I'm not opposed to this. I'm opposed to the West imposing its IP regime on the world. I'm supportive of Western copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets in the US and Western Europe. However, the concept of IP ownership -- let alone specifics of how its structured -- are a cultural and human construct.
Other countries should be free to figure out other ways of doing this.
Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).
I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way. There are fundamentals and externalities -- the war on Ukraine is wrong, and we should intervene. However, on something like having IP law, let alone breaking it up into copyrights/patents/trademarks, let alone stating durations and contexts of all of those, this just seems like overreach.
I feel like this is one of those places where corporate lobbyists managed to change people's values in a way which is quite unfortunate. People learn about IP theft in elementary school, it gets integrated into UN human rights documents, and something which is really culturally-dependent is viewed as universal. It wasn't viewed this way when I was a child.
Even little things make a big difference. We've gone from "copyright infringement" to words like stealing and theft. They're fundamentally different concepts which were intentionally mixed up. If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).
I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws. I'm just arguing we shouldn't force our IP regime on everyone else.
For an interesting real-world case of ignoring IP laws, one might look at the history of Philips and its light bulbs:
- The Netherlands didn't have patent laws in the decades that Edison was introducing his lamps
- Philips bought up the machines of competitors that Edison drove out of business through his patent monopoly and started producing lamps en masse in the Netherlands
- more than a few researches of said former competitors joined Philips' R&D crew, presumably partially out of spite, partially because it was the only place where they could continue their research
- this combination of experts and not giving a damn about patents resulted in really quick innovation at Philips' factories, meaning their light bulbs soon were both better and cheaper than anyone else's (of course, this only lasted until the light bulb manufacturers formed a cartel to introduce manufactured obsolescence).
- eventually the Netherlands caved in to international pressure to introduce patent laws. By then Philips was so huge that they started abusing it for patent trolling of their own.
About this "manufactured obsolescence of light bulbs" conspiracy theory which gets repeated over and over again: it's not that simple. Light bulbs have a spectacularly bad efficiency already, but the early light bulbs with their extremely long life were even worse. To quote Wikipedia, for a given light bulb, "A 5% reduction in voltage will double the life of the bulb, but reduce its light output by about 16%". So it's a tradeoff: if you make the filament thick enough, you'll have a light bulb which lasts for decades, but shines very dimly while consuming a lot of electricity. To improve efficiency, you can make the filament thinner, but then it'll burn out faster.
Funny how that is always used as a counter-argument when nobody gave a shit about light-bulb efficiency until three decades ago. Like, I'm sure it's technically true. I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them.
There is a difference between a conspiracy theory and a well-documented conspiracy. The things the Phoebus Cartel did falls squarely into the latter, including the planned obsolescence.
Errr... let me quote from the Wikipedia article you linked:
> Some engineers deemed 1,000 hours a reasonable figure to balance the various operational aspects of an incandescent bulb, since longer lifespan means reduced efficacy (lumens per watt): a longer-life bulb of a given wattage puts out less light (and therefore proportionally more heat) than a shorter-life bulb of the same wattage. Nevertheless, long-life incandescent bulbs were and are available with lifespan ratings up to 2,500 hours, and these do in fact produce less light per watt.
What I was trying to say in my previous comment was that while there was a cartel which did reduce the lifetime of commonly-used light bulbs, they didn't do it solely to increase their profits - there was an actual technical tradeoff involved, and they chose a figure which provided (in their opinion) a good balance of all the involved parameters. That's what always gets forgotten when this story is mentioned.
> they didn't do it solely to increase their profits
But they also did pretty obviously do it in part to increase their profits.
The cartel was formed in part as a response to the volatility of the lightbulb market (there was so much competition it was difficult for any company to stay dominant or to maintain stable/predictable profits), and was followed by a large increase of sales for the cartel's members.
Short of long-term environmental costs (which nobody was seriously worrying about in the early 1900s), there's very little reason to standardize the light output, efficiency, and lifespan of a bulb, which could instead be determined by consumer choice in a free market.
If the Pheobes Cartel was simply setting labeling standards, maybe it would be debatable whether or not there was any bad intention. But it remains a good example of planned obsolescence in part because of the excuses engineers used at the time, which were pretty clearly not the entire reason for cartel's formation, but were used to dismiss criticism of reduced competition.
It's a good lesson for people to learn: planned obsolescence is usually accompanied by a couple of engineering reasons for the tradeoffs, and sometimes those tradeoffs are justifiable in a vacuum. But planned obsolescence removes the ability for the consumer to choose their own tradeoffs and to optimize for their own needs, and instead it prioritizes making specific technical tradeoffs that just coincidentally happen to benefit the company's bottom line.
> The cartel lowered operational costs and worked to standardize the life expectancy of light bulbs at 1,000 hours[6] (down from 2,500 hours),[6] and raised prices without fear of competition. The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours.
The simple fact that they explicitly set a lower operational life target rather than setting a minimum target tells me everything I need to know about what they were trying to do. The additional fact that they fined manufacturers who exceeded the target doesn't leave much room for speculation.
If they had any interest whatsoever in efficiency as the driver, the targets would have been based on an efficiency target like lumens per watt rather than life expectancy.
> I highly doubt this was in any way a motivation back in the day, especially since light bulbs, as inefficient as they are, were still much better than the candles and gaslight that preceded them.
There are still examples of these early light bulbs in museums and such. They are very, very dim, producing light akin to that of a hair dryer. A modern person would be pretty shocked at just how little light these things put out. It's the reason gas street lamps stuck around into the 40s and 50s; nearly outlasting the Phoebus Cartel.
None of which is evidence that a cartel was necessary to enforce different standards; consumer preference would have solved that problem on its own.
Power efficiency problems only require cooperation to solve in instances where the downsides aren't immediately visible to the consumer (ie, long-term decreased power costs, labeling, environmental costs). But people definitely weren't worried about environmental efficiency of light bulbs when the Phoebus Cartel started up. For consumer-visible deficiencies (as in literally how much visible light a lightbulb produces), you don't need collusion to convince consumers to make the switch to a clearly (pun intended) better product.
It's worth noting just how janky and circuitous these standards were as a way of increasing efficiency, given that Phoebus Cartel had perfectly good measures for efficiency that they could have targeted instead. There were not rules for minimum lumens, or max wattage, or minimum efficiency; there were only rules on maximum lifespan. In fact, for their "class B" category of lamps, not only did the Phoebus Cartel not impose minimum efficiency measures, they actually included an upper bound on how efficient Class B lamps were allowed to be.
I think it's extremely unlikely that the Phoebus Cartel was primarily worried about the environmental costs of inefficient light bulbs, and I think it's extremely unlikely that in the absence of a cartel consumers would have been unable to tell the difference between a dim lightbulb and a bright one when making purchasing decisions. The most likely explanation of their behavior is the simplest one; they set constraints designed to maximize profits and decrease the risk of large competitors out-innovating each other, and then designed engineering optimizations and standards to fit into those constraints, not the other way around.
Personally, I think the color and higher luminosity per light bulb (both very desired features at the times of incandescent lighting) were what made those bulbs successful.
Even though those companies made an effort to push the bulbs (and were very happy with the result), and they were overall cheaper for the customer than the long-lived ones, I don't think any of those factors is impactful enough to explain the change on the entire market. Notice that those companies didn't own the entire market at the time, just a huge fraction of it. If people wanted the yellower bulbs, they could get them.
In fact a company in Germany tried to circumvent the EU ban on lightbulbs by calling then heatballs. Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
There also are (or were) a lot of consumer products which used ordinary incandescents for heat. The familiar example to Americans of a certain age is the EZ-Bake Oven, but there was a long tail of others, because if you wanted an off-the-shelf source for ~40-150W of heat, and the light is either a plus or neutral, it was tough to beat an Edison bulb and socket.
Bird sanctuaries are harmed by the ban in some ways (though in the meantime they've no doubt found alternatives) because incandescent bulbs make great heaters.[1]
> Makes sense because as a heater they're very efficient.
Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient. Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
> Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient.
My personal concept of resistive heat is effective comes from a YouTube channel called Technology Connections. The argument is that almost all of the energy taken in by an electric resistive heater is given out as heat so it is pretty close to 100% efficiency. I understand that a heat pump is practically a better alternative for almost all use cases though.
Similarly, speaking of electric light bulbs, my understanding is there is no reason why an LED light bulb shouldn't last over ten years of continuous use. At least that is my impression from this reddit comment (please correct me if I am wrong)
> There are many poorly manufactured LED lights out there. The LED itself is typically fine, but the driver electronics in the base tend to fail on poor quality products.
> I was having lots of failures for a while, but much less lately as I've tried to look for more brand name products.
I think heatpumps are something like 400% efficient for domestic heating, depending on outfoor temperature and so forth, so I guess resistive heating is inefficient by comparison, though I agree it seems weird to call close to 100% efficient "terribly inefficient". Probably losing heat from your lightbulbs to whatever is on the other side of your cieling is a significant factor too.
> I agree it seems weird to call close to 100% efficient "terribly inefficient"
A lot of my winter and nighttime electricity comes from natural gas.
50-60% of the heat energy in natural gas can get turned into electricity and make it to my house.
Then, it can be used to heat my ceiling a light bulb, where almost half of the heat immediately escapes my home. This is not a very good way to heat my house, versus my high-efficiency natural gas central air system that is more than 95% efficient in using the energy in natural gas to heat my home: it's about 3x worse.
Of course, even more efficient would be to use the natural gas to make electric power that runs a heat pump. That could be 200% efficient end-to-end.
The second problem with LEDs is heat. LEDs produce a lot less heat than incandescents, but they also deal much worse with getting hot. Thus you need large (for surface area) and/or expensive (due to more expensive materials with high conductivity) heat sinks. Cheaper bulbs will tend to cheap out on this aspect, but there are also fundamental constraints especially in bulbs designed to fit traditional fittings.
> Resistive heat (like a light bulb or space heater) is terribly inefficient.
Resistive heat has efficiency ~1. That is better that almost any other heating source with exception of heat pumps and cogeneration. If we consider visible light as a separate gain, then light bulb has efficiency ~1.02
> Resistive heat up high (in a ceiling or on a light) is even worse than resistive heat at ground level, because the heat escapes the dwelling without heating the occupants in the room much.
For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection. So it heats whole room and occupants, but not air.
> That is better that almost any other heating source
... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it. High efficiency natural gas heating systems are 98% efficient; compare to natural gas combined cycle plants that are ~60% efficient, plus a few percent more lost to transmission and distribution.
> with exception of heat pumps
Sure, that's the actually-efficient source of heat from electricity.
> For light bulb, i guess most energy is dissipated by IR radiation and only small part by convection.
For incandescent bulbs, this is unrealistic. The bulb is quite hot and heats the air around it and the fixture.
Moreover, of the IR, a whole lot also strikes the fixture and is conducted into the ceiling.
... if you don't charge generation and transmission inefficiencies against it.
Well yes. Statement 'efficiency of X' generally means 'useful work of X / relevant energy input into X on X boundary', not including efficiency of whole supply chain from primary energy source.
I have no idea what the percentages are but based on a lifetime of anecdotal experience esp with incandescent, I'd bet you're wrong. Being across the room from a light bulb will warm you a bit, but nothing like proximity to the bulb, especially when you're above it.
You're also being hit with more IR when you're closer. That being said, getting the same amount of light from an LED seems to only take 10% as much power, but they're also probably putting out much less IR, but LEDs still heat up a little, ...
A bare lightbulb is almost an anisotropic point source. You can put a reflector around it to target the IR in some direction. Its energy efficiency at the bulb is the same, i.e. nearly perfect. The energy delivered to target is different.
It does if you only consider the efficiency of the electricity -> heat conversion, but electricity generation itself is often not that efficient. It can be a lot more efficient to go fuel -> heat than fuel -> electricity -> heat.
One trick of cold rooms and frozen pipes - put a light bulb in there.
In the (old) house that I'm in, there's a room that is for all practical purposes, under the garage. It is very poorly insulated and for some reason, some water pipes ran through it. On a cold winter, the pipes can freeze.
So, there's a lightbulb in there that for several years kept the pipes from freezing. The pipes have since been rerouted.
The next step up from just a lightbulb is to put a Y connector with two lightbulbs on it and screw a dusk to dawn sensor into one of the branches and then another lightbulb into that. This way, if the primary lightbulb burns out, the other one will turn on.
It's still a thing in Poland. They are either sold as heatballs or workshop light (doesn't have strobe effect which could be potentially dangerous around saws). That was mostly when fluorescent lightbulbs were the only alternative. These days people go for LED lightbulbs instead.
People cared, that's why large office buildings were using flourescent lights in the 1960s. Homeowners didn't care, because incandescent lights had a more pleasing color spectrum and the cost of running them was insignficant in the overall household budget, even with their inefficiency.
> About this "manufactured obsolescence of light bulbs" conspiracy theory which gets repeated over and over again:
You should be really cautious when using the phrase “conspiracy theory” especially when talking about a cartel for which we have plenty of historical evidences.
Of course the Phoebus cartel isn't responsible for all problems with light bulbs, and it didn't even worked as well as it was supposed to and not for as long as it was supposed to, but it is still a real thing.
It's not just a theory. It's real. There was enforcement and everything, and decisions made to increase profit at cost of harm to the consumer. Veritasium did a video on it if you'd like to follow up there, and it's sourced.
I'm not super fond of the notion of IP, and I have lots of criticisms of "the western IP regime"; however, it's incorrect to frame this as "imposing western IP regime" in any sense that implies that "imposing one's regime" is immoral. In other words, this is just a trade agreement, and all parties have the right to impose their conditions. Trade only ensues if both parties are content with the conditions. Arguing that one party's conditions are "imposing" while the other's aren't is nonsensical.
Your suggestion that the west should be required to trade with countries which don't respect western IP policies is actually an imposition insofar as it imposes on western nations' freedoms of association, but allowing countries to determine their own trade provisions isn't an imposition.
I'll hazard an analogy: if I refuse to debate certain people on the Internet who don't adhere to my rhetorical standards, am I "imposing my regime on everyone else" (and thus I should be required to debate everyone who wants to debate me)?
EDIT: significantly revised to (hopefully) improve clarity.
Your point makes sense if you treat states as the relevant actors, but a free trade deal is actually normally about states aggreeing to not stop or impede their citizens from trading with each other, which I think flips it back to being a coercive relationship, though who is coercing who might change depending on the framing. I still tend to think the "imposing western IP regime" frame feels accurate to me, though I would call it "America imposing its IP regime on the rest of the world", perhaps not accurately.
> a free trade deal is actually normally about states aggreeing to not stop or impede their citizens from trading with each other, which I think flips it back to being a coercive relationship
Coercion requires a threat to an actor's rights. In the case of nations, these rights can probably be summarized as territorial integrity and political independence. While there are powerful incentives to cooperate, these incentives aren't coercive as they don't intrude upon territory or political independence (including the ability to decide with whom and under which terms one trades).
I think it's a fine thing to criticize the western legal framework of IP and you can argue that the west shouldn't export this legal framework; however, I don't think there's any philosophically consistent way to argue that the export mechanism (mutually beneficial agreements, basically) is "coercive" except perhaps to indict any kind of mutually beneficial agreement.
I completely agree with this, and I'm an abolitionist. We either abolish IP for everyone, or recognizing each other's IPs is the bare minimum for a trade agreement.
Trade agreements usually begin with far more tangible and fundamental agreements to allow physical goods, stop tariffs, and allow for health/safety standards and inspections.
IP agreements are far more complex and are usually negotiated on top/after the initial agreement.
> I'll hazard an analogy: if I refuse to debate certain people on the Internet who don't adhere to my rhetorical standards, am I "imposing my regime on everyone else" (and thus I should be required to debate everyone who wants to debate me)?
Yes, you’re forcing them to abide by your “rhetorical standards”. The point of debate to help someone see your point of view. Nowhere does it require abiding by a certain process. If so, one could make the argument that only those that have not taken logic and learned the proper way to debate can engage in such things. So yes, you’re forcing people to play by your rules, or you refuse to play. It’s actually quite a bit childish.
"if I refuse to debate certain people on the Internet who don't adhere to my rhetorical standards, am I "imposing my regime on everyone else"
Thats a terrible analogie.
To argue that being cut off from the global economy is 'freedom of association' is like arguing that selling cocaine to children is 'just free market' and "honest business"
Countries are not people - if the rest of the world stops trading with UK, 60 milliom people starve. In some countries, people will freese to death without fuel. West imposed moderate sanctions on Russia, and economy is already collapsing.
The analogy is as accurate as an analogy can be, but let's not debate analogies lest we get mired in pedantry. Let's talk about Russia: by not invading Ukraine and needlessly slaughtering civilians, Russia was able to enjoy the privilege of participation in a global economy and all of the entailed prosperity. When Russia chose to opt out of the global economy, its domestic economy predictably tanked. Sanctions are one of a few options at the west's disposal for preventing the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians without risking escalation toward a nuclear war.
Ideally Russians would understand that sanctions are a consequence of their government's murderous invasion and that they represent a mild inconvenience compared to the plight of Ukrainians--if a given Russian can't muster the courage to protest (yes, I understand protests are illegal, which makes those who do protest all the more commendable) then I hope he can muster the courage not to complain about sanctions (similarly I hope westerners can muster the courage not to complain about high gas prices and so on).
I am not trying to justify a hideous war, i am trying to demonstrate a point:
The threat of cutting off trade is an attempt to 'twist the arm' of a country. In this case its justified, cool. (Although some of them like banning Russian cat breeds, seem questionable)
But then why are posters above pretending that many countries, which signed up this IP regime under threat fo being cutoff from trade, didn't do that under duress?
> But then why are posters above pretending that many countries, which signed up this IP regime under threat fo being cutoff from trade, didn't do that under duress?
Because most people reserve "duress" for a threat to one's rights. In the case of nations, these rights are generally territorial integrity (basically, the right not to be invaded or attacked) and political independence (the right to self-govern, including to choose with whom and under which terms a nation engages in trade or other treaties and alliances). While there are certainly powerful incentives for cooperation, it's incoherent to argue that exercising one's right to self-govern is coercive and thus out-of-bounds.
"Very little of this existed prior to around 1700."
That's because books were hand-made items, the industrial revolution hadn't begun, and there was no concept of IP.
>If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits
Well, yes. Ease of copying is a non-issue, because the real cost is in creation.
Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
And I make that point as someone who has seen multiple developers quit one particular space (music software) because piracy made it impossible for them to earn a living.
Pretending this is about what you want is simply narcissistic selfishness. There are two parties in these transactions, sometimes they're small independent developers and not giant corporates, and piracy has very real effects on their livelihood.
There are many things one can do which lead you to have less profit.
One can run false advertisements, hire mercenaries to attack your factories, dump below-price goods on the market (and jack up prices once you're out-of-business), sign exclusive anti-competitive deals with your suppliers, vandalize your employee's homes so none want to work for you, and so on.
No one would argue that any of those are ethical, but none of those are theft.
Confusing words like this is a standard tactic, but it's not conducive to having reasoned discourse.
It's also not conducive to attack a straw man. You put a lot of words in my mouth. I said we shouldn't impose Western IP regimes on other nations. You somehow changed this to music piracy in the west. There's no logical connection there either.
As a footnote, on the topic of piracy in the west: when I was in college, there was a lot of copyright infringement. None of those kids had money to buy what they were pirating. A couple of decades later, no one I knew from college infringes on copyrights. The lost profits were zero. Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it. It's in discussing scenarios like that when the analogy to theft breaks down. The tools for addressing it are different. As a matter of policy, it makes the most sense to target places where there is the most capacity for losing profit. One example of an IP regime which I thought was clever -- from an Eastern European country shortly after the fall of communism -- only criminalized copyright infringement for non-minors. If I child wanted to copy a $5000 CAD program or a $200 IDE to learn to use it, it was legal. Copyright enforcement started once kids hit 17 (and was enforced). The West forced the country to shut down that "loophole," but it seemed like a reasonable policy to me.
> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it.
This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.
Some of this was pretty explicit and pretty well documented. In the late nineties, Microsoft strategically encouraged piracy in many developing countries, to develop lock-in. This wasn't just comfort; once a country has infrastructure built around Windows, from scripts, to data formats, to workforce skills, to everything else, it's almost impossible to switch off. At the time, the plan was to crack down once countries developed a little bit and could afford to pay.
Indeed, many years later, Microsoft then cracked down on piracy when countries reached middle income. I'm not familiar with Microsoft to know if that was intentional follow-though on the original strategy, or coincidental. By the time the crackdown happened, Microsoft was a very different (and much less strategic) company with different people. In either case, they came out way ahead for it.
> Speaking at University of Washington, Bill Gates said: “Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket
Err, nope. If I steal a bicycle from the shop around the corner there is one less bicycle the owner can sell.
If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.
This condition is simply not true in the majority of cases of piracy of digital items.
I worked in third world countries, I have a friend who is a single mother on a low wage job.
These are just /some/ examples where a sale of many digital items, software, media, etc. would provably not happen.
There is no 'theft' because there was no income withheld from the creator. [1]
[1] Whether they should be allowed to do that is a different matter – one detached from theft/economy.
It's a philosophical/ethical issue and I agree with parent that the view we hold on these things is recent and shaped by conditions that frequently no longer apply (physical item vs digital one resp. cost of making a copy).
> If I copy a digital asset the loss is hypothetical. It only exists if the condition holds true that I would have purchased the item if I hadn't been able to just copy it.
This argument never held up. By taking it, you admit it has value to you. Whether or not you agree with the asking price is incidental: you have to acknowledge you are taking something with some value and not paying for it.
I've pirated my fair share of software and media, and had my own software pirated. I'm not judging anybody for pirating software, but I am calling out specious self-justifications about doing so. You pirate it because it's cheaper and easier than paying for it.
It's not that simple; there are places where your asset has value for a user but the user _cannot_ (and I really mean cannot here) pay that value.
It's not a matter of convenience, and it's not just because it's cheaper either -- piracy is the only way to actually get access to it for some people. Otherwise, it's just prohibitively expensive for them.
Sure, you could argue that that still falls under "because it's cheaper", but there's a difference between someone pirating because they just want to save money and someone pirating because they literally can't afford to get it legally no matter what.
And this doesn't cover stuff like software just being plain unavailable in some regions; I literally cannot get some software I use in university legally.
If I copy a digital object, I'm not taking anything at all: I'm making a brand new instance, identical to the original. I pay for the computer hardware and electrical power necessary to make the copy, and for the storage space it lives in.
Sure, but that's semantics. You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for. You can't pretend the thing you have acquired is without value if you wanted it. Piracy is really about "do I want to pay, and can you stop me from getting it without paying?" and this business about "I'm not really stealing because it's digital and the marginal cost of production is zero" is just self-justification.
I hate it when people say that to dismiss things. Semantics is all about meaning. Without it we can't have a discussion. It's what's important about the words we say.
> You are acquiring a thing which has value to you, and has value to its owner, and which the owner has asked you to pay for.
Right, which means it had enough value for you to copy it, but says nothing about whether or not it was valuable enough to pay money for it. And if it wasn't valuable enough to pay money for it, the author loses nothing in that particular instance of piracy.
Of course, that doesn't mean all piracy falls under this case, but it does seem important to distinguish between these things.
> I hate it when people say that to dismiss things.
I always avoid ever saying anything like "that's [just] semantics", and I try to discourage others to, too, but in many of the situations where it shows up (including this one), there's nothing wrong with the complaint itself. When you hear someone swipe, "I'm not going to argue semantics with you", it generally carries an implicit accusation of an attempted change in subject. Consider:
Sara: "Nathan ate the clementines I bought from Oliver this morning!"
Oliver, Nate's friend: "I didn't sell her any clementines. The only fruit I've even touched today are these. They're not clementines. They're small mandarin oranges."
Does it matter that Sara can't distinguish clementines from ordinary mandarins? If there's a law that punishes you differently depending on whether you stole true clementines or not, then sure, what they actually are is materially relevant. Absent that, though, does Sara care what the definition is right now? No, and neither should anyone else. To even bring it up just distracts from Sara's actual complaint.
That is to say: if the argument starts as a semantic one, then semantic quibbles are relevant. ("The law says this about subcategory Y. Does what's at issue satisfy the definition of Y, or is it merely Z?") If it's not, though, then it's appropriate to call someone out on DOSing the conversation with a semantic rabbit hole (instead of being able to concede, "You say 'photocopier', while I say 'Xerox'", and then moving the fuck on).
Of course it's semantics - we're discussing the meaning of the word "theft", and deciding whether it applies to this situation! By denying the relevance of semantics you beg the question, assuming that the words must mean to everyone precisely what they mean to you.
"Owner", for example: your statement presumes the idea of software copyright, that someone who is neither party to the copying scenario can "own" the pattern of bits being copied, and have a right to demand payment for it. Well, that is the question, and the Russians clearly have a different point of view than yours.
Of course I share their skepticism: the idea of intellectual property seems to have brought about rather more harm than benefit, and I generally follow Proudhon's view on the subject of property.
I don't know why you keep confusing theft with copyright infringement. There is no logical reason to do that other than to do some subconscious moral framing.
It's similar to arguing ice cream is not fresh because it is made of frozen milk. You're trying to form a bad association that is completely illogical.
I'm mostly not in favor of software or media piracy (though if it has been sufficiently long (not sure how long) since it has been commercially available, or a handful of other cases that don't come to mind right now, I think probably fine), but I do think it makes sense to distinguish it from theft, and indeed, distinguish it on the basis that you are not depriving the person of a thing which they have.
If Joe is selling cherries he grew on his cherry tree, and I start selling some cherries from my cherry tree for cheaper (or just giving away cherries), this does deprive Joe from some of the profit he would get from selling his cherries, because some people who would have bought some cherries from Joe instead of from me, but I am by no means stealing profits from Joe. I'm not taking his cherries. He still has his cherries. That's not to say that he isn't worse off. He is, of course, worse off. But (except if some other conditions hold) I haven't wronged him, and I certainly haven't stolen from him.
(Ftr, I don't actually have a cherry tree, and do not grow any food.)
Now, if Joe is selling copies of a file, and I am giving away copies of the same file, well, it seems like a similar situation. One difference is that in the case of the cherry tree, both Joe and I are putting in the work to create the product, namely, by raising and maintaining our respective cherry trees, and harvesting the cherries,
while in the case of the computer file, it may be that Joe put in a lot of work into creating that file in the first place, and I did not, and so if I were to sell copies of the file, that would seem quite questionable.
Now, if I were to distribute the file Joe made and is selling, the reason this would be bad is probably a combination of "This makes Joe worse off, and he should be rewarded for the benefit he provided others, and also society decided on that basis that I shouldn't do that, and unless there is an overriding moral obligation to do otherwise, I morally ought to follow the ethical rules that society has established."
This is, I'll admit, somewhat similar to at least some of the reason it would be bad for me to steal some of Joe's cherries and give them away (though with less of the reason being "because of the ethics society decided" part than in the case with distributing the file.)
Though, one difference in this case is, Joe could do other things with the cherries other than sell them, and by stealing them, I am depriving him also of that option. This doesn't happen in the case of distributing the file. Nor would it happen if I had a magical duplication beam which I used to make duplicates of his cherries.
I think this difference is an important part of the concept of theft.
The concept of theft, I expect, arose substantially before money, and I imagine also before significant trade.
The concept of "Hey, that's mine! I need that!" is fairly basic, and is based on "If another person takes it from you, you don't have it anymore." .
Now, of course, socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should. I think it is best to use different words for them, because I think it makes sense to keep the concepts separate (though related).
> socially we could agree to use the word "theft" to also include software/media piracy, but I personally don't think we should
Do you personally feel that wage theft isn't theft?
Same hypothetical, except the cherries Joe picks aren't actually Joe's—they're Jill's. Jill owns some farmland where cherries grow, and she lets people pick them. They do so on the premise that cherry pickers get paid by Jill on Tuesdays. Joe moves to town and picks cherries there all week and then hands them over. Jill says "thanks" and then slams the door in Joe's face. Does this fail to meet the threshold for the appropriate use of the word "theft"? Joe has not had anything taken from him[1]—certainly not any physical property[2] he could do anything else with or ever plausibly argue "That's mine" to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear—because the cherries were never his.[3]
Indeed, calling the fact not paying an employee's a type of theft seems to be an originally English idiom¹. In other languages it's more akin to an unpaid debt or a breach contract rather than stolen property. Intuitively, to have something stolen one needs to have gained ownership of it in the first place. (And being owed something is not the same as owning it.)
P.S.: What's with the hashes?
¹. It seems to also be used in Spanish, but mostly in an American context as a calque from English.
Not a native speaker and NAL, but why would anyone call this "theft"? If anything (assuming that the premise was agreed upon by both parties, of course), I'd call that defalcation, embezzlement, or simply fraud.
But as you laid out yourself, this doesn't fit any definition of theft.
Property is about the boundaries of what one can control, not about physical stuff and land. What makes property property is not physical boundaries and the tangible nature of a thing, but the fact that you can control who gets to use what you possess and under what conditions, backed by the power of the state. In states with copyright laws, this applies equally to land and widgets as it does things you write.
Property being about land and geographical boundaries is one of the most common misconceptions that gets shattered in the first few weeks of a first-year course on the subject in law school.
Yeah, I think you're kinda hitting the nail on the head here. The idea that people should be allowed to control ideas or concepts is wrong. We need to move past this as a species, so much of what is relevant to the day to day lives of people on this planet exists in a world where scarcity is artificial. That's not okay. Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.
Copyright law does not protect abstract ideas or concepts. It protects specific artistic expressions of them. See https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf; there's also a whole body of law around this.
> Artificial scarcity is not something we should allow.
Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity so that people can produce things that are valuable but not physically scarce so that they can buy those things that actually are scarce.
You're making a huge logical leap assuming that artificial scarcity is the only reason that we produce non-physical goods, and that's easily contradicted by the existence of FOSS. There are plenty of creators who create things for all sorts of reasons besides profit. And in many cases, there are people who want to create free things and can't because of things like patents and IP trolls preventing them from doing it.
> Unfortunately, unless we're all going back to a society in which people can only produce things that are physically scarce, like food, we need artificial scarcity
You said that unless we have artificial scarcity, we are all going back to a society where people only produce physically scarce things.
Charity isn't somehow the only other choice, not that this would be my ideal solution but I think we could still have some working version of capitalism where intellectual property was greatly undermined and everyone was better off for it.
> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise? A realistic example I've lived, is that purchasing the software/movie or whatever copyrighted material is impossible due to its unavailability in the local market, the absence of payment methods to purchase it online and/or the heavy cost compared to the cost of living in most parts of the world.
> Do they really end up with less money if the person wouldn't purchase it otherwise?
Frankly it doesn't matter whether the person would have purchased the item or not if they couldn't make their own copy. Going down that path would outlaw all competition, or even just choosing to abstain from purchasing anything. There is nothing inherently wrong with making choices or taking actions which result in other people receiving less income than they might have in some other hypothetical scenario. What matters is that they still have all of their own property whether the copy is made or not—they are not made any worse off than they were before.
> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
I don't think this analogy works very well here. What if the alternative is that the potential buyer would just never have purchased the product in the first place? Then there is simply no exchange that would have occurred, and the seller's "money in their pocket" was never going to be any different in this case.
To think about this analogy some more...Is it theft if one walks into a store, sees something interesting that they remember for their own benefit later, but they choose not to make any purchases? Does that deprive the shopowner of income in some way that the potential buyer should be made responsible for?
This isn't to argue that copying software (or music, or movies, and so on) is universally good or bad here, just that the theft analogy really has some serious problems with it.
Potential buyers are not just in the "I will pay for it" / "I won't pay for it" categories. There is a middle who would be willing to pay for it, but if they can get it for free, will do that.
I pirated Ableton Live until v5. I've paid for the full suite every release after that. If I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't be paying for it now. This is pretty much ubiquitous in Ableton users, and I'm pretty sure that it applies to many other high end software packages. Photoshop would probably be the best example, but Office, Autocad and many others would have a similar customer base.
If the creation is the part that matters why would they want to keep selling instead of taking a page out of indie game dev collectives or open source projects like Godot and Blender who earn salaries through Patreon-like monetisation strategies? Then piracy basically becomes a non-issue because it's the labour that matters, not paying for an artificially scarce digital copy. This seems like a pretty easy "best of both worlds" approach, no?
Only because everyone else is paying for enforcing those licensing fees. That copyright makes things easy in a society built around copyright doesn't really say much.
I you want to get really pedantic with the use of "literally": you're misquoting him. He didn't say you're literally "taking" the money out of their pocket; he said they literally have less in their pocket. I guess we could argue most people don't use cash these days so it's not literally in their pocket, but that's a level of pedantry I don't think is really valuable in a public forum.
I'm not misquoting them. How do you propose I can cause someone to _literally_ have less money in their pocket, without me _literally_ taking it out of their pocket? Regardless of whether that pocket is a literal pocket, or a bank account? By definition I am "taking".
My act of piracy does not "very literally" cause any amount of money to be removed from the IP owner. And if the poster meant to invoke the more colloquial form of literally, they damn well shouldn't have qualified it with "very."
This is a fine example of the abuse of the word "literally". People excuse the abuse, saying that it also means something like "emphatically"; but in this case, it's clear why this abuse results in errors.
As far as "theft" is concerned: software, including recorded music and films, has zero marginal cost of production. The software industries therefore have the potential to generate extreme profits, unrelated to the risks and costs of development. Intellectual Property laws are needed to protect these extreme profits.
Incidentally, I'm not aware that the term "Intellectual Property" was in use before about 1985. Copyright infringement, in particular, wasn't a crime before about that date; enforcement was by civil suit, and if you didn't make any money from infringement, then the court's award couldn't be greater than zero.
While the 'Intellectual Property' terminology probably did start in the 1980's alongside personal computers, the concerns about wide scale infringement definitely existed prior to that via Xerox (i.e. copy) machines (paper), audio tape/cassettes (sound) and VCRs (video) which made widespread consumer duplication trivial. This was all a thing before 1980, it just exploded as the technology reached the masses in the 80's.
Copyright infringement was most definitely a thing before then and damages could be awarded even if you had no income from it. See statutory damages. Really the only thing that changed with computers was the ability to make perfect copies, thanks to the data being digital. Prior to that, the problem was somewhat mitigated by the analog nature of it and that by the time you got to the 3rd or 4th generation copy the quality had significantly degraded.
> This is a fine example of the abuse of the word "literally"
It's not. The problem lies with the way the respondent rephrased the original. The original, as written ("very literally ends up with less money"—not to "very literally take money out", as the respondent chose try to use in a bizarre and underhanded setup), is in perfectly reasonable accord with the correct use of the word "literally"...
Piracy is only “analogous to theft” if the “thief” is making a choice between paying vs. pirating.
I personally don’t know a single software pirate who would have actually bought the things they’ve pirated. Mostly they just would have gone without the software, probably using some free alternative instead. There’s no value lost by piracy here, because there was no potential to capture value from these users in the first place.
Pirates are often teenagers without a single dollar to their name to spend on software, but all the time in the world to explore shady websites for warez. Later, once they have money, they buy software!
> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket
Thats a very slippery slope
Freeing slaves was theft
When Ghandy led subjects of India of the British Empire to the sea to mine salt, that was theft - mining salt was illegal for them
Using electromagnetic spectrum without a lisence is theft
Are you using the oxygen molecule I produced without paying? Is your house casting a shadow on my land, blocking sunlight i am entitled to?
What about ownership of airspace, 'ownership' of international waters and economic exclusive zones, ownership of orbits in space, ownership of the atmosphere and 'ownership' of pollution?
All ownership is a social construct - piracy is a symptom of the overall system being crap
Very little of this existed before the 1700s because all the science and math knowledge was still being stolen from the rest of the world using the racist "Doctrine of Christian Discovery".
Patents granted to Asians, Africans, and indigenous Americans for prior-art would bankrupt Europe.
Remember, before the 15th century less than 5 people could do long division in Europe. Try solving middle/high school math equations without the number 0 and using only roman numerals, you will understand the problem very quickly. For this and many other reasons, most of the intellectual heavy lifting was done outside of Europe. It took 400 years or so to collect information and catch up to the rest of the world.
A few countries had an outsized role in deciding these terms like much of the other WTOs rules...through the use of pressure, coercion, and other carrot/stick approaches.
If it's not voluntary, I don't consider it global consensus.
Joseph Stiglitz makes a similar point...
"TRIPs imposed on the entire world the dominant intellectual property regime in the United States and Europe, as it is today. I believe that the way that intellectual property regime has evolved is not good for the United States and the EU; but even more, I believe it is not in the interest of the developing countries."
You're being deceitful here. Stigler does oppose TRIPS because of its effect on developing countries--because intellectual property protection keeps developing countries from using patented things. In other words, he wants patents to be less restrictive, not, as you're falsely implying, more restrictive.
At the point where something is copied the creation process has already occurred. The fundamental idea behind IP is that it will put incentives on people to create as they can guarantee big profits afterwards.
But is this incentive adequate in modern society? I would argue it is worth revisiting. A lot of the science that is done around the world is already funded by governments with no guarantees of patent success, so it is clearly possible. Open source software also shines a light on the willingness of people to create amazing things for everyone...
> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.
When I repair an iPhone instead of buying a new one, Apple ends up with less money in their pocket. Repairing an iPhone clearly isn't theft, so this argument is clearly fallacious.
When a country signs a treaty, it is agreeing to something, presumably because it sees some benefit in it. It is entering into a kind of contract, from which there are presumably multiple benefits to all participants. Nothing is being imposed on anyone. It is being freely chosen by the governments that participate.
If a country signs a treaty while a US gunship is sitting in it's port, it sees a clear benefit of not having a "regime change" or a war.
If a Nigerian politician signs a treaty while receiving bribes or election support from a Western or Chinese oil company, that doesn't mean "a country" sees a benefit.
If a country signs a treaty at a risk of being ostracized by the world, it's taking the lesser of two evils.
And if you take a child bride from a war zone, it's a free exchange, with both sides seeing benefit. However, that doesn't mean it's fair or non-coercive. Power imbalances can allow for pretty nasty, unfair deals.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread with examples, both modern and going back 200 years.
Of course, "the western IP regime" didn't become ubiquitous because of these kinds of coercive practices even if some of them have happened historically. They happened because both sides saw a benefit. Of course, even absent malicious coercion, power imbalances can remain, but invoking "fairness" implies some objective (or otherwise agreeable) standard which patently doesn't exist. Just say you wish Russia (or whomever) had more negotiating power if that's what you mean. The closest we can get to an objective standard is: each side can freely (i.e., absent malicious coercion) choose for themselves.
> Not the case at all. Treaties are sometimes ... coercion
Exceptions don't refute the general case.
> Otherwise there would be no need for a treaty and nations could choose to enforce others' values of their own free will.
The point of a trade treaty is for each party to formally affirm that they will abide by the other's conditions. This is necessary irrespective of coercion.
Really? Every time I want to open a bank account in Switzerland I am asked if I am an American citizen. I am not asked if I am a citizen of another country or any other specific place. I am only asked if I am an American citizen.
Are you asked if you are Swiss citizen when you open a bank account in America?
Per FATCA treaty you should be but that isn't happening because the mighty power the US holds over anyone dealing with USD. If a US bank doesn't share its Swiss tax cheats nothing happens. If a Swiss bank hides them they get taken to the cleaners and can loose to do business with USD which is a death blow for any bank.
Oh, they did? Let's look at how America prevented Africa from manufacturing HIV treatments
"""
In 1997, South Africa tried one tack. It passed a law to allow the
importation of patented medicines that had been produced or sold in another
nation's market with the consent of the patent owner. For example, if the
drug was sold in India, it could be imported into Africa from India. This
is called "parallel importation," and it is generally permitted under
international trade law and is specifically permitted within the European
Union.
However, the United States government opposed the bill. Indeed, more than
opposed. As the International Intellectual Property Association
characterized it, "The U.S. government pressured South Africa ... not to
permit compulsory licensing or parallel imports." 3 Through the Office of
the United States Trade Representative, the government asked South Africa
to change the law — and to add pressure to that request, in 1998, the
USTR listed South Africa for possible trade sanctions.
That same year, more than forty pharmaceutical companies began proceedings
in the South African courts to challenge the government's actions. The
United States was then joined by other governments from the EU. Their
claim, and the claim of the pharmaceutical companies, was that South Africa
was violating its obligations under international law by discriminating
against a particular kind of patent — pharmaceutical patents. The demand
of these governments, with the United States in the lead, was that South
Africa respect these patents as it respects any other patent, regardless of
any effect on the treatment of AIDS within South Africa.
We should place the intervention by the United States in context. No doubt
patents are not the most important reason that Africans don't have access
to drugs. Poverty and the total absence of an effective health care
infrastructure matter more. But whether patents are the most important
reason or not, the price of drugs has an effect on their demand, and
patents affect price. And so, whether massive or mar- ginal, there was an
effect from our government's intervention to stop the flow of medications
into Africa.
By stopping the flow of HIV treatment into Africa, the United States
government was not saving drugs for United States citizens. This is not
like wheat (if they eat it, we can't); instead, the flow that the United
States intervened to stop was, in effect, a flow of knowledge: information
about how to take chemicals that exist within Africa, and turn those
chemicals into drugs that would save 15 to 30 million lives.
"""
If it didn't get approved by the US Senate (and, hint hint, the Budapest Memorandum didn't) then the treaty is not binding on the US. Other countries need to stop taking anything the US says or promises in international relations seriously until it goes through the senate. And admittedly, the US needs to stop making promises until it's sure it has the needed votes in the senate first.
You can choose not to have "Western values" imposed on you.
Don't use the products whose creators' values you don't agree with.
It's even easier in software with its widespread and thriving open source ecosystem.
Yet you don't seem to promote that. Instead, you seem to promote the idea that people who want stuff should be able to impose THEIR values on the creators of that stuff.
If a creator doesn't want their creation used by people who they don't agree with, dont make or share the thing. It's really that simple. What we have instead is creators appropriating the legal system to enforce their wishes. It doesn't take a genius to see the negative ramifications of that level of overreach.
I don't conflate personal property with intellectual property so this reasoning falls flat for me and doesn't appear to be contradictory. I can see how it would appear contradictory to people who do see personal and intellectual property as the same thing. I challenge these people to examine the experiences that led them to make this choice and which experiences would have led them to choosing differently.
> I challenge these people to examine the experiences that led them to make this choice
If you make a coffee table out of wood from a sustainable forest, does it belong to you? What causes it to become personal property?
If you make a coffee table out of code from a second life engine, does it belong to you? What causes it to not be personal property?
What if the coffee table you make in VR is made from "wood" tokenized on a blockchain that cost money to generate the electrons for?
Your examination concludes that things made from your invention and/or labor rendered in atoms are property, but from your invention and/or labor rendered in electrons are not? Or one form of labor has a right to earn a living, the other does not?
Until we achieve a post-scarcity world -- where life-time is included in scarcity -- that thinking seems both wishful and facile.
A coffee table made of wood can only be used by a couple people at a time,
and it can only be in one person's living room at a time.
There might be more than a couple people who want to use it,
and they might all want it in their living room.
These are conflicting desires.
To resolve this conflict, someone has to have the authority to decide
where the coffee table will go and who gets to use it.
The most natural choice is usually the person who made it,
although in some cases it might be someone else.
A coffee table made of code can be used by an infinite number of people
in an infinite number of virtual living rooms.
Everyone who wants to use it is able to,
and everyone can have one in their living room without conflict.
Since there is no conflict,
there is no need for anyone to decide its resolution.
These are all excellent epistemological questions.
> What causes it to not be personal property?
My baseline is that things are not property, so justifying the absence of property is a foreign concept to me. I'm curious why people would tend toward assuming property and then rationalizing away property in certain contexts. The assumption of property has consequences so enormous that I cannot authentically assume it as my default. Again, really interested to hear what made people chose that as their default.
> Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).
You could say that about a lot of things. It's pretty irrelevant to the question of if something should be thing or not.
But that fact should serve as a caution to people wanting radically change it (e.g. abolishment): most of us only have direct experience with the problems created by the solution, but not the problems the solution solved.
> I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way.
But likewise, we shouldn't compromise our values either. I'm not denying that "corporate lobbyists" have a had a pernicious effect on IP law, but my understanding is that most of this "imposition" has been in the context of the quid-pro-quo of trade deals. It's totally legitimate for a country with a Western-style IP system to decide it doesn't want to give some trading partner favorable trade terms if that partner refuses to recognize IP.
> What do you mean we have no experience with the problems it solves?
Some people want to just abolish IP (e.g. patents and copyright) because they've read some articles about abuse by patent trolls or copyright terms that are too long. They're not thinking about (say) the author who spent a large amount of effort writing a successful book, just to have to continue working a regular job, while all the profits go into the pocket of some corporation(s) that are under no obligation to pay the author because copyright doesn't exist so they have no special rights. Or the books that never exist because the author never writes a second book, because it's too difficult and stressful to juggle writing with a job, and they can't live off the proceeds of their previous work.
Legal rights give power to the little guys. Take away those rights, and it'll mainly be the big guys who benefit.
> the concept of IP ownership -- let alone specifics of how its structured -- are a cultural and human construct. [...] I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way
When thinking beyond the means (economical based incentive) and skipping straight to the end (advancement of human technology and culture) - One particularly huge country (China) has already been doing an accidental experiment for a long time: taking western IP and patents with a pinch of salt, and just using them pretty freely (as far as I understand it), at least at a national level.
I find the existence of that duality in the world really interesting, and it's not exactly one sided because the west has been exploiting China and Asia in general in their own way. On one side you have economically based idea and technology creation incentives with ever increasing restrictions; on the other you have all the benefits unleashed without restriction, yet without significantly affecting the incentive for the source (I'm sure some "not rich enough" people will complain it does but frankly the economical mechanism have already been pushed too far).
I don't disagree, the IP framework should be minimal, but you'll find the most staunch supporters are outside the US. If anything, the internet culture normalized piracy. It's ridiculous that in 2022 we re limiting what people can do with recipes, cheeses, bag designs, rounded corners, and cheap drugs. It doesnt have to be all-or-nothing, but IP has grown too much.
We really don't limit that stuff if you want to use it for home use. No one from KRAFT is going to come after you for trying to make KRAFT AMERICAN SINGLES at home to save money.
They are going to come after you if you try to sell them to MAKE money or tell others how to make it.
> I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws
Maybe you should be.
Personally I am of the stance that IP rights are inherently unenforceable once a work is released to the public, especially in the digital realm where information copies itself freely. Knowledge and art should be freely given and received and IP laws are directly opposed to this. There are other ways to monetize almost all forms of IP if that is the desired outcome.
If it’s possible to prevent some action entirely by technical means, then there is no need for law against it. The prohibition against murder is also “unenforceable” in the sense that there will never be any murder.
That seems counter to the notion of cultural appropriation being wrong. If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefacts wholesale if they choose, doesn't that work the other way around?
I know, that's happened a lot in the past, but aren't we moving towards recognising that was wrong and figuring out more respectful forms of cultural and commercial interchange?
I think this is a deep misunderstanding of cultural appropriation, but it is the misunderstanding that has gained traction in twitter circles. Cultural appropriation is a denunciation of exploitative oppression, not "anything where someone copies something that his culture (??) didn't come up with".
The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?)
The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation.
Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least.
A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.
Tonight I'm cooking Mushroom Risotto. I'm British. I guess the act of cooking it isn't cultural appropriation because I'm not making a profit from it. But is the seller of the risotto rice appropriating from Italians?
This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
I should have probably extended the final paragraph of my answer, rather than limiting it to the "public-facing" version. And I guess I invited this with the Taco Bell example.
Culture isn't proprietary to a group, and these groups aren't objectively demarcated in any way. To even say "Risotto belongs to the Italians!" is to make statements on who Italians are, and pretend that this is some immutable, objective group, and that for some reason, there is this magical doorstep that if you carry Risotto over it turns it bad. It's when the corporation pretends to "take" this cultural heritage as a marketing facade that they're appropriation something nobody owns, to then turn a profit from it.
SO, I apologize for my mangled point. Culture isn't proprietary. Languages and food and customs and songs and stories travel. This is what makes human dynamism. Cultural appropriation is the act of trying to take possession of it. The very act of copyrighting something communal is the problem.
I think a lot of it depends on how a given product is branded/marketed. Mrs. Buttersworth's is a good recent example here in the U.S. Had this brand actually been originally founded by a kindly grandmother who happened to be black and started bottling up her favorite syrup recipe, there would be no issue. (or anything that even remotely related to how it was branded) Another example are current stories about things like Russian Vodkas are rebranding (to distance themselves from the current situation) when the reality is that the only thing Russian about them is the brand name. We do this all the time with consumer brands from foods to restaurant chains claiming, directly or indirectly, some level of authenticity that isn't even remotely there either in terms of the product itself or those involved in producing it... often neither. It's even worse when said brand is actively harming the group they are profiting from the association with.
I'm progressive enough that I'm frequently called an SJW, but I think the concept of cultural appropriation is one of the worst ideas humans have invented. Cultures don't own stuff, individuals own stuff. Mixing, adapting, and copying from each other is how we grow and develop.
> Cultures don't own stuff, individuals own stuff.
What does it mean to own stuff? Clearly more entity classes than individuals can own stuff—much IP is owned by companies, a legal fiction of an individual owned by people in the class of shareholder with generous but limited dispositional power held by people classed as company officers.
Some cultures have established foundations and such to own things, like the Free Software Foundation or the Scientologists. Some fishing rights are granted to certain cultures which pre-existed contemporary government.
I‘m in the same position and agree wrt to the term „cultural appropriation“. One example for IP shared by a culture would, however, be protected terms of origin, such as Champagne or Bourbon.
That is true, however creating something is work, thus the creator should be rewarded for it.
Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces.
And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
Can you name the inventor of pizza? If I make a pizza at home, do they loose any money? Should it be forbidden for non-Italian people to make pizza, on the grounds of cultural appropriation?
I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza.
However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.
Are you implying it doesn't happen right now? I'm brazilian, and over here there's cases of american and european scientists patenting drugs using components from herbs that are traditional to our native people... Then they patent it and we can't use our own plants in our industry because it's been patented.
"Cultural appropriation" is newspeak. It defacto must be considered to be wrong because the term was invented in order to put a negative spin on sharing.
By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair".
It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination".
Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does.
Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists.
To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.
First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.
Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it.
Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms.
Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach.
Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here.
I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.
> If other cultures should be allowed to duplicate any of our cultural or economic artefacts wholesale if they choose, doesn't that work the other way around?
It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.
I don't think cultural appropriation is wrong. I think it's mostly original Americans who said 'stop mocking our rites and religion' and it grew from there. It grew in the US and reached the rest of the Western world quite fast. But as long as you're not a dick about it, it should be fine.
Tons of italian companies have to sue chinese ones because they copy italian products design, down to screws, and sell them on italian market at half the price. Wanna talk about parmesan, a wanna be Parmigiano Reggiano? So italian companies have higher costs also to pay lawyers to sue? No thanks.
You don't like IP? Fine, do something else, maybe better, but stealing remains stealing, whatever you call it.
So a business in America should have to pay thousands of dollars for a Windows Server license despite our society being the one who makes windows and russia just gets to steal it? Then we have to compete with russia using technology they stole from us?
Why don't we all just keep our technology to ourselves. Or does that not suit russia because russia can only steal everyone else's technology?
If I were king of the US for a day, I think the lowest hanging fruit would be cutting virtually all IP durations in half and eliminating submarine patents. I might even go further for copyrights, and eliminating many types of software patents. It would help businesses, it would help consumers, it would help most content producers -- the only group that wouldn't benefit are lawyers.
You're sort of building this up as the idea of the US forcing its norms and laws on others, but that isn't what this is. The merits of protecting IP exist whether or not they are prevalent in any country.
When participating in a global economy, other participants expect fair dealing. What do you think will happen now with Russia? We'll assume they are going to try to steal our tech. Instead of trading with them, we won't do business with them at all whenever possible. We learned this the hard way with China. And their internal incentives to create IP also disappear - who would want to spend time building an app in Russia when the guy next door is now allowed to steal it and sell it as its own? Nobody.
You're going to see much more draconian DRM. User experience will suffer. Less tech will be created. People will avoid doing business with Russia (and we already see that happening, and it was already true to an extent before they started murdering Ukrainians). And Russia's economy will continue to fail.
Guessing Russia is not taking a stand against IP or copyright at all. Just making it legal for them to steal from non-Russian owners. Don’t think they will remove copyright for Russian creators.
By definition it cannot be theft. Because of sanctions, the Russians wouldn't be allowed to pay for Western software anyways, so there is no difference to the bottom line.
Whereas if they pirate Russian software or software they can buy, there is an impact to the bottom line.
As a result it can be seen as a logically consistent position.
Because the store can't sell those goods. In this case the store can still sell the goods, and there is no lost revenue. There is not a single analogy to theft.
> If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).
Okay, so what is your suggestion here? Make it legal to make the copies? You know that that will only make more companies implement more aggressive DRM, right? Because, if you can't legally stop people from copying your software, you have to stop those who copy it from being able to run it.
This is also why cloud applications with web interfaces are on the rise. They don't have to worry about piracy because it's literally impossible unless people break into their servers, which I'm sure no one is going to argue isn't a crime.
IP was a major innovation. This is the stance Abraham Lincoln took, and I think there is an argument that much of the technological progress we have seen is helped by IP law.
The fact that we sat on our hands while China stole our IP for two decades is a contributing factor to why Russia felt emboldened to attack the Ukraine.
I disagree. I don't think giving people a coercive monopoly on doing things similar to them helps innovation. I think it's one of the main barriers to innovation. It prevents iterative improvements and encourages resources to be spent on preventing others from competing instead of making a better next generation product.
I've recently dropped the "the", because I understand some people object to it. Is this because "The Ukraine" referred to a geographical region, while "Ukraine" is the name of a country?
Mostly that. The theory is that using the definite article implies Ukraine is part of some larger region, which is a highly charged political statement. This Wikipedia article has more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine#English_defini....
Ah, thanks. Interesting to compare "The Argentine", the abandoning of which usage the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina explains as a mere fashion change.
IP has nothing to do with technical sophistication. I believe IP is directly led to culture and greed as people want to maximize profits rather than help society and promote ideas.
The point is that I pay hundreds of dollars for JetBrains and Russian citizens return the favor for stuff that I write. That's what we've agreed on as two countries. Agreements aren't a new construct.
I think that the value of IP protection makes sense for health & safety, and also for small/growing businesses that don't want to be shut-out from bad actors.
Where it gets worse is when it gets enforced by some giant behemoth as just another tool to maintain dominance and essentially forbid competition. It's just extracting money for the sake of having more money.
For example, Lay's (owned by PepsiCo) forbidding farmers in India from growing the same potatoes that Lay's uses for chips because PepsiCo owns a patent on the seeds. There's basically no other rationale behind doing stuff like this besides "but my money!". Like, the rest of the world should just cave to a $227B US conglomerate on everything they want?
At that point, IP isn't even about up keeping freedom or justice or whatever, it's just another way to enforce a colonialism-esque class hierarchy via capitalism.
> "However, the concept of IP ownership -- let alone specifics of how its structured -- are a cultural and human construct."
This "X is a social construct" meme has degenerated from meaning "it could have been designed/evolved differently" to "it doesn't matter, because it is relative so it might as well not be" - it's a terrible meme. There is a very big difference between claiming something is very wrong AND it follows an arbitrary decree or custom that was unjust, and claiming that whatever is socially constructed is also wrong. Pretty much every aspect of social life is a social construct. Justice is a social construct. Not killing each other over the slightest disagreement is a social construct. Pretty much every boundary, every aspect and definition that gives people meaning is a social construct.
The case for somehow breaking up IP laws regionally, I don't think it's a very good one because it would effectively cut out entire regions from many developments. But "it's just a social construct" - that just doesn't make any case either way.
BTW having separate, insular knowledge is what the current situation evolved from. Mutual certification and validation - say Rospatent being integrated into the Madrid System ( https://rospatent.gov.ru/en/activities/international_coopera... ) - is just a way to remove insularity and reduce costs for smaller IP owners without big pockets behind. What Russia is doing here is basically reneging accords, not some valiant pro-IP-freedom effort. This is a bit like US prints pirating the hell out of every British (+Empire) author after US independence. Just getting away with it, not some Libertarian movement.
"Russian culture isn't conducive to innovation. So russia shouldn't be forced to respect intellectual property. If it weren't for stolen IP russia would have no IP."
Leverage in negotiations is not the same as force.
It’s easy to look beyond the months of negotiations that precede trade agreements when not involved. Or buy into certain narratives crafted to pressure US negotiators, that the US is “forcing itself” on nations. But elected officials from other nations signed on the dotted line after, ostensibly, long debate.
Hey, could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot lately, unfortunately, and it's not what this site is for. Also, you've been doing it for a long time - that's a problem:
Many people have a concept of human rights, which we contrast rights which are considered to be legal creations (legal rights). Frequently people are considered to have a natural right to life, whereas the right to vote or own a business would be mere legal creations. Jefferson, among others, distinguishes copyright as a social construct[0], which different societies may feel free to respect or not, in consideration only of their own benefit. As pertains to the current topic, Russia by this act is disregarding their treaty obligations, but not necessarily violating anyone's human rights by doing so.
No one is forcing anything. Any country can do whatever it wants in it's legal system. If you want to become an economic island like this, it's unlikely anyone will force anything on you.
What matters is whether then you want to trade with the countries who's IP you are using. At that point it becomes extremely unfair to the country that developed the IP.
If China steals industry secrets that took billions to develop, and then sells those same products for cheaper (because they get the IP for free) in the west, is that fair?
I don't like your rhetoric of the west using force. There is no force or legal requirement if you don't engage with the west. But of course everyone wants to engage with the west, but at that point you have to come to a mutually agreed trade and legal pact. This is normal. This is also voluntary on the part of both countries.
I think this has a pretty limited view of history. If you think no one is forcing anything, I'd encourage you to look at how Commodore Perry opened Japan with gunships, the Opium War which did much the same to China, the East India Company, and similar incidents. Countries which wanted to stay closed to Western-style trade didn't do very well.
The tools have gotten more nuanced, but they're still at play. There are quite a few books on the ways the West subverts democratic structures in Africa in order to be able to extract natural resources. China is now getting in on this game too.
We still use militaries to protect Western trade interests, especially around key shipping lanes like the Panama and Suez canals.
But if you want to speak about it in a historical context, I would ask you explain what you mean by the "west" and the west forcing their values.
And I would note you are speaking to someone who's country's been invaded by mongols, ottomans, and russians within the last 1000 years. They all seemed to want to "force" their values on the people living here.
I think you guys may be coming from different cultural contexts.
In the previous commenter's context the West forcing its ideals informs his/her comments. In your context the mongols, ottomans, and russians forcing their ideals informs your comments.
You're both probably right.
At the same time, it's ludicrous to tell a, say, Zambian, that no one forced anything on them in the "modern context". When we know we forced everything from their laws, right down to their very borders onto every nation in sub-saharan africa. We even forced them to sign the very treaties we're saying were not forced on them. The leaders who didn't sign, we killed, and put a new leader in place who signed.
Zambia, just like Venezuala or Cuba, or North Korea, is free to leave whatever system was forced on them by the west. And they can probably steal western trade secrets without many repercussions.
Hungary and Poland can test whether they can get outside of the EU's legal jurisdictions and whether they can lead decent lives doing that.
Just to reitirate, ultimately these things are actually voluntary. But they come with consequences. And it's not like these western values of trade, and individual rights are really western any more, when Japan and Korea has had success with them, arguably China was well (before Xi).
But there are consequences if you want to go it alone, and it's questionable whether other economic systems actually work as well.
The Zambians have opted out. Have you been there recently? The people there have taken the Chinese opportunity and run with it, probably because of what they perceived to be a lack of opportunity in the Western system.
I think as the West attempts to keep some of these nations in Western orbit, we need to more openly acknowledge some of the issues our system has caused them in the past. Then we should lay out for them a credible reset that compares favorably to their Chinese opportunity. Absent that, the Chinese will continue to gain outsized influence across Africa because Africans will continue to make decisions that really are just common sense in the current context.
Larger point being that we can't simply claim we have not forced anything on people and these places are acting irrationally. From the perspective of a lot of places outside of the West, things have been forced on them, and they are beginning to take what are, from their perspective, perfectly rational actions to rectify these issues.
No, we're not all probably right. You're right. I'm right. cloutchaser is simply making posts ignorant of cultures and history. This is not uniquely western, but his list is just wrong:
- Mongols did not force ideals or cultures on the people they conquered. If you surrendered and paid tribute, you were free to do as you pleased.
- The Ottomans were mixed; you were pressured but not forced. Non-Muslims, for example, paid higher taxes.
Most long-lived empires let people do their thing. The Romans lasted for a millennium, and finally collapsed when (and in part because) they tried to impose Roman values on everyone, and that turned out to be more expensive than the empire could sustain.
These also aren't historic; I posted examples from the 1800s, but also recent ones.
The comment about Korea and individualism is just crazy too; Korea is probably the most deeply Confucian culture left.
Pointing out all of the historic and cultural errors would be an essay longer than the comments.
And what you say about ottomans is also wrong. You should speak to historians in the affected countries.
Mongols - perhaps you are right, if you were left alive, which was mostly women and children. So I guess for them they got to live free in the mongol empire...?
I left out the Russians because they did impose quite a lot. In theory, the entire goal was to spread Communist ideology. In practice, it was a lot more imperialistic than that, but you were definitely under a boot.
The level of ignorance here is staggering. The Mongols were pretty straightforward. For the most part, they would politely ask you to surrender. If you did, you were left alone to live as you saw fit, as part of a trade network, Mongol-friendly governance, and paying tribute. No one got killed. If you fought and lost, there was wholesale slaughter. Everyone got killed. There were a few in-betweens. There was no scenario like the one you're describing. The in-betweens might, for example, have skilled workers and artisans carted off.
I won't get into a back-and-forth about the Ottomans. You have no idea my background, and you presume too much. You have no idea who I am, or whom I've spoken to.
Industry secrets are a freely-chosen alternative to IP; they're not the same as IP. Proper IP protection requires disclosure and is either time-limited (wrt. copyrights and patents) or constrained so as not to impede competition (trademarks). When IP is extended beyond these boundaries, it becomes wrong and a severe drag on economic growth. Such as when IP-related laws are used to impinge on fair dealing, fair use and first-sale rights, e.g. by enforcing oppressive DRM.
Or when patents are extended by yet another 15 years, because of a minor/trivial update to the invention. Or when (criminal) copyright is extended by yet another 70 years, long after the original author has died.
I have an issue with the suffocating IP regime (videos being copyright stricken for simple use of works, DRM, rent seeking, patent trolls, etc). And if non-Western countries want to construct or use their own notions of intellectual “property,” then so be it, if it is their own software and their own creations.
But Russia is specifically saying you can pirate software from countries supporting sanctions i.e. Western software made under Western ideas of IP and an expectation of profit for their work. If Russia wants to allow pirating Russian software, then I don’t see the issue. But to buck another country’s legal framework is a step over the line. If Russia wants to use Western software (Photoshop, Microsoft Word, cloud providers), they need to respect the Western terms of use.
Take the .cat domain for Catalan. It is Catalonia’s right to make the terms of use of that domain such that the user must support Catalan translations. If you don’t want to agree by these terms, it is not your right then, to say “well that’s a Western idea of cultural integrity and I don’t agree with that and I’m gonna use the domain anyways.” It’s their domain, their software, not yours.
I'm tired of the TnT Russian team cracking my macOS apps. Both Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) and rcmd (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) are now available for free on macOS piracy websites.
I made many attempts at discouraging this through anti-piracy measures I learned while working as a malware researcher a few years ago. But if I want my apps to also be available on offline devices, there's really no way to combat this.
The apps are also targetted more toward power users which are more likely to know about cracked apps. This is really hurting indie devs.
Not that you asked my opinion, but $23/year for screendimming software--its no wonder people crack this.
The only realistic scenario that I'd pay that is if my employer was fronting the cost. Then again, maybe for some people it really is delivering that much value.
Lunar lite and rcmd seem priced fairly. If it makes you feel any better (probably not), the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow. Or if they did pay for it, would pay for it with things like stolen app store giftcards.
In another life, I was quite money-limited, and so I downloaded basically every game, movie, song, and app. I didn't feel badly about it either. I was never going to buy the media. I couldn't. Once I got old enough and had enough disposable income to not have to pirate things, I stopped. But quashing my piracy would have never equated in more sales. Anyone who sees a pirate download and assume that's a lost sale is deluded--its not happening.
I think the best methods are trying to get people to pay (who haven't already) are probably guilt or a productive-spirited suggestion. If you can detect that someone is cracking your software or doesn't have a valid license, put a donation link in the shape of a coffee cup in the corner of your software. At least people have the option to support you. Otherwise--you'll never best the crackers.
It’s not screen dimming. It is an app to fully control the monitor without using its physical buttons.
Lunar can change the hardware brightness, the same one that you can change using the monitor OSD. That in itself required a lot of reverse engineering and research about the DDC protocol.
Adaptive brightness, ambient light sensor integration and other automatic features also needed months of non-stop work.
Plus, the app is open source, trying to give something back to the community which gave me the inspiration to create this: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar
Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours.
I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply.
the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow
I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it
| the thief would have probably never bought it
If you don't need the Pro features, don't pay for them and don't use them. Simple as that. Why does it feel okay to steal them in the software world, but it's clearly a crime in the real world?
You're describing the complexity of achieving the outcome. That is a great achievement - you spent months of work to achieve something technically complex. Congratulations, sincerely. However, to the end user, Lunar is a utility that controls screen brightness. I too am not surprised that many people are reluctant to pay a yearly subscription to control the brightness of their display.
The screen brightness changing is free forever. The license is unlimited (not yearly subscription) and only for the Pro features (automatic adaptive brightness, sensor integration etc.)
It doesn't matter. He created it and can price it at $1,000 if he wants. The point is nobody should expect him to continue working for free after people crack the software. Thus, cracking hurts indie devs and innovation because there's less recoupable reward for such work.
Unfortunately, as cool as it is, I don't think it really changes much. I took a quick scan of your website, determined it was expensive screen-dimming software. Others are likely to do the same.
I have no doubt that this took an extraordinary amount of time to get right. You also did a beautiful job with the app and the website. I've tried to put something together that's a fraction of the complexity, and, well--it's just a lot of work. You should be proud of what you built.
That being said, all of what I said still stands: even though it allows you to control the hardware through software, it's still an expensive piece of software, and it's sort of niche. Having to rebuy the software every year for updates is also sort of a piss-off, even though I know you're doing lots of testing for each OS update and possibly hardware revisions too.
Having seen a few different situations, sometimes people may not pay because:
a) it’s quite expensive in their currency
b) they don’t really have a payment method available for international transactions
c) maybe they’re just poor and got some kind of a hand-me-down computer with their savings
d) culturally, in many places hardware has been seen as worth paying for, but software is seen as something you just copy (don’t even get me started on the pricing differences between app releases that do the same thing but run on Macs and on iOS/iPadOS devices)
e) there is a sense of entitlement towards bits, be they apps or photos or music or movies or TV shows
f) People feel uncomfortable with the 1 year updates. It's seriously off putting to me, as these days everything turns into a subscription. I understand that you don't want to maintain stuff forever for free, but I really hate that everything seemingly turns into a subscription.
I don't want to pay the full price for some updates in the future. Your app seems like it would sell so much better as an impulse buy pricing wise, but that's just me. If this works for you, it works for you.
I don't mind the price personally but together with the "subscription" feel I won't be buying it, one of the two needs to change for me to be interested.
I completely agree. I am Romanian, and in our country, €20 for software was seen as an impossible amount of money. Nobody would pay that amount for software, even companies I worked at used pirated software.
I sometimes get the “I come from a poor country” email and after checking if the email is not some usual spammer, I provide a 50-75% discount code depending on the country.
I understand that price should be relative to the country, and I have smaller prices on Paddle for the countries that are supported.
I'd pay twice the yearly cost or more if it was a one-time purchase.
A subscription model is an immediate pass though.
Edit: Dev clarifies elsewhere that the license is perpetual and subsequent payments cover updates. If a nonrecurring payment option exists, then I would happily make use of that, and quite possibly return to pay for updates.
This isn't unique to indie-devs. People (and others have) will give you a laundry list of reasons as to why they can't afford to buy your project, but at the same time entitled to use it for free. Even open-source is no pancea; billion dollar corporations have abused open source communities as well.
Threads like these are slotted into the back of my head when people make comments complaining about the SaaS-ification/Cloud-ification/Electron-ification of all software. The calculus is incredibly simple; why take the time building native apps making a third or half as what you are making in Cloud, while others tell you that what you have built isn't that valuable and you should be grateful they even pirated it?
It depends. I think you’ll need more work to find the right customer/market who values what you’ve built and is willing to pay. Potentially it could be a lot more than what your current price is, especially businesses.
> Even with $23 per license, after taxes I barely make half of what I made at my previous job where I worked less hours.
I don’t understand how you can dismiss this so simply.
Seeing the odd numbered price of $23, I presume you have tried different pricing tiers and options, since pricing is a matter of elasticity and finding the right price point to maximize your revenue would require some effort.
> the people pirating your software probably wouldn't have paid for it anyhow
I heard this argument so many times.. it's like saying to someone who just got their bike stolen while they were trying to sell it
| the thief would have probably never bought it
Actually, that saying about piracy is true many a times. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work in your favor either way. Anecdotally, I decide what I’m willing to pay for something and what I’m not willing to pay for something. Have I pirated software? Yes, I have in the distant past. And during those times, I wouldn’t have bought them at those prices either.
Maybe you need to change your website messaging to encourage those who cannot or will not pay to use the Lite version and encourage those who want the Pro version to pay. Pricing doesn’t have to be static all the time.
I hope you find the best options that work well for you and your customers.
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” [1]
I feel like steam sales validate this point. Steam provides a better service than downloading warez and cracked games from p2p sites. For many, it's better than visiting a local retail/GameStop and buying the game. It also unlocks a world of indie games that would otherwise be not so easily discovered/attainable. So, people pay.
Indeed, the problem in the analogy seems to be that software is infinitely able to duplicate. But what’s overlooked is that software also needs maintenance, lots of it.
Tomorrow will be an Apple Event and I’m already expecting some new hardware I’ll have to support or some breaking change to an internal API (because controlling monitors isn’t possible with public APIs).
When a bike is bought, the owner is done with it. While the software developer is bound to keep the software running and compatible with new technologies.
Of course, I could just forget about it and leave the users that bought it with an unusable app when the next MacBook comes out. If piracy is accepted, why wouldn’t this be accepted too.
The problem with the analogy is that it doesn't work. Never has and never will. And you started it with comparing piracy to a bike theft. If someone without money came and stole my bike but I still had a copy of my bike. I wouldn't mind.
Ok maybe not a bike. Maybe a jar of strawberry jam filled from a large pot :)
You won’t care as much about the theft since you still have an almost full pot of strawberry jam, but you care a little since that pot will eventually end.
Analogs in the order of appearance:
- jar of jam: copy of Lunar
- large pot of jam: my willingness to keep updating the app in a world where everyone sees theft as “meh whatever, I wouldn’t have paid anyway”
A better analogy would be if I were to give a walking tour to people who pay me $50 to do said tour, but someone uses a parabolic microphone to unknowingly listen in to the tour
If you sell a program which works now, you're not making any claims it will continue to work in the future, that's the model software sales ran for years. There's no reason, legal or ethical, for you to continue to give free updates to people that bought something from you in the past, just like if you sell a bike to someone you don't need to continue to maintain it.
For your software you could sell a support contract with it, you could even bundle it in up front, and then sure you are expected to provide that support.
None of this is of any relevance to someone . If I copy your software it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't cost you, it doesn't deny you the use of that software. It's wrong, sure, but not because of theft, just like it's wrong to sneak into an empty cinema, or download something from the internet.
If I steal your computer, it does hurt you, it denies you the use of that computer. That is theft, that is wrong, and I'd argue more wrong than copying your software.
About 700 people received a free Pro license for Lunar for donating in the past (a much smaller amount than the current price, usually $3).
After their free update period ended, some of those people began using the cracked version. I know that because they reported issues without knowing that the tnt@team.ru email would show up on the report.
I don’t know how many people are doing that, but I can say for sure that there are people that could pay for the software, but don’t because using the crack is easier for them.
Paddle also offers a dashboard and I can clearly see the monthly revenue dropping by $500-$1k on months when a crack is released for the latest version. When I launch an update with a new anti-piracy measure that stalls the crackers for another month or two, the monthly revenue goes back up.
“It doesn’t hurt the dev, I wouldn’t have paid anyway” is just something people tell themselves to justify their action.
> but don’t because using the crack is easier for them.
That's a whole separate problem. In my experience 'anti piracy' measures cause problems for people who pay for the software, it's just another reason not to pay. If it's easier to use a cracked product, you are doing something wrong.
> “It doesn’t hurt the dev, I wouldn’t have paid anyway” is just something people tell themselves to justify their action.
Nobody is trying to justify people not respecting your intellectual property rights, just call it what it is - copyright infringement. It is not theft, just like someone using an ad blocker isn't theft, or someone ripping a DVD they bought so they can watch it on their phone isn't theft.
The anti piracy measures I use are completely transparent for the end user. They are just checks for the integrity of the app. If a cracker tampered in any way (e.g. added their own dylib at RPATH) I can detect it.
The crack isn’t easier to use than the app. I meant that it’s easy enough to download the crack so the users don’t have any incentive to purchase.
Whether someone steals your zero marginal cost good has no effect on whether you will update your software. If the thief would have paid it might, but if they wouldn't buy your product anyway you're no worse off.
The price is wrong and you don’t want to admit that.
This is a free utility or $1 for a tiny tiny market.
Hook people and then charge them in that kind of shitty update model. Or a different model. Upsell something else in the app. Collect and sell data. If that price and funnel is not worth your time, then you have to do something else, thats it.
okay okay I'll be more mature here, I checked it out and it doesn't come up that way on my google predictions! tried new sessions on different machines in different locations
Because real theft destroys value, while “stealing” information merely doesn’t realize potential gains.
> I barely make half
Entrepreneurship is difficult. If it was merely about effort, our societies would have been completely different.
Interesting careers tend to pay less; video game developers work more and get paid less. FOSS software written by unpaid labor is perhaps the extreme example.
The statement "Not that you asked my opinion, but $23/year for screendimming software--its no wonder people crack this." does not make any sense. If this is an application that only dimms the screen (which you can do multiple ways without any application) why would anyone make an effort of creating and distributing it and why would anyone make an effort on searching for a cracked version of given application? Surely there is some added value to it.
Also "if you can detect that someone is cracking your software or doesn't have a valid license, put a donation link in the shape of a coffee cup in the corner of your software. At least people have the option to support you." I have no data to back this up, but I really doubt that the people that are money-limited or just don't want to pay 20$ for an application will suddenly support a developer voluntarily.
ah, see, you've applied logic where there is none. Am I really going to open a philosophical debate with myself when I visit a product's webpage? I scrolled through, I saw different scheduling types, some other features. But as a whole, the software's purpose is "make screen brighter or dimmer" and that's something I just don't have big use for.
And on your second point. I also don't have data. But if people crck software that costs $23, maybe they're willing to pay some fraction that isn't $23. Isn't that reasonable? Or in your mind, are there two groups of people: one that will pay anything, and the other that will pay nothing?
+1 to this. I really hate when small/non-essential software had not just high cost but freaking subscription. Not speaking about OP but https://www.noisli.com/ for example that was useful, no question, but now asking $120 to listen white-noise that I can download for free? I'm okay to pay $20 for offline app and sent $100 to charity. I'm also sure they would have times more profit from this.
Instead of this, pay fix price for software and 1 year of updates seems time more fair.
Not that you asked my opinion, but $1,300 for iPhone--its no wonder people steal this.
The only realistic scenario that I'd pay that is if my employer was fronting the cost. Then again, maybe for some people it really is delivering that much value.
I categorically disagree with this false equivalence. Copyright infringement and theft are not the same--no matter how much knowledge workers would have you believe otherwise.
Actually, I find it a little ironic that you backed up your statement using someone else's intellectual property.
I‘m a developer myself and i have the money, that is not the problem.
I have no mac myself, so not a use case for me, but and don‘t get this wrong ...
Design of the app is good, website is 10/10 ... but a subscription for a monitor control app is a hard sell.
One time i would say:“well, why not. i use it and there is no better way“ but my lizard brain says:“23$ or euro every year for like 5 or 10 years ... thats money. Nope. One time developing it and a few minor fixes ... “
I have no idea how bad every mac os update f+++s with your app and maybe its a pain, but well lizard brain
But the thing is, it's not a subscription. If Lunar keeps working for you, you can avoid updating after the free period of updates ends. No need to pay again.
If you don't upgrade your Mac hardware to something exotic (like the M1 upgrade), and if macOS doesn't pull the rug from under us, devs that play with the DDC protocol, then you won't need any updates.
But Lunar is very dependent on the hardware, because it talks low-level I²C with the monitor controller.
So if you upgrade, and I have to spend thousands of dollars on new hardware and months on reverse engineering it, I expect to be paid for it.
You pay for the product as is now, not for my unlimited future time.
> I think the best methods are trying to get people to pay (who haven't already) are probably guilt or a productive-spirited suggestion.
And you also say:
> I didn't feel badly about it either.
Those don't seem consistent.
The reality is that cracking and using cracked software is ethically and immorally wrong. People do it because they're selfish and can get away with it.
You make it sound like people who pirate software are trying to hurt creators.
They're not. The means to acquire the software are just too great. If you give people a way to express their gratitude in other ways--they might (they also might not. heck they probably won't. but I'd also expect it to be non-zero).
> You make it sound like people who pirate software are trying to hurt creators.
No, I am absolutely not claiming any intention malice. I'm claiming selfishness.
> The means to acquire the software are just too great.
It doesn't matter. If you didn't make X, and the person who did make X doesn't give you any right to X... you don't have any right to X.
They made it. By virtue of actually creating the thing, they morally have all of the rights to decide who should have access to it. If they haven't given you access to it, what right do you have to claim over it?
> I'm tired of the TnT Russian team cracking my macOS apps.
Another HN poster has a relevant suggestion[1]:
> In the 90s I used to make money off shareware, and every time I release a new version hackers would release "cracks" for the license key. Eventually I figured out that these cracks are coming from Russia.
>
> In the next version of my program, I added a check for system language, and if I detect Russian then I bypass the license key checks, and the program is free to use. This stopped hackers from releasing cracks.
Maybe this is common knowledge in your circles, but otherwise it’s far from widespread. I learned about it from the linked comment (as did other people) and no one I told it to had heard of it before. That includes software developers of popular apps.
Devils advocate: if the majority of business software is sold from the US and the US is refusing to sell software to Russia, what choice is there?
I’m sure the Russian government are using Microsoft Office, if they can’t legally buy it anymore then they must make the piracy of it legal: or they’re breaking their own laws.
Or they retrain on open/libreoffice. But that unfortunately has a poor track record of working.
As staunch of a FOSS advocate as I am, this is probably the sensible move for now. :/
Leaving Ukraine is least bad for Russia, the pain from sanctions has only just started, they are facing economic collapse, and this move won't save them.
I am curious about these statements. Europe, China and India are still buying oil and gas from Russia. They can still import from China/India. Why would the economy collapse?
Europe is planning to sharply reduce their oil & gas imports so this can't continue to be used as a lever against them. Every EV, every electrified house, etc. lowers demand for Russian petroleum. Similarly, they have a lot of other exports and as each of those is replaced by purchases elsewhere they'll have to work harder to re-enter the markets after hostilities end. There are also some big challenges for certain sectors: for example, after watching the current massive under-performance, how many places are going to be jumping at a chance to buy their weapons systems?
Also, remember that while China and India can choose to continue receiving exports they didn't pay as much as Europe did _before_ the war. If Russia has reduced itself to one or two potential buyers, those buyers have the power to dictate pricing well under market and the financing options are going to be very much not in Russia's long-term interests. China has a strategy they've used on smaller countries where they offer aggressive loans for projects and then take control of infrastructure / resources if the borrower defaults, and I'd be exceedingly unsurprised if some Chinese companies end up doing something similar here.
Their entire supply chain from cars to planes to military goods to computers and software relies on the west. Their best people have already left and more will leave soon.
In some sense they could survive on a war footing (i.e. people won’t starve) but their economy will take decades to recover even if sanctions are lifted soon. They lost 25% of their wealth in a few days (rubble) and don’t even have a functioning stock market.
The Russian government sadly already thought of that. They have already set up parallel supply chains for their planes, military goods, cars, softwares and computers. For planes, it's through domestic industry being kept isolated for military reasons. For military goods, it is all made in CIS countries and use no foreign (except maybe Chinese? Not sure) critical components. For cars, they have begun to import Chinese cars already. For software, piracy solves the issue. For computers, they have domestic low performance processors with already functional x86 emulation, as well as the option to buy Chinese chips.
Most of their civilian planes are Boeing and Airbus, then much further down in numbers Tupolev et al. While there had been efforts to revive civilian aircraft industry, the only recent model is the Sukhoi Superjet 100, which is relatively small and limited to regional flights.
So far there have been no such sanctions, and there doesn't seem to be any plans for it. Foreign airlines are allowed to order parts into Russia for their own use just fine.
In the worst case, the airlines will have to transport the parts to Russia themselves, which is not much more costly than getting Boeing to do it.
Right. The main trouble with planes is how advanced avionics and engines have become. That, and whoever you’re flying to needs to certify the aircraft; China started the 737Max grounding, they’re no aviation regulatory paper tiger.
All Russia has the domestic capability for is going back to long range four engine planes, which will increase maintenance and fuel consumption.
Oh don't think I am under the illusion it will go perfectly, I think it will have grave disasters. I just don't think it will have a significant impact on their warmaking ability, and that eventually they will mostly recover.
So many reasons.
Fossil fuels are half of their economy at best. As a single market, China doesn't pay them much per barrel. Their oil production per barrel is expensive. Their drilling industry uses Western tech and resources, including Western technicians. I have a difficult time imagining any country doing well with their imports and exports reduced by 50-60%.
oec.com has lots of info per country on what makes up their economy.
Europe and the USA simply have no alternative to Russian oil and natural gas. They may have in 20 or 30 years from now if they start investing in it several billion dollars per year right now. That's why gas prices in Europe and oil prices in the USA are skyrocketing these days.
Because you can't just shift all of your supply chains to cut off all dependence on imports from Europe overnight.
In the long term, Russia can survive by selling gas to Europe, and buying goods from China. In the short term, there's an absolute madhouse in the domestic markets.
Unlike in the Soviet days, when most of its domestic products were locally produced, Russia has de-industrialized, and all of its supply chains have become incredibly dependant on the West. It can't turn back the clock 40 years overnight.
Aside from the economic disruption everyone else has mentioned, there's also the incredibly expensive war they are currently engaged in. Income is plummeting while expenses are going through the roof.
Americans think denying people Iphones is a great punishment. In reality Russians will save a lot of money buying Oppo and Vivo phones from China that function just as well for 99% of users.
They will use Linux, build their own alternatives for Google/Youtube or use Chinese sites. It will all be fine. In fact their data will be safe from Google and Meta.
Sadly true. IMHO to only thing left, is removing russian translation from every downloadable software. Side effect, maybe more russian speaking/reading people learn english or another language (at least reading).
Not gonna help, they'll go back to using unofficial translations. There were a lot of those back in the 90s when Western software companies ignored ex-Soviet markets because there wasn't any money to be made there.
I've used a lot of them personally, especially games. Some of those translations were pretty good, and some were so bad they were actually hilarious, and have become a meme (like "wasted → потрачено" in GTA San Andreas)
I know one indie game whose Russian localization was done and distributed with the pirated version first, before being adopted by the dev and added to the official distribution. (of course since the guy is only doing gamedev as a hobby, his stance regarding piracy of his own games is quite relaxed)
A more likely outcome would be the development of Russian alternatives to that software. The pirate version would be patched binaries.
Decades ago I patched binary Commodore 64 applications to have messages in Spanish, getting as far as patching programming environments like Logo and BASIC to have not just error messages but also the keywords translated.
Even without source code it is somewhat doable, and modern applications often have localization mechanisms that remain in the compiled executable.
The development of alternative takes many years. Sure they can make some half-baked trashy version. But it will reduce users productivity a lot for years to come.
Better, introduce peace messages in the Russian translation, and reliable information about the war in Ukraine. This way the software will be banned in Russia, and everyone else speaking Russian can continue using the software without problems, which seems fairer ^^
No war is right. That's it. No situation is black and white.. One could argue that Russia's invasion could've been avoided by simply talking while other places didnt even have a choice. Wars are politicians incompetence or simply not seeing others interests and points of view but their own. Remove yourself from countries try to look from a 3rd point of view and you will see. The only way to break this cycle... All these poor innocent lives in all these wars all of a sudden came to me as a result of what I see in my current age and I will be honest, I am more mad at humanity than ever... what we think we are vs what we actually are is so different and that should be opened up and taught in schools.
There were almost 200k civilian deaths in Iraq. Russia will have to try very hard to beat the US there. And don't forget, Iraq was not the only country that the US invaded.
Yes, both countries are evil, but US is "number one".
edit:
" A war of permanent occupation, and oppression, under absolute rule, is not the same."
The US set up a puppet government, Putin will likely do the same.
* There were almost 200k civilian deaths in Iraq *
The inference, in this context, is that the US directly slaughtered 200k civilians. This is pure deceit.
Or are you suggesting the US lined up civilians and shot them?
What you mean is, the US destabilized the region and then locals slaughtered each other, causing 200k deaths.
A massive difference.
The Middle East is a hotbed of conflicting religions, and tribalism runs rampant. Any "destabilization" caused deaths are impossible to separate from whatever next local conflict would have caused, regardless.
It seems that 13k civilians were killed directly by the US and its allies (around 300 for Russia at this moment). Although I do not see why the civilian deaths caused by the destabilization of the region should not be counted as I don't buy the "they would have died anyway" argument (and even if it was true it would not be a valid justification for not blaming the US for these specific deaths, if someone murders someone you won't just let them free because there were order people looking to kill said person). It was the US that was providing local militias with weapons after all.
The middle east being a hotbed of conflicting religions is not an excuse. It just means that the US should have treated the region with a lot more care, you don't go around bombing nuclear reactors and then claim that it is their fault for exploding.
It seems that 13k civilians were killed directly by the US and its allies
Wrong logic.
First, one report claims this as a theory, where as the US believes 1300.
Second, this was over 5 years, half a decade!
Third, great care was taken to not harm civilians.
Fourth, this was the US and her allies, not the US alone. Some of her allies are locals.
Further, this was a campaign against a violent group, Islamic State, invading, and slaughteting people relentlessly. Had the US and allies not stepped in, it is not hard to imagine IS killing even more, had their progress not been halted.
This is just an absurd comparison. You are working so hard, and diligently, to present the US in the worst light possible. It is just silly.
Ah, there was a misunderstanding. I am talking about the 2003-2011 Iraq war. The ISIS thing is a direct result of the destabilization caused by the invasion. The 13k figure was for that invasion, I do not know how many civilians died by the hands of the US in the ISIS war, although the independent sources cited in wikipedia claim the deaths to be "8,317–13,190".
"Second, this was over 5 years, half a decade!"
And? The US has not really changed. Look at Yemen, Libya, etc.
"Third, great care was taken to not harm civilians."
You certainly can't see that great care in the "collateral murder" video. I am sure Russia will also talk about the great care that it took to not hurt civilians.
"Fourth, this was the US and her allies, not the US alone. Some of her allies are locals."
I don't think that this really changes anything. In addition Russia could claim the same about solders from Chechnya, Belarus, Crimea, etc.
"You are working so hard, and diligently, to present the US in the worst light possible"
You are working so hard, and diligently, to justify the atrocities that the US committed.
But I think that Russian and US military policy sometimes is similar. Let's take Syria as an example. Syria had good relations with Russia and as a trustworthy and reliable ally allowed to build a Russian base there. I guess that US didn't like the idea of having a foreign military base in the Middle East so they supported the opposition trying to overthrow the government. And Russia didn't like the idea of losing a base and a good ally so they supported the government.
Am I wrong here? It looks like nobody really cared about Syrian people and that's what's similar in US and Russia foreign policy. Wars are usually waged for land or for power, not to protect someone's liberties.
You are right though that America recently didn't annex land; but they did so earlier, see history of Panama Canal Zone for example [1]:
> In March 1902 Colombia set its terms for such a treaty: Colombia was to be sovereign over the canal, which would be policed by Colombians paid for by the United States. The host nation would receive a larger percentage of the tolls than provided for in earlier draft treaties.
> The draft terms were quickly rejected by American officials.
> A Frenchman who had worked on his nation's canal efforts, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, represented Panamanian insurgents; he met with Roosevelt and with Secretary of State John Hay, who saw to it that his principals received covert support. When the revolution came in November 1903, the United States intervened to protect the rebels, who succeeded in taking over the province, declaring it independent as the Republic of Panama.
> negotiated a treaty, giving the United States a zone 20 miles (32 km) wide and full authority to pass laws to govern that zone.
The same trick that US, USSR and Russia have repeated multiple times since: support the opposition against the government; get something valuable (like land or permission to build military bases) in return. Repeat if the opposition you have helped stops being grateful.
> But I think that Russian and US military policy sometimes is similar. Let's take Syria as an example. Syria had good relations with Russia and as a trustworthy and reliable ally allowed to build a Russian base there. I guess that US didn't like the idea of having a foreign military base in the Middle East so they supported the opposition trying to overthrow the government. And Russia didn't like the idea of losing a base and a good ally so they supported the government.
> Am I wrong here? It looks like nobody really cared about Syrian people and that's what's similar in US and Russia foreign policy. Wars are usually waged for land or for power, not to protect someone's liberties.
It's a bit more complicated than just “nobody really cared” — the U.S. was already bogged down in two wars of choice with no end in sight so a third one was going to be a very hard sell. The U.S. did provide aid to some groups and actively attacked ISIL but the latter was the primary combat goal because there was no interest in occupying Syria and accepting the massive requirements in personnel and casualties that would require.
That's one of the key differences with the current situation in the Ukraine: Russia has made it clear that their goal is to rebuild the historic empire and are willing to accept large death counts to do so.
You are correct. The US and Russia are not really comparable. The US has caused more suffering through its foreign policy than Russia since 1991. It plays in a league of its own.
> These are not equal things. What Russia is doing is not related to how to US behaves. A war of permanent occupation, and oppression, under absolute rule, is not the same.
How can we know what Russia is going to do in Ukraine? Did Putin tell you? For now, we can say they're the same. Not to mention all those countries supported financially, militarily... by the US, who apply an absolute rule of oppression to their citizens.
So, it is OK to invade a country, and cause losses among its civilians, if the president of that country does not qualify for the western definition of democracy?
Also, both Chile or Guatemala were democracies when the US financed and organized the coups that deposed their elected presidents, just to put some friend dictator.
> So, it is OK to invade a country, and cause losses among its civilians, if the president of that country does not qualify for the western definition of democracy?
Yes, and any "definition of democracy" is questionable, either you have it or you don't.
Do you think that Saddam was in any "definition" a democratic president?
How about Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Putin?
> Also, both Chile or Guatemala were democracies when the US financed and organized the coups that deposed their elected presidents, just to put some friend dictator.
That was wrong, what can I say? I don't pretend US is a good guy, it is more gray. But in that color definition Russia is black, or at least very dark gray.
> How can we know what Russia is going to do in Ukraine? Did Putin tell you?
Actually, Putin has given a few speeches on the topic. In the most recent one, I believe, he said that he wanted to annex Ukraine. After a previous speech in which he said that he doesn't believe Ukraine has any existence as an ethnic state, since Ukrainians are (to him) just Russians.
The word you're looking for is "annex". The US wanted to occupy Iraq until a puppet government could stand on its own. This is strictly identical to Russian goals in Ukraine. Neither want to annex, they want to occupy until a self-sustaining puppet government can be installed.
Crimea is already annexed, and LPR/DPR are already de-facto independent. That is the aftermath of the 2014 events. It is necessary for Ukraine to recognize these losses if there is to be some kind of peace, since it's not possible for them to gain it back.
That's why the current invadion is moreso akin to the Iraq war. The invadion in 2014 can be analogised to other conflicts, if you want.
The US did not leave Iraq when they were asked to. They simply called a few thousand of them "defence contractors" instead, and promptly returned them all in 2014.
Russia has already annexed territory.
By the way, the US is still occupying territory to this day in Cuba, so clearly the intent remains.
They put pack more than 10 000 troops and took control of Iraqi airspace.
The troops I'm talking about weren't for commercial security. They were in US "embassy" complexes and were used as an occupying military.
Russia annexed Crimea. They aren't occupying it. It is a done fact. Annexation has nothing to do with international recognition. Annexation is when a sovereign state takes over territory and annexes it to it's own. Which Russia did to Crimea in 2014.
Russia is asking Ukraine to recognize the facts on the ground and give up it's claim, after which both countries may exist in a state of peace.
The current Iraq government is a puppet. The US kills people on Iraqi soil without asking for their permission, and when they asked the US to leave, they strongarmed the government.
The Iranian affinity comes in no small part organically or from pro-Iranian militias.
So you're saying that the Iraqi government does not have a monopoly of violence, and has to share it with the US? That is to say, an occupation. Which you just said wasn't the case.
Oh so two things are not EXACTLY IDENTICAL and therefore we can't talk about the massive overlap between the two things? That 'whataboutism' culture that has formed on Reddit is so debate stifling its egregious that it hasn't been stomped out.
> and even if the situations were exactly the same, that still doesn’t justify Russia invading Ukraine
I would take issue with the word justify.
That country A did something bad to country B doesn't justify country C doing the same bad thing to country D. But what it does do is puts the actions of country C in historical perspective (i.e. is it uniquely evil), and calls into question the moral argument advanced by country A (if it claims that what country C does to country D is wrong, then how come it did the same to country B? where was the moral argument then?).
When we see someone say one thing and do another, we call such person a hypocrite. This person might object that by calling him so, we engage in a whataboutism, because his actions have no bearing on whether what he says is the right thing to do. But such objection typically doesn't work. I wonder why.
If you wanted to take this further then you'd have to do a greater comparison of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia's invasion of Ukraine... and I think then you'd have a difficult time drawing a good comparison.
If Russia is or is not justified in its invasion of Ukraine, what is it? What word would you use here when someone is attempting to draw a comparison in order to make one thing "ok" because of another thing?
> If Russia is or is not justified in its invasion of Ukraine, what is it?
I've no idea. I don't know if there is such a thing as a justified invasion; and if there is, then what are its criteria; and whether all countries have agreed to recognize the same set of criteria; and what specific criteria Russia would claim that it met in this case.
I know that there were several ill-defined reasons that the Russian government offered to its citizens. Obviously, after the invasion had already started. Obviously, insisting that they are in the right. I have not heard an in-depth analysis of their reasons against the criteria of a justified invasion. All I heard are fragments.
> What word would you use here when someone is attempting to draw a comparison in order to make one thing "ok" because of another thing?
There was no 2014 puppet government. The U.S. frankly did not much care about Ukraine in 2014.
Any suggestion that Ukraine is not making its own choice to be a liberal democracy, even despite the Orange Revolution, even despite 2014, even despite the fierce defensive fighting going on as we speak, is an effort to deny an entire people agency. It is racist.
Where were you for the last 8 years when the war crimes were committed in the East of Ukraine? West didn’t talk about it, CNN wasn’t putting up banner “We are Donbass” but bombing and shelling of the cities was happening nonetheless. Get of your high horse, it doesn’t have legs to stand on.
Why does it matter where this person was 8 years ago? Undeniably, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a bad thing. Please be mindful to leave constructive comments that add to the conversation
> Why does it matter where this person was 8 years ago?
Not 8 years ago, but for the last 8 years. You know, being unaware of some pretty basic circumstances around an issue and then claiming undeniability is pretty rich of you.
> constructive comments that add to the conversation
How did your comment add to the conversation? You just repeated a common black/white sentiment and showed that you weren't fully informed about the topic. Please, be mindful next time.
Watched too much Russian news? I have no idea what was going on in DNR/LNR. The western stance was that Ukraine was combating separatists aided by the Russian government.
The Russian narrative of "we're helping the newly recognized DNR/LNR" doesn't make much sense - why are they invading all of Ukraine to make those two regions safe?
This is sort of like if the US "helped" Taiwan by taking Beijing. Or South Korea by capturing Pyongyang.
Also, the Russian news keep saying "DNR/LNR forces aided by Russian forces". When it's clear it's just the Russian military.
So Russia should follow US IP law but pay for warcrimes unlike the US? Why is it only when it is good for the west that other countries should follow the same rules?
> Leave Ukraine and pay for the war crimes committed there
This is what eventually will happen, but over Putin's dead body most likely. "Live by the sword, die by the sword", that kinda thing, etc. Everybody agrees that by starting this pointless war Putin has painted himself into a corner.
If he has thousands of nuclear warheads, he's not just a rat and he's not cornered.
ie. there are still diplomatic ways out of this open to Putin. If he is not open to considering them and feels cornered, it is his own shortsightedness and failing.
It has been said that you should never draw your pistol unless you are going to shoot. I don't know if that's true; but I do think it's unwise to threaten violence unless you are quite sure you are prepared to carry through.
I think Putin is prepared to carry through (he's made the threat more than once). Russia seems to be losing in Ukraine; but they can't be seen to be slinking away with their tail between their legs. So I think there's a good chance Russia will pop a tactical nuke in Ukraine.
For the same reasons, NATO can't be seen to tolerate the popping of tactical nukes in a regional conflict; they would have to retaliate, for fear that their nuclear deterrent be treated as a joke. I haven't any idea how NATO might select their target, though; striking a city would be gross over-reaction, and striking Russians in Ukraine would be rather counterproductive.
> For the same reasons, NATO can't be seen to tolerate the popping of tactical nukes in a regional conflict; they would have to retaliate, for fear that their nuclear deterrent be treated as a joke.
NATO should definitely not respond to nukes with nukes unless Putin drops one on a NATO country. Ukraine is not in NATO. That makes it a first strike, not a retaliatory strike. Putin's propaganda has been that NATO is an aggressor threatening Russia. If NATO strikes Russia in retaliation for a strike on a non-member country that only vindicates him, and you know, leads directly to WWIII
> NATO should definitely not respond to nukes with nukes unless Putin drops one on a NATO country.
Hey, I didn't mean to sound like a cheerleader for global thermonuclear war! I'm just observing that the logic of nuclear deterrence calls for a response whoever Russia attacks. If it becomes clear that Russia can nuke anyone it likes as long as they're not in NATO, then it can march into e.g. Georgia or Armenia with a company of conscripts, and take over, declaring that any resistance will be met with nukes.
Suppose Russia pops a small nuke in Ukraine? Really, that's not going to achieve any major military victory. They'd need a few to end the war in Russia's favour. That would result in clouds of fallout afflicting NATO countries. At some point you'd have to say "that's enough". But at what point? After two? A dozen? Only after the first megaton city-flattener?
I was a member of CND for a year, back in the 80's. I still favour unilateral disarmament. I quit not because I didn't support the goals, but because I was shocked at the political infighting I observed at the Annual General Meeting.
> Everybody agrees that by starting this pointless war Putin has painted himself into a corner.
Not everybody. The "NATO pushed Putin into corner by inviting Ukraine" theorem is still alive. In any way, cornered Putin is angry Putin and angry Putin is dangerous and may be unpredictable.
The idea that NATO's expansion east is what pushed Russia to invade Ukraine is frankly ridiculous. I can see how it's problematic for them, and they did bring it up before the invasion, but that was mainly more lies, the war had already been planned and decided months ago.
Putin has said that Ukraine is a historical mistake, and laments the dissolution of the Soviet union. This war is because he want's to create a larger Russian empire, not a preemptive strike for self defense.
It's also catastrophically self-fulfilling: it's not like the eastern NATO members joined on a whim, they worked hard to make the case for it because they knew what living next to Russia meant and didn't want to be next. The war of conquest in Ukraine has done more to encourage continued NATO expansion than everything the older members have done in decades combined.
Exactly. The only reason NATO isn't in Ukraine and kicking the invaders out right now is because Ukraine isn't a NATO member. Meanwhile, NATO has been very clear about defending every inch of their member's territory. That's a very convincing argument for Russia's neighboring countries. I live in one of them, and I've been against a NATO membership until now, because I ruled out the possibility of war in Europe in my lifetime. I was wrong.
I'm no fan of the invasion, but "the war had already been planned and decided months ago" is not an argument you might think it is -- NATO stuff was going on pretty much since USSR dissolution, and 2014 stuff with Crimea was first act in the same war, in response to regime change on Ukraine and some progress in shelf oil development there that threatened Russia's hold on EU markets.
A 2015 talk by John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago discusses the "NATO pushed Putin into corner by inviting Ukraine" angle. Mearsheimer calls himself a "realist."
Mearsheimer completely ignores the agency of small European countries and makes the classic IR mistake of assuming that what might be 'rational' behaviour for a state in a Realist sense is also correct behaviour.
You can use Realism to predict that Russia would eventually try to regain the power it lost over Eastern Europe and the Baltics with the dissolution of the USSR. In fact that very understanding and fear is precisely why countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics pushed so hard to join NATO and the EU, because they predicted that would happen.
But that doesn't make Russia's actions the right move, either legally or morally. They have agency too and could always have made the choice to not to try to act like an empire with violent hegemony over their neighbours.
1. He has in other talks, and he has used it as a way to explain away Russia's actions. As though they're an actor with no agency that can only react.
2. "NATO pushed" is deceptive framing. The countries that joined NATO after 1991 had to lobby hard over many years to get NATO members to agree to expand. Even then the process took forever with MAPs and other interim steps each designed to slow the process down.
These people believe that only the USA makes real decisions out of free will and everything else is only a consequence of those decisions or others uncontrollable reactions to those decisions. Apparently being an expert in geopolitics is mainly just about having a story and sticking to it through thick and thin.
NATO was much more focused on China as a potential future enemy though. Until Putin put himself back on the map as an agressor most EU countries were spending as little on defense as they could get away with. I feel this is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No wonder China is gleefully standing by. They're just biding their time. When 2 dogs fight over a bone...
Russia has a long history of "fast succession", if some military guy finds Putin behavior hurting to its business, Putin will suddenly catch covid and die.
Although death by a thousand cuts is something, I doubt they would retire from Ukraine because Word now says "please activate". The cost of just pirating it is much lower than that of stopping the war
It's easy to ride a high horse and advise states (which have always been vicious, in old or modern history) to do the right thing, period. Who has done more war crimes and inhumane acts in recent years, and in recent decades, around the world, Russia or the U.S.? Which is to say, the U.S. cannot go around lecturing anyone about morality or worse. Have people forgotten the nuclear bombing of huge Japanese cities? It's beyond atrocious.
Following this logic, no one should ever feel guilty or be compelled to stop doing something morally wrong, because someone else probably did worse in recent memory. Someone else's bad behavior does not manifest _permission_ for you to do the same.
It's amazing how many people ignore this, pretending only a lonely lunatic thinks this is a good idea.
Putin's approval rating is at 70% [0]. From [1] (referring to the invasion of Crimea):
> President Putin's approval rating among the Russian public increased by nearly 10% since the crisis began, up to 71.6%, the highest in three years, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, released on 19 March.[346] Additionally, the same poll showed that more than 90% of Russians supported unification with the Crimean Republic
So it looks to me that most Russians supported the Crimea invasion. Why would it be different now? I find it hard to believe that if Russia hadn't found such a stubborn resistance and would've been able to annex Ucrania quickly, which was what the Russian government thought would happen, in five years all the polls wouldn't show Russians supporting the invasion.
I get where you are coming from, but falsifying election results and population polling are a bit different. putin himself is polling very frequently to get feedback (or validation) and until a few weeks ago there were even somewhat credible polling agencies that showed lower numbers but still majority.
> I get where you are coming from, but falsifying election results and population polling are a bit different
Do you remember "garbage in - garbage out"?
If people fed nothing but bravado on how the glorious leader shines the path to the wonderful future, how in the world they would see him in a negative light?
The last two years showed everyone what even the professionals are happy to spew an utter nonsense, directly contradicting their profession and education, just because they want to feel that way.
And remember - population polling gives you information on how people feel about something, not why do they feel that way.
PS:
"Let us ask your opinion on these matters:
1. How do you feel about our President?
#a I'm delighted to live in this glorious days and I'm fully supported our glorious leader!
#b I'm a shithead and prefer to spend the rest of my days in gulag."
Hyperbole, sure, but how the poll is constructed, where it was performed also matters.
I kind of agree with you on "garbage in - garbage out" .. majority eats up garbage and therefore approve putin. Decision to eat garbage still lays with them.
On the other hand, I have a limited amount of empathy and at the moment it is being consumed by people who are actually being bombed by not their own government.
I would say believing that garbage is on them. [1]
But when you have nothing other than garbage?
Don't forget what this is the country where you can be detained for holding an invisible placard [0] - so saying something out of the party line is a quick way for the unemployment at least, hence the people who could had provided some other info (primarily on TV) have big incentives not to do so.
[1] which is another joke because half of those people lived or at least were born when "government never tells the truth" was the default MO even for the government itself.
Indeed hence why sanctions are so important. They act as a channel to tell them something is up with what their beloved leader is doing. The TV tells them their patriotic war is highly popular and well justified, yet they can’t buy iPhones anymore. Well, maybe just maybe they will wake up. Because people are protesting and going to jail there, so it’s not impossible to know what’s going on. It just takes the willingness not to dismiss anything against Putin as “fake news”.
Any state ultimately derives its power from the people. There are countless examples of this, from peaceful protests to civil disobedience, violent revolutions and military coups.
Or from a different perspective: if the opinion of the citizens doesn't matter, then why is Putin shutting down independent journalism and turning up the propaganda in his own country? That only makes sense if he cares what the public thinks.
Harder to spot if you don’t have an outside view. From inside, all you hear and see is that the media which was shut down were “evil propagandist” aligned with $ENEMY who wanted to harm $NATION by spreading lies about $POLITICAL_BUZZWORD.
No a state derives its power from capacity for and willingness to use violence. The state is whatever group has the most of that in a given area. The population can obviously be a threat to a state, but it's ridiculous to expect people to risk their life to stop a state just because they happened to be born in its territory.
>The wast majority of Russian people have nothing to do with what the state is doing.
Then they can all take to the streets and protest against the regime to make their PoV heard. Sure, the protesters will clash with the police/military who will use force against them, but if it's indeed the vast majority of people as you claim, against the regime, then the police/military cannot overwhelm over ~80 million people on the streets.
If the vast majority refuse to take to the streets in protest, then it means they silently or otherwise approve the government's actions. It's up to the Russian people to sort out their politics, by violent force if need be, if they're truly unhappy with the past 30 years of fake democracy and corruption among their leadership.
Same how in 1989 people and students in Romania took to the streets, en masse, to oust the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who refused to step down and had the military shoot the protestors. Spoiler alert: he still got ousted, so the excuse that "we can't protest in Russia against Putin" does not fly.
Thing is that people in russia are flooded with false information and Putin propaganda. If you trust these kind of news (like many US citizens believe in stuff that Trump says including voter fraud), then there's no need for them to stand up. And everyone who is trying to tell the truth will go to prison.
One thing that comes to mind about Ceausescu, when I visited his 'palace' (the people's house) was how many escape routes and hidden exits there were (including apparently a network of tunnels under the city)
For a man who is said to have thought the people deeply loved him, he sure was paranoid. Or maybe he actually knew how much people hated him and he was just fooling himself?
But Putin is nowhere as unpopular as Ceausescu was. His approval ratings that I've seen are no different from those of Western leaders. A lot of people there seem to believe Ukraine is full of Nazis. Nobody is going to storm his palace any time soon and I don't think the sanctions will help. They'll just reinforce his "the West is out to get us" narrative. Don't forget they don't have anything reminiscent of a free press anymore.
> The problem is - as long as the economy is fine they don't care
Personal anecdote:
In April 2010 I was protesting ratification of the so called "Kharkiv Pact" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact) in Kyiv. I remember a moment, when I was single-handedly pushing three rows of soldiers (national guard; they didn't really try) and almost no one else joined, one of the members of our group said to another: "There won't be a revolution today. Let's wait till they start losing money, then we'll try again".
Last year at least 60% of Belarus protested Lukaschenko, and did it for months. What good did that bring them? 10% is not nearly enough for Russian situation
Doesn't work this way. Might is right. You are talking emotionally. Ukraine is fighting this alone with not much military assistance. Why on earth Russia leaves and pay? Who is the law enforcer and judicial system ensuring that happen? Oh yeah whoever has the biggest gun AND willing to use it. Hey, that happens to be Russia too.
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That is a nice reasoning and you are right: Russia is able to commit atrocities.
Where you go wrong is that the comment you were replying to was not talking about their ability but their options. The grand parent comment said: (paraphrasing) “Hey, what can Russia do, if no one licences them software?” To which the comment you responded said (again paraphrasing) “They have the option to stop the war”.
You are not disputing that Russia has the option to retreat, you are just talking about how they are strong and nobody can force them. Which might be true, might be false but certainly is a complete non sequitur in the context of this conversation.
We've banned this account for repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
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Pirated software is okay for home users, but in a mission critical business context, you need constant support and security updates. Pirated software, by its nature, will not be as secure as official software, and it will not be as up to date. Also who do you call when you need support?
Basically pirated software is not a solution for mission critical businesses.
Also who do you think is cracking the software? The same people who would find it very easy to put in malware into the software.
If Russia is running on pirated software, it will be a nightmare.
They need to get off Western software and push open source alternatives. they are massively inferior, especially in the B2B software side of things, but so be it. This is what Russia needs to do now.
Not just lack of updates. It’s also a vector for distributing exploits. Encouraging piracy while the country is under intense cyber attack seems like a risky move.
There's a possibility that these hacking/cracking groups are also under the purview of the government. Meaning, they could release non-malware infested cracks for goverment/corporate use. It's aslo possible that the teams may patch security exploits along with their cracks.
> So the Russian government are probably already in the process of transitioning to FLOSS.
That might seem ironical in multiple ways: a dictatorship where freedom of expression is suppressed that promotes FLOSS because they don't trust closed software. Maybe the western world can learn a lesson or two from that.
Its probably more that they care about having the source code and being able to modify and rebuild it rather than the FLOSS licenses. For most proprietary software you don't have the source.
FLOSS license conditions aren't very well respected even in the West. Hopefully the lawsuit against Vizio will set a precedent that makes it possible for users to enforce them as well as copyright holders.
"All digital content must be made available in country X at the lowest price available in any other jurisdiction. If this condition is not met, said digital content can be freely accessed by any other means."
Unfortunately, most EU & other countries signed up to the draconian "life+130years" copyright agreements...
Which works well until your country wants to create its own software. Then someone sets up a shell company in Somalia and someone says well if your software isn’t as cheap as it is in Somalia than we get to pirate it…
It also, interestingly, digs the hole deeper. Small developers will almost certainly stop selling into Russia. It's probably collateral damage in the grand scheme of things, but a real side effect nonetheless.
The reason it has a poor track record of working has more to do with market dominance and underhanded monopoly practices though. The situation here is arguably the reverse.
Russia has a poor track record of working. Making bad copies of the software is a valid choice for them, the narrative is that the sanctions will not scare them because russia can make everything themselves, also better than the rotten west.
Ukraine was the same last time I checked. Which, admittedly, was 2006 when I bought cracked software on an Odessa book & CD market (lots of small vendor stalls, a permanent market). I've been to both Russia and Ukraine a few times since but that was the only time I needed software (temporarily, only while I was there, relax guys - back then I had a paid license for the entire Adobe Suite back in the office at home).
I don't know what the deal is in Russia but in Argentina piracy is rampant but Microsoft has been ruthless and they have done stuff it would make your skin crawl.
Microsoft basically has power of police here. I don't know who they bribed or in exchange of what or how they managed to achieve this.
They go for companies, basically they send you an email and ask you about your infrastructure, licenses and tell you on X day we will be there to audit the software licenses that you are using. This is not optional, this is mandatory. You have to let them in since they will come with cops if necessary.
We have dealt with them sadly, but we are a linux only shop so we made abundtantly clear that we were going to fight until the end to make them accountable and bill them dearly for every second they spent here. After a few back and forths they decided it wasn't necessary to audit our company, probably not because of our indisposition, but because they probably realized we weren't lying and there was no money to collect here.
To add insult to injury they will use these emails to offer you Microsoft Teams. It's insane.
I'm from Argentina. I've heard this before and I didn't really believe it, and maybe I still don't. Like, there are so many things you might do that could be a spanner in the works for this scheme. What if you hang up on them? What if you refuse to answer the door? To my knowledge there are no laws that require one to open the door for police; if they have an order from a judge they don't need to knock. What if you refuse to unlock your systems to allow them to inspect them?
Do you know where I could get more information on this?
laws 11723 and 25036, they can get a judge's order, google: software legal allanamientos
don't confuse raids of people distributing software illegaly, this happened to companies that were suspected of using pirated versions at some scale and for some reason didn't want to settle.
In recent years, no. Everyone was afraid of huge fines (and maybe even jail terms, if memory serves) for pirated software, and there was a time when police actively searched office computers for pirated software from major suppliers that had branches in Russia (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk etc).
Torrents, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.
The author talks about access being shut off for subscription based softwares. I think this further highlights the danger of subscription based software (regardless of whether you think it’s being used for “good” in this context).
Also The Equity and Concourse Fonts used in this blog are by Matthew Butterick a famous Rackateer! Didn’t expect to come across it here
Matthew is a famous lawyer-Rackateer. The Equity family was originally designed for legal writing! I have been a proud licensee of his work for many years. I was grateful for his special permission to use the type on my blog, before that was covered by his standard, self-serve license.
Alas, Matthew's fonts don't include Cyrillic alphabets. So I swap in Noto Serif for the body text of multilingual posts.
It's the 'their own people' part that's problematic. If they only decide against the interest of businessed but in the interest of the people then I have no problems with it.
It might spur development of the FOSS alternatives, like Wine and ReactOS, FreeCAD and LibreCAD, GIMP and Krita, Octave and Sage, etc; for all kinds of the proprietary software that was blocked.
If closed source forks of copyleft projects become legal then will FOSS still benefit? On the one hand, just generally having FOSS more widely used could be good in and of itself, and closed source forks are difficult to maintain especially if the project upstream is lively. On the other hand it might mean Russian companies adding great features to GPL software and not sharing them.
> Russian companies adding great features to GPL software and not sharing them.
I suspect that is already happening. For example Astra Linux is a Debian derivative but their developers don't appear to be active within Debian.
The other thing is that some FOSS may remove support for Russia in some way. A font removed characters only used in Russian/Belarusian. Qt are blocking downloads from Russia/Belarus. OpenBLAS are considering removing support for Russian Elbrus processors.
On the contrary. Rampant piracy is one of the main blocks for spreading the usage of Free Software. No one (besides the activists) has any incentive to use FLOSS if you can get an industry standard software for free.
One should take this with a grain of salt. For now, it’s only a rumor.
And it may stay that way because there’re a lot of domestic software in Russia as well: you cannot legalize piracy without hurting your own IT.
The same was with IT industry support rumors last week: one (among several) of the leaked proposals was to remove taxes on salary for IT. It stayed off the table.
> among which is being discussed the suspension of criminal and administrative liability for use of pirated software “from countries supporting sanctions”.
Honestly seems like a proportional response to the sanctions, which have gone so far as to steal the Russian government's deposits in foreign banks. Not that those sanctions are or aren't justified, but the west had to expect this in response.
Usually moderators are quick to change titles here to more accurate ones, especially in sensitive topics like this. I wonder why this one hasn't been changed.
Related: Qt disabled downloads for anyone that has a Belarus or Russian IP-Address. There are talks about why they blocked it currently going on at their public mailing list[1]. One argument that came up, is that the downloads are blocked, because Qt is also used in the military. My guess is that this will definitely strengthen other UI toolkits like Flutter in the future.
Flutter is not an alternative to Qt, not even close. Not to speak about C++ compatibility. If anything, things like GTK+, WxWidgets, EFL are on the same page, albeit less polished and advanced.
Depends on what your requirements are. If it "modern" design (let's not start the millionth discussion on what native/modern design is here), that is also supported on mobile/web, then I would say go with flutter as UI and something like rust as your main language to write your business logic in [1]. You can even use regular c++ with their FFI [2].
It won't make any real practical difference, there are plenty of indirect ways to get those downloads and I'm sure Russians will start mirroring the repos within the country. This sort of thing is more about making a point.
The justification that "Qt might be used in military applications (it is today)" is ridiculous. This isn't going to stop the military from using Qt. It's only going to stop poor ordinary people who can't afford a VPN and don't know how to use Tor.
I think this is motivated by bigotry against Russian and Belarusian people caused by a collectivist view of the world where people who had nothing to do with a crime should still be punished for it. It's really scary and disappointing to see.
As a black person living in a European country with very little racism, I thought my non-experince of racism was evidence that it's possible for a society to move past racism all together and treat everyone as the individuals they are, but in the last week I have heard more bigoted statements about people based on their origin than in all my life beforehand, including from people I would never have expected anything like that from.
We are seeing Russians who have strongly condemned Putin's war being ostracised and denied opportunities for something that's completely outside of their control. This is both morally wrong and contraproductive.
Yes, it's insane that people who don't necessarily support Putin are deprived of resources and opportunity, all in the name of justice. I think a lot people just want to show they did something, just any random thing, not knowing that by alienating potential allies in Russia they're forcing people in Russia to beg to be on Putin's side.
I'm really hoping that this could be the start of a worldwide IP reform (both copyright and patents). The idea of patents (limited exclusivity for disclosure) makes sense, but reality has strayed far from it. Likewise, copyright with its obscene and ever-expanding protection terms and lack of fair use protections in most countries is in dire need of a reform.
However, this might also backfire by pushing companies more towards making everything a SaaS subscription service so customers never have any code they could pirate.
This is interesting. It seems to be the way forward. I think it should be extended to everything including hardware and medicine. Free market. Free to copy, free to improve the work of others. Companies need to get creative; be the first on the market then sell contracts to users, sell subscriptions, loyalty programs... They don't need copyright or patent protection; they just need creativity and they need to build trust with their customers.
I don't believe for a second that this will harm innovation in any way. Big pharma dies most of their innovation using taxpayer money anyway... It costs them nothing so why would they stop R&D? If they did, some other company would quickly step in and do the R&D using government money...
Allowing copies doesn't guarantee access in the first place. That's why Stallman wrote a license that levers off copyright to require disclosure of trade secrets, i.e. source code.
If the USA abolished software copyright tomorrow, more software development would go behind closed doors, and more finished apps would get distributed as binaries only. None of the users currently dependent on proprietary SaaS would be "liberated".
Note this is about using pirated software. This isn't about breaking protection in software to allow it to be used. Breaking copy protection is still illegal in Russia.
just read this essay -- very impressive that the author wrote a PhD thesis in Russian language, and lived in Moscow. However, the essay does not support the initial paragraphs, it seems. This is a thin overview of a forty year development of digital media economy. While Moscow copy-shops in the early 2000s may draw rebuke now, I saw late 1990s Hong Kong and WOW was there a LOT of Pirated Everything. Probably I would guess, more than Moscow. Fast forward to 2022, and there is every bit of this, and more, with layers of economy involved like a soil analysis of the Amazon River basin.
Are US interests threatened by stopped-payment subscriptions to Office 365? Does anyone want to pay their Oracle monthlies? As noted in the article, a lot of Western big-name enterprise software was cancelled recently whether it is pirated or not.
Drastic circumstance are a trigger, but the world of software is not done evolving and plenty of the accusations here are not new. I wanted this essay to be more specific, and to get into more examples, but instead it glosses over large topics to come to a hasty conclusion.
The tech aspect of the sanctions deserve to be more scrutinized. The average Russian company certainly can pirate Windows (now legally), but now they have to worry about all sorts of backdoors and vulnerabilities that will expose them to their competitors. It would seem that the logical solution would be to adopt FOSS rather than pirate, at least for any serious professional work.
I expect we'll start to see software that will include code that detects Russian character sets, Russian timezones, Russian internet addresses and will refuse to work if unlicenced. Most likely they'll be able to bypass those but a significant majority won't be able to pirate due to lack of technical knowledge.
An interesting point from the history of GOG is that it originated from a market where piracy was the norm, Noclip has a great documentary about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A
You really think a missing translation is going to protect anything? I'm not from Russia, but close enough. We've seen a lot of unofficially translated software (and games) back in the 90s. Some of those translations were really good. And you don't need source code to do it.
There are large portions of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania where the mother tongue is Russian. Some folks over 45 may not even speak the local language, and may not need to. Most of the younger people would be bilingual (or more commonly tri), though.
Lots of people in Moldova speak Russian bilingual too. Russian is commonly spoken in Kazakhstan - even Russian courses in the universities.
Overall for many Russian is a decent choice to have a produce localized to or search for information in general. Like in your case - compare it to Estonian where the native speakers are fewer than 1.5 million (even, when you include all age groups) - a lot smaller market, harder to localize due to lack of translators, etc.
There are 10's of millions of primary Russian speakers living outside of Russia. Much more than some Asian, African, and European languages that are regularly translated.
You've just lost the vast majority of the market who NEED Russian translations to use your software.
I imagine most Russian speakers outside of Russia, who buy software, would also have an least some proficiency in either English, French or another supported language.
Even though I haven't kept up with my French, I could probably manage to use a French version of Windows. It's going to be harder, but not impossible.
> I mean, who would support translations of a language where you're software almost 100% gets pirated.
Language nerds can be as weird/passionate as tech nerds. Plenty of people who will translate things for either language politics reasons (dislike of English as the lingua franca) or for fun.
I don't think there is any reason to believe laws against piracy are effective at reducing piracy. I think the people who paid for Russian language software before will continue doing so as long as they can still make the payment.
If office were not legally available from Microsoft, but was legally available from professional "software distributors" (e.g. crackers) with helpdesk services, then there would definitely be large companies buying MS office from the distributors.
It's been shown time and time again that automation increases economic activity and jobs in an economy. This is why we don't live in a hell world of 99% unemployment and universal poverty, with unemployed horse buggy drivers on every street corner, despite unbelievably deep and extensive automation of almost every aspect of our lives.
>It's been shown time and time again that automation increases economic activity and jobs in an economy.
Even if it spurs economic activity overall, it doesn't mean the gains of that activity are fairly distributed. Many towns were completely ruined by the decline in manufacturing jobs, even if others propspered.
Here in the UK we went through a painful economic decline in the 70s and restructuring in the early 80s. Things were pretty rough for a while, but then we went through an economic boom in the late 80s as productive forces were unleashed.
I'm basically a capitalist because I believe capitalism is based on essential economic freedoms to own property, freely associate and buy and sell one's labour. But I also believe that there is a role for effective social services, public health care and a social safety net. You need a health economy to pay for it though, and that's the balance that needs to be struck.
Between this and the news they are now arresting anyone for posting or broadcasting anything they consider "fake news" (and shutting down BBC in Russia) they are in full culture collapse.
Anyone can see this won't end well and won't end anytime soon, what country is going to end sanctions while even one Russian soldier is still in Ukraine and for example it took TWENTY years for US to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. So likely still there until 2030 unless somehow Putin is replaced with sanity which is unlikely.
Now I wonder what country they will do this to next because they are already under maximum sanctions and they know NATO/US won't go in and won't even do a no-fly zone. So why not double down with yet another country?
Moldova is next, and Georgia. Both applied for EU membership this past week (token gesture as they won’t be admitted, certainly not quickly enough). The “no-fly zone” also means no Ukrainian forces flying and is kind of a benefit for Russia right now given how the war appears to be going. It’s also a risky escalation without much benefit. NATO jets shooting at Russian jets give Putin the justification he needs to go attack NATO countries.
Yes but Putin is dropping 500 pound bombs on civilian apartment complexes. Jets vs Jets and military vs military is the horror of war but right now it's a slaughter of the innocent.
To pretend it's -not- going to end up in multi-country conflict if we just sit back is -exactly- what happened in WW2, everyone sat back and watched while millions of innocents suffered and died and then finally drew a line.
Ok, no "boots on the ground". But stop the 500 pound bombs on apartment complexes. Imagine if it was your street and what you'd be begging the world to be saved.
'Enforcing a no-fly zone' is a euphemism for 'declaring war'.
You can't enforce the former without doing the latter, because people with SAMs are going to start shooting at your airplanes, and your 'no-fly zone' now turns into a 'we are bombing ground troops zone' which is indistinguishable from a 'we have declared war' zone.
I don’t think you can piecemeal it. If we do a “no-fly zone” you might as well put boots on the ground because that’s what will happen anyway. What do you think stops Putin from “feeling threatened” by NATO warplanes flying out of Poland and using a nuclear weapon on an airbase to “solve the problem”. If you cross the threshold then why wouldn’t he just assume NATO is attacking Russia and just start new military operations? The no-fly zone is certainly worth considering but it adds instability with unpredictable outcomes.
Of course if people were dropping bombs on my neighborhood I’d be begging for salvation. I’d be begging for more than a no-fly zone. I’d want Russian military bases bombed and international forces engaging in combat to repel invaders too. Should we also do that? Russians aren’t using only 500lb bombs. They’re on the ground with machine guns, they launch missiles from Russian territory, and they use artillery.
We have to be careful. There is a lot at stake here. I agree with your suggestions about appeasement, but the situations aren’t totally the same since NATO apparently has a far more dominant military and economically it’s not even a discussion. Germany had the best military to start WWII.
It was enforced selectively (as many laws there) with occasional arrests of freelance computer technicians. They would be asked to do a minor repair and then install pirated versions of Windows, MS Office, Autocad etc to reach a certain threshold after which it would be qualified as an "economic crime on a particularly large scale".
There was a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when foreign vendors tried to the RIAA/MPAA tactic of highly publicized enforcement against individuals and small institutions. Microsoft, for example. It mostly backfired.
They eventually shifted to enforcing against large entities and intermediaries. Same as in the West.
Well, they can't go all-in yet. They need to be able to increase their countermeasures after the USA introduce more rigorous measures.
As someone living in Europe, I'm not happy that the EU was forced to impose sanctions on oil and gas, while the USA still imports Russian oil. And it's the Europe that will be devastated if it comes to nuclear war, both USA are big enough to partially survive.
So, yes, every step in avoiding escalation, not going to maximum is a good step, if it would increase the duration of human life in Europe for a few more years.
Other countries should be free to figure out other ways of doing this.
Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).
I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way. There are fundamentals and externalities -- the war on Ukraine is wrong, and we should intervene. However, on something like having IP law, let alone breaking it up into copyrights/patents/trademarks, let alone stating durations and contexts of all of those, this just seems like overreach.
I feel like this is one of those places where corporate lobbyists managed to change people's values in a way which is quite unfortunate. People learn about IP theft in elementary school, it gets integrated into UN human rights documents, and something which is really culturally-dependent is viewed as universal. It wasn't viewed this way when I was a child.
Even little things make a big difference. We've gone from "copyright infringement" to words like stealing and theft. They're fundamentally different concepts which were intentionally mixed up. If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).
I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws. I'm just arguing we shouldn't force our IP regime on everyone else.