Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)
memex.craphound.com
memex.craphound.com
>Regardless of whether you think [things like 3D printed guns] are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: “Can’t you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”
I don't think that was an accurate prediction of the past 10 years. Hollywood lost the copyright wars: even the most locked down TV dongle will happily play pirated movies with the right apps, often available from the official app store. SOPA failed, and to this day the US is free from IP and domain blocking (though many other democratic countries are now under court ordered blocking regimes). UEFI didn't kill the freedom to run any OS on your PC. User-modifiable device firmware wasn't banned, and thanks to the right to repair movement the law is actually being used to open up devices.
Instead, the threat to general purpose computing came from the tech industry itself: Apple, Google, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft, the same companies that used their influence to kill SOPA, locked down devices and operating systems to protect their own profits, not to protect non-tech sectors or to appease regulators.
I thought the government was more concerned with surveillance than law-breaking programs. Or were you saying that they want us to stop running things like VPNs?
I know some people can create ammo but they need the casings which could also be restricted. And really, whoever wants to can create a weapon from a few pipes and other easily fabricated parts. Shinzo Abe's murderer did just that.
3D printers are not gamechangers here. They just make things a little easier.
> they need the casings which could also be restricted
Are casings particularly hard to make? It seems like anyone with the tools and skills to make a gun from parts could also make little cylinders that fit in that gun. Or just do the cannon thing, have a vaguely spherical ball and some explosive stuff packed behind it.
And you could build a black-powder gun that might be a bit less accurate but would involve nothing really traceable.
But I thought the part where the firing pin hits the cartridge gets damaged and the primer there isn't easily replaced. I'm probably wrong, I never even held a real gun.
If you can do that, you can ban guns too. Easy right? What's more, ammunition is easier to make than a gun.
https://www.quora.com/If-the-US-banned-sales-of-gun-ammuniti...
The hobbyist? describing making 400 rounds an hour by hand in his garage is a good rule of thumb.
As for technical barriers, it is obvious that they will be circumvented, yes - but experience also shows that most people don't bother, which is exactly why such barriers are still promoted by the industries that benefit from them. It's the same story for ammo and guns.
Note that I haven't said anything about the desirability of such barriers in either case. FWIW I actually own tools to manufacture "ghost guns". Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that any such restrictions on ammo and ammo components would be effective in exactly the same sense that DRM is effective - by reducing the number of people involved in the activity by several orders of magnitude.
> As for technical barriers, it is obvious that they will be circumvented, yes
> any such restrictions on ammo and ammo components would be effective in exactly the same sense that DRM is effective
My original objection was that guns are "easily tackled" as an incorrect assertion. You responded with a derail into moving the goalpost to "it's partially effective". Your responses are not compelling reasons to modify my stance.
With the new Secure Boot rules this ‘goal’ is ever closer. By default, new computers must now only boot the Microsoft boot loader, which can only boot Windows.
Did they?
Remember how "music lockers" like Google Play Music and the original incantation of Amazon Music, used to be a thing? Yeah, Big Music killed that. The closest thing we have now is music matching services that will happily nuke your music when the publisher delists those compositions for whatever reason.
Plex and the like make organizing and consuming pirated movies easy, but finding the source of those movies is still not trivial, and people _still_ get scary emails from their ISPs if they detect that enough of your traffic is being used for this purpose.
The Netflix app does not allow AirPlay (used to) or Bluetooth streaming (also used to).
It's still very much a cat and mouse game, and the cat is getting smarter every day.
Do you really think there would be a big backlash if Apple and Microsoft prevented "sideloading" and required all application installs to be from their official app stores? It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets.
We aren't there yet, but it does seem to be the direction we are going.
> It's already pretty much the default for phones, and tablets.
It's unfortunate they made it that far with smartphones, but there is much less precendent for thinking of a phone as a "general purpose computer" in comparison to a laptop/desktop.
Increasing security/limitations now means that you can't install things in your /home any more (at least without root). I used to be able to install opensc for using a badge with ssh. Now I have to install cask ... which requires root/admin privs. Similarly if I say brew install iterm2, when I run it it just says "iTerm.app can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software"
Certainly seems like the screws are tightening.
Take media sharing / device discovery for example. It has gotten to the point that just about any consumer product either has to communicate with some external server to find devices in your home, or use one of the multitude of zeroconf / airplay / mDNS / etc type protocols. It's gotten to the point that you can't even build a home network with more than one subnet in it. If I want my (most like fully of security holes) IP cameras to not exist on the same VLAN as my servers, well, good luck getting to two to talk to each other. Same for printers, media players, speakers, TVs, receivers, etc. If it isn't on the same subnet, it might as well not exist. Could this be easily solved with an option of typing an IP address into a config page? Yes. Does any product offer this? None that I've seen.
Sorry for the ranty example; I've been fighting that issue recently.
The way Apple could do it is by introducing the said package manager for iPadOS. iPadOS could soon grow to do everything what MacOS does but only with certain restrictions. If it's faster but cheaper, most people would then just buy it over a general purpose laptops.
I expect that governments will offer a "compromise" which is that you can run these "unapproved" apps, but they must be signed by a developer key which is tied to a domain name, and that domain name must be checked (by the OS) against a blacklist of banned applications/developers/websites.
That should be enough to block any encrypted messaging apps without backdoors, or apps like Tor, or bittorrent clients.
There could be a cat-and-mouse game as developers try to rename their apps, generate new keys, and register new domains, but when governments notice that their ability to censor is at stake, they will spare no expense on whichever intelligence agency or defence contractor is tasked with keeping the blacklists updated faster than any banned applications can reach mass adoption.
In parallel to this, governments will require that ISPs only let devices access the internet if they pass a "secure boot" check, which confirms that the device is running an operating system which enforces this blacklist.
We're probably less than 5 years away from some G7/EU country mandating this system, with the timeline only limited by the rate of adoption of technology like Windows 11 and Pluton. Older devices (and those running "unapproved" OSes) will be limited to specific ports and IP ranges, for "cyber-security" reasons.
It's already gone.
If you don't believe me, just try and read all the files on your very own {android, iphone} device (without desoldering chips) and see what happens.
General-purpose computing is a just a local optimum for profit extraction. Nevertheless it feels like guessing the correct answer for the wrong reasons. I welcome and embrace the FUD.
Computers are a network even without internet. (you can carry floppies) This network does everything. It touches everything. We all want to pay for it. Our money goes towards making the network more useful.
The copyright network really has very few players interested in preserving and expanding it but we all pay for it.
> when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important.
But it consumes the same budget. We have finite resources, finite expertise and finite moving hands. It means people are dying, health is declining, agriculture is hindered, water is polluted etc
Meanwhile youtube is deleting just about everything. 3 strikes and everything you've ever published there is gone. Knowledge is lost. We don't know what impact it has but it is safe to assume stuff wont be what it should have been if the maker cant see videos important to his task.
More obvious it gets with scientific publications that cite lists of papers and books that are no longer available.
We need a new network to make sure people get paid for the useful things they make. It can simply be paid for in advance. It's not a challenge.
We can make donations, one can do crowd sourcing and we can create funds that assign budgets by committee. That profits wont randomly grow madly out of proportion with the work is not a bug but a feature.
Roberts space industry suggests we are missing out in a huge way. First people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was not made(!?) Then people were willing to fold over large sums of money for a game that was incredibly delayed(!???) And now people are actually enjoying being part of the development process(!????) Things are progressing towards a finished product but its so overly ambitious that complex works add up to very little progress. I never would have imagined people would put up with that but in hindsight it seems to make sense.
Sadly I think occam's razor applies here past this statement.
Today? More like the 1980s! Nintendo invented the whole App Store business model decades prior to the iPhone, and for reasons a lot more insidious than Apple's.
This whole article has aged like milk. Or, more charitably; it's a snapshot in time of the worries of people a decade ago, many of which never came to pass. Since this article was written, SOPA failed due to an unprecedented public protest, encryption bans have sort of sputtered and gone nowhere, and the EU is legally mandating that iPhones run unauthorized software while iPhone buyers are clutching their pearls about it.
That last one is particularly revealing. You see, the security landscape for individual users is far bleaker now than it was back in 2011. A decade ago it did not make financial sense to hack the average user, and now it does. Regular users - or at least some of them - are the ones still prosecuting the War on General-Purpose Computing. Governments and copyright maximalists are on the side of keeping things open. The spymasters like being able to drop their 0days in plausibly-deniable unsigned bait apps, after all.
The case for copyright maximalists is less obvious. You might think that they'd prefer more DRM, because it makes things easier for them. And that's true up to a point. But there's also no way to standardize it. It just gives you monopolization everywhere. In fact, it's a repeat of the days of iTunes, where Apple had the entire music industry at their feet because they had so badly misjudged music downloads. The RIAA went DRM-free because it let them sell music the way they wanted to. And now we have Epic Games, one of the larger fishes in the game industry pond, trying to legally undermine the whole basis of the console industry so they can sell more Fortnite skins.
I do still think the section about copyright being fundamentally boring still holds water. But it's less boring than it used to be back when the US pulled everyone into TRIPS and WIPO. A large portion of today's media consumption is on platforms that don't actually pay their way, at least not to the liking of the copyright maximalists. The war they fight is not on general-purpose computing, but on accessible social video platforms; the ones whose creators are crushed under the burden of having to constantly validate their legality and complain rabidly about it.
This, too, has historical precedent. Google and Wikipedia were able to spook people into spamming their local Congresspeople out of passing SOPA/PIPA with a well-timed protest campaign. Going back further, while Napster may have had some of the most inept and hilariously bad legal argumentation[1], the public took their side - not the law's. When the public does care about copyright, it's almost always to weaken it or keep it from getting stronger.
Of course this could also just get swept up into World War IV: The Culture Wars, like everything else inevitably does. All the international treaties that were designed to make copyright untouchable had their days numbered the moment that right-wing populists tried to wrestle countries out of the global trade system. Hell, there's a Republican congressperson that's genuinely trying to sell the GOP on going back to 28-year copyright terms purely to pwn the libs over at Disney.
[0] There have been several notable instances in which really scummy mobile app marketing tactics have passed through App Review for whatever reason.
[1] No, seriously, they tried arguing that they should be legally treated like radio because once someone downloaded a full and complete 320kbps MP3 copy of one particular hit song, they might go out and buy the full album full of other tracks they don't care about.
I don't think Nintendo had any online consoles in the '80s. Are you referring to the NES refusing to run cartridges that were not authorized by Nintendo?
Maybe 2012?
and always saw it linked there. which is original?
Copyright also seems to be going fine.
This article seemed to paint a much bleaker future than actually eventuated
15 years ago, if you were computing you were almost certainly using a general purpose computer. Phones were more locked down, but they also were basically just for texting and calling, and could never serve as a primary device.
Now, most people spend a majority of their time in a locked down environment (phones and tablets) consuming locked down content (subscription only, on approved devices). The default 15 years ago was open, now it is default closed.
We’ve also abstracted away everything from files, for long enough that the idea of not streaming something but playing it locally is becoming more and more niche. Same for applications, which have gone more and more to web based subscription models.
Default is closed, now.
I had to start with how to make a file and folder and what the desktop was, etc. Basically, the issue was that their computing experience was all platform based. Everything for them was click a link, use the browser, walled google-classroom gardens, etc.
By catering to the lowest common denominator we are creating a tech-illiterate society. This is on all of us who dumb down our features to make sure the users can understand.
Apple is intentionally hostile to sharing files and makes it very hard. Improved slightly in recent IOS versions, but still super hard. You can’t just email yourself mp3s and Play them like normal music on your phone, you have to use a third party app or a PC or something to transfer them to iTunes.
in all seriousness, there really are very few reasons for sharing audio files these days. The only ones I can think of are:
- finding a work that is not online (like a specific live record or like 85% of early 80s hardcore that hasn't been remastered),
- pirating (which music streaming services has made ubiquitous for 99.95% of people who consume music; thanks, Sean Parker!), or
- audiophiles buying $10,000 balanced headphone cables with gold TRS jacks (because mics don't belong in headphones, _obviously_)who only listen to test tracks in FLAC format (who don't have newer iPhones anyway)
as far as i remember, iPhones were able to play loose audio files, but you couldn't catalogue them into iTunes, which was annoying given that iPhoneOS (only 2010's kids remember this) didn't have a built-in file manager. moreover, most of those files came compressed (_Mediafire's anger intensifies_), and iPhones didn't have a publically-usable extraction utility, which made working with them a huge chore.
I think the MP3 player in its earliest form was a concession that we lived with (because it was easier than dealing with jackets of CDs and anti-skip sucking) that was absolutely destined for a streaming-only world (because my gut says that MOST people never wanted to get into the audio collection business; they only want to listen to their favorite songs from their glory days in college)
More seriously, I wonder if we should look at the raw numbers. Before, perhaps all the people who use a mobile as a general purpose computer did not even have a computer. And likewise maybe more people have a PC-type device than before, but still represent a smaller fraction. I take heart in this.
Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
I also question this whenever I see that "people mostly use locked-down devices now". But I don't have any numbers; honestly it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong.
> Edit: see e.g. the rise of the home lab movement
Sure, but care should be taken for this not to skew the numbers. That more people can now afford to have a mini-datacenter in their house – and therefore there being more computers out there – doesn't mean that there are more distinct people whose main computing device is a general-purpose computer.
To me, the people interested in the home lab movement are those who already were interested in doing "more" with computers, as opposed to just "consuming recommended content".
I know it's my case and I do it now because computers are cheaper, and it's easier to find quiet ones.
I've always done this even when I didn't have a lot of money. Server hardware has always been cheap because most of its audience won't even think about buying it secondhand, they will only buy new with warranty and 4hr support. I got $400 fibre channel cards for $10 because literally nobody wants them and companies throw out perfectly good cards when the warranty expires. It's a joke.
In the early 2000's I had Sun Fire and Netra's. I had an HP 9000 HP-UX box with 1GB (in the day when that was a ridiculous amount of memory). These days I have HPs.
A home lab has always been within reach. In fact I find it harder now due to energy consumption, as energy was always cheap.
However, the biggest issue to me, up until very recently, was noise. I have a ~4-year-old Lenovo Think Server that is quieter than some laptops. I also have my eye on a somewhat older HP rack-mount server that is also extremely quiet and should be decommissioned soon.
But up until around 2010, a rack-mount server would have driven me insane. Ditto for switches. Around 2012 I first saw a then-new HP model that was fanless. But it only did 100 Mbps, all the gigabit models came with a jet-engine attached. Now I managed to find a fanless Gigabit Ruckus with a few 10G ports, since they start to be old enough.
Other than that, online marketplaces. Not eBay generally, because its auction system and international reach drives prices up, even for items which normally gather low interest. I tend to use local buy & sell websites where people usually offer lower prices than advertised and these kinds of items are not very popular so they tend to go cheap.
I've never seen fanless servers, but my home lab is not something I keep running 24/7 anyway. And it sits in a dedicated room with my 3D printers and electronics workbench so it's not the kind of place I hang out for peace and quiet anyway :) It's my mancave really (though, for lack of a partner, right now my whole apartment is a mancave :) ).
My 24/7 stuff I do pick for energy-efficiency and to a much smaller extent, noise. I have 4 NUCs for this stuff. 2 nice ones with 4/6 cores and 64GB RAM, and 2 ancient ones (one atom and one skylake IIRC) which are very low power though. They're the ones that keep running when everything switches to UPS.
I'm not really big into networking so I have some semi-managed TP-Links that bought new for 35 bucks. They're gigabit, 8 ports and can do basic stuff like vlans and mirroring which is all I need. I'm not doing any CCNA stuff or anything.
And yeah I know you can unlock Android but it's really really fringey. Most people don't. And that's like 95% most.
My apple watch is super cool from a hardware perspective, but so locked down that I can't use it in the ways that I would like to. For example, it has a barometric pressure sensor, but I/my apps can't directly read the sensor data, instead a filtered update is pushed to the app approximately every 1.5 seconds. Why? I know the sensor is capable of reading at 20+ hz.
It used to be that the designed feature or function would be very close to the implementation, but that really hasn't been the case for a very long time. People aren't buying "a large bank of memory addresses" but rather "a device that contains pictures", for lack of a better example.
With the watch a customer isn't actually buying a package of sensors, ARM-cores, BMS, Lithium-Ion battery, and display, but they are buying the experience of having a device that tells the time, notifies them if something happens and can track some aspects of their life so they have an overview of it later (be it for turning their life into a game or simply tracking their energy use/consumption). And then all of that for at least an entire day.
Why would the implementation of the feature result in a sensor that can be polled at a high frequency but is actually only pushed at a lower frequency? It's anyone's guess but here is my guess:
The sensor has its own specs but those are set in isolation and might differ based on implementation inside a casing, so they only way to get true data would be to have some form of calibration or offset where a low-power CPU core for sensor tasks just gets the raw values and applies the offset/calibration. Next, there is power consumption where they might have found the perfect balanced duty-cycle between data that has had enough time to cool down and be useful as well as power requirements for the sensor core and the sensor itself. So they have some sort of RT OS doing reading, processing etc. on a low-power core at a lower interval to get a 1% battery life increase. Do that for 10 sensors and suddenly it's worth it. It's quite an investment to have a team of people dive into the hardware, firmware and application development to do all that, so it's likely not a matter of "how can we spend a multi-million R&D chunk on making the hardware less useful", but rather some "how do we make millions of mass produced devices use a little bit less power" concept.
This is also where the push vs. pull comes from, instead of having every application do some interrupt or scheduling, you just ask to be part of a list of observers and when the data changes you get notified. Much more efficient, and if everyone has to do that, there is a much smaller chance of the user experience suddenly changing and support personnel (phone, in-store) getting complaints about something they can't fix because some third party app did it.
My hot water kettle heats water, why can't I wire it up to be my whole house heater?
The sensor that is in the Apple Watch draws significantly less than 1ma when polled at 20 hz. Without an EE degree I have my devices, including the 90s era processor and piezo speaker, running for 100+ hours on a 150mah button cell.
I cite this example because I KNOW what is possible. This is a pure software issue.
I suspect that apple rate limits because the raw sensor data is quite noisy, and would look glitchy in a badly designed app. But there is a lot of signal in that noise that I want access to. Instead people in the gliding hobby spend hundreds to buy devices that have the same sensor package as an iPhone 6, but are able to access the sensors in a way that are useful.
Yes, but 15 years ago far fewer people did far less with computing devices of any kind than they do today. Imagine if, for example, I made this argument:
"In 1992, the default for using a personal computer was to both create and consume information, e.g. writing and reading email, writing and reading documents. Today the default is to just consume information, e.g. YouTube, TikTok, AppleTV."
That would be true, but not because of locking devices down. It would be true in because in the last thirty years, the industry had expanded the number of users and their use cases by orders of magnitude.
The people who sent and received emails are still sending and receiving emails. Same for the people writing and reading documents. But all those people are also now watching TV and YouTube and TikTok on computers instead of analogue televisions in their recreational time AROUND the documents and emails.
And there are many, many people who just want to consume content for every "maker" generating content of any type, whether it be programs, documents, videos, music, whatever.
How many people are involved in the construction and operation of the Webb telescope? How many people just want to see pictures of what it sees?
Makers are a small proportion of humanity, and even for makers, making is a small proportion of our use cases for tech.
And the tongue-in-cheek answer is, "Because Linux." Optimizing a device for makers often makes it sub-optimal for consumers.
I am a bassist. But I listen to music far more than I play music, and I have no interest in constructing a player-bass like a player-piano. For when I listen to music, closed-source "information appliance" ecosystems beat open-source general-purpose ecosystems.
I maintain quite a bit of general-purpose computing ways to manage music, but honestly, it's more because I have an aversion to corporate control than any thought that it's easier to be in complete control.
Joel Spolsky wrote that the key feature of Napster wasn't that music was free, it was that you could type the name of a song and listen to it right away. The challenge for us as technologists pursuing a free future is that information appliances do this better than general-purpose ecosystems.
If that paraphrase is true then Joel Spolsky has no idea what he's talking about on this subject.
Without a doubt the key feature of Napster was that students could download-- not stream-- music. For free. Students would consequently fill their harddrives with everything they thought they'd want to listen to in their lifetime, often buying 2nd harddrives to populate with more mp3s. (Well, that and pron.) Keep in mind many dorms were still using dialup connections during this period-- thus there was a pattern of students running to the library computer lab to download a few mp3 albums to zip disk (yes, zip disks) then bring them back to the dorms.
What facilitated immediate listening/viewing was sharing directories in Windows with the rest of the LAN on college campuses.
Quick digression to argue against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect-- while your paraphrase of Joel Spolsky expresses an idea that is indeed false, I reserve judgement on anything else Spolsky has ever written (and frankly on whatever his verbatim words were on this same topic). I mean what kind of pathetic, impulsive nimrod would I become if I simply through out an entire body of someone's work on a single passing impression?
Edit: Just to cover my bases-- in every case I can remember, students who were playing music in their dorms or a shared space had winamp or some other such player loaded up with a playlist selected from thousands from their own collection. Napster was the place to download songs for your collection, not the place to build an ad-hoc playlist in realtime. Maybe there are cases where people were doing this. But the overwhelming supermajority of Napster users were using it because they could replicate a subset of the whole to build their own lifetime library of music. For free.
2nd edit: I almost forgot-- nearly everyone in the dorms would share a directory when they hooked up to the LAN. The process of finding immediately playable content was to browse the various shared directories in windows, or use Windows search on them which IIRC worked incredibly slow or not at all. This was a common practice because again, most people were still on dial-up and couldn't download anything from Napster nearly as fast as you could on the computer lab networks.
Later, Youtube made both music and video files immediately playable. Around that same time, torrent tech started to improve to the point where you could stream while downloading as well as do keyword searches with vastly improved results. This is all to say that Napster kicked off a pattern of college kids grabbing free content, and this proliferation of content caused the development of realtime playback of discoverable content.
So what you paraphrased above isn't exactly "wet streets caused rain." It's more like "the issue isn't the rain-- it's the wet streets." I'm honestly not sure which is worse. :)
I love having the choice. Most of the time I want the locked-down thing. A bunch of extra "freedom" I'm not actually using is just a hassle and liability when all I wanna do is take and crop some photos, or do some writing, or whatever.
Now we have that option, and then also general-purpose computers are so cheap and widely available that you can easily score decent ones for free.
Far from being some computing apocalypse, the situation now is excellent. Computers were a barely-tolerated near-failure for most normal use cases, but now there are options that don't suck for normal people wanting to do normal things. And general-purpose computing is more accessible than ever.
Maybe some Dark Age of Computing still lurks, but it's not happened yet, and things have only gotten better so far.
IMO the worst thing about the current computing era are the handful of Web monopolies and the way "AI"/machine-learning has mostly enabled systems working against us rather than creating agents working entirely on our behalf.
Unless copyright terms get shorter, they are not "fine". Even the status quo is not "fine".
Life+50 years (or more) is ridiculously long:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
If an artist can't re-coup their costs in, say, thirty years, they are bad at business side of things and should get out of the way to allow other creative people to build on their work.
The novel Nightmare Alley was published in 1946, and the author died in 1962:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_(novel)
There's no reason why it should (AFAICT) still be under copyright such that royalties need to be paid to, e.g., turn it into a movie:
Can we get something straight? In vast majority of cases it's the massive content industry corporations that are doing the cost recouping here, not the artists themselves. Artists get tiny peanuts or even less if they weren't known enough to fight corporate lawyers of their own publisher.
"Poor artists recouping their life work" is a nice PR message from publisher corporations to defend status quo though.
If Sony/Tri-Star hasn't re-couped the cost of making Terminator 2 by now…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_film
Or:
Copyright applies only to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable.
That means that software is the embodiment of both creative and functional expressions that are commingled. They are so mixed together by the time the buyer gets it, there is no simple way of separating the two. That weakens the strength of copyright over the whole.
It also misleads folks into believing everything about software is protected, even silly things like header files or trivial functions. Because these purely functional expressions are so highly intertwined with the rest, folks just assume they have a legitimate copyright over them! Even judges get this wrong!
So software isn’t inherently copyrightable except for it any creative expressions it contains. What counts as creative expression?
Traditionally, it didn’t take very much creative expression to be copyrightable. A screen design is copyrightable. A color scheme could be copyrightable. Code that saves a file after applying whatever edits the user has made is NOT copyrightable, as it is a purely functional expression.
But what if I came up with a cool/fast way of finding primes and coded it into C. I created it. It is unique in the entire world! It took many hours to come up with. Certainly I should be able to protect my work, right?
No. Mathematical algorithms are not creative expressions but purely functional expressions. It doesn’t matter how long it took to create or how the algorithm was discovered.
But what about the code to implement the expression? The code is the expression of the algorithm. There may be a bit of creativity in the code, but we are back to functional expression as opposed to creative expression. Where’s the line? It’s fuzzy enough considering it in the abstract but impossible to consider given only the executable software itself.
Personally, I think software should have it’s own copyright protections, unique from other written works. What that should look like and how it should work is an open question that should be discussed.
Remember, the purpose of copyright is not to enrich the author. The purpose is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” If any copyright scheme fails to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it is not serving the public as intended.
Where downloading apps from another source is possible, multiple levels of popups are triggered with warning messages optimised through A/B testing to minimise clickthrough rates.
Widewine and similar hardware DRM are now standard.
General purpose computing is still alive, but it's taken serious hits.