If that's true, then you should have no problem finding entertainment that artists are willingly giving away. No need to pirate.
I guess reading comprehension is not your strong point. I did not say that there was no scarcity of creativity, I said that there is no scarcity of the products of that creativity. That means that new ways of monetizing creativity must be developed.
That's still not a justification for you being an asshole.
Yeah, calling people "assholes" is going to solve the problem. I know this is rough for you, but the "assholes" of the world are going to make use of new technology and their behavior will be dictated by economics, whether or not you like it. Assholes refused to wave red flags in front of their cars, assholes sent email instead of paying for postage, and assholes used digital cameras instead of film, and yet you are not complaining about those lost jobs or ruined industries, are you?
Really though, I hope that nobody sings "Happy Birthday to You" at your next birthday party. That is a copyrighted song, after all, and I would not want you to think of your friends as assholes.
There is no real way for an outsider to estimate the cost of producing a movie. Movie studios vastly overstate the costs of movie production to avoid paying people whose contracts stipulate a percentage of profits; this is a practice that is called Hollywood Accounting and it once received the attention of a congressional investigation.
Large amounts of money is spent on special effects that add little to the development of the plot or characters in a movie. While this makes movies look cool, it is not clear that it is necessary for the movies to be a box office success, and it often detracts from the plot (many movies hardly have a plot to speak of, and rely solely on special effects for entertainment value). Further, these special effects should come down in price as computer time becomes cheaper and software is improved.
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
Economics defeats moral arguments every single time. People pay money to see their favorite bands play a live concert, because live concerts are an experience that cannot be burned to a disc or downloaded from a website. People pay money to see movies in a movie theater because you cannot download the experience of being in a movie theater. Concerts and movie theaters make money because the experience you are buying is scarce.
Copies of music and movies are not scarce resources anymore. We no longer require specialized industrial equipment to make those copies, and it costs almost nothing to make a copy. With an effectively unlimited supply, we should expect copies of music and movies to cost nothing; the industry needs to find some new scare-but-demanded way to enjoy entertainment, or focus more on the ways they have left.
Except that we have computers and the Internet now, and there is no scarcity of entertainment or of the equipment needed to copy entertainment. The economics of selling copies of entertainment are going to win eventually; people are not going to stop downloading things. This process can be painful, with people splitting hairs over copyright infringement and trying to criminalize common behavior, or it can be peaceful as new ways of monetizing our entertainment come into existence.
Economics will trump moral arguments every single time -- it is not a question of "if" but of "when, and what will happen during that process?" The systems we set up to police copyright in the computer age will have long-lasting and highly negative consequences. Those systems will almost certainly outlive copyright itself, and will be put to other uses when copyright is dead.
Computers and computer networks present as many new opportunities for monetizing entertainment as they have rendered obsolete, and then some. We should be exploring those new opportunities, and working on legal frameworks to promote them.
Authors could try to model that has been working for Pioneer One. Or they could publish books chapter by chapter, and not publish the next chapter of a book until enough money has been raised.
There, two ideas from me that allow authors to publish books at no cost using the Internet while still being compensated for the time they spend on their books. Maybe it is not perfect, but at least I did not throw my hands in the air, demand that everyone be labeled a criminal, and buy off a bunch of politicians to further my agenda.
And you've essentially said that you deserve the hard work of all these people for free,
Yeah, what a terrible thing to say. Whenever I see some interesting artwork in a store window, I'll be sure to give the store some money just for having looked at the art -- how could I think of enjoying some art without paying?
We live in a new world with realities; get over it.
Oh no, there is new technology and old ways of monetizing creative work are failing! How dare people use their computers without paying authors?! Let's write a bunch of laws that criminalize common and widely accepted activity, so that an old business model can remain profitable in the face of a changed world!
The copyright system was established at a time when most people could not make large numbers of copies of creative works using the equipment in their homes; only specialized industrial equipment could do that. Now the world is different, and the law needs to be restructured to reflect the new realities of the world.
So where are the "anti-SOPA" opinions in the New York Times? Where are the opinions of people like Cory Doctorow? Where are the calls for rethinking the copyright system, the arguments against artificial scarcity, or the opinions of people who question the very premise of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA?
Maybe I just do not read the New York Times enough, but I cannot remember seeing such opinions being published.
There are plenty of laws on the books to help companies pursue copyright, patent, and trademark violations. SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are about creating this:
We do not need more legislation, we need innovative business models that monetize entertainment in new ways. As long as there is an Internet and people can buy general purpose (read: not restricted by DRM) computers that connect to the Internet, there will be downloading. Future business models for the entertainment industry will have to use downloading in some profitable way (this is not terribly far fetched -- musicians have been known to use filesharing systems as a form of free advertising).
Yes, calling a bill that requires ISPs and search engines to block access to certain websites a "censorship" bill is obviously bad -- it gets people angry! We should just sugar coat it and hope that nobody notices that the bill pushes for censorship.
Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's to appease social conservatives who think of the children a little too often
Can we please get rid of patents on cryptography? There are a lot of cryptosystems out there whose deployment is being hampered by patents on the underlying mathematics, and which could go a long way toward improving the state of computer security. This would not be a bad place to start repealing software patents:
Convenience. Users care more about convenience than security, so if a browser actually takes action on OCSP or CRL issues, the user will just switch to a competing browser that does not.
No, that would imply that she gave them random bits. They could, given sufficient computer time, brute force her passphrase and decrypt the document. Those bits are not meaningless; they do actually encode the document, the prosecution just wants her to give them a shortcut to decoding it.
Now, if she were using a one time pad, perhaps what you said would make sense. Except that then she could give them anything and claim it was a key, and there would be no way to show otherwise.
The judge isn't asking for the defendant to incriminate themselves
No, the judge is only asking the defendant to decipher a document that will be used as evidence against the defendant. Totally different! Plus, computers are involved, so the constitution is not relevant anyway!
Of course it does. "On the computer" means we can apply a variety of bad metaphors and thus skirt around various constitutional protections by pretending the situation is something it is not.
It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court.
That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
Perhaps it is just my limited legal knowledge, but I am not seeing how a defendant being compelled to explain the information in a document, which is then submitted as evidence against the defendant, is not a violation of the fifth amendment. If a drug dealer was in court, could the prosecution demand that the drug dealer explain the meaning of slang terms that refer to drugs, and then use that explanation while presenting a wiretap transcript?
By asking for a decryption key, the prosecution is asking for information that will be used, in combination with the ciphertext, as evidence against the defendant. Perhaps I have too much faith in the fifth amendment, but I am not seeing how demanding that a defendant explain the meaning of a document -- whether by definition words or by providing a decryption key -- is not a fifth amendment violation.
No it does not. This is a situation where metaphors must absolutely be avoided to protect our rights. Encrypting a document is not the same thing as putting a document in a safe; encrypting a document is encoding it so that the secret key is required for decoding. By demanding the secret key from the defendant, the prosecution is demanding that the defendant tell them how the document should be interpreted. Indeed, one only needs to examine one of the most basic security definitions -- ciphertext indistinguishability -- to see why this is the case (the prosecution cannot show that the ciphertext is an encoding of an incriminating document and not an exonerating document if the cipher meets the indistinguishability definition).
What we are seeing is new technology being used as a justification for undoing our civil rights.
This is not a matter of "producing" the documents -- the prosecution has them, in the form of an encrypted hard drive. This is a matter of helping the prosecution decypher the documents.
To put it another way, suppose there were only two possible documents on the hard drive, one incriminating, the other exonerating. Given only ciphertext for one of those documents, the prosecution cannot say which document was encrypted. Given ciphertext plus a passphrase, the prosecution can make a case that it was the incriminating document (assuming it was). Demanding the passphrase from the defendant is like demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
Oh wait, it is involves super-duper-secret-spy-stuff (cryptography) and magical computers, so we are supposed to dispense with logic and rely only on bad metaphors that help the prosecution's case. That poor, poor prosecutor, whose case is weak without violating the fifth amendment.
Oh yeah? I have a thumb drive that I rarely decrypt (it has a list of passwords for various websites), and after a few weeks I start having trouble remembering the passphrase. It has been a few months since this woman entered the passphrase into her laptop; I can understand forgetting a secure passphrase by now.
It is not terribly hard to find this information, if you are curious. As bad as things may have gotten in the US, we have not quite stooped to the level of China when it comes to covering up aggressive government action.
I am not going to claim that malicious users can be prevented from doing any damage. All I am saying is that a malicious user's ability to do damage can be restricted in a well designed system. The entire point of MLS systems is to ensure that users cannot leak or alter sensitive information, beyond what is necessary for their job. "Inside jobs" are a problem that has been extensively worked on, and resilience to such attacks is not completely impossible. There are cryptographic approaches to dealing with potentially malicious parties within a given system, which can ensure that security is maintained even if some of the participants are corrupted.
We really do not have to throw our hands in the air and declare spear-phishing to be some kind of ultimate attack that cannot be defended against.
I copy your music. Now you don't have the $20 I would have paid you if I didn't steal your music.
I go to my friend's house to listen to the music. Now you do not have the money I would have paid had I bought it.
I am fired from my job. Now you will not get any money from me.
I buy a burrito instead of a CD. Now you do not get my money.
I decide to keep my money and save it for retirement; your music is not worth listening to anyway. Now you do not get my money.
Theft all around, right? No, not right, because that is how life works. Selling recordings of music is a risk business; there is no scarcity, so the supply curve should put the price somewhere around $0. While copyright was once a way to encourage the creation of a distribution infrastructure, arguments like yours are now being pushed as a justification for using copyright to create artificial scarcity, so that an old business model can survive new technology. Industries desperately trying to ban or regulate technology so that they can maintain their revenue stream is something society has seen before:
Slashdot Mirror
If that's true, then you should have no problem finding entertainment that artists are willingly giving away. No need to pirate.
I guess reading comprehension is not your strong point. I did not say that there was no scarcity of creativity, I said that there is no scarcity of the products of that creativity. That means that new ways of monetizing creativity must be developed.
That's still not a justification for you being an asshole.
Yeah, calling people "assholes" is going to solve the problem. I know this is rough for you, but the "assholes" of the world are going to make use of new technology and their behavior will be dictated by economics, whether or not you like it. Assholes refused to wave red flags in front of their cars, assholes sent email instead of paying for postage, and assholes used digital cameras instead of film, and yet you are not complaining about those lost jobs or ruined industries, are you?
Really though, I hope that nobody sings "Happy Birthday to You" at your next birthday party. That is a copyrighted song, after all, and I would not want you to think of your friends as assholes.
Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.
Economics defeats moral arguments every single time. People pay money to see their favorite bands play a live concert, because live concerts are an experience that cannot be burned to a disc or downloaded from a website. People pay money to see movies in a movie theater because you cannot download the experience of being in a movie theater. Concerts and movie theaters make money because the experience you are buying is scarce.
Copies of music and movies are not scarce resources anymore. We no longer require specialized industrial equipment to make those copies, and it costs almost nothing to make a copy. With an effectively unlimited supply, we should expect copies of music and movies to cost nothing; the industry needs to find some new scare-but-demanded way to enjoy entertainment, or focus more on the ways they have left.
Except that we have computers and the Internet now, and there is no scarcity of entertainment or of the equipment needed to copy entertainment. The economics of selling copies of entertainment are going to win eventually; people are not going to stop downloading things. This process can be painful, with people splitting hairs over copyright infringement and trying to criminalize common behavior, or it can be peaceful as new ways of monetizing our entertainment come into existence.
Economics will trump moral arguments every single time -- it is not a question of "if" but of "when, and what will happen during that process?" The systems we set up to police copyright in the computer age will have long-lasting and highly negative consequences. Those systems will almost certainly outlive copyright itself, and will be put to other uses when copyright is dead.
Computers and computer networks present as many new opportunities for monetizing entertainment as they have rendered obsolete, and then some. We should be exploring those new opportunities, and working on legal frameworks to promote them.
Authors could try to model that has been working for Pioneer One. Or they could publish books chapter by chapter, and not publish the next chapter of a book until enough money has been raised.
There, two ideas from me that allow authors to publish books at no cost using the Internet while still being compensated for the time they spend on their books. Maybe it is not perfect, but at least I did not throw my hands in the air, demand that everyone be labeled a criminal, and buy off a bunch of politicians to further my agenda.
And you've essentially said that you deserve the hard work of all these people for free,
Yeah, what a terrible thing to say. Whenever I see some interesting artwork in a store window, I'll be sure to give the store some money just for having looked at the art -- how could I think of enjoying some art without paying?
We live in a new world with realities; get over it.
Oh no, there is new technology and old ways of monetizing creative work are failing! How dare people use their computers without paying authors?! Let's write a bunch of laws that criminalize common and widely accepted activity, so that an old business model can remain profitable in the face of a changed world!
The copyright system was established at a time when most people could not make large numbers of copies of creative works using the equipment in their homes; only specialized industrial equipment could do that. Now the world is different, and the law needs to be restructured to reflect the new realities of the world.
So where are the "anti-SOPA" opinions in the New York Times? Where are the opinions of people like Cory Doctorow? Where are the calls for rethinking the copyright system, the arguments against artificial scarcity, or the opinions of people who question the very premise of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA?
Maybe I just do not read the New York Times enough, but I cannot remember seeing such opinions being published.
There are valid reasons to fight against piracy
There are plenty of laws on the books to help companies pursue copyright, patent, and trademark violations. SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA are about creating this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity
By turning this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Into a fancy version of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television
Using tactics borrowed from this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_firewall_of_china
We do not need more legislation, we need innovative business models that monetize entertainment in new ways. As long as there is an Internet and people can buy general purpose (read: not restricted by DRM) computers that connect to the Internet, there will be downloading. Future business models for the entertainment industry will have to use downloading in some profitable way (this is not terribly far fetched -- musicians have been known to use filesharing systems as a form of free advertising).
Yes, calling a bill that requires ISPs and search engines to block access to certain websites a "censorship" bill is obviously bad -- it gets people angry! We should just sugar coat it and hope that nobody notices that the bill pushes for censorship.
Now now, I think the empty string program was highly readable: it did exactly what it said it did.
Do you work at a school? The idea of a school censoring the web is a lot more disturbing than a private business...
Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's to appease social conservatives who think of the children a little too often
FTFY
Can we please get rid of patents on cryptography? There are a lot of cryptosystems out there whose deployment is being hampered by patents on the underlying mathematics, and which could go a long way toward improving the state of computer security. This would not be a bad place to start repealing software patents:
http://www.voltage.com/technology/patents/index.htm
Here too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents
Convenience. Users care more about convenience than security, so if a browser actually takes action on OCSP or CRL issues, the user will just switch to a competing browser that does not.
They just have a meaningless arrangement of bits.
No, that would imply that she gave them random bits. They could, given sufficient computer time, brute force her passphrase and decrypt the document. Those bits are not meaningless; they do actually encode the document, the prosecution just wants her to give them a shortcut to decoding it.
Now, if she were using a one time pad, perhaps what you said would make sense. Except that then she could give them anything and claim it was a key, and there would be no way to show otherwise.
The judge isn't asking for the defendant to incriminate themselves
No, the judge is only asking the defendant to decipher a document that will be used as evidence against the defendant. Totally different! Plus, computers are involved, so the constitution is not relevant anyway!
Does the 'on the computer' part make it special?
Of course it does. "On the computer" means we can apply a variety of bad metaphors and thus skirt around various constitutional protections by pretending the situation is something it is not.
It's not the actual possession of a physical document that matters. It's whether the information it contains is shown to the court.
That is an explanation, but the chemist is not testifying against himself. There is no assertion that the chemist wrote the list, or purchased the named chemicals, or assembled the bomb.
Perhaps it is just my limited legal knowledge, but I am not seeing how a defendant being compelled to explain the information in a document, which is then submitted as evidence against the defendant, is not a violation of the fifth amendment. If a drug dealer was in court, could the prosecution demand that the drug dealer explain the meaning of slang terms that refer to drugs, and then use that explanation while presenting a wiretap transcript?
By asking for a decryption key, the prosecution is asking for information that will be used, in combination with the ciphertext, as evidence against the defendant. Perhaps I have too much faith in the fifth amendment, but I am not seeing how demanding that a defendant explain the meaning of a document -- whether by definition words or by providing a decryption key -- is not a fifth amendment violation.
Encryption creates perfect safes
No it does not. This is a situation where metaphors must absolutely be avoided to protect our rights. Encrypting a document is not the same thing as putting a document in a safe; encrypting a document is encoding it so that the secret key is required for decoding. By demanding the secret key from the defendant, the prosecution is demanding that the defendant tell them how the document should be interpreted. Indeed, one only needs to examine one of the most basic security definitions -- ciphertext indistinguishability -- to see why this is the case (the prosecution cannot show that the ciphertext is an encoding of an incriminating document and not an exonerating document if the cipher meets the indistinguishability definition).
What we are seeing is new technology being used as a justification for undoing our civil rights.
This is not a matter of "producing" the documents -- the prosecution has them, in the form of an encrypted hard drive. This is a matter of helping the prosecution decypher the documents.
To put it another way, suppose there were only two possible documents on the hard drive, one incriminating, the other exonerating. Given only ciphertext for one of those documents, the prosecution cannot say which document was encrypted. Given ciphertext plus a passphrase, the prosecution can make a case that it was the incriminating document (assuming it was). Demanding the passphrase from the defendant is like demanding the defendant explain difficult to understand parts of the document, which is unquestionably demanding that the defendant testify against themselves.
Oh wait, it is involves super-duper-secret-spy-stuff (cryptography) and magical computers, so we are supposed to dispense with logic and rely only on bad metaphors that help the prosecution's case. That poor, poor prosecutor, whose case is weak without violating the fifth amendment.
so her claims she "forgot" are not very plausible
Oh yeah? I have a thumb drive that I rarely decrypt (it has a list of passwords for various websites), and after a few weeks I start having trouble remembering the passphrase. It has been a few months since this woman entered the passphrase into her laptop; I can understand forgetting a secure passphrase by now.
Most of what I wrote is based on Operation Sundevil, which is covered pretty well in this book:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm
There is some other information scattered around:
http://www.textfiles.com/news/2600dcr2.txt
http://www.totse2.com/totse/en/zines/cud_a/cud664.html
It is not terribly hard to find this information, if you are curious. As bad as things may have gotten in the US, we have not quite stooped to the level of China when it comes to covering up aggressive government action.
I am not going to claim that malicious users can be prevented from doing any damage. All I am saying is that a malicious user's ability to do damage can be restricted in a well designed system. The entire point of MLS systems is to ensure that users cannot leak or alter sensitive information, beyond what is necessary for their job. "Inside jobs" are a problem that has been extensively worked on, and resilience to such attacks is not completely impossible. There are cryptographic approaches to dealing with potentially malicious parties within a given system, which can ensure that security is maintained even if some of the participants are corrupted.
We really do not have to throw our hands in the air and declare spear-phishing to be some kind of ultimate attack that cannot be defended against.
I copy your music. Now you don't have the $20 I would have paid you if I didn't steal your music.
Theft all around, right? No, not right, because that is how life works. Selling recordings of music is a risk business; there is no scarcity, so the supply curve should put the price somewhere around $0. While copyright was once a way to encourage the creation of a distribution infrastructure, arguments like yours are now being pushed as a justification for using copyright to create artificial scarcity, so that an old business model can survive new technology. Industries desperately trying to ban or regulate technology so that they can maintain their revenue stream is something society has seen before: