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Java Forum / General / July 2007Has anyone tried the usb devices?
I've seen these secure USB devices. You can only run the software off the USB devices and can't copy it to disk. It's OK if you have a limited and controlled distribution with a hight license fee. Not a solution for thousands of clients, but would seem to avoid the mass copy of the software. On another note, can anyone point me to recommended 3rd party licensing software? > You can only run the software off >the USB devices and can't copy it to disk The CPU in the fob will be very slow, so this is suitable only for doing a very small part of the app. Also consider how you will update these keys if needed. I wrote a an essay on them http://mindprod.com/bgloss/thumbdrive.html. I think what you want, for many applications, but I could not clearly find is a decryption algorithm run inside the fob so the private key in there is never exposed.  SignatureRoedy Green Canadian Mind Products The Java Glossary http://mindprod.com On Jul 15, 2:19 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote: > > You can only run the software off > >the USB devices and can't copy it to disk [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > find is a decryption algorithm run inside the fob so the private key > in there is never exposed. Yech! I've long thought a gadget like that with a non-exposed private key was THE solution to our current CC fraud woes and similar -- a portable electronic "iWallet" you could load money onto, then use for online or retail transactions, which would display itself the amount of the transaction it was signing, so it wouldn't be possible to rip off the user without them being able to see the real amount they'd be debited. Also of course the signed transaction would include timestamp, GUID, and the like, and like a signed cheque could only be cashed once. In fact it would be an electronic checkbook more than a credit or debit card. Vendor wouldn't be able to save a copy and then use it to repeatedly ding you -- no more sneaky "evergreen" subscription BS. They want more money, they need you to explicitly authorize each subsequent charge, and that means they get at most one more out of you before you cancel. But using the same technique to create a super-dongle is downright perverse. Twenty-first century, meet Victorian era royal patent type nonsense. Did you know that the mighty Lotus product line was strangled by its own dongles back in the 80s, helping pave the way for the MSOffice takeover of the productivity-app space shortly after? >Did you know that the mighty Lotus product line was strangled by its >own dongles back in the 80s, helping pave the way for the MSOffice >takeover of the productivity-app space shortly after? Whatever system you use must not interfere with legitimate use. Violate that cardinal rule and your product ends up in the trashcan or defanged. One project I have on the back burner is an extension to the Replicator. It will mirror a set of encrypted files on client machines. Your dongle contains private keys (in an uncopyable form), to let you decrypt some subset of those documents. So to use, you just plug in your dongle to a USB port and just the files you are allowed to look at appear in plaintext to your apps. They would remain in encrypted form. I could not stop you from browsing and printing a copy or copy/pasting a copy. When you took out the dongle, the files would effectively disappear. SignatureRoedy Green Canadian Mind Products The Java Glossary http://mindprod.com On Jul 15, 5:46 pm, Roedy Green <see_webs...@mindprod.com.invalid> wrote: > >Did you know that the mighty Lotus product line was strangled by its > >own dongles back in the 80s, helping pave the way for the MSOffice [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products > The Java Glossaryhttp://mindprod.com That's more along the line of my thinking. The application would only run if the dongle with a license key was present. My application supports a management education course and is used by the instructor to process input from the students. The execution of the program needs to be flexible as the courses are done on the client site and the instructor may have to use a client machine because of network restriction and access to network printers. So my thought was to have a license key secured on the dongle. The code could be installed anywhere (java runs) but would only operate if it sense the dongle. Each key would be unique plus I could set up an expiration date. Any thoughts? Thanks, bucky > So my thought was to have a license key secured on the dongle. The > code could be installed anywhere (java runs) but would only operate if > it sense the dongle. Each key would be unique plus I could set up an > expiration date. > > Any thoughts? Yes -- why on earth do you want to cripple this software's ease-of-use to try to extort money from people that don't have enough as it is? Students and teachers are both well known classes of people under perpetual financial strain. Charging either of them more than a sliver above the marginal cost for something is criminal. P.S. what is with GG today? The post I'm replying to showed up on the read-only NNTP server I use over 20 minutes before it showed up on Google for me to respond to. Propagation the other way (e.g. of my own postings) is virtually instantaneous... > That's more along the line of my thinking. The application would only > run if the dongle with a license key was present. [...] By "dongle," I assume you mean "the 100% reliable dongle that cannot possibly fail when your customer needs it most, not even by being left in the pocket of his other trousers back at the hotel on the other side of town. Satisfaction guaranteed." > Any thoughts? One: The fundamental message of any enforcement scheme is "I don't trust you." How eager are you to put your every relationship with a customer (or potential customer) on an adversarial footing? The answer "I want to be my customers' mortal enemy" is, of course, acceptable -- provided you've thought it through and are comfortable with the consequences. Does the forced installation of "Windows Genuine Advantage" make you feel friendlier to Redmond, or does it make you more inclined to screw them if you can find a way? And WGA is a whole lot less coercive than any go/no-go dongle would be. Here's a point to ponder: The provider/purchaser relationship is not one-sided. If the customer offered to place his payment in escrow pending his acceptance of your product as suitable to his needs, would you be willing to send him your dongle? If not, why not? Why are your rights in this two-sided TRANSaction superior to your customer's? Do you think your customer agrees with your reasoning? But, hell: It's your product, and I'm not going to say you're wrong or foolhardy or pro-global-warming or any such thing; after all, I don't know your circumstances. Make your own choice -- but make it an informed, not a reflexive, choice. SignatureEric Sosman esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid > > That's more along the line of my thinking. The application would only > > run if the dongle with a license key was present. [...] [quoted text clipped - 36 lines] > Eric Sosman > esos...@ieee-dot-org.invalid Actually, that's we way we do business now. However, we're exploring more arms length relationships plus potential customer in China -- which has a well published reputation. You certainly give one side of the equation. But what I'm looking for is other experience with these devices -- so that I can make a more informed decision. Do you have any experience with this kind of advice? bucky wrote On 07/17/07 09:18,: >> [...] >> But, hell: It's your product, and I'm not going to say [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > Do you have any experience with this kind of advice? (I'm assuming s/ad/de/.) With USB dongles, no. With earlier-technology dongles, my experience was limited to recommending that my (then) company acquire a competitor's product instead of the dongleized candidate. (Others made the same recommendation, so I never actually had the pleasure of dealing with the dongle.) But as I say: It's a business decision, and it's your business, and you may well opt for more rather than less coercion. If you've thought it through, fine -- but I raise the counter-arguments because it seems to me an awful lot of people jump straight to the enforcement bit (dongles, obfuscators, secret keys, whatnot) *without* thinking it through. SignatureEric.Sosman@sun.com > Do you have any experience with this kind of advice? I know a hardware dongle better than some alternatives. I have a 2-D CAD package that I like a lot but whose authors were somewhat paranoid. It originally used a soft locking system that depended on various keys being in specific blocks of the hard drive. That generally worked OK except that running a defragger wrecked the soft locks by moving them. This annoyed both me and the local distributor on a regular basis. On the distributor's advice I got the alternative system - a passive printer port dongle - and the problem has been solved for good. At least this dongle is hard to loose because it's screwed to the back of the PC. I can see it being useful under circumstances where the package must, for some reason, be installed on machine(s) that are not under your control, e.g. on a client's machines for the duration of a course, and the client is buying your services, not the software. About the only other way I know to get a similar effect is to leave the software installed remotely on your own server, but there could well be reasons why this might not work as well as locally installed copies: response time and the impact of network congestion both come to mind. Signaturemartin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org | On Jul 17, 3:09 pm, Martin Gregorie <mar...@see.sig.for.address> wrote: > I know a hardware dongle better than some alternatives. I have a 2-D CAD > package that I like a lot but whose authors were somewhat paranoid. It [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > printer port dongle - and the problem has been solved for good. At least > this dongle is hard to loose because it's screwed to the back of the PC. So if you ever need to print a document from this crippleware, you're up the creek. > I can see it being useful under circumstances where the package must, > for some reason, be installed on machine(s) that are not under your > control, e.g. on a client's machines for the duration of a course, and > the client is buying your services, not the software. Why not just let them keep the software and have the use of it? Their continued use of it costs you nothing, after all. Denying it to them appears to be gratuitous vandalism. > About the only other way I know to get a similar effect is to leave the > software installed remotely on your own server, but there could well be > reasons why this might not work as well as locally installed copies: > response time and the impact of network congestion both come to mind. Not to mention, gratuitously making their continued use of the software cost you something just to give you the ability to and an excuse to charge them for it and control them like a dictator isn't exactly very nice. Still, without the torture chambers, death camps, and legions of doom, you aren't quite the tin Pol Pot you aspire to be. Yet. Still, this era of software Stalinism is ending and you cannot stop it. Fighting the inevitable change will only deplete your own resources and harm yourself and everyone around you that you bully and victimize in the attempt to cling to your old and sad business models. It's as if the buggy whip makers passed a law forbidding the use of a vehicle without a buggy whip, regardless of the uselessness of such on one with a motorized engine, just to preserve their "right" to stay in business despite times changing, and there was mass civil disobedience, and then they started suing everyone in sight, getting car companies to require ignition interlocks so a car engine could only be started with a key that took the form of a buggy whip, and so forth. Meanwhile the buggy whip key can't be used at the same time as your printer, er I mean won't fit on a normal key ring with your house keys, and cars and their keys are needlessly expensive compared to their marginal costs, ... > On Jul 17, 3:09 pm, Martin Gregorie <mar...@see.sig.for.address> > wrote: [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > So if you ever need to print a document from this crippleware, you're > up the creek. The printer-port dongles of the Old Days were pass-through connectors most of the time: You plugged the dongle into the machine's parallel port, and you plugged the printer cable into the other side of the dongle, and the printer and computer talked as if the dongle weren't there. Only when you dinged the dongle Just So would it dong back at you. >> I can see it being useful under circumstances where the package must, >> for some reason, be installed on machine(s) that are not under your [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > continued use of it costs you nothing, after all. Denying it to them > appears to be gratuitous vandalism. "Vandalism" seems a strong term for "not giving the product of my labor away for free." Unless you're part of the "property is theft" crowd, of course -- in which case, why are you walking around in stolen clothes? > Still, this era of software Stalinism [...] > [even less rational rant snipped] SignatureEric Sosman esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid > > Why not just let them keep the software and have the use of it? Their > > continued use of it costs you nothing, after all. Denying it to them > > appears to be gratuitous vandalism. > > "Vandalism" seems a strong term for "not giving the product > of my labor away for free." I was referring to "forcibly taking away software he already has and was using, though this usage continuing would cost you nothing". What you proposed is analogous to if you let me see and make my own copy (with my own materials and other resources) of a fancy china plate you showed me and I had it for a while and ate off it sometimes, and then one day you snuck into my house and smashed it -- even though my eating off the plate I had didn't make *yours* dirty or stop you using yours at the same time or anything like that. Very unlike if you rented me your plate for a limited time, during which time you didn't have it to use as there was only the one. Notice how absurd all these painfully cretinous, inefficient, and damaging ideas become when you recast them with everyday tangible objects in place of software? > Unless you're part of the "property > is theft" crowd, of course -- in which case, why are you walking > around in stolen clothes? Far from it -- I support strong property rights. Including my right to bar you from entering my home and smashing my china plate simply because I copied the fancy design on yours, and despite the fact that my use of mine in no way diminishes your ability to use yours or increases your costs in using yours. And likewise my CDs, my computer, the software copies loaded onto my computer, ... > I was referring to "forcibly taking away software he already has and > was using, though this usage continuing would cost you nothing". That's not quite true, practically, because by continued ability by the customer to use that software, the "vendor" would have to expect loss of future jobs. I understand that this mindset is not compatible with yours, and you call this attitude "stalinism", etc, but in the end it's the customer who decides, whether these stalinistic attitudes really pay. Face it, at these times it unfortunately does pay for the stalinist. > What you proposed is analogous to if you let me see and make my own > copy (with my own materials and other resources) of a fancy china > plate you showed me and I had it for a while and ate off it sometimes, > and then one day you snuck into my house and smashed it -- even though > my eating off the plate I had didn't make *yours* dirty or stop you > using yours at the same time or anything like that. Again, this *does* pay (for the vendor), as long as consumers are dumb enough (or have any other reasons) to re-borrow (for money) a sample from exactly the same one who smashed the previous clone. While government legalizes (in your example) the action of smashing the plate, (actually, when borrowing his plate for cloning, he already told you, that your clone would be smashed remotely (thus without actually entering your home) after some period of time...) the government doesn't force you to borrow the same vendor's plate next time. If you do, knowing that it will be broken a certain time later, then you're either not playing with a full deck, OR you even might have convincing other reasons to do so. Based on your example, one such reason could be: - you have a tendency of inadvertedly smashing them yourself, and based on the expectation that you have to re-clone one, anyway once in a while, that vendor (in the sense of that he lends you his latest sample for cloning, for which he takes a small fee) is the cheapest source for samples. anyway you casually are fed up of the old design, and want to clone a new design each time you create a new plate - and you're not the creative type to make a design on your own. He's the only one within reach who offers samples of your preference. >> Unless you're part of the "property is theft" crowd, ... > Far from it -- I support strong property rights. The whole point of copyrights etc is, that these bytes on your harddisk are *not* your property!. You always just "borrow" them. And the vendor *does* care what you do with it, because certain actions on your side might impact negatively on the number of his customers and thus the butter on his (really own) bread. It doesn't make a difference, for the vendor, whether he lends you something (and doesn't have it for the while), or if he lets you copy it, and then finds no one else to lend it to (for money), because every one else just copies it from you. You could, of course, make an agreement with the vendor, that he will not smash the plate, and that you may even lend on your plate to others for copying, as long as these others are willing to pay remuneration to the creator of the design. Since you're not yet known as a Nobel prize winner, I assume you haven't found a reliable alternative, non-stalinistic model for remuneration That all said, I agree with you, in that I also dislike this practise being played on me, and that I avoid such vendors where possible. Of course my PC's don't run windows nor MacOS, and on my linux machines I don't use apps of which I don't have (or can easily obtain) source code. I don't buy hardware that would require proprietary drivers, either. Oh, and I did pay for some software I used, sometimes on a voluntary base, and sometimes just the marginal cost for a distribution medium e.g. as part of a magazine. > > I was referring to "forcibly taking away software he already has and > > was using, though this usage continuing would cost you nothing". > > That's not quite true, practically, because by continued > ability by the customer to use that software, the "vendor" > would have to expect loss of future jobs. That may or may not actually be true. Regardless, it is not true that this company is entitled to any particular hypothetical future revenues. There is no right to profit enshrined in the constitution; perhaps the right to try, but that's not the same thing. Also, "loss of future jobs" makes it sound like this is a situation where the users need this software regularly to do something, and it's being provided on a kind of "pay per use" model rather than provided free and open source or even sold on a per-copy basis. That's frankly extortionate. I see no justification for charging such huge margins for software per copy as you often see charged, let alone charging per use, given that a software vendor's costs are not generally proportional to use or even to copies in circulation. (Except to the extent that they also operate a network service the software uses, such as e.g. the World of Warcraft servers and game world. That vendor's costs actually are proportional to usage, justifying their per-month fees, though light users should really have the option of a per-actual-chunk-of-time-spent-using-it payment plan too.) > I understand that this mindset is not compatible with yours, > and you call this attitude "stalinism", etc, but in the end > it's the customer who decides, whether these stalinistic > attitudes really pay. No, it's the legislature, since they currently legislate that the customer can either pay or do without and no other option is made legal. If the legislature let perfectly interchangeable software be marketed by anyone who wanted to, the market would then settle on a price decided by the customers. (And that price would likely be somewhere in the neighborhood of zero.) > Face it, at these times it unfortunately does pay for the > stalinist. A symptom of bad legislation, not of stalinism being good. > > What you proposed is analogous to if you let me see and make my own > > copy (with my own materials and other resources) of a fancy china [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > dumb enough (or have any other reasons) to re-borrow (for money) > a sample from exactly the same one who smashed the previous clone. Yes, so long as there's no law requiring that nobody else sell interchangeable eating plates. Actually, no, since if I make a replica with my own resources rather than borrow yours, you breaking into my place and smashing my replica is break and enter and vandalism. (If I borrowed yours and you broke into my place and smashed it, on the other hand, it's just break and enter.) [snip some increasingly silly stuff] Who would accept terms like these from a plate vendor? Why does anyone accept terms like those from a software vendor, especially when the per-copy costs of software are so much lower? Why don't they have any alternative source of fully compatible software that does the same thing? Who do we blame for this? How do we fix it, to get the economy running much more efficiently and ensure the system ceases to reward perversities such as vendors making a product and then expending additional effort, time, and expense to deliberately degrade its utility? > Based on your example, one such reason could be: > - you have a tendency of inadvertedly smashing them > yourself, and based on the expectation that you > have to re-clone one... Inapplicable to software. Software does not suffer from wear and tear. If you're prone to damaging the installation on a machine of yours, you do wisely to keep backups of that machine's contents and configuration so you don't have to buy a new copy of anything if something goes wrong, or lose any of your own otherwise-irreplaceable data. > are fed up of the old design, and want to clone a > new design each time you create a new plate - and > you're not the creative type to make a design on > your own. A valid reason for buying plates, selling them used, buying new ones ... which is clearly not what you are describing. Destroying a perfectly good plate is negative-sum. If it's to the advantage of one party to do this to an object that some other party has and it is also not illegal for them to do so then unless the object is a WMD or something equally likely to make things worse rather than better when used, the law is clearly broken. > He's the only one within reach who offers > samples of your preference. Uh-oh. Monopoly alert! Another failure of the free market, probably due to meddlesome legislators. > The whole point of copyrights etc is, that these bytes on > your harddisk are *not* your property! Yes, they are. They're my electrons bought from the hydro company on my disk platter bought from wherever I bought the drive from. Giving a third party power over them just because they happen to resemble some pattern of bytes they had earlier is ludicrous and violates my property rights in my machine. > And the vendor *does* care what you do > with it, because certain actions on your side might > impact negatively on the number of his customers and > thus the butter on his (really own) bread. GM *does* care what I do with a load of iron and some glass and other materials because certain actions on my side (e.g. building a car with these and then selling it) might impact negatively on the number of GM's customers. Can GM outlaw my building a car out of scrap? No. Should society indulge GM in its wish that nobody but GM be able to make cars and thereby compete with GM? No. Does it? No. Why should it with any other manufacturer, whether of cars, or of little plastic discs, or whatever? > It doesn't make a difference, for the vendor, whether he lends > you something (and doesn't have it for the while), or if he lets > you copy it, and then finds no one else to lend it to (for money), > because every one else just copies it from you. If the vendor can't compete with free, then he should go into business selling products with a marginal cost bigger than zero! OTOH, plenty of vendors can compete with free. Red Hat sells Linux discs at a profit. (Entirely aside their support-contract business, also profitable.) Dasani sells bottled water for a per-bottle fee when most of their potential customers, probably all, get either free or flat- monthly-fee water from their kitchen tap that is just as good for drinking. > Since you're not yet known as a Nobel prize winner, I assume > you haven't found a reliable alternative, non-stalinistic > model for remuneration I don't need to to prove my point; Red Hat, Dasani, etc. all have proven it already for me. So why reinvent the wheel? >> > I was referring to "forcibly taking away software he already has and >> > was using, though this usage continuing would cost you nothing". [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > this company is entitled to any particular hypothetical future > revenues. That wasn't my point in this particular answer. it's point was to show, that the vendor *thinks* that continued use of his software will/might/could cut on his future income, and thus he makes the software that is already installed there, unusable. He *might* be wrong with his thinking, in that continued usability of that software by his clients *might* even help him get future jobs there, but from his very point of view, he *thinks* that it's the other way round. If you *think* it will be a hot sunny day, you probably leave your raincoat at home when going for a walk, and then it might start to rain cats and dogs, and afterwards who damn yourself for not having taken your raincoat with you. But you wouldn't want government to rule that you must take your raincoat with you ... This was about the situation, where alternative business models of your liking are indeed feasible. The rest of this posting deals with the other ones. > [snip some increasingly silly stuff] ditto > Why does anyone accept terms like those from a software vendor, > especially when the per-copy costs of software are so much lower? Because it's part of an agreement... and I expect you'll now split hairs again, whether one can make an agreement with a stone. If law wasn't there to make accepting such agreements the only legal way for the customer to use the software, then there wouldn't be any off-the-shelf-software (or at most only a marginal subset thereof) It's not that most would be open and free then, but rather non-existing. Or alternately, the shops would have to hire someone to negotiate all the agreements and have you identify and sign the agreement. Of course he wouldn't be willing to accept a lower price or extra levels of freedom any more than a rock would and the price for hiring him would be silently added to the agreement-fee for each product. Is that more to your liking? If law was changed to make copying principially legal, then these vendors would adapt to a new one, which isn't necessarily more to your likings: they would program their software such, that it requires pay per use (that is rent). you'd then be able to copy it as you wish, but whichever copy you put in your drive it will require some payment to use the software. Only a marginal number of vendors could/would adapt to business models like redhat. One reason why there already exist pay-per-use models is, that these vendors even now don't trust the users to comply with current copyright-laws. Copyright law isn't there to make software-prices high, it's there to *enable* less complicated ways (and thus of course cheaper ways!) for distribution of software that the vendor just doesn't want to give away for free. Oh, and finally, unless the copy I make of some inventor's idea will cause remuneration to go to the inventor, it is immoral. If instead I copy my own idea, and take less remuneration for it, myself, then that's fair competition. (so much for GM caring if I build my own car rather than buying theirs) You naively think that, after removing something of your dislike, the space wouldn't be filled by something even more to your (and other's) dislike. On Jul 23, 4:05 am, Andreas Leitgeb <a...@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> wrote: > >> > I was referring to "forcibly taking away software he already has and > >> > was using, though this usage continuing would cost you nothing". [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > there, but from his very point of view, he *thinks* that it's the > other way round. You have failed to provide a justification for society supporting the vendor and helping enable and enforce this behavior. Big chemical companies have an incentive to dump toxic waste willy- nilly. Does society permit them to do so, or severely restrict how and where they can dispose of waste and how it must be treated beforehand? You cannot justify something with "it's in the interests of this business here that has thus-and-such market cap". Why does society not only condone but actually assist business pollution of our property rights in our hardware and the arrangements of bits resident on that hardware? That is precisely what it is -- pollution, taking our stuff and by artifice degrading its value, and creating a toxic environment with ripple-on harmful effects besides (e.g. orphan works, vendor lock-in, lack of competition, the need to seek all sorts of permission before you are allowed to innovate or be creative...all well-documented problems with copyright and patent.) > If you *think* it will be a hot sunny day, you probably leave your > raincoat at home when going for a walk, and then it might start to > rain cats and dogs, and afterwards who damn yourself for not having > taken your raincoat with you. But you wouldn't want government to > rule that you must take your raincoat with you ... You're right. Government should stay out of it. Instead government steps in and enforces that since some big businesses don't take their raincoats with them, and "big business is doubleplusgood!!!1!11one", therefore rain is outlawed! Despite a) the obvious impossibility of perfectly enforcing this decree, b) that even partial enforcement is damned expensive and difficult (e.g. doming over every major urban area), and c) even partial enforcement tramples on rights (e.g. what happens to astronomers, air travel, people who actually like the rain, people with gardens whose tapwater is metered and that can't afford to use extra tapwater to replace the lost rainfall, and various forms of wireless communications if they dome over every major urban area?) > > Why does anyone accept terms like those from a software vendor, > > especially when the per-copy costs of software are so much lower? > > Because it's part of an agreement... I'll rephrase. Why does anyone "agree" to such lopsided "agreements" instead of simply shopping elsewhere? > If law wasn't there to make accepting such agreements the only > legal way for the customer to use the software How fortunate for the everyday people of limited means that indeed that law isn't there then! Read 17 USC section 117(a)(1) sometime and enlighten yourself. You are permitted by law to make private copies as part of normal use of software, e.g. installation and the transient copies in RAM. No special permission from the copyright holder is required; only that you purchased a copy legitimately. Which you (hypothetically) did at the retail outlet. Having purchased the copy, you may now use it as you see fit without any need for permission from the copyright holder, save that such permission is needed by law if you intend to distribute copies, and perhaps if you intend to make private copies beyond those the software automatically requires or makes in normal use and prudent backups. The software vendor has no need of the onerous "license terms" to protect their (illegitimate) interest in preventing free copying; copyright law does that anyway. Or at least tries. > It's not that most would be open and free then, but rather non-existing. Evidence? > If law was changed to make copying principially legal, then these > vendors would adapt to a new one, which isn't necessarily more to > your likings: they would program their software such, that it > requires pay per use (that is rent). Pay per use is even less justified on economic or public-policy grounds than pay per copy. If the law made copying principally legal it would certainly make sense to make hacking and tinkering to work around attempts to enforce pay per use legal as well. Pay per use then would, as it should, be viable only for stuff like Everquest where you use a vendor's server resources by using the software. Without payment they refuse access to the server. Without access to the server the software's not very useful. Working around that requires actual theft (of services), i.e. costing the vendor something without paying them to cover their added expenses due to your usage, and theft would obviously still be against the law. Circumventing a gratuitous use of a vendor's server not intrinsically needed to perform the software's function should however be possible without compromising the software's function. In the simplest case of a gratuitous phone-home enforcement check, you'd just decompile the software and figure out how to spoof an "authorized" response, then cut the vendor out of the loop entirely. Their server resources are not consumed so there's nothing you're costing them with each use to justify them demanding payment any more anyway. This would be legal if copyright, patent, and the DMCA were eliminated. It should be legal. > Only a marginal number of vendors could/would adapt to business models like redhat. Evidence? > Copyright law isn't there to make software-prices high, it's there > to *enable* less complicated ways (and thus of course cheaper ways!) > for distribution of software That's mythological bullturds. It enables no such thing. The cheapest way to distribute software, also spreading the burden evenly across its users and making it touch each one extremely lightly indeed, is called BitTorrent. If your theory were correct, copyright law would have resulted in BT being the predominant means of distribution of software. In fact, BT IS the predominant means of distribution of one type of software -- free software, which has been copylefted, that is. So in fact copyright law RETARDS less complicated (and cheaper) ways of distributing software. Demonstrable, incontrovertible FACT. You are wrong. YHL. HTH. HAND. > Oh, and finally, unless the copy I make of some inventor's idea will > cause remuneration to go to the inventor, it is immoral. Incorrect. Alice invents something. Bob implements it using his own time, money, and materials. Bob's doing so has clearly not deprived Alice of anything. In fact, Bob may do this in secret; and what Alice doesn't know doesn't hurt her. No harm, no foul. No foul, no immorality. This too is airtight logic, unless you redefine "immoral" to be "whatever I don't like" instead of "what malicious or irresponsibile actions threaten or cause measurable harm to a nonconsenting other". > You naively think that, after removing something of your dislike, > the space wouldn't be filled by something even more to your (and > other's) dislike. You have no evidence to support your theory that it would be. And by the way, you misspelled "na?ve". Java Media JMStudio uses USB memory very Nicely and drops it clean if you set the Preferences with a path to it. CatBurglerV8 > On Jul 23, 4:05 am, Andreas Leitgeb <a...@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> > wrote: [quoted text clipped - 157 lines] > You have no evidence to support your theory that it would be. And by > the way, you misspelled "na?ve". OMG -- the trifecta! Top-posting, quoting everything without trimming, AND not addressing the specific post quoted (this looks like it should be a reply to the OP, not to any of the existing replies and replies to replies, etc.) > [ shipload of BS snipped ] Good luck on your crusade for free beer for all. I'd guess, you've almost reached your goal! The breweries are already rethinking their business plan, and you might want to hold your breath until paradise finally breaks through. <EOD> from my side. Wasted enough time... On Jul 24, 3:01 am, Andreas Leitgeb <a...@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> wrote: > > [ shipload of BS snipped ] > > Good luck on your crusade for free beer for all. [nonsense snipped] No, just free speech, my property rights in my hardware back, and goods no longer being priced way higher than marginal cost. > On Jul 24, 3:01 am, Andreas Leitgeb <a...@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> > wrote: [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > No, just free speech, my property rights in my hardware back, and > goods no longer being priced way higher than marginal cost. Could you jokers take your political diatribe somewhere else and stay out of the way of people who just want to exchange technical ideas. > Could you jokers take your political diatribe somewhere else and stay > out of the way of people who just want to exchange technical ideas. The "technical idea" you were requesting was inherently politically loaded, since you wanted to spend extra effort to make your product less valuable so that you could get more money, which is simply perverse, and since the very reason that doing such a thing might actually be in your interests (if not anyone else's!) is due to bad legislation. > On Jul 17, 3:09 pm, Martin Gregorie <mar...@see.sig.for.address> > wrote: [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > So if you ever need to print a document from this crippleware, you're > up the creek. Nope. You could print through it. This type of dongle used to be common. They had both make and female D-25 connectors on them so a standard printer cable plugged into the back of it. Its default action was to transfer print data and responses transparently. I never used one at code level so I don't know how you told it to handle dongle requests rather than pass stuff to the printer. >> I can see it being useful under circumstances where the package must, >> for some reason, be installed on machine(s) that are not under your [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > continued use of it costs you nothing, after all. Denying it to them > appears to be gratuitous vandalism. If the software is part of your course material you wouldn't want to give it away any more than you'd give away your lesson plans, instructor manuals or presentation material. Besides, if you leave it enabled on client machines you can guarantee that some cheapskate will demand free support. Or are you suggesting that paid-for support could be a worthwhile revenue stream? To a training organization rather than a software supplier? >> About the only other way I know to get a similar effect is to leave the >> software installed remotely on your own server, but there could well be [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > and legions of doom, you aren't quite the tin Pol Pot you aspire to > be. Yet. You do go off on irrelevant rants, don't you? Incredible. Purely as an example I'm using a private tool that might form a training aid as part of a paid-for course. As such its not for sale or use outside the training organization. It belongs to the trainer. Nobody gets to use it outside a paid-for course. These are two ways that merely make certain that you take your property with you at the end of the course. No dictators of secret police, just simple property ownership. Signaturemartin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org | > If the software is part of your course material you wouldn't want to > give it away any more than you'd give away your lesson plans, instructor > manuals or presentation material. Why not? Where did you learn economics? Because everyone should be warned away from there. You have on the one hand your scarce and valuable expertise and talents, and on the other your cheap and easily reproduced plans, manuals, software, and material. Furthermore, preventing anyone ever competing with you on the latter by making copies and undercutting your price is nontrivial -- ask the RIAA how expensive and futile it can get. (15,433 lawsuits and counting ... and still 600,000,000 more illicit copies out there to go ... and the latter number actually is growing despite their efforts ...) The sensible thing to do is to cheaply sell or even give away the easily-duplicated stuff as a loss-leader to market your talent, and charge for access to that. => You charge for one on one tuition or get hired to teach XYZ at a learning institution based on your expertise and wind up with a salary. The widely-distributed copies of the teaching materials attract students, in the one case your customers and in the other your employer's customers. Give away what can be given away at no cost and charge for what's scarce and that the freebies will automatically help promote. There's really no sense in society not only tolerating suckier business models but actually legislating that those using these suckier business models will be subsidized by the government using tax money to enforce said business models. Especially not in society doing so in such a manner that those business models actually become competitive with superior ones! It's one thing to give lame individuals a tax-funded crutch. It's another to give free, taxpayer- subsidized crutches to lame businesses. End corporate welfare now! > Besides, if you leave it enabled on > client machines you can guarantee that some cheapskate will demand free > support. Don't provide free support. You're under no obligation to provide free support, after all. > Or are you suggesting that paid-for support could be a > worthwhile revenue stream? To a training organization rather than a > software supplier? No, paid-for on-site training by your instructors with their scarce expertise is a worthwhile revenue stream. The software is not serious competition for your instructors, not unless you've made some amazing breakthroughs in AI recently and not made any public fanfare about this achievement; the software may, however, be a cheap advertisement for your instructors. Not only not allowing but actively preventing its persistence (nevermind its actual copying!) is denying yourself free advertising. In fact, it's like paying to have a billboard advertising your key product taken down that would likely have stayed standing for ages otherwise, and that you were not being charged any rent to have stay up, either. > Purely as an example I'm using a private tool that might form a training > aid as part of a paid-for course. As such its not for sale or use > outside the training organization. It belongs to the trainer. Nobody > gets to use it outside a paid-for course. These are two ways that merely > make certain that you take your property with you at the end of the > course. No dictators of secret police, just simple property ownership. Except that it isn't. A copy remaining on a client machine does not deprive you of the copies you take with you where you go. Making it "not for sale or use outside the organization" serves no logical purpose I can think of other than to gratuitously impoverish other people at the cost of ADDED WORK ON YOUR PART. It removes something that those people might find useful to have around, and that would remind them of your training services. Those services might come in handy again someday, where the software alone does not suffice, and they'd be immediate repeat customers. If instead you act all nasty and do gratuitous stuff, treat their computers like you have some kind of title to them telling them what they can and cannot do with them or actually destroying data on them yourself, and charging them for the privilege, I wouldn't blame them if they don't beat a path to your door the next time they have need of similar expertise, and instead look elsewhere for it! Free MagazinesGet these publications absolutely FREE for up to 12 months. There are no hidden fees and no obligation. 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