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Date:      Mon, 4 May 1998 13:31:18 +0200
From:      Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>
To:        Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: ports/www/ijb - Imported sources
Message-ID:  <19980504133118.00078@follo.net>
In-Reply-To: <19980504115714.07998@techunix.technion.ac.il>; from Anatoly Vorobey on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 11:57:14AM %2B0300
References:  <19980503230438.48318@follo.net> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980503205621.20104E-100000@sasami.jurai.net> <19980504032939.07389@follo.net> <354d2457.225839725@mail.cetlink.net> <19980504042649.61453@follo.net> <19980504032939.07389@follo.net> <19980504115714.07998@techunix.technion.ac.il>

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On Mon, May 04, 1998 at 11:57:14AM +0300, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> You, Eivind Eklund, were spotted writing this on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 03:29:39AM +0200:
> > Arguments!  Come up with arguments!
> 

[... on the HTTP protocol sending out parts of the data as different streams
snipped ...]
> Your argument about those silly "licenses" on sites is also wrong.
> They're invalid and unenforcable.

You'll have to take those cases with e.g. ZDnet and C/NET, not me - I'm not
a lawyer trying to enforce the licenses, I'm a private citizen trying to
argue reasonable conduct - and trying to get people to actually think about
what they're doing.

> First of all, a "page" is not an abstraction which exists on protocol
> level. A "page" is something out together by my software from separate
> entitites I pull from a site, so there's no reverse-engineering in my
> putting it together from a subset of the whole set of possible entitites
> (again, browsing with images turned off is an important special case).

I didn't claim that this was reverse-engineering.  I claimed that
reverse-engineering was a special case of filtering, and one that is illegal
in the US.  (Most software licenses in the US state that you can't modify
the executable of a program - I don't know if that holds up there, either. 
I know it doesn't hold up in my end of the world.)

> Here's an analogy for you. Suppose I invented magical ink that
> erases profane words from paper automatically and leaves other
> intact. I buy a book published by your friend content-maker and
> apply this ink before reading. Now, a friend of yours has
> a "license" on the book's cover which tells me I must not change
> book's content before "displaying" (i.e. reading) it. Am I
> breaking the law? Your friend will get laughed at in court.

Books are fairly limited in how they can be licensed, due to special
consideration being put on them in laws.

Other content may be licensed different ways, though there are limits on the
licenses there too.

> Which brings me to the next point. Your friends the content-makers
> say I'm ripping them off. They say I want a free ride on their
> content. Bullshit, if you excuse my language. THEY want a
> free ride - on the medium. They're using a medium (Web, HTTP) which
> explicitly lets its user to pull or not to pull different
> images/other files separately, and they want to brainwash ME, a user
> of the medium, to give up this freedom of mine and get their ads
> no matter what. Their attempts to produce content are appreciated;
> their attemtps to force down my throat what I don't want (and don't
> have to, by the nature of the medium) to see are not.

They're not attempting to "force down your throath what you don't want to
have" - they're offering you a service for a certain pay.  This payment
happens to consist of viewing and downloading advertising.  For a limited
set of users (those using Lynx and browsing without images) they even offer
the service for free.

What is your model for paying for content?  That's what we're talking about
here.  Talking about 'nature of the medium' is IMO a strawman argument - how
do you think the production of content should be paid for?  I'm not talking
about 'making it profitable' - I'm talking of paying actual costs.

> Should they desire that I get their ads no matter what, they should look
> INTO a DIFFERENT MEDIUM which allows that. Was that clear enough? For
> example, they can use ActiveX controls which display ads on my Windows
> desktop, and make their site unbrowsable without ActiveX. Or they can use
> .PDF file with graphics built-in the file and ask me to download them.

It's not bloody difficult to make the web a limited medium where you can't
browse without images, and can't download pages without seeing ads.  It
require that ads and HTML pages are downloaded from the same domain, but
apart from that it should be technically fairly easy, in the precense of
cookies and images (and dropping users that don't have cookies and images
aren't considered a large loss any longer).

> Your arguments about ijb being a 'cracker' tools or about
> its user being 'pirates' are just way too silly to address,
> esp. in the light of what I wrote above. They would be offensive
> if they weren't so laughable.

"The nature of software is to be copiable, so calling my
payment-removal-system a cracker-tool would be offensive if it wasn't so
laughtable."

"The nature of software is to be a stream of bytes, not distinct
executables, so calling my program for automatically modifying executables
to remove the stated copyright and the copyprotection a crackers tool would
be offensive if it wasn't so laughtable."

I'm fully willing to offend.  People that don't think clearly easily get
offended by labels.  (I try not to be, but that doesn't always work ;-)

The nature of pirates is that they take content without paying.  Be that
music, books, software, or web-pages - it doesn't matter.  The nature of
crackers (in the original meaning, not the one the original hackers are
trying to push over) is removing copy-protection.  Now, you might say that
the protection on most web-pages is laughtably simple - it is.  That does
IMO not change the nature of task - namely, separating the payment system
(in this case the ads) and the content (software vs web-pages).

BTW: "A lot of my best friends are pirates" - I'm not in a position where I
can judge people for electing to be pirates (there isn't many years since I
copied software myself), but I _can_ attempt to make them aware of what
they're doing.  Though it is hard for them when it is so convenient to work
around the system.

Eivind.

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