RE: A Question of Ethics (was: Overriding Acrobat User Settings)( 1of2)

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Andrew said:


>> If anyone knows the answer to how to work around Adobe software
>settings,
>> whether user-configured or otherwise, be extremely careful not to
>broadcast
>> it (e.g.: by posting to this list) or even write/talk about it.  

>I can tell you a big hacker secret right now and I won't go to jail...

>Everything is hackable. The key is, does anybody care to hack it. 

In this case, was it not a demonstration of a flaw, so 
that the company could sell their OWN product or service?
They were not, in fact, ripping off Adobe's work and selling 
as their own, and they were not ripping off any content 
that people had "secured" in locked PDFs and selling IT as 
their own.  They merely poked at a format that is widely 
used and recognized, for purposes of demonstration.

Would it have been convincing if they had merely claimed, 
without any substantiation, that PDF locking was not only 
quite breakable, but had been broken? They showed it.

>> It is ethically righteous to defend your copyrights and expect just
>returns
>> for your efforts and passion.  However, when factoring 
>"greed" into this
>> precept, we ALL suffer: customers, employees, the companies 
>themselves,
>fair
>> use, freedom of speech, society in general.
>
>Copyright protection and greed are the same thing.

I have no problem with greed. I have a problem with 
people using deadly force to implement their greed.

You are physically safe from me. I am not safe from you.

>Company's need money to survive, so they find ways to create goods and
>services that are in demand. Then they must defend those hard-earned
>developments from competitors, thieves, and loser employees 
>who think its
>okay to rip them off. Hence they build security systems 
>(encryptions) to
>defend themselves from nasty people.

Fine. But as we all know, it's an ongoing battle, 
and it's an ongoing compromise between utilility 
and effectiveness.

The lazy way out is to use force (or the equivalent, 
using agents to employ force on your behalf).

If you want to keep people out, build a good lock, 
and install it in a substantial structure. Accept 
that eventually someone will discover how to get 
past it. At that point, you either invest some more 
effort in the next generation of locks, or you 
decide that too few persons will be sufficiently 
motivated to defeat the existing locks. Deal harshly 
with anyone who enters your actual premises unauthorized.

Distributionn media are not premises.

All the kafuffle is really Adobe (and other software 
companies) using force to shore up a flawed model.
The model is that they are /s/e/l/l/i/n/g/ renting 
software (code, instructions) for use on customer's
computers.

That model is going to die soon, if Microsoft and Sun 
get their way (never mind the Open Sourcers). 
Most people will stop using applications 
on their own computers and will instead use free 
thin clients to run software on remote servers (ASPs).
They'll pay rent for the use of the remote apps, 
and perhaps for the use of "secure" data storage on 
similar servers.

I am reminded of the "War on [some] Drugs". It's an 
artificial construct that is breaking down because 
not enough people agree with it.

Laws against the initiation of force, against fraud, 
against misappropriation of physical property are 
supportable and enforceable, because most people can 
naturally agree that they don't want to be killed, 
beaten, or have their goods broken or taken. The laws 
work because they merely codify the fact that most 
people are willing to concede reciprocity in those 
areas. That is, most people see the value of conceding 
rights in those areas (personal safety and safety of 
physical property) in order to have others reciprocally 
concede the same rights to them.

Laws that are simply made up for some people's 
convenience or gain may work for a while, but 
they begin to fail when the situation changes 
so that enough people are inconvenienced and 
do not see the utility for themselves. That is 
what is happening to copyright in the digital age.

At one time it was expensive to make unauthorized 
duplicates of printed works. You needed to have 
pretty-well the same equipment (printing presses) 
that the publishers had, and you needed to run 
a large distribution network, before it became 
economical for you to make money by ripping off 
a publisher.  As reproduction technologies became 
cheap and ubiquitous, it became easy for individuals 
to make their own copies. At the point where it is 
just as convenient to make your own copy as it 
might be to buy a bootleg copy... you stop buying 
from large bootleggers.  The current laws were 
aimed at the big (capital-intensive) bootleg 
operations, and had some utility against them.

As the current publishing model fails, big publishing 
companies will expend big resources getting nasty 
with "transgressors", until they finally get the 
idea and close their buggy-whip factories. Certainly 
they'll hold on while bound paper remains the most 
convenient model for consuming written material, 
but as digital readers become truly ubiquitous, 
they'll have to switch to some other model. It'll 
be too easy for people to acquire content. The 
publishers (who may eventually be simply the 
authors) will have to provide some other value, 
some cachet.   There's a reason why an original, 
single, oil painting fetches more money than one 
of X-many signed lithographs. Mass-produced un-signed 
copies generally fetch lots less than the signed, 
numbered lithos. 

Several popular music groups are actually making 
more from touring than from record sales. People 
value the "original", present, real, ephemeral,
non-recorded experience.  Cachet.

>People (artists, writers, welders, etc.) need money to survive. So they
>work hard at producing something of value and selling that to 
>companies.

And there's where the analogy fails. Writers and 
artists produce something that is just too easy 
to copy. If a welder produces something, you use 
it in place. You've got just that single object 
(boat, pipeline, trailer, whatever). Nobody else 
can have the use of it while you are using it.
If you (or others) want another, you have to pay 
the welder to do the same (or similar) work over 
again. Welders are safe until Star Trek replicators 
become a reality.

A welder becomes wealthy by becoming more efficient, 
or by doing demonstrably better work, so that s/he 
can either produce more in a given time, or produce 
that which is considered more valuable than what other 
welders can produce. A welder, no matter how good, 
does not get to sit back on his/her ass and watch 
royalties flow in.

There's the difference. Writers and arteestes want 
somebody with a gun to help them get paid over 
and over for a single effort.


>Then they must defend those hard-earned products from losers and slimy
>companies that want to get their work free or for very little money. 
>Hence they get attorneys and writers' unions to defend them 
>from big nasty
>companies. 

See above. The welder (or farmer or anybody else 
who directly produces something tangible) is certainly 
NOT defending any such thing. They get paid for 
their latest work and they move on.

You folk are supposed to be technical writers. 
Some of you are making money from the artificial 
contrivance of copyright, because you write books. 
The rest of us (the majority?)really could not 
care less if copyright vanished tomorrow. I put 
the copyright claim statement on every manual 
that I write, but only because it is expected. 
The chances are vanishingly small that my company 
would ever pursue anybody for re-using what I write. 

Some of you may be writing columns and features 
for periodicals, and so may think that copyright 
is doing you some good, but for the most part 
it is irrelevent in that arena, too. Most of 
what appears in periodicals is timely, and 
therefore soon loses its utility.  Ask your 
magazine publisher how often they pursue anybody 
for stealing old columns... or even how often 
they receive requests from anybody but libraries 
and school-teachers for permission to reproduce.
With today's technology, it's simply too easy to 
write a "new" article, quoting a few verbatim 
passages, but otherwise paraphrasing in order to 
make some new point, to match the style of the 
new periodical, or simply to make the old words 
fit the new column space.
Why bother with exact lengthy quotes that you 
have to pay for?
>
>The point is - you are no different than a company. You're protecting
>yourself, they are protecting themselves. Just because they're 
>bigger and
>have more resources than you does not mean it is okay to steal 
>their work
>or technologies. 

The defeat of a locking mechanism was not 
a theft. Adobe's technology was still intact 
in their (Adobe's) hands. They were not in 
any way prevented from using it. At the same 
time, the people who demonstrated the defeat 
of the algorithm (or the implementation) did 
not steal the technology, and did not use 
the technology. They merely showed something 
about it. If that's inconvenient to Adobe, 
well that's tough. If the revealed failure is 
sufficiently important, then customers will 
demand better, and Adobe will expend some 
effort to plug the leak. On the other hand, 
it may be that most customers would find it not 
worth the bother. Anybody who truly wants to 
do more than mildly inconvenience an "un-
authorized" reader is certainly going to use 
procedures and tools that are more secure 
than Adobe's PDF locking.  Wouldn't you?




(continued next post)

/kevin

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