Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Recently, there was an OSNews article called "Sparrow's acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source". I think there are issues enough with the logic in that statement alone, so I got baited into reading.

Sparrow, I guess I should add, is a pretty neat (though low featured, afaict) stand-alone email application for OS X. People like it. Google bought it. Now there will be no new Sparrows and, more importantly, no Sparrow for iPad, which they'd been working on recently.

Buying Sparrow was very likely, I believe, a talent acquisition move for Google. They're buying the programmers as much or more than the code. Regardless, apparently the OSNews author believes that if Sparrow had been open source, it'd be reasonable to expect the next version of Sparrow to come out on time and under budget in spite of the developers leaving. And I guess the implication is that Sparrow would have grown just as quickly and been just as personally lucrative for the developers if it were an open source project as it did as a closed source one (wait... what?).

Such an argument is pretty sad. Open Source only protects you from your favorite app's going kaput if you have programmers ready to contribute, and usually to contribute for free. I've posted a couple of times that I'm reading Dreaming in Code, the book about the Chandler Project. Some folks seem to enjoy the app. It's open source. Chandler's also essentially dead. Thunderbird is open source. It's in stasis mode too.

Open source does not protect you from a project's death. It does allow a group of programmers to pick up where the original team stopped. And if you've ever inherited code, you know what a bear coming to a brand new codebase can be. Let's just say it's often a theoretical possibility, but practical nightmare. Every program is a cyborg. Completely remove the original human element -- the original developers -- and the cyborg likely dies. Google's hiring Open-Sparrow's developers kills Open-Sparrow just as surely as this kills Closed-Sparrow. The difference? At least Closed-Sparrow's programmers made enough cash to keep them interested to this point in the game.

Show me a project that went -- entirely unfunded -- from commercial to successful open source project. Closed source protects small programming shops. There's no way around it. There are a few exceptions that prove the rule where donations fund projects, but I don't know that any were initially closed-source commercial projects.

More importantly, it's hard to sell software as a business model using free software. Services, fine, you can sell yourself as someone who provides services for OSS, but there's not a huge market for email-app-related services. Not many calls from people waiting to spend $120/hour for you to configure Sparrow. Lots more willing to pay for the app or to click your, in my case at least, surprisingly well-targeted ads.

Regardless, replying to a comment to the OSNews post, I believe I convinced myself of why BSD is evil in nine words or less.

OSNews > Thread > "RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?" by Macrat:

RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?
by Macrat on Sun 22nd Jul 2012 02:33 UTC in reply to "Whining because they are Apple fanboys?"
Member since:
2006-03-27

Your suggestion - that Apple users consider open source - is like asking a group of religious fanatics to convert to atheism.

All Mac users are using open source as open source apps come with OS X.

http://www.apple.com/opensource/
Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?
by rufwork on Mon 23rd Jul 2012 13:52 in reply to "RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?"
Member since:
2012-07-23

The important thing to remember is that the OS is using BSD-licensed stuff under the hood. That means it was open source, but isn't any more.

The BSD is far too permissive, and doesn't protect software. I'm surprised it's considered an Open-as-in-Free license at all sometimes. "Please plagiarize my code and call it your own! I'm begging you!"

Reply Parent Score: 1

And that's really the rub for me. BSD allows a situation where it was open source, but it isn't any more.

Thank you, me, for putting that succinctly. Based on the length of your typical post, including the preamble to this one, I'm surprised you were able to come through like that for us.

Labels: apple, bsd, copyright, gng, licensing, open, os x, OSS

The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right.

A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange.

That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

(Matt)

Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment.

The Rare Book Room

What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain.

How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you.

More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel.

How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.)

Rare Books and Software

So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.)

Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means.

Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not.

This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms.

Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out.

The Obsolescence of Copyright

I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books.

(Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.)

The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates.

Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens.

Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0

Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it.

So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way.

As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers.

Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, November 24, 2022
The unremediation of information ownership From Christian Heilmann (via Om Malik): The global library is burning ... On the social web, knowledge is smothered by agenda and on the publisher web by ads and paywalls and contracts. Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago? Back in library days you were able to do that. On news portals, most articles are deleted after a year, and on newspaper web sites you hardly ever get access to the archives – even with a subscription. (Aside: Just checked my local newspaper, hoping for a counter-example, and it's true there too. Even with my monthly, inflated subscription payments, I don't have access to the archives. Though I bet my local library does, as it did (natch) during the "library days".) This -- what ultimately boils down to the loss (or "unremediation") of [paper] ownership -- is, perhaps, why we need a more thorough Archive.org. Labels: archive, copyright, subscriptions, web posted by ruffin at 11/24/2022 09:49:00 AM

Friday, September 04, 2015
What should be patentable? It's obvious Even the so called "good" software patents have a lot of the same elements as th... \| Hacker News: I have been involved with several patent suits (on both litigant side and defendant side) and as an engineer, I have to admit that there has never been a time when I haven't read the statement of the problem the patent says its going to solve, and not thought of the solution myself, way before the patent presents the same solution. In other words, every single litigated software patent I've been asked to review has been BLATANTLY obvious. And I'm no genius. I've talked to other engineers and they've all said the same thing. I just explain a problem domain, and they usually give a solution that comes under the claims of the litigated patent. I wish this was the bar for a patent -- If it's not intuitively obviously ("BLATANTLY") new and patentable, it's not patentable at all. Labels: business, copyright, patents posted by ruffin at 9/04/2015 11:19:00 AM

Friday, June 28, 2013
Society belongs to us. It's time to make copyright feed the public domain (again). From a blog on the Washington Times website titled "Why haven't we outgrown fairy tales?" focused mainly on current show "Once Upon a Time" and some upcoming movies: Maria Tatar, Harvard University folklore and mythology professor, explains why fairy tales and their fans are timeless. I did a quick search for "copyright", which doesn't seem to appear [in the article here]. And copyright is the answer. Way to go, Dr. Tatar. Anything before 1923 is in the public domain in the United States. Nobody's going to sue you for copying Hansel and Gretel, no matter how badly you do it. These stories keep getting used because it's easier to repackage a past, successful plot than to create one from whole cloth, and there are no royalties to pay to the public domain. If you can license Batman, great. Otherwise, you're quickly drawn to what we all own, stories in the public domain. Did Shakespeare write one wholly original play? The question is why we don't force our government to go back to a copyright system that continually puts valuable property into the public domain for reuse -- and subsequent value we can all share successfully like the shows mentioned here. Copyright is supposed to feed the public domain once the value of exclusive ownership has been sapped for a fair period. Then it belongs to all of us. And let's face it, no idea is created in a bubble. We all contribute to society's values and mores. And society ultimately belongs to us. A little more about the history on the hijacking of copyright here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act Labels: copyright, public domain posted by ruffin at 6/28/2013 07:54:00 AM

Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Eric Schmidt conceives of corporations as countries & I wonder if Linux provides any patent coverage Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Says Apple and Google Will Resolve Issues 'the Adult Way' - Mac Rumors: The adult way to run a business is to run it more like a country. They have disputes, yet they've actually been able to have huge trade with each other. They're not sending bombs at each other. I think both Tim [Cook, Apple's CEO] and Larry [Page, Google's CEO], the sort of successors to Steve [Jobs] and me if you will, have an understanding of this state model. This metaphor scares me a little, though obviously it's already the world we live in. The real empires use legacy empires as foundation. On one hand, I'm happy to have patent squabbles out of the courts, but I'm upset with the implicit connotation that corporations should essentially be making law. For me, I think the bottom line is that [the current system of] patents let copyright overreach its useful bounds. Macrumors paraphrases more of the interview thusly [sic]: "He also noted that the litigation would continue for "a while" and that the big loser is not Apple or Google, but a smaller company trying to get an operating system off the ground as they wouldn't have the necessary patent coverage." Is that accurate? What does Linux do for mobile devices? I'm completely in the dark here. Is Linux allowed to use patents because nobody sued early enough to protect them? Or does Linux not violate patents? Is "everything" in Linux (pick a distro) based on "prior art"? Certainly Red Hat has pockets deep enough to sue, right? If Fedora (or whatever Linux they're running) tripped up on patents, you'd think they'd would be sued -- or that the non-pursuit means the protection of those patents (though here I notice I'm stupidly conflating (c) with patents) is void? That is, if I put DistroX on a hand-held device, how could that violate a patent any more than DistroX on a mobile device? I wish the FSF would release MobileHurd and have pockets deep enough to protect against suits -- sort of a detente invoked by the fear of mutually assured annihilation. But then I'd be using state-based metaphors. EDIT: Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_and_free_software EDIT2: More reading and a quote: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ So if Microsoft ever sued Linux distributor Red Hat for patent infringement, for instance, OIN might sue Microsoft in retaliation, trying to enjoin distribution of Windows. It's a cold war, and what keeps the peace is the threat of mutually assured destruction: patent Armageddon - an unending series of suits and countersuits that would hobble the industry and its customers "It's a tinderbox," Moglen says. "As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere." Cue the Admiral. Labels: copyright, Google, linux, patents posted by ruffin at 12/05/2012 12:38:00 PM

Monday, July 23, 2012
Why BSD is evil in nine words or less. Recently, there was an OSNews article called "Sparrow's acquisition highlights the dangers of closed source". I think there are issues enough with the logic in that statement alone, so I got baited into reading. Sparrow, I guess I should add, is a pretty neat (though low featured, afaict) stand-alone email application for OS X. People like it. Google bought it. Now there will be no new Sparrows and, more importantly, no Sparrow for iPad, which they'd been working on recently. Buying Sparrow was very likely, I believe, a talent acquisition move for Google. They're buying the programmers as much or more than the code. Regardless, apparently the OSNews author believes that if Sparrow had been open source, it'd be reasonable to expect the next version of Sparrow to come out on time and under budget in spite of the developers leaving. And I guess the implication is that Sparrow would have grown just as quickly and been just as personally lucrative for the developers if it were an open source project as it did as a closed source one (wait... what?). Such an argument is pretty sad. Open Source only protects you from your favorite app's going kaput if you have programmers ready to contribute, and usually to contribute for free. I've posted a couple of times that I'm reading Dreaming in Code, the book about the Chandler Project. Some folks seem to enjoy the app. It's open source. Chandler's also essentially dead. Thunderbird is open source. It's in stasis mode too. Open source does not protect you from a project's death. It does allow a group of programmers to pick up where the original team stopped. And if you've ever inherited code, you know what a bear coming to a brand new codebase can be. Let's just say it's often a theoretical possibility, but practical nightmare. Every program is a cyborg. Completely remove the original human element -- the original developers -- and the cyborg likely dies. Google's hiring Open-Sparrow's developers kills Open-Sparrow just as surely as this kills Closed-Sparrow. The difference? At least Closed-Sparrow's programmers made enough cash to keep them interested to this point in the game. Show me a project that went -- entirely unfunded -- from commercial to successful open source project. Closed source protects small programming shops. There's no way around it. There are a few exceptions that prove the rule where donations fund projects, but I don't know that any were initially closed-source commercial projects. More importantly, it's hard to sell software as a business model using free software. Services, fine, you can sell yourself as someone who provides services for OSS, but there's not a huge market for email-app-related services. Not many calls from people waiting to spend $120/hour for you to configure Sparrow. Lots more willing to pay for the app or to click your, in my case at least, surprisingly well-targeted ads. Regardless, replying to a comment to the OSNews post, I believe I convinced myself of why BSD is evil in nine words or less. OSNews > Thread > "RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?" by Macrat: RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys? by Macrat on Sun 22nd Jul 2012 02:33 UTC in reply to "Whining because they are Apple fanboys?" Member since: 2006-03-27 Your suggestion - that Apple users consider open source - is like asking a group of religious fanatics to convert to atheism. All Mac users are using open source as open source apps come with OS X. http://www.apple.com/opensource/ Reply Parent Score: 3 RE[2]: Whining because they are Apple fanboys? by rufwork on Mon 23rd Jul 2012 13:52 in reply to "RE: Whining because they are Apple fanboys?" Member since: 2012-07-23 The important thing to remember is that the OS is using BSD-licensed stuff under the hood. That means it was open source, but isn't any more. The BSD is far too permissive, and doesn't protect software. I'm surprised it's considered an Open-as-in-Free license at all sometimes. "Please plagiarize my code and call it your own! I'm begging you!" Reply Parent Score: 1 And that's really the rub for me. BSD allows a situation where *it was* open source, but it isn't any more.** Thank you, me, for putting that succinctly. Based on the length of your typical post, including the preamble to this one, I'm surprised you were able to come through like that for us. Labels: apple, bsd, copyright, gng, licensing, open, os x, OSS posted by ruffin at 7/23/2012 10:38:00 AM

Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Music wants to be free, unless you paid for it at the wrong time Is it wrong of me to be upset that my old Protected AAC files sound like crap once I've burned to CD and ripped as mp3s? I mean, heck, I bought these things from Apple for full price, and though they still sell the same files without DRM (and, painfully, now at twice the bit rate I got), I'm strangely stuck. You're supposed to be able to pay 30¢ a track to get the DRM removed, but for whatever complicated licensing reason, I can't. I've got albums from Rolling Stones, Rich Robinson (not really a big change there), No Doubt, White Zombie, and Alison Krauss, all on protected AAC that can't be cashed in on iTunes Plus. This didn't used to be a huge deal. I usually listened to iTunes while working and often an iPod while I was moving around. And it's not like I don't have plenty of other albums. On my MacBook now, Protected AAC tracks less than 3% of my music collection. What bugs me is that 1.) I do like these AAC albums more than average and 2.) Now iTunes allows you to download your DRMless tracks as many times as you'd like, to whatever machine you're on. Reread the second. One thing that always bothered me was that I could lose the AAC files, and I usually burned albums to CD pretty quickly in case I had a hard drive failure. Amazon and iTunes both have mini-clouds now, where tracks you buy from them can be downloaded over and over. Amazon would also like you to consider streaming your music, though I don't see the advantage of streaming files that small to your phone at inferior bit rates when you want to listen to music. It's worth the SD card space to avoid stuttering music, imo. iTunes of course has iTunes Match as well, where you shell out $30 a year to access all of your files over the cloud, and occasionally at a higher bitrate that the files than you initially owned. So if you ripped The Cranberries at 128 bits/sec on your bondi blue iMac and threw the disc away, you can get them at 256 bits/sec now. And for those of you that pirated files, well, shame on you, but you can get copies of those from Apple's cloud wherever you are as well. Instead of being mad about Apple laundering pirated files, apparently the music companies consider this "found money". Finally, since Apple apparently pays some royalties for each time a Match subscriber downloads a track, copyright holders are getting a small cut of cash from the schmoes that pirated the files before. (This attitude also suggests that the companies really do understand each album stolen does not constitute a loss at retail prices, though that's not a surprise.) You can get copies of all the music in your library that's on the Store, that is, unless you initially bought them from Apple during The FairPlay years. Painfully, those files, unlike the ones you grabbed years ago from Limewire or the original Napster, aren't going to show up on Match. Now I have to imagine the files I just ripped from a CD made from 128 bit/sec AAC files that sounds like crud would count for Match. Which also makes me wonder how strict Match is about the files you say are legitimate. If I want a new, expensive album, can I simply make mp3 files that are the proper length with the right names/ID3 tags and have iTunes Match do the pirating for me, virus free? Or is the check more complicated, double-checking the sound in the file against an original's signature? If we have iPhone apps that can "listen" to what's playing and find that song for you to buy, well, you'd hope iTunes Match is at least as complex. And would my mp3's from Audacity-recording of cassettes match that cut? If you can make mp3s simply of the same length with ID3 tags and confuse Match, well, it's a real irony that legitimately purchased, DRM protected files are now in practice less legitimate than a kid with Audacity. Labels: copyright, DRM, iTunes, ramble posted by ruffin at 7/10/2012 10:55:00 PM

Saturday, December 24, 2011
Google Music Manager's License Links -- Not Good Enough (but it does do FLAC!) I'm playing around with Google's Music Manager a little, uploading a few hundred tracks just for fun and downloading a few I grabbed from a recent promotion. I'm not sure how I feel about cloud music, but it seems like a decent idea. Surprised Apple & Google don't care about the bandwidth. How much can a dollar a track really buy you? But the link to the OSS used in the Music Manager isn't quite enough. Many OSS apps that include or are themselves Free software display the GPL or LGPL in their entirety when you install, making you "accept" the GPL before using the software. I always thought that was the wrong terminology -- you're not really "accepting" it so much as the developers who made your software did. In retrospect, however, this in-your-face license makes a lot of sense. Many applications only have the required OSS licenses in their About boxes, and that just barely seems to meet the letter of the law for some OSS license requirements, imo, even though I'm guilty of doing the same thing. I think you're required to give the license to your user and a link to code, and hiding just the license in an obscure menu item isn't the way to do that. Google does even worse in the Music Manager. In the About, there's a link to a page (admittedly a page copied locally by the install, though it is an html page that requires a browser to view) that has more links to licensing realted to the software they've used in Music Manager. In some cases, like libmpg123, the link is directly to the LGPL. In others, like id3lib, the link is to that software's home page, not the license. That seems bogus. I will credit that page with an appropriate link to the tarball (http://dl.google.com/dl/androidjumper/src/current/music-manager-source.tar.bz2), which is nicely done. But the tab for About with a link to YA page of links, on which you may have to hunt to find the license, is closer to Kevin Bacon than the letter of the LGPL. EDIT: But it's hard to stay mad when Google Music handles FLAC with its Cloud player. Awesome. Labels: copyright, Google, gpl, lgpl, licensing, OSS posted by ruffin at 12/24/2011 06:47:00 PM

Saturday, February 05, 2011
iTunes and HD movies: A confusing set of choices I've been meaning to watch the social network, and saw it teased on iTunes today. I clicked on the very off-chance that it was a cheap rental. No luck. But what was strange was the grayed out HD choices. I hadn't seen that, nor its "The HD version of this movie is available on Mac or Windows 7 computers with HDCP components." I'm using Vista right now. No dice, I guess. Nor is my monitor HDCP. I didn't think that always happened though, and somewhat randomly picked out the most under-appreciated Bond movie, The Living Daylights, to check. Sure enough, I'm good enough to rent that in HD. Luckily I already own it. On VHS, I think. This was pretty reminiscent of a complaint against the MacBook from Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign, whose banner I've got at the top of this page. The MacBook apparently won't let you play every movie through non-HDCP out. Here's a quote, if you follow a link to ars technica in the FSF complaint. When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see above. John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system. Strangely, only some iTunes Store movies appear to be HDCP-aware, as other purchased media like Stargate: Continuum and Heroes season 2 play through the projector just fine. Attempts to play Hellboy 2 or other HDCPed films through the projector via QuickTime also get denied. Other movies that don't work include newer films like Iron Man, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Love Guru, but older films like Shawshank Redemption are restricted as well. So I've included Hellboy 2's entry from the iTunes store in this entry's screenshot as well. Yet another option: Here I can only grab SD versions unless I have an iPad or Apple TV. "Also Available in HD on iPad and Apple TV." That's strange, huh? I'm not sure if it's the SD version in the ars technica story. I suppose iTunes might even restrict SD playback. But it, regardless, is a third choice in HD content. 1.) Can't buy without the right OS. 2.) Can buy, no questions asked. 3.) Can't buy without the right snazzy Apple hardware. It's a strange new world of copyright. I like lending books. So much more intuitive. That said, I'm buying more and more from Kindle. Saves me gas, I can put the text on my iPod, and I've often got a free, if poorly read, audiobook to boot. Nothing better than listening to six hours of Foucault via computerized narrator. Labels: copyright, DRM, F/free, HDCP, iPad, iTunes, macbook posted by ruffin at 2/05/2011 10:48:00 PM

Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Copyright, the ultimate cover discourse (for abusing privacy rights) Leveraging Copyright: Russia and Microsoft \| Public Knowledge: This week, the New York Times reported that Russian authorities were searching the offices and seizing the computers of public interest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) disfavored by the government, under the guise of enforcing Microsoft copyrights. This is why you only use Linux in your NGO and announce to the government ahead of time. I wonder if there's any such thing as probable cause here. Was there a reason to expect that the versions of Windows, etc weren't legit? WinZip in the 90s and early 2000s would probably have been an even better cover. Microsoft's reply is, for me, honestly, unexpected. Anti-Piracy Enforcement and NGOs - The Official Microsoft Blog – News and Perspectives from Microsoft - Site Home - TechNet Blogs: To prevent non-government organizations from falling victim to nefarious actions taken in the guise of anti-piracy enforcement, Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products. Labels: copyright, microsoft, russia posted by ruffin at 9/14/2010 06:54:00 PM

Thursday, April 22, 2010
The NY Times' "Ethicist" is Anything But From The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - NYTimes.com: [Q:]... The publisher apparently withheld [a Stephen King book's eBook version] to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y. [A:]An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical.... Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability... What crap. Is the book out of print? Is that hardcopy somehow obsolete now? Of course not. There's obviously value added with the eBook or ole C.D. wouldn't've wanted it. How does Mr. Cohen (the "Ethicist") decide when you've paid enough into the system to begin illegal civil disobedience? Can I pay for the movie in the theater and then download? Better parallel: Can I burn a Blu-Ray b/c I've purchased the DVD at full price? What if I paid a clearance price for the DVD? Have I still paid in enough for someone to forward me a bootleg Blu-Ray in high def? If I've read the book, can I sneak into a theater showing the movie that's not quite filled? Where's the harm in that? Would it really put poor, poor CD out to take along that "more than three and a half pounds" of codex on his trip? Really? Look, if you want a law changed because, in this case, you feel superior enough to remark "the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology", then start lobbying. Now show me one fair law that's anticipated a specific technology perfectly. Sort of another anachronism, ain't it? Honestly, I think eBooks are an interesting way to leverage your ownership of IP into more profit. As long as we're not EULAing hardcopies, knock yourselves out. Furthermore, in this case we have easier solutions for CD. Wait for the g******d eBook to be released. Trade time for money. Read another book on your trip. I just finished Water is Wide* by Pat Conroy on my iPod. You'll enjoy it. If you want to read a new book now, ya gotta pay. Or why not go to your local library and reserve a copy to read while you're waiting. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it? You're not out a buck. Now you read Conroy on your trip and you get to know the latest and greatest from that sick-o King[1]. And guess what, you've already paid for the privilege. Take advantage of it. Had Cohen even so much as said, "Though the risk of being caught is low, it does exist, and in NY the penalty is [X]. I would also say that you need to delete the eBook as soon as you return from your trip, when its marginal utility is gone, and that once the eBook is released, you should stop using this rationalization immediately," I would have felt a little better. As it stands, it bothers me that a representative of what's essentially the record of the United States could show such a simpleton's approach to ethics and encourage his readers to break the law without understanding the ramifications on themselves and the corporations that provide them with their goods. I'm no corporate cheerleader, but when a "ethicist" rationalizes stealing in officially sanctioned e-print, you know society's gauge of right and wrong had long since made a turn for the gutter. [1] Actually, I'm suspicious King is one of the best authors alive. I've read a few of his books that aren't about blood and guts, and they're all exceptionally well written. Still, I tried that city in a bubble book and couldn't get past the first few chapters. SICK. It's all about how you apply yourself, I guess. Labels: blu-ray, business, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ethics, evil, hats of money, kindle, licensing, nyt, web 2.0 shiite, zealousness posted by ruffin at 4/22/2010 12:05:00 PM

Thursday, April 01, 2010
David Pogue Misunderstands eBooks From David Pogue’s Review of the iPad - NYTimes.com: There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). Well, he's probably not wrong in the sense that movies in a book form factor have largely displaced the demand for text. That said, I've personally purchased a good deal more books (here, "books writ large") recently because of my iPod. I've sailed through a few junk novels (vampires and WoW fantasy), Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide (horrible job editing the eBook, however, RosettaBooks), part of Pygmy from that Fight Club guy (a little too hard core for me to finish), short story from Frank Herbert, a double issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, etc etc., as well as a few books for young'uns that I've managed to share. The key is that it's lots easier to read when you're accidentally carrying these books around with your calendar, notebook, mail handler, and mp3 player. If the iPad is mobile at all, those who do read will read more. And more importantly to book publishers (and this is where Pogue misses the boat), it's a lot harder to buy a used eBook than a used codex (ie, paper book). The iPod/Kindle/iPad/iPhone platforms all allow strict DRM, both in software and in physical tipping points (how exactly would I share my eBooks? I can figure it out, but 1) it's illegal to pass files, I believe and 2) I can't toss 'em across the office when I'm done and not worry about when they come back). The iPad will be much friendly to read on than the iPod and iPhone, even friendlier than the none too colorful (see Sega Game Gear commercial, above -- and that's the guy from My Name is Earl, ain't it?) Kindle. I've used my laptops a good deal, but a longer-lived battery and a friendly, hand-holdable device should encourage even more folk who like to read to read digitally and, I'll wager, to read more. And it's going to be much more likely that what they're reading is material they purchased directly from the publisher. Take that, local thrift store! Labels: amazon, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ebooks, hats of money, iPad, kindle, online distribution posted by ruffin at 4/01/2010 11:27:00 AM

Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Silly NYT rabbits, information wants to be free From AppleInsider \| WSJ has pre-release iPad kept 'under padlock and key' by Apple: How much to charge for content on the iPad and other devices remains a point of contention. While reports have suggested that Times executives cannot agree whether to charge $10 per month or closer to $30 per month, the Journal began charging users of its iPhone application late last year. Murdoch has previously said that News Corp. intends to charge for all of its online news sites, noting that 'quality journalism is not cheap.' A coworker once told me (luckily in a story about a third coworker) that, "A mistake on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." Same sort of reasoning seems to apply here. That good journalism is costly doesn't make it worth more to me. Let me be blunt: I'm not paying $10 a month to access the NYT on a mobile device. I love the NYT, and consider it, on some level, to be the national register. I'd gladly pay $15 a month to receive the Sunday edition printed and delivered to my door if I was within an area with delivery. But on an iPad? Forget it. I believe newspapers are going to have to learn to recut their information. I have no idea the best way to do it. I would have thought the current advertisement driven version would have to do (and I've enjoyed the interactive Apple dual-ad advertisements in particular; not all advertisement is bad). To sum this ramble, I think it'd be smarter to figure out how to get the most money out of an ad-supported, open publication model, and then determine how much information that medium/genre/style of publication supports. I'm occasionally tempted to argue against the operation of the open market in specific situations -- there are things which the market has not yet been able to price accurately, and things for which I don't believe accurate prices can be found -- but this is a clear example of where I'm all for it. I believe the Times et al will find that Pay to Play is going to taunt them a second time. Labels: ads, control, copyright, DRM, iPad, market, news, nyt, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/03/2010 05:50:00 PM

Wednesday, February 03, 2010
GPL code in a copyrighted book? If you print GPL'd code as part of a copyrighted book, does the universe end? Apparently not, but I would like to know how one gets away with that. Labels: copyright, gpl posted by ruffin at 2/03/2010 10:05:00 AM

Sunday, November 22, 2009
Is there such thing as "practically free" software formats? I enjoyed thinking through Should we fight for Ogg Vorbis?, a contribution to the Linux Journal by Glyn Moody back in 2007. The most problematic statement in the piece, I think, is this one. So my doubts about this campaign have nothing to do with any weaknesses in Ogg. It's just that I wonder whether this is really something the free software world should be expending much energy on when there are other more pressing problems. Whereas DRM and software patents, for example, are manifestly and unequivocally bad for free software (and indeed for everyone), that doesn't seem to be true for the MP3 format. Is there a reason to have an open and free format when patent holders don't seem to care much about the folks who are making free software and aren't paying royalties/license fees? Rather, aren't there more pressing places where license holders are worried about enforcing patents where someone could be turning their OSS coding resources? I'm not sure how to feel about this one. I know that I'm getting to the point that I prefer PDF over any other file format for printed works. I'm so freakin' tired of dealing with the way doc, docx, rtf, etc keep fookin' slightly whenever I open them in the wrong application. I used to make do with Microsoft Word, 1998 and 2000, and as long as those apps kept working I figured I'd make do. They don't work so well any more. Now that Word 2100 or whatever it's at now can save in pdf, I'd rather just see pdf files. It's harder for me to edit a pdf than even a wacky docx at times, but there are a wealth of fairly reasonably priced apps that'll allow one to mess with pdfs. At worst, I just print them out and scrawl. Perhaps ODF is the best alternative, but PDF is the practically open format that seems to be doing best, and I don't even have to Google LAME to display it on most OSes. Does this disinclination to support ODF more directly comprise my politics? Yes, I believe it does. We need a standard that will display well outside of its contemporary platform, and display that way for the foreseeable future and beyond. That seems to be pdf to me (and yes, I realize pdf can sometimes be no more descriptive than avi; you really don't know what's in the wrapper. Again, egg + face). Still, is there "practically free" that should be good enough? I'm not sure. I don't like the mp3 reasoning any more than I did for gifs years earlier or pdfs, even after they've been declared an open standard (thanks wikipedia) in 2008. OOXML is open too, you know. Yet there's a certainly practicality to using these formats not designed to be open to humans and machines at the same time. I hate bluffing. Is GNU/hurd ready yet? Labels: control, copyright, DRM, ethics, F/free, licensing, pseudo-academic, Word posted by ruffin at 11/22/2009 01:00:00 PM

Tuesday, July 07, 2009
I've broken Netflix For months now, Netflix hasn't so much as ventured a recommendation -- or, if it has, they have been few and quickly dismissed. This despite my having rated 444 movies. Seriously? You've got nuttin? If I've got Bloodrayne on my list, isn't it likely I'll watch anything? Maybe my queue's long enough and my plan sorry enough they don't feel they need to entice me into using Netflix more. Still, I'd expect recommendations and an upsell. In other news, I'm at least temporarily tired of blogging about much of anything, really really like what I've seen of Paintbrush for OS X (which does what Seashore should have done for OS X: provide a Paint replacement), and believe that Ogg Theora will eventually be used more for commercials than anything else. That's right, the new built-in video codec in Firefox will be used to ensure everyone in that browser sees what are now Flash adverts without a hitch. Until bandwidth costs < licensing, I'm not sure why anyone would walk away from what's already on the scene -- Flash, Silverlight, h.264. In fact, Apple's serving the h.264 Kool Aid as quickly as possible, putting hardware support into every consumer Mac it makes in addition to the iPhone. I'd like to see Theora do to video what png did for images on the net. Still, the only place they make sense -- file size is small enough and the desire to get the message out there more pull than push -- is advertisements, and even then only for adverts being pushed to folk with Firefox browser strings. Labels: apple, control, copyright, firefox, iphone, licensing, paint, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 7/07/2009 12:47:00 PM

Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Faux public domain Much of what's been posted to archive.org is not in the public domain. And anything that gets pasted into Wikipedia often gets repeated like wildfire with the assumption that Wikipedia contents have also been, give or take, donated for anyone to use. Of course there's very little prevent anyone from pasting copyrighted text in there, at least until someone else bothers to do the very human work of identifying and removing it. (Aside: Does Wikipedia spider through its contents searching for known copyrighted work?) The exploitation of open use hosting sites seems to be a place where [very] petty [marginal] criminals [unwittingly at times?] are laundering copyrighted work. Labels: copyright, online distribution, public domain posted by ruffin at 2/04/2009 12:34:00 PM

Monday, May 14, 2007
The Obsolescence of Copyright: Virtual Rare Book Rooms The virtual rare book room is nearly an important enough point to get just right. A recent post by Matt at curmudgeongamer.com, I blog where I've posted in the past, "On game preservation and GameTap" points to an email conversation he has regarding the dangers of subscription-based software delivery systems. In this case, the software consists of video games, and the system is GameTap's. Here's a quote from the exchange. That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings). (Matt) Let's refine the word "gatekeeper" and ownership a bit to ensure we've got a more accurate image for what I was trying to convey with the "virtual rare book room" comment. The Rare Book Room What a rare book room does is not thwart individual ownership but avoid copyright restrictions. Rather, it recreates the restrictive functions of copyright once works have reached the public domain, when their content should, by that theory, belong to all. In a sense, rare book rooms are the perfect picture of the cliche that possession equals nine-tenths of the law. The "copyright-function" is moved from copyright owner to the rare book room, ironically enough via the public domain. How does a rare book room do this? Well, it's an issue of scarcity. Imagine you've got an "authentic" (whatever that means today) copy of the first printing of The Faerie Queene in your possession (not sure if that's a great example, but pretend there are very few copies in the world left). The copyright expired, well... let's say it expired some time before RMS was a gleam in a gleam in anyone's eye. If you wanted, you could release high-res scans of your copy for anyone in the world to view, make exact duplicate runs, etc. You have that right. The Authors Guild that pressured Amazon to stop selling used books, of which I'm sure Spenser is still a due-paying a member, could do nothing to stop you. More importantly, if you lent the book out without restriction, anyone else had rights to do the same. People could come to a library where you'd lent the book, make a copy of the text, and then release that transcript to the world, even sell it. There's nothing copyright can do to protect that content any more. It's in the public domain. Try that with the latest Crichton novel. How do libraries with a rare copy of the The Faerie Queene perform an end-run around copyright, and still stop you from making such transcripts? Well, they make you sign a contract when you enter the room promising that you won't. No revocation of your public domain rights means no access. They keep their toys to themselves, and access, even in publicly funded libraries, be damned. If they want to pull access, even after you start your studies, the rare book room can. You've given them the right to turn the faucet off. (I'm not necessarily against the system with books, but I have my very idiosyncratic biases in that medium.) Rare Books and Software So what can software companies learn from rare book rooms to help them put the proverbial kibash on piracy? One is to drastically change the rules of the game, and keep all permanent, fully-functional copies of their productions' media out of your hands. Trust me, I feel the same urge, and have often thought about making my crappy shareware server-dependent to avoid the apps being easily and permanently cracked. (First, however, I'd need to write an app worth cracking.) Online games are one very good example of this lesson at work. UOX and RunUO (GPL Ultima Online in .NET; who'd've thunk?) aside, it'd be very difficult for me to reproduce an MMORPG. Blizzard would just as well I copy the World of Warcraft client as many times onto as many machines as I want! Without a server to play on, the client's useless. They own my gaming experience and my gaming labor. At any time, they can raise subscription rates or close up shop. Without the server - their virtual rare book room, of sorts - I'm done, with only a few gigs of neurotically taken screengrabs to show for it. They never give me the software, so even in however many years Sonny's got copyright lasting now, I still won't be able to recreate WoW and play by what were wholly legal means. Same with GameTap, but GameTap is a more conventional solitary gaming experience rather than one that's online by definition. Sure, there might be some way to [likely illegally] byte-sniff and grab a copy of Save the Whales, but GameTap can still turn the faucet (get it? hardy har) off at any time, whether it's because they'd like to redefine the terms of their subscription [I assume; haven't used GameTap and am speaking generically here] or, as Matt suggests, they go belly-up. Without a server, MMORPGs are somewhat useless; the whole schtick is to play online with others. With KABOOM! and other traditional one-player fare, it's not. This is also, as I vaguely understand it, an issue in the latest GPL rewrite (correct me anyone if I'm off here). There was a loophole in GPL 2 that allowed people to run web services based on GPL code and never have to give back the updates to the code they had made and were running live on their server. Because the build was never released and customers/users/clients only had access to the servers, not the software, the provider essentially legally hid modified GPL 2 licensed software in the rare book rooms of their servers. Sure, the source was still technically GPL'd, but the only way you could access it would be to become one of their employees. To do this, you had to agree - by signing Bob's favorite contract - not to share company code! The protections of the GPL 2 copyleft, and therefore copyright, were avoided. The web servers were virtual rare book rooms. Extend to [the current] Napster, or any other subscription based service. Once the right to hold the content is removed or given up, you've got no chance to hang on to the product(s) until copyright runs out. The Obsolescence of Copyright I'll sum it up one more way and be done. If you had to sign a contract saying you won't use a piece of newly created software more than 10 years, and that after the end of that period you will destroy all copies, there's no legal route for it to hit the public domain. It's an en/forced scarcity, the sort of scarcity the Authors Guild wanted to create artificially with books. (Aside: Authors Guild: Don't want used books competing with new ones? Don't sell so danged many up front! You only get to take advantage of scarcity once here, either with lots of units to handle explosive demand up front, or with a limited release to deal with a sustained demand over the long haul. That, if well cared for, books last forever, and that the information they contain can be passed along like any heirloom (or just for fun) is part of their beauty and appeal, dang it.) The danger here is that arguing against subscription-based scarcity is a losing battle. It's legal. It's intelligent. It's a great end-run around copyright, making copyright obsolete, in a sense. It's an exploitation (more fairly, "use") that allows corporations to maximize profit vis-a-vis pirates. Moving from the old, static media system to this off-site, subscription-based one marks a long-term loss for the consumer, for public domain, and for archival/academic/historical interests in the future. I dare the industry to take care of all three, but without heightened awareness in consumers who are willing to demand books-in-hand, I can't imagine it happens. Postscript: The Apple Clause of Moore's Web 2.0 Strangely, of course, Apple already is handing over the bytes with music. Rather than puling a Napster, they're giving you the bytes, to hold and keep. Furthermore, they've apparently determined that, rather than fight piracy with DRM, they'll just tax it. So why doesn't Apple do this with movies? Same reason it will never happen with mainstream MMORPGs - if a song only has about 3 megs of bytes, even 30, it's a manageable size to store and trade on a peer-to-peer basis as the Internet is currently configured. Pirates can and will distribute music singles quickly and easily. Games and movies can be gigs big. Carry this forward and look at the move to high def content, etc. It's all about convincing consumers to demand more bytes. It's harder to trade larger files, and, for now at least, easier to police their movement on the network. The next version of the Gnutella protocol will have to be quite a bit more distributed in its pulls if the corporate Web 2.0-philes have their way. As bandwidth grows, so must the products being traded, or they'll be just as easy to trade as music, where the battle over piracy has already been lost. This is, of course, another reason to fight for net neutrality. Controlling bandwidth means controlling content, which means more control for corporations and less control for consumers. That could be A Bad Thing, or, as I suggest above, at least another good challenge for programmers. Labels: apple, business, copyright, DRM, ethics, gametap, online distribution, virtual console posted by ruffin at 5/14/2007 11:18:00 PM

Friday, February 09, 2007
Google's Books, making the page into a TV show How long before we have Google Adwords-like advertisements in the next Crichton novel? Try, "It's already happened". I never knew how important in-content, relatively subdued advertising would become when I watched the World Cup back in '92 or so. Remember that? When Coke (or whoever) would have a constant image at the bottom of the telecast while the game was played? Certainly product placement has grown a bit, which Disney has masterfully taken to such heights that, for Disney, the product is the headliner of the show (Wiggles, Doodlebops, though they too learned from the capitalist's petri dish which is educational TV -- Sesame Street, Barney, etc). Still, these "unobstrusive" ads, unobtrusive only due to the over-conditioning society has received from TV (minus World Cup) and radio, are growing pretty quickly. As an aside, I've got the first volume of the Seasame Street "nostalgia" release on DVD, which includes the very first episode of the show to air. I was struck both by the new intro, where a cartoon character warns me that the show might not be applicable to the needs of today's pre-schooler (they've got to have a reason to make more, right?) and with the speed with which industry inserted a commercial into children's TV via the government, in this case, government grants for the show. In the episode, there's a five minute or so commercial for drinking milk that boggles my mind. I'll likely comment more later, but there's your typical 1960s film strip, deep, masculine voice explaining why milk is good for everyone involved laid over a soundtrack of a 1960s style folk singer quietly extolling the benefits of milking to the happy cows, eating under shade trees, making the milk. This is something that deserves transcription, certainly. To end the aside, The Electric Company's early episodes rock. I could only wish for a show this educational to be released now. Between the Lions doesn't come close to the unabashed, direct, almost unconscious approach to learning to read The Electric Company provides. That, or, more likely, it did one heck of a job enculturating me. In either event, thanks, Cos, for taking on the job of being the godfather of a generation. I fear the demise of the printed book, though I'm intrigued by the possibility of ads to possibly provide books for free. I'm not sure you can ever kill the medium of the codex. It's simply too cheap to produce, too easy to transport, and inexpensive enough to replace that it can go anywhere with anyone. It is an extremely low-cost alternative to the Game Boy and Blackberry, and will on this point alone continue to exist for quite some time. But how will it become remediated by digital media, and for what effect? There, I'm extremely curious and suspicious. Labels: ads, copyright, Google, government, Sesame Street posted by ruffin at 2/09/2007 03:09:00 PM

Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Softonic's end run around copyright I've blamed Google for not allowing users access to more than one edition of some books online, effectively erasing access to those old versions in a 1984 style that would make Orwell proud. Well, now Softonic, apparently one of Europe's analogs for download.com or versiontracker.com, has pulled a fast one in the opposite direction. Softonic places themselves between users' access to the files they'd like to donate, and end users to download. It's skillfully arranged. Let's say I release version 1.0 of my software for free, and choose to make it available on Softonic. Now let's say that I release version 2.0 and want to charge, I don't know, $4.99. I pull down all my copies of 1.0 and update my listings online. Versiontracker.com, as an example, links directly to your site. They serve as a clearinghouse of links. Users search, hopefully (if you're versiontracker) click a few ads, and download directly from the site without ever going there. This seems like a pleasant enough tradeoff. Versiontracker allows you to find my software, and for that they get first crack at showing ads. I can easily halt access to the file since Versiontracker is not mirroring it; it's only on my server. Softonic never takes down version 1.0. The links to your "mirrors" of the software are gone, but they still have an accessible copy. If 1.0 does a decent job, will people shell out $5 to get the update from you, or will they download from Softonic? Now, a la used books, you're competing in large part with yourself. Bad? Not necessarily, but it is a pretty clear paradigmatic disconnect. I've often wondered about the potential harm of releasing a to-be-shareware app as a free demo first. You'd likely pick up a few users, and certainly later versions would be sharper, less buggy, and contain more features, but you'd always have to worry about competing with your historical selves. With a digital release, you've essentially created the possibility of there being limitless, all but free, copies of your "old edition." Taking down your copies solved the Versiontracker issue. But there will always be a few people hosting your file on some wacky ftp site, somewhere. You can't eliminate the production of the old edition; you can only seek to make it more difficult to find -- and therefore, a la the iTunes Music Store where it's often worth $0.99 a track not to have search for a song or worry about viruses, scarity means you'll have more people willing to pay. Okay, so here's the deal with Softonic. Softonic continues to mirror your file even after you've taken it down. Great. They charge a dollar for a user to download from their mirror. Less great. If you've taken down your old file from your site and done a good job getting it removed from other hosts, you're now in competition directly with Softonic-as-host. They are selling your software for a dollar when you're charging five. Is your upgrade worth the extra dough? If not, and especially in a case like this where the application doesn't offer a demo, Softonic's easily found mirror is awfully tempting. I'm not sure how I ultimately feel about hosting what were released as freely distributable files. Perhaps in this case it's the PodTube designer's fault for letting out a free 1.0. Though I can't say s/he should've known better, s/he could've, and that's the way the system runs, better or worse. I know I have zero sympathy for those who try to limit the sale of used books, and am against Google's remediation of books into a closely monitored, digital rare book room style end run around copyright. Softonic is doing precisely what I hope Google doesn't, but fear they will. Softonic is able to [and Google is increasingly putting itself in a position where it could]... 1.) limit access to files in ways we can assume the original author did not intend. 2.) directly profit from this ability to control access 3.) leverage its position from [ad supported] information clearinghouse to information broker. Perhaps this simply means I'm not for having a new medium influence the distribution of a legacy medium when such a change would benefit predominantly the proverbial fat cats. Regardless, it's an important distunction to make. Labels: copyright, shareware posted by ruffin at 2/06/2007 02:35:00 PM

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