Copyright Funeral Today - 25 ebooks uploaded to freenet -
Michael Hargreave Mawson
Metet <anm...@mixmaster.shinn.net> writes
>Hash: SHA1
>
>TODAY ANTICOPYRIGHT HISTORY HAS BEEN MADE :
I don't want to know.
I want to *buy* books, so that authors can get paid for them.
Who is your favourite author? How many hours of pleasure has he or she
given you? Do you really believe that that is worth *nothing*?
ATB
--
Mike
"His wish was to become a historian - not to dig out facts and store
them in himself... but to understand them, call the dead back to life
and let them speak through him to their descendants. She sometimes
wondered who would pay for it and who would heed."
- from "Harvest of Stars" by Poul Anderson.
Anncrispin
save others from being pirated.
That's rather like blackmail, isn't it?
I told you that these people hate writers. Now maybe you all will believe me.
-Ann C. Crispin
bitflipper2
e-publishing work at a fraction of the normal published price. Now, if I can only
get this damn box into the "library" to do some serious reading.....
Charlie Stross wrote:
> Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
> as <anncr...@aol.com> declared:
> Nope. I don't think they hate writers. I think they're just clueless
> fuckwits who have generalised from a couple of principles (such as
> "information wants to be free" and "the net pushes the marginal cost
> of copying down towards zero, so paying for a copy is extortion") and
> reached a faulty conclusion.
>
> Unfortunately, they're right about Freenet; shutting it down would
> be virtually impossible. (See freenet.sourceforge.net for details.)
> Moreover, if a decision was made to do so, the consequences would be
> worse than the disease. (Think: omnipresent surveillance police
> state on the net, everywhere, all the time.)
>
> So I'll just repeat the first damage-control related idea that sprang
> into my mind ten minutes ago:
>
> "Everyone, if you _must_ download an unauthorised copy of a book from
> Eternity, or anywhere else on the net, then if you read it please pay an
> apropriate amount -- 10-15% of the cost of a hardcover copy, minimum,
> it's only about US $2 -- into a PayPall account for the author. You'll
> sleep better at night and it'll help ensure they write more books for
> you to read."
>
> (Shareware is probably not going to raise enough money to help, but it's
> better than nothing -- and even if the people making the unauthorised
> copies don't have a conscience where the writers are concerned, the
> readers may be a bit more responsive.)
>
> -- Charlie
Brenda
I suppose you could think of it as an honor, to be pirated along with Arthur C.
Clarke and Keith Laumer. Nevertheless, my editor has been informed. There are
times when it's comforting to reflect that Tor Books is but a suction cup on the
tentacle of a very large octopus.
And, damn, I've closed my post office box. But people who REALLY want to send
me checks can email me for a snail address.
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough, author of DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE
From Tor Books in May 2000
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
J.B. Moreno
> 3. A stegonographic message. :-) Who knows what information might
> be encoded in those OCR and formatting errors? And if these postings get
> enough people to download the text, then the intended recipient won't
> stand out in Echelon's log files. (Okay, this one is low probability...)
Not really, if the publisher is distributing an etext version it would
be pathetically easy to encode a whole bunch of info into it.
Everything from the credit card number that was used to buy it to the
date and time of purchase and the IP number used.
--
JBM
"Moebius strippers only show you their back side." -- Unknown
Mark Atwood
> Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> and then having it shut down on that basis.
And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
I'm just about to bring up a node, just `cause I think the protocol
theory and the implementation are neat.
Someone going to try banning the distribtution of ISC INN next?
--
Mark Atwood |
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
> > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > and then having it shut down on that basis.
> And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
Access to the port can be blocked at the router, just like a number of
universities have done with the port Napster's software uses.
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jfo...@ricochet.net> Space Cooties! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
Charlie Stross
as <nob...@dizum.com> declared:
>These books are utterly impossible to remove by any authority even old Billy
>boy himself. Not even on Monica's orders ! Once a book a book is posted on
>Freenet it stays there - no sysadmin or webmaster can pull it off. Even we
>can't remove them.
Congratulations, I hope you're really proud of yourselves for fucking
over the people who write the stuff you enjoy reading. You may think
this is an act of rebellion against the existing copyright regime, but
you aren't hurting the big publishing houses or fat cat executives:
you're hurting the badly paid writers who slave away over a hot word
processor for weeks and months on end to produce something original.
I'd strongly suggest that anyone who _does_ download these books from
Freenet should stick an appropriate amount -- at least 10-15% of the
hardback cover price springs to mind -- in a paypall account for the
authors. It won't fix the damage but at least it'll be a gesture in the
right direction.
-- Charlie
Charlie Stross
Wim Lewis
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>as <anncr...@aol.com> declared:
>
>Nope. I don't think they hate writers. I think they're just clueless
>fuckwits who have generalised from a couple of principles (such as
>"information wants to be free" and "the net pushes the marginal cost
>of copying down towards zero, so paying for a copy is extortion") and
>reached a faulty conclusion.
Actually, I'd assume that these people are either trying to attack
Freenet (and the remailer network) or are just trolling in this
newsgroup (note how they've started mentioning Ann Crispin, the
poster who's reacted most vehemently to their actions, by name).
Seriously: posting a crappily-OCRd, badly-formatted version of a book
that came out thirty-five years ago is *not* going to have any
significant monetary impact. Someone trying to make a point about
copyrights would choose something more recent, more popular, more
in the public eye --- music, probably, maybe software --- and
would put at least a minimal effort into correcting the OCR errors.
Scenarios that make a bit more sense to me are:
1. AST-style newsgroup trolling. Most people here are going to have
opinions about whether copyrighted books should be pirated; most
people are presumably going to think that not paying the author
is a bad thing. Result: flamage, discord, etc. I still think this
is the most likely scenario. Ann Crispin probably isn't helping
much by rising to the bait, though I understand she may be legally
obligated to do so.
2. An indirect attack on the anonymity and robust-file-storage services,
which are mostly provided by people who don't have the resources to stand
up against a lawsuit or a large number of newsgroup complaints. Granted,
these services are designed with the intent that no single provider
is vital to the service as a whole, but giving the service a bad reputation
will still harm it.
3. A stegonographic message. :-) Who knows what information might
be encoded in those OCR and formatting errors? And if these postings get
enough people to download the text, then the intended recipient won't
stand out in Echelon's log files. (Okay, this one is low probability...)
>"Everyone, if you _must_ download an unauthorised copy of a book from
>Eternity, or anywhere else on the net, then if you read it please pay an
>apropriate amount -- 10-15% of the cost of a hardcover copy, minimum,
>it's only about US $2 -- into a PayPall account for the author. You'll
>sleep better at night and it'll help ensure they write more books for
>you to read."
Sure. Where is the author's PayPal account? And how can I be (reasonably)
sure that the account actually belongs to the author? (The people
who work on Freenet and related services *are* thinking about this
problem, BTW --- they mostly aren't rabid anti-IP loons, they're rabid
anti-suppression-of-information loons. :-) )
--
Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
The netcom address will be unreliable after September. Use the hhhh address.
"Remember, false information wants to be free, too." -- Bill Snyder, rasfw
Keith Stokes
>Congratulations, I hope you're really proud of yourselves for fucking
>over the people who write the stuff you enjoy reading.
Seems unlikely that this pathetic little person enjoys anything.
Joe Slater
>2. An indirect attack on the anonymity and robust-file-storage services,
>which are mostly provided by people who don't have the resources to stand
>up against a lawsuit or a large number of newsgroup complaints. Granted,
>these services are designed with the intent that no single provider
>is vital to the service as a whole, but giving the service a bad reputation
>will still harm it.
If someone wanted to do that, wouldn't it make more sense to use child
pornography or tobacco advertisements?
jds
--
I die. The rasfw posters all ask "Where are Joe's entertaining messages?"
Frustration builds among the posters until they get coronary aneurisms.
All die.
O, the embarrassment.
Anonymous
>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in contempt
>as <nob...@dizum.com> declared:
>
>>These books are utterly impossible to remove by any authority even old
Billy
>>boy himself. Not even on Monica's orders ! Once a book a book is posted on
>>Freenet it stays there - no sysadmin or webmaster can pull it off. Even we
>>can't remove them.
>
>Congratulations, I hope you're really proud of yourselves for fucking
>over the people who write the stuff you enjoy reading. You may think
>this is an act of rebellion against the existing copyright regime, but
>you aren't hurting the big publishing houses or fat cat executives:
>you're hurting the badly paid writers who slave away over a hot word
>processor for weeks and months on end to produce something original.
>
>I'd strongly suggest that anyone who _does_ download these books from
>Freenet should stick an appropriate amount -- at least 10-15% of the
>hardback cover price springs to mind -- in a paypall account for the
>authors. It won't fix the damage but at least it'll be a gesture in the
>right direction.
>
>
>
>-- Charlie
Another one who doesn't get the full picture. Let Buddha set you upon
the path to enlightenment :
Of all the things in the world the most precious is a human life.
Of all the things that it is to be human , intelligence is the most
beautiful. And writers , the great ones , sit at the apex of this
value-pyramid. And I would be the first to agree that they must be
rewarded financially.
However the internet in general , and Freenet in particular ,
embody an even greater idea of transcendental power. For the first
time in human history we have before us systems of communication
that enable us to exercise complete free speech unhindered by law or
custom. As important as authors' rights to get paid are , the right
to unfettered free speech is infinitely greater.
An extension of completely free speech is that one can freely say or
write anything they so chose , including books and all other media.
In such a world the concept of copyright is a contradiction , a
logical zuchzwang to its proponent.
Given that information "will out" how do we set about the task of
ensuring that authors and other infoproducers are adequately rewarded
?
Market mechanisms are useless in this scenario as supply will be
practically infinite. As I've said before I hold not the solution to
this conundrum. But that is no reason to delay the revolution even if
we could.
Finally as per your suggestions for ameliorating the anticipated
effects of copyright busting postings by paying dues to the authors ,
I say "why not ? ". Provide us with a means to do so that is easy
and accessible and I'm sure we'll be surprised by peoples' honesty
although needless to say it probably won't be as much as they would
get via conventional channels. But that should only be a temporary stop-gap
measure until a more secure means of assuring their
livelihoods is formulated. Indeed I want us to nurture all creative
talent by every means including monetary. I want there to be a jungle
of creativity encompassing the whole biosphere. But not at the expense
of allowing the developing MegaCorps (eg. Warner , NewsIntrnl ) to
maintain and consolidate their stranglehold on the world's thought
structure. So you see I'm not ideologically opposed to paying authors
and artists. On the contrary. The problem however is to reconcile the
right to universal access to information at source with the the
writer's right to be rewarded for his labors. The two are not
mutually antithetical but merely require some careful and creative
solutions to bridge the gap between them.
Finally let me reply to Ann Crispin re. hating her. I for one don't hate you
nor do I even hold contempt for your actions. I merely regard you as
a misguided product of your time and place. Which is sad really , as
being an SF writer , I would've hoped you'd have had the foresight to
see past the present and realize the promise of unfettered freedom of
speech and universal access to information. Perhaps Mammon has placed
a mote in thine eye blinkering your vision.
Incidentally I wasn't the poster who blasted you with the canine epithet
and in any case I personally regard your role here as little more than a
stock character taken out of a childrens' pantomine chasing after perceived
wrongdoers with rolling pin and saucepan to hand - or modern e-versions
thereof.
As such you do little here other than to keep me amused and provide me with
a little light relief as I wryly observe your "clownery". Even your
surname has certain onomatopoeic connotations of bumbling
incompetence. No offense meant. You are the foil to some peoples'
rapiers but not to mine. You're too droll for that as far as I'm
concerned.
vv
Anonymous
>wi...@netcom.com (Wim Lewis) wrote:
>>2. An indirect attack on the anonymity and robust-file-storage services,
>>which are mostly provided by people who don't have the resources to stand
>>up against a lawsuit or a large number of newsgroup complaints. Granted,
>>these services are designed with the intent that no single provider
>>is vital to the service as a whole, but giving the service a bad reputation
>>will still harm it.
>
>If someone wanted to do that, wouldn't it make more sense to use child
>pornography or tobacco advertisements?
>
Precisely , and we have indeed agonized over the implications Freenet
has re. child pornography. You can be sure that the first time such a
thing happens the authorities will scream blue murder demanding the
immediate shutdown of Freenet branding us as a pedophiles' haven.
This happens with metronomic regularity with every new medium.
Except this time we can't be shut down. Not by anyone.
Pertinent to this is the fact that I believe in a society of maximum
freedoms. I also believe that for that to happen their must be
maximum responsibilities. And one of these responsibilities should be
towards children - meaning that child rapists and child pornographers
should be executed. Not imprisoned then rereleased to commit further
crimes. That may seem at odds with my previous views on freedom of
information bit it is not. Both go hand in glove together.
vv
Joe Slater
>Pertinent to this is the fact that I believe in a society of maximum
> freedoms.
You believe in acting like a complete tonker; making things unpleasant
for everyone around you. I will be delighted when the thuggish police
force of your degenerate country cart your arse off to jail, where you
will be forced to perform sexual favors for large men in return for
some measure of physical protection.
Phil Fraering
Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
and then having it shut down on that basis.
--
Phil Fraering "One day, Pinky, A MOUSE shall rule, and it is the
p...@globalreach.net humans who will be forced to endure these humiliating
/Will work for tape/ diversions!"
"You mean like Orlando, Brain?"
Phil Fraering
> Unfortunately, they're right about Freenet; shutting it down would
> be virtually impossible. (See freenet.sourceforge.net for details.)
> Moreover, if a decision was made to do so, the consequences would be
> worse than the disease. (Think: omnipresent surveillance police
> state on the net, everywhere, all the time.)
No it's not. You have to assign it a port.
What's so impossible about shutting down the fucking net? It would
just take a couple nukes at the right altitude.
I don't see anything about freenet that would make it immune from
the sort of net censorship practiced by countries like China.
Douglas Muir
>
> I will state my feelings clearly - copyright needs to have sharp limits,
> and these thieving nimnos need to be shown the sharp end of a civil
> lawsuit stick. I don't like seeing living people's revenue-earning property
> stolen and (effectively) ripped into teeny-tiny pretty smithereens.
Sing it, brother.
I especially dislike the way they keep saying "this can't be stopped, so moral
and legal and ethical issues no longer are relevant".
This is the morality of a looter in a blackout. The fact that it comes
wrapped in a this-is-so-kewl technical sugarcoat just makes it that much more nauseating.
Doug M.
Phil Fraering
> Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
>
> > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > and then having it shut down on that basis.
>
> And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
What about "shutting down nodes" don't you understand?
Wim Lewis
David Joseph Greenbaum <dj...@cornell.edu> wrote:
>And there is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet. None at all.
>There are logs and there are sys-admins who want to avoid heavy legal
>bills.
I think you underestimate the amount of effort and thought that goes
into things like the remailer network. Even if all packets into and
out of all remailer nodes were logged, it would still be extremely
difficult if not impossible to determine the origin of a particular
post. (Assuming that the network's being used correctly, and also that
a reasonable number of the nodes are not sting operations.)
> I remember with anon.penet.fi went down, because of lawsuits
>regarding illegalities committed by its users, and nym.alias.net *will* do
>the same,
Penet went down because it was being used to criticize the Church of
Scientology, and the CoS does not like being criticized, and has many
lawyers. (Nym.alias.net is a later generation of remailer, designed
in part to avoid penet's weaknesses. Mixmasters, an even later refinement.)
Some remailers are operated in parts of the world which have had recent
and unpleasant experience with governments who want to know what every
citizen is doing and saying. Both the remailer operators and their (new)
local legal systems may be resistant to being leaned on by some large
American corporate interest.
>[eek. I sound like a Republican.]
Well, a totalitarian, at least.
Note that I'm not defending the etext pirate(s), and I'm not saying that
they have a right to be doing what they're doing: what they're doing is
bad, and should be stopped. But shutting down the remailer network,
or tracing a post through it, is (A) not as simple as just sending a few
legal nastygrams to Remailer Headquarters, and (B) arguably more costly in
terms of real freedoms than leaving it up is in terms of some imagined
loss of revenue to Frank Herbert's estate.
Nancy Lebovitz
>and these thieving nimnos need to be shown the sharp end of a civil
>lawsuit stick. I don't like seeing living people's revenue-earning property
>stolen and (effectively) ripped into teeny-tiny pretty smithereens.
>
>There are logs and there are sys-admins who want to avoid heavy legal
>become havens for illegal activity.
>
It's going to be interesting to see what happens if they put a current
bestseller online.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Nancy Lebovitz
J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
>Wim Lewis <wi...@netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> 3. A stegonographic message. :-) Who knows what information might
>> be encoded in those OCR and formatting errors? And if these postings get
>> enough people to download the text, then the intended recipient won't
>> stand out in Echelon's log files. (Okay, this one is low probability...)
>
>be pathetically easy to encode a whole bunch of info into it.
>Everything from the credit card number that was used to buy it to the
>date and time of purchase and the IP number used.
>
the text into ASCII?
Jordan S. Bassior
If you love science fiction and fantasy, it is both immoral and idiotic to
deliberately rob the authors of their royalties. Do you want to see the whole
genre die?
--
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
--
"Whoever would be a man must be a non-conformist" (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
--
ma...@my-deja.com
dj...@cornell.edu (David Joseph Greenbaum) wrote:
>
.
>
> And there is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet. None at
>all.
So did the Feds catch those responsible for the denial of service
attacks on the major portals ?
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Ron Miller
come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
Lois Tilton
> I especially dislike the way they keep saying "this can't be stopped, so moral
> and legal and ethical issues no longer are relevant".
If indeed it can't be stopped, this is when moral and ethical issues are
the only issues left.
Morality isn't refraining from wrong action when you can't act, it's
refraining from wrong action when you can.
--
LT
www.darkspawn.com
Charlie Stross
as <nob...@remailer.privacy.at> declared:
>In such a world the concept of copyright is a contradiction , a
> logical zuchzwang to its proponent.
Agreed. But ...
>Given that information "will out" how do we set about the task of
> ensuring that authors and other infoproducers are adequately rewarded
> ?
>Market mechanisms are useless in this scenario as supply will be
> practically infinite. As I've said before I hold not the solution to
> this conundrum. But that is no reason to delay the revolution even if
>we could.
That *LAST* sentence is where I part company from you.
Because you're in the position of sitting on a tree branch and sawing it
off behind you.
If you start down this path, guess what? You'll hit the sales of books,
both on paper and especially as e-books. The response will be draconian
and will affect both software hardware; for example, a move towards
proprietary book-readers that use bizarrely anti-aliased fonts to militate
against scanners and which can only process heavily-encrypted e-books
in proprietary formats. A move to legally require digital steganographic
watermarks embedded in all output streams from scanners at the hardware
level (as is currently the case with colour photocopiers). Use of lexical
steganographic fingerprinting of texts (using a bunch of editor-specified
grammatical variations in a given text to allocate a user-ID to each sold
copy so that the 'leaker' can be nailed hard and fast). Oh, and criminal
sanctions against anyone who uses Freenet or similar anonymous systems.
You'll also hurt a lot of authors. If they don't get paid, they'll have
to find something else to do to earn a living, which means they'll stop
writing. Do you really want to *reduce* the supply of good books?
-- Charlie
Nomen Nescio
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Hash: SHA1
On 21 Sep 2000 00:28:17 GMT, wi...@netcom.com (Wim Lewis) wrote:
>In article <slrn8sih5u....@antipope.nsl.co.uk>,
>Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>>as <anncr...@aol.com> declared:
>>>I told you that these people hate writers. Now maybe you all will
believe me.
>>
>>Nope. I don't think they hate writers. I think they're just clueless
>>fuckwits who have generalised from a couple of principles (such as
>>"information wants to be free" and "the net pushes the marginal cost
>>of copying down towards zero, so paying for a copy is extortion") and
>>reached a faulty conclusion.
>
>Actually, I'd assume that these people are either trying to attack
>Freenet (and the remailer network) or are just trolling in this
>newsgroup (note how they've started mentioning Ann Crispin, the
>poster who's reacted most vehemently to their actions, by name).
>
>Seriously: posting a crappily-OCRd, badly-formatted version of a book
>that came out thirty-five years ago is *not* going to have any
>significant monetary impact. Someone trying to make a point about
>copyrights would choose something more recent, more popular, more
>in the public eye --- music, probably, maybe software --- and
>would put at least a minimal effort into correcting the OCR errors.
That would be true were it the same version of the book posted here .
The version of Dune posted to Freenet appears to be completely correct
and properly formatted. Several quite recent bestsellers are also
listed among the 25 books. In any case the worry of copyrightists
shouldn't be that these 25 books were posted. No , it should be what
these postings portends : If 25 books can be posted with ease in one
night on a system on which it is impossible to remove them then it
implies that this number can be scaled up indefinitely to any number
of books. It is the equivalent of a book store selling "illegal"
copies in the middle of town and thumbing its nose at the police and
them being unable to a single thing about it.
I LOVE IT !
Read on to see why ...
>Scenarios that make a bit more sense to me are:
>
>1. AST-style newsgroup trolling. Most people here are going to have
>opinions about whether copyrighted books should be pirated; most
>people are presumably going to think that not paying the author
>is a bad thing. Result: flamage, discord, etc. I still think this
>is the most likely scenario. Ann Crispin probably isn't helping
>much by rising to the bait, though I understand she may be legally
>obligated to do so.
>
>2. An indirect attack on the anonymity and robust-file-storage services,
>which are mostly provided by people who don't have the resources to stand
>up against a lawsuit or a large number of newsgroup complaints. Granted,
>these services are designed with the intent that no single provider
>is vital to the service as a whole, but giving the service a bad reputation
>will still harm it.
Who said this is giving Freenet a bad reputation ? This is precisely
what it was designed for when it was a still nothing but a a mere
gleam in its founder's eye.
>3. A stegonographic message. :-) Who knows what information might
>be encoded in those OCR and formatting errors? And if these postings get
>enough people to download the text, then the intended recipient won't
>stand out in Echelon's log files. (Okay, this one is low probability...)
Yeah , yeah, whatever you want to believe.
Wasn't it Andy Grove who said :
" infinite paranoia is infinite awareness " ?
>
>>"Everyone, if you _must_ download an unauthorised copy of a book from
>>Eternity, or anywhere else on the net, then if you read it please pay an
>>apropriate amount -- 10-15% of the cost of a hardcover copy, minimum,
>>it's only about US $2 -- into a PayPall account for the author. You'll
>>sleep better at night and it'll help ensure they write more books for
>>you to read."
I'd love the opportunity to pay my favorite authors provided that :
(a) every cent reached them
(b) I could choose to be anonymous when paying them , as with cash
(c) Transfer of funds is near instantaneous and you can see proof
that your funds have reached their intended destination.
(d) no friction in the system ; ie it should be just as easy to pay 10 cents
as 10 dollars.
Such a system would provide quick feedback and gratification to both user
and author. Incidentally I would not limit this system to book authors but
also to ALL writers. In fact there've been many times when I'd've loved to
express my appreciation of certain posters' quality postings on Usenet by
sending them money , but unfortunately no convenient mechanism exists.
I propose that in the future every Net account should include a bank
deposit account where it should be possible to both receive amd make
payments with the same (or greater) level of anonymity as cash.
Indeed, if solid currency affords us a degree of frictionlessness
whereby we can make minimum payments of 1 cent units , then
e-currency with its non-physical representations should ultimately
make possible smaller units such as 0.1 cents. Indeed it would be the
equivalent of a verbal raspberry to send a poster of an ineffectual
article a payment of 0.1 cents ! Such a system is very doable - all
that is needed is the political will -of which more below.
So you see , I'm not ideoligically to paying authors - of any kind .
On the contrary I'd like to extend the current system to make it more
equitable so that we can choose whom we want to reward and by how
much. Let us not forget that there are , floating around the Net
,some truly superb posters on Usenet as well as authors of fantastic
websites who put in untold amounts of efforts into their websites but
receive not a dime. They are what make the net such a rich
intellectual ecology and are the unsung heroes financially speaking.
If there was some mechanism whereby one could make instant ,
real-time payments as one was visiting their sites as a gesture of
appreciation then i'm all for it. And I don't think there is a single
fair-minded person who would disagree with that.
What I will not do however is to allow the evil that is copyright to
restrict the universal free flow of information on the net. No way.
Not now and not ever. Copyright is to information as to what
Prohibition was to alcohol. Except that copyright laws have become
ever more grossly bloated and monstrously corpulent in their
unjustness and iniquity. Millions in Africa have died because of
pharmaceutical copyright laws. Many have died here as well because
their HMOs have refused to fund their treatment with EPO , needed
in chronic renal failure . I personally know of just such a case ; my
girlfriend of 9 years. This is a drug that costs over $9000 a year ,
but could be produced for less than a TENTH of the cost were it not
for the fact that one company has a stranglehold on the market thanks
to copyright. Thank God she is now getting treatment but only because
she has a lot of people who love her and care about her . What if she
didn't ? And I'm not even calling for pharm companies to not be paid
, only that they should be better regulated. At present their profits
are an outright obscenity which is why US healthcare costs are the
highest in the world.
Recent copyright laws have taken us even
deeper into the abyss by stripping away personal liberties to protect
copyright holders' so-called rights. Which is no surprise , given the
fact that Hollywood managed to strong-arm the DVD industry into
producing multi-region decoders , thereby splitting the world into
artificial to suit their greedy designs. Having got away with that
moral atrocity it was no surprise that they were emboldened to
engineer the Fascistic Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Using fulltime teams of lawyers and Washington lobbyists they can
essentially bypass democracy with their money.
What realistic hope does the little guy hope have against this organized
behemoth ? While he or she is busy at work doing their daily
9 to 5 grind in an effort to feed their family - and returning home
everyday too exhausted to think about the big picture - the Copyright
Holders have just spent yet another day lobbying in Washington and eroding
even more of his rights without them realising it. Until they hear (for
example) on the news that copyright has been extended to 75
years after the holder's death. What chance does Joe Public have in all this
? Whether it's Gore or Clinton elected the lobbyists have their fingers in
both pies and they are amongst the largest funders of both Presidential
Campaigns to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. He who pays the piper
gets to choose the tune. Go figure.
And where'd they get that money to fund them?
- From ungodly gains accumulated thanks to previous copyright laws.
And the new money goes into lobbying for even more lobbying to make even
more money out of copyright. And so the cycle goes on , increasing in its
monstosity. The great MegaCorps are addicted -
Copyright is their fix , their habit , their crack cocaine. And when one
tries to detox an addict things can quickly turn very nasty , very
quickly.
Provided that equitable payment mechanisms evolve , we will have an
even richer tapestry on the net than at present.
But payment mechanisms will have little incentive to evolve so long
as the present status quo is maintained. So long as the MegaCorps
are sitting pretty what incentive do they have for making radical
changes ?
So we must impose change on the system if it is unwilling
to do so from within. Ironically , some pain to the independents might
ensue during this interrugnum - but the end-result will be worth it
and the smaller fry will be the real beneficiaries as the costs of
business startup will tend towards zero. For example in this model a
truly superb poster and / or website owner could make a fulltime
living posting on Usenet and/or maintaining their website.
In any case this is a revolution that promises to be bloodless and
that can only be a good thing
>Sure. Where is the author's PayPal account? And how can I be (reasonably)
>sure that the account actually belongs to the author? (The people
>who work on Freenet and related services *are* thinking about this
>problem, BTW --- they mostly aren't rabid anti-IP loons, they're rabid
>anti-suppression-of-information loons. :-) )
>
You couldn't be more wrong. The founder of Freenet is utterly opposed
to copyright . Read his manifesto explaining why at the links I gave
in the first post. So go ahead call us " rabid anti-IP loons" or
"anti-suppression-of-information loons". If that's an insult then I'm
proud to be called that. Very , very proud.
> Wim Lewis * wi...@hhhh.org * Seattle, WA, USA
>The netcom address will be unreliable after September. Use the hhhh address.
> "Remember, false information wants to be free, too." -- Bill Snyder, rasfw
Actually it is impossible to flood Freenet with false copies of
counterfeit works even if they differ by one bit or byte. This is
specifically countermanded by the Freenet protocol. Just as you can't
make a counterfeit of this PGP signed copy.
See the links in the first post in this thread to learn why.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.2 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>
iQA/AwUBOcn9Ilftyvw/JxGSEQJypQCdGhewpkPX3QDnr68OoDisJ/HlMKIAoM11
ulX1i2PTy5YM7q62nPMvhWK0
=gkh2
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Alexander Johannesen
> Yup . . . I can certainly assure anyone who uploads one of my books that
they will
> come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
Got some heavy connections we should know about? :)
Alex
--
____________________________________________________________________________
"Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know."
- Frank Herbert
An Metet
Mark Atwood
> "Mark Atwood" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message news:m3g0mu1...@flash.localdomain...
>
> > Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
>
> > > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > > and then having it shut down on that basis.
>
> > And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
>
> Access to the port can be blocked at the router, just like a number of
> universities have done with the port Napster's software uses.
Well, I've been thinking about that, and have been looking at the Freenet
code base...
The port doesn't have to be "fixed in stone", and it could be easily
disgused as HTTPS at 443, or SSH at 22, or even HTTP at 80, TELNET at
21, NNTP at 119, SMTP at 25, etc.. In fact, there are some neat tricks
so that you could run a *regular* service daemon, that will hand off
to the Freenet server as appropriate depending on who connected and
what they said...
Then you cant lock it down at the port, you will have to instead
sniff and recognize the traffic. And if it's all SSL/TLS, you
can't even do that...
I love, *love*, subversive technology. I love thinking about it,
I love writing it.
Mark Atwood
> Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> writes:
>
> > Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
> >
> > > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > > and then having it shut down on that basis.
> >
> > And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
>
> What about "shutting down nodes" don't you understand?
Freenet (and it's kin, such as Publicus(sp?)) is designed so that
shutting down a node, or even many of them, does not cause any
document to go offline. It "merely" increases the WAN traffic
to/from/between the survivors.
I'm looking at the codebase now. When I install this thing, I will
have *no* idea what all documents will be kept in it's local cache.
And neither will anyone else, including cops, bluenoses, busybodies,
and copyright police.
Ron Henry
>I told you that these people hate writers. Now maybe you all will believe me.
Personally, I think you're implying too coherent and complex an ideology by
saying they "hate writers".
They remind me of kids I knew in jr. high who thought they were rocket
scientists because they realized the guys at the Radio Shack had attention
lapses while serving customers and they could use the opportunity to steal
calculators and radios out of the display case. There's a sad and
self-defeating adolescent mentality that will always get a kick out of ripping
others off. It's simplistic and puerile.
(It's really a laugh that these these chimps think an anonymous remailer, PGP,
and a scanner make them Ghandi crossed with Linus Torvalds or something.)
Besides, isn't it clear how clearly they enjoy -- relish -- getting the goat
of people who respond to them on newsgroups? We only feed their tumescent egos
by replying so indignantly to them every time they spam/troll us. I imagine
having "the Establishment" hate them is probably even more an appeal toward
continuing all this bullshit as having some crappily-scanned text files for
their Palm Pilots could possibly be.
Ron
--
Ron Henry ronh...@clarityconnect.com
http://people2.clarityconnect.com/webpages6/ronhenry/
J.B. Moreno
> J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
> >Wim Lewis <wi...@netcom.com> wrote:
> >
> >> 3. A stegonographic message. :-) Who knows what information might
> >> be encoded in those OCR and formatting errors? And if these postings get
> >> enough people to download the text, then the intended recipient won't
> >> stand out in Echelon's log files. (Okay, this one is low probability...)
> >
> >Not really, if the publisher is distributing an etext version it would
> >be pathetically easy to encode a whole bunch of info into it.
> >Everything from the credit card number that was used to buy it to the
> >date and time of purchase and the IP number used.
> >
> Would it be feasible to take that sort of information out by converting
> the text into ASCII?
No. It would be possible to filter out /some/ of the information by
getting multiple copies and comparing them, but not all of it and what
you missed could end up being as revealing as what you didn't. I'd not
want to risk it with less than a dozen copies spread out over a year (or
inside info on what was done).
This still doesn't make it possible to say "it's physically impossible
to distribute this" but it does make it possible for someone to knock on
your door and say "you're under arrest, you distributed _Title_
illegally, the publisher claims this cost him a hundred thousand
dollars. He's suing you for the hundred grand and we're going to lock
you up for a couple of years".
And there is nothing the FreeNet type people can do to stop this type of
tracking.
--
JBM
"Moebius strippers only show you their back side." -- Unknown
Douglas Muir
> I'd love the opportunity to pay my favorite authors provided that :
>
> (a) every cent reached them
>
> (b) I could choose to be anonymous when paying them , as with cash
>
> (c) Transfer of funds is near instantaneous and you can see proof
> that your funds have reached their intended destination.
>
> (d) no friction in the system ; ie it should be just as easy to pay 10 cents
> as 10 dollars.
I'd love the opportunity to pay the store for the goods I buy there, provided
that I didn't have to stand in line at the checkout counter.
But since that's not the case, I'll just shoplift instead.
[snip confusion between copyrights and patents]
Doug M.
Anncrispin
>
>If you love science fiction and fantasy, it is both immoral and idiotic to
>deliberately rob the authors of their royalties. Do you want to see the whole
>genre die?
>
>
>--
>Sincerely Yours,
>Jordan
As far as I can tell, they don't care whether authors get paid or not, and they
don't care whether they continue to write or not. They know that, even if the
Anne McCaffreys and Robert Jordans of the sf/fantasy genre quit writing, and
the midlist writers like myself, that there will be lots of wannabe writers
willing to give their stuff away for free, just to be read.
So they'll have stuff to read, no problem. It just won't be professionally
written.
-Ann C. Crispin
lal_truckee
anncr...@aol.com (Anncrispin) wrote:
> I don't really appreciate the implication that if I give them my
books, I might
> save others from being pirated.
>
> That's rather like blackmail, isn't it?
>
> I told you that these people hate writers. Now maybe you all will
believe me.
Nancy Lebovitz
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>
>If you start down this path, guess what? You'll hit the sales of books,
>both on paper and especially as e-books. The response will be draconian
>and will affect both software hardware; for example, a move towards
>proprietary book-readers that use bizarrely anti-aliased fonts to militate
>against scanners and which can only process heavily-encrypted e-books
>in proprietary formats. A move to legally require digital steganographic
>watermarks embedded in all output streams from scanners at the hardware
>level (as is currently the case with colour photocopiers). Use of lexical
>steganographic fingerprinting of texts (using a bunch of editor-specified
>grammatical variations in a given text to allocate a user-ID to each sold
>copy so that the 'leaker' can be nailed hard and fast). Oh, and criminal
>sanctions against anyone who uses Freenet or similar anonymous systems.
>
>You'll also hurt a lot of authors. If they don't get paid, they'll have
>to find something else to do to earn a living, which means they'll stop
>writing. Do you really want to *reduce* the supply of good books?
>
specified grammatical variations".....
Dorothy J Heydt
Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
>
>Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
>use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
>more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
>and then having it shut down on that basis.
Whether it works that way or not, Phil, congrats on having
figured out a way to call the pirates "fascists," which will
probably annoy them greatly.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Dorothy J Heydt
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>
>You'll also hurt a lot of authors. If they don't get paid, they'll have
>to find something else to do to earn a living, which means they'll stop
>writing. Do you really want to *reduce* the supply of good books?
Charlie, I don't think these guys know a good book from a bad.
If indeed they ever read a book at all.
Dorothy J Heydt
Jordan S. Bassior <jsba...@aol.com> wrote:
>My turn to chime in.
>
>If you love science fiction and fantasy, it is both immoral and idiotic to
>deliberately rob the authors of their royalties. Do you want to see the whole
>genre die?
As I just said to Charlie...
I don't think these guys read sf/f or anything else.
Dorothy J Heydt
Anncrispin <anncr...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>As far as I can tell, they don't care whether authors get paid or not, and they
>don't care whether they continue to write or not. They know that, even if the
>Anne McCaffreys and Robert Jordans of the sf/fantasy genre quit writing, and
>the midlist writers like myself, that there will be lots of wannabe writers
>willing to give their stuff away for free, just to be read.
>
>So they'll have stuff to read, no problem. It just won't be professionally
>written.
And they'll be unable to tell the difference.
lal_truckee
anncr...@aol.com (Anncrispin) wrote:
> I don't really appreciate the implication that if I give them my
books, I might
> save others from being pirated.
>
> That's rather like blackmail, isn't it?
>
> I told you that these people hate writers. Now maybe you all will
believe me.
I'm new to this discussion, so bear with me till I get to my question,
please.
I think "you(writers)" and "them(netizens, for want of a better word)"
are deliberately missing each other's point.
Them: e-copies are here, now. Copyright and subsequent author royalties
passed back to the author ONLY through publishing house/distributors is
becoming a less viable way to make a living.
You: writers create written works for a variety of reasons, not the
least of which is monetary recompense, and you justifiably want your
money.
Now my questions: What's the real split in that $6.95 I pay for a
paperback? What does the mid-list author ACTUALLY realize? And is there
any real reason to believe that once this is all sorted out, authors
won't receive MORE through some currently unknown mechanism?
I can think of several ways - shareware, maybe, - download fees from an
author's website, maybe, - printed "souvenir" copies, once the work is
known, maybe, - lectures, readings, booksignings for fee, once the
author is known (the latter mechanism was viable in the 19th century.)
Anybody have other ideas?
In my case, I would be likely to go to my neighborhood printing shop
(formerly copymat) and have a $2.00 copy run off, since I like the look
and feel of printed books. The shop could keep $1.00 and the author
would get $1.00. I bet mid-list writers don't get $1.00 per copy
royalties today.
J.B. Moreno
> You'll also hurt a lot of authors. If they don't get paid, they'll have
> to find something else to do to earn a living, which means they'll stop
> writing. Do you really want to *reduce* the supply of good books?
I wish people would stop talking to this prick -- his answer to your
question is obviously "Hell yes!".
All responding to him does is treat him seriously -- which just scares
people. Ignore him and he'll go away.
J.B. Moreno
> Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
>
> > Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> writes:
> >
> > > Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
> > >
> > > > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > > > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > > > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > > > and then having it shut down on that basis.
> > >
> > > And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
> >
> > What about "shutting down nodes" don't you understand?
>
> Freenet (and it's kin, such as Publicus(sp?)) is designed so that
> shutting down a node, or even many of them, does not cause any
> document to go offline. It "merely" increases the WAN traffic
> to/from/between the survivors.
As someone explained 5 months ago on slashdot -- shutting it down is
easy: simply brand it as evil and then make it illegal. Your friends
and co-workers will rat you out either because they don't want to be
evil or because of the reward.
And the simplest way to brand it as evil? Use it for evil purposes,
make it the home of the snuff-film, the rape of the little kiddies,
copyright violation out the gazoo.
BTW -- decreasing the nodes decreases the anonymity, and if the document
is only on one node and that is the node that gets taken offline, then
it's gone.
Lisa Hertel
>
> Seriously: posting a crappily-OCRd, badly-formatted version of a book
> that came out thirty-five years ago is *not* going to have any
> significant monetary impact. Someone trying to make a point about
> copyrights would choose something more recent, more popular, more
> in the public eye --- music, probably, maybe software --- and
> would put at least a minimal effort into correcting the OCR errors.
>
instance).
I'd love to see someone write a virus that attacks freenet....
Evilly, Lisa Hertel
Charlie Stross
>All responding to him does is treat him seriously -- which just scares
>people. Ignore him and he'll go away.
I disagree. Ignore him and he's likely to jump up and down and redouble
his attempts to be obnoxious. Whereas by reasoning with him I might be
arguing with a post, but at least there's a *chance* I can do something
to enlighten him.
(Gaah: I have a conference to go to tomorrow, three or four deadlines to
hit, and a worrying set of twinges in my wrists. I give up for now; see
you next week.)
-- Charlie
Mark Atwood
>
> I'd love to see someone write a virus that attacks freenet....
Me too. Lets get the worms and overrun attacks out of the way right
off, rather than have them sit around like time bombs for a decade or
two like has happened in INN and Sendmail.
(Tho they are a bit less likely, given what language the Freenet
servers are written in.)
Richard A. Knaak
> are deliberately missing each other's point.
>
> Them: e-copies are here, now. Copyright and subsequent author royalties
> passed back to the author ONLY through publishing house/distributors is
> becoming a less viable way to make a living.
> You: writers create written works for a variety of reasons, not the
> least of which is monetary recompense, and you justifiably want your
> money.
>
> Now my questions: What's the real split in that $6.95 I pay for a
> paperback? What does the mid-list author ACTUALLY realize? And is there
> any real reason to believe that once this is all sorted out, authors
> won't receive MORE through some currently unknown mechanism?
Yes, the fact that they don't seem to care about the authors in the first
place...and how long would we have to wait for this unknown mechanism to
make itself known?
>
> I can think of several ways - shareware, maybe, - download fees from an
> author's website, maybe, - printed "souvenir" copies, once the work is
> known, maybe, - lectures, readings, booksignings for fee, once the
> author is known (the latter mechanism was viable in the 19th century.)
> Anybody have other ideas?
Shareware works questionable at best. Download fees would not be very big
for most mid-list authors. "Souvenir" copies would not add up to much since
a lot of people, once they've read the story, would not feel it really worth
it to order the same story for money, this time.
Booksignings for fees? Only if you're Stephen King. Talk to a bookstore
some time about their likelihood of paying a fee to a mid-list author.
>
> In my case, I would be likely to go to my neighborhood printing shop
> (formerly copymat) and have a $2.00 copy run off, since I like the look
> and feel of printed books. The shop could keep $1.00 and the author
> would get $1.00. I bet mid-list writers don't get $1.00 per copy
> royalties today.
How would the author get this $1.00? From the goodwill of the copyshop? It
would also cost more than that, too, by the way.
Laura Higley
>
> Thanks, Charlie, for a 'real' alternative. I also applaud Steven King for his
> e-publishing work at a fraction of the normal published price. Now, if I can only
> get this damn box into the "library" to do some serious reading.....
You call a dollar a chapter a fraction of the cost?
--
Laura Higley http://www.nitelinks.com
Welcome to the world of electronic books!
Ian Burrell
pl...@newsreaders.com (J.B. Moreno) wrote:
> Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
> > Would it be feasible to take that sort of information out by
converting
> > the text into ASCII?
>
> No. It would be possible to filter out /some/ of the information by
> getting multiple copies and comparing them, but not all of it and what
> you missed could end up being as revealing as what you didn't. I'd
not
> want to risk it with less than a dozen copies spread out over a year
(or
> inside info on what was done).
>
This requires some kind of watermarking. Watermarking is easy with
images and sounds because variations can be introduced in the digital
stream that can't be seen or heard be people. Although, I think most
schemes don't survive format conversions and encoding. With text, the
changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order and are more
recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along with their
content being changed like that. External information in the encryption
or headers can be removed by converting to text.
> And there is nothing the FreeNet type people can do to stop this type
of
> tracking.
>
Even if the protection isn't possible, it is possible to license the
content to only be distributed in the watermarked/encoded form. Anyone
who possesses or distributes a different format is violating copyright.
The thing that scares me is if the war between copyright holders and
free information people turns ugly. The copyright holders push for
stronger legal restrictions, introducing strong copy protection,
destroying fair use, and making everyone pay rents. Which makes people
more likely to circumvent the protection and distribute things widely.
Which makes the holders more paranoid about piracy. Copyright only works
as a balance between freedom and protection.
- Ian
John Schilling
>Freenet (and it's kin, such as Publicus(sp?)) is designed so that
>shutting down a node, or even many of them, does not cause any
>document to go offline. It "merely" increases the WAN traffic
>to/from/between the survivors.
>I'm looking at the codebase now. When I install this thing, I will
>have *no* idea what all documents will be kept in it's local cache.
>And neither will anyone else, including cops, bluenoses, busybodies,
>and copyright police.
They will when the people upstream of you decide they don't want to
take the kiddie-porn rap all by themselves, when the cops are offering
them a reduced sentence in exchange for running a modified version of
the freenet software which tracks the comings and goings of suspect
packets. Then you get the same deal, and woe to you if you are at the
end of the chain.
This sort of protocol is fine and well for small, secretive operations,
but hardly bulletproof when used publically. Distributed computer
networks are good for hiding things, and good for advertising things.
Not so good for doing both at the same time.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
J.B. Moreno
> And some authors will be driven mad by the requirement of "editor-
> specified grammatical variations".....
Really unlikely, there are a whole bunch of ways to say "he said",
including whether or not it comes before or after the quotes. Is "hmn"
with one m or two? In sentence number 346, the period is followed by
only one space. Is the author really going to get upset at that? You
can even set it up so that the author picks the variants that he feels
best suit that particular spot. Sure, that's more work (or is that
"that is"?) but not a whole lot.
Ron Miller
>
> On the contrary I'd like to extend the current system to make it more
> equitable so that we can choose whom we want to reward and by how
> much.
So the provider of a service is not the one to set the price--you are? And it is
up to you to decide whether or not you want to pay at all? Hmmm...
> What I will not do however is to allow the evil that is copyright to
> restrict the universal free flow of information on the net. No way.
> Not now and not ever. Copyright is to information as to what
> Prohibition was to alcohol.
How so? Prohibition tried to stop the sale, distribution and use of
alcohol--copyrights protect an artist's or author's right to profit from his or
work. Seems a fundamental difference here. Copyrights, in fact, encourage the
dissemination of art and literature by providing an incentive for creativity.
> Except that copyright laws have become
> ever more grossly bloated and monstrously corpulent in their
> unjustness and iniquity. Millions in Africa have died because of
> pharmaceutical copyright laws.
Are you confusing copyrights with patents? I think you may be . . .
> Many have died here as well because
> their HMOs have refused to fund their treatment with EPO , needed
> in chronic renal failure . I personally know of just such a case ; my
> girlfriend of 9 years. This is a drug that costs over $9000 a year ,
> but could be produced for less than a TENTH of the cost were it not
> for the fact that one company has a stranglehold on the market thanks
> to copyright.
No . . . thanks to their patent. A different thing.
In any event, I think I see here something of a personal vendetta against a very
useful set of laws.
> Thank God she is now getting treatment but only because
> she has a lot of people who love her and care about her . What if she
> didn't ? And I'm not even calling for pharm companies to not be paid
> , only that they should be better regulated. At present their profits
> are an outright obscenity which is why US healthcare costs are the
> highest in the world.
This has a lot more to do with the greed of the companies than it has to do with
patent law.
> Recent copyright laws have taken us even
> deeper into the abyss by stripping away personal liberties to protect
> copyright holders' so-called rights.
"So-called"?
> Which is no surprise , given the
> fact that Hollywood managed to strong-arm the DVD industry into
> producing multi-region decoders , thereby splitting the world into
> artificial to suit their greedy designs. Having got away with that
> moral atrocity it was no surprise that they were emboldened to
> engineer the Fascistic Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
> Using fulltime teams of lawyers and Washington lobbyists they can
> essentially bypass democracy with their money.
> What realistic hope does the little guy hope have against this organized
> behemoth ?
You mean the little guy who wants what someone else owns without having to pay
for it? That sure sounds democratic to me...
> While he or she is busy at work doing their daily
> 9 to 5 grind in an effort to feed their family - and returning home
> everyday too exhausted to think about the big picture - the Copyright
> Holders have just spent yet another day lobbying in Washington and eroding
> even more of his rights without them realising it.
Eroding what rights?
> Until they hear (for
> example) on the news that copyright has been extended to 75
> years after the holder's death. What chance does Joe Public have in all this
> ?
Chance to do what? Get everything for free? Poor babies . . .
> >Sure. Where is the author's PayPal account? And how can I be (reasonably)
> >sure that the account actually belongs to the author? (The people
> >who work on Freenet and related services *are* thinking about this
> >problem, BTW --- they mostly aren't rabid anti-IP loons, they're rabid
> >anti-suppression-of-information loons. :-) )
> >
>
> You couldn't be more wrong. The founder of Freenet is utterly opposed
> to copyright .
He's just a parasite who would like to have his cake, eat it and never have to
pay for it. Let's make him work some 40-hour weeks for me without pay for a while
and see how he likes it. After all, don't I have as much right to the unpaid use
of his labor as he has to mine?
> Read his manifesto explaining why at the links I gave
> in the first post. So go ahead call us " rabid anti-IP loons" or
> "anti-suppression-of-information loons". If that's an insult then I'm
> proud to be called that. Very , very proud.
OK. You're a loon.
Private User
Charlie Stross wrote:
>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>as <nob...@remailer.privacy.at> declared:
>
>>In such a world the concept of copyright is a contradiction , a
>> logical zuchzwang to its proponent.
>
>Agreed. But ...
>
>>Given that information "will out" how do we set about the task of
>> ensuring that authors and other infoproducers are adequately rewarded
>> ?
>>Market mechanisms are useless in this scenario as supply will be
>> practically infinite. As I've said before I hold not the solution to
>> this conundrum. But that is no reason to delay the revolution even if
>>we could.
>
>That *LAST* sentence is where I part company from you.
>
>Because you're in the position of sitting on a tree branch and sawing it
>off behind you.
That's what they said when VCRs were invented - 25 years afterwards
witness greater than ever cinema attendance figures that video was
supposed to kill.
Even more strikingly and more pertinent to this discussion is the fact that
all
of the major newspapers publish copies of their daily editions on the net.
I don't see that this has decimated the newspaper buying figures.
On the contrary newspaper readership figures are as vibrant as they've ever
been. So here at least your analogy of " tree branch sawing " doesn't
appear
to hold true. There will always be places for both types of media.
Freenet is at the stage where Napster-type systems were 5 years ago.
As such it is only at an embryonic level of development.
25 books will not cut the mighty branch of bookdom nor will a million even.
There will always be books - at least for the forseeable future (50-100
years).
I think people often overlook what a robust technology books constitute.
As for authors not getting paid , well that consideration is even further
away
than 5 years. Even if every book were on the Net I believe that people would
still
purchase books for a whole variety of reasons.
The Net will never achieve its promise until the whole of the world's store
of
knowledge is uploaded. It is a dream now , but I firmly believe it can be
achieved
by 2025 given the exponential increase in computational power. But if we
wait for
legislation and Congress to give it their blessing then nothing will ever
get done.
>If you start down this path, guess what? You'll hit the sales of books,
>both on paper and especially as e-books. The response will be draconian
>and will affect both software hardware; for example, a move towards
>proprietary book-readers that use bizarrely anti-aliased fonts to militate
>against scanners and which can only process heavily-encrypted e-books
>in proprietary formats. A move to legally require digital steganographic
>watermarks embedded in all output streams from scanners at the hardware
>level (as is currently the case with colour photocopiers). Use of lexical
>steganographic fingerprinting of texts (using a bunch of editor-specified
>grammatical variations in a given text to allocate a user-ID to each sold
>copy so that the 'leaker' can be nailed hard and fast). Oh, and criminal
>sanctions against anyone who uses Freenet or similar anonymous systems.
I think you've got a little carried away with your futurising here. Napster
had
- and still has - 100,000's of titles of music available for free
downloading.
Far more than any real world music store. And yet we did not see the
music industry adopting these repressive measures that you outline.
The reason should be clear ; by doing so they would drive ever greater
hordes of the public into the arms of the Napsteresque services.
It would be like cutting off their noses to spite their faces , and I doubt
they
would be that foolish.
Let us also mention that although part of the issue revolves around
copyright ,
that is not the whole story. The big Studios and the MegaCorps are also
worried
about losing control of the means of information delivery.
>You'll also hurt a lot of authors. If they don't get paid, they'll have
>to find something else to do to earn a living, which means they'll stop
>writing. Do you really want to *reduce* the supply of good books?
>
Is this what happened to independent artists when Napster came on the
scene ? I think not.
In the long term though it would be fair to say that the jury is still out.
Remember that to make an omelette you first have to break an egg.
>
>-- Charlie
>
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.2 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>
<encoded_portion_removed>
=EyD9
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Mengmeng Zhang
>> You couldn't be more wrong. The founder of Freenet is utterly opposed
>> to copyright .
> He's just a parasite who would like to have his cake, eat it and never have to
> pay for it. Let's make him work some 40-hour weeks for me without pay for a while
> and see how he likes it. After all, don't I have as much right to the unpaid use
> of his labor as he has to mine?
Um... I have never seen the "founder of Freenet" say anything about being
"utterly opposed to copyright". The troll is lying.
--
MZhang - Geek extraordinaire, U2 Fanatic, _and_ he knows where his towel is.
"But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The
beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its
loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone
between the captive armies of the earth?" - Salman Rushdie
Ron Henry
>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>as <pl...@newsreaders.com> declared:
>
>>All responding to him does is treat him seriously -- which just scares
>>people. Ignore him and he'll go away.
>
>I disagree. Ignore him and he's likely to jump up and down and redouble
>his attempts to be obnoxious. Whereas by reasoning with him I might be
>arguing with a post, but at least there's a *chance* I can do something
>to enlighten him.
YMMV of course, but my own many years of experience trying to avoid cranks and
trolls on Usenet strongly suggests otherwise.
J.B. Moreno
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J.B. Moreno) wrote:
> > Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
> > > Would it be feasible to take that sort of information out by
> > > converting the text into ASCII?
> >
> > No. It would be possible to filter out /some/ of the information by
> > getting multiple copies and comparing them, but not all of it and what
> > you missed could end up being as revealing as what you didn't. I'd not
> > want to risk it with less than a dozen copies spread out over a year (or
> > inside info on what was done).
> >
>
> This requires some kind of watermarking. Watermarking is easy with
> images and sounds because variations can be introduced in the digital
> stream that can't be seen or heard be people. Although, I think most
> schemes don't survive format conversions and encoding. With text, the
> changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order and are more
> recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along with their
> content being changed like that.
I think all of them would -- after all, I doubt if very many of them
care if the text reads:
"Hello", he said. And offered his hand.
or
He said, "Hello", and offered his hand.
Or to take an example out of a book at hand
"Thank you" I said.
"It's nothing".
versus
"Thank you" I said.
"It's nothing" he replied/responded/said.
And remember -- there's no reason why you can't have the author's input
on where to put the watermarks and what you /use/ as the alternative
text.
> > And there is nothing the FreeNet type people can do to stop this type of
> > tracking.
>
> Even if the protection isn't possible, it is possible to license the
> content to only be distributed in the watermarked/encoded form. Anyone
> who possesses or distributes a different format is violating copyright.
You want to be able to find the distributor, there are likely to be too
many people in possession of it to be able to successfully prosecute
them.
> The thing that scares me is if the war between copyright holders and
> free information people turns ugly. The copyright holders push for
> stronger legal restrictions, introducing strong copy protection,
> destroying fair use, and making everyone pay rents. Which makes people
> more likely to circumvent the protection and distribute things widely.
> Which makes the holders more paranoid about piracy. Copyright only works
> as a balance between freedom and protection.
Yes, which is why I think it's best to just killfile these jerks that
are bragging about what they are doing -- they are looking for attention
and people saying "stop" are just feeding their egos, making them feel
self-important "look, I scared him. Haha, big name author is afraid of
*me*!", when in reality he's just a self-important prick that if ignored
won't have any effect at all.
John Ringo
they will
: come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
I'll be interested to see if there is any noticeable change in paper sales.
John
--
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad
girls live.
-- George Carlin
See sample chapters for my upcoming book "A Hymn Before Battle" at:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200007/0671319418.htm?blurb
Available in October from Baen Publishing wherever fine books are sold!
:-)
www.johnringo.com
"Ron Miller" <rmi...@crosslink.net> wrote in message
news:39C9F853...@crosslink.net...
: Yup . . . I can certainly assure anyone who uploads one of my books that
they will
: come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
:
: Brenda wrote:
:
: > <sigh>
: >
: > I suppose you could think of it as an honor, to be pirated along with
Arthur C.
: > Clarke and Keith Laumer. Nevertheless, my editor has been informed.
There are
: > times when it's comforting to reflect that Tor Books is but a suction
cup on the
: > tentacle of a very large octopus.
: >
: > And, damn, I've closed my post office box. But people who REALLY want
to send
: > me checks can email me for a snail address.
: >
: > Brenda
: >
: > --
: > ---------
: > Brenda W. Clough, author of DOORS OF DEATH AND LIFE
: > From Tor Books in May 2000
: > http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
:
William December Starr
Anonymous <nob...@remailer.privacy.at> said:
> Of all the things in the world the most precious is a human life.
> Of all the things that it is to be human , intelligence is the most
> beautiful. And writers , the great ones , sit at the apex of this
> value-pyramid. And I would be the first to agree that they must be
> rewarded financially.
> However the internet in general , and Freenet in particular ,
> embody an even greater idea of transcendental power. For the first
> time in human history we have before us systems of communication
> that enable us to exercise complete free speech unhindered by law or
> custom. As important as authors' rights to get paid are , the right
> to unfettered free speech is infinitely greater.
No, it isn't. But you don't really believe any of the shit you're
spewing anyway, do you?
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
lal_truckee
"Richard A. Knaak" <rkn...@centurytel.net> wrote:
Withering destruction of all my ideas <grin>
OK, you have shot down my suggestions -
The fact remains 1) that it will become a trivial matter to circumvent
the printed page; 2) that the printed page is where the current
"copyright tollhouse" exists today; 3) that we want authors to produce
interesting works because we want to read them; 4) that we need to
discover/invent/ a way to make it profitable.
How, was the question. What are your ideas? I gave you my (admittedly
spur-of-the-moment) ideas. Let's hear yours!
I might add that the total destruction of the publishing "industry" as
we know it, to the benefit of authors, is OK by me. Near as I can tell,
the publishing industry exists to print interminable repeats of whatever
sold yesterday, with women in armor on the cover if possible. I'd prefer
some system that allows original works of low demand to be "published"
so I stand a tiny chance of discovering something appealing to me.
CLIP of my ideas, and refutation of same...
Daniel Silevitch
<La...@onyxcat.net> wrote:
> bitflipper2 wrote:
> >
> > Thanks, Charlie, for a 'real' alternative. I also applaud Steven King for
> > his
> > e-publishing work at a fraction of the normal published price. Now, if I
> > can only
> > get this damn box into the "library" to do some serious reading.....
>
>
> You call a dollar a chapter a fraction of the cost?
Sure. It's simply a fraction where the numerator is greater than the
denominator.
Pedantically yours.
-dms
Ross Presser
Moreno)".wrote.posted.offered:
>And there is nothing the FreeNet type people can do to stop this
>type of tracking.
Of course there is. They can produce all content fed into Freenet by
"safe" means, i.e., only feed an ebook file into Freenet if you
yourself scanned it; only feed a pirated CD-ROM in if the legal
purchaser has no idea that you pirated it; etc.
--
Ross Presser * ross_p...@imtek.com
A blank is ya know, like, a tab or a space. A name is like wow! a
sequence of ASCII letters, oh, baby, digits, like, or underscores,
fer shure, beginnin' with a letter or an underscore.
Ross Presser
Heydt)".wrote.posted.offered:
>In article <87aed29...@globalreach.net>,
>Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
>>
>>Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
>>use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
>>more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
>>and then having it shut down on that basis.
>
>Whether it works that way or not, Phil, congrats on having
>figured out a way to call the pirates "fascists," which will
>probably annoy them greatly.
Um, no. My interpretation of what Phil said is that fascists = people
who hate the freedom implications of Freenet and want it shut down for
that reason, who are therefore supporting pirates. q.v. Strange
Bedfellows Dept.
Lois Tilton
When information is free, it'll be worth what you paid for it.
--
LT
Pf2144
> I also applaud Steven King for his
>e-publishing work at a fraction of the normal published price.
He's not doing it at a fraction of the normal publishing price, though. He's
charging $2 an installment, and while I can't remember how many words each
installment is at the moment, I did the math when he first started and it turns
out that if he publishes the entire book, and you pay for each installment, and
it's a normal size book, it's basically the price of a hardcover (roughly).
Personally, I don't like the e-book format. I just don't believe it's worth as
much as they charge (and I certainly wouldn't download pirated copies) and I'd
rather not stare at a screen for all those extra hours. I'm sticking to
paperbacks.
Dorothy J Heydt
J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
>> This requires some kind of watermarking.... With text, the
>> changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order and are more
>> recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along with their
>> content being changed like that.
>
>I think all of them would -- after all, I doubt if very many of them
>care if the text reads:
>
> "Hello", he said. And offered his hand.
>or
> He said, "Hello", and offered his hand.
Um, do you write yourself?
Most of the writers I know would already have agonized over
which phrasing sounded better, and having made a reluctant choice
would scream bloody murder at being asked to have their choice
set at naught.
Me, it would not bother one way or the other, because if in
order to get a book published you had to go through this kind of
rigamarole the publishers would cut back to publishing only the
guaranteed and proven best-sellers [there are those who say that
this has already happened] and the likes of me would never get
published at all.
John Ringo
: rigamarole the publishers would cut back to publishing only the
: guaranteed and proven best-sellers
Dorothy:
You could actually program the typesetting program to do it. It's called a
Canary Trap program. (Clancy, speaking of bestsellers.)
John
--
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad
girls live.
-- George Carlin
See sample chapters for my upcoming book "A Hymn Before Battle" at:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200007/0671319418.htm?blurb
Available in October from Baen Publishing wherever fine books are sold!
:-)
www.johnringo.com
"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
news:G196G...@kithrup.com...
: In article <1ehbcy4.m6vdhd12ee8rbN%pl...@newsreaders.com>,
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> My turn to chime in.
> If you love science fiction and fantasy, it is both immoral and idiotic to
> deliberately rob the authors of their royalties. Do you want to see the whole
> genre die?
What about the editors (human, not text editing programs)? Some authors
are convinced they no longer need editing, and we all know how *that*
turns out. Add agents and a webmaster or two and you're back to having
"publishing" houses, even though it's still nothing but 'net. All this
infrastructure will cost money, probably enough to still make piracy
attractive. =(
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jfo...@ricochet.net> Space Cooties! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> Yup . . . I can certainly assure anyone who uploads one of my books that they will
> come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
Can even God tire of the "whack-a-mole" game?
Holly E. Ordway
>I might add that the total destruction of the publishing "industry"
>as we know it, to the benefit of authors, is OK by me. Near as I can
>tell, the publishing industry exists to print interminable repeats of
>whatever sold yesterday, with women in armor on the cover if
>possible. I'd prefer some system that allows original works of low
>demand to be "published" so I stand a tiny chance of discovering
>something appealing to me.
I just don't get why the publishing industry is the target of so much
hatred.
Sure, there are lots of books out there (including, most likely,
interminable repeats of books with women in chainmail bikinis) that
I'm not interested in reading at all.
OTOH -- I have read many, many, many excellent books in my life, and I
continue to find books to read and enjoy, and... *every single one of
those books was [gasp!] published by the publishing industry!
Wow, I must be so completely brainwashed by The System that I didn't
realize that I shouldn't have enjoyed those books. If it was published
by a print publisher, who earned profits off of it, it clearly must
not have been any good, artistically speaking. Or my tastes have been
degraded, or something.
OK, my sarcasm isn't directed specifically at you, lal_truckee, but at
the sort of conglomerate of anti-publishing-house views I've seen. But
really... there is plenty of good stuff published. Maybe it doesn't
all stay on the shelves as long as each and every one of us would
like, but hey, that's what used book stores are for. And I've
certainly had a hell of a lot more luck finding good stuff to read in
material published by publishing houses, as opposed to freely
distributed stuff on the web or in fanzines. (Not that there isn't
good stuff out there... but I haven't found it, nor do I want to waste
my time sifting the chaff to find it.)
--Holly
Dorothy J Heydt
John Ringo <john...@cuthis.mindspring.exthisout.com.invalid> wrote:
>: order to get a book published you had to go through this kind of
>: rigamarole the publishers would cut back to publishing only the
>: guaranteed and proven best-sellers
>
>Dorothy:
>
>You could actually program the typesetting program to do it.
Well, *I* couldn't.
And my estimate is that the publisher would not go to the trouble
of getting a programmer to do it if it wasn't worth it.
Which takes you straight back to the guaranteed and proven
best-sellers.
Michael P. Kube-McDowell
<nob...@dizum.com> carefully left the following thoughtprints where
they could be seen:
>Except that copyright laws have become
>ever more grossly bloated and monstrously corpulent in their
> unjustness and iniquity. Millions in Africa have died because of
>pharmaceutical copyright laws. Many have died here as well because
>their HMOs have refused to fund their treatment with EPO , needed
>in chronic renal failure . I personally know of just such a case ; my
> girlfriend of 9 years. This is a drug that costs over $9000 a year ,
> but could be produced for less than a TENTH of the cost were it not
>for the fact that one company has a stranglehold on the market thanks
>to copyright.
You apparently don't know the difference between patents and
copyrights. And in your ignorance, you've set up a system where you
propose to settle your grievances with Person A by beating the crap
out of Person B. You must be so proud.
K-Mac
Malcolm
>
> A move to legally require digital steganographic
> watermarks embedded in all output streams from scanners at the hardware
> level (as is currently the case with colour photocopiers).
>
"watermark", which is the problem with your scheme.
Malcolm
"J.B. Moreno" <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote in message
>
> No. It would be possible to filter out /some/ of the information by
> getting multiple copies and comparing them, but not all of it and what
> you missed could end up being as revealing as what you didn't. I'd not
> want to risk it with less than a dozen copies spread out over a year (or
> inside info on what was done).
>
your tagging algorithm), but not audio, images or text. The reason is that
the soundtrack / picture / story has got to be decrypted in order to be
understood by the user. As long as you redigitise it, any tags will be
removed.
Anyway, I am unconvinced that this strategy is of much help. You can trace
copies back to the original pirate, but if a chain of twenty or more copies
exists between the copy you capture and the pirate exists, the work is
effectively in the public domain.
Andrea Leistra
J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
>> With text, the
>> changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order and are more
>> recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along with their
>> content being changed like that.
>
>I think all of them would -- after all, I doubt if very many of them
>care if the text reads:
> "Hello", he said. And offered his hand.
>or
> He said, "Hello", and offered his hand.
All it takes is two people in collusion and "diff" to locate these
in the text, and produce a pirated version that's not a clone of
any one and is thus difficult to trace. I don't think relying
on this sort of protection is a good idea. And how on earth
would you generate enough unique variations to account for 10,000
copies of a book?
--
Andrea Leistra
John Schilling
>I might add that the total destruction of the publishing "industry" as
>we know it, to the benefit of authors, is OK by me. Near as I can tell,
>the publishing industry exists to print interminable repeats of whatever
>sold yesterday, with women in armor on the cover if possible. I'd prefer
>some system that allows original works of low demand to be "published"
>so I stand a tiny chance of discovering something appealing to me.
Another reader who thinks he wants the slushpile fed into his home computer
on a T-1 line...
Shelly Raines
I'm sorry but I fail to see how this is any big deal. I can
walk into any library in the country and check out a copy of
Dune for free; at that point I could copy it, scan it, even
keep it if I were unethical. But most readers aren't. The
advent of public libraries didn't ruin book sales. Neither
will these silly people. Those who want to own the books
will continue to buy them.
Shelly
Nancy Lebovitz
J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix3.netaxs.com> wrote:
>
>> And some authors will be driven mad by the requirement of "editor-
>> specified grammatical variations".....
>
>Really unlikely, there are a whole bunch of ways to say "he said",
>including whether or not it comes before or after the quotes. Is "hmn"
>with one m or two? In sentence number 346, the period is followed by
>only one space. Is the author really going to get upset at that? You
>can even set it up so that the author picks the variants that he feels
>best suit that particular spot. Sure, that's more work (or is that
>"that is"?) but not a whole lot.
>
My impression is that some authors get extremely involved with
small differences of phrasing.
"Hm" is obviously prounounced differently than (from?) "hmm". Or did
you actually mean "hmn" vs. "hmmn"?
The number (or better yet, the exact size) of space(s) after the
period would be nicely useful for watermarking, but would be destroyed
by a conversion to ASCII.
I'd fight to the level of middling inconveniance against "that is"
in your final sentence myself.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Dorothy J Heydt
John Schilling <schi...@spock.usc.edu> wrote:
>lal_truckee <lal_t...@my-deja.com> writes:
>
>>I might add that the total destruction of the publishing "industry" as
>>we know it, to the benefit of authors, is OK by me. Near as I can tell,
>>the publishing industry exists to print interminable repeats of whatever
>>sold yesterday, with women in armor on the cover if possible. I'd prefer
>>some system that allows original works of low demand to be "published"
>>so I stand a tiny chance of discovering something appealing to me.
>
>Another reader who thinks he wants the slushpile fed into his home computer
>on a T-1 line...
Aw, he just doesn't realize how tiny his tiny chance is.
Ethan A Merritt
Andrea Leistra <alei...@f1n3.u.arizona.edu> wrote:
>In article <1ehbcy4.m6vdhd12ee8rbN%pl...@newsreaders.com>,
>J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
>>Ian Burrell <ibur...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
>>> With text, the
>>> changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order and are more
>>> recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along with their
>>> content being changed like that.
>>
>>I think all of them would -- after all, I doubt if very many of them
>>care if the text reads:
>
>> "Hello", he said. And offered his hand.
>>or
>> He said, "Hello", and offered his hand.
Why make it that obvious? Why not
"Hello", he said, and offered his hand.
vs
"Hello", he said, and offered his hand.
Hide it in the white space. Electronically you could hide it in
the difference between em-dash and en-dash. Or given a PostScript-like
formatting language you could hide it in the 6th decimal place of the
x/y positioning information for a gazillion text chunks.
>
>All it takes is two people in collusion and "diff" to locate these
>in the text, and produce a pirated version that's not a clone of
>any one and is thus difficult to trace. I don't think relying
>on this sort of protection is a good idea. And how on earth
>would you generate enough unique variations to account for 10,000
>copies of a book?
10,000 is only 2^^13, so you'd only need 13 such places where the
text varied to generate more than enough book variants. The point
about diff-ing text still stands, though.
Just knowing the class of changes (extra space, 6th decimal place
y offset, actual text variation) is probably enough to counterfeit
a copy that's so different from any authentic copy that it's
untraceable but still visually perfect upon reading. You couldn't
hide the fact that it's counterfeit, but you would have obscured
the specific originals it was counterfeited from.
My gut feeling is that this approach is a dead-end, but that there's
some clever method, blindingly obvious in retrospect, that
no-one's come up with yet. A fortune awaits the clever soul who
comes up with a scheme that works.
Ethan A Merritt
J.B. Moreno
> alt.distinguished."pl...@newsreaders.com (J.B.
> Moreno)".wrote.posted.offered:
>
> >And there is nothing the FreeNet type people can do to stop this
> >type of tracking.
>
> Of course there is. They can produce all content fed into Freenet by
> "safe" means, i.e., only feed an ebook file into Freenet if you
> yourself scanned it; only feed a pirated CD-ROM in if the legal
> purchaser has no idea that you pirated it; etc.
If there isn't a book version to be scanned that doesn't do them any
good, and if there is then the scanning time and the problems associated
with /that/ increases the "cost" to both the distributor and the reader.
I'm not talking about what is happening now, I'm talking about the
idiots that say "it's electronic and computers and can't be stopped".
At the moment such a scheme would hardly be worth the trouble, OTOH if
publishers switched to all etext and then let someone release a book
that should sell in the millions, and for which only a few thousand are
sold due to piracy, and you'll see the price go up and the protections
go into place.
J.B. Moreno
> J.B. Moreno <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote:
> >Ian Burrell <ibur...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> >> With text, the changes need to be spelling typos or grammar word order
> >> and are more recognizable. Not sure how many authors would go along
> >> with their content being changed like that.
> >
> >I think all of them would -- after all, I doubt if very many of them
> >care if the text reads:
>
> > "Hello", he said. And offered his hand.
> >or
> > He said, "Hello", and offered his hand.
>
> All it takes is two people in collusion and "diff" to locate these
> in the text, and produce a pirated version that's not a clone of
> any one and is thus difficult to trace.
The "safer" method would be to buy a second copy (you never know who's
on the other end, and if publishers or the law is really going after
people there will be sting operations).
Anyway -- the thing is that "diff" doesn't necessarily get you a
guaranteed "clean" version, it only gets rid of the things that are
different between your copy and the other copy. This means that it is
no longer a simple matter of "it's john doe" but that still doesn't
eliminate the "it's one of the two hundred people that bought it on the
second tuesday of sept. 2004".
> I don't think relying on this sort of protection is a good idea. And how
> on earth would you generate enough unique variations to account for 10,000
> copies of a book?
By doing it in more than one place and in more than one way. 10,000
different variations easy in a novel length work, if you weren't doing
anything else that would only require that you make changes in 15
different places, and if you allow things like easily accepted typo's or
rewording then you don't even need that many (not to mention things like
using a tab instead of a space, or the number of spaces between words,
do you write 3000 or 3,000).
This would of course involve some extra effort by the author to be done
"just right", but not a whole helluva a lot.
Geoffrey Kidd
Merritt) wrote:
>
>My gut feeling is that this approach is a dead-end, but that there's
>some clever method, blindingly obvious in retrospect, that
>no-one's come up with yet. A fortune awaits the clever soul who
>comes up with a scheme that works.
>
> Ethan A Merritt
If it works, of course, it can't be pirated, and if it doesn't work,
it can. :)
Steinn Sigurdsson
> "J.B. Moreno" <pl...@newsreaders.com> wrote in message
> > No. It would be possible to filter out /some/ of the information by
> > getting multiple copies and comparing them, but not all of it and what
> > you missed could end up being as revealing as what you didn't. I'd not
> > want to risk it with less than a dozen copies spread out over a year (or
> > inside info on what was done).
> >
> You can possibly tag computer software (as long as the pirate doesn't know
> your tagging algorithm), but not audio, images or text. The reason is that
> the soundtrack / picture / story has got to be decrypted in order to be
> understood by the user. As long as you redigitise it, any tags will be
> removed.
Not necessarily - if you embed the watermark in the
lower significant bits, then it persists in high fidelity
copies.
For degraded copying, which scrambles the least significant
bits or collapses them to lower dynamic range, put low
spatial (or time for audio streams) frequency structure into the
data - even if the algorithm is known, it may not be
possible to strip it if the signal is unknown.
Anne M. Marble
>
> It's going to be interesting to see what happens if they put a current
> bestseller online.
The Harry Potter books can often be found in alt.binaries.e-books. It
didn't take them long to put up Book IV. Imagine how long it would take to
scan that!
Bwah hah hah. Maybe that's the secret. All authors will end up writing
books the size of Robert Jordan novels to make it harder to scan their
books.
phil hunt
>Sure. Where is the author's PayPal account?
If they don't have one, you can use their email address.
--
*****[ Phil Hunt ]*****
"An unforseen issue has arisen with your computer. Don't worry your silly
little head about what has gone wrong; here's a pretty animation of a
paperclip to look at instead."
-- Windows2007 error message
phil hunt
>cha...@nospam.antipope.org (Charlie Stross) writes:
>
>> Unfortunately, they're right about Freenet; shutting it down would
>> be virtually impossible. (See freenet.sourceforge.net for details.)
>> Moreover, if a decision was made to do so, the consequences would be
>> worse than the disease. (Think: omnipresent surveillance police
>> state on the net, everywhere, all the time.)
>
>No it's not. You have to assign it a port.
>
>What's so impossible about shutting down the fucking net? It would
>just take a couple nukes at the right altitude.
>
>I don't see anything about freenet that would make it immune from
>the sort of net censorship practiced by countries like China.
You could embed freenet messages in email; that would make them harder to
detect.
If you really want untraceable information, you could encode it
and then steganographically encrypt it in another message, say a
jpeg, mp3 or mpeg, then post to a relevant Usenet group that the
recipient is monitoring. This would be about as secret and
untraceable as it gets.
lal_truckee
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
?
? Aw, he just doesn't realize how tiny his tiny chance is.
Cheap shot.
You don't know how tiny I consider my chances are today. If it weren't
for Dark Carnival's deep shelves and back stock I'd have almost no SF to
read.
You can't find ANY decent sf in non-specialty outlets, and the stuff on
the specialty store's "new" shelves are lame tv/movie tie-ins, vol 14 of
some S&S tripe, or <choke> fantasy, with a token interesting
novel occasionally.
Actually what I figure will happen is "critics" will make their money
through the same channels as the e-author, and people will discover and
depend on (probably a hierarchy of) critics who recommend books near
their taste, earning some percentage of what-ever an author earns; the
critic would pass some on down to his minions trudging through the slush
piles.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Phil Fraering
> "Joe \"Nuke Me Xemu\" Foster" <j...@bftsi0.UUCP> writes:
>
> > "Mark Atwood" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message news:m3g0mu1...@flash.localdomain...
> >
> > > Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
> >
> > > > Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
> > > > use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
> > > > more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
> > > > and then having it shut down on that basis.
> >
> > > And they will shut it down, how, exactly?
> >
> > Access to the port can be blocked at the router, just like a number of
> > universities have done with the port Napster's software uses.
>
> Well, I've been thinking about that, and have been looking at the Freenet
> code base...
>
> The port doesn't have to be "fixed in stone", and it could be easily
> disgused as HTTPS at 443, or SSH at 22, or even HTTP at 80, TELNET at
> 21, NNTP at 119, SMTP at 25, etc.. In fact, there are some neat tricks
> so that you could run a *regular* service daemon, that will hand off
> to the Freenet server as appropriate depending on who connected and
> what they said...
And as soon as you have stuff like that, you don't have a regularized
network of the things any more.
--
Phil Fraering "One day, Pinky, A MOUSE shall rule, and it is the
p...@globalreach.net humans who will be forced to endure these humiliating
/Will work for tape/ diversions!"
"You mean like Orlando, Brain?"
Phil Fraering
> Lisa Hertel <li...@thor.com> writes:
> >
> > I'd love to see someone write a virus that attacks freenet....
>
> Me too. Lets get the worms and overrun attacks out of the way right
> off, rather than have them sit around like time bombs for a decade or
> two like has happened in INN and Sendmail.
>
> (Tho they are a bit less likely, given what language the Freenet
> servers are written in.)
What languages does Freenet use?
Phil Fraering
> "Ron Miller" <rmi...@crosslink.net> wrote in message news:39C9F853...@crosslink.net...
>
> > Yup . . . I can certainly assure anyone who uploads one of my books that they will
> > come to genuinely understand what the "wrath of God" means.
>
> Can even God tire of the "whack-a-mole" game?
I don't think God thinks like that. I suspect He invents coyotes and
pumas and other mole-vores and goes on vacation.
Phil Fraering
> On 21 Sep 2000 01:03:37 -0500, Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> wrote:
> >cha...@nospam.antipope.org (Charlie Stross) writes:
> >
> >> Unfortunately, they're right about Freenet; shutting it down would
> >> be virtually impossible. (See freenet.sourceforge.net for details.)
> >> Moreover, if a decision was made to do so, the consequences would be
> >> worse than the disease. (Think: omnipresent surveillance police
> >> state on the net, everywhere, all the time.)
> >
> >No it's not. You have to assign it a port.
> >
> >What's so impossible about shutting down the fucking net? It would
> >just take a couple nukes at the right altitude.
> >
> >I don't see anything about freenet that would make it immune from
> >the sort of net censorship practiced by countries like China.
>
> You could embed freenet messages in email; that would make them harder to
> detect.
Charlie just left, but I've seen him do the math in the past about how
that wouldn't stop a determined opponent. I wasn't sure whether I believed
him.
The technology's advanced a lot since then, I suspect.
> If you really want untraceable information, you could encode it
> and then steganographically encrypt it in another message, say a
> jpeg, mp3 or mpeg, then post to a relevant Usenet group that the
> recipient is monitoring. This would be about as secret and
> untraceable as it gets.
And how long would it stay there? It would have to be repeatedly
re-posted to get around the cancelbots; eventually, you're just
relying on the usenet servers of the world as a _very_ space-inefficient
(steganography? with compressed data like jpeg or mp3?) virtual
network. They'd have problems with the load for sure (those that
still bothered to carry those newsgroups; they'd probably just filter
out large posts instead) and your storage capacity for the whole network
would be infintesimal.
Mark Atwood
> >
> > Well, I've been thinking about that, and have been looking at the Freenet
> > code base...
> >
> > The port doesn't have to be "fixed in stone", and it could be easily
> > disgused as HTTPS at 443, or SSH at 22, or even HTTP at 80, TELNET at
> > 21, NNTP at 119, SMTP at 25, etc.. In fact, there are some neat tricks
> > so that you could run a *regular* service daemon, that will hand off
> > to the Freenet server as appropriate depending on who connected and
> > what they said...
>
> And as soon as you have stuff like that, you don't have a regularized
> network of the things any more.
The idea was that you couldn't find it or block it with simple
router rules anymore. With a little bit more work, only peers
need to know about the subtrifuge. It could be penetrated yes,
one by one, but not quickly or easily or globally.
--
Mark Atwood |
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Mark Atwood
> Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> writes:
>
> > Lisa Hertel <li...@thor.com> writes:
> > >
> > > I'd love to see someone write a virus that attacks freenet....
> >
> > Me too. Lets get the worms and overrun attacks out of the way right
> > off, rather than have them sit around like time bombs for a decade or
> > two like has happened in INN and Sendmail.
> >
> > (Tho they are a bit less likely, given what language the Freenet
> > servers are written in.)
>
> What languages does Freenet use?
The current reference implementation servers are written in Java, and
the reference client as well. There is a demonstration client written
in Perl.
I understand that there is an effort under way to put a client into
Mozilla, and I read someone else musing about writing a client as a
Windows Explorer plugin, similar to Microsoft's plugin for WebDAV.
Phil Fraering
But at that point it's no longer a secure anonymous distributed
no-single-location version of usenet; it's more secret.
Bill Snyder
<nob...@remailer.privacy.at> wrote:
>Soon the " lead time " from publication date to Usenet posting will shrink to
>a matter of days for the really popular books. Indeed I envisage that there
>will be great kudos attached to the first guy/gal to post online versions.
>
Oh, right. "Be the first one on your block to repay an honest
craftsman, possibly even an artist, who's struggled and sweated and
finally produced something you've really enjoyed reading -- by
stealing it." If your idea of "kudos" is to be pointed out as the
Largest Bipedal Asshole in town, maybe so.
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Joe "Nuke Me Xemu" Foster
> On 20 Sep 2000 22:55:13 -0700, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
> >Phil Fraering <p...@globalreach.net> writes:
> >Someone going to try banning the distribtution of ISC INN next?
> Unlikely, but the RIAA *has* tried to ban netnews software, see
> <http://www.superpimp.org/> for details.
I wouldn't put it past the RIAA, but I did find this, saying it's a joke:
<http://www.superpimp.org/faq.html#General4>
Even Outlook Express can decode multipart binaries, so why would PAN be
singled out?
--
Joe Foster <mailto:jfo...@ricochet.net> Space Cooties! <http://www.xenu.net/>
WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to
because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!
phil hunt
>
>Looks like the fascists have figured out how to shut down freenet:
>use it for massive copyright violation to the point where it's used
>more for that than for its intended use of going around censorship,
>and then having it shut down on that basis.
Yep.
The best hope for Freenet is for it to stay under the lawmakers'
radar for a few years.
Dorothy J Heydt
phil hunt <ph...@comuno.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>On 21 Sep 2000 00:28:17 GMT, Wim Lewis <wi...@netcom.com> wrote:
>>Sure. Where is the author's PayPal account?
>
>If they don't have one, you can use their email address.
Excuse me.... how are you going to send money to an email
address?