els@pur-phy.UUCP (Eric Strobel) (04/03/84)
An amazing number of people jumped on me when I made my
comment about a $20 found on the street. I never said that I
wouldn't make an attempt to find the owner! I mistakenly thought
that the civilized reader would assume that. My point was that
if I end up with the money, I'm not going to lose any sleep about
it. I've lost money myself and said to myself,"It's your own
stupid fault, you twit! Be more careful the next time!" I
suspect my real mistake was mentioning a $20 and not a $1 bill!!
How many of you have picked up a dime and pocketed it???? Was that
theft???? If anyone thinks so, that is a matter of personal ethics
and I won't deny anyone the chance to feel that way.
Speaking about personal ethics, having worked with a local
minister while he did his D.Min. thesis on this subject, I feel
somewhat qualified to talk about it, but there is very little to
say. Personal ethics are just that, personal!
The real problem lies in the arguments that equate information
with property. Car theft is theft because you are taking something
that LEGALLY belongs to someone else. Nobody owns the HBO transmissions
I spoke of. They are on the airwaves, and the airwaves are free.
The only way someone can own information ( as far as I know) is to
hold a patent or copyright or something similar. This is probably
enough to keep most people from making copies. When I said that
software should be encrypted or something like that, that was based
on the assumption that encryption would be easier than filing
copyright paperwork (thinking the process to be of the same order
of difficulty as getting a patent). I have learned that anyone
can copyright anything just by affixing the right words. For the
one person operation, this is then easier.
I still maintain that if I don't see the copyright stuff
and there is no encryption, then the author has been careless!
(`') (`')
\\ _____ // Writing cause I got work, hanging by
\\ / \ // my bruised ,bleeding and mangled thumbs
\/ O O \/ at the off-the-wall teddy bear keyboard of
| o |
\_____/ ERIC STROBEL
/|+++|\
//-----\\ decvax!pur-ee!Physics:els
// \\
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els@pur-phy.UUCP (Eric Strobel) (04/03/84)
I failed to include some thoughts in my previous article (or for
those who suffer severe UUCP-warping, in the following article!). The
point has been made that the software authors may be forced to include
routines that limit the number of possible backup copies, but then what
do you do when Murphy's law catches up with you??? For now, why don't
we let this be a point of discussion.
My point is that our whole system of justice is based on the idea
that certain actions are made to be somehow unprofitable. How then do
we make obtaining certain information unprofitable?? Keep in mind that
much information should be allowed to flow freely, no matter what some
people feel. An example of the difficulty of drawing a line on this is
the current discussion between the scientific community and the Reagan
administration on how much classifying is too much. Using my previous
example, and assuming that the above line is drawn, how can HBO make it
unprofitable for me to pick up their transmission?? The answer is most
likely just what the pay-TV people are doing, or if not then they ought
to, put the entire decoder on a special chip. Unless I'm a hard-core
hacker of hardware, I'm unlikely to duplicate it at all, much less for
anything like it would cost me to have them come out and install the
stupid thing. So I guess the point that needs discussion here is,
what sort of scheme can be used to make copying a program more expensive,
in some manner, than buying it?
Finally, how does some company know what fraction of its stuff
is being copied??? Does it make sense to take extreme precautions
to protect 1% of your sales, especially when a fraction of that is,
or may be, like free advertising? After all, there will always be
mad hackers who will break any protection scheme, but there aren't all
that many of them around (Are there???).
I suppose a secondary discussion would be: Can information be
put on the same footing as personal property such as a car??
(`') (`')
\\ _____ // Writing cause I got work, hanging by
\\ / \ // my bruised ,bleeding and mangled thumbs
\/ O O \/ at the off-the-wall teddy bear keyboard of
| o |
\_____/ ERIC STROBEL
/|+++|\
//-----\\ decvax!pur-ee!Physics:els
// \\
(_^_) (_^_)