The RIAA vs. Steve Jobs
weblog.rogueamoeba.com
weblog.rogueamoeba.com
So the RIAA didn't have any legal standing and instead used "influence/intimidation" to which Steve stood up?
> We knew recording was useful, but the app’s ability to apply audio effects anywhere on the Mac carried much less legal peril.
Look at this. Innocent software developers, intimidated by these nebulous "legal perils" of copyright infringement to the point they felt afraid of marketing a perfectly reasonable and legal feature.
I can't possibly be the only person deeply offended by this. We don't need their blessing to record anything. We should be free from their tyranny but it binds us to this day.
You really think Open Source is going to solve the problem? I love the FOSS as much as the next man, but it's not some holy panacea for all of our freedom-loving woes. RIAA doesn't have to sue the developer in Russia, they can just take the legal fight to the consumers (and they HAVE done so).
No, regulation is the solution. Learn about politics, learn the local and federal laws and get on the horn with people if you're so concerned.
I have a degree in political science, completed about half of law school before deciding I didn’t want to leave technology, have worked in and around government for most of the last 25 year.
Transparency—and open source plays a big part in this—in the answer. Regulation can be important to, but if there isn’t transparency in the field (even if not for all models, though that will be important) and particularly for anything adopted for important use in administering policy and pressure from the open source community on proprietary vendors, the dangers of AI are magnified.
Yes, I know people tied to the big vendors are selling the idea that opacity and regulatory restrictions are the answer, and I’m telling you read Adam Smith:
The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers.
That’s why you hear that story.
though they were able to partially take down the repo it was brought back after the legality ot their claim was analyzed.
Are there people organizing to develop, deploy, run and provide “AI on demand” for free to people?
Like Wikipedia but for AI.
How much money would be needed? How many volunteers? Who wants to build this?
Stable Horde, though its p2p rather than centralized nonprofit https://stablehorde.net/
I can't be the only one that sees the irony in developed western democracies relying on Russia and China to protect liberty and freedom.
While I appreciate a lot of the hardware and hard work that comes from China, I think their government makes them adversarial to the point where the US should seriously work on shoring up domestic production and alternative supply chains. China has been working hard to make the US unnecessary for their own. Not many countries can really exist without at least their neighbors, but it's very concerning. Similarly with alignments with Russia going through.
Not that I advocate for the military interventions going on right now for the most part... I just think the US govt and industry have become so short sighted to the point that long term harm is inevitable.
Government don't care if you use open or closed source software, in fact it probably welcomes hackable (as in easy to tinker with, more moving parts that they could easily extract data from) open computers more.
I don't like anything about the RIAA, but a lot of computer users don't have the high ground either.
There was a singular reason for this: UX. The IP mob absolutely despised anything different to their existing business model, and were too boneheaded to recognize the opportunity to make something good. Most of all, they hated that they needed to change. It took decades, but now only niche enthusiasts download music, even though it’s as easy now as it was then.
The same thing could be said about TV streaming, of course, although they’ve done a worse job on the technical side.
RIAA not liking what users do caused RIAA to do user-hostile design, from which we're still suffering. Bad users, bad!
As GabeN said - piracy is a service problem.
Pirate sites generally had better quality than iTunes (which was 128kbps for way too long), and were often ripped from a better sounding source or master because the people uploading albums were dedicated fans of the material. One great example is the soniclovenoize uncensored stereo version of "We're Only In It For The Money".
Spotify doesn't have this problem.
Remember what.cd?
Basically if you operate any website, as long as the DMCA request you get is reasonably properly filed, you are required to process it or else you risk legal liability.
It's a goddamn mess and when you're operating on the scale of say, Google, you don't have the option to risk that liability and hire people who can examine those claims. No, what you do is blindly process all claims and just hope that people counterclaim the bad ones.
It's why for example GitHub sticking it's neck out for 1201-related violations (where they manually investigate any anti-circumvention related takedown) is such a big deal. They are running a risk by doing that where if they tell the RIAA (who usually files these requests) to go fuck themselves, that they could be forced to eat crow in court, but they're doing it because well... the RIAA abused that part of the DMCA to file a dodgy claim against youtube-dl[0].
Improper DMCA claims are technically punishable as perjury but the actual process is so draining that it's super rare to see someone convicted for it.
[0]: The RIAA assumes that youtube uses actual encryption to protect people from downloading them. They're wrong - YouTube doesn't use widevine or anything like that for regular uploads (movies are a different case, they do use widevine), they have their own rolling cipher which is just a plaintext javascript file that your browser fetches when loading YouTube. Youtube-dl contains a python reimplementation of that cipher. Fully legal insofar as section 1201 is concerned, but the RIAA filed it under that anyway (because they'd have no actual standing to file a regular DMCA claim for basically blatantly reusing Google code, since the RIAA isn't Goole).
When in France the RIAA equivalent came up with a plan to add a tax to all digital storage media, because it could be used for piracy, the tax was applied an we all ponied up. Why ? because they make money, deal with politicians everyday and make sure the wheels are well lubrificated when they need them to turn.
For a very long time the computer industry had none that, and/or wanted contents right holders on their side, with not enough negociation power.
Now I feel we're on the other side with Apple straight telling legislators to turn a blind eye because they need their semi-monopoly to keep printing money.
RMS has suggested a similar tax on internet users in exchange for legalizing file sharing [1].
The idea of taxing something associated with the consumption of creative works in order to fund the creators instead of the direct sale of copies model is one of the more popular ideas among those who try to actually figure out how creators should be funded in an age where anyone can make unlimited copies for essentially no cost.
[1] https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...
... usually ends up as a barrier to creators, because the funding goes to established creators or industry cartels, reinforcing their existing advantage over upstarts and independents.
The government could do it via grants to creators, but then you've got the government playing a major role in determining what art gets created, which would not doubt in the US end up a partisan thing. Yuck!
Another approach would be to track downloads and distribute the money based on popularity. That at least gets away from having the government decide what gets funded.
Sadly it (is ?)was way broader than that and you'd have a tax on hard drives sales whatever you would do with them. Imagine needing two extra hard-drives for your home NAS to store your family pics and videos and something like 2 to 3% of the price goes to some artists that _might_ be impacted by piracy some way or another.
https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Propriete-litteraire...
From Daring Fireball:
According to https://twitter.com/adamcurry/status/1639396942345117696
His actual words were “fuck them”.
It's longer, totally demolishes the complaint, and contains the line:
""" Not only am I unintimidated by litigation, I sometimes rather miss it. """
" In the modern-day vernacular, people often refer to a criminal case “being thrown out”. Obviously, this is little more than a figurative expression. Cases aren’t actually thrown out, in the literal or physical sense. Nevertheless, in the specific circumstances of this case, the Court is inclined to actually take the file and throw it out the window, which is the only way to adequately express my bewilderment with the fact that Mr. Epstein was subjected to an arrest and a fulsome criminal prosecution. Alas, the courtrooms of the Montreal courthouse do not have windows."
" To be abundantly clear, it is not a crime to give someone the finger. Flipping the proverbial bird is a God-given, Charter enshrined right that belongs to every red-blooded Canadian"
Yes, the legal system we have in place is mostly about bullying and you have every reason to be offended
Stand-alone devices that were meant only to allow you to record audio did require special “audio CDRs”. But CD writers that connected to your computer could use “data CDRs” that could still be used to record standard audio CDs
Shame though that they caved and seem to have disabled a video equivalent on macOS.
Before a certain version of iOS, that set of ways including communication via shared memory. Now it no longer does.
Even before that, there are various extension mechanisms that allow an app to say “I want to share information with compatible apps” and the user gets to choose which app to share the blob of data with.
The other side is that an app gets to publish extensions that are run out of process of the app that it is receiving the data blob from.
Still, other people have found ways to do it without shmem, so in some sense it doesn't matter all that much.
Nothing like Gatekeeper existed back then, and if code signing was a thing it certainly wasn't in widespread use. Even kernel extensions were completely unsigned until the release of OS X Mavericks in late 2013.
Edit: To be clear, I'm sure it would have been technically possible for Apple to kill Audio Hijack. However, I think it would have required either enormous engineering effort (e.g. replacing third party kernel extensions a decade early) or a completely unprecedented policy change (blacklisting a specific hash or bundle identifier, of an app that wasn't malware). I don't think there's an alternate timeline where Apple would have done either of these things, whatever happened in that meeting with Steve Jobs.
It seems like a pretty odd request to make of Apple, as opposed to contacting Rouge Amoeba directly.
A lot of these associations were much less sophisticated about how they viewed technology. It wasn't unreasonable for something like the RIAA to view apple as being responsible for the actors on its platform. It is odd, but not uncommon.
Also, the "audio hijacker" was located in a well-known system directory, so Apple could just nuke that directory.
That's assuming Apple really wanted to break AHP. It's unclear how much motive Apple had to follow the RIAA request even before the now famous meeting.
Contemporaneously to this story, Apple disabled screen capture of DVD movies and introduced PT_DENY_ATTACH (preventing debugging of the DVD player) at the behest of the MPAA.
All Apple needed to do was to push an update which breaks the software.
if (process == "AudioHijack") { dont_stream_audio();}
AudioHijack would find some way to work around that, as I'm sure they can, the RA team is wicked smart but their software would be broken for a day/week/month until they did and then Apple would analyze their workaround (using their exponentially greater manpower and better understanding of the system and find a way to break it again.
Cue cat and mouse game. The thing is in that scenario, Apple loses nothing when RA fixes their software (they can just tell the RIAA they're trying -- and they are!) but every time Apple breaks Audio Hijack they would be eating away at the userbase and inserting doubt into potential purchasers. Am I going to spend $65 on something which my OS manufacturer clearly doesn't want me using and is probably going to break in a month or three for an indeterminate amount of time.
You're seeing this as "can apple unequivocally disable this software" but that is the wrong question, even today it's not true (I can disable gatekeeper/SIP/etc if I'm determined enough and if I want i'll just run Ashai) but the real game here is Apple making it more difficult to use it and the REAL game would have been Apple instilling doubt in existing customers and potential purchasers.
Anyway I'm glad Apple didn't do that, RA produces some great software.
It was actually much cheaper back in the day, not that it matters much to the argument.
My memory is not good enough anymore to remember how much it was and the button for the wayback machine is too far away to use that.
Windows 3.1 famously refused to run on top of Digital Research's DOS.
> DR-DOS has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)"
https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_inc...
> Beta testers of Windows found that if they were using DR-DOS, this was detected and false error messages were generated.
Microsoft's encrypted code to disguise what it had done was unravelled by Geof Chappell in England, who commented at the time that "the only error' is that the user is running Windows with someone else's version of DOS."
https://web.archive.org/web/20081005102243/http://news.bbc.c...
Would the courts have cared about the technical details?
Is "That is currently impossible" ever a reason to not do something a court orders you to do?
It is unlikely that a court would have done anything; we had that court case in the form of VCRs, and sanity prevailed.
(IANAL, but the court case that set precedent for "it's not illegal if it has substantial legitimate uses, even if it also allows copyright infringement" seems applicable)
¹ https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A... ² https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
> On a Mac with Apple silicon, the security policy must be set to Full Security, the default setting.
People usually defend it as “quality” though but that’s very subjective imo.
If it puts food on the table of someone that might be not writing bleeding edge algorithmic software, but take cares of reliability, system integration, UI designs and UX patterns of a scoped problem to solve, I'll have hard time to be against it.
- annotated screenshots* of the app UI (e.g. on https://lunar.fyi/faq#bad-ddc)
- instant web links to optimized videos of screen recordings, that I can easily paste in an email
- the Mac recording is usually an uncompressed MOV which you have to spend time and battery to recompress using ffmpeg and upload somewhere
To do that without Cleanshot, I would have to go through an image editing software like Pixelmator, which I use sometimes for more complex tasks, but it's many times slower than select region of screen to screenshot, annotate, Cmd-C, Cmd-V
It saves me way more time than what amounts to $30.
It definitely is relative, if you don't have this kind of need or workflow, $30 seems like too much for screenshots.
* One nitpick I had with it was that the resulting screenshots were not size optimized, so I created a free app that optimizes the app in the clipboard directly: https://lowtechguys.com/clop
I annotate screen grabs daily as part of my job and never found anything that comes close to CleanShot X. Would love to hear what's new and worthy on the market!
I asked for a Photoshop alternative for a commercial setting and you basically linked me to a Gimp.
It's like when people ask for an alternative to a managed MS Office 365 service and somebody replies with "just use LibreOffice" lol.
No mate, no. No way!
But what is the "principle", other than stinginess?
But yes, under his watch he made the most locked down operating systems and distribution system we had ever known.