Python obfuscation

S

Steven D'Aprano

What I think of this thesis is on a par of what I think of this way of
spelling the possessive adjective "its" (and equally unprintable in
polite company).

Aside: given that "it's" is "it is", how would you spell the possessive
case of it?
If I could choose to eradicate only one of these two
from the world, I'd opt for the spelling -- the widespread and totally
unfounded belief in the worth of obfuscation is also damaging, but less
so, since it only steals some time and energy from developers who (if
they share this belief) can't be all that good anyway;-).

Not that I disagree with you about obfuscation in general, but I can think
of one particular usage case for obfuscation which is neither useless nor
morally suspect:

"Now listen carefully class, your homework for this week is to write a
program to blurgle a frobnitz. As a test of correctness, your program
must return the same results as the test function blurglise. Before you
get any clever ideas of copying the code from blurglise, keep in mind
firstly that the source code is obfuscated, and secondly that I am not an
idiot, I will recognise my own code if you try to pass it off as yours."
 
M

Mike Meyer

My, we're about to get *seriously* off topic.

Steven D'Aprano said:
And that is the million dollar question.

So-called "intellectual property" is a government-granted monopoly which
is not based on any principle of ownership. Ideas are not something you
can own in any real sense (as opposed to the legal fiction), ideas are
something that you can *have* -- but having had an idea, you can't
naturally prevent others from having the same idea independently, or
making use of your idea if you tell them about it -- and should you tell
them your idea so that now they have it as well, that does not diminish
the fact that you also have that idea.

It's a common misconception that ideas are protected by intellectual
property laws. They're not. Well, they're not supposed to be.

Copyright doesn't protect ideas, plot lines or similar
things. Copyright protects expression of those things in a tangible
medium. So if you read a book, then write a book with the same plot
line, you aren't in violation of copyright. Characters can be
protected by copyright, so you do have to be a bit careful about that.

Patents aren't supposed to protect ideas - they're supposed to protect
inventions. That's a fuzzy line, and the interpretation of 35 USC
Section 101 that allows the patenting of software has made it even
fuzzier. This broad interpretation has recently been used to patent
story lines <URL:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051103183218268 >, which is
close enough to patenting ideas that I can't really tell the
difference.
Given the absolute lack of real evidence that strong "intellectual
property" laws are good for either innovation or the economy, and given
the absolute artificiality of treating ideas as if they were scarce goods,
I don't understand why the artificial monopoly rights of copyright holders
are allowed to trump the natural rights of copyright users.

Because the copyright holders are organized, and have money to
influence congress that outweighs the funds that - since they're
generally unorganized - individual copyright holders have
available. So you get laws that help copyright holders enforce and
extend their copyright at the expense of the rights of the general
public.

<mike
 
A

Alex Martelli

Steven D'Aprano said:
Aside: given that "it's" is "it is", how would you spell the possessive
case of it?

As I was thought and have always seen it spelled in good literature --
"its". I'm not at all tempted to affix "'s" to make possessives out of
pronouns -- "I's", "you's", "we's"...?!-) Remember, English is not my
native language, so what I have internalized are _rules_, not a native
speaker's magical communion with the language...;-)

Not that I disagree with you about obfuscation in general, but I can think
of one particular usage case for obfuscation which is neither useless nor
morally suspect:

"Now listen carefully class, your homework for this week is to write a
program to blurgle a frobnitz. As a test of correctness, your program
must return the same results as the test function blurglise. Before you
get any clever ideas of copying the code from blurglise, keep in mind
firstly that the source code is obfuscated, and secondly that I am not an
idiot, I will recognise my own code if you try to pass it off as yours."

Sure, that's one example -- but the instructor SHOULD really consider
placing burglise on a secure server on the intranet instead, making it
available (via CGI, webservice, whatever) to check input/output
relationships, rather than making the obfuscated code available and
raising questions of obfuscation and reverse engineering.


Alex
 
T

The Eternal Squire

Without copyright, how could one possibly earn a living writing a
novel? And I submit that many ISD's are only a single person burning
with that one software idea of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Great
American Novel. Are we to punish that impulse by denying that person
a legal monopoly on that idea?

I believe piracy is bad for everyone: the consumer, the writer, and
the country as a whole. I don't oppose copyleft, but then, I don't
oppose copyright either. Let's distribute the former for free, and
honor the need for the writer of the latter to earn a living.

The Eternal Squire
 
Y

Yu-Xi Lim

Alex said:
It's interesting, in this context, that Civilization IV is mostly
written in Python (interfaced to some C++ via BoostPython).

It took me 12 seconds with a search engine to determine that CivIV's
protection uses "SafeDisc 4.60" and 30 more seconds to research that
issue enough to convince myself that there's enough information out
there that I could develop a crack for the thing (if I was interested in
so doing), quite apart from any consideration of the languages and
libraries used to develop it -- and I'm not even a particularly good
cracker, nor am I wired into any "underground channels", just looking at
information easily and openly available out on the web and in the index
of a major search engine.

Yes, I never said it's uncrackable. The cracks available are iffy and
the alternatives are sufficiently inconvenient to dissuade the
less-savvy user from attempting them. In which case, the copy protection
has succeeded.
What I think of this thesis is on a par of what I think of this way of
spelling the possessive adjective "its" (and equally unprintable in
polite company). If I could choose to eradicate only one of these two
from the world, I'd opt for the spelling -- the widespread and totally
unfounded belief in the worth of obfuscation is also damaging, but less
so, since it only steals some time and energy from developers who (if
they share this belief) can't be all that good anyway;-).

The level of pedantry here is amazing and it doesn't apply only to
programming languages. While we are discussing my typos, I'd like to
note that I may accidentally interchange "you're" and "your", "there",
"they're", and "their", and a bunch of other homonyms.

I hadn't seen any damage done from misusing "it's". Certainly not on par
with the Sony case which Mike Meyer cites as evidence against copy
protection (and presumably obfuscation, which was the topic of the
discussion)



This topic seems to be drifting. I thought I might clarify what I mean
by "code obfuscation" to get things back on track.

Code obfuscation is a transformation of the program (whether at source
code level, intermediate object code level, binary executable level,
etc) to hinder (prevention seems impossible) reverse engineering
(attempts to determine the workings of the code, to modify the function
of the code, etc). While there are many possible transformations that
can be done on programs (compression, run-time optimizations, etc), the
key here is the intent to hinder reverse engineering. I hope this is
agreeable to everyone.

Python already conveniently supports certain transformations on
programs. Off the top of my head, I think of compiled bytecode (pyc and
pyo files), and modules in zip archives. Any of these can be used as a
means of obfuscation. (Compiled languages naturally undergo
transformations which tend to have more effectiveness against reverse
engineering)

Now, to address points made by Mike Meyer. He says that obfuscation adds
steps to the release process and also cites Sony's XCP fiasco as an
example of unseen costs of "copy protection".

Indeed, everything has a cost, and I was wrong in saying "free".
However, if convenient language-supported transforms are used, the
direct cost of using obfuscation would be miniscule in comparison to
just about everything else. Implementing it should be one simple step,
and testing it shouldn't be required (if you reasonably assume the
language isn't broken).

I am going to ignore certain aspects of the Sony XCP case, such as the
bad EULA and the bad PR (we shall leave that to the lawyers and
marketing folk and stick to something we programmers can actually fix).
What we have left is a broken software implementation of copy
protection. If language-supported (or even OS-supported, which would
have helped Sony*) transformations are used, we can expect to rule out
such brokenness, i.e. no obfuscation-induced incompatibilities and
related help-desk calls. This further reduces the unexpected costs of
code obfuscation to zero (did I miss anything?)

This form of obfuscation is certainly weak, but given that the costs are
so tiny, why not use it? Even if you could gain one customer (and a few
dollars if you're a shareware developer), you have more than recuperated
your costs. If you don't, you probably lost 5 minutes of development
time. Is this a worthwhile gamble? I believe so.

Mike Meyer may reiterate his point about "keeping honest people honest"
and thus such obfuscation has little ("insignificant") benefit. Whether
this little difference is "insignificant" is up to the
developer/publisher/etc to decide. My thesis (to borrow Alex Martelli's
language) is that it is possible to obtain *some* benefit from
obfuscation with *minimal* costs.

There are physical examples of attempts to hinder reverse engineering:
glueing the cases of devices shut and sealing integrated circuits in a
blob of epoxy, among others. With such examples, I don't think it's
unreasonable to believe that similar possibilities exist for software
products. This is not cited as concrete evidence, just something that
hints at a possibility.


* Someone may start crying out, "DRM-supporter! Burn him at the stake!"
I think code obfuscation and DRM should be approached as seperate
issues, unless one believes that the user's right to software includes
unlimited access to the source code. That itself is also a separate
discussion, imo.
 
Y

Yu-Xi Lim

Alex said:
There is no effective manner of protecting your code, except running it
only on well-secured machines you control yourself. If you distribute
your code, in ANY form, and it's at all interesting to people with no
interest in respecting the law, then, it WILL be cracked (and if users
choose to respect the law, then you need no "protecting").

Indeed. An this extends to web services too. If you have input which can
be observed (or even better, controlled) and output that can be observed
too, one would be able to infer the workings of the code (reverse
engineering in one of its purest forms).

If your business strategy relies heavily on a proprietary algorithm or
even something as weak as lock-in via a proprietary "un-interoperable"
data format, then web services is not the final answer. It may work for
certain applications (Microsoft's for example) where the cost of reverse
engineering is equivalent to the cost of building from scratch.
 
P

Paul Rubin

The Eternal Squire said:
Without copyright, how could one possibly earn a living writing a
novel?

This guy seems to be doing ok: http://craphound.com
His publishers are the only ones allowed to sell his novels commercially,
but you can download them all and print them out noncommercially for
your own personal enjoyment or to share with your friends. No obfuscation
is needed.
And I submit that many ISD's are only a single person burning with
that one software idea of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Great
American Novel. Are we to punish that impulse by denying that
person a legal monopoly on that idea?

You know, there's lots of people who would like to make a living as
actors or musicians or novelists or whatever, and maybe they even have
enough talent and skill to do it, but for whatever reason it's just
not in the cards for them, copyright or not. So they do other things
instead. Maybe it's also not in the cards for some people to be
programmers even though they'd like to be, so they do other things
instead too. For the most part, I don't feel any sense of tragedy
about this.
I believe piracy is bad for everyone: the consumer, the writer, and
the country as a whole. I don't oppose copyleft, but then, I don't
oppose copyright either. Let's distribute the former for free, and
honor the need for the writer of the latter to earn a living.

Everyone has the right to try to earn a living from programming, but
no one is entitled to be guaranteed success at it.
 
B

Ben Finney

Yu-Xi Lim said:
Code obfuscation is a transformation of the program (whether at
source code level, intermediate object code level, binary executable
level, etc) to hinder (prevention seems impossible) reverse
engineering (attempts to determine the workings of the code, to
modify the function of the code, etc). While there are many possible
transformations that can be done on programs (compression, run-time
optimizations, etc), the key here is the intent to hinder reverse
engineering.

That's a workable definition.
I hope this is agreeable to everyone.

The definition is agreeably solid.

The intention is disagreeably sickening.
 
M

Mike Meyer

Yu-Xi Lim said:
Indeed, everything has a cost, and I was wrong in saying
"free". However, if convenient language-supported transforms are used,
the direct cost of using obfuscation would be miniscule in comparison
to just about everything else. Implementing it should be one simple
step, and testing it shouldn't be required (if you reasonably assume
the language isn't broken).

Failng to test what you ship is simply poor engineering and poor
marketing. If you're incompetent, you might skip those
steps. Otherwise, you have to test with obfuscation in place.
I am going to ignore certain aspects of the Sony XCP case, such as the
bad EULA and the bad PR (we shall leave that to the lawyers and
marketing folk and stick to something we programmers can actually
fix). What we have left is a broken software implementation of copy
protection. If language-supported (or even OS-supported, which would
have helped Sony*) transformations are used, we can expect to rule out
such brokenness, i.e. no obfuscation-induced incompatibilities and
related help-desk calls. This further reduces the unexpected costs of
code obfuscation to zero (did I miss anything?)

You ignored the fact that the *act* of copy protection cost them
customers. It wasn't the poor implementation or the EULA, it was the
fact that people who were denied their fair use rights returned or
refused to buy their product. The rest of it merely made it widely
publicized.
This form of obfuscation is certainly weak, but given that the costs
are so tiny, why not use it? Even if you could gain one customer (and
a few dollars if you're a shareware developer), you have more than
recuperated your costs. If you don't, you probably lost 5 minutes of
development time. Is this a worthwhile gamble? I believe so.

And if instead you lose one customer because you've denied them their
fair use rights, then your copy protection has lost you more in the
form of a cost that you overlooked than all the costs you actually
considered.
Mike Meyer may reiterate his point about "keeping honest people
honest" and thus such obfuscation has little ("insignificant")
benefit. Whether this little difference is "insignificant" is up to
the developer/publisher/etc to decide. My thesis (to borrow Alex
Martelli's language) is that it is possible to obtain *some* benefit
from obfuscation with *minimal* costs.

Actually, obfuscation by itself has *no* benefit. If all you do is
obfuscate the code, none of the pirates will ever notice - they'll
just copy the code without ever trying to read it. It's the copy
protection mechanisms you're trying to obfuscate that gains you the
alleged benefit. Once you provide a copy protection mechanism,
obfuscation has some benefit, though the costs aren't clearly minimal,
not if you're a cometent engineer. It's the benefits of the copy
protection that I claim are insignificant.

<mike
 
A

Alex Martelli

Yu-Xi Lim said:
Indeed. An this extends to web services too. If you have input which can
be observed (or even better, controlled) and output that can be observed
too, one would be able to infer the workings of the code (reverse
engineering in one of its purest forms).

....unless you have "nonobservable state", of course, in which case the
inference is conceptually impossible. For example, say that you have
developed a new and revolutionary system to predict weather, much better
than anything the competition has. You offer it as a for-pay web
service, the customer-supplied inputs being the space-time coordinates
at which prediction is required, while the customer-provided outputs are
a vector of possible weather conditions each with an attached
probability, just as they might be for ANY weather-prediction web
service, except that (by hypothesis, or else you won't make much money
on this;-) the outputs of your weather predictor match reality much
better than the competitors'. "To infer" whatever would essentially
mean to reinvent your whole "revolutionary system" from scratch.

Much the same would apply if what your system is able to predict better
than your competitors' is any other kind of phenomenon of economic
interest in a sufficiently complex real-world system -- from interest
rates to the probability that two would-be online daters will like each
other. And it doesn't have to be prediction -- one famous system where
ESR, as a consultant, advised his clients to keep their program a trade
secret, was "just" a better heuristic than any of their competitors' for
cutting a set of given shapes with automated tools out of a slab of
wood, if I recall correctly... a problem that's computationally
intractable to solve anything but heuristically, and a better heuristic
saves wood, worktime, and/or wear and tear on the tools, therefore is
worth money.

In practice, you ARE going to be able to operate your system
successfully bases on keeping a good innovative algorithm or heuristic
secret, for a while -- until somebody else independently reinvents it
(or, invents something even better, in which case your secret may become
irrelevant). IP protection is a possibility, but copyright per se might
be too weak, and whether patents apply in any given case is always
controversial (Europe soundly defeated a proposed software patent
directive, after a bitter fight, less than a year ago).

If your business strategy relies heavily on a proprietary algorithm or
even something as weak as lock-in via a proprietary "un-interoperable"
data format, then web services is not the final answer. It may work for
certain applications (Microsoft's for example) where the cost of reverse
engineering is equivalent to the cost of building from scratch.

....and the latter is going to be the case for many important
"proprietary algorithms", as above exemplified.

A cryptographically sound "proprietary data format" may be essentially
impossible to break, too -- although, differently from many potential
algorithms, it has per se no added value, and may run afoul of sensible
legislation (or sensible would-be customers), such as Massachussets',
mandating the use of standard data formats.


Alex
 
A

Alex Martelli

Yu-Xi Lim said:
I hadn't seen any damage done from misusing "it's". Certainly not on par

You should see my pharmacy bill for Maalox... and my liver ain't too
happy about it either;-)


Alex
 
A

Alex Martelli

Paul Rubin said:
This guy seems to be doing ok: http://craphound.com
His publishers are the only ones allowed to sell his novels commercially,
but you can download them all and print them out noncommercially for
your own personal enjoyment or to share with your friends. No obfuscation
is needed.

One might also quip (not truthfully in Cory's specific case, I hasten to
add!-) that many of today's novels are intrinsically obfuscated enough
to need no further technological help on that front;-).

Quips aside, the question is a sensible one to ask -- not as a
rhetorical question, as TES apparently intended, of course, and not just
about novels (many different creative endeavours may require different
answers). The "novel" as a specific literary form is not that old, just
a few centuries, but the issues were not very different for many other
literary forms over the ages and cultures, and many different answers
have been given or attempted.

For example, Virgil was writing poems (epic and otherwise), not novels,
but that's not very relevant to the question of how he made a living;
the classic solution, in his case, was to find rich patrons willing to
pay him to do so. Of course, there are obvious problems with this
model... for example, Virgil was paid to write the Aeneid because his
patrons liked its patriotism (as well as its towering artistic
qualities), but a work with equally good art but an anti-patriotic
ideology would have been much harder to monetize at that time (and also
risked landing the author in the soup, as Ovid found out, but that's
another issue, quite unrelated to monetization).

Zooming forwards a couple of millennia, we see the model of
"serialization" -- having the novel published in periodic installments
by a magazine. Avid readers, we're told, crowded the piers of New York
waiting for ship to land which carried the magazine with the latest
installment of some Dickens novel -- and Dumas and Sue, in France, had
fully comparable success in similar ways. At that time, copyright
existed, in theory, but practically wasn't very well enforced (most
particularly, I believe, in the USA, where the probability of a British
publisher of actually enforcing a copyright was laughably low...) --
nevertheless, the reasonable cheapness of magazines coupled with the
readers' urgency for the next installment let these authors earn a
comfortable living anyway. Here, the problem is presumably that you
need VERY popular novels for this to work -- but then, a tiny fraction
of novelists actually make a comfortable living from just their novels,
even with today's monetization approaches.

Modern equivalent of serialization (publishing one chapter at a time on
the web, the next chapter to come only if the author receives enough
payment for the previous one) have been attempted, but without much
success so far; however, the holy grail of "micropayments" might yet
afford a rebirth for such a model -- if paying for a chapter was
extremely convenient and cheap, enough people might choose to do so
rather than risk the next chapter never appearing. Remember that, by
totally disintermediating publishers and bookstores, a novelist may
require maybe 1/10th of what the book would need to gross in stores, in
order to end up with the same amount of cash in his or her pockets.

One could go on for a long time, but the key point is that there may or
may not exist viable monetization models for all sorts of endeavours,
including the writing of novels, depending on a lot of other issues of
social as well as legal structures. Let's not be blinded by one model
that has worked sort of decently for a small time in certain sets of
conditions, into believing that model is the only workable one today or
tomorrow, with conditions that may be in fact very different.


Alex
 
M

Mike Meyer

Paul Rubin said:
This guy seems to be doing ok: http://craphound.com
His publishers are the only ones allowed to sell his novels commercially,
but you can download them all and print them out noncommercially for
your own personal enjoyment or to share with your friends. No obfuscation
is needed.

Not really a good counterexample, because "His publishers are the only
ones allowed to sell his novels commercially" is only possible because
of copyright. Without that, anyone could take the downloadable copy of
his novels and start competing with his publishers - presumably with
lower overhead, because they didn't have to pay Cory.

Asking about novels is an excellent question - it's one of the few
forms of copyrightable material where it's not the final end product
and you have to give the public access to the media for them to use
it. If either one of those isn't true, you can probably find a
business model that doesn't depend on copyright.

<mike
 
S

Steven D'Aprano

And if instead you lose one customer because you've denied them their
fair use rights, then your copy protection has lost you more in the
form of a cost that you overlooked than all the costs you actually
considered.

In a competitive marketplace, why would I choose to buy DRMed software if
there is a non-DRMed equivalent with the same functionality and equivalent
cost? DRM is both an extra cost and a lower functionality applied to the
software: an extra cost because if I can only run three simultaneous
instances when I want four, then I need to pay more; lower functionality
because things I may wish to do (like lock the original disk in the
fireproof safe and install off a backup copy) may be impossible.

If you are supplying to a non-competitive market, you may decide that you
don't mind losing some sales. In non-competitive markets, the pressure to
improve the ratio of functionality to cost is weak.

[snip]
Actually, obfuscation by itself has *no* benefit. If all you do is
obfuscate the code, none of the pirates will ever notice - they'll just
copy the code without ever trying to read it. It's the copy protection
mechanisms you're trying to obfuscate that gains you the alleged
benefit.

I don't think you mean copy protection, as in preventing copies -- it is
difficult for an application to prevent the OS from making physical
copies, and by difficult I mean "essentially impossible". Perhaps you mean
access control, for example the software will only run for three people
simultaneously.
Once you provide a copy protection mechanism, obfuscation has
some benefit, though the costs aren't clearly minimal, not if you're a
cometent engineer. It's the benefits of the copy protection that I claim
are insignificant.

That's not quite true -- there may be instances where there is a real or
perceived benefit from keeping the algorithms used secret: perhaps you
have found a more efficient way to do something, or perhaps you just want
to hide from your users just how bad your code really is, or perhaps
you've conned^H^H^H^H convinced them to pay a premium price for reduced
functionality and don't want them bypassing your access control mechanisms.

The problem is, developers often have a ridiculously over-inflated opinion
of the worth of their code, and the business people behind them even more
so. Everybody[1] thinks that their two-bit Visual Basic calculator app is
going to be the next Microsoft Windows and make them a fortune, but only
if they keep the source code secret. Because so much code is secret,
people fail to appreciate just how little innovation there really is in
the IT industry, and imagine that just because they personally sweated
blood for months writing the code, it must be valuable.

Anyway, I think this is all a storm in a teacup. With the possible
exception of game console software, I think the idea of shrink-wrapped
software generally and software licencing particularly is a temporary
aberration. In a decade, software obfuscation will only exist as a way for
hackers to prove how clever they are, as in the Obfuscated C Contest.
Until then, well, if you think you can a commercial advantage by annoying
your customers, knock yourselves out.





[1] By "everyone" I mean "lots of people who should know better".
 
S

Steven D'Aprano

Without copyright, how could one possibly earn a living writing a
novel?

I don't know. How did William Shakespeare make a living from writing plays
and sonnets and poems? How did Sir Walter Scott make a living from writing
novels? How do chefs make a living from creating new recipes, and stand-up
comedians from telling jokes?

Perhaps there is no way to make a living from writing novels without
copyright. There is no way to make a living from playing solitaire either
-- should the government pass a law giving a legal monopoly on playing red
queen on a black king to my granny, so that everyone playing that move
has to pay her ten cents? That would make her old age so much more
comfortable. If you object to my proposal, I can ask "But without it, how
could one possibly make a living playing solitaire?"

Do we care if novelists can make a living writing novels? Most of them
don't anyway. The Stephen Kings, Tom Clancys and J.K. Rowlings are the
exception, not the rule -- for every Terry Pratchett who has "had to
change banks because [he] filled the first one up", there are a hundred
thousand who never make a living from writing at all.

If you've been involved in writing novels, you will know that the real
difference between an interesting idea and a great novel is usually a good
editor. A good editor does maybe a quarter or a third of the intellectual
labour of creating a novel -- not the grunt work of hitting typewriter
keys and putting ink to paper, but the brain work of making sure that the
story actually tells a story well. Why should the author get the monopoly
and the editor nothing? How do editors make money without a monopoly
granted by the government like copyright?

How do magazine and newspaper writers make a living when they don't get
the copyright on the things they write?

These are all important questions, and you will notice I deliberately am
not giving answers -- but they are also irrelevant because I didn't say
that I was against copyright. What I asked was why the artificial rights
of creators are given more importance than the natural rights of users.


And I submit that many ISD's are only a single person burning
with that one software idea of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Great
American Novel.

If their "one software idea of a lifetime" is as pointless, useless and
just *bad* as the average would-be "Great American Novel", then copyright
or no copyright nobody will want their poxy code. Sourceforge is full of
software projects, 90% of which go nowhere. The world is filled with
millions of wanna-be poets, writers and creators whose sum total
contribution to the artistic wealth of the world is negative.

I'm not just using hyperbole. By poisoning the well with their garbage,
they just make it that little bit harder for genuinely talented artists to
be heard. Only 2% of books sell more than 5,000 copies, ever, and many
wonderful books never get a second print-run because they just can't get
people's attention.

Despite this, people keep trying to write the Great American Novel.
Creative artists will create, even if they would be economically better
off washing dishes at Greasy Joe's Diner for a buck an hour. Michaelangelo
didn't stop painting because he had no copyright protection.

Are we to punish that impulse by denying that person
a legal monopoly on that idea?

Who's talking about *punishment*?

The natural state of things is not copyright. "No copyright" is not
punishing the author any more than "no flying unicorns" is punishing
little girls with a fantasy for flying through the sky on the back of a
horned horse. It is just the way things are.

Copyright is a gift granted by the government, not the natural state of
the world. When kings and emperors and presidents give commercial and
economic gifts, like monopolies, they rarely are for the benefit of the
majority.

Lots of ideas have no legal monopoly. There is no legal monopoly on (say)
good gardening skills, or the specific way of mixing the batter to make
extra light and fluffy bread. Why should some ideas be privileged over
others?

Lack of copyright doesn't need to be defended, as it is the natural state
of the world. Copyright is the special state which needs to be defended,
and there is precious little evidence that copyright makes sense
economically for *anyone*, author, publisher, readers or society as a
whole.

That's not to say that copyright isn't good for one or more of the above:
I have my intuitions as to who copyright benefits. But my point is that
there is a serious lack of evidence one way or the other, and what
evidence there is suggests strongly that over-strong copyright laws (like
we have now) are bad for *everyone*, and that weaker copyright (as in the
early 20th century) would be better.


I believe piracy is bad for everyone: the consumer, the writer, and
the country as a whole. I don't oppose copyleft, but then, I don't
oppose copyright either. Let's distribute the former for free, and
honor the need for the writer of the latter to earn a living.

Who mentioned copyleft? Copyleft is just a version of copyright: instead
of "All Rights Reserved", copyleft gives the user additional rights they
may not have got otherwise. Copyleft is not opposed to copyright, it _is_
copyright (despite the cute name).

In any case, piracy is demonstrably *not* bad for everyone. The entire US
movie industry would not exist if not for patent infringement: the baby
industry was being choked out of existence by the high royalties and
licence fees demanded by the holders of Thomas Edison's patents, until
they fled to California where enforcement was lax.

Likewise radio, which got its start from unauthorized transmission of
music, what we would call "piracy". The US government recognised that
"piracy = theft" was just propaganda, and legislated to give the radio
stations a compulsory licence rather than shut them down.

Likewise cable TV, which got its start from outright theft of transmitted
signals: in 1972 Jack Valenti of the MPAA testified to the American
Congress that the cable TV industry would destroy the movie industry
utter, and described cable TV as a parasite. Congress didn't swallow
it, and thirty years later both Hollywood and cable TV are thriving.

Having got it his first prediction that the sky is falling so badly wrong,
Valenti tried again ten years later, when he testified that the personal
home VCR would destroy the American movie industry -- he described it as
being to the American public and the movie industry as the Boston
Strangler was to women living alone. Instead, the VCR saved Hollywood
from collapse, with cheap direct-to-video movies now their
bread-and-butter, making up for all those big budget flops.

Going for three failures from three, now Valenti is campaigning against
peer-to-peer and the Internet.

Talking of outright theft, no discussion of monopoly rights is complete
without mentioning the record labels' habit of outright theft of ownership
from the artists who actually create music. It churns my stomach to see
thieves and con artists like the RIAA trying to take the moral high ground
with talk of "copying is theft".

Closer to home for the software industry, it is well recognised that
for software companies starting out, they get more benefit from
copyright infringement than they lose in revenue. Windows is the perfect,
if extreme, example: by turning a blind eye to piracy, Microsoft made sure
that anyone who wanted Windows could get it. That in turn meant that
programmers entering the workforce were already programming for Windows,
that businesses were demanding software that run under Windows, that
hardware manufacturers were supporting Windows.

Even today, Microsoft has a dilemma in China and South East Asia -- they
have a monopoly on Windows, but revenue is low because piracy rates are
extraordinarily high. But they don't dare get too strict on stamping out
piracy, because the last thing they want is to drive the billions of
actual or potential computer users of Asia to Linux -- Microsoft wants
hardware suppliers to support Windows first and Linux not at all or at
least as just an afterthought, not the other way around. Microsoft needs
software companies and consultants and programmers to work in the Windows
space, not Linux.

This means that, paradoxically, companies that work in the Linux space
actually want Microsoft to stamp down harder on piracy than Microsoft
wants to. We want more Ernie Balls:

http://www.osv.org.au/index.cgi?tid=91


As Microsoft knows, piracy is effectively giving your product away for
free. Can you think of any reason why you would want to give your product
away for free? Promotions, network effects, "the first sample is free",
driving your competitors out of business, try before you buy, software
which is paid for by advertising... there are many reasons why companies
might not just turn a blind eye to piracy but welcome it. The mistake is
to only think of piracy as lost revenue.
 
A

Alex Martelli

Steven D'Aprano said:
In a competitive marketplace, why would I choose to buy DRMed software if
there is a non-DRMed equivalent with the same functionality and equivalent
cost?

The only explanation I can think of is, their marketing must be
AWEsome!-)


Alex
 
D

Dennis Lee Bieber

comfortable. If you object to my proposal, I can ask "But without it, how
could one possibly make a living playing solitaire?"
Ask the casino's that created Klondike and Canfield... One would buy
a sealed deck from the house, and one would win back money based upon
how many cards one manages to move to the foundation piles.
--
 
T

The Eternal Squire

Perhaps there is no way to make a living from writing novels without
copyright. There is no way to make a living from playing solitaire either
-- should the government pass a law giving a legal monopoly on playing red
queen on a black king to my granny, so that everyone playing that move
has to pay her ten cents? That would make her old age so much more
comfortable. If you object to my proposal, I can ask "But without it, how
could one possibly make a living playing solitaire?"

Reductio de absurdum counterargument.

If their "one software idea of a lifetime" is as pointless, useless and
just *bad* as the average would-be "Great American Novel", then copyright
or no copyright nobody will want their poxy code. Sourceforge is full of
software projects, 90% of which go nowhere.

Thomas Edison (I think it was him) once said it took 999 failures to
make 1 success. That makes SourceForge 10 times more successful.
The world is filled with
millions of wanna-be poets, writers and creators whose sum total
contribution to the artistic wealth of the world is negative.
I'm not just using hyperbole. By poisoning the well with their garbage,
they just make it that little bit harder for genuinely talented artists to
be heard.

Whose opinion? Yours, or the market's?
Despite this, people keep trying to write the Great American Novel.
Creative artists will create, even if they would be economically better
off washing dishes at Greasy Joe's Diner for a buck an hour. Michaelangelo
didn't stop painting because he had no copyright protection.

And so the only valid income for a creative type is psychic income?
The natural state of things is not copyright. "No copyright" is not
punishing the author any more than "no flying unicorns" is punishing
little girls with a fantasy for flying through the sky on the back of a
horned horse. It is just the way things are.

Nature can be cruel. Do we dare drink unpasteurized milk because
natural is always good? For millenia slavery and serfdom were
considered "natural", but it caused endless human misery. And what
about plumbing and flush toilets? Those are not natural means to
convey eliminated wastes, but having just that in a society increases
the life expectancy of all its members by at least 10%.

The purpose of humanity is to NOT accept the way the things are... but
to apply compassion in all situations which if unaided cause great pain
and suffering.
Copyright is a gift granted by the government, not the natural state of
the world. When kings and emperors and presidents give commercial and
economic gifts, like monopolies, they rarely are for the benefit of the
majority.

Last I knew, we had government by, for, and of the people. We give
these gifts to ourselves, our officials serve at our pleasure. I
believe we decided to choose to give ourselves the gift of copyright
because that way a creator can be rewarded for his efforts rather than
his hiers.
Lots of ideas have no legal monopoly. There is no legal monopoly on (say)
good gardening skills, or the specific way of mixing the batter to make
extra light and fluffy bread.

Reductio de absurdum counterargument again.
Why should some ideas be privileged over others?

This is a corallary of the idea that people have the right to pursue
happiness... which could basically mean either increased convience of
life, longer lifespan, or greater joy within. Any idea which
increases happiness in a society as a whole is more worthwhile than an
idea which does not. And the market decides which is which.
Lack of copyright doesn't need to be defended, as it is the natural state
of the world.

And again, is everything about nature always good? God made us just a
little less than the angels, so that we could apply our sense of
compassion to natural situations that are bound to cause misery.
Copyright produces less misery, IMHO, than it causes.
But my point is that there is a serious lack of evidence one way or the other

Billions of dollars supporting the lives of hundred of thousands of
people is pretty strong evidence that we are doing something right.
and what
evidence there is suggests strongly that over-strong copyright laws (like
we have now) are bad for *everyone*, and that weaker copyright (as in the
early 20th century) would be better.

And here is the crux of the debate. If good, how strong should it be?
Strong enough so that the creator pay his rent and his food and put his
children through college. No so strong that a new creator can't derive
a worthwhile new work from the old.
In any case, piracy is demonstrably *not* bad for everyone. The entire US
movie industry would not exist if not for patent infringement: the baby
industry was being choked out of existence by the high royalties and
licence fees demanded by the holders of Thomas Edison's patents, until
they fled to California where enforcement was lax.

But that's apples versus oranges, patent is far different from
copyright.
It churns my stomach to see
thieves and con artists like the RIAA trying to take the moral high ground
with talk of "copying is theft".

Copying is theft of opportunity for the creator to be rewarded for his
efforts. The RIAA serves an important role in attempting to introduce
this idea as part of our social norms and courtesies.
The mistake is only think of piracy as lost revenue.

Piracy occurs when the taking occurs without the consent of the
creator. Derivation and reverse engineering are not piracy, and has
been shown as such in court. Admittedly there is a very thin line.
And open source is not piracy, as the consent is given.
 
M

Mike Meyer

The Eternal Squire said:
Last I knew, we had government by, for, and of the people.

As far as I know, only one country ever claimed to have that, so your
"we" only applies to citizens of that country, and not to everyone who
may be reading the letter - and the status of the person you quoted
but did not attribute is unclear.

Further, recent evidence is that this is no longer true in that
country, assuming it ever was.
And here is the crux of the debate. If good, how strong should it be?
Strong enough so that the creator pay his rent and his food and put his
children through college. No so strong that a new creator can't derive
a worthwhile new work from the old.

Neither of your two stated goals are being met by the current
copyright system. One of them is simply absurd as stated - presumably
because your statement is incomplete. Copyright by itself does not pay
the rent, put food on the table or put people through college. It's
strong enough to be do that *if* the public values what you create
enough and *if* you work hard enough at marketing it and *if* you
produce enough. Those are some mighty big ifs.

On the other hand, we're liable to never see creative work derived
from any Disney property newer than the Mouse, with certain narrow
exceptions. It seems that the government "by, for and of the people"
has reliably extended the lifetime of copyrights - retroactively, even
- every time the Mouse is about to slip into the public domain. Maybe
"the people" you're talking about above are "the rich corporations
with the congresscritters in their pockets." But that's hardly "the
majority".
Copying is theft of opportunity for the creator to be rewarded for his
efforts. The RIAA serves an important role in attempting to introduce
this idea as part of our social norms and courtesies.

You apparently think that taking the opportunity for the creator to be
rewarded for their efforts is ok if you deride other people who do
that very thing. So what's the difference between the RIAA and a
pirate who publicly points out that what the RIAA is up to?

<mike
 
T

The Eternal Squire

As far as I know, only one country ever claimed to have that, so your
"we" only applies to citizens of that country, and not to everyone who
may be reading the letter - and the status of the person you quoted
but did not attribute is unclear.

It applies to not only the US, which explicitly has "We The People" in
our
Constitution, but to all other countries who model on republican
systems: Japan, Germany, France, South Korea, Taiwan, and more.
Further, recent evidence is that this is no longer true in that
country, assuming it ever was.

Wow, how Machiaviellian.
Copyright by itself does not pay
the rent, put food on the table or put people through college. It's
strong enough to be do that *if* the public values what you create
enough and *if* you work hard enough at marketing it and *if* you
produce enough. Those are some mighty big ifs.

Yes, profitable innovation is 1 percent inspiration plus 99 percent
persperation.
Maybe "the people" you're talking about above are "the rich corporations
with the congresscritters in their pockets." But that's hardly "the
majority".

It sometimes works that way, unfortunately. But at least we can vote
the
bastards out when we hear of such things.
You apparently think that taking the opportunity for the creator to be
rewarded for their efforts is ok if you deride other people who do
that very thing.

And in what way is piracy a form of creation?
So what's the difference between the RIAA and a
pirate who publicly points out that what the RIAA is up to?

The difference is that the RIAA does not copy software without the
copyright holder's consent.
 

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