321–330 of 457 posts
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Great of something that is ethically bulletproof but quite illegal!
Legal grey area. > But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use. https://info.legalzoom.com/copyright-law-making-personal-cop...
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Depends on your economy. Specifically what he does is of course illegal but the general principle of removing drm from your own purchase isn't That the bitstream of semantically meaningful content is identical appears to be the key issue. Why does it matter how you get there?
The general principle of removing DRM is forbidden, at least in the US, which is presumably why DRM removal tools are distributed through the same shady web sources as pirated content. "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
A savvy lawyer might argue that’s not what’s meant by effectively, but it’s at least a little ambiguous.
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I found that for certain types of books, digital works fine, while for others it is a disaster. For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. For textbooks or other materials where you are expected to flip back and forth through pages trying to digest the material, as well as for books with tons of graphs and diagrams, ebooks are indeed suboptimal. My personal rule is tha…
> For novels, poems, and other non-textbook books without tons of graphics, ebooks are great. E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaki…
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As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales. Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawool…
>As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? Why Windows became popular will never have a single unarguable objective answer. It was probably a combination of factors, like anything else. The only fact we know is that Microsoft became one the most successful and richest companies, and it was because hundreds of millions of people paid Microsoft f…
Many pirates are not bad people: they want to pay for your content, but for a variety of reasons they can’t (DRM prevents them from using it they way they want, they can’t afford it right now, etc.) As circumstances change they will purchase your stuff.
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Project Gutenberg self-censored themselves to all German users in protest of the lawsuit.
If they did not have servers in Germany couldn't they have just ignored the lawsuit? They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my si…
... GDPR? Granted, extraterritorial enforcement can be quite difficult.
Can you imagine someone trying to start public libraries if they didn't already exist now? I think it's safe to say it would never ever happen, at least in the US. Between lobbying and the general disdain for most things run by any type of government here, they'd never have a chance. Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never s…
My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.
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Penguin Random House charges libraries $35, $45, or $55 for each "copy" and then expires them after two years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... Hachette also expires their e-books after 2 years. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l... See also the drama about "Controlled Digital Lending", where a library makes their own scan of a book and lends it out.
Wow that is repulsively scummy.
I wonder how this can even be legal in Europe. If someone sold you something, its yours. AFAIK, There is enough consumer protection to stop most EULA bullshit. So it seems it only needs someone to sue and some proof microsoft used the word 'sold' when you bought it.
"and you will receive a full refund of the original purchase price." Seems fair enough to me.
Every piece of DRM'd content will end up like this. Every book, movie, show, album, and game will be dead in a few decades (or sooner) if it relies on some company maintaining it's servers. It's good that there's alternatives, but it seems like the alternatives are slowly diminishing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...
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Are you implying that DRM is a solution to piracy? If anything, DRM is a big driver for piracy, and its success rate is near zero. Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release. The "better solution" is to treat your customers with respect and let them own their bought goods. Gog.com is a good example here, in my opinion. What definitely doesn'…
Its fine to have an opinion on how things should be, but some of your assertions are not based on facts. >Virtually all major DRM-"protected" works are available on thepiratebay shortly after release. Sometimes before release. "Virtually all Server OSs get hacked/have had security bugs. Nobody should use them to host or store anything." All you're saying is that DRM isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect, and it isn't exa…
DRM and servers are fundamentally different in that securing a server is an achievable goal. There is nothing fundamental that stops you from exposing an interface without any holes in it, even if it's quite hard. DRM is the polar opposite. Where servers are physically isolated from attackers in a manner that allows for perfect security* DRM is physically colocated on the attacker's machine in a manner that explicitly denies perfect security.
Servers are also broken into fairly sporadically for short periods of time and many of them never at all. Data stolen from servers usually slowly goes stale as people change their passwords and so on. On the other side of the fence I cannot think of a DRM that wasn't compromised relatively quickly and excluding anti-cheats once DRM is compromised it stays that way forever.
You can even see the discrepancy in the availability of files. I can pirate basically any game almost immediately after launch but if I want background production files lifted from server, even for an ancient game, the Half-Life 2 beta is almost the only example. One of them is certainly more niche but not enough to explain the size of the gulf.
Both are examples of imperfect things but there's always going to be a line between "imperfect" and "too imperfect to bother with" and personally I feel DRM falls on the "too imperfect" side of that line.
* = Assuming breaking into the data center is outside of the threat model, which it usually is.