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Slashdot thread on Breaking Windows. The helicopter ride was great but short and quite expensive. NY is overwhelming. Sorry for the lack of new posts, slow net connection, my mind is elsewhere. Hope everyone's having a great weekend. Read the review of Breaking Windows, and get a copy for yourself. Everyone who's in the tech business in some way, even people who just use the stuff, should know how the industry really works. Another subject we're going to cover in more detail is the case of the Russian programmer who's in an American jail for breaking the Digital Milennium Copyright Act. The act makes it illegal to write software that unlocks a copy protection scheme. It's an interesting philosophy, and a loop back to the 80s when such software was not only legal, but was instrumental in getting software publishers to see that copy protection was anti-user. There were several major software companies in the 80s in the US in the business of creating and updating such software to work around successively more complex copy protection schemes. They won awards from the PC software magazines. The leading company, Central Point Software, merged with Symantec. These were considered indispensible utilities. Now there are arguments on both sides. I know the publisher's side, because I was on that side in the 80s. The position is that users can't be trusted to do the right thing, to pay for the software they use. Before you laugh, there are lots of people who use computers, many more today than in the 80s, who can't be trusted in this way. They will take the software they want and not pay for it. On the other side are users who do pay, whether or not there are copy protection hurdles. They argue that they shouldn't have to give up functionality, or put up with time-wasting nuisances, because other people are dishonest. Now there's a counter to that argument. What else is new? (I'm in NY, after all.) You may someday miss a plane because of a long line at airport security. Life is filled with annoyances like that. On the other hand, the users say this is not a matter of life and death, the worst that happens is that some rich software company is deprived of their revenue. (But most software companies are not rich.) Why should they care about that? And if you make piracy illegal, isn't that enough? And is it safe computing to not have a good backup of your work and the programs use to access the data? And does the punishment fit the crime? In the United States, where we value freedom above all else (or used to) do we really want to put programmers in jail for writing software that users want? In the 80s I argued with users about this, and then woke up and realized that I didn't have much of a business if I was arguing with my users. The DMCA is a terrible law, it's un-American, anti-user, and beneath us, and restraining of free speech, and probably won't stand a constitutionality test, much as the Communication Decency Act didn't. It's true that the Internet introduces some new challenges, but we must have a clear philosophy, and putting programmers in jail should raise everyone's awareness to what's coming in the future. More of this, for sure. Would you be willing to go to jail for your beliefs?
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