Russia to legalize software piracy
writing.kemitchell.com
writing.kemitchell.com
Other countries should be free to figure out other ways of doing this.
Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).
I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way. There are fundamentals and externalities -- the war on Ukraine is wrong, and we should intervene. However, on something like having IP law, let alone breaking it up into copyrights/patents/trademarks, let alone stating durations and contexts of all of those, this just seems like overreach.
I feel like this is one of those places where corporate lobbyists managed to change people's values in a way which is quite unfortunate. People learn about IP theft in elementary school, it gets integrated into UN human rights documents, and something which is really culturally-dependent is viewed as universal. It wasn't viewed this way when I was a child.
Even little things make a big difference. We've gone from "copyright infringement" to words like stealing and theft. They're fundamentally different concepts which were intentionally mixed up. If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).
I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws. I'm just arguing we shouldn't force our IP regime on everyone else.
I know, that's happened a lot in the past, but aren't we moving towards recognising that was wrong and figuring out more respectful forms of cultural and commercial interchange?
No.
It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.
First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.
Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it.
Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms.
Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach.
Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here.
I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.
The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?)
The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation.
Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least.
A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.
This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
Culture isn't proprietary to a group, and these groups aren't objectively demarcated in any way. To even say "Risotto belongs to the Italians!" is to make statements on who Italians are, and pretend that this is some immutable, objective group, and that for some reason, there is this magical doorstep that if you carry Risotto over it turns it bad. It's when the corporation pretends to "take" this cultural heritage as a marketing facade that they're appropriation something nobody owns, to then turn a profit from it.
SO, I apologize for my mangled point. Culture isn't proprietary. Languages and food and customs and songs and stories travel. This is what makes human dynamism. Cultural appropriation is the act of trying to take possession of it. The very act of copyrighting something communal is the problem.
I love that line and it makes perfect sense.
By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair".
It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination".
Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does.
Linguistics(?) is hard...
Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists.
To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.
Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces.
And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza.
However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.
What does it mean to own stuff? Clearly more entity classes than individuals can own stuff—much IP is owned by companies, a legal fiction of an individual owned by people in the class of shareholder with generous but limited dispositional power held by people classed as company officers.
Some cultures have established foundations and such to own things, like the Free Software Foundation or the Scientologists. Some fishing rights are granted to certain cultures which pre-existed contemporary government.
What matters is whether then you want to trade with the countries who's IP you are using. At that point it becomes extremely unfair to the country that developed the IP.
If China steals industry secrets that took billions to develop, and then sells those same products for cheaper (because they get the IP for free) in the west, is that fair?
I don't like your rhetoric of the west using force. There is no force or legal requirement if you don't engage with the west. But of course everyone wants to engage with the west, but at that point you have to come to a mutually agreed trade and legal pact. This is normal. This is also voluntary on the part of both countries.
The tools have gotten more nuanced, but they're still at play. There are quite a few books on the ways the West subverts democratic structures in Africa in order to be able to extract natural resources. China is now getting in on this game too.
We still use militaries to protect Western trade interests, especially around key shipping lanes like the Panama and Suez canals.
But if you want to speak about it in a historical context, I would ask you explain what you mean by the "west" and the west forcing their values.
And I would note you are speaking to someone who's country's been invaded by mongols, ottomans, and russians within the last 1000 years. They all seemed to want to "force" their values on the people living here.
Is this a western thing?
In the previous commenter's context the West forcing its ideals informs his/her comments. In your context the mongols, ottomans, and russians forcing their ideals informs your comments.
You're both probably right.
At the same time, it's ludicrous to tell a, say, Zambian, that no one forced anything on them in the "modern context". When we know we forced everything from their laws, right down to their very borders onto every nation in sub-saharan africa. We even forced them to sign the very treaties we're saying were not forced on them. The leaders who didn't sign, we killed, and put a new leader in place who signed.
Hungary and Poland can test whether they can get outside of the EU's legal jurisdictions and whether they can lead decent lives doing that.
Just to reitirate, ultimately these things are actually voluntary. But they come with consequences. And it's not like these western values of trade, and individual rights are really western any more, when Japan and Korea has had success with them, arguably China was well (before Xi).
But there are consequences if you want to go it alone, and it's questionable whether other economic systems actually work as well.
I think as the West attempts to keep some of these nations in Western orbit, we need to more openly acknowledge some of the issues our system has caused them in the past. Then we should lay out for them a credible reset that compares favorably to their Chinese opportunity. Absent that, the Chinese will continue to gain outsized influence across Africa because Africans will continue to make decisions that really are just common sense in the current context.
Larger point being that we can't simply claim we have not forced anything on people and these places are acting irrationally. From the perspective of a lot of places outside of the West, things have been forced on them, and they are beginning to take what are, from their perspective, perfectly rational actions to rectify these issues.
- Mongols did not force ideals or cultures on the people they conquered. If you surrendered and paid tribute, you were free to do as you pleased.
- The Ottomans were mixed; you were pressured but not forced. Non-Muslims, for example, paid higher taxes.
Most long-lived empires let people do their thing. The Romans lasted for a millennium, and finally collapsed when (and in part because) they tried to impose Roman values on everyone, and that turned out to be more expensive than the empire could sustain.
These also aren't historic; I posted examples from the 1800s, but also recent ones.
The comment about Korea and individualism is just crazy too; Korea is probably the most deeply Confucian culture left.
Pointing out all of the historic and cultural errors would be an essay longer than the comments.
And what you say about ottomans is also wrong. You should speak to historians in the affected countries.
Mongols - perhaps you are right, if you were left alive, which was mostly women and children. So I guess for them they got to live free in the mongol empire...?
The level of ignorance here is staggering. The Mongols were pretty straightforward. For the most part, they would politely ask you to surrender. If you did, you were left alone to live as you saw fit, as part of a trade network, Mongol-friendly governance, and paying tribute. No one got killed. If you fought and lost, there was wholesale slaughter. Everyone got killed. There were a few in-betweens. There was no scenario like the one you're describing. The in-betweens might, for example, have skilled workers and artisans carted off.
I won't get into a back-and-forth about the Ottomans. You have no idea my background, and you presume too much. You have no idea who I am, or whom I've spoken to.
When a country signs a treaty, it is agreeing to something, presumably because it sees some benefit in it. It is entering into a kind of contract, from which there are presumably multiple benefits to all participants. Nothing is being imposed on anyone. It is being freely chosen by the governments that participate.
If a Nigerian politician signs a treaty while receiving bribes or election support from a Western or Chinese oil company, that doesn't mean "a country" sees a benefit.
If a country signs a treaty at a risk of being ostracized by the world, it's taking the lesser of two evils.
And if you take a child bride from a war zone, it's a free exchange, with both sides seeing benefit. However, that doesn't mean it's fair or non-coercive. Power imbalances can allow for pretty nasty, unfair deals.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread with examples, both modern and going back 200 years.
Are you asked if you are Swiss citizen when you open a bank account in America?
Per FATCA treaty you should be but that isn't happening because the mighty power the US holds over anyone dealing with USD. If a US bank doesn't share its Swiss tax cheats nothing happens. If a Swiss bank hides them they get taken to the cleaners and can loose to do business with USD which is a death blow for any bank.
Not the case at all. Treaties are sometimes compromises and in sometimes coercion under the diplomatic guise of choice.
Otherwise there would be no need for a treaty and nations could choose to enforce others' values of their own free will.
Exceptions don't refute the general case.
> Otherwise there would be no need for a treaty and nations could choose to enforce others' values of their own free will.
The point of a trade treaty is for each party to formally affirm that they will abide by the other's conditions. This is necessary irrespective of coercion.
"""
In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the
importation of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another
nation's market with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the
drug was sold in India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This
is called "parallel importation," and it is generally permitted under
international trade law and is specifically permitted within the European
Union.
However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than
opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association
characterized it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to
permit compulsory licensing or parallel imports." 3 Through the Office of
the United States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa
to change the law — and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the
USTR listed South Africa for possible trade sanctions.
That same year, more than forty pharmaceutical companies began proceedings
in the South African courts to challenge the government's actions. The
United States was then joined by other governments from the EU. Their
claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical companies, was that South Africa
was violating its obligations under international law by discriminating
against a particular kind of patent — pharmaceutical patents. The demand
of these governments, with the United States in the lead, was that South
Africa respect these patents as it respects any other patent, regardless of
any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South Africa.
We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt
patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access
to drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care
infrastructure matter more. But whether patents are the most important
reason or not, the price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and
patents affect price. And so, whether massive or mar- ginal, there was an
effect from our government's intervention to stop the flow of medications
into Africa.
By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States
government was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not
like wheat (if they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United
States intervened to stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information
about how to take chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those
chemicals into drugs that would save 15 to 30 million lives.
"""
Did you sign a contract to be aligned with whatever the individuals running your country decide that you should do?
You're whole statement hasn't suggested any better approach and is flawed in it's core.
That aside, this article isn't about IP either...
A lot has happened in the past 300 years…
The fact that we sat on our hands while China stole our IP for two decades is a contributing factor to why Russia felt emboldened to attack the Ukraine.
I've recently dropped the "the", because I understand some people object to it. Is this because "The Ukraine" referred to a geographical region, while "Ukraine" is the name of a country?
Well, that is the question, isn't it? You consider mimicry to be a form of theft; others disagree.
They are going to come after you if you try to sell them to MAKE money or tell others how to make it.
- The Netherlands didn't have patent laws in the decades that Edison was introducing his lamps
- Philips bought up the machines of competitors that Edison drove out of business through his patent monopoly and started producing lamps en masse in the Netherlands
- more than a few researches of said former competitors joined Philips' R&D crew, presumably partially out of spite, partially because it was the only place where they could continue their research
- this combination of experts and not giving a damn about patents resulted in really quick innovation at Philips' factories, meaning their light bulbs soon were both better and cheaper than anyone else's (of course, this only lasted until the light bulb manufacturers formed a cartel to introduce manufactured obsolescence).
- eventually the Netherlands caved in to international pressure to introduce patent laws. By then Philips was so huge that they started abusing it for patent trolling of their own.
There is a difference between a conspiracy theory and a well-documented conspiracy. The things the Phoebus Cartel did falls squarely into the latter, including the planned obsolescence.
In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1]
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/incandescent-bulb-ban-...
Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though.
Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong)
https://old.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/leunb1/why...
> There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products.
> I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.
A lot of my winter and nighttime electricity comes from natural gas.
50-60% of the heat energy in natural gas can get turned into electricity and make it to my house.
Then, it can be used to heat my ceiling a light bulb, where almost half of the heat immediately escapes my home. This is not a very good way to heat my house, versus my high-efficiency natural gas central air system that is more than 95% efficient in using the energy in natural gas to heat my home: it's about 3x worse.
Of course, even more efficient would be to use the natural gas to make electric power that runs a heat pump. That could be 200% efficient end-to-end.
Or, as the gas is already being pumped to your home, use the natural gas directly to power the expansion engine of the heat pump. Noisy, though.
Or use the gas for cooling in the same manner that a propane-powered refrigerator does. Although I have no idea how efficient that would be.
Resistive heat has efficiency ~1. That is better that almost any other heating source with exception of heat pumps and cogeneration. If we consider visible light as a separate gain, then light bulb has efficiency ~1.02
> Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection. So it heats whole room and occupants, but not air.
It does if you only consider the efficiency of the electricity -> heat conversion, but electricity generation itself is often not that efficient. It can be a lot more efficient to go fuel -> heat than fuel -> electricity -> heat.
... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it. High efficiency natural gas heating systems are 98% efficient; compare to natural gas combined cycle plants that are ~60% efficient, plus a few percent more lost to transmission and distribution.
> with exception of heat pumps
Sure, that's the actually-efficient source of heat from electricity.
> For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection.
For incandescent bulbs, this is unrealistic. The bulb is quite hot and heats the air around it and the fixture.
Moreover, of the IR, a whole lot also strikes the fixture and is conducted into the ceiling.
Well yes. Statement 'efficiency of X' generally means 'useful work of X / relevant energy input into X on X boundary', not including efficiency of whole supply chain from primary energy source.
In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze.
So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted.
The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.
I keep wondering when ASIC+5G "electric heaters" will be nearly given away to people.
Many (most?) people preferred both more light and a less extremely warm color temperature.
Then why did they need a secret agreement and fines to enforce it?
> Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt.
What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.
But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits.
The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members.
Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market.
If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition.
It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.
> The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
The simple fact that they explicitly set a lower operational life target rather than setting a minimum target tells me everything I need to know about what they were trying to do. The additional fact that they fined manufacturers who exceeded the target doesn't leave much room for speculation.
If they had any interest whatsoever in efficiency as the driver, the targets would have been based on an efficiency target like lumens per watt rather than life expectancy.
Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.
There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.
Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product.
It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be.
I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.
You should be really cautious when using the phrase “conspiracy theory” especially when talking about a cartel for which we have plenty of historical evidences.
Of course the Phoebus cartel isn't responsible for all problems with light bulbs, and it didn't even worked as well as it was supposed to and not for as long as it was supposed to, but it is still a real thing.
Gravity is also theory - but there is so much evidence that a layman would call both a fact.
"To quote Wikipedia, for a given light bulb, "A 5% reduction in voltage will double the life of the bulb, but reduce its light output by about 16%"."
The intention is irrelevant - the point is that they conspired to manipulate the market, which is illegal.
If it's okay because someome deems the decision right, then robbing banks to feed poor people is okay too.
But there is a tipping point when international enforcement of copyright and patents starts to work in your favour.
That's because books were hand-made items, the industrial revolution hadn't begun, and there was no concept of IP.
>If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits
Well, yes. Ease of copying is a non-issue, because the real cost is in creation.
Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
And I make that point as someone who has seen multiple developers quit one particular space (music software) because piracy made it impossible for them to earn a living.
Pretending this is about what you want is simply narcissistic selfishness. There are two parties in these transactions, sometimes they're small independent developers and not giant corporates, and piracy has very real effects on their livelihood.
If I pirate something, how do I _very literally_ take money out of the pocket of the creator?
As far as "theft" is concerned: software, including recorded music and films, has zero marginal cost of production. The software industries therefore have the potential to generate extreme profits, unrelated to the risks and costs of development. Intellectual Property laws are needed to protect these extreme profits.
Incidentally, I'm not aware that the term "Intellectual Property" was in use before about 1985. Copyright infringement, in particular, wasn't a crime before about that date; enforcement was by civil suit, and if you didn't make any money from infringement, then the court's award couldn't be greater than zero.
Copyright infringement was most definitely a thing before then and damages could be awarded even if you had no income from it. See statutory damages. Really the only thing that changed with computers was the ability to make perfect copies, thanks to the data being digital. Prior to that, the problem was somewhat mitigated by the analog nature of it and that by the time you got to the 3rd or 4th generation copy the quality had significantly degraded.
It's not. The problem lies with the way the respondent rephrased the original. The original, as written ("very literally ends up with less money"—not to "very literally take money out", as the respondent chose try to use in a bizarre and underhanded setup), is in perfectly reasonable accord with the correct use of the word "literally"...
My act of piracy does not "very literally" cause any amount of money to be removed from the IP owner. And if the poster meant to invoke the more colloquial form of literally, they damn well shouldn't have qualified it with "very."
One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on.
No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft.
Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse.
It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either.
As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.
This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.
Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.
Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise? A realistic example I've lived, is that purchasing the software/movie or whatever copyrighted material is impossible due to its unavailability in the local market, the absence of payment methods to purchase it online and/or the heavy cost compared to the cost of living in most parts of the world.
Frankly it doesn't matter whether the person would have purchased the item or not if they couldn't make their own copy. Going down that path would outlaw all competition, or even just choosing to abstain from purchasing anything. There is nothing inherently wrong with making choices or taking actions which result in other people receiving less income than they might have in some other hypothetical scenario. What matters is that they still have all of their own property whether the copy is made or not—they are not made any worse off than they were before.
I don't think this analogy works very well here. What if the alternative is that the potential buyer would just never have purchased the product in the first place? Then there is simply no exchange that would have occurred, and the seller's "money in their pocket" was never going to be any different in this case.
To think about this analogy some more...Is it theft if one walks into a store, sees something interesting that they remember for their own benefit later, but they choose not to make any purchases? Does that deprive the shopowner of income in some way that the potential buyer should be made responsible for?
This isn't to argue that copying software (or music, or movies, and so on) is universally good or bad here, just that the theft analogy really has some serious problems with it.
Err, nope. If I steal a bicycle from the shop around the corner there is one less bicycle the owner can sell.
If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.
This condition is simply not true in the majority of cases of piracy of digital items.
I worked in third world countries, I have a friend who is a single mother on a low wage job.
These are just /some/ examples where a sale of many digital items, software, media, etc. would provably not happen. There is no 'theft' because there was no income withheld from the creator. [1]
Proof: https://www.techdirt.com/2017/09/21/eu-buried-own-400000-stu...
[1] Whether they should be allowed to do that is a different matter – one detached from theft/economy. It's a philosophical/ethical issue and I agree with parent that the view we hold on these things is recent and shaped by conditions that frequently no longer apply (physical item vs digital one resp. cost of making a copy).
Property being about land and geographical boundaries is one of the most common misconceptions that gets shattered in the first few weeks of a first-year course on the subject in law school.
> Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.
Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity so that people can produce things that are valuable but not physically scarce so that they can buy those things that actually are scarce.
(Emphasis mine.) Who said that? Certainly not me.
Acts of charity happen all the time, and we are doubtless better off for them. But those are a choice. It doesn't mean it should be the only choice.
> Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity
You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.
This argument never held up. By taking it, you admit it has value to you. Whether or not you agree with the asking price is incidental: you have to acknowledge you are taking something with some value and not paying for it.
I've pirated my fair share of software and media, and had my own software pirated. I'm not judging anybody for pirating software, but I am calling out specious self-justifications about doing so. You pirate it because it's cheaper and easier than paying for it.
If Joe is selling cherries he grew on his cherry tree, and I start selling some cherries from my cherry tree for cheaper (or just giving away cherries), this does deprive Joe from some of the profit he would get from selling his cherries, because some people who would have bought some cherries from Joe instead of from me, but I am by no means stealing profits from Joe. I'm not taking his cherries. He still has his cherries. That's not to say that he isn't worse off. He is, of course, worse off. But (except if some other conditions hold) I haven't wronged him, and I certainly haven't stolen from him.
(Ftr, I don't actually have a cherry tree, and do not grow any food.)
Now, if Joe is selling copies of a file, and I am giving away copies of the same file, well, it seems like a similar situation. One difference is that in the case of the cherry tree, both Joe and I are putting in the work to create the product, namely, by raising and maintaining our respective cherry trees, and harvesting the cherries,
while in the case of the computer file, it may be that Joe put in a lot of work into creating that file in the first place, and I did not, and so if I were to sell copies of the file, that would seem quite questionable.
Now, if I were to distribute the file Joe made and is selling, the reason this would be bad is probably a combination of "This makes Joe worse off, and he should be rewarded for the benefit he provided others, and also society decided on that basis that I shouldn't do that, and unless there is an overriding moral obligation to do otherwise, I morally ought to follow the ethical rules that society has established."
This is, I'll admit, somewhat similar to at least some of the reason it would be bad for me to steal some of Joe's cherries and give them away (though with less of the reason being "because of the ethics society decided" part than in the case with distributing the file.)
Though, one difference in this case is, Joe could do other things with the cherries other than sell them, and by stealing them, I am depriving him also of that option. This doesn't happen in the case of distributing the file. Nor would it happen if I had a magical duplication beam which I used to make duplicates of his cherries.
I think this difference is an important part of the concept of theft.
The concept of theft, I expect, arose substantially before money, and I imagine also before significant trade.
The concept of "Hey, that's mine! I need that!" is fairly basic, and is based on "If another person takes it from you, you don't have it anymore." .
Now, of course, socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should. I think it is best to use different words for them, because I think it makes sense to keep the concepts separate (though related).
Do you personally feel that wage theft isn't theft?
Same hypothetical, except the cherries Joe picks aren't actually Joe's—they're Jill's. Jill owns some farmland where cherries grow, and she lets people pick them. They do so on the premise that cherry pickers get paid by Jill on Tuesdays. Joe moves to town and picks cherries there all week and then hands them over. Jill says "thanks" and then slams the door in Joe's face. Does this fail to meet the threshold for the appropriate use of the word "theft"? Joe has not had anything taken from him[1]—certainly not any physical property[2] he could do anything else with or ever plausibly argue "That's mine" to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear—because the cherries were never his.[3]
1. 30e7f23b81e476dd7afc8f4e23401aed004567526f8dc58ca97fc3339fe5d2bf
2. d38b2ef315ebb47a44a28abf7884c7fecf05b11f0d34a875fffc89ce4f955e81
3. 188e9eee6f835b8a6bd2f927de75006cd87215d10dee9a0225e320f3ee6d4b65
P.S.: What's with the hashes?
¹. It seems to also be used in Spanish, but mostly in an American context as a calque from English.
I hate it when people say that to dismiss things. Semantics is all about meaning. Without it we can't have a discussion. It's what's important about the words we say.
> You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for.
Right, which means it had enough value for you to copy it, but says nothing about whether or not it was valuable enough to pay money for it. And if it wasn't valuable enough to pay money for it, the author loses nothing in that particular instance of piracy.
Of course, that doesn't mean all piracy falls under this case, but it does seem important to distinguish between these things.
I always avoid ever saying anything like "that's [just] semantics", and I try to discourage others to, too, but in many of the situations where it shows up (including this one), there's nothing wrong with the complaint itself. When you hear someone swipe, "I'm not going to argue semantics with you", it generally carries an implicit accusation of an attempted change in subject. Consider:
Sara: "Nathan ate the clementines I bought from Oliver this morning!"
Oliver, Nate's friend: "I didn't sell her any clementines. The only fruit I've even touched today are these. They're not clementines. They're small mandarin oranges."
Does it matter that Sara can't distinguish clementines from ordinary mandarins? If there's a law that punishes you differently depending on whether you stole true clementines or not, then sure, what they actually are is materially relevant. Absent that, though, does Sara care what the definition is right now? No, and neither should anyone else. To even bring it up just distracts from Sara's actual complaint.
That is to say: if the argument starts as a semantic one, then semantic quibbles are relevant. ("The law says this about subcategory Y. Does what's at issue satisfy the definition of Y, or is it merely Z?") If it's not, though, then it's appropriate to call someone out on DOSing the conversation with a semantic rabbit hole (instead of being able to concede, "You say 'photocopier', while I say 'Xerox'", and then moving the fuck on).
Of course it's semantics - we're discussing the meaning of the word "theft", and deciding whether it applies to this situation! By denying the relevance of semantics you beg the question, assuming that the words must mean to everyone precisely what they mean to you.
"Owner", for example: your statement presumes the idea of software copyright, that someone who is neither party to the copying scenario can "own" the pattern of bits being copied, and have a right to demand payment for it. Well, that is the question, and the Russians clearly have a different point of view than yours.
Of course I share their skepticism: the idea of intellectual property seems to have brought about rather more harm than benefit, and I generally follow Proudhon's view on the subject of property.
It's similar to arguing ice cream is not fresh because it is made of frozen milk. You're trying to form a bad association that is completely illogical.
It's not a matter of convenience, and it's not just because it's cheaper either -- piracy is the only way to actually get access to it for some people. Otherwise, it's just prohibitively expensive for them.
Sure, you could argue that that still falls under "because it's cheaper", but there's a difference between someone pirating because they just want to save money and someone pirating because they literally can't afford to get it legally no matter what.
And this doesn't cover stuff like software just being plain unavailable in some regions; I literally cannot get some software I use in university legally.
Patenting a "ground flower X and leaves of plant Y in alcohol with sugar added" was not a thing back then.
Recipe as secret is not compatible with modern standards like peer-review / FDA approval, etc ...
I pirated Ableton Live until v5. I've paid for the full suite every release after that. If I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't be paying for it now. This is pretty much ubiquitous in Ableton users, and I'm pretty sure that it applies to many other high end software packages. Photoshop would probably be the best example, but Office, Autocad and many others would have a similar customer base.
Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.
Remember, before the 15th century less than 5 people could do long division in Europe. Try solving middle/high school math equations without the number 0 and using only roman numerals, you will understand the problem very quickly. For this and many other reasons, most of the intellectual heavy lifting was done outside of Europe. It took 400 years or so to collect information and catch up to the rest of the world.
Patents last 20 years. So no.
>Patents last 20 years. So no.
That's a domestic choice that most countries had no say in, there is no global consensus on how long patents should last.
In the US, congress has the right to grant and extend patents for however long it wishes (and has done so many times in the past).
So yes, to my original point.
Yes there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
Also, you're confusing patents and copyrights. Patents have not been extended for very long lengths.
If it's not voluntary, I don't consider it global consensus.
Joseph Stiglitz makes a similar point...
"TRIPs imposed on the entire world the dominant intellectual property regime in the United States and Europe, as it is today. I believe that the way that intellectual property regime has evolved is not good for the United States and the EU; but even more, I believe it is not in the interest of the developing countries."
I personally don’t know a single software pirate who would have actually bought the things they’ve pirated. Mostly they just would have gone without the software, probably using some free alternative instead. There’s no value lost by piracy here, because there was no potential to capture value from these users in the first place.
Pirates are often teenagers without a single dollar to their name to spend on software, but all the time in the world to explore shady websites for warez. Later, once they have money, they buy software!
When I repair an iPhone instead of buying a new one, Apple ends up with less money in their pocket. Repairing an iPhone clearly isn't theft, so this argument is clearly fallacious.
The printing press was over 200 years old in 1700, like 99% of the nearly a billion books in Western Europe were printed.
I have less money than if you sent me some right now. You not sending me money is clearly not theft.
Thats a very slippery slope
Freeing slaves was theft
When Ghandy led subjects of India of the British Empire to the sea to mine salt, that was theft - mining salt was illegal for them
Using electromagnetic spectrum without a lisence is theft
Are you using the oxygen molecule I produced without paying? Is your house casting a shadow on my land, blocking sunlight i am entitled to?
What about ownership of airspace, 'ownership' of international waters and economic exclusive zones, ownership of orbits in space, ownership of the atmosphere and 'ownership' of pollution?
All ownership is a social construct - piracy is a symptom of the overall system being crap
But is this incentive adequate in modern society? I would argue it is worth revisiting. A lot of the science that is done around the world is already funded by governments with no guarantees of patent success, so it is clearly possible. Open source software also shines a light on the willingness of people to create amazing things for everyone...
Isn't everything a human construct? What does that even mean?
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0...
Don't use the products whose creators' values you don't agree with.
It's even easier in software with its widespread and thriving open source ecosystem.
Yet you don't seem to promote that. Instead, you seem to promote the idea that people who want stuff should be able to impose THEIR values on the creators of that stuff.
If you make a coffee table out of wood from a sustainable forest, does it belong to you? What causes it to become personal property?
If you make a coffee table out of code from a second life engine, does it belong to you? What causes it to not be personal property?
What if the coffee table you make in VR is made from "wood" tokenized on a blockchain that cost money to generate the electrons for?
Your examination concludes that things made from your invention and/or labor rendered in atoms are property, but from your invention and/or labor rendered in electrons are not? Or one form of labor has a right to earn a living, the other does not?
Until we achieve a post-scarcity world -- where life-time is included in scarcity -- that thinking seems both wishful and facile.
> What causes it to not be personal property?
My baseline is that things are not property, so justifying the absence of property is a foreign concept to me. I'm curious why people would tend toward assuming property and then rationalizing away property in certain contexts. The assumption of property has consequences so enormous that I cannot authentically assume it as my default. Again, really interested to hear what made people chose that as their default.
A coffee table made of code can be used by an infinite number of people in an infinite number of virtual living rooms. Everyone who wants to use it is able to, and everyone can have one in their living room without conflict. Since there is no conflict, there is no need for anyone to decide its resolution.
When participating in a global economy, other participants expect fair dealing. What do you think will happen now with Russia? We'll assume they are going to try to steal our tech. Instead of trading with them, we won't do business with them at all whenever possible. We learned this the hard way with China. And their internal incentives to create IP also disappear - who would want to spend time building an app in Russia when the guy next door is now allowed to steal it and sell it as its own? Nobody.
You're going to see much more draconian DRM. User experience will suffer. Less tech will be created. People will avoid doing business with Russia (and we already see that happening, and it was already true to an extent before they started murdering Ukrainians). And Russia's economy will continue to fail.
We'll outsource all our manufacturing to them, and freely participate in technology transfer along the way, because we want access to the market? /s
The point is many entered treaties to respect and recognize foreign IP.
And you know why? Because they eventually become technologically sophisticated enough that they want their IP recognized and respected.
You act like this was imposed by the West when it entered into voluntarily.
Whereas if they pirate Russian software or software they can buy, there is an impact to the bottom line.
As a result it can be seen as a logically consistent position.
So if you take goods from a store that doesn't exist is it stealing?
Maybe you should be.
Personally I am of the stance that IP rights are inherently unenforceable once a work is released to the public, especially in the digital realm where information copies itself freely. Knowledge and art should be freely given and received and IP laws are directly opposed to this. There are other ways to monetize almost all forms of IP if that is the desired outcome.
You could say that about a lot of things. It's pretty irrelevant to the question of if something should be thing or not.
But that fact should serve as a caution to people wanting radically change it (e.g. abolishment): most of us only have direct experience with the problems created by the solution, but not the problems the solution solved.
> I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way.
But likewise, we shouldn't compromise our values either. I'm not denying that "corporate lobbyists" have a had a pernicious effect on IP law, but my understanding is that most of this "imposition" has been in the context of the quid-pro-quo of trade deals. It's totally legitimate for a country with a Western-style IP system to decide it doesn't want to give some trading partner favorable trade terms if that partner refuses to recognize IP.
The US copyrights regime was mostly imposed on my country in 1994. What do you mean we have no experience with the problems it solves?
(Any honest discussion at that time would at a minimum bring shorter terms.)
Some people want to just abolish IP (e.g. patents and copyright) because they've read some articles about abuse by patent trolls or copyright terms that are too long. They're not thinking about (say) the author who spent a large amount of effort writing a successful book, just to have to continue working a regular job, while all the profits go into the pocket of some corporation(s) that are under no obligation to pay the author because copyright doesn't exist so they have no special rights. Or the books that never exist because the author never writes a second book, because it's too difficult and stressful to juggle writing with a job, and they can't live off the proceeds of their previous work.
Legal rights give power to the little guys. Take away those rights, and it'll mainly be the big guys who benefit.
When thinking beyond the means (economical based incentive) and skipping straight to the end (advancement of human technology and culture) - One particularly huge country (China) has already been doing an accidental experiment for a long time: taking western IP and patents with a pinch of salt, and just using them pretty freely (as far as I understand it), at least at a national level.
I find the existence of that duality in the world really interesting, and it's not exactly one sided because the west has been exploiting China and Asia in general in their own way. On one side you have economically based idea and technology creation incentives with ever increasing restrictions; on the other you have all the benefits unleashed without restriction, yet without significantly affecting the incentive for the source (I'm sure some "not rich enough" people will complain it does but frankly the economical mechanism have already been pushed too far).
It's about not doing what they agreed for when they signed these contracts which are now terminated.
Okay, so what is your suggestion here? Make it legal to make the copies? You know that that will only make more companies implement more aggressive DRM, right? Because, if you can't legally stop people from copying your software, you have to stop those who copy it from being able to run it.
This is also why cloud applications with web interfaces are on the rise. They don't have to worry about piracy because it's literally impossible unless people break into their servers, which I'm sure no one is going to argue isn't a crime.
Without legal teeth, they can’t do that with offline consumables. They haven’t been able to even with their current draconian laws.
The client needs to consume the information, and so is in an inherently advantageous position to copy.
> cloud applications
Exactly. And these are popular even with their legal shenanigans. These laws have never helped the consumers at all.
Where it gets worse is when it gets enforced by some giant behemoth as just another tool to maintain dominance and essentially forbid competition. It's just extracting money for the sake of having more money.
For example, Lay's (owned by PepsiCo) forbidding farmers in India from growing the same potatoes that Lay's uses for chips because PepsiCo owns a patent on the seeds. There's basically no other rationale behind doing stuff like this besides "but my money!". Like, the rest of the world should just cave to a $227B US conglomerate on everything they want?
At that point, IP isn't even about up keeping freedom or justice or whatever, it's just another way to enforce a colonialism-esque class hierarchy via capitalism.
Why don't we all just keep our technology to ourselves. Or does that not suit russia because russia can only steal everyone else's technology?
Great argument, Putin.
Your suggestion that the west should be required to trade with countries which don't respect western IP policies is actually an imposition insofar as it imposes on western nations' freedoms of association, but allowing countries to determine their own trade provisions isn't an imposition.
I'll hazard an analogy: if I refuse to debate certain people on the Internet who don't adhere to my rhetorical standards, am I "imposing my regime on everyone else" (and thus I should be required to debate everyone who wants to debate me)?
EDIT: significantly revised to (hopefully) improve clarity.
IP agreements are far more complex and are usually negotiated on top/after the initial agreement.
You think modern trade agreements can't be coercive?
Thats a terrible analogie.
To argue that being cut off from the global economy is 'freedom of association' is like arguing that selling cocaine to children is 'just free market' and "honest business"
Countries are not people - if the rest of the world stops trading with UK, 60 milliom people starve. In some countries, people will freese to death without fuel. West imposed moderate sanctions on Russia, and economy is already collapsing.
Ideally Russians would understand that sanctions are a consequence of their government's murderous invasion and that they represent a mild inconvenience compared to the plight of Ukrainians--if a given Russian can't muster the courage to protest (yes, I understand protests are illegal, which makes those who do protest all the more commendable) then I hope he can muster the courage not to complain about sanctions (similarly I hope westerners can muster the courage not to complain about high gas prices and so on).
The threat of cutting off trade is an attempt to 'twist the arm' of a country. In this case its justified, cool. (Although some of them like banning Russian cat breeds, seem questionable)
But then why are posters above pretending that many countries, which signed up this IP regime under threat fo being cutoff from trade, didn't do that under duress?
Because most people reserve "duress" for a threat to one's rights. In the case of nations, these rights are generally territorial integrity (basically, the right not to be invaded or attacked) and political independence (the right to self-govern, including to choose with whom and under which terms a nation engages in trade or other treaties and alliances). While there are certainly powerful incentives for cooperation, it's incoherent to argue that exercising one's right to self-govern is coercive and thus out-of-bounds.
Yes, you’re forcing them to abide by your “rhetorical standards”. The point of debate to help someone see your point of view. Nowhere does it require abiding by a certain process. If so, one could make the argument that only those that have not taken logic and learned the proper way to debate can engage in such things. So yes, you’re forcing people to play by your rules, or you refuse to play. It’s actually quite a bit childish.
Coercion requires a threat to an actor's rights. In the case of nations, these rights can probably be summarized as territorial integrity and political independence. While there are powerful incentives to cooperate, these incentives aren't coercive as they don't intrude upon territory or political independence (including the ability to decide with whom and under which terms one trades).
I think it's a fine thing to criticize the western legal framework of IP and you can argue that the west shouldn't export this legal framework; however, I don't think there's any philosophically consistent way to argue that the export mechanism (mutually beneficial agreements, basically) is "coercive" except perhaps to indict any kind of mutually beneficial agreement.
But Russia is specifically saying you can pirate software from countries supporting sanctions i.e. Western software made under Western ideas of IP and an expectation of profit for their work. If Russia wants to allow pirating Russian software, then I don’t see the issue. But to buck another country’s legal framework is a step over the line. If Russia wants to use Western software (Photoshop, Microsoft Word, cloud providers), they need to respect the Western terms of use.
Take the .cat domain for Catalan. It is Catalonia’s right to make the terms of use of that domain such that the user must support Catalan translations. If you don’t want to agree by these terms, it is not your right then, to say “well that’s a Western idea of cultural integrity and I don’t agree with that and I’m gonna use the domain anyways.” It’s their domain, their software, not yours.
It’s easy to look beyond the months of negotiations that precede trade agreements when not involved. Or buy into certain narratives crafted to pressure US negotiators, that the US is “forcing itself” on nations. But elected officials from other nations signed on the dotted line after, ostensibly, long debate.
This "X is a social construct" meme has degenerated from meaning "it could have been designed/evolved differently" to "it doesn't matter, because it is relative so it might as well not be" - it's a terrible meme. There is a very big difference between claiming something is very wrong AND it follows an arbitrary decree or custom that was unjust, and claiming that whatever is socially constructed is also wrong. Pretty much every aspect of social life is a social construct. Justice is a social construct. Not killing each other over the slightest disagreement is a social construct. Pretty much every boundary, every aspect and definition that gives people meaning is a social construct.
The case for somehow breaking up IP laws regionally, I don't think it's a very good one because it would effectively cut out entire regions from many developments. But "it's just a social construct" - that just doesn't make any case either way.
BTW having separate, insular knowledge is what the current situation evolved from. Mutual certification and validation - say Rospatent being integrated into the Madrid System ( https://rospatent.gov.ru/en/activities/international_coopera... ) - is just a way to remove insularity and reduce costs for smaller IP owners without big pockets behind. What Russia is doing here is basically reneging accords, not some valiant pro-IP-freedom effort. This is a bit like US prints pirating the hell out of every British (+Empire) author after US independence. Just getting away with it, not some Libertarian movement.
It's like having the KKK join your cause.
I made many attempts at discouraging this through anti-piracy measures I learned while working as a malware researcher a few years ago. But if I want my apps to also be available on offline devices, there's really no way to combat this.
The apps are also targetted more toward power users which are more likely to know about cracked apps. This is really hurting indie devs.
The only realistic scenario that I'd pay that is if my employer was fronting the cost. Then again, maybe for some people it really is delivering that much value.
Lunar lite and rcmd seem priced fairly. If it makes you feel any better (probably not), the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow. Or if they did pay for it, would pay for it with things like stolen app store giftcards.
In another life, I was quite money-limited, and so I downloaded basically every game, movie, song, and app. I didn't feel badly about it either. I was never going to buy the media. I couldn't. Once I got old enough and had enough disposable income to not have to pirate things, I stopped. But quashing my piracy would have never equated in more sales. Anyone who sees a pirate download and assume that's a lost sale is deluded--its not happening.
I think the best methods are trying to get people to pay (who haven't already) are probably guilt or a productive-spirited suggestion. If you can detect that someone is cracking your software or doesn't have a valid license, put a donation link in the shape of a coffee cup in the corner of your software. At least people have the option to support you. Otherwise--you'll never best the crackers.
Lunar can change the hardware brightness, the same one that you can change using the monitor OSD. That in itself required a lot of reverse engineering and research about the DDC protocol.
Adaptive brightness, ambient light sensor integration and other automatic features also needed months of non-stop work.
Plus, the app is open source, trying to give something back to the community which gave me the inspiration to create this: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar
Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours.
I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply.
the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow
| the thief would have probably never bought it
Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don't think it really changes much. I took a quick scan of your website, determined it was expensive screen-dimming software. Others are likely to do the same.
I have no doubt that this took an extraordinary amount of time to get right. You also did a beautiful job with the app and the website. I've tried to put something together that's a fraction of the complexity, and, well--it's just a lot of work. You should be proud of what you built.
That being said, all of what I said still stands: even though it allows you to control the hardware through software, it's still an expensive piece of software, and it's sort of niche. Having to rebuy the software every year for updates is also sort of a piss-off, even though I know you're doing lots of testing for each OS update and possibly hardware revisions too.
Open-source solutions are everywhere, and like someone said recently, open-source is seen as free support unfortunately.
Having seen a few different situations, sometimes people may not pay because:
a) it’s quite expensive in their currency
b) they don’t really have a payment method available for international transactions
c) maybe they’re just poor and got some kind of a hand-me-down computer with their savings
d) culturally, in many places hardware has been seen as worth paying for, but software is seen as something you just copy (don’t even get me started on the pricing differences between app releases that do the same thing but run on Macs and on iOS/iPadOS devices)
e) there is a sense of entitlement towards bits, be they apps or photos or music or movies or TV shows
I sometimes get the “I come from a poor country” email and after checking if the email is not some usual spammer, I provide a 50-75% discount code depending on the country.
I understand that price should be relative to the country, and I have smaller prices on Paddle for the countries that are supported.
I don't want to pay the full price for some updates in the future. Your app seems like it would sell so much better as an impulse buy pricing wise, but that's just me. If this works for you, it works for you.
I don't mind the price personally but together with the "subscription" feel I won't be buying it, one of the two needs to change for me to be interested.
I'd pay twice the yearly cost or more if it was a one-time purchase.
A subscription model is an immediate pass though.
Edit: Dev clarifies elsewhere that the license is perpetual and subsequent payments cover updates. If a nonrecurring payment option exists, then I would happily make use of that, and quite possibly return to pay for updates.
This isn't unique to indie-devs. People (and others have) will give you a laundry list of reasons as to why they can't afford to buy your project, but at the same time entitled to use it for free. Even open-source is no pancea; billion dollar corporations have abused open source communities as well.
Threads like these are slotted into the back of my head when people make comments complaining about the SaaS-ification/Cloud-ification/Electron-ification of all software. The calculus is incredibly simple; why take the time building native apps making a third or half as what you are making in Cloud, while others tell you that what you have built isn't that valuable and you should be grateful they even pirated it?
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” [1]
[1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-...
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” - GabeN
Seems like a pricing issue as well as a service issue.
People are buying things not to play them, but because it's a good deal/easy to do. Many of the games on the sale are acquired and not played.
> Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours. I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply.
Seeing the odd numbered price of $23, I presume you have tried different pricing tiers and options, since pricing is a matter of elasticity and finding the right price point to maximize your revenue would require some effort.
> the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it | the thief would have probably never bought it
Actually, that saying about piracy is true many a times. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work in your favor either way. Anecdotally, I decide what I’m willing to pay for something and what I’m not willing to pay for something. Have I pirated software? Yes, I have in the distant past. And during those times, I wouldn’t have bought them at those prices either.
Maybe you need to change your website messaging to encourage those who cannot or will not pay to use the Lite version and encourage those who want the Pro version to pay. Pricing doesn’t have to be static all the time.
I hope you find the best options that work well for you and your customers.
No it's not.
If a thief takes your bike, you no longer have it, you can't sell it.
Tomorrow will be an Apple Event and I’m already expecting some new hardware I’ll have to support or some breaking change to an internal API (because controlling monitors isn’t possible with public APIs).
When a bike is bought, the owner is done with it. While the software developer is bound to keep the software running and compatible with new technologies.
Of course, I could just forget about it and leave the users that bought it with an unusable app when the next MacBook comes out. If piracy is accepted, why wouldn’t this be accepted too.
You won’t care as much about the theft since you still have an almost full pot of strawberry jam, but you care a little since that pot will eventually end.
Analogs in the order of appearance:
- jar of jam: copy of Lunar
- large pot of jam: my willingness to keep updating the app in a world where everyone sees theft as “meh whatever, I wouldn’t have paid anyway”For your software you could sell a support contract with it, you could even bundle it in up front, and then sure you are expected to provide that support.
None of this is of any relevance to someone . If I copy your software it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't cost you, it doesn't deny you the use of that software. It's wrong, sure, but not because of theft, just like it's wrong to sneak into an empty cinema, or download something from the internet.
If I steal your computer, it does hurt you, it denies you the use of that computer. That is theft, that is wrong, and I'd argue more wrong than copying your software.
After their free update period ended, some of those people began using the cracked version. I know that because they reported issues without knowing that the tnt@team.ru email would show up on the report.
I don’t know how many people are doing that, but I can say for sure that there are people that could pay for the software, but don’t because using the crack is easier for them.
Paddle also offers a dashboard and I can clearly see the monthly revenue dropping by $500-$1k on months when a crack is released for the latest version. When I launch an update with a new anti-piracy measure that stalls the crackers for another month or two, the monthly revenue goes back up.
“It doesn’t hurt the dev, I wouldn’t have paid anyway” is just something people tell themselves to justify their action.
That's a whole separate problem. In my experience 'anti piracy' measures cause problems for people who pay for the software, it's just another reason not to pay. If it's easier to use a cracked product, you are doing something wrong.
> “It doesn’t hurt the dev, I wouldn’t have paid anyway” is just something people tell themselves to justify their action.
Nobody is trying to justify people not respecting your intellectual property rights, just call it what it is - copyright infringement. It is not theft, just like someone using an ad blocker isn't theft, or someone ripping a DVD they bought so they can watch it on their phone isn't theft.
The crack isn’t easier to use than the app. I meant that it’s easy enough to download the crack so the users don’t have any incentive to purchase.
Per license at the wrong price is the wrong price.
If the offline version cant be protected and the legal remedy is inadequate then pick a different line of business and exit the market.
If the app keeps working as expected and you don’t need any update, the Pro features will be available forever on that license.
This is a free utility or $1 for a tiny tiny market.
Hook people and then charge them in that kind of shitty update model. Or a different model. Upsell something else in the app. Collect and sell data. If that price and funnel is not worth your time, then you have to do something else, thats it.
edit: Oh I see, you're that guy that comments on everything [0]. Sorry for responding in the first place.
[0] https://whaly.io/posts/top-10k-commenters-of-hacker-news-in-...
Your $23 license-if-you-want-to-upgrade is arbitrarily priced for what consumers are used to.
google.ro does. It may be just in Romania ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ weird if it is
Because real theft destroys value, while “stealing” information merely doesn’t realize potential gains.
> I barely make half
Entrepreneurship is difficult. If it was merely about effort, our societies would have been completely different.
Interesting careers tend to pay less; video game developers work more and get paid less. FOSS software written by unpaid labor is perhaps the extreme example.
Also "if you can detect that someone is cracking your software or doesn't have a valid license, put a donation link in the shape of a coffee cup in the corner of your software. At least people have the option to support you." I have no data to back this up, but I really doubt that the people that are money-limited or just don't want to pay 20$ for an application will suddenly support a developer voluntarily.
In the first 4 years, Lunar was actually completely free and supported by donations on BuyMeACoffee.
I made a total of $5k in those 4 years from donations, probably even less after PayPal took their huge cut.
And on your second point. I also don't have data. But if people crck software that costs $23, maybe they're willing to pay some fraction that isn't $23. Isn't that reasonable? Or in your mind, are there two groups of people: one that will pay anything, and the other that will pay nothing?
The only realistic scenario that I'd pay that is if my employer was fronting the cost. Then again, maybe for some people it really is delivering that much value.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/12/19/crime-blotter-roo...
Actually, I find it a little ironic that you backed up your statement using someone else's intellectual property.
> I think the best methods are trying to get people to pay (who haven't already) are probably guilt or a productive-spirited suggestion.
And you also say:
> I didn't feel badly about it either.
Those don't seem consistent.
The reality is that cracking and using cracked software is ethically and immorally wrong. People do it because they're selfish and can get away with it.
They're not. The means to acquire the software are just too great. If you give people a way to express their gratitude in other ways--they might (they also might not. heck they probably won't. but I'd also expect it to be non-zero).
No, I am absolutely not claiming any intention malice. I'm claiming selfishness.
> The means to acquire the software are just too great.
It doesn't matter. If you didn't make X, and the person who did make X doesn't give you any right to X... you don't have any right to X.
They made it. By virtue of actually creating the thing, they morally have all of the rights to decide who should have access to it. If they haven't given you access to it, what right do you have to claim over it?
One time i would say:“well, why not. i use it and there is no better way“ but my lizard brain says:“23$ or euro every year for like 5 or 10 years ... thats money. Nope. One time developing it and a few minor fixes ... “
I have no idea how bad every mac os update f+++s with your app and maybe its a pain, but well lizard brain
But the thing is, it's not a subscription. If Lunar keeps working for you, you can avoid updating after the free period of updates ends. No need to pay again.
If you don't upgrade your Mac hardware to something exotic (like the M1 upgrade), and if macOS doesn't pull the rug from under us, devs that play with the DDC protocol, then you won't need any updates.
But Lunar is very dependent on the hardware, because it talks low-level I²C with the monitor controller.
So if you upgrade, and I have to spend thousands of dollars on new hardware and months on reverse engineering it, I expect to be paid for it.
You pay for the product as is now, not for my unlimited future time.
Instead of this, pay fix price for software and 1 year of updates seems time more fair.
Another HN poster has a relevant suggestion[1]:
> In the 90s I used to make money off shareware, and every time I release a new version hackers would release "cracks" for the license key. Eventually I figured out that these cracks are coming from Russia.
>
> In the next version of my program, I added a check for system language, and if I detect Russian then I bypass the license key checks, and the program is free to use. This stopped hackers from releasing cracks.
On a related funny note, the first Metal Gear Solid V crack only worked on Chinese timezone or language setting, I forgot which.
Didn’t think I’d be relinking to this XKCD so soon: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Maybe this is common knowledge in your circles, but otherwise it’s far from widespread. I learned about it from the linked comment (as did other people) and no one I told it to had heard of it before. That includes software developers of popular apps.
The fix? FOSS.
I’m sure the Russian government are using Microsoft Office, if they can’t legally buy it anymore then they must make the piracy of it legal: or they’re breaking their own laws.
Or they retrain on open/libreoffice. But that unfortunately has a poor track record of working.
As staunch of a FOSS advocate as I am, this is probably the sensible move for now. :/
"Leave Ukraine and pay for the war crimes committed there" is an obvious choice that comes to my mind.
I don’t think the US would leave Iraq because they couldn’t buy IP licensing. They’d probably say that the IP licensing is invalid and do it anyway.
Anyway. Obviously I want this invasion to end, but obviously they don’t. So, this move makes sense given that context.
I've used a lot of them personally, especially games. Some of those translations were pretty good, and some were so bad they were actually hilarious, and have become a meme (like "wasted → потрачено" in GTA San Andreas)
I know one indie game whose Russian localization was done and distributed with the pirated version first, before being adopted by the dev and added to the official distribution. (of course since the guy is only doing gamedev as a hobby, his stance regarding piracy of his own games is quite relaxed)
Decades ago I patched binary Commodore 64 applications to have messages in Spanish, getting as far as patching programming environments like Logo and BASIC to have not just error messages but also the keywords translated.
Even without source code it is somewhat doable, and modern applications often have localization mechanisms that remain in the compiled executable.
They will use Linux, build their own alternatives for Google/Youtube or use Chinese sites. It will all be fine. In fact their data will be safe from Google and Meta.
oec.com has lots of info per country on what makes up their economy.
Russian oil is already going unsold, without formal sanctions.
Also, remember that while China and India can choose to continue receiving exports they didn't pay as much as Europe did _before_ the war. If Russia has reduced itself to one or two potential buyers, those buyers have the power to dictate pricing well under market and the financing options are going to be very much not in Russia's long-term interests. China has a strategy they've used on smaller countries where they offer aggressive loans for projects and then take control of infrastructure / resources if the borrower defaults, and I'd be exceedingly unsurprised if some Chinese companies end up doing something similar here.
In some sense they could survive on a war footing (i.e. people won’t starve) but their economy will take decades to recover even if sanctions are lifted soon. They lost 25% of their wealth in a few days (rubble) and don’t even have a functioning stock market.
This is already a catastrophe for Russia.
All Russia has the domestic capability for is going back to long range four engine planes, which will increase maintenance and fuel consumption.
It is only necessarily for regional flights.
In the worst case, the airlines will have to transport the parts to Russia themselves, which is not much more costly than getting Boeing to do it.
Explainer-Importance of Russian Titanium to Global Industry
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2022-03-01/...
In the long term, Russia can survive by selling gas to Europe, and buying goods from China. In the short term, there's an absolute madhouse in the domestic markets.
Unlike in the Soviet days, when most of its domestic products were locally produced, Russia has de-industrialized, and all of its supply chains have become incredibly dependant on the West. It can't turn back the clock 40 years overnight.
Since you didn't specify bad for who (but really, even if you did) still this:
> "Leave Ukraine and pay for the war crimes committed there"
This is what eventually will happen, but over Putin's dead body most likely. "Live by the sword, die by the sword", that kinda thing, etc. Everybody agrees that by starting this pointless war Putin has painted himself into a corner.
ie. there are still diplomatic ways out of this open to Putin. If he is not open to considering them and feels cornered, it is his own shortsightedness and failing.
It has been said that you should never draw your pistol unless you are going to shoot. I don't know if that's true; but I do think it's unwise to threaten violence unless you are quite sure you are prepared to carry through.
I think Putin is prepared to carry through (he's made the threat more than once). Russia seems to be losing in Ukraine; but they can't be seen to be slinking away with their tail between their legs. So I think there's a good chance Russia will pop a tactical nuke in Ukraine.
For the same reasons, NATO can't be seen to tolerate the popping of tactical nukes in a regional conflict; they would have to retaliate, for fear that their nuclear deterrent be treated as a joke. I haven't any idea how NATO might select their target, though; striking a city would be gross over-reaction, and striking Russians in Ukraine would be rather counterproductive.
NATO should definitely not respond to nukes with nukes unless Putin drops one on a NATO country. Ukraine is not in NATO. That makes it a first strike, not a retaliatory strike. Putin's propaganda has been that NATO is an aggressor threatening Russia. If NATO strikes Russia in retaliation for a strike on a non-member country that only vindicates him, and you know, leads directly to WWIII
Hey, I didn't mean to sound like a cheerleader for global thermonuclear war! I'm just observing that the logic of nuclear deterrence calls for a response whoever Russia attacks. If it becomes clear that Russia can nuke anyone it likes as long as they're not in NATO, then it can march into e.g. Georgia or Armenia with a company of conscripts, and take over, declaring that any resistance will be met with nukes.
Suppose Russia pops a small nuke in Ukraine? Really, that's not going to achieve any major military victory. They'd need a few to end the war in Russia's favour. That would result in clouds of fallout afflicting NATO countries. At some point you'd have to say "that's enough". But at what point? After two? A dozen? Only after the first megaton city-flattener?
I was a member of CND for a year, back in the 80's. I still favour unilateral disarmament. I quit not because I didn't support the goals, but because I was shocked at the political infighting I observed at the Annual General Meeting.
Not everybody. The "NATO pushed Putin into corner by inviting Ukraine" theorem is still alive. In any way, cornered Putin is angry Putin and angry Putin is dangerous and may be unpredictable.
Do you of a good source that covers the topic?
You can use Realism to predict that Russia would eventually try to regain the power it lost over Eastern Europe and the Baltics with the dissolution of the USSR. In fact that very understanding and fear is precisely why countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics pushed so hard to join NATO and the EU, because they predicted that would happen.
But that doesn't make Russia's actions the right move, either legally or morally. They have agency too and could always have made the choice to not to try to act like an empire with violent hegemony over their neighbours.
2. "NATO pushed..." does not imply Russia is right. Russia is wrong, legally and morally, but it can be simultaneously true that NATO pushed Russia.
2. "NATO pushed" is deceptive framing. The countries that joined NATO after 1991 had to lobby hard over many years to get NATO members to agree to expand. Even then the process took forever with MAPs and other interim steps each designed to slow the process down.
No wonder China is gleefully standing by. They're just biding their time. When 2 dogs fight over a bone...
Putin has said that Ukraine is a historical mistake, and laments the dissolution of the Soviet union. This war is because he want's to create a larger Russian empire, not a preemptive strike for self defense.
Where you go wrong is that the comment you were replying to was not talking about their ability but their options. The grand parent comment said: (paraphrasing) “Hey, what can Russia do, if no one licences them software?” To which the comment you responded said (again paraphrasing) “They have the option to stop the war”.
You are not disputing that Russia has the option to retreat, you are just talking about how they are strong and nobody can force them. Which might be true, might be false but certainly is a complete non sequitur in the context of this conversation.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Or from a different perspective: if the opinion of the citizens doesn't matter, then why is Putin shutting down independent journalism and turning up the propaganda in his own country? That only makes sense if he cares what the public thinks.
Shutting down the media limits the average person’s reason to know there is even a thing to protest against.
It’s not absolute power over the people, but it does diminish the power of the people.
Putin's approval rating is at 70% [0]. From [1] (referring to the invasion of Crimea):
> President Putin's approval rating among the Russian public increased by nearly 10% since the crisis began, up to 71.6%, the highest in three years, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, released on 19 March.[346] Additionally, the same poll showed that more than 90% of Russians supported unification with the Crimean Republic
So it looks to me that most Russians supported the Crimea invasion. Why would it be different now? I find it hard to believe that if Russia hadn't found such a stubborn resistance and would've been able to annex Ucrania quickly, which was what the Russian government thought would happen, in five years all the polls wouldn't show Russians supporting the invasion.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_...
Do you remember "garbage in - garbage out"?
If people fed nothing but bravado on how the glorious leader shines the path to the wonderful future, how in the world they would see him in a negative light?
The last two years showed everyone what even the professionals are happy to spew an utter nonsense, directly contradicting their profession and education, just because they want to feel that way.
And remember - population polling gives you information on how people feel about something, not why do they feel that way.
PS:
"Let us ask your opinion on these matters:
1. How do you feel about our President?
#a I'm delighted to live in this glorious days and I'm fully supported our glorious leader!
#b I'm a shithead and prefer to spend the rest of my days in gulag."
Hyperbole, sure, but how the poll is constructed, where it was performed also matters.
On the other hand, I have a limited amount of empathy and at the moment it is being consumed by people who are actually being bombed by not their own government.
Hmm, no.
I would say believing that garbage is on them. [1]
But when you have nothing other than garbage?
Don't forget what this is the country where you can be detained for holding an invisible placard [0] - so saying something out of the party line is a quick way for the unemployment at least, hence the people who could had provided some other info (primarily on TV) have big incentives not to do so.
[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-protest-arrests/25324619.html
[1] which is another joke because half of those people lived or at least were born when "government never tells the truth" was the default MO even for the government itself.
Then they can all take to the streets and protest against the regime to make their PoV heard. Sure, the protesters will clash with the police/military who will use force against them, but if it's indeed the vast majority of people as you claim, against the regime, then the police/military cannot overwhelm over ~80 million people on the streets.
If the vast majority refuse to take to the streets in protest, then it means they silently or otherwise approve the government's actions. It's up to the Russian people to sort out their politics, by violent force if need be, if they're truly unhappy with the past 30 years of fake democracy and corruption among their leadership.
Same how in 1989 people and students in Romania took to the streets, en masse, to oust the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who refused to step down and had the military shoot the protestors. Spoiler alert: he still got ousted, so the excuse that "we can't protest in Russia against Putin" does not fly.
For a man who is said to have thought the people deeply loved him, he sure was paranoid. Or maybe he actually knew how much people hated him and he was just fooling himself?
But Putin is nowhere as unpopular as Ceausescu was. His approval ratings that I've seen are no different from those of Western leaders. A lot of people there seem to believe Ukraine is full of Nazis. Nobody is going to storm his palace any time soon and I don't think the sanctions will help. They'll just reinforce his "the West is out to get us" narrative. Don't forget they don't have anything reminiscent of a free press anymore.
The problem is - as long as the economy is fine they don't care.
Personal anecdote:
In April 2010 I was protesting ratification of the so called "Kharkiv Pact" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact) in Kyiv. I remember a moment, when I was single-handedly pushing three rows of soldiers (national guard; they didn't really try) and almost no one else joined, one of the members of our group said to another: "There won't be a revolution today. Let's wait till they start losing money, then we'll try again".
an unrealistic choice is not a choice.
The Russian narrative of "we're helping the newly recognized DNR/LNR" doesn't make much sense - why are they invading all of Ukraine to make those two regions safe?
This is sort of like if the US "helped" Taiwan by taking Beijing. Or South Korea by capturing Pyongyang.
Also, the Russian news keep saying "DNR/LNR forces aided by Russian forces". When it's clear it's just the Russian military.
Not 8 years ago, but for the last 8 years. You know, being unaware of some pretty basic circumstances around an issue and then claiming undeniability is pretty rich of you.
> constructive comments that add to the conversation
How did your comment add to the conversation? You just repeated a common black/white sentiment and showed that you weren't fully informed about the topic. Please, be mindful next time.
If some product is impossible to buy legally in some region there is little harm in pirating it.
"All digital content must be made available in country X at the lowest price available in any other jurisdiction. If this condition is not met, said digital content can be freely accessed by any other means."
Unfortunately, most EU & other countries signed up to the draconian "life+130years" copyright agreements...
The right choice is to stop murdering civilians in Ukraine and invading their free nation. It's pretty simple.
Apparently the Russian government are talking about creating their own GitHub replacement, as China did with gitee.com.
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/03/07/You-And-Whose-GitH...
So the Russian government are probably already in the process of transitioning to FLOSS.
That might seem ironical in multiple ways: a dictatorship where freedom of expression is suppressed that promotes FLOSS because they don't trust closed software. Maybe the western world can learn a lesson or two from that.
That would be the only free thing in Russia then.
There is something absurd with that sentence, Software licenses are completely irrelevant if piracy is legal.
I know this one! They should have chosen not to fucking invade Ukraine.
Basically pirated software is not a solution for mission critical businesses.
Also who do you think is cracking the software? The same people who would find it very easy to put in malware into the software.
If Russia is running on pirated software, it will be a nightmare.
They need to get off Western software and push open source alternatives. they are massively inferior, especially in the B2B software side of things, but so be it. This is what Russia needs to do now.
Wasn’t this already the case for pretty much every entity outside the government and the largest corporations?
It's well known that Russia is a safe haven for piracy & copyright infringment. Can't say that hasn't benefitted me quite a few times.
Picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/11634911@N04/4005305105
The illegal software actually came with pretty good support and money-back guarantee, and it wasn't just en empty promise.
So, this phenomenon is not limited to Russia and in the specific current context, unless things in Ukraine have changed(?), they both do it.
Russia has always been pretty notorious for piracy.
Torrents, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.
Microsoft basically has power of police here. I don't know who they bribed or in exchange of what or how they managed to achieve this.
They go for companies, basically they send you an email and ask you about your infrastructure, licenses and tell you on X day we will be there to audit the software licenses that you are using. This is not optional, this is mandatory. You have to let them in since they will come with cops if necessary.
We have dealt with them sadly, but we are a linux only shop so we made abundtantly clear that we were going to fight until the end to make them accountable and bill them dearly for every second they spent here. After a few back and forths they decided it wasn't necessary to audit our company, probably not because of our indisposition, but because they probably realized we weren't lying and there was no money to collect here.
To add insult to injury they will use these emails to offer you Microsoft Teams. It's insane.
I cannot wish them ill enough.
Do you know where I could get more information on this?
don't confuse raids of people distributing software illegaly, this happened to companies that were suspected of using pirated versions at some scale and for some reason didn't want to settle.
Also The Equity and Concourse Fonts used in this blog are by Matthew Butterick a famous Rackateer! Didn’t expect to come across it here
Alas, Matthew's fonts don't include Cyrillic alphabets. So I swap in Noto Serif for the body text of multilingual posts.
i pledge my allegiance to the walt disney company
That's pretty much exactly what Putin or Kim jong un is doing
https://glineq.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-end-of-end-of-histor...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I suspect that is already happening. For example Astra Linux is a Debian derivative but their developers don't appear to be active within Debian.
The other thing is that some FOSS may remove support for Russia in some way. A font removed characters only used in Russian/Belarusian. Qt are blocking downloads from Russia/Belarus. OpenBLAS are considering removing support for Russian Elbrus processors.
https://github.com/hikikomori82/osifont/issues/11 https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-Marc... https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/3551 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenBLAS...
So the non-shared forks of FOSS are likely to be inevitable.
All else aside, that's just bloody stupid. A lot of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language.
And it may stay that way because there’re a lot of domestic software in Russia as well: you cannot legalize piracy without hurting your own IT.
The same was with IT industry support rumors last week: one (among several) of the leaked proposals was to remove taxes on salary for IT. It stayed off the table.
> among which is being discussed the suspension of criminal and administrative liability for use of pirated software “from countries supporting sanctions”.
[1] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-Marc...
[1] https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge
[2] https://docs.flutter.dev/development/platform-integration/c-...
I think this is motivated by bigotry against Russian and Belarusian people caused by a collectivist view of the world where people who had nothing to do with a crime should still be punished for it. It's really scary and disappointing to see.
As a black person living in a European country with very little racism, I thought my non-experince of racism was evidence that it's possible for a society to move past racism all together and treat everyone as the individuals they are, but in the last week I have heard more bigoted statements about people based on their origin than in all my life beforehand, including from people I would never have expected anything like that from.
We are seeing Russians who have strongly condemned Putin's war being ostracised and denied opportunities for something that's completely outside of their control. This is both morally wrong and contraproductive.
Even if you're right about them being disingenuous, I don't see why this would be racism. Maybe nationalism?
However, this might also backfire by pushing companies more towards making everything a SaaS subscription service so customers never have any code they could pirate.
I bet this bodes well for the Indian sci hub case.
I don't believe for a second that this will harm innovation in any way. Big pharma dies most of their innovation using taxpayer money anyway... It costs them nothing so why would they stop R&D? If they did, some other company would quickly step in and do the R&D using government money...
If the USA abolished software copyright tomorrow, more software development would go behind closed doors, and more finished apps would get distributed as binaries only. None of the users currently dependent on proprietary SaaS would be "liberated".
Are US interests threatened by stopped-payment subscriptions to Office 365? Does anyone want to pay their Oracle monthlies? As noted in the article, a lot of Western big-name enterprise software was cancelled recently whether it is pirated or not.
Drastic circumstance are a trigger, but the world of software is not done evolving and plenty of the accusations here are not new. I wanted this essay to be more specific, and to get into more examples, but instead it glosses over large topics to come to a hasty conclusion.
Edit: I mean, who would support translations of a language where you're software almost 100% gets pirated.
Edit 2: Downvote, without a comment? That's not what i expected from HN.
My former girlfriend is from Estonia and speaks Russian natively.
I have colleagues who are Ukrainian and speak Russian primarily.
End result? People learned English.
Lots of people in Moldova speak Russian bilingual too. Russian is commonly spoken in Kazakhstan - even Russian courses in the universities.
Overall for many Russian is a decent choice to have a produce localized to or search for information in general. Like in your case - compare it to Estonian where the native speakers are fewer than 1.5 million (even, when you include all age groups) - a lot smaller market, harder to localize due to lack of translators, etc.
You've just lost the vast majority of the market who NEED Russian translations to use your software.
I imagine most Russian speakers outside of Russia, who buy software, would also have an least some proficiency in either English, French or another supported language.
Even though I haven't kept up with my French, I could probably manage to use a French version of Windows. It's going to be harder, but not impossible.
Language nerds can be as weird/passionate as tech nerds. Plenty of people who will translate things for either language politics reasons (dislike of English as the lingua franca) or for fun.
I hope they will "liberate" software from the evil "billionaires" (they are called oligarchs in Western Media).
Nothing exposes the western hypocrisy more.
> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.
If software piracy even figures in your judgement of their actions there’s something wrong with you
/s
But ok, go for it.
That silly thing that has provided a good living for me and my family for the last 25 years.
Even if it spurs economic activity overall, it doesn't mean the gains of that activity are fairly distributed. Many towns were completely ruined by the decline in manufacturing jobs, even if others propspered.
There's also something to be learned from the past. Manufacturing destroyed the goods-producing artisan/mechanic/craftsmen industry.
Here in the UK we went through a painful economic decline in the 70s and restructuring in the early 80s. Things were pretty rough for a while, but then we went through an economic boom in the late 80s as productive forces were unleashed.
I'm basically a capitalist because I believe capitalism is based on essential economic freedoms to own property, freely associate and buy and sell one's labour. But I also believe that there is a role for effective social services, public health care and a social safety net. You need a health economy to pay for it though, and that's the balance that needs to be struck.
Like?
Anyone can see this won't end well and won't end anytime soon, what country is going to end sanctions while even one Russian soldier is still in Ukraine and for example it took TWENTY years for US to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. So likely still there until 2030 unless somehow Putin is replaced with sanity which is unlikely.
Now I wonder what country they will do this to next because they are already under maximum sanctions and they know NATO/US won't go in and won't even do a no-fly zone. So why not double down with yet another country?
To pretend it's -not- going to end up in multi-country conflict if we just sit back is -exactly- what happened in WW2, everyone sat back and watched while millions of innocents suffered and died and then finally drew a line.
Ok, no "boots on the ground". But stop the 500 pound bombs on apartment complexes. Imagine if it was your street and what you'd be begging the world to be saved.
Of course if people were dropping bombs on my neighborhood I’d be begging for salvation. I’d be begging for more than a no-fly zone. I’d want Russian military bases bombed and international forces engaging in combat to repel invaders too. Should we also do that? Russians aren’t using only 500lb bombs. They’re on the ground with machine guns, they launch missiles from Russian territory, and they use artillery.
We have to be careful. There is a lot at stake here. I agree with your suggestions about appeasement, but the situations aren’t totally the same since NATO apparently has a far more dominant military and economically it’s not even a discussion. Germany had the best military to start WWII.
You can't enforce the former without doing the latter, because people with SAMs are going to start shooting at your airplanes, and your 'no-fly zone' now turns into a 'we are bombing ground troops zone' which is indistinguishable from a 'we have declared war' zone.
They eventually shifted to enforcing against large entities and intermediaries. Same as in the West.