[ale] [OT] rant - decadence in society - DRM

[Michael Trausch]

On 03/23/2011 10:58 AM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> Later in the message, I'm going to rant about DRM.  However, first, I
> want to rant about decadence.  You walk into a Target or Walmart or
> Costco or ANY store.  You look over your head, there is a camera
> pointing at you.  You get to the door to walk out, there is a canyon of
> sensors you have to pass through.  You go bowling, there's a policeman
> parked outside and officers roaming around in the building
> continuously.  Heck, you send your kid to a public school, and THEY have
> cameras, policemen, and metal detectors everywhere.  You go buy a pair
> of sneakers.  They have RFID tags built in.  Your wife or relative has a
> baby in the hospital.  They put a bar code on the mother's wrist and the
> baby's wrist so the baby doesn't get stolen!  (I appreciate the
> proactive stance by the way.)  You buy a Nintendo / Sony / Microsoft
> game console for you kid at Christmas.  Someone follows you home from
> the parking lot and robs you in your driveway and takes the unit.  You
> go to the thrift store, find that really neat thing you want, and put it
> in your cart, turn your back for 5 seconds, and someone takes it out of
> your cart and buys it right out from under you.  60% - 70% of students
> surveyed say they cheat on tests.  WHY are all these things happening?
> You might say, because we can.  We have the technology for sensors and
> surveillance.  These are simply crimes of opportunity.

One could easily say that this is the Orwellian world that we've 
created.  The thing is that most people aren't bothered by such things, 
and so they're implicitly allowed by society.  I don't like it anymore 
than you do, but I don't see what can be done about it.

> I don't believe that is solely the case.  Caveat, I'm only 45, but I'm

Only?  ;-)

> going to be speculating about events of the past.  I could be entirely
> wrong, but I don't think so.  Now, obviously, you can go back to the
> bible and read about criminals and thieves all the way back 2000 years
> ago.  We've always had policemen, jails, and criminals.  Let's do a
> thought experiment, as Albert Einstein was fond of.  Imagine we're back
> in the 1700's, the early founding stages of our nation, with a twist.
> Imagine we have the culture of yesterday, with the technology of today.
> Compensate in the thought experiment for the difference in population,
> but, imagine they had the internet, they had the electricity, the
> stores, the appliances, the cars, etc.  Do you believe that a citizen in
> New England in the 1700's would go into a Target store and have a camera
> pointing in his face at the checkout?  Do you believe he would go
> bowling and have policemen looking over his shoulder.  Do you believe he
> would be worried about his baby being stolen from the hospital?  Do you
> believe he would be worried about having the game he bought for
> Christmas stolen from him in his driveway?  Even accounting for the
> random acts of violence that occur in any culture, do you think these
> things would be a common occurrence back then?  I, for one, do not think so.

I am not sure that I could answer one way or another on that.  We didn't 
do any sort of monitoring then like we do now, largely because in order 
to do so, we would have had to have committed a massive number of people 
to the task.  It was inconvenient and expensive.  Monitoring these days 
has become more or less automatic when it comes to keeping monitor data 
for future analysis, and as far as real-time monitoring, even a good 
chunk of that is automatic for various things.

> I believe that, over the last hundred years, and particularly over the
> last 70 years, this nation has seen a substantial increase in decadence,
> a substantial decrease in morals, a substantial decrease in ethics, a
> substantial increase in crime.  I believe these changes have occurred at
> a rate even faster than the increases in population.  I believe that we,
> as a culture, are generally more decadent than were were 200 years ago.
> We have, in my opinion, to an alarming degree, lost some of the most
> important parts of our heritage.  We have largely left the time when
> honor, and integrity were the critical foundations of our psychology and
> our culture.  I am afraid for our culture, because I believe that, when
> honor and integrity are no longer the baseline for the culture, that the
> culture will self destruct.

I think that you're probably right.  Rare it is to see people who are, 
IMHO, paragons of ethics.  I think that most parents do not take the 
time to educate their children on what ethical behavior is, let alone 
how to use their own critical thinking skills.

A lot of the time that I have spoken with others, I've been told that 
teaching my son how to use critical thinking skills will backfire on me. 
  I don't see how.  He's going to make mistakes, he's going to get 
things wrong, and it's our job (those of us in the house) as his parents 
to get him to *make* those mistakes, and subsequently use those critical 
thinking skills to learn from them.  Otherwise, what's the point?  We're 
here to help him learn, and grow, and hopefully become a decent person.

That said, I think that we probably differ a bit on what that means.

> Fast forward back to today.  Let's talk about intellectual property or
> IP.  Here's the definition from dictionary.com:
>
> intellectual property - property that results from original creative
> thought, as patents, copyright material, and trademarks.
>
> That's not the greatest definition in my opinion, but we'll go with it.
> There are two critical components of the definition.  The first is
> property.  Property conveys rights of control, privacy, and ownership.
> (PS - I'm not a lawyer.)  The laws of all civilized nations recognize
> the existence of IP.  Then, there is the part about creative thought.
> So, how does creative thought manifest itself in the real world and
> become property.  Typically, it will be in the form of a design, a
> pattern, a picture, a musical performance, a movie, a book, a thesis,
> etc.  Copyright laws generally protect written property and
> performances.  Patents generally protect designs.  We could debate
> endlessly about the appropriateness of these laws.  I, for one, have a
> problem with software patents.  Regardless, the laws are on the books,
> and we should honor them until we change them, in general.  These laws
> give the author or creator of IP the exclusive right to control its
> distribution and / or marketing, control its reproduction or
> replication, control it's performance (if applicable), and control
> derivative works made from it.

I do not subscribe to the school of thought that says we should honor 
laws simply because the laws are written.  Whether an action is legal or 
illegal is not my primary decision point---and it never will be.  In 
fact, it is pretty low on the list.  If I were to take an action and 
that action happens to be illegal, I might consider the question of why 
it was made illegal in the first place.  And I might even learn 
something from that particular line of thinking and decide that the 
action itself really isn't something I should do.  But if I arrive at 
the decision that something is unethical or improper, it's not because 
"the law says so".  Our laws are created by idiots just like those that 
exist in the majority of our society, and a fair number of them are 
themselves unethical or improper.

Case in point:  In Georgia it is illegal to sell things that are 
flavored like marijuana (see O.C.G.A. § 16-13-30.6, titled "Prohibition 
on purchase and sale of marijuana flavored products").  Why?  What 
purpose does that serve, really?  This particular section of the 
O.C.G.A. contains a litany of "findings" regarding marijuana, ending 
with the following four "findings":

   - The sale of marijuana flavored products, including lollipops and
     gum drops, which claim "every lick is like taking a hit" is a
     marketing ploy that perpetuates an unhealthy culture and should
     not be permitted in the State of Georgia;

   - Marijuana flavored products are a threat to minors in the State of
     Georgia because such products give the false impression that
     marijuana is fun and safe;

   - Marijuana flavored products packaged as candy or lollipops falling
     into the hands of unsuspecting minors may serve as a gateway to
     future use of marijuana and other drugs; and

   - Merchants who sell marijuana flavored products are promoting
     marijuana use and creating new customers for drug dealers in
     the State of Georgia.

(These "findings" are O.C.G.A. § 16-13-30.6 ¶ (b) (8) through (b) (11), 
inclusive.)

The law prohibits anyone to sell marijuana flavored products to minors, 
and prohibits minors from representing themselves as adults for the 
purpose of obtaining marijuana flavored products.  What?  Seriously? 
We're talking about something that is _flavored_ like a controlled 
substance becoming a controlled substance because of its _flavor_? 
Don't the lawmakers of this state have anything better to do with their 
time?

Where is the O.C.G.A. statutes that make it possible for the people to 
use powers of initiative or referendum.  Oops, I forgot, they're not 
there.  Our state would rather spend its time creating jokes and 
embedding them into the state law.

As an aside, I *still* want to know why marijuana --- a completely 
natural substance --- is illegal.  And why tobacco (also a completely 
natural substance) is controlled.  It seems perfectly plain to me that 
it is perfectly illogical to make laws to, in effect, attempt to control 
nature.  There is even some evidence that the government has only 
succeeded in making the marijuana plants more robust in its efforts in 
the past nearly 100 years to eradicate it.  *shrug*

In the same area of our state law, "model glue" is also made into a 
controlled substance (see O.C.G.A. § 16-13-90 through § 16-13-96).

We might as well rip out all of title 16 chapter 13 and replace it with 
the text "It shall be unlawful to do anything which may reduce an 
individual's life expectancy or be misused in any manner which may cause 
the illness or death of an individual.  The State of Georgia shall have 
the paternal authority to enforce this code section by any means deemed 
fit by the State of Georgia."  Because that is what it amounts to.

There are so many things wrong with the law --- and in a state like 
Georgia, it's highly unlikely that they will actually ever be fixed 
unless the legislature grants the power of self-government to the people 
--- that it boggles the mind.  Some of these statutes only exist because 
people do not have the power to have them removed, and some legislator 
felt that it was important to make the government a more paternal figure 
than it is.

Within the context of ethics, I believe that laws that take away the 
freedom of an individual or a group of individuals are themselves wholly 
unethical, for the reason that they unduly restrict the actions which an 
individual may choose to take.  If a person wants to stick needles in 
their arms on a park bench or on a MARTA bus for all the world to see, I 
say that they should go for it.  It should be legal to do so.  It is a 
better anti-advertisement than any of the stupid PSAs that we piss money 
down the drain on.  Ever seen a heroin addict, or a crackhead?  I mean a 
real one, not something fictionalized as on the television.  They are 
scary-looking individuals, and they often look dead already.  I think 
that allowing them to be out in public and allowing all that stuff to 
happen right in the plain light of day would be a more effective 
deterrent than anything we've wasted money on so far.  And hey, if you 
want to kill yourself with drugs, that's fine, too.  Just do everyone 
else a favor and hurry it up: overdose early, if you please.

[snip]
> So, we have the perfect storm, a huge decrease in morals and ethics, a
> huge increase in disrespect for other people and property of all types,
> and a whole genre of DATA which is considered by the laws of all
> civilized nations to be PROPERTY, and the availability of technology
> that makes it incredibly easy to STEAL this genre of PROPERTY.

It is this line of thinking that has made it possible to discover 
applications of equations and then apply for protection on the use of 
the equation.  I'm sorry, but to me that just doesn't pass for anything. 
  Insofar as patents go, it's turned into a game of creatively 
disguising the thing being patented.  If you can take an equation and 
somehow convince the patent office that it's not an equation that you're 
patenting, but some new invention, it'll be granted.  That is how 
Microsoft managed to patent things like the red squiggly line in its 
background spell-checking mechanism.  (AIUI, that patent was eventually 
thrown out.)

Now, if I write a software program, I feel that I am certainly entitled 
to _copyright_ protection.  I can copyright the code that implements the 
system.  That said, I feel that current copyright law is absolutely 
stifling.  A copyright term of $AUTHOR_LIFE + 75 (or however many it is) 
years is simply too long.  A copyright term of 7 years would be 
preferable for most types of media, including video and software 
programs, IMHO.

> Let's talk about Avatar, the recent phenomenally successful movie which
> I happen to like.  What is the PRODUCT?  What is the PROPERTY involved?
> Is the property involved $ 2 worth of plastic, paper, and ink in the DVD
> and case?  Of course not.  We're talking about INTELLECTUAL property.
> The property, which conveys all the rights described above to the owner,
> is the script, and the performance of that script embodied on a reel of
> plastic film, a DVD, or even a hard drive.  Now, the producers of Avatar
> spent about $ 300 million to produce the film.  I'm not even going to
> talk about whether that's too much and how much actors get paid, etc.
> It is what it is.  To make the film, they hired thousands of people and
> contracted for hundreds of services.  Remember what I said about people
> having the right to get paid for their work.  They invested this money
> in the hopes that the film would be popular enough to make them back
> their investment plus profit.  As it turns out, it was phenomenally
> successful and turned in revenues of around $ 2.8 billion if I recall.
> They absolutely have the right to get paid for their work.

Well, those who did the work have the right to refuse to work for free 
(as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread).   However, things 
are created all the time that are unsuccessful; there is no right to get 
paid for having something created---if nobody wants it, nobody will pay 
for it!  But the individual actors (in this context I use the word to 
mean "anyone who contributed to the development/creation of the 
product", be they producers, programmers, engineers, or actors in the 
stage sense of the word) certainly have the right to elect to not work 
if there will be no payment from the business or individual that is 
putting the work together.

I do think that you picked an excellent example, though: society is 
willing to pay nearly 3 BILLION dollars for a MOVIE (and it wasn't even 
a documentary or something otherwise educational or beneficial to 
society!) but it is not willing to pay for other things that it uses and 
derives benefit from on the regular.  How many people on this list paid 
to see the movie Avatar in the theater (note: I'm not one of them)?  Of 
those of you who did, how many people donated at least the cost of that 
movie ticket to a project or non-profit that backs projects that you use 
and care for (admittedly on _this_ list I expect that to be most, but 
this is also not the primary audience that I am talking about)?

In 2009, the GNOME Foundation received $295k, and paid out $250k (if I'm 
reading their 2009 Annual Report correctly, that is).  That's good, but 
I have to wonder: why didn't they raise more?

In December, 2009, SPI received $3,804 of income, and had $8,049 in 
expenses.  Ouch.  (SPI, for those who don't know, is a foundation that 
backs Debian, PostgreSQL, and other projects.)

In 2009, the Software Freedom Conservancy received $191k, with $71k in 
expenses.  It supports a fair number of projects.

I couldn't find numbers for the Linux Foundation.

For all three of the former, if every individual and business that 
benefited from the projects they support contributed just a few bucks, 
they'd likely have been able to hire more people to work on things.  All 
of us know that majority of the developers that work on these projects 
are volunteers.  But think of things like Samba, which could seriously 
use more full-time developers (especially for the research and 
development that is going into Samba 4).  Or Twisted, which could use 
more full-time help for mundane tasks like porting to Python 3.  Or 
Wine, which I'm sure we _all_ know needs more full time help than can 
probably possibly be purchased.  If they could pay 30 people to do 
nothing but dissect Windows APIs and write clean-room reports on them, 
and pay another five people to implement all of the things coming from 
the clean-room reports, Wine would be a lot farther along than it is 
today (though I am not saying that they're not making excellent 
progress; but full-time, paid help would certainly further it for such 
tasks).

However, our society clearly has different priorities.  We'll spend $3 
BILLION on a movie, but not even a single million on three key 
foundations that work on software that could seriously use the funds.  Wow.

> The problem is, that with modern technology, they don't have to get paid
> for their work.  If you went to see a movie at the 40's, you physically
> went to the theater and watched it.  Of course, we still do this today.
> You really couldn't steal it, since you had to be there, and there were
> no portable cameras that you could hide in your hat.  Now, as we all
> know, with modern technology, you can pop the DVD in the PC, rip it, and
> have a copy of the movie on your hard drive.  Then, if you are not an
> ethical person, you can have the computer make an infinite number of
> copies of the intellectual property, and distribute that intellectual
> property to any number of people.

Here is where we start to differ in our opinion, I think.

Imagine that you have a first-run TV show that you watch, and imagine 
that you have a DVR or somesuch that records the things.  Imagine that 
you have a failure.  Imagine that the network that airs the show does 
not have the show on their Web site, doesn't make it available on 
something like Netflix or Hulu, and generally speaking makes it 
impossible to catch it in any other way.  And imagine that you've 
searched through all the aforementioned things, because you want to 
watch the show without crossing into gray areas or simply breaking the 
law outright.

Is it unethical to then acquire the episode from BitTorrent?  I do not 
think so.  Particularly if you're sought for other methods to view it 
that would incorporate advertisement revenue to the network.

Let's look at another issue; on this issue, I expect that I am at odds 
with majority of the people in the world, including on this list: 
advertisements on Web sites.  Ad blocking software is something that is 
very popular.  I think the use of ad blocking software (particularly in 
its default configuration of "block everything") is highly unethical. 
If I am reading Slashdot, or Ars Technica, or someone's blog, and they 
have advertisements that are there because that is one method used to 
cover the costs of providing the content, hosting infrastructure, or 
whatever, then it's a perfectly fair trade.  In exchange for providing 
me free access to your content, I will view your ads (though 95% or more 
of the time, I won't click on them, simply because I've no need nor 
desire to do so).  I'm honestly surprised that such sites have not made 
it a requirement that the advertisements be loaded and displayed before 
the rest of the content is served or simply started mandating that 
people subscribe to view content.

Now, to be fair, I'm not one-sided on this issue:  I think that Web 
sites have a responsibility to keep the advertising from being overly 
intrusive.  Keep the ads inline, at the _very_ least; pop-ups are overly 
intrusive, especially the ones that appear when you try to click 
somewhere on the page to get around pop-up blockers.  And if you have to 
use Flash for advertising, at least be kind enough to use a Flash 
program that is well-tested on multiple platforms and doesn't bring a 
browser to its knees or peg the processor.

"What about sites that fail to hold up their end?" is a question that I 
am often ask.  My answer?  Don't go!  Simple as that.  That's perfectly 
ethical.  Two wrongs don't make a right, and for that matter if such a 
site then decided that they would go to great lengths to inhibit people 
from viewing the site if they haven't loaded and displayed the 
advertisements, people are just setting themselves up to get all pissed 
off when that happens.  The wrong message is sent all the way around.

If everyone simply went around sites that displayed intrusive 
advertising, I think that they'd get the clue.  However, ad blockers 
really send a different message; they send the message that "I want your 
content for free," and it is, IMHO, no more ethical then outright theft is.

[snip]
> So, I have to ask myself, if I did produce such a movie or book, would I
> use copy protection on it.  As much as I hate to say it, I would
> seriously consider it.  The more the project cost me, and the more it
> was likely to be stolen, the more seriously I would consider it.  Now,
> some of you will probably flame me (please don't) about how ineffective
> that would be.  That's not the issue.  Copy protection would stop casual
> customers from casual theft.  Those knowledgeable and determined
> crackers might bypass it, and might steal the work, and might distribute
> the work.  HOWEVER, that requires motive and intent to break the law and
> commit the theft.  That is more likely to create an audit trail and that
> put's them into the ballpark of a prosecutable and provable offense.  If
> I was really concerned about theft, I would have the content watermarked
> in such a way that I could trace any illegal copies.

Hey, that's better than DRM.  I'm more than happy to buy content that is 
watermarked and traceable to me.  Primitive?  Yes.  But it's something 
that can be done safely and securely, and without any unintended 
consequences relating to the failure of DRM to be fully portable or work 
in all instances.  I would *very much* prefer to buy content that is 
watermarked than DRM'd.  ****VERY**** much.

If I buy a song in MP3 or Ogg format from a Web site on the Internet, or 
a PDF, Mobipocket, or EPUB book, I have _absolutely_ no problem with a 
watermark being installed within the file.  And you know, watermarking 
can even be done in ways that it would be very difficult to remove the 
watermarks.  Imagine a scheme where when a user purchases a piece of 
media, a UUID is generated, and the UUID is the basis for a watermark. 
Then, the watermark could be embedded into the content using 
steganography, with pseudo-random padding, or maybe a hash of the file 
without the watermarks, or maybe a hash of the file up to the point of 
the current watermark, or something around the UUID to fill up blocks 
that can be passed to an encryption algorithm and ensure that the 
encrypted blob is always different---effectively using some sort of 
algorithmic IV to ensure that it's "just a blob".  Of course, no header, 
no footer, and some sort of algorithm would be required in order to 
ensure that the watermark could be read later for verification.  That 
would _rock_, too, because then it would be very easy to trace content 
back to its purchaser without unduly crippling it, _and_ it would be 
possible to detect whether or not the file has been tampered with in a 
safe manner.

For that matter, the watermark could be something that was "peppered" 
throughout the file with error correction code built-in, such that for 
very large files it would be very easy to find the watermark if it is 
something that you know to look for and are aware of how it is done, but 
very difficult to detect otherwise, and innocuous to any software that 
adheres to the standards for the file format.  Such steganography is 
possible in virtually every file format, if it is very carefully 
designed, and for that matter even plain text files could have 
watermarks applied in such a fashion (though admittedly the chance that 
they would be destroyed is remarkably high, since plain text files are 
often edited and thus the marks would move around and possibly be edited 
away).  But for things like PostScript, PDF, PNG, JPEG, EPUB, 
Mobipocket, and virtually any other type of format that uses container 
file formats, it'd very likely work.

I would absofsckinglutely **LOVE** it if that became the standard means 
of protecting content.  A non-intrusive, freedom-protecting method for 
protecting content by tracking things back to the original purchaser of 
a copyrighted work?  That would be AWESOME.  I'm dead serious. 
Something that says "Yes, FN M. LN is the person that bought this copy, 
and now it is all over the Internet, oops."

For that matter, it would likely have the side effect of creating a 
trail that could be followed in the event of certain types of data 
theft.  It would be at least somewhat likely that it would be possible 
to determine the difference between "person X torrented the file all 
over the Internet and wilfully committed piracy" vs. "person X was the 
victim of a breakin because they're a moron and their password was 
'password' and someone stole the content and they are the ones that 
torrented it".

It would have the beneficial side effect of breaking privacy-intruding 
online storage systems.  You know, the ones that claim that they 
deduplicate all the storage, and that if user X has uploaded file Y, 
then user Z attempts to upload file Y again, file Y won't be uploaded 
(or stored) a second time?  Yeah, forget that.  The hashes that would be 
used would be different for every single file, so you now have more 
privacy as a side effect.  Most excellent!

I was going to reply to the rest, but I have run out of time.  I will 
try to find time later to do just that.

	--- Mike