If you doubt the critics of CI Host here simply because they may be anonymous, you might want to try a google search of CI Host. It's likely to turn up more critics than advocates.
It is, of course, always possible that this was just an idea that didn't pan out. Google is not immune to mistakes, and this wouldnt be the first product that they've withdrawn. They're a good company, and they have a lot of good products, but sometimes things just don't workout the way they are planned.
This isn't exactly correct though, because you're mixing two issues. Copyright defends certain rights of the copyright holder, namely those exclusive rights to make copies, prepare derivative works, distribute copies of the original or the derivative works, exclusive rights to perform the work (for various kinds of art) and to display the work (again, for art). In the license that is provided, the owner of the copyright provides you, the end user, with certain rights that they otherwise reserved (the right to copy the software into memory, onto your hard drive, etc.). Violating this license is in one sense a contract breach, but in another its also violation of copyright law which is very much a government involved legal manor just as violating the right of someone else almost always is. For example, if you loan someone a piece of equipment that they then refuse to give back, they may be both violating a contract and performing larceny, but just because they breached a contract doesn't mean they are not guilty of a real crime as well.
Let's none of us deny that software piracy is illegal and to some degree... wrong (in that you're doing something to something someone created that they don't want done to it, of course, that doesn't say anything about just _how_ wrong it is... i would bet, not that wrong ultimately). However, poor sales of the software in China alone does not say anything about causation, simply correlation.
My point is this. Sure, piracy exists, but we cant blame poor software sales on piracy _alone_. After all, if we were to do that, people might start doing crazy things like complaining that people wont buy crappy music because of internet downloads, when the reality is that some music just sucks. If we had awesome Vista sales in the US, and poor sales in China, and you considered Chinese market factors on the process and built an actual model to analyze it, then maybe, maybe you could say something conclusive about piracy. You however, are just making a bigoted guess, at best.
their way of placing ads on pages hardly seems non-trivial though. furthermore, it would be difficult to come up with another method that was still competitive (because of the massive disutility associated with floating ad windows like the kind that netzero used originally [back when they were free]).
Right, but this is where it gets interesting. Copyright protects how content is distributed, but not necessarily how it is used (unless the use is distribution like, public display for example). DRM on the other hand, coupled with the DMCA, allows the record industry to package copyrighted content with licensed software, which is illegal to circumvent. What they have now discovered (or, perhaps always knew) is that by using this regime they can actually license the true use of the content, as opposed to just how it is reproduced, meaning that you dont even really own a "copy" of the song anymore, but instead, in effect, a limited licensed right to use it. It's sneaky, and it's evil, and most importantly of all, it has paved the way for a system in which we never actually buy music, and we never actually own any rights to the music, but are, in fact, just given permission to play it. Under that regime, "fair use" is meaningless.
You could take a picture of the CD. Good luck playing that though... maybe if you cut it out and blew it up a few times with the copier to cd size..... Or would that be violating the DMCA?
The song in the buffer cant be played independently of the CD. The CD has to be in the player for the buffer to be used to play the music that is on it. Now, I know, you could design a buffer that did not work this way, but let's assume that they're designed this way on purpose. if they are designed intentionally not to work if a CD is not in the player, then by designing or modifying your CD player such that you could play the song without the CD by way of the buffer, then you have violated the DMCA, and the RIAA is going to ram a lawsuit up your ass.
If you're right about "fair use" in and of itself not extended to this medium, then I hate to break it to you, but there is no "fair" right to reproduce someone elses property. They could even take this in a differnt direction and suggest that when you buy the CD you're actually buying a limited license to play the CD, but not to do anything else to it (like rip, or copy). If this is true, and the RIAA is not selling a CD, but the right to play it (as they are perfectly in their rights to do) then we could be in trouble.
That isnt their goal at all, in fact, it's quite the opposite. They're trying to kill the CD market in favor of the online download business. Onine downloads do not give us the same rights that buying a CD does, in fact, we get less rights (seemingly only the limited right to play the song, and copy it to another medium a limited number of times).
By making CDs more expensive or difficult to acquire, or incompatible with portable music players, they can cause the market to shift itself to mediums that they can better control, even before the CD becomes completely obsolete.
If you ask me, the RIAA "enjoys" its copyrights a bit too much already. They're trying to transform the music industry from one in which you "buy a copy of a song" into one in which you "buy a limited licence to play the song" under which you have no fair use rights (since you dont actually own the copy, only the right to play it). This is bad for all of us, and I would suggest that companies like Apple really helped pull off the bait and switch. At this point, if people stopped using the online download services and started using CDs again instead (for the rights) the record companies would probably pull the CDs or encrypt them somehow so you still had to be bound by their overrarching licensing agreements.
Sorry guys, but I think the age of "my music" or "owning music" is dead, and currently in the process of being burried. This is just the latest shovel of dirt.
I wonder if microsoft's strategy here is really the best. They almost always find ways to package software like e-mail and other mobile computing applications into cell phones, where, mobile e-mail and cell phones can actually be better off separated (in terms of the wireless worker). Consider this, you own a business. You decide that everyone on your staff needs mobile e-mail. Do you A: get them a system that allows them to send and recieve e-mail, or B: get them all "cell phones" that they can also use to handle "business phone calls"? Also, think of it from the worker's perspective. You're not going to drop your current cell phone service because you wont take personal calls on the company's dime (at least, not all of them). So, what you're going to end up with is nothing more or less than two cell phones on you at all times either of which could ring to your dismay.
While i have no particular appreciation for RIM over microsoft, or vice versa, I just dont see the "cell phone route" as the one that will end up being the best strategy for everyone involved.
I diddnt like the way the writter wrote this paragraph
"Amelio had long been an avid amateur pilot, and he owned his own private jet that Apple used. Instead of allowing the struggling Apple to use the jet free of charge, Amelio created an independent company, Aero, to manage it and charge Apple for any fuel and maintenance the plane might need during company flights."
It makes it sound like he should have let the company use his jet for free, meaning that he would pick up the tab for fuel and maintenance, which, for a jet, has to be horrifically expensive. How is it unreasonable to have the company pay for the fuel and maintenance on something like a jet? It's not like he was charging a rent or anything...
Everything you say regarding various types of industrial and market organization in your first paragraph is correct and correctly stated. However, I do not agree with your point about government granted monopolies via patents and copyrights (that they are always bad). If you take a durable good which is perfectly reproducible (anything digital nowadays) without some rights for the content creator, there is little motivation to create the content to begin with. I'm sure this sounds like a very tired argument to you, but I'm sure that nobody out there spending months or years of their lives to write a book would be as motivated if they knew their work would be reproduced without compensation almost immediately after it is produced.
I'll get back to that point in just a minute, but I want to touch on Gator for a second. This is not a flaw in contract law, but instead a nasty trait of our lazy society. People don't read things that they agree too! Now, just because millions of people are ignorant enough to enter a binding contract with gator not to remove their software does not mean that binding contracts in general are bad, or even that binding contracts not to remove software are bad. What it means is that people don't pay enough attention, and no matter what kind of reforms you suggest, that will always be a problem.
As far as copyrights and patents being unfree parts of society, i cant, don't and wont dispute that. They are by definition not free (as in freedom) because producing the things they protect is not free (as in beer). As long as it costs people money, in either opportunity cost, or in actual physical resources, to produce forms of intellectual products, they will need to be protected somehow if they are to be sold. As far as shackling the market, without copyrights and patents, there would be no market. There is no market for free (as in freedom) goods, because they are by definition public goods (non-exclusive, and non-rival, in this case, perfect information).
If we lived in a situation where the (or any) government could actually afford to pay straight up for all these goods, then sure, we wouldnt need to be able to sell them. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there is no way to pay for these things using the government. Indeed, today's more advanced economies rely heavily on the production and sale of these goods for their very operation. If you struck down the mechanisms that make this possible, the government would get less revenue to "pay for them" not more.
As far as negotiating the terms, what do you expect? The fact that microsoft is the single seller of microsoft office means that they get to dictate the terms. This is a case of monopolistic competition, true, but if they couldn't sell it, they wouldn't make it. And don't be confused, if they were not able to control the terms of the sale, they probably wouldn't bother producing it. Obviously there is a welfare loss. Nobody would debate that there is a welfare loss in a monopolistic situation. But if you were to look to utility theory, it is obvious that the consumer is better off with office than with the money that they would have had instead, or they would not have purchased it.
Is that fair? ehhh, i dunno. That's a tough line to walk, especially considering that the actual affects of changing the terms under which office is sold are hard, if not impossible, to actually predict.
So, i guess what it comes down to with the contract monopoly argument is: do contracts hurt people when used in conjunction with a monopolistic good? Yes! Of course. Monopolies hurt consumer welfare. But the question becomes, does the benefit outweigh the cost? I say yes on the whole for society, you say no. I can point to the last 500 years of progress as evidence. You can point to idealism as justification. That's just where we differ.
As far as your implementing government funding smartly, i would say that i've already demonstrated that it is quite impossible for the government to
Yeah, but you cant gather evidence through illegal means for one. Two, Sony is trying to stop widespread piracy. It wouldn't make any sense to waste money going after a single person who already bought the product assuming they aren't trying to help others rip it off. Also, if you're familiar with the process of decompiling software to discover how it works and circumvent it, you will know that the concept of software that detects that it has been bypassed is strange at best. You would either A. write a program that duplicated the functionality of the De-DRMing part of the software (in which case the mysterious watchdog wouldn't even be included) or B. modify the software's code so that it would believe it should remove the DRM for you thinking that you are a valid user. It's not a guard dog, it's just a decoder. You will either trick it into thinking you've provided it with the correct code, or you will build your own.
If the government provided that much funding for artistic endeavors, we'd all be artists for the handouts. I dont deny the massive failures of a private system as well, but i think it's clear we need a mix of the two. Also, contract law is a cornerstone of the legal system. There are some rather formal and complex rules as to how they work, i'd suggest checking out the wikipedia articles on them, they're really quite interesting (contracts). If we lived in a society where people could not use contracts to sell other people various rights to property, many things would go away that we would want to keep. It's just to complex to try to write a law that does that, and I would argue, that in a "free society" it wouldnt even be right to try.
I dont know if i fully understand your bomb example, and would like you to clarify something. Are you suggesting that it should be okay for people to demand that you would remove the coat? (assuming they dont have any reasonable reason to know that you have a bomb) Because, i mean, in today's society they could totally check you for the bomb (if they had good reason) they just cant search you without a reason.... P.S. how did this topic get to searches?
Sorry for the confusion, but i meant precedents in terms of approvals of exceptions, not, like, court cases. I think were both on the same page now. P.S. I agree with what you said completely.
You are totally misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not arguing that people should not be allowed to share information. Indeed, i feel that sharing of information is the most important thing humans do. Instead, what i'm discussing is a completely differnt point: how able or allowed you as an individual are to do your own investigations on your own computer on your own time with your own software, which, i argue, is not at all restricted now because it's simply impossible to police. When you break a DRM system and then publish your method, that's differnt. But then again, if you look at the parent post, publishing information is completely differnt from exploring your own curiosity on your own system.
I don't disagree with your last post, I just think you think i'm saying something other than what i am actually saying.
What is a "corporate dictatorship" exactly? Corporations in and of themselves have little to nothing to do with the debate about intellectual property. Research firms are the ones who can get hurt by striking down certain patent concepts. Individual artists (superstars especially) can be hurt by striking down copyrights. I don't think we need to tend towards a "free information society" because I accept that such a thing is, for the time being, quite impossible. Instead, i would advocate reverting to the original copyright rules (which were much less restrictive, and actually fair to everybody). I don't think that the concept of IP in and of itself is evil. People should get something for their work, as well as credit, and perhaps the concept of "owning" something they create. But at the same time, they should be forced to give it up to the betterment of society after a reasonably short period of time (maybe a decade for copyrights). I am also afraid that if we struck down copyrights completely, we would not do away with the concept. Instead people would form organizations and contracts which would likely function like even more restrictive versions of copyrights (private libraries whose membership requires you to sign an agreement that you will not reproduce any of the material you access). It would be like a big "book club." It would probably happen because most writers would invoke the "starving artist" defense (even professors, and scholars) and information would go from protected but accessible to guarded and inaccessible.
Sure, but that wouldn't make any sense. Defending their actions would cost more money than they hoped to recover by thwarting piracy. By retracting the software, they enable themselves to do it again (but more carefully) without having to pay for the right to do so (expensive court case).
Well, be careful not to overstate the problem. While the language of the DMCA makes it clear that it is illegal to even do this type of investigation with your own computer, it's not reasonable to assume that they would prosecute you unless you published the information you obtained (indeed, how would they know?). This is not an issue of individual rights, but instead it is an issue of the overall welfare of a community and how it is hurt by stifling curiosity, communication, and collaboration in a very critical area (security).
I'm not so sure. Let's face it, we wont defeat the DMCA by continuing to say it's "illegitimate." I think what we need to do is work through its channels to set precedents, so we can build a case for how studying various mechanisms actually helps society more than it hurts it. I don't see any good new reasons to oppose the DMCA coming up if we continue to stonewall it. But if we use its own language to get a foot in the door, we stand a good chance of weakening its strangle hold on certain aspects of security research. (not to mention fair use)
Slashdot Mirror
If you doubt the critics of CI Host here simply because they may be anonymous, you might want to try a google search of CI Host. It's likely to turn up more critics than advocates.
It is, of course, always possible that this was just an idea that didn't pan out. Google is not immune to mistakes, and this wouldnt be the first product that they've withdrawn. They're a good company, and they have a lot of good products, but sometimes things just don't workout the way they are planned.
This isn't exactly correct though, because you're mixing two issues. Copyright defends certain rights of the copyright holder, namely those exclusive rights to make copies, prepare derivative works, distribute copies of the original or the derivative works, exclusive rights to perform the work (for various kinds of art) and to display the work (again, for art). In the license that is provided, the owner of the copyright provides you, the end user, with certain rights that they otherwise reserved (the right to copy the software into memory, onto your hard drive, etc.). Violating this license is in one sense a contract breach, but in another its also violation of copyright law which is very much a government involved legal manor just as violating the right of someone else almost always is. For example, if you loan someone a piece of equipment that they then refuse to give back, they may be both violating a contract and performing larceny, but just because they breached a contract doesn't mean they are not guilty of a real crime as well.
Let's none of us deny that software piracy is illegal and to some degree... wrong (in that you're doing something to something someone created that they don't want done to it, of course, that doesn't say anything about just _how_ wrong it is... i would bet, not that wrong ultimately). However, poor sales of the software in China alone does not say anything about causation, simply correlation.
My point is this. Sure, piracy exists, but we cant blame poor software sales on piracy _alone_. After all, if we were to do that, people might start doing crazy things like complaining that people wont buy crappy music because of internet downloads, when the reality is that some music just sucks. If we had awesome Vista sales in the US, and poor sales in China, and you considered Chinese market factors on the process and built an actual model to analyze it, then maybe, maybe you could say something conclusive about piracy. You however, are just making a bigoted guess, at best.
So, AMD's stock, up or down in the short-term? They've been taking a bit of a beating over the past 3 months.
their way of placing ads on pages hardly seems non-trivial though. furthermore, it would be difficult to come up with another method that was still competitive (because of the massive disutility associated with floating ad windows like the kind that netzero used originally [back when they were free]).
Right, but this is where it gets interesting. Copyright protects how content is distributed, but not necessarily how it is used (unless the use is distribution like, public display for example). DRM on the other hand, coupled with the DMCA, allows the record industry to package copyrighted content with licensed software, which is illegal to circumvent. What they have now discovered (or, perhaps always knew) is that by using this regime they can actually license the true use of the content, as opposed to just how it is reproduced, meaning that you dont even really own a "copy" of the song anymore, but instead, in effect, a limited licensed right to use it.
It's sneaky, and it's evil, and most importantly of all, it has paved the way for a system in which we never actually buy music, and we never actually own any rights to the music, but are, in fact, just given permission to play it. Under that regime, "fair use" is meaningless.
You could take a picture of the CD. Good luck playing that though... maybe if you cut it out and blew it up a few times with the copier to cd size..... Or would that be violating the DMCA?
The song in the buffer cant be played independently of the CD. The CD has to be in the player for the buffer to be used to play the music that is on it. Now, I know, you could design a buffer that did not work this way, but let's assume that they're designed this way on purpose. if they are designed intentionally not to work if a CD is not in the player, then by designing or modifying your CD player such that you could play the song without the CD by way of the buffer, then you have violated the DMCA, and the RIAA is going to ram a lawsuit up your ass.
If you're right about "fair use" in and of itself not extended to this medium, then I hate to break it to you, but there is no "fair" right to reproduce someone elses property. They could even take this in a differnt direction and suggest that when you buy the CD you're actually buying a limited license to play the CD, but not to do anything else to it (like rip, or copy). If this is true, and the RIAA is not selling a CD, but the right to play it (as they are perfectly in their rights to do) then we could be in trouble.
Clearly you don't believe in sophistry :).
That isnt their goal at all, in fact, it's quite the opposite. They're trying to kill the CD market in favor of the online download business. Onine downloads do not give us the same rights that buying a CD does, in fact, we get less rights (seemingly only the limited right to play the song, and copy it to another medium a limited number of times). By making CDs more expensive or difficult to acquire, or incompatible with portable music players, they can cause the market to shift itself to mediums that they can better control, even before the CD becomes completely obsolete.
If you ask me, the RIAA "enjoys" its copyrights a bit too much already. They're trying to transform the music industry from one in which you "buy a copy of a song" into one in which you "buy a limited licence to play the song" under which you have no fair use rights (since you dont actually own the copy, only the right to play it). This is bad for all of us, and I would suggest that companies like Apple really helped pull off the bait and switch. At this point, if people stopped using the online download services and started using CDs again instead (for the rights) the record companies would probably pull the CDs or encrypt them somehow so you still had to be bound by their overrarching licensing agreements.
Sorry guys, but I think the age of "my music" or "owning music" is dead, and currently in the process of being burried. This is just the latest shovel of dirt.
I wonder if microsoft's strategy here is really the best. They almost always find ways to package software like e-mail and other mobile computing applications into cell phones, where, mobile e-mail and cell phones can actually be better off separated (in terms of the wireless worker). Consider this, you own a business. You decide that everyone on your staff needs mobile e-mail. Do you A: get them a system that allows them to send and recieve e-mail, or B: get them all "cell phones" that they can also use to handle "business phone calls"? Also, think of it from the worker's perspective. You're not going to drop your current cell phone service because you wont take personal calls on the company's dime (at least, not all of them). So, what you're going to end up with is nothing more or less than two cell phones on you at all times either of which could ring to your dismay. While i have no particular appreciation for RIM over microsoft, or vice versa, I just dont see the "cell phone route" as the one that will end up being the best strategy for everyone involved.
I diddnt like the way the writter wrote this paragraph
"Amelio had long been an avid amateur pilot, and he owned his own private jet that Apple used. Instead of allowing the struggling Apple to use the jet free of charge, Amelio created an independent company, Aero, to manage it and charge Apple for any fuel and maintenance the plane might need during company flights."
It makes it sound like he should have let the company use his jet for free, meaning that he would pick up the tab for fuel and maintenance, which, for a jet, has to be horrifically expensive. How is it unreasonable to have the company pay for the fuel and maintenance on something like a jet? It's not like he was charging a rent or anything...
Everything you say regarding various types of industrial and market organization in your first paragraph is correct and correctly stated. However, I do not agree with your point about government granted monopolies via patents and copyrights (that they are always bad). If you take a durable good which is perfectly reproducible (anything digital nowadays) without some rights for the content creator, there is little motivation to create the content to begin with. I'm sure this sounds like a very tired argument to you, but I'm sure that nobody out there spending months or years of their lives to write a book would be as motivated if they knew their work would be reproduced without compensation almost immediately after it is produced.
I'll get back to that point in just a minute, but I want to touch on Gator for a second. This is not a flaw in contract law, but instead a nasty trait of our lazy society. People don't read things that they agree too! Now, just because millions of people are ignorant enough to enter a binding contract with gator not to remove their software does not mean that binding contracts in general are bad, or even that binding contracts not to remove software are bad. What it means is that people don't pay enough attention, and no matter what kind of reforms you suggest, that will always be a problem.
As far as copyrights and patents being unfree parts of society, i cant, don't and wont dispute that. They are by definition not free (as in freedom) because producing the things they protect is not free (as in beer). As long as it costs people money, in either opportunity cost, or in actual physical resources, to produce forms of intellectual products, they will need to be protected somehow if they are to be sold. As far as shackling the market, without copyrights and patents, there would be no market. There is no market for free (as in freedom) goods, because they are by definition public goods (non-exclusive, and non-rival, in this case, perfect information).
If we lived in a situation where the (or any) government could actually afford to pay straight up for all these goods, then sure, we wouldnt need to be able to sell them. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there is no way to pay for these things using the government. Indeed, today's more advanced economies rely heavily on the production and sale of these goods for their very operation. If you struck down the mechanisms that make this possible, the government would get less revenue to "pay for them" not more.
As far as negotiating the terms, what do you expect? The fact that microsoft is the single seller of microsoft office means that they get to dictate the terms. This is a case of monopolistic competition, true, but if they couldn't sell it, they wouldn't make it. And don't be confused, if they were not able to control the terms of the sale, they probably wouldn't bother producing it. Obviously there is a welfare loss. Nobody would debate that there is a welfare loss in a monopolistic situation. But if you were to look to utility theory, it is obvious that the consumer is better off with office than with the money that they would have had instead, or they would not have purchased it.
Is that fair? ehhh, i dunno. That's a tough line to walk, especially considering that the actual affects of changing the terms under which office is sold are hard, if not impossible, to actually predict.
So, i guess what it comes down to with the contract monopoly argument is: do contracts hurt people when used in conjunction with a monopolistic good? Yes! Of course. Monopolies hurt consumer welfare. But the question becomes, does the benefit outweigh the cost? I say yes on the whole for society, you say no. I can point to the last 500 years of progress as evidence. You can point to idealism as justification. That's just where we differ.
As far as your implementing government funding smartly, i would say that i've already demonstrated that it is quite impossible for the government to
Yeah, but you cant gather evidence through illegal means for one. Two, Sony is trying to stop widespread piracy. It wouldn't make any sense to waste money going after a single person who already bought the product assuming they aren't trying to help others rip it off.
Also, if you're familiar with the process of decompiling software to discover how it works and circumvent it, you will know that the concept of software that detects that it has been bypassed is strange at best. You would either A. write a program that duplicated the functionality of the De-DRMing part of the software (in which case the mysterious watchdog wouldn't even be included) or B. modify the software's code so that it would believe it should remove the DRM for you thinking that you are a valid user. It's not a guard dog, it's just a decoder. You will either trick it into thinking you've provided it with the correct code, or you will build your own.
If the government provided that much funding for artistic endeavors, we'd all be artists for the handouts. I dont deny the massive failures of a private system as well, but i think it's clear we need a mix of the two.
Also, contract law is a cornerstone of the legal system. There are some rather formal and complex rules as to how they work, i'd suggest checking out the wikipedia articles on them, they're really quite interesting (contracts). If we lived in a society where people could not use contracts to sell other people various rights to property, many things would go away that we would want to keep. It's just to complex to try to write a law that does that, and I would argue, that in a "free society" it wouldnt even be right to try.
I dont know if i fully understand your bomb example, and would like you to clarify something. Are you suggesting that it should be okay for people to demand that you would remove the coat? (assuming they dont have any reasonable reason to know that you have a bomb) Because, i mean, in today's society they could totally check you for the bomb (if they had good reason) they just cant search you without a reason....
P.S. how did this topic get to searches?
Sorry for the confusion, but i meant precedents in terms of approvals of exceptions, not, like, court cases. I think were both on the same page now. P.S. I agree with what you said completely.
You are totally misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not arguing that people should not be allowed to share information. Indeed, i feel that sharing of information is the most important thing humans do. Instead, what i'm discussing is a completely differnt point: how able or allowed you as an individual are to do your own investigations on your own computer on your own time with your own software, which, i argue, is not at all restricted now because it's simply impossible to police. When you break a DRM system and then publish your method, that's differnt. But then again, if you look at the parent post, publishing information is completely differnt from exploring your own curiosity on your own system.
I don't disagree with your last post, I just think you think i'm saying something other than what i am actually saying.
What is a "corporate dictatorship" exactly? Corporations in and of themselves have little to nothing to do with the debate about intellectual property. Research firms are the ones who can get hurt by striking down certain patent concepts. Individual artists (superstars especially) can be hurt by striking down copyrights. I don't think we need to tend towards a "free information society" because I accept that such a thing is, for the time being, quite impossible. Instead, i would advocate reverting to the original copyright rules (which were much less restrictive, and actually fair to everybody). I don't think that the concept of IP in and of itself is evil. People should get something for their work, as well as credit, and perhaps the concept of "owning" something they create. But at the same time, they should be forced to give it up to the betterment of society after a reasonably short period of time (maybe a decade for copyrights). I am also afraid that if we struck down copyrights completely, we would not do away with the concept. Instead people would form organizations and contracts which would likely function like even more restrictive versions of copyrights (private libraries whose membership requires you to sign an agreement that you will not reproduce any of the material you access). It would be like a big "book club." It would probably happen because most writers would invoke the "starving artist" defense (even professors, and scholars) and information would go from protected but accessible to guarded and inaccessible.
Sure, but that wouldn't make any sense. Defending their actions would cost more money than they hoped to recover by thwarting piracy. By retracting the software, they enable themselves to do it again (but more carefully) without having to pay for the right to do so (expensive court case).
Well, be careful not to overstate the problem. While the language of the DMCA makes it clear that it is illegal to even do this type of investigation with your own computer, it's not reasonable to assume that they would prosecute you unless you published the information you obtained (indeed, how would they know?). This is not an issue of individual rights, but instead it is an issue of the overall welfare of a community and how it is hurt by stifling curiosity, communication, and collaboration in a very critical area (security).
I'm not so sure. Let's face it, we wont defeat the DMCA by continuing to say it's "illegitimate." I think what we need to do is work through its channels to set precedents, so we can build a case for how studying various mechanisms actually helps society more than it hurts it. I don't see any good new reasons to oppose the DMCA coming up if we continue to stonewall it. But if we use its own language to get a foot in the door, we stand a good chance of weakening its strangle hold on certain aspects of security research. (not to mention fair use)