Avoiding LispWorks Personal annoyances
in [Lisp]
|
Prev: &optional combined with &rest
Next: local-time on Clozure CL windows vista 64 Can't resolve foreign symbol "gettimeofday"
From: Tim Bradshaw on 1 Oct 2009 16:06 On 2009-09-27 01:54:45 +0100, gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> said: > Circumventing limitations in a > piece of software that I am able to download freely, and which - after > circumvention - in no way affects the ability of anyone else to use > the software Why do you think that is true? If everyone did what you are describing, do you think that LispWorks would continue to provide a personal edition for no charge? I would not if I was them. So what you are doing is only denying the ability of others to use the product to the extent that the number of people who do what you are doing is very small compared to the number of people who do not do so. A similar argument would say that if I only take a very small amount of money from you, that's not theft.
From: Dave Searles on 1 Oct 2009 16:08 Alessio Stalla wrote: > Still, what troubles me is that we are able to deal with bytes much > more easily than with atoms. I cannot copy a chair or modify an ATM by > messing with it at the atomic level. Yet. It's called molecular nanotechnology, and it's coming Real Soon Now. When it does, maybe before 2030, the upheavals recently observed in the music industry will look like a minor puff of warm breeze besides the Category 5 howler that will rattle the timbers of the major manufacturing industries at that time. > Does this mean that when you reach the technical level necessary to > copy something almost freely, and to change it at the level of its > basic constituents, private property naturally ceases to exist? No, it just means that after copyright goes the way of the dodo, patent law will follow it into extinction (or maybe just irrelevance) in due course. And there's another huge upheaval coming sooner: the death of privacy. Hopefully it will cause the birth of a new era of unprecedented tolerance and understanding, rather than, as I fear, everyone being smeared by everyone else and looking really bad. Probably the latter will happen, then the former, and a fairly elaborate almost Victorian system of politeness norms will arise regarding what one is permitted to call attention to and discuss in public about other people without it being considered very rude, or at least gauche and gossipy. Mostly we already have such norms but they'd have to strengthen enormously to compensate the inability to keep things secret. We'd also have to acknowledge and accept a lot of truths about ourselves as a species; for instance, that we are not naturally monogamous, contrary to popular and semi-legislated myth.
From: Tim Smith on 1 Oct 2009 16:36 In article <ha31j7$tsk$1(a)news.eternal-september.org>, Dave Searles <searles(a)hoombah.nurt.bt.uk> wrote: > > #3. Artificially, by force of law, imbue intellectual goods with some of > > the characteristics of real property so as to make it work like a > > regular good in the free market. > > They already would "work like a regular good in the free market"; they > work like a regular good in the free whose marginal cost happens to be > approximately zero. No, such goods do not work, in the sense that a free market, responding to supply and demand, does not result in the optimal allocation of resources for intellectual goods. -- --Tim Smith
From: Kaz Kylheku on 1 Oct 2009 16:41 On 2009-10-01, Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb(a)informatimago.com> wrote: > Kaz Kylheku <kkylheku(a)gmail.com> writes: > >> On 2009-10-01, Tim Smith <reply_in_group(a)mouse-potato.com> wrote: >>> In article >>><e4d6dd55-54f9-4079-bed5-022428eb1de8(a)j9g2000prh.googlegroups.com>, >>> gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> I don't steal. >>> >>> Stealing is not the best analogy for what you are doing. >>> >>> A pure free market doesn't work well for intellectual goods, such as >>> books, music, software, and so on, because the marginal cost of making a >>> copy is close to zero. In a pure free market (which means there would be >>> no legal restrictions on making and distributing copies) you'd only get >>> books and music from artists who are independently wealthy or otherwise >>> find a patron, because trying to make money actually selling books and >>> CDs wouldn't work. As soon as you published, the copies would start, and >>> they would undercut you enough that you'd just never make back your >>> initial costs. >> >> Copying isn't the best analogy for what he is doing. He has a legal copy of the >> software. Having obtained a legal copy of a work, all he is doing is flipping >> the bits of a storage device which he owns. I.e. doing as he pleases with >> private property. > > Would this analogy do: > > He's at an ATM, and there's a lamppost nearby. He noticed that > when drawing money from the ATM, if he kicks the lamppost that > sends a pulse in the ATM that prevents it to debit his account. Yes, that analogy would do, with these additional contextual constraints: - he owns the ATM, the network behind it and the bank (and possibly the lamp as well). - he is the only client of the bank; nobody is being cheated if funds are siphoned from the bank, without any state change in the accounting. Remember, if I'm hacking a program in my own privacy, that doesn't affect anyone. Maybe I'm just doing research into cracking techniques. One person obtains the the trial version of a program to try it out. Another person obtains the the trial version of a program in order to solve the puzzle of defeating its protection mechanisms. All of the ways of using the program which do not harm anyone are fine, in a free society. Suppose that instead of a coding hack to expire the program after several hours, the trial program comes with a much simpler mechanism. There is a "program.conf" file, which contains the string "trial_version=1". To change the program to the full version, all you have to do is edit this file to say "trial_version=0". Or just delete that line, or the entire file. The license says you may not do this, unless you pay first. It would be obvious that the program is donation-ware (a form of begging). You are no more obliged to pay than to drop a dollar into the street musician's guitar case. The only difference between deleting ``trial_version=1'' and eliminating a time limit from machine code is that you have to use your brain more for the latter. And that's what's supposed to make it wrong, somehow. If the program can be obtained free of charge, it's donation-ware, even if it contains deliberately planted bugs which cripple it. If that program actually contains all of the code of the full version, you have a right to ``debug'' it to turn it into the full version, for your own personal use (but redistribution of the hacked copy, which is a derived work: that's copyright infringement). Modifying a program, without redistribution, is completely fair use. If you own a book, you can add notes in the margins or on blank pages, highlight or underline text, tear out pages, black out text with a black felt pen, or cover text with corrective tape and write your own. You can even redistribute that book itself (as opposed to a photocopy). (Though it has to be obvious that the modifications are not attributed to the original author; one copyright is that the author of a work has the right not to have derived works, such as mockeries and travesties, attributed to him). You can burn the book to keep yourself warm, or read it in the toilet and then ``put it behind you''. You may not whack someone on the head with it, though.
From: Kaz Kylheku on 1 Oct 2009 16:43
On 2009-10-01, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)cley.com> wrote: > On 2009-09-27 01:54:45 +0100, gnubeard <gnubeard(a)gmail.com> said: > >> Circumventing limitations in a >> piece of software that I am able to download freely, and which - after >> circumvention - in no way affects the ability of anyone else to use >> the software > > Why do you think that is true? Because you can prove it? You can put a programmer in a blackbox, and tell him to either reverse-engineer a program on the computer therein, or to do some other kind of development not related to that program. No events escape from the black box which will let you detect whether he has done the reverse engineering. |