Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 18:17:52 +0300 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/www/ijb - Imported sources Message-ID: <19980504181752.37647@techunix.technion.ac.il> In-Reply-To: <19980504133118.00078@follo.net>; from Eivind Eklund on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 01:31:18PM %2B0200 References: <19980503230438.48318@follo.net> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980503205621.20104E-100000@sasami.jurai.net> <19980504032939.07389@follo.net> <354d2457.225839725@mail.cetlink.net> <19980504042649.61453@follo.net> <19980504032939.07389@follo.net> <19980504115714.07998@techunix.technion.ac.il> <19980504133118.00078@follo.net>
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You, Eivind Eklund, were spotted writing this on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 01:31:18PM +0200: > On Mon, May 04, 1998 at 11:57:14AM +0300, Anatoly Vorobey wrote: > > You, Eivind Eklund, were spotted writing this on Mon, May 04, 1998 at 03:29:39AM +0200: > > > Arguments! Come up with arguments! > > > > [... on the HTTP protocol sending out parts of the data as different streams > snipped ...] Well, there was an argument [you snipped it], are you going to address it? > > Your argument about those silly "licenses" on sites is also wrong. > > They're invalid and unenforcable. > > You'll have to take those cases with e.g. ZDnet and C/NET, not me - I'm not > a lawyer trying to enforce the licenses, I'm a private citizen trying to > argue reasonable conduct - and trying to get people to actually think about > what they're doing. You might be surprised to discover that some people, even of the awful barbaric variety of ijb users, do think about that quite a bit. There's, for example, a very interesting and thoughtful FAQ on the ijb site (that's junkbuster.com) that you might want to read. Moreover, it looked for me as if you wanted to convince people they're up to something immoral and possibly illegal, rather then to get them to think. What you are saying, basically, is: "ijb is baaaaaaad because it lets you avoid paying [by seeing adverts] for the free stuff [content] you get, and that's baaaaaaad and also if we all do that people who make free stuff won't make it any more". Please correct me if I'm capturing your basic argument unfaithfully. Now, that, in my world, is a moralistic call rather than a philosophical position. As former, it's fine, except that I consider the moral underlying it invalid and misguided, and I explained why in my former lengthy message. As latter, it doesn't look good at all. First, there's an obvious internal contradiction in terms. If the stuff is _free_, you _do not_ pay for it - either with dollars or your attention and fatigue at seeing ads. If you MUST PAY for it, it's no longer free, that's all. My time and moods (ads distract and annoy me) are actually much more valuable to me than money in many cases. The confusion is widespread and is being maintained because companies find it useful to advertise "FREE STUFF" (example: "free" email address with ads attached to all messages, and so on), but it's still a confusion. Secondly, you use the famous argument "what if everybody does this", which is not at all free from problems. It has been attacked (and defended) by numerous philosophers since Kant, who appears to be the first who noticed its weirdness and granted a lot of attentino (and ink) to it. Thirdly, you don't even begin to discuss all the (very relevant) issues of intellectual property, of how valid (morally, not legally) are "licenses" on web sites (is a license which DEMANDS from you to watch this site in 895x347 resolution valid? morally right? this is just a small example), and so on and so forth. > > First of all, a "page" is not an abstraction which exists on protocol > > level. A "page" is something out together by my software from separate > > entitites I pull from a site, so there's no reverse-engineering in my > > putting it together from a subset of the whole set of possible entitites > > (again, browsing with images turned off is an important special case). > > I didn't claim that this was reverse-engineering. I claimed that > reverse-engineering was a special case of filtering, and one that is illegal > in the US. (Most software licenses in the US state that you can't modify > the executable of a program - I don't know if that holds up there, either. > I know it doesn't hold up in my end of the world.) Your claim is inaccurate in any case. Reverse-engineering is illegal in some places not because it's filtering (again, as I tried to explain above, ijb doesn't, technically, do filtering. Firewalls do filtering. ijb helps avoid initiating needless HTTP connections) and may change the end user's perception of the product (be it a Web page or a commercial software program). The law doesn't care about that one little bit. Reverse engineering is illegal because it helps you find out trade secrets and/or dishonor copyrights and that is forbidden by the law. I think you will agree that no trade secrets are being discovered by not initiating HTTP connections to pull some images for an HTML page! In some places, by the way, reverse engineering is protected by the law so strongly you can freely do it even if your license doesn't want yout o. > Books are fairly limited in how they can be licensed, due to special > consideration being put on them in laws. > > Other content may be licensed different ways, though there are limits on the > licenses there too. Yes, and limits are defined in particular by what the medium can allow/disallow. The Web medium allows me to choose what I pull off the site. > > free ride - on the medium. They're using a medium (Web, HTTP) which > > explicitly lets its user to pull or not to pull different > > images/other files separately, and they want to brainwash ME, a user > > of the medium, to give up this freedom of mine and get their ads > > no matter what. Their attempts to produce content are appreciated; > > their attemtps to force down my throat what I don't want (and don't > > have to, by the nature of the medium) to see are not. > > They're not attempting to "force down your throath what you don't want to > have" - they're offering you a service for a certain pay. This payment > happens to consist of viewing and downloading advertising. No good. Wrong medium. If they put HTML files on their server in (for example) public_html directory with right permissions, _they_ are implicitly agreeing that everyone in the world can make an HTTP request and get that file and do with it anything he wants on his own computer. That's the freedom the medium defines for everybody. If they want to restrict this freedom and force a user to: pay them money, pay them in user's time by pulling an ad image from their site and watching it, pay them in any other way - they are free to restrict access to their content - by putting it into directory with password, by choosing another medium altogether, and so on. But they cannot legally (or morally) force me to do anything just because I took a file free for taking by the public, as defined in the medium. Just as if you get a file from public ftp, start reading it and it says in the beginning "NOW GO AND WATCH OUR ADS AT HTTP://WWW.OURADS.COM", you're neither morally nor legally obliged to actually do that. If a content provider wants to force you, he shouldn't have put the file on the ftp site for your taking freely. In case of the Web, it's simply quicker and more automatised. Again, your friends the content-providers don't want all those more complicated solutions because it limits their audience severely. They want to use the most portable medium accessible to everyone in the simplest way: click on a link, see a file. And yet, at the same time, force you to pay in your time, for example, by watching their ad. They want a free ride. And they are not getting it from me. > For a limited > set of users (those using Lynx and browsing without images) they even offer > the service for free. That's twisted logic. Suppose someone is selling apples and I snatch an apple and start running away. The man who sells apples doesn't pursue me because he recognizes the damage as not great enough for pursuit. But that _doesn't make me innocent_. Same here. In your ethical model, someone who watches the site and not the ads is a thief, just like someone who stole an apple. It may be that the content provider doesn't care because the loss isn't great enough, but he's still a thief according to your ethics and it shouldn't be OK, just as it isn't OK to steal an apple. > What is your model for paying for content? That's what we're talking about > here. Talking about 'nature of the medium' is IMO a strawman argument - how > do you think the production of content should be paid for? I'm not talking > about 'making it profitable' - I'm talking of paying actual costs. Strawman argument is when you attack not your opponent's ideas, but a weaker version of them built by yourself for that purpose. Where is it here? I'm attacking specifically what you say, by arguing that I'm morally and legally free to look at what I want, from the variety of files available for HTTP download off the Web. Now, "model of paying for content" is another thing altogether! _That_ is not really relevant for the argument. Why should I let considerations on how content producers are going to make money affect my freedom? The production of content may be paid for in many different ways. They usually involve restricted access to the resource and/or different medium than simple Web browsing. No, I'm not happy if a resource stops being free for download and starts charging money per access. But it doesn't mean I should give up my freedom to see what I want. Besides, in practice number of people using ijb or different tools is negligible. Currently it's probably much less than number of people who browse with images turned off! The content producers simply want more ads pulled off from their site, because it gets them more money. I sympathize with their wishes but see no reason for that to affect my (or anyone else's) freedom to turn off images or use ijb. > > Should they desire that I get their ads no matter what, they should look > > INTO a DIFFERENT MEDIUM which allows that. Was that clear enough? For > > example, they can use ActiveX controls which display ads on my Windows > > desktop, and make their site unbrowsable without ActiveX. Or they can use > > .PDF file with graphics built-in the file and ask me to download them. > > It's not bloody difficult to make the web a limited medium where you can't > browse without images, and can't download pages without seeing ads. Oh yes, it's bloody difficult, otherwise it would have been done by now. In the same way, it's bloody difficult to make all Web ActiveX-only, because people at large won't "buy" it. > It > require that ads and HTML pages are downloaded from the same domain, but > apart from that it should be technically fairly easy, in the precense of > cookies and images (and dropping users that don't have cookies and images > aren't considered a large loss any longer). That's really the site's problem, not mine, why do I have to even worry about it and how all of it is relevant here? > > Your arguments about ijb being a 'cracker' tools or about > > its user being 'pirates' are just way too silly to address, > > esp. in the light of what I wrote above. They would be offensive > > if they weren't so laughable. > > "The nature of software is to be copiable, so calling my > payment-removal-system a cracker-tool would be offensive if it wasn't so > laughtable." Wrong analogy. Payment-removal system forces you to pay before you use [or use all features]. There's nothing similar in a file being offered for HTTP download on a public server. If ijb was a tool to circumvent passwords in .htaccess protected directories, your analogy would hold water. As it isn't, it doesn't. > "The nature of software is to be a stream of bytes, not distinct > executables, so calling my program for automatically modifying executables > to remove the stated copyright and the copyprotection a crackers tool would > be offensive if it wasn't so laughtable." This is really silly. Among other flaws of this "analogy", as I have pointed out several times already, ijb doesn't "modify" any file DLed off the server. This analogy would hold water if HTML fileswere unreadable without a password when DLed from the Web and ijb was a tool to crack such a password. As it isn't, it doesn't. > I'm fully willing to offend. People that don't think clearly easily get > offended by labels. (I try not to be, but that doesn't always work ;-) As I said, I wasn't offended. Your calling me a pirate and a cracker is laughable, not offensive, because it's so ridiculous; it speaks volumes about your confusion in the matter. > The nature of pirates is that they take content without paying. Be that > music, books, software, or web-pages - it doesn't matter. What you fail to understand is that when your friend puts an HTML file in a free-for-taking medium - the Web - he loses the ability and justification, legal or moral, to demand payment for DLing this file and using it on your computer in any way you want. The act of putting unencrypted free-for-browsing HTML file presumes everyone in fact is free to go and browse it. Moreover, your friend _WANTS_ it this way - because if he chose another more restricted medium, fewer people would browse it. But then he wants to have his cake and eat it too - and attach to this act MY responsibility to also go out and read his ad. You're not thinking clearly when you call me a pirate for browsing an HTML file free for browsing. If I take a file from a public ftp site, and then not perform everything it asks me to do - am I a pirate? > The nature of > crackers (in the original meaning, not the one the original hackers are > trying to push over) is removing copy-protection. Now, you might say that > the protection on most web-pages is laughtably simple - it is. There is NO protection, simple or otherwise. There is an HTML tag which I might or might not use to load an image from a site. What protection are you talking about? > BTW: "A lot of my best friends are pirates" - I'm not in a position where I > can judge people for electing to be pirates (there isn't many years since I It doesn't matter whether you judge me or not. Your calling me a pirate reveals a deep misunderstanding of what piracy is, and how Web functions. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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