Welcome to Fractal Forums

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EDIT:  The following discussion has been split off from this topic:  http://www.fractalforums.com/images-showcase-(rate-my-fractal)/3d-mandelbrot-and-julia-sets-with-waves/ 

It was taking over a thread which was intended to discuss a new feature in FractalWorks.  The discussion is valid, but does not belong in that thread, so I gave it it's own!

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Maybe you don't recall our old conversation about how I "fixed" that problem because my mac is not often able to get online for more than a few minutes at a time!

And since at that time you gave me permission to explore other ways to deal with the situation, I discovered an even more effective "fix" and now all my old versions work, with no need to resort to the methods of my first fix   :clown:

I can go into details if you are interested, but don't want to mention anything publicly!

Meanwhile, I'll look into downloading the new build.  May I suggest putting a link to the page in your signature?  I have to go digging for a link now!

EDIT
@Rathinagiri - I doubt there is a windows build.  Sadly there isn't even a MINE type software similar to WINE  (WINE is a WINdows Emulator for Mac, so I guess MINE would be a Mac Emulator for windows.  But no such software exists to my knowledge)

Why don't you want to mention anything publicly? It's as if you think we shouldn't be allowed to run any version of software we please, and stand pat at a particular version if we'd prefer not to update it, or something. That seems very weird.

You didn't know that I *am* very weird? 

Well, at least you figured it out!   :gum:

I just don't want to mention these "fixes" publicly without Duncan's permission.  One is very simple and has no direct effect on the software, but the other is actually hacking the program in the simplest possible way, using only tools everyone has if they own a mac.

But it is Duncan's program, and I didn't even consider trying the second idea without asking him first!  I'll post both methods if he says it's OK.  But I wont violate his trust by posting them without his consent.

It is NOT "as if (I) think (you) shouldn't be allowed to run any version of software (you) please, and stand pat at a particular version if (you'd) prefer not to update it, or something" - Just the opposite!  That is how Duncan wants it, and it's his program to distribute as he sees fit.  *I* didn't want it that way, so I asked the program's creator for permission to try and get around it!

I couldn't get my mac online, so tried the first trick (which ANYONE should be able to figure out!) when it passed it's expiration date, and it worked.  It's the simplest trick in the world for getting around expiration dates, and does not involve touching the program itself in any way, so I felt free to do it without asking.  At that time I wrote Duncan and told him of this gap in his program's security.  I offered to investigate further and see if I could find other gaps, and he said to feel free.  This other method involves getting into the program on a very basic level  (no fancy compilers or decompilers were used), but because of that I was compelled to ask before even trying it!

But he never said I could post this information publicly.  And so I will not.  Out of respect.

You are a clever person and should have enough clues from this post to figure out the first trick from here.  But you seem like an honorable person too, and should understand that disclosing something publicly, which I was only given permission to investigate privately, would be a breach of trust.

That's why I wont post it publicly until and unless Duncan himself says it's OK  :siren:

I don't get this. The program's "security"? If I install a program on my computer, I want its "security" to be protecting it from other people on my behalf, not protecting it from me on someone else's behalf. I don't consider the latter to be legitimate at all. My hardware, my CPU cycles, my choice what the machine does with them. Program developers don't magically get some kind of sublet rights to my machine. That would be like letting a furniture maker or appliance maker have a key to my house and the ability to limit, post-sale, what I could do with the furniture or appliance. Not only is there a "why should I let someone exert any control over something after they've sold it to me?" question there, there's also a "why should I trust them?" one.

I can see this Duncan fellow not wanting to have to support multiple versions at once, but forcing people to upgrade and trying to actually physically restrain them from using an older version if they want to seems quite extreme. Duncan can always just tell people that only the latest version is supported, sorry, etc.

Instead, he's acting like Apple and its freaking app store, wanting to keep controlling everything even after he's supposedly given or sold it to you. Apple also seems to be doing so to try to maintain a seamless, safe, and cheaper to support user experience, with maybe a dash of more ulterior motives thrown in, and it chafes when Apple does it too -- both users and developers have had plenty of complaints about Apple's app store policies, bricking jailbroken phones, and things of that nature.

In my opinion, Duncan is making a mistake by adopting an Apple-like design philosophy that involves trying to control the product after it's left his hands.

It's his mistake to make, but a) I do think it is one and b) I don't see anything morally questionable about jailbreaking his app, any more than there is a moral issue with jailbreaking an iPhone, nor in aiding others in jailbreaking theirs.

Perhaps you do, and that is then your mistake to make (or at least in my opinion it's a mistake).

Anyway, carry on, but please do give this at least a little thought.

It's not interfering with your hardware or cpu cycles in any way.

It's a simple expiration date.

Like all trial versions of software, it has a time-out date.  My guess is that he may make it Commercial one day, and does not want working trial versions out there when that day comes.  But that is only a guess...


I don't like it either.

But as I said, it's his app to do with what he wants.


Agreed in this case.  It is free software, so placing an expiration date on it is silly.

But I do a lot of things others call silly, so I can respect his right to behave in a silly fashion without getting upset at him for it.

No question he is limiting the appeal of his software by behaving thus.


I see a contradiction here - on one hand you say it's his mistake to make, but on the other hand you see nothing wrong with hacking the software to violate his right to make such mistakes?  I never heard Hacking called Jailbreaking before, but hacking is hacking.  If you are going to do so, it's best to have the permission of the software owner/creator first.  If permission is given, I'll post what I did.  If not, I will not.  That's why I got permission before even attempting this!  There is a huge difference between acting with and without the knowledge of the software owner in this case.

Remember - you do NOT own such software.  It is Licensed to you.  And the Creator retains the ownership of the actual software.

This is true of ALL software.  Except open source, which this clearly is not.

Your statements sound like an endorsement of illegal hacking.

Please do not endorse illegal activity on this forum   :siren:

Dude, you're coming on awfully strong and sanctimonious. How about you tone things down a bit, and stop slinging mud. I thought we were all friends here.

I choose to make this app freely available. I would ultimately like to finish it to professional standards and actually make some money from it, but I haven't had the time to do that. In the meantime, I am happy to share my efforts with other fractal enthusiasts, free of charge.

While I am still developing the app, it is very useful to be able to retire old versions. I have made a number of changes that are not compatible with older versions. (For example, the app allows you to generate a custom URL that launches the app and recreates a plot. I've changed the URL format several times in ways that older versions would not understand. Newer versions understand old-format URLs, but old versions do not understand new-format URLs)

The app I provide is a time-limited free trial. That is the license I provide to the users of my software. If you don't like that, don't use the app. It's that simple.

Software is usually licensed, not purchased. When you buy most software, you don't actually buy the software at all. Instead, you buy a license to use the software. The copyright owner still retains ownership of that software, and you agree to an end user license agreement (EULA) as part of purchasing a license to run it. If you don't like those terms, you are free to NOT buy products that use those terms. If you purchase software (and therefore agree to the EULA) you are bound to follow it's terms, and breaking those terms is a breach of contract, subject to civil and possibly criminal action. Again, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Vote with your wallet.

I am a software developer by profession. I take intellectual property rights very seriously. It is how I earn my livelihood. "Jailbreaking" an app is a breach of contract. It's illegal and wrong. It is different than unlocking a device so that you can install software on it that you are legally entitled to own, as the US courts have recently decided

I happen to agree with your objections about Apple's restrictive distribution of apps for their mobile platforms. When I buy a computer, (and these mobile devices are very definitely computers) I expect to be able to create/buy, install, and run any software I want on that computer, from any legal source. I resent Apple making themselves the sole arbiter of what software I can run on my computer. There are many good things about Apple's hardware and software, but if they ever try to move this policy to their "real" computers (desktops and laptops) I will abandon Apple and not look back. I'll take my business elsewhere.

Not letting you do as you see fit with your hardware or cpu cycles is interfering.


He may have written it, but once a copy is on your machine, that copy is yours, not his. You seem to feel he still somehow has ownership of it after it's changed hands, and I find that very odd.


If we disagree, it is not here; it is with the notion that you don't have the right to override his silliness on your own machine.

If a furniture maker deliberately made wobbly chairs, that would be silly. If someone bought one of those chairs but didn't fix the wobble, and furthermore didn't tell anyone else how to fix the wobble, because of a belief that somehow they didn't have the right to fix the wobble because "they're his chairs and he has a right to be silly", I would consider that silly, too. I say he has a right to make his chairs wobbly and his customers have a right to make any one of these chairs un-wobbly after taking ownership of it. We have the right to modify our property in ways that don't harm others (make a fire hazard, etc.). That's what it means for something to be "our property". Our chairs, our computers, our (copies of) software, etc.


You make it sound like I was advocating breaking into Duncan's computer and changing the source code or something! I'm only talking about fixing your copy and helping other fix their copies. Like fixing those wobbly chairs you bought, not breaking into the factory and fiddling with the machines to cause them to build the chairs differently.


Modifying your own computer and the software running on your own computer is not "hacking" in the colloquial, pejorative sense of that term. It's very different from breaking into somebody else's computer and messing with their stuff.


?!

I don't need permission from the construction company to build an extension to my house. I don't need permission from the manufacturer to fix a wobbly chair. I don't need permission from GM to rotate the tires on my car. I don't need permission from Schwinn to repaint my bicycle. I don't need permission from HP to put another gigabyte of RAM in my computer. Why should I need permission from Duncan to alter my copy of some software he wrote?


Sure you do. It's your copy to do with as you please. What do you think it is, a rental or something? The only reason you can't modify something you rented, normally, is because if you modify it you modify it for everyone and not just you. Like, if you rent a video and scratch the dvd, the scratch will make it skip for everyone who rents that particular dvd after you. If you rent a snowblower and replace some parts, you've changed that snowblower for everyone who rents that particular snowblower after you. But your copy of some software is yours; if you change it you can't f&@! it up for anybody else the way you can if you fiddle with a borrowed dvd or a rented snowblower.


I endorsed doing as you please with your own computer and whatever you have on it, not breaking into someone else's computer and messing with their stuff on it without their permission.

I think the distinction is pretty clear here.

My machine -- my stuff. Someone else changing it around on me without asking -- bad. Me changing it around -- not bad. Someone else trying to stop me changing it around -- just as bad as someone else changing it around on me without asking.


Pardon me, but when people suggest I don't have the right to do as I please with my own computer hardware it bothers me a bit.


Who's slinging mud? I suggested that certain behaviors were a mistake, but didn't accuse anyone of anything worse than possibly having slightly poor judgment or engaging in short-term thinking. I certainly haven't accused anybody of acting in bad faith. Your use of the phrase "slinging mud" on the other hand edges close to being such behavior itself.


That may be convenient for you, from a support perspective, but it's at the expense of your users' freedom, including their right to skip a version with a known bug or problem and wait for the next one among other things.

It's very much Apple's sort of design philosophy and it rubs quite a lot of people, besides me, the wrong way. Users being nannied and told what to do instead of being allowed to do things that maybe the company/author/whatever thinks are bad ideas and learn from their own mistakes.


That's a legal theory used by the likes of Microsoft to try to impose restrictions above and beyond what copyright law actually allows. It is also, if you'll pardon my bluntness, a crock. If you get a shrinkwrapped box of Microsoft Office at the store, take it to checkout, pay, and leave with it, that's a purchase, not a "rental" or a "licensing". You own those copies, just as you own books or movies you buy at the book store or video store. Copyright law says you can't just make copies and sell them yourself and stuff like that -- however you can use your copy as you see fit and to resell it when you're done with it.

When you go to use it, it will generally pop up some box purporting to take away some of your property rights in your copy, but that's a far cry from actually signing a contract with Microsoft. Not only is there no meeting of the minds, you don't even get anything for "agreeing". According to Title 17 Section 117(a):


Translated from legalese into English, that means you don't need Microsoft's permission to install Office and run it (though both acts make copies) because these copies are created "as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program". Which means the thing you're supposedly getting (Microsoft's permission) in exchange for "signing" away your property rights in that copy of Office is worthless. Which makes the "contract" one-sided (as well as unsigned, unwitnessed, and so forth).

The second subclause lets you back up your computer/the install discs/whatever, so long as you don't keep those if you resell your used copy.

Long story short, there's nothing remotely resembling a real contract being negotiated and signed here, so it's not a breach of contract to break Microsoft's various "terms and conditions". It's your copy on your computer to do with as you please, just as you can scribble margin notes in a book you buy (no copyright violation here) or rip out pages, or use a dvd you bought as a coaster or to prop up a slightly short table leg to stop the thing from wobbling.


I very much doubt that, actually. When was the last time you got a royalty statement? Thought so. You earn a salary like most software developers.


It can't be, when there's no contract to breach.


No, it's not. It's no more illegal than buying and then defacing a book or a dvd. Your copy, yours to mess with as you see fit. Distributing copies of it yourself would be copyright infringement but that's a different matter. And both breach of contract and copyright infringement are normally civil, not criminal, matters anyway.


It's no more morally wrong than ripping a page out of a book you bought. It may be contrary to the author's wishes, and he may be unhappy to hear of people treating his beloved novel that way, but it is not wrong.


It's no different. My stuff to do with as I please. My machine. My book. My disc. My chair. My table. My car. My bike. My copy of a piece of software. In some cases it would infringe an intellectual property right if I were to make copies for other people, but those laws do not extend to limiting what I can do with my own copies in private, and for a very good reason: if they did they would undermine, rather than work together with, normal property rights. In fact they contain explicit exemptions, like the aforementioned Title 17 Section 117(a), to reaffirm what should be common sense anyway, which is that your own copies are yours to do with as you see fit within your own private domain.


And yet you act the same way? That's troubling. You don't like it when the hardware vendor restricts you, but you're all too happy to do the same kind of thing to the people on the next rung down -- the users of the software you write. Can you not see the symmetry here? In fact there's four levels here; above Apple are the cellular carriers and they often try to bully handset manufacturers into limiting the capabilities of the phones, to try to force the users to use expensive data services instead of, say, USB or bluetooth connections to get their photos off their phone. Apple has the clout to make handsets that allow easy data portability, but they try to impose their own restrictions on users and developers. And then developers like you chafe at Apple's restrictions but try to layer on another set of 'em for the end user. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.


When I buy software, I expect to be able to use it as I see fit, and modify it to better suit my use for it, in any way that does not infringe copyright. I resent software developers (particularly Microsoft) trying to make themselves the sole arbiter of what functionality I can use, when, how often, and under what circumstances in my copy of e.g. Office.

The law gives them the right to say I can't go around making and selling copies, and things like that, but that's it. Nowhere in it are they granted control over private use of a copy. They try to claim you need their permission to make a copy to install it, and then condition that permission on accepting a burdensome "contract" full of extra restrictions including restrictions on private use, but the fact is that the law explicitly permits making the private copies of software that are needed for its installation and use, AND making private backup copies, so I do not need Microsoft's permission to make these copies and do not therefore feel bound by their so-called "contract", legally or morally.


They're moving slowly in the opposite direction, if anything. I heard somewhere that Apple used to behave just as badly with Mac software and Mac developers as they now do with the iPhone app store, and gradually relented. History will hopefully repeat itself with the app store.

As for you, I don't see what harm it really does you if you stop trying to force restrictions on your users' use of the software you write.

• You can just tell them that older versions than the current one are not officially supported. Then ignore pleas for help from users with outdated versions, except to suggest they upgrade. Then you avoid the support headaches you fear if people are not all using the same version.
• As for if you later want to sell copies, if free copies of version 0.6 beta are a serious competitor to $19.99 copies of version 4.1 with three times as many features, then begging your pardon but version 4.1 f&@!ing blows and isn't worth the price tag. In other words, if 4.1 is genuinely a vast improvement over 0.6 beta then you needn't fear; and if it's not, then you're really charging people $19.99 not to brick their existing, good-enough-for-them copy rather than charging people $19.99 for a vastly improved version. The latter is asking payment for goods; the former is extortion, just as surely as if you went around telling people "Nice copy you have there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it" in your best gangster-imitation voice and costume.
  
• And with that in mind, which would you buy from, a chairmaker whose older, cheaper chairs have flooded the market who sells a more expensive, vastly better chair, or a chairmaker who occasionally charges all his old customers twenty bucks not to bust into their home and take an axe to the chair they'd already bought a while back, in order to then try to sell them the new, more expensive one? I can tell you one of these businesses focuses on providing value and is likely to be liked by customers; the other focuses on trying to squeeze money out of anyone it can is is likely to get a very nasty reputation, even if they claim some contractual fine-print makes their extortion-like tactics legal and even moral. Microsoft, without quite going to that extreme, has gotten a notoriously bad reputation for greed by behaving in similar ways, trying to corral and control their customers instead of focusing on providing value. You have a choice as to which kind you want to be, a company like Sun or Red Hat with a mostly good reputation for providing value or a company like Microsoft or Apple with a tarnished reputation for focusing more on corralling and controlling people in order to squeeze money out of them in preference to using a good value proposition to part them from their money.

No offense is intended with any of the above, by the way -- just advice offered in good faith, plus a rebuttal of the more dubious legal and moral arguments for why we shouldn't modify our own stuff.

If you can offer cogent and lucid counterarguments, by all means, go ahead, but anyone responding with namecalling or other uncivil behavior will not change my mind about anything (except, possibly, I'll revise my opinion of them downward). So no flames, please. I feel I have tried to avoid flaming, while stating the facts and making my arguments calling them as I see them (and maybe being a bit blunt at times); I ask that others try to avoid flaming also.

This topic has been split off from the topic it was derailing.

Any further discussion can continue here, please.

OK - how does your position differ from, say, downloading Adobe's Multi Thousand Dollar Suite of programs for a free 30 day trial - then, after 30 days pass, you do something to the software to make it run forever?

Is that not Stealing Thousands of Dollars?

In that example, you agreed to use the program suite for 30 days when installing it, then buying it if you wish to continue using it thereafter. But by your logic - as I see it - you are under no obligation to abide by that agreement because "nobody witnessed the Contract" and because it is "yours" now that it is on your computer.

What then stops you from decompiling it, and using knowledge gleaned from their source code to writ your own version of Photoshop and Friends?  Or even selling those programs after you write them?

There have to be limits on what you can do with such software.  Where do you see those limits as existing?  Where do you draw the line and call an action illegal?

Please correct me if I am wrong, but that is how your argument appears to me.

As far as I know, the legal situation in most of the western hemisphere actually allows you to do as you see fit. You are legally entitled to crack any copy protection, and to work around expiration dates and other artificial limitations.

But you have to do it yourself, even make some of the tools yourself, because what's prohibited is the distribution of copies (both cracked payware and tools specifically for cracking). Technically, your homebrew cracked version is already an illegal copy. But since you don't distribute it, no one will ever be able to prove the accusation, and consequently no one will ever legally judge you.

I am not a lawyer. My explanation may be a mess, but that is largely caused by the whole thing being a mess. Immaterial wares just don't behave like the tangible stuff that most of our laws were made for. Before the internet, data was always tied to a tangible medium; and methods and processes could not easily be detached from the artisans who applied them. These days, copying bits is so cheap as to be effectively free. And methods/processes can be encoded into programs, effectively turning them into data as well.

In the old days, the act of making a copy was involved and difficult enough to act as a physical barrier. These times are gone. But the law, and society in general, and even technology itself (think of all the privacy issues and security breaches that you keep hearing of every single week), have big trouble keeping up.

Is it just me or is any hack on privately owned software illegal to discuss openly on a public forum such as this?
I should remember a time when there were some great game makers out there in Japanese only, and even translating them is illegal.   Certainly what you do privately is up to you but that must stay private or you risk the chance off being sued.  It's like buying a Rembrandt and then painting over it.  Just because you own it does not give you the right to change it.

You own it ; but it will at times come with "terms of use"

Are you saying cracking tools themselves are illegal? John http://www.openwall.com/john/ springs to mind, but that's a password cracker so slightly different. This is supposed to go to show the tools may not be illegal - they can also be presented as security enhancing rather than cracking tools. A sysadmin would use this to detect which of the users on a system use weak passwords and advise them accordingly. Try also a google search for wireless+cracking+ubuntu.

When you talk about open-source projects, that is different.  They have different agreements and to work on open source is to change freely and share freely (mostly) and with acknowledgments all under the gnu license.  Though there are software programs to purchase that is based on open-source projects, such as SUSE-Linux, which follow their agreements.

Cracking and hacking is not illegal if it's allowable by license only.

If I understand the law on these matters, it's only illegal to discuss specific ways to hack specific software.

Not to have a general discussion as is taking place here.

Problems arise on sites that do things like post working serial numbers, or post patches, or even posting actual cracked software  (or even posting links to such things hosted elsewhere).  All of the above is illegal.

My request that a member refrain from endorsing illegal hacking was just that.  A request.

He's welcome to endorse it if that's how he feels, but it goes against the spirit of this forum.

We had a member recently post a request for a working serial number for Ultra Fractal 5.

That request was for illegal activity, and he was not requested to stop.  He was told to stop, and given a Ban Warning over it!

There is a world of difference between the two.

As for painting over a Rembrandt, Yes.  You'd have every right to do that if you paid for the original painting legally.  It would be Evil, but Legal.

I recall a furor in the Art World when somebody bought an expensive and famous painting, cut it up into little squares, and sold the squares individually!

What he did was Reprehensible, but Legal.

@Sockratease

Hmmm, yea the painting wasn't a good example, but my point should be about the copyright of an item.  Though now that I think about it,  it's too fuzzy and not really the same thing as this topic discusses.

But I agree with you on your statements.

It doesn't, really -- but then, copyright law doesn't forbid it either. Adobe is basically giving you a copy of their $1000-retail doohickey free and asking you to stop using it, but copyright law only says you can't make and distribute more copies, not that you can't use a copy you got legitimately or that the author gets to yank copies back just by saying so.


No, because it doesn't cost Adobe thousands of dollars, nor was Adobe even guaranteed that you'd otherwise have paid thousands of dollars. If you use the download for 30 days, then delete it and use the GIMP instead, Adobe is still not making that sale, and Adobe is still out whatever minuscule cost it incurred in the download; nothing is different from Adobe's perspective, which means it's hard for me to make a moral case that it's wrong, and the lack of any clause in Title 17 letting copyright holders unilaterally recall copyrighted works post-sale means it's hard for me to make a legal case for Adobe here either. Instead I'd argue that Adobe's business model has problems, though they seem to be successful enough that it seems it's working well enough for them for now. But it's predicated on setting a very inflated price on goods that don't actually cost all that much, and that's a sure-fire recipe for eventually having low price competition, whether from their own stuff that's been "pirated" or from alternatives like the GIMP.

A related question: should the law explicitly support that sort of business model?

I'd say no. Three reasons. One, such a law treads on the property rights of end users. Real property rights. It means giving every vendor in the marketplace some kind of continuing threads of ownership of their goods post-sale, rendering the whole concept of a sale meaningless and destroying the very concept of private property. No longer would we own our cars, our computers, or even the clothes on our backs. In other words, welcome to North Korea.

Second, companies like Adobe don't need it. If Adobe wants to provide a computing service without giving end users the means to do it on their own without further help from (and thus payments to) Adobe, they can provide it as a web service and charge money after the first thirty days. (That's how World of Warcraft makes money.) If they do that, then there's no ownership issue. Breaking into Adobe's servers is hacking and using fake logon credentials or whatever to access a pay service you didn't pay for would be fraud. And Adobe's business model would not be affected by people doing anything they damned well pleased, privately, on their own client computers.

And third, there's a supposition here that business models like that deserve some kind of special protection from competition. Why? I don't see the logic behind that. Adobe can rent a computing service over the network or get the government to pass a law outlawing disarming software timebombs on your own computer, and let's say they perfectly protect against anyone pirating or otherwise using Photoshop without paying them. And then the GIMP gains a few more features and a better user interface and an easy to use Windows installer and begins to eat Photoshop's market share at a ferocious rate, and Adobe's business model falls to pieces anyway. What are you going to do now, outlaw the GIMP? There are some that would try, claiming you can patent "editing a photo using layers" and similar concepts however implemented and using that to outlaw all competing software that does remotely the same thing. And there are experts all over the software world that will tell you that that would be a disaster and would kill innovation in the tech sector.


You did? Agreed with who? The last time I checked, you checked a box and clicked a button to make some annoying dialog go away during the installation. That doesn't seem to me to be the same as sitting across a negotiating table from an Adobe rep, with your lawyer at your right hand and his at his, and hashing out an agreement, then signing some documents and Xeroxing them and the lawyers on each side slipping their respective copies into their briefcases. Or anything close.

You seem to think you can agree to something and sign a contract with a dialog box in a piece of software running on your own computer. You own that computer. If you'll pardon the colorful metaphor, it's the contract-formation equivalent of masturbation.


Why, nothing, of course.


That, however, would be copyright infringement.


Why?


Morally? Where your actions would actually harm someone -- much as your right to free expression stops when your fist hits someone else's nose.

I don't, however, consider "not buying from Adobe" to be harming Adobe. Lots of people don't buy from Adobe. I also don't consider "doing something Adobe doesn't want" to be harming Adobe, in a wrongdoing sense. If I signed an agreement with Adobe representatives not to do it, and then did it, that'd be breach of contract; if I'd verbally promised people at Adobe one thing and then did another that would be non-illegal but dishonest, but clicking some button on some software running on my own computer does not, in my mind, create any kind of obligation to anyone else, whether legal or moral.

And to see why, just read this next sentence:

By reading this sentence and then at any future time clicking your Windows Start button, you agree to pay me one million dollars ($1,000,000) on or before June 17, 2011.


Where it actually breaks the law. In the specific case of copyright infringement, if you make copies available to others without permission. In the specific case of contract breach, if you make an agreement with a person or, via a human representative, with an organization, (including especially signing and submitting a written agreement), for an exchange of something from each side that the other values, and subsequently break your side of the bargain.

Note that altering downloaded software fits neither. No copies are being passed on and interacting with the GUI of some locally-running software is not submitting a signed agreement to any remote organization.


And you had it more or less right.


Your homebrew cracked version is not illegal as I understand it. The DMCA prohibits trafficking in tools for cracking copy protection. If someone sells me a disk that's rigged to be hard to copy and has copyrighted content on it, and I make a tool for copying that sort of disk and distribute the tool, that's trafficking. On the other hand, if the tool does not break copy protection it doesn't seem it should qualify. Say it's a tool that locates Harry Potter ebooks (copyrighted works) on a computer's hard drive and scribbles a margin note saying "Harry Potter is kid stuff! Read something more grown up!" onto each one, this is altering a copyrighted work but it's not breaking copy protection. If I distribute a tool that alters a piece of copyrighted software, such as to patch a bug or remove a limitation, likewise that tool is not breaking copy protection (given that the limitation in question wasn't a limitation on making copies of the software, of course, i.e. was copy protection).

And if I merely tell someone how to do something, that's speech. The last time I checked, speech is protected. Even telling someone how to make explosives or how a particular bank branch has weak security is free speech, although acting on that speech may violate laws against unlicensed handling of explosives and break-and-enter and robbery. Telling someone how to break a copy protection scheme likewise seems equivalent: acting on it may be copyright infringement but the speech should be allowed.

Certainly the speech should be allowed if it's allowed when it tells people how to do something much more serious. If I can tell someone that you can kill with a specific poison (if they do it, it's murder) but I can't tell someone that you can break some bit of copy protection with some particular action (if they do it, it's copyright infringement) then there's a huge imbalance in the law, since murder is by far the more serious offense of the two!


You're right that the whole thing is a mess.


That's why ultimately copyright enforcement is going to be useless. Even if applied perfectly. Adobe might make Photoshop hack-proof and force everyone to pay through the nose to use it -- and the GIMP will eventually eat their market share, or something else will. The natural price in the marketplace for photo-editing software is zero, because the marginal cost of photo-editing software is zero, and trying to artificially prop it up is doomed to eventual failure.

But it's not the end of the world. The GIMP proves that you don't need to be able to charge hefty margins on photo editing software for the marketplace to produce photo-editing software, at the same time as it threatens Adobe's business model. It may be the end of certain business models and even of certain actual businesses, but it's not the end of the world; the automobile ended the era of horse-drawn carriages and reduced the buggy-whip industry to just a sliver of what once was, but it wasn't the end of the world, and we're pretty sure it's actually better because of the transition.

(Before someone jumps up and shouts "global warming!", I invite them to compute how much methane would outgas from a population of horses large enough to support modern road transportation needs, and then multiply by 29 for that is how much more potent methane is than CO² as a greenhouse gas, and then compare to current vehicular emissions of the latter gas.)


They'll fail. We have laws on the books now that are unenforced and irrelevant; copyright will probably join them fairly soon. I doubt the political will exists to actually repeal it but it will become antiquated and disused at some point simply because it will have become useless to assert it instead of conducting your business differently so that it didn't matter.


Are you kidding? Let me quote something to you.


There's a few exceptions for obscenity, hate speech, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, and inciting violence, and that's it. Discussing the means to perform an act (even a criminal one) is legal.

There are criminal conspiracy laws, but they require two things: 1. An agreement to a criminal scheme, and 2. An act in furtherance of the scheme. If we decide to rob a bank and then one of us goes and buys the ski masks, that one might be charged with conspiracy to commit robbery at that point; probably not without further, more serious steps such as an actual attempted robbery would the charges stick. And note that it has to be a crime; copyright infringement is a civil matter. Conspiring to break into a remote server might be an offense if there was a specific plan to actually perpetrate the hack and if some step was taken to carry out that plan.

Conspiracy law requires an act in furtherance precisely so it isn't an unconstitutional ban on speech; merely discussing a plan cannot be illegal in and of itself.


Shortsighted thinking on the part of the copyright holders. Translating them makes them accessible to a broader market. If the copyright holder wasn't selling to that market anyway they lose nothing; and if they were, they should have done the translation themselves, so why didn't they? Better is to exploit the network effects of having more users to make it more valuable for the subset that are paying users; they can then sell more (or charge more, or even both) in the market they do sell to.


Huh? Of course it does. It might be silly, and even a travesty, but under property rights law it's not a crime to buy something, even something one-of-a-kind, and then deface it. It being copyrighted wouldn't change that, either -- I mentioned before your right to buy a book and scribble notes in it, or rip pages out, or whatever.


If you own it you decide the "terms of use". The most a manufacturer is legally allowed to do if you use a product in a way they don't like is void your warranty and generally refuse to support it.


Yes. This goes to show why it is foolish and dangerous to ban tools (or worse, speech) rather than ban specific bad uses of those tools (e.g. breaking into someone else's computer to snoop and trash their files). And we already have laws against the bad uses: laws against hacking, laws against vandalism, privacy laws, laws against burglary, and so forth.


Not even that; see above. Now if we discussed how to hack fbi.gov in specific details and then one of us took a further action, such as port-scanning fbi.gov, that might be enough to put us afoul of conspiracy law. And (unfortunately; see above about banning tools) if we made a script to crack a copy prevention scheme and distributed the script we'd run afoul of the execrable DMCA.


Posting numbers can't really be illegal in any sane legal system. Posting actual cracked software is obviously copyright infringement and posting patches may violate the DMCA.


The only hacking I endorsed was hacking that is, or should be, perfectly legal: hacking your own stuff to make it work better for you.

You are not allowed to release specific "circumvention methods", say, a step by step guide to crack a particular piece of software. In doing so, you would be distributing a "tool" that is meant specifically and exclusively to be used for illegal purposes.

You are legally allowed to discuss the broader topic for educational purposes. After all, you cannot sensibly teach programmers to come up with copy protection if you cannot tell them about the possible attacks.

With regards to this point, the laws in the western hemisphere are rather ... diverse. Some jurisdictions prohibit the sale, but not the making and possession of such tools. Others prohibit possession, making and sale. Some jurisdictions permit the tools; some others limit their application to a whitelist of strictly legal purposes; and some jurisdictions rule out a specific blacklist of illegal uses.

It's a mess.

The concept of free speech, as used in the United States of America, does not exist in that same broad generality anywhere else in the world. It is very relevant to these matters in the USA, because it is one of the few old and established "laws" that does in fact govern "immaterial wares".

Where I live, as an example, the constitution only protects the weaker concept of "free voicing of opinions" (and the general absence of censorship - but there is an invariant small blacklist of specific Nazi topics that are in fact censored here in Germany). In other words, I am allowed to say that copy protections suck. But I might not be allowed to publicly explain in detail why exactly a specific protection scheme is technically bad (because it's too easy to circumvent).

(And the whole EULA thing complicates matters even more; partly because most EULAs contain one or two illegal and unenforceable points buried in all the fine print. But they still make for an imposing threat to the unsuspecting consumer.)

This is why patent law is the new tool used by software businesses. Copyright is indeed headed for irrelevance, but who needs copyright when you can prohibit the competitors from re-creating some functionality at all?

In the long run, I agree that those societies which largely abandon the concept of intellectual property will be victorious. They are enjoying a speed of innovation that will quickly leave the old establishment behind. But for us here inside the old establishment, it's going to be a long and painful process. I am now in my fifth decade, and I don't expect to see this settled during my remaining lifetime.

But I very much expect it to turn out as you stated. "Information wants to be free" is not just a slogan for thieves to hide behind. It's not just a crazy ideology of a few computer nerds. In the informational world, "information wants to be free" is a law of nature as fundamental as thermodynamics is in the physical world. It's not the kind of law that you can break.

The law must surely make a distinction between speech and a tool. A tool has to be more than just speech -- compilable code, or an executable, or a physical device.


Then you should lobby in your country to have true freedom of speech as we do here in North America.


"One or two"? :) I think it's a wee bit more than that.


That's the idea. I'd like to see asserting terms and conditions that are unenforceable by law be considered a form of fraud, myself. For starters, every single assertion that something is "for home viewing only" or "permission is required to republish" or etc. that does not acknowledge the existence of fair use. Copyright has grown like a cancer and in that it has been exceeded only by copyright overreach: claiming "rights" that don't actually exist in Title 17, including frequently the "right" to make fair use go away just by decreeing it, ditto first sale, and "rights" to control various post-purchase uses other than the performance and distribution acts that are covered by Title 17.

Actually, I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're better off without the whole mess, in its entirety. Open source is big business these days and has proven that you can make money off software without restricting copying. The recording industry music copyrights are defacto unenforceable and the recording industry, troubled though it is, is still afloat, and more music is being created than ever. Only the creme de la creme of book authors ever see so much as a dime in royalties. About the only creativity that might be seriously crippled by the loss is filmmaking and judging by the churning out year after year of predictable sequels, actioners, disaster flicks, romantic comedies, and so forth, filmmaking may not be that big a loss. And what truly interesting experiments in that area are occurring all seem to be posted for free on YouTube!

Copyright seems less about incentivizing creation of anything these days and more about keeping a few people rich. Movie moguls and record label execs and, most of all, lawyers. Not one of whom is actually an artist, though they'll all claim to represent artists.


An excellent point. Therefore I respectfully submit that we ought to outlaw software patents, and maybe give some serious consideration to getting rid of the rest of them too. Gene patents -- ridiculous. Why does the USPTO keep granting patents on inventions that have four billion years of prior art? Machinery patents -- the machine is obsolete before it can be fully copied by industrial spies these days. Drug patents -- the case with the strongest arguments for (cheap to reproduce, enormous R&D costs) and the strongest arguments against (if I'm dying of a treatable condition and I can afford to pay the marginal cost to produce one dose, should my life be sacrificed on the altar of incentivizing R&D?) Show me a way to significantly cut R&D costs in that area and I'll say get rid of those patents too. Ditto if someone invents a cheap way to back up and restore human personalities or port them to better hardware.


Take a look at Estonia -- rapid development of internet and tech infrastructure. China's mushrooming manufacturing economy. India -- filmmaking(!), music, and software. Brazil -- software, filmmaking, etc. Korea -- manufacturing, software, biotech.

Of course that's just history repeating itself. The fledgling US had weak to no "intellectual property" laws -- short copyrights, no foreign author copyrights, and no patents. It burgeoned rapidly compared to the European nations with their stronger "protections". Protection is not quite the right word for it -- it's protectionism in disguise, and protectionism is a discredited philosophy for how best to promote domestic industry and economic growth. Current US foreign policy even explicitly mentions copyright as key to protecting the domestic film and music industries, and any student of history knows what happens to the "protected" industries: foreign competitors rapidly outproduce them. Bollywood is going to be hosting the 2020 Academy Awards at the rate the US is "protecting" (read: smothering to death) its domestic creative industries.


Heard of iPS cells? Your life expectancy assuming current technology gets you to 2030 with your ticker still working. Only we won't have current technology. We'll have grow-you-some-replacement-parts-quick-and-cheap technology easily by 2030. Maybe even repair-them-in-situ technology. So despair not. :)


You're very close with that one, but in fact it's not just "as fundamental as thermodynamics", it actually is thermodynamics. Information and entropy are almost the same thing and their spreading around is the natural thermodynamic evolution of a system. Particles entangle and we get decoherence -- thermodynamics applied at the quantum level makes the whole universe turn into a sheaf of distinct parallel worlds. Cosmic growth ultimately powers it -- given the Bekenstein bound, doubling the radius of the observable universe quadruples its degrees of freedom and thus its information storage capacity. Data, as everyone well knows, expands to fill the space available, so the universe branches and all these different possibilities get realized. And of course the average one of these is messier than the last. Out pops the second law, but it's really about information all along. And of course there's Jefferson's famous observation that an idea forces itself into one's possession and one cannot dispossess oneself of it; that's obviously a thermodynamically irreversible process right there.

Hence the Sisyphean nature of the things the record companies are trying -- it's exactly like trying to keep a boulder at the top of a steep hill when the thermodynamically favored state has it at the bottom and its gravitational potential energy converted into heat.

I know. I just don't think I can explain the connection well enough. I may be convinced, but I am not sure I could convince others by any scientific standard.


Thus far I have tried not to debate my opinions, but stay with claims that I could defend objectively, scientifically. The trouble is, as much as there may be an emergent irresistible force that propels the whole intellectual property issue towards the point of maximal entropy - the exact ducts through which we funnel all those bits will not emerge from first principles. There will be a lot of opinion, ideology, and politics involved. Sysiphus' hands will slip, and the boulder will roll downhill - but it will follow a path painstakingly carved into the mountainside by various groups with very different interests.

Or, in other words, it will matter surprisingly little that the end result is fixed and unavoidable. There will still be many battles fought before this story concludes. And those battles do need to be fought, for the bigger picture of society. There will be a disruptive transition, bringing benefits and downsides. We cannot really afford to let things just run their course, but must put effort into the other cornerstones of our laws: fair sharing of costs and rewards of this transition.

Such opinions, ideologies, and politics are really at the heart of this very discussion thread. The science part of it is fairly clear and not up for debate.


(BTW, my survival instincts seem to be defective. I don't strive to live forever. Nor am I suicidal. It's just that I recognize death as being a requirement for darwinian evolution to function. And I recognize that it's the species that matters, not the individual. But this is another train of thought that would follow opinion and ideology rather than science.)

At this point I think the best that could be done by governments is to declare an official phase-out date for copyright: they all expire on that date and after it no more come into being. Set it reasonably far ahead -- a few years. Then leave it up to private industry to plan for it, arrange their affairs, position themselves for the market shifts. As the deadline looms the effects of copyright will become less, since everyone will know it won't last much longer. This produces a gradual transition, terms initially being still longer than the commercial life of most works but shortening steadily at one year per year right till the end.

As for your musings on death being necessary for Darwinian evolution, the question to ask yourself now is is Darwinian evolution the best way for humans to adapt going forwards? I'd argue that we have long adapted less by genetic change than by learning and inventing, and learning is something most people can do at any age. To the extent that older people are less able to learn and adapt that is just another negative consequence of aging that we should hope someday to cure. And of course human genetics will soon be increasingly malleable to directed, intentional amendment. At some point we will have fully reverse engineered ourselves, and with that comes the capability to create version 2.0, port ourselves to new hardware, and the like. Of course the prospect of version 2.0 someday arising and displacing version 1.0 may seem daunting, but we're eventually replaced by our offspring -- the next Darwinian generation -- as it stands; whereas in the future we may be able to individually upgrade to 2.0 instead of having to die and leave the world to newborn version 1.0001s. Put that way suddenly it's the old way of human improvement that seems daunting.

Of all the optimization algorithms known to mankind thus far, the only one that is (statistically) guaranteed to find the optimal point under any and all conditions, is a specific kind of random walk - with extremely slow convergence (step size is proportional to 1/log(time)).

I believe that means the concept of "intelligent design" is fundamentally flawed, even when we ourselves are the intelligent designers (or some would say: "even when a supreme being" ...). Making any smart choices can only help short term, while you are still very far from the unknown optimum. In the long run, trial and error according to die rolls is the only known good bet, hence the "best bet".

The power to design Homo Sapiens Sapiens 2.0 will come to us eventually. There is even a chance that we might use that power wisely. But our own survival instincts will bar us from just moving over and making room. I cannot rule out the possibility that the terrified masses will just burn all scientists at the stake ... or that some crazy dictator tries to build his army of supersoldiers and is all too successful ... interesting times. :)

We have to "move over and make room" now. In theory you'd be able to upgrade yourself to 2.0 without loss of personal identity and continuity, by contrast.

And as optimization processes go, evolution is slow and quite dumb compared even to version 1.0 of us. Evolution never managed in four billion years some things that our brains managed in a million: traveling to the moon, ejecting objects from the solar system entirely, obtaining detailed visual reconaissance from Mars's surface, heavier-than-air flight at supersonic speeds, various achievements in computing and telecommunications, figuring out Fermat's Last Theorem, and on and on. We've designed machines that evolution would have taken numbers of years to produce so large they'd require Knuth up-arrow notation to describe. And that's version 1.0. If you think 1.0 isn't smart enough or is too short-sighted to solve some problems and find some clever parts of solution spaces, wait'll you see 2.0.