Tl:dr; It was a release file for their Minecon event. It was never meant to be public. Obsessing over a password protected in a company's S3 bucket is weird and crosses many limits.
More like a reverse-streisand effect. They were honest about the contents of the file, it was Minecraft 1.0 and not interesting, but the community didn't accept the explanation.
I think the house analogy fails because you cannot duplicate a house, take it somewhere else, and attempt to break into it there. If you could, that would undoubtedly be seen as a violation.
Unsure why it took the community so long to crack the file.
Ouch
Take for example, the infamous 2B2T Minecraft server.
Exploits and game breaking mechanics by virtually impossible to discover bugs, and the no rule against hacking and cheating, have led to things people didn’t think were even possible in Minecraft over the servers ~15 year history.
It's similar in format to communities that obssess over "lost media." The inability to pirate or get access to something becomes an obsession. Even if the piece of media exists in an archive somewhere, that doesn't matter to them because it's about the fact that they themselves don't have access to it that has become the obsession.
Human nature. Refusing to accept being told "no" by some greater force is the instinct that pushed humanity forward to where we are today.
I’m personally of the mind that if my tax dollars went towards protecting your shit, you owe society access.
This is not defending the ones who believe they have the right to things sans that deal
By your logic you owe me access your house since my tax dollars pay for the legal system that gives you property rights?!
You get a certain period to commercialize it, then it's public property. Hiding it away to prevent that is a breach of the spirit of the agreement society made with the creator.
That you believe it's a "ridiculous" argument shows how much you've been brainwashed by corporations.
All this stuff is generally built on the shoulders of previous works, that are public domain. Copying story structures, phrasing, etc. Even entire storylines.
And that's before we get onto the fact that all these corporations benefited from eveything we paid for. Laws to protect their IP, enforcement, infrastructure paid with by public money, education of workers, etc..
They've got their hands out to take, take, take, but when it comes to holding up to their part of the bargain, it's suddenly extensions on copyright terms, minor tweaks to "renew" IP that was never part of the original deal, etc. while feeding a ton of cash to politicians in what looks like a bribe, acts like a bribe, but is termed "lobbying".
Physical property is made up too. You don't lose anything from someone sleeping on your couch either.
Artificially restricting what can be remembered and by whom solely on the basis that some forms of memory produce new physical artifacts ("copies") is absurd on its face.
That said, the ability to monetize a memory is much more like the couch. In theory this is the resource copyright aims to protect. In practice, experts disagree to what extent piracy impacts potential monetization leaving us with two sides of the debate tending to talk past eachother.
Unless we agree upon the abstract concept of “owning” property even while you do not physically possess it.
You need look no father than a kindergarten to see the natural way of things: the toy belongs to whichever toddler is holding it.
While not entirely comparable, it is no more absurd to extend the idea to intangible ideas as well.
If you need to bring us down to kindergarten or toddler level for us to no longer need to come to an agreement on the definition of ownership, I’m not sure there’s much more to discuss
Do you “own” your house even when you’re not home? Yes, you do, because we all agreed on this made up thing called “property rights” and we pay our tax dollars to have it enforced. Otherwise whoever is in your house “owns” it until you or someone else forcible removes them or convinces them to leave.
All our rules are “made up”.
You know what, your words are all made up.
I am not aware of any type of IP enforced in the US that comes with a yearly taxed based on the value of the IP. If one exists, please let me know.
While the US Army isn't allowed to use your house in peace time, if it has any tactical value in war time, it can and will have access to your house. The US Army is the personification of the tax dollars of GP, through the government.
Because of the US's relationship with personal property, it has been decided that only the worst case scenarios lead to these rights being "shared", but on less important subjects, especially ones that cost you nothing in the case of having a copy of your work made, yes. Things like the Audio Home Recording Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act) make it legal for me to make a copy of your work. What happens with this copy depends, maybe I'll share it with friends (and in this case, IP law will consider it minor enough that they won't care), maybe I'll resell it and make money from it (which IP law definitely considers a big no no).
You must be naive if you believe that you have any right to both benefit from public protection _and_ keep full control over how <thing> gets used.
With IP law you are given the exclusive, enforceable right to control the distribution and sale of an idea for N years... at which point it becomes public domain.
In either case the decision to publish an idea will inevitably make it public domain. The government protects their shit because $REASONS but there is absolutely no obligation for it to be made public until that protection lapse. In matters of human culture this seems like a bug, not a feature but enforcing some standard of "reasonable worldwide availability" by force seems impossible. The invisible hand of piracy "solves" this oversight and functions like a safety valve.
Not an endorsement of either side, just an observation.
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. [...] Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
> Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly
> Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law
> Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit
> and the whole nation will be in the plot
> when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop
> The public seldom makes nice distinctions
> The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create
Well, the protection is only from random people accessing one's stuff, so this is a very silly (in fact nonsensical) argument. "If my tax dollars went towards you having right X, I thus deserve to infringe on that right X".
Our tax dollars go towards protecting lots of different things for lots of different people (including me and you) that we have no rights to at all, nor ever will.
The social contract is we all pretend we can't trivially copy their works for a couple decades so they can turn a profit and then the works enter the public domain.
The constant extensions of copyright duration clearly demonstrate that the copyright industry has no intention to fulfill their end of the deal. They have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights and become rent seekers.
Whether or not it's a freedom people should have is a difficult question to answer because we don't know what the modern world would be like without copyright (I expect creators would try and get paid for creating more works so it might look like how nowadays some shows end in cliffhangers to give the creators some leverage over the publishers to say 'look, people want to know what comes next, maybe you should let us do another season').
I can totally understand that, it just means they don't buy the various excuses for why they shouldn't be allowed to. I wouldn't either, in most "lost media" cases.
If you actually wish to understand, I can point to a thread where this was discussed somewhat at length by others and myself not too long ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907830
TL;DR:
Public domain is the natural state of information. Intellectual property is an absurd state granted monopoly on what boils down to numbers. Copyright in particular is a functionally infinite monopoly that robs us of our public domain rights. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of unjust laws and arguably a moral imperative. Copyright enforcement requires the destruction of computer freedom as we know it as well as everything the word "hacker" stands for and therefore it must be resisted even if it destroys the copyright industry. It makes zero economic sense to charge money for information which has infinite availability, therefore society must figure out how to pay creators before the work is produced.
I have every right to see a thing. Just like you have every right to try to stop me from doing so. The general rule is that we shouldn't hurt eachother trying to do it/prevent it.
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