#ip

[denizharitasitutkunu]

Büyükçekmece Haber

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[reapering]

[prokopetz]

Copyright doctrinaire who doesn't understand how IP works losing their shit over stuff that doesn't actually infringe upon anything versus copyright abolitionist who also doesn't understand how IP works insisting they're sticking it to the Man by doing the thing the first guy is freaking out about.

[adi-lives]

yall made such a big deal over goblins in a movie/book franchise but when jewish shops were vandalized, synagogues firebombed, and a 12 year old jewish girl was gang raped it was dead silent.

you cannot curry favor from our community by doing performative activism for things that don't matter and disappearing when things do.

[thoughtportal]

HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech.

On Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith posted a series of screenshots on Bluesky in order to share a concerning email he received from the age

[weemietime]

(Edit: Sorry this posted too soon - this is a post from Reddit by user AustinQareen, which I am reproducing here because I am tired of this narrative going unchallenged)

On Genocide

I honestly can’t understand why anyone would accuse Israel of genocide. The word has a specific meaning: it refers to the deliberate, systematic extermination of an entire people. Nothing Israel has done even if you think its actions are too harsh or morally wrong remotely fits that definition.

If Israel wanted to commit genocide, it has had the military capability to wipe Gaza off the map in a matter of days. Instead, it has repeatedly warned civilians before strikes, dropped leaflets, made phone calls, and even paused operations to let aid in. No country in history has gone to such extremes to limit civilian harm while fighting an enemy embedded among civilians.

Hamas, on the other hand, has made its intentions absolutely clear. Its charter calls for the annihilation of Jews. Its entire strategy is built around ensuring maximum Palestinian civilian death by launching rockets from schools, hospitals, and densely populated neighborhoods. It uses children as human shields, recruits them as soldiers, and steals humanitarian aid meant for civilians.

When people call Israel’s self-defense a “genocide,” they’re not just misusing a word they’re inverting reality. The side openly calling for extermination (Hamas) becomes the victim, and the side trying to stop it (Israel) becomes the perpetrator. It’s Orwellian.

So yes I’m confused, because I can’t see how anyone could look at this situation, compare intent, methods, and outcomes, and still apply the word genocide to Israel. It feels like a moral hallucination a narrative so emotionally satisfying to some that it overrides facts, logic, and even the definition of the word itself.

Maybe this is the reason why people stick with “genocide”: the emotional investment that Gazans are good, and good must prevail, reality be damned. I’m listening to Abby Martin on the Piers Morgan Show, and she is repeating something I have heard a lot recently arguing that Israel should make concessions to Hamas on a moral basis. How does Hamas have the right to anything? Hamas did what they did on October 7, so it lost the moral right to anything, and then it lost the war it started, so it lost the practical right to anything. Why does Hamas have the right to anything? Her argument seems to be .... Israel bad, Gaza good. Israel must pay.

Many people say “hundreds of scholars and organizations have called it a genocide,” as if that ends the discussion. But if we’re being strict about law, evidence, and logic, there’s a real problem here — and it’s not about emotion or bias, it’s about method.

The UN Genocide Convention (1948) defines genocide as having three parts:

A protected group (ethnic, national, racial, or religious).

Certain acts such as killing members of the group, causing serious harm, or deliberately inflicting conditions meant to destroy them.

Specific intent — the conscious goal to destroy that group, in whole or in part.

Without proven intent, there is no genocide, no matter how terrible the actions appear.

Groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and figures like Norman Finkelstein have labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. They cite civilian casualties, destruction, and wartime statements by Israeli officials. Those statements are treated as proof of genocidal intent. But that’s a major legal mistake.

The UN’s own court precedents — from the ICTY, ICTR, and ICJ — are clear that statements made during wartime cannot, by themselves, prove genocidal intent unless they are directly tied to concrete orders or policy actions. People say extreme, even horrible, things under the stress of war. Courts recognize this. Tribunals require clear evidence of a deliberate plan or pattern aimed at destroying a group, not just rhetoric or collateral damage.

It is also normal for acts that could be considered “genocidal” in isolation — killing, destruction, suffering to occur during wartime. Almost every war involves civilian deaths, property destruction, and atrocities of some kind. The Gaza war, tragic as it is, is not unique in that regard. What matters legally is intent to destroy a group as such, which is absent here. Israel’s stated and demonstrated goal is to defeat Hamas, not Palestinians.

This is where the reasoning collapses. Experts who should know better are treating emotion and destruction as if they were evidence of intent. They are counting wartime anger as policy. They are mistaking tragedy for genocide.

Under strict legal interpretation: – The protected group element is met (Palestinians in Gaza). – Some acts (killing, harm, destruction) are present. – But the intent — the defining feature of genocide — is absent.

You can argue that Israel’s response is excessive or cruel, but that is not genocide. If it were, every modern war with civilian deaths would also qualify, making the term meaningless.

Yet Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Finkelstein continue to use the word “genocide” anyway. They know the legal definition. They know the UN rulings that warn against treating wartime speech as intent. And still, they do it.

Why?

Is it because “genocide” has become a moral weapon rather than a legal term? Because outrage now carries more weight than precision? Because they believe moral theater is more powerful than strict truth? Is it Jew-hatred? Or is it the current fashion of post-colonial studies, with its simplistic oppressor/oppressed lens reducing a complex and long history into a comic-book-binary of good versus evil?

Whatever the reason, it leaves us in a strange place. The very people who claim to defend international law are bending it. The ones demanding accountability are ignoring the standards that define accountability.

If the Genocide Convention is applied strictly, calling Israel’s actions genocide simply does not fit. That’s not denial of suffering it’s defense of logic, law, and historical nuance.

So here’s my honest question to anyone reading this: Why do people especially experts and organizations that know the legal standards keep calling this genocide when it clearly does not meet the definition, and when the acts themselves, while tragic, are normal for wartime?