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Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

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Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#111

Post by ClumsyPilot »

choeger wrote: post #5

Interesting case. If Microsoft really demands that a user does not disable features, I am looking forward to some taking this to court. The thing is, software licenses are still largely uncharted territory. If I am not allowed to modify the system as my hardware executes it, will Microsoft take liability for any damage, material or immaterieal that could be caused by it? Think of an upgrade bricking your device (happ…

It is made even more interesting by the fact that to me, as an end user, it is absolutely unclear what i am suppose to delete/modify and what i am not.

How do I know that deleting or modifying a particular dll is a violation? It doesnt look any different than any other file.

Furthermore, if Windows craps out, which isn't rare, i might have to go into system files and commit dmca violation. As an alterbative, will a Microsoft send a technician to my house, or compwnsate me for the system being down?

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#112

Post by hajile »

gbear605 wrote: post #62
dancemethis wrote: post #53

It is a DMCA violation to remove what Microsoft calls "Windows features" from its proprietary operating system. It tells a lot about what DMCA and Windows are. It tells even more about whose side they are on: the common people or the enterprise. I can only hope the answer is easy enough to figure out, but I'll leave a tip just in case: not on the side of people.

This was not a instance of DMCA not allowing tweaks, but rather DMCA not allowing people to distribute minorly changed isos of Windows.

What about fair use?

The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost).

The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use.

The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can still be fair use. It also contributes a great many man-hours of work though which means it wasn't just a blind copy/paste either.

The effect on the potential market is the big thing here. MS would claim they lose money by not being able to spy on users or show them ads. However, their licensing scheme remains untouched which seems to indicate that theft is not a motivating factor. Considering the use of the new work, it could be argued that ads and telemetry would be blocked by a DNS filter anyway and no actual profit would be lost. Further, those people would have moved on to the free alternative Linux which is already the defacto standard for a lot of pen testing and event the license profit would be lost. Then there's the question about if collecting that data is even legal (I don't believe it has ever been tried in court) and how that would interact with the DMCA.

It really doesn't seem like a case MS would really want to go to court over.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#113

Post by gruez »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #30

People should use NTLite to customize their own ISO files (downloaded directly from Microsoft). You can never trust a customized ISO from the internet.

Is that still a thing? How much can you gain from customizing your ISOs using that tool? A few hundred megabytes?

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#114

Post by selectodude »

nvarsj wrote: post #102
loufe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was just the game makers needing to build for another platform which is the problem. Unfortunately a large problem is also graphics drivers. NVidia and AMD don't do much to help the open source community / linux with the development of their drivers, meaning they don't harness the power of the cards often times by significant margins comparing with Windows. There are other technical hiccups which make a dif…

AMD has excellent open source support. They embraced the Linux community a few years ago, and we now have a high quality AMD driver mainlined in the Linux kernel. Games run very well on AMD/Linux, including Steam/Proton. It's NVIDIA that is completely Linux/OSS hostile, and still follows the broken proprietary driver approach they have been doing for years. On top of that they actively ignore the agreed community sta…

Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers. It’s their lack of desire to open source pieces of them to make them work better with desktop Linux that is the issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Nvidia GPUs used on Linux don’t have a screen connected to them, so supporting wayland isn’t really a priority.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#115

Post by jeroenhd »

Ntrails wrote: post #80
smolder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad move for MS. It's user hostile enough to have telemetry and ads in the OS in the first place. If they fight against people's efforts to make it usable again, they lose market share, developers/power users lose interest in the platform, less software gets bought from and made for their store, and so on. I think what they really need is a pro version of Windows that attracts pro users by removing the bull…

> It's user hostile enough to have telemetry and ads in the OS in the first place. I may be alone, but I think those two things are very different classes of feature, and am very relaxed about the former as an opt out.

The opt-out does not exist for Home and Pro users. Only Windows 10 Enterprise can completely disable the telemetry engine. Unless you take extra steps (firewall rules, network-level blocking, etc.) Microsoft will get a ping every time a new device is plugged in and there's no way to disable that for the common user.

I used to accept most telemetry popups from Microsoft before they became opt-out, but in the scheme MS has currently set up, I don't think MS let their customers make an informed choice about their data collection. For that reason, I oppose it as much as I can.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#116

Post by nailer »

smolder wrote: post #78
belorn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is not what the DMCA copyright claim says. It does not complain about redistributing the files of a paid OS. The complaint is explicitly about providing a tool to work around technical restrictions, so "just provided an exe and some patch files" will not make microsoft happy. A common copyright claim of someone sharing copies of proprietary files would not make news. Using the DRM circumvention provision in…

This is a bad move for MS. It's user hostile enough to have telemetry and ads in the OS in the first place. If they fight against people's efforts to make it usable again, they lose market share, developers/power users lose interest in the platform, less software gets bought from and made for their store, and so on. I think what they really need is a pro version of Windows that attracts pro users by removing the bull…

The hack is probably removing even the 'Security' low-level telemetry. Which yes, would hurt users.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...

Edit: if you don't feel like reading the link, the 'security' level is the minimum required for updates.

No updates means no security updates. Which means exploitable boxes. Which would return us to the grand old days of exploited Windows XP botnets.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#119

Post by gruez »

hajile wrote: post #112
gbear605 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was not a instance of DMCA not allowing tweaks, but rather DMCA not allowing people to distribute minorly changed isos of Windows.

What about fair use? The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost). The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use. The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can…

This is a very charitable interpretation of fair use.

>The transformative factor seems rather clear. People want the many altered things and consider it different enough to go out of their way to find it (despite it not reducing their out-of-pocket cost).

Is it really that transformative? It might be from a user-privacy point of view, but if consider all parts of the operating system, it's negligible.

>The nature of the work is that it is a tool rather than a work of fiction which is also in favor of fair use.

This seems to be a misinterpretation of the law. That part of the test (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#2._Nature_of_the_copy...) was intended to prevent copyrighting of facts. In this regard, an operating system is probably closer to fiction than non-fiction. I'm not aware of any exception for "tools".

>The amount taken is substantial, but it has already been ruled that even 100% taken can still be fair use. It also contributes a great many man-hours of work though which means it wasn't just a blind copy/paste either.

Again, if you consider the entire operating system, even weeks/months of effort by a single person would be dwarfed by the millions (tens of? hundreds of?) of man-hours that went into making the entire OS.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#120

Post by HissingMachine »

I have no opinion about Ninjutsu OS because I'm not the target market. But I would have never even heard about it without this DMCA complaint, and I presume many who might be interested in it heard about it first from news about this DMCA complaint. Just pointing this out.
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