"The Coming War on General Computation":
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
If we want computing freedom, or in other words: consumer rights, then we need to enact laws that are pro-consumer to ensure an open future. Things like being able to repair our devices were taken away (Apple) and brought semi-back with right-to-repair laws (albeit only proposed atm), ownership of software and your data taken away by online services (Adobe, etc), and lots others.
Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard?
Laws are the only way to force everyone to play nice. We can have the nicest open source stack, but that's nothing if companies can just seize them with their own laws.
We need to get rid of those products and replace them with free software instead. It doesn't even matter if it's better or worse, as long as it's ours. This is the most sensible long term investment since it's the only thing that will truly benefit humanity forever.
Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
In the meanwhile, I'd be interested in finding a community that puts "relatively open" hardware to good use. That includes old computers that won't grow antifeatures on their own, but also e.g. microcontrollers. I believe the dual-core 125MHz $1 Raspberry RP2040 is more powerful than my first PC was (although it might have less RAM and unfortunately can't be transparently expanded as far as I know). It's not exactly open hardware but it's well documented, and even the boot rom is open source (that is rare). You don't exactly have lots of integrated peripherals (e.g. ethernet) so it'd be very difficult for them to have some kind of remote backdoor. It's also quite simple to program; a hacker scale operating system is entirely feasible.
And that is of course just one of many choices out there. There are far more powerful microcontrollers out there. And by their nature, it's not going to be very easy for the copyright mafia to get their slimy tentacles between you and the core.
You'd give up a lot of power but on the other hand, I could buy 500 of them for the price of my laptop. I don't know, maybe we don't need to run everything on a single high performance CPU and could instead have a small cluster; perhaps each chip running its own application?
It's definitely not a "ready world" but I see lots of possibilities and am excited for the future of microcontrollers. But I'm also seeing the line between microcontrollers and processors getting blurred.
It's also quite expensive because by definition such things will always be more expensive. Vote with your wallet and not just your HN post and you'll push the world just the tiniest bit in the direction you want.
So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything. They must own our computers. They must ensure computers obey them so that they can make it refuse to copy data without approval. We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
So in this matter it really is us or them. Either the copyright industry loses, or we lose computing freedom and everything hackers stand for will be history. There's also the looming threat of government encryption regulation which faces the exact same problem. I say computers and the internet are jewels of humanity and too important to be compromised by these governments and stakeholders, and I'd sacrifice a thousand copyright industries to keep them alive and free.
This is not true. It could be enforced by courts and not by computers.
Courts are slower and more expensive, so they'll only be used for the most egregious violations. But that's fine. Those are the high value ones. You wrote some code or made a movie, Netflix wants to use it, Netflix has to pay you for it. Because Netflix is big and you can sue them.
> We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
The assumption here is that everybody wants to subvert their business model. For the RIAA that might be true, but we don't need the RIAA. They can lose. Specifically because they're crooks and nobody respects them.
But already right now I can find basically the entire Netflix catalog on BitTorrent sites, and still I pay them.
And look at Substack. You have people making content, the readers respect the writers, so they pay. In many cases even when the articles are available without paying or after only a short delay. Because the readers know they won't be created if the creator has to go dig ditches instead for money.
We should get rid of DMCA 1201 (prohibiting circumvention of DRM). We don't need to get rid of the law that prevents Google News from hosting the full articles on their own servers while stripping out the subscription links.
Yes there are occasional abuses, unfair YouTube takedowns and crap like this from Google. They must be fought, no argument there. Life will go on.
This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D.
Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole.
Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
Any tort in law also has secondary liability attached to it, and it's generally accepted caselaw that online service providers get secondary liability if someone uses them to infringe. Congress decided that said providers should be able to disclaim that liability if they participate in a notice-and-takedown process; and the EU has gone further and replaced that with a very context-sensitive "best practices" approach that almost certainly will be interpreted as "video sites must have an equivalent to YouTube Content ID".
From an old media perspective, this is crazy. If CBS licenses a TV show that infringes upon a third-party copyright, they cannot disclaim liability by saying it's the licensee's problem. If they could, then you could construct a bunch of LLCs to separate the infringement from the liability. And this is effectively what online services have done: YouTube, for example, gets to automatically[1] recommend you infringing content, and those who have been infringed only have the legal recourse of sending takedown notices.
Getting rid of the takedown system would mean that copyright owners would have to go back to suing individual users, which is both expensive and, IMO, wrong. YouTube gets to own online video and infringe copyright with impunity, because they passed the buck onto individuals that largely cannot afford to pay damages on infringement. If you're a legitimate[2] user of copyright, you can't economically get the infringement to stop or go underground. Furthermore, if you are a copyright troll, this does nothing to stop you; you will still be able to sue individuals and coerce them into settling baseless claims.
The underlying problem is that online platforms want to half-ass copyright. You can decide whether this is because they understand the draw that infringing content provides to them, or if proper enforcement interferes with the FAANG business model of "own the platform and take 30%". Either way, it's a compliance cost. We don't want people just suing individuals, and we don't want people suing online services to the point where any amount of third-party content is too legally perilous to touch. The answer was supposed to be notice-and-takedown, which is designed basically as a way for online service providers to push papers around between copyright owners and users without having to resort to an expensive lawsuit.
However, nobody likes this. Online service providers that try to do things "by the book" wind up with all sorts of legal pitfalls for both themselves and their users. So even the current notice-and-takedown regime in the US has been subverted by private agreement. For example, DMCA 512 requires copyright owners to actively monitor infringements of your work; but YouTube Content ID instead provides a turn-key solution to find infringing work on that platform. It also lets you just monetize the infringements instead of taking them down, which is also a sort of backdoor license for Google. I suspect some sort of similar arrangement is involved with Google Drive, where you can't share files that trip whatever content ID system is involved here.
So even "killing vigilante enforcement" would not be good enough, because Google has already found it lucrative to privilege copyright owners over regular users. You need to specifically regulate these takedown alternatives rather than just getting rid of takedowns.
[0] Technically speaking, a DMCA takedown notice from someone who does not own the copyright to the work in question is legally deficient and can be safely ignored by Google. However, most online service providers do not do a good job of checking.
[1] As per Mavrix v. LiveJournal, the process has to be automatic. Human curation takes you out of your DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is effectively a "willful blindness" requirement, IMO, which is also bad.
[2] As in, you're interested in preventing sharing of newly-published works for a reasonable time frame, rather than keeping an ironclad grip on Steamboat Willie or Super Mario Bros forever.
My previous take on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488496
I'd say 20-25 years from first publication would be a good time window. If your creation has not become worth anything in that time, it wasn't timely or of real interest. On the other hand, if a creation[tm] does become part of cultural background, 25 years is more than enough to reap the benefits. And at the end of the term, if something is part of the cultural scenery, it needs to be in public domain no matter what.
What a window like that would ensure is that creators can earn royalties over time, but it would prevent the inter-generational rent seeking dynasties. Copyright is supposed to encourage creation, by handing over a strictly temporary monopoly, but also guaranteeing that the monopoly remains short enough to enable culture to evolve.
Lobbyists wondering why not slip this into appropriations bill and make MS put this in desktop.
If things weren't so complex, a small group of hackers would "shut up and hack" and fix their grievances and give the community something new to play with. Instead, we've gotten to the point where most people realize that they are too small in face of all the complexity. Then what choices do you have left? Give up, or get bitter and angry because those who have the resources to maintain a browser or Linux distro aren't doing what you want (and eventually you give up anyway because shouting into the void doesn't fix anything). One can go against the grain but they will be left in the dust; I saw lots of bitter Palemoon users who were ignored as the web moved on and sites started breaking on their increasingly outdated Firefox fork. I can't blame those users.
It's this same complexity that enables e.g. Google to just block your browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
Open standards mean nothing if only one company on earth has the resources to implement them (and they deliberately push out others). Open standards mean nothing if they require you to implement user-hostile, freedom-disrespecting features that enable behavior like above.
