroring out or worse, instead of just providing a prompt for the user to enter admin credentials).
This is not the OS's responsibility, it is the application's. The OS *should* return an access denied error and it is then the application's job to act appropriately on that error. Having the OS second-guessing apps on what they "really" meant to do is a recipe for disaster and a gaping security hole.
Who's to say they don't ?
"Admin rights to their PCs" != "runs as Administrator all the time".
In the case of Microsoft, if they spent a lot of time working & testing as something other than "Administrator" (userid or privileges), they might get a better appreciation for their users' plights & frustrations.
99.9% of problems relating to running as a non-Admin on Windows aren't even remotely Microsoft's fault, nor anything they could realistically "fix".
Microsoft have been telling developers to write LUA-friendly applications since about 1998.
And the Windows API didn't made thinks easy, with some duplicated functions or parameters ignored on Win9x, ... Even if the security design of WinNT was ok Microsoft could have done something to ease the pain of cross-platform ( Win9x-WinNT ) development ! Like I don't know, patch Win9x to reproduce the same folder hierarchy like document and setting even if with only one user in it [...]
They did. Windows 98 - and I think Windows 95 OSR3 as well - duplicated the "multiuserness" of NT in terms of filesystem and registry structure.
No developer has had an excuse for not writing LUA-friendly applications since 1998.
Microsoft shares no blame in the contemporary plague of applications that needlessly require administrator privileges. They have been telling developers what to do for ~8 years now. They have had a multiuser system for ~13 years. Even the consumer version of Windows has been multiuser for ~5 years. They hacked a certain level of "multiuserness" into their single-user DOS-based Windows products from 1998 onwards to ease the transition. Yet, still, developers do *idiotic* things that mean their software needlessly requires elevated privileges. Like storing user preferences in system registry keys, or trying to open files in application directories read-write. These are not mistakes caused by difficult APIs or a lack of documentation, they are *errors* resulting from incompetence and ignorance.
Here's a good rule of thumb: if you find a Windows application requiring elevated privileges that you, the end user, can hack in LUA-compliance by fiddling with file and/or registry permissions, then that app has been written by incompetent and/or ignorant developers.
From a technical perspective, Windows doesn't have any equivalent to 'root'.
Er, yes it is. You drop a config file into %USERPROFILE% or write it to HKEY_CURRENT_USER (where you should be putting it *anyway*) and the system takes care of the rest.
By the way, the poster's use of the word "root" is a little misleading. In Windows terms, "root" is really the LocalSystem user, which has full access to everything, including \Device\PhysicalMemory and other juicy objects. The Administrator user has the ability to escalate privileges to LocalSystem, but it requires a few extra steps.
Strictly speaking, Windows has no equivalent of root, as it has no concept of a 'superuser'.
What problems did you have ? Because while I don't use WMP frequently, I've never had a problem using it in a non-admin account.
These problems in XP aren't rare and are artifacts of an infrastructure with security tacked on in ugly layers again and again, all as afterthoughts.
The security infrastructure in NT (ie: XP) has been there from the get-go and certainly wasn't "tacked on" as an "afterthought".
I hope Vista proves better at this, but wonder how many applications will continue as problematic because of a murky and muddled and shifting security architecture.
It's got nothing to do with the architecture and everything to do with poor developers.
And, also for the record, Microsoft has the money and power to fix this once and for all. I'm sure some will defend Microsoft's incremental work on this, but for too many years my observation has been Micosoft using their money to buy additional fingers with which they point at others to blame rather than work to solve comprehensively the security and system integrity problems.
How do you propose Microsoft "fix" it ? By writing everyone's applications for them ?
Back then it was a bit of a pain, as some maintenace tasks actually required logging in as an Administrator and didn't work with "Run As". Plus, "Run As" required you to actually download and install a PowerToy, rather than being part of the context menu by default.
Nowadays pretty much everything necessary is doable via "Run As" - and the few things that aren't XP users can simply use Fast User Switching to bounce into an Adminstrator account (I use Win2k3 on my desktop which, sadly, lacks this feature). Windows 2000 users will need to start up a CMD prompt or Explorer window running as Administrator and go from there, or in rare cases actually login to an Administrator account.
The biggest hurdle is teaching "ignorant" end users the distinction between an "Administrator" and a "Regular User". Once you've achieved that, teaching them how (and when) to do stuff in "Administrator mode" is relatively easy.
Unfortunately, running as an Admin is only effective today because the vast bulk of malware is as poorly written as much consumer software and craps itself when faced with a non-admin account. As non-Admin accounts become more common - and malware writers become more competent - this will change and most of the protection offered by a non-admin account offers will evaporate.
It's not especially difficult to run as a non-Admin, assuming the user actually understands what that means, but IMHO - after having put some thought into this recently - a good set of well maintained antivirus and antispyware software will provide a level of protection as good, if not better, and do it less invasively and more sustainably. The usefulness of unprivileged accounts - particularly on the typical single-user desktop - is overstressed by people who have histories of heavily multiuser environments (or like to pretend they do) and think that the principles there translate directly into the "appliance computing" the typical PC is used for.
If the user in question will have a relatively static application load and someone to set it up for them initially, with the occasional spot of maintenance, then running as a regular user is trivial (my mum was using Windows XP in a regular user account for ~4 years until I bought her an iMac last year - I think I had to do some maintenance on the machine maybe 3 times, one of which was the SP2 install).
I hope the basis for your claim is a bit more sturdy than "if its purpose was to control who can and cannot view/listen/whatever to a creative work, it would have been called "controlright" or some other silly name."
The objective of copyright is to generate value in things that would otherwise have no value (apart from the cost of reproduction) - copies of information. Since value is essentially a measure of scarcity, the only way it can do this is by "creating" scarcity. It can only do this by restricting how copies of information can be made and distributed. Since this kind of restriction has no existence in nature, an artificial one had to be used. So someone came up with copyright laws.
Copyright is wholely and solely about the control of the reproduction of information. While it gets drssed up in flowery idealism like "improving culture" and "benefiting society", the meat and potatoes of copyright has always been about economic manipulation. All modern society - with its insatiable corporate greed and dirt-cheap, practically instantaneous methods of reproduction, distribution and communication has done, is make this more obvious.
I agree that effectively infinite copyright terms and increasingly harsh punishments for non-profit copyright violations are ridiculous, but they are not at all in conflict with the fundamental principals and concept of copyright. The main difference is copyrights are typically now held by amoral corporations driven by greed, rather than individuals just trying to make a living doing something they love.
Why should he be granted an exemption from the inherent attributes of the thing he has created ? You can't "unhear" music or "unsee" films.
Yeah, CDs are cheaper, notice the decline in the purchase of recorded music too.
Maybe if you believe music industry propoganda. Last I heard, the dramatic growth in online music distribution is vastly outstripping the decline in CD/LP/tape sales. Which is great news for the record companies, because they sell a song online for about the same price as they do on a CD, but their costs for the former are just about zero. It's not so good news for the artists, however, because they just receive the same paltry cut they always did.
If people are too cheap to support the artist via CD sales what do you think is going to happen when the most recent tour is available within hours of the performance for free?
You seem to be missing the point of a live performance, and why people go to them. Not to mention how pitiful an amount out of the cost of a CD (or online song) actually goes into "supporting the artist".
Personally, I'd be more than happy to double the amount of "support" I give the artist, if it meant paying just that amount, plus duplicate costs, for a CD. It would also mean I'd be able to afford around ten times as many CDs, as well.
But if someone hears the recording of a current tour?
I have never heard or seen two identical live performances.
I think some people would stop being as generious with their concert funds.
I see no reason to think that. Neither in rational argument, nor historical precedent.
Again, your whole theory hinges on the assumption that if people can obtain likenesses of the music being performed at a live show for less than the cost of said show, they won't go to it. The simple fact that live music hasn't gotten any less popular, despite the fact that CD, LPs, etc have pretty much always had a lower cost than live shows, basically blows that assumption out of the water.
Not to even go back to my original thought that someone shouldn't have to tour to make money.
Why ? Why shouldn't people have to work to earn a living ? Why should "artists" be given the extraordinary privilege of receiving recurring payment - effectively forever - for one piece of work ?
While it's certainly understandable why people benefitting from this grossly one-sided system wouldn't want it to stop, that doesn't make that system even a little bit fair.
When someone produces a work of art they should have rights over that work, if they decide it's ok for you to copy and redistribute that's fine, don't act like it's your God given right to do that tho.
"God" - if you choose to believe in such an entity - has already demonstrated everyone has a "right" to do that by setting the base attributes of information. If "God" had intended for the "creators" of information to be able to control its every reproduction, then "He" wouldn't have made it so trivial to reproduce in the first place, nor made reproduction an inherent requirement of learning. "He" probably also would have had copyright law written into the Ten Commandments, as well, rather than invented as a legal construct a mere few hundred years ago.
People got to eat, this includes musicians.
What makes you think good musicians won't be able to earn enough to eat ? Why should bad musicians have their food bills subsidised by a broken system in the name of corporate greed ? Which other people are you thinking of who get their food paid for multiple times from a single piece of work ?
That's not OS security, it's physics.
Not to mention, it still doesn't stop the user deliberately executing malicious code. It just stops that malicious code from infecting the system.
Your logic dicates that every platform is infected.
Pretty much.
I'm not talking about Flash or Word docs. Those have their problems too, but they're generally bugs that can be fixed. I'm mostly talking about .exe's. Are you saying that the vast majority of users require the ability to send untrustworthy .exe's back and forth, and execute them automatically?
I don't believe any current software automatically executes .exe files _by design_. But, certainly, users value the ability to quickly and easily send each other this weeks silly little game, or self-installing set of screensavers, mouse pointers, smiley faces, "internet toolbards", etc, etc and run them straight away.
There are a lot of plausible steps in between draconian central signing authorities (which, no, would not be workable) and the just about completely unfettered, promiscuous, ridiculously insecure situation we have today.
Most of which are little more than dialog boxes saying "This is a bad idea, are you sure ?". Having to chmod +x a file is no different to such a dialog box. Having to copy a file into a location that isnt mounted noexec is no different to such a dialog box. Having to specifically grant permissions to something the user runs is no different to such a dialog box.
To be blunt, if you want to retain the ability for a computer to run arbitrary code, then closing the "user is able to run arbitrary malciious code" hole is impossible. As long as the decision whether or not to run malicious code is left in the hands of people unable to make an appropriate choice, they will continue to run malicious code.