> Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partners
There's a whole secondary and very interesting story to be told here about the nasty relationship that has formed between copyright holders and these firms specializing in takedowns that cling to them like barnacles on a whale.
It's obviously tempting to outsource a job like tracking down copyright violations which doesn't play in to any of your business's competencies, but it also seems quite likely that the companies who provide this "service" typically do so in a way that looks good on a paper report that a manager at the host company receives, but doesn't actually benefit them optimally for the money they spend on it.
Takedown companies seem to go after violations that will net them the fastest and most reliable takedown rates. They want to run up the score so that they can say "last month, we took down 5482 violations of your copyright in Adobe Reader" or what have you. This means, largely, going after posts and uploads on sites that have "quick service" DMCA takedowns like Twitter and YouTube. You're not investing time on random websites that may or may not even respond. No human intelligence is required (indeed, even desirable) in this process. It's effectively humans being paid the lowest possible wage to do an automated job. In some cases I suppose it's probably fully automated.
These people (as will many lawyers, outsourced or not) will go out of their way to ruin the image of your company and brand in the eyes of customers, even when there is absolutely nothing to be gained.
It just doesn't look great when a devoted fanbase starts getting takedown notices and legal threats over memes, supplementary content, etc.
A legal department with agency is not a good idea. There should be very specific instructions as to what they can initiate on their own.
> Adobe holds a near monopoly in the creative world.
I remember that being a real problem, but as I learned when I left the Adobe ecosystem last year, there's now a healthy ecosystem of competitive creative tools from ISVs like Affinity, Gravit, Figma, Procreate, Blackmagic Design, etc. The irony is that Adobe helped jump-start this ecosystem when they went subscription-only.
I always wondered how it could be legal to automatically send DMCA takedown requests. A DMCA request on a site like Twitter means the post and account are immediately blocked until the situation is clarified, and that can be a big issue for the user, especially if their livelihood depends on access to this account (I guess a bigger problem if their Google account is blocked due to a DMCA on YouTube).
Yet it seems ok to automate this, knowing full well that there will be false positives that could seriously affect people. Sometimes it feels like we eventually got a soft version of Skynet, ruled by robots, except they aren't trying to kill us yet.
> how it could be legal to automatically send DMCA takedown requests
Because the ones benefiting from this lobbied their way into getting it. And to extract the most value they implemented automated means of doing it. Not only does this allow easily sending a flood of takedown notices thus discouraging anyone from even thinking of crossing you, it also provides an easy scapegoat in the near impossible situation that the company abusing the system is actually called to answer for the abuse. "It was just a technical mishap".
But this isn't a technical problem, it's a corruption problem. And it doesn't have a technical fix, it has a legal one that cannot be applied because of the lobbying (corruption) mentioned earlier.
On the other hand most takedown notices aren't actual "DMCA takedown notices". Platforms like YouTube or Twitter simply have an arrangement with the big "content owners" that they will act on such internal notices. That's to shield themselves from incurring costs when unavoidably they will host copyright infringing content that they don't take down. It's easier and safer to take the side of the big content owners than that of the users.
The law only has provision for taking down the illegal content, and if you respond with a counterclaim then it is supposed to but restored. Twitter, Youtube et alii have taken it upon themselves to suspend accounts and make it very hard to get things restored.
The DMCA was written to shield them from incurring costs.(see OCILLA) They have wholly decided to operate in a realm outside the law in conjunction with copyright holders to actively seek out infringing material on their platform, to the point of limiting fair use and false positives.
"To qualify for the § 512(c) safe harbor, the OSP must not have actual knowledge that it is hosting infringing material or be aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent. It is clear from the statute and legislative history that an OSP has no duty to monitor its service or affirmatively seek infringing material on its system."
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...
> the statute describes two ways in which an OSP can be put on notice of infringing material on its system: 1) notice from the copyright owner, known as notice and take down, and 2) the existence of "red flags."
> The "red flag" test contains both a subjective and an objective element. Subjectively, the OSP must have knowledge that the material resides on its system. Objectively, the "infringing activity would have been apparent to a reasonable person operating under the same or similar circumstances."
TL;DR: A half page automated email from a content owner has to be acted on expeditiously, can only be overturned with a lawsuit, and there's no penalty for abusing the system. Big content owners put a lot of money in the pockets of legislators to get such obviously biased laws in their favor.
The takedown example here [0] requires all of 30 minutes of effort to be able to send notices as fast as your internet connection allows it. At this point all protections the OSP (YouTube) has are removed.
The "red flag" process sets the bar just as low for the content owners. No OSP wants to test challenging this out in court knowing they make an enemy out of big content owners and even expose themselves to targeted attacks and more liability.
But worse, the law puts a hell of a burden on the allegedly infringing party (the YouTube user) who has to fight in court against an automated email. Given the imbalance of power you'd expect the legislation to propose some penalty for abuse, like rapidly increasing fines for each false flag. It does not. It is solely aimed at "expeditiously" complying with the demand of the content owner leaving the other party with an impossible fight if they want the situation corrected.
There is no reasonable interpretation where setting such a low bar for content owners but such a high bar for everyone else has anything to do with fairness. Big name content owners payed for this, and the US legislators took the money and delivered. YouTube and Twitter simply have no bone to pick with them and would rather stay out of the fight by complying without objections.
>YouTube and Twitter simply have no bone to pick with them and would rather stay out of the fight by complying without objections.
Which is fine, they wish to operate a legal business. But they are going out of their way to create their own system that is more stringent than the law.
>TL;DR: A half page automated email from a content owner has to be acted on expeditiously, can only be overturned with a lawsuit, and there's no penalty for abusing the system.
Per the outline in Wikipedia, Alice does not need to file a lawsuit to get the material reinstated, only send a counterclaim letter, similar to the claim letter sent by the content holder. If the content holder wishes to contest further, they must file a lawsuit, otherwise after 14 days the material may be put back up.
>there's no penalty for abusing the system.
No and that is a problem.
I am not very familiar with the red flag system and there did not seem to be a good description at a glance. My guess would be that if your system is used/ is promoted as enabling infringement, then you may be liable. Like MegaUpload was.
The reason that Youtube and Twitter go above and beyond the law is simple, it gives them more power and they view being content owners as their next step so they are doing what they can to consolidate power on that front. We should not give them a pass for this behavior.
These days corruption is so rife, I am still amazed that whenever ones mentions it as a plausible cause of an event, there is a high chance the opinion will be buried with downvotes.
Corrupt governments are one thing, but it is interesting how governments created an impression that corruption is a marginal problem, that it does not exist. Rarely you see anyone charged yet alone convicted and if you see it's rather some little things in the grand scheme of things.
Some events are brazenly obvious yet I never hear them ever being investigated. I've been thinking how do you even report something like this if you only have your own suspicions but no hard evidence? How do you even get evidence that e.g. some regulation was bought? (e.g. you can see certain companies listed as party donors or belonging to a family of certain politicians and then you see a regulation going through against expert advice that hugely benefit those companies at the expense of competing businesses, yet even journalists known for being in opposition won't touch the topic).
> governments created an impression that corruption is a marginal problem, that it does not exist.
Governments create the impression that small, widespread corruption is the one that counts. The one where you pay a cop to get out of a speeding ticket, or a doctor to get better medical care. They will go out of their way to commission reports that condemn this as the real danger to society while using obscure metrics to support that idea.
At the same time they invent a word to use when governments and legislators are involved: lobbying. They write off the corruption happening at high levels even if it's responsible for fundamentally changing how society works in ways that small corruption never could. Laws that weaken the educational system, or employee's rights, that protect corporations, etc. not only are the reason for why most small corruption exists in the first place, they also damage society beyond belief. And the kind of money and favors involved dwarf the GDP of many of those "most corrupt countries in the world". Which is why governments go out of their way to make this look like fair game, it's just lobbying.
Getting the "evidence" is next to impossible because of the framework built around this. There are actual laws sending you to prison for giving $50 to a cop to get out of a fine, or the cop for taking it, written by the same people who wrote the law that allows one to pay $50M to a legislator to pass a "favorable" law. Of course there are some nuances that are always the go to for justifying how lobbying isn't bribery but they're all just as solid as saying "beautiful kids, it would be a shame if something... happened to them" is not extortion.
The DMCA is against free expression. To ban some expression a court order used to be needed. Now a DMCA request is enough, as long as some party enabling the expression (Twitter in your example) is legally in the US, to effectively ban the expression. The burden of proof is shifted to the expressor.
This makes banning expression so much easier.
Funny enough the US tax money also paid for research to circumvent this issue, resulting in what we know as the dark web.
> except they aren't trying to kill us yet.
A lot of people have had their livelihood taken, or greatly reduced, by DMCA.
I believe that many major sites (e.g. Youtube) offer "DMCA-like" service where copyright holders send takedown requests that are not DMCA requests with all the associated requirements and legal consequences for the one who submits false claims. They don't have to honor DMCA-like-but-not-really requests, but they have chosen to do so.
1. Some sites lock accounts on reports rather than just the offending content or have YouTube-style systems which aren’t the DMCA. That’s an indirect problem especially when, as in the latter case, it’s probably a private deal where YouTube avoided lawsuits by agreeing to spare the major holding companies the expense of filing DMCA complaints.
2. The DMCA has penalties for false claims but they’re almost never enforced. This is the best area for reform: if someone’s bot incurred liability for every claim where it misidentified the material or hit a fair use case (e.g. police officers playing music loudly to make YouTube auto-block recordings of them) they would quickly start improving those systems and adding human checks.
It's my understanding that the DMCA's "truth" provision is limited to whether the person is authorized to represent the copyright holder, and not anything to do with the actual infringement claim itself
I am not a lawyer but my understanding is that it’s more than that: see https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 - infringement covers not just that you have copyright but also that the user doesn’t have a valid right to use it, which includes fair use.
Diebold lost a case where someone published internal emails and they used the DMCA to try to get them taken offline, and a judge agreed that this was fair use:
What I'm referring to is that perjury seems to be limited to cases where the claim to represent the copyright holder is unauthorized. One can file any number of DMCA claims on otherwise false grounds (such as fair use, etc), and if the court then chooses to sue upon DMCA appeal, they can cost the user far more than they should be able to, even if the user wins, as long as the person filing the DMCA is authorized by the copyright holder to do so.
I would like to see such perjury charges be expanded to situations where it is clear the copyright holder's representative has acted in bad faith regarding whether infringement even happened, or whether it was justified infringement (fair use).
It just makes Adobe look more greedy though. Adobe should do their own DCMA take down notices, and put some brains behind it?
Getting customers used to using you software, just might make them cough up a monthly subscription rip-off at some point? There was a time when you bought the program, and got a reasonable amount of updates. (Sorry about the last line. I know you guys know that.)
Adobe lost my wallet when they got greedy, and figured loyal customers wouldn’t take notice.
Diffusion of responsibility; the takedown firm takes a lot of the bad PR and legal liability when wrong. Adobe also shields their brand by not insourcing.
And Adobe can try to shift the blame however they want, the final responsibility lies with them as the rights owner and as the ones who hired that takedown firm to act in their name.
I think you're right - just looks like monthly report padding. This is the problem with private security, it's hard to trust that the client sees the value in you, when part of your effectiveness comes from deterrence. No takedowns would be great news for Adobe if it meant that no one was pirating their software, but it doesn't make for a very compelling presentation at contract renewal time.
Ultimately the damage here is relatively minor, but this behaviour could cause serious harm in future.
This one is quite fascinating. It comes with a highres GUI mimicking Windows 3.1. I wonder how big the market was in 1993 for graphical applications running on pure DOS.
It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be in text mode. There was even at least one pre-emptive multitasking system for running multiple applications at the same time (full screen) and switching between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
Running one graphical app under DOS needed less system resources than running one under Windows, so you could get more bang for buck. Also, at that point Windows was still not great at interacting with some hardware devices in real time, so some devices needed DOS to work well.
For Acrobat Reader, it definitely did make sense - they wanted to make the PDF format usable on as many platforms as possible. I can remember buying a "budget" version of System Shock in the mid-90s which only consisted of a CD in a jewel case, but contained the original manual as a PDF, with the DOS Acrobat Reader included to display it...
That's awesome. I missed that stretch of years when DOS games were sold with PDF manuals stored on disk, but not everybody was launching them from Windows 95...
My pre-teen self didn't get to run games from CD-ROM before 1997 or so. :-(
How do you define "no longer supported"? Easiest answer is to restore copyright length to a sane amount of time. Prior to 1978, it was 28 years, optionally extendable to another 28 years. Our current conception of effectively-infinite copyright is very new, and I think has had incredibly harmful effects. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking...
Yeah we end standard support release+2 years and extended support release+5 years for major versions. Given that it's still mostly the same core code that was implemented 10 years ago, not sure how this would gel.
I suppose one problem with this is when you release a new version that substantially overlaps with the previous version. If I release WidgetReader 2.0 that has 90% of the code shared with WidgetReader 1.0, and only sell new licences to the new version, should I be obliged to allow free access to WidgetReader 1.0? What about when I release WidgetReader 1.1? Or if I give free upgrades to all existing licence holders to 1.0? (Free upgrades are actually most likely when the upgrade is especially small e.g. a patch to fix some bug, but by your rules they're almost the worst because now there are no supported installations of the old version left at all.)
For that matter, what if I rewrite the whole code base but keep the same general functionality and target audience - does that change things? If so then you've just disincentivised certain types of refactors even though they have very little impact on the users.
Of course there is a big gap, both in code and functionality, between Acrobat 1.0 and the current version but it's still the same product in theory, so it leaves open the question of where to draw the line.
I don't think the argument was that you should hand over the source code. It's just that you shouldn't be able to legally go after others distributing the old version.
There is an issue with the period right after your WidgetReader 2.0 is released. Most will be perfectly happy with version 1 (many may even prefer it) and you'll have a hard time selling the new version, given that you're competing with your own old and now free version.
Perhaps it should be more like: 10 years after the end of life date. It's tricky, I want software companies to be able to make money on sell their software, and not having to rely on subscriptions, but I also feel that we should be able to legally copy 25 year old video games and software for DOS 6.22.
I understood there was no pressure to release source code, I was just using source code overlap as a measure of similarity.
An expiry time, like 10 years, sounds a lot more reasonable. It's a bit like the expiry for copyright and pantents, at least in their original concepts. Come to think of it, maybe the solution is simply to dramatically reduce copyright expiry, maybe to a simple fixed 10 years for creation point. That would probably benefit everything, not just software.
I'm running Omnifocus 2 on my mac, and it's been broken partially since Big Sur. Omnigroup doesn't support it, won't release a patch, and sells Omnifocus 3 as a separate product. I'd love to be able to just fix this small error and continue using the thing I bought.
But the brand name is still protected; the last version of a product named Adobe Acrobat Reader is from last year.
The PDF standard is open, and there are plenty of reader alternatives with all kinds of licenses; if Acrobat was some kind of unique thing that was no longer supported or you could no longer get a legal copy, then you'd have more of a point.
Adobe Reader for DOS is not supported, and many of the open source and third party commercial alternatives never supported DOS. What's even more nuanced here is later versions of Adobe Reader are free to download and often distributed by third parties.
Antique software is often preserved better on pirate websites than through official channels.
Earlier this week I was setting up an iPod Touch 2G for a friend, maximum iOS 4.2.1, made in 2008. I wanted to install Springtomize, a paid tweak. The Cydia store has shut down, so there's no way to legally buy it. The pirate sites were no longer hosting such an old version.
In the end I emailed the developer, and he was super excited and encouraged that someone is still using his code! He sent me the deb file for free, which installed perfectly of course. He's now working for Apple as a security researcher.
I'm glad that the Internet Archive tries hard to allow people to upload antique data, and endures the DMCA troubles that come with that. Hopefully WinWorldPC will prevail against Adobe in this case too; and I wonder whether the EFF can help.
This is enough info to get him in trouble with his employer. (Apple is very strict about Apple-related side-hustles, especially the ones not through the 'proper' channels like jailbroken devices). Might be worth rewording this.
Rockbox and iPodLinux are great for hard drive based iPods with a click wheel. The iPod Touch is a touchscreen media player, like an iPhone without a phone.
We need to have a DMCA day every year where everyone sends a 100 notices each to take down random content and preferably targeting content of politicians. Its the only way to raise awareness and also make companies not blindly remove content. If costs become high, they will lobby for more restrictive use of these notices.
I don't believe actively sending false claims of copyright infringement can be called 'civil' still. It's going for the offense, instead of passively resisting.
Not necessarily. The Constitution requires that all people get equal enforcement of the law. If you can demonstrate that the perjury components are never enforced against companies, you can argue that perjury charges would be unconstitutional selective enforcement.
I wouldn't want to be one of the people who have to prove that, though.
"This [software] is antique. It belongs in a museum, not in a DMCA claim," Hyppönen tells TorrentFreak. "The original tweets stays up. It’s just a link to a site hosted by someone else. If needed, I’ll fight Adobe."
Why does he think he stands a chance? It's not like he linked to a library.
This is a very good example of why so-called "intellectual property" (and "private property" as a sacred right) needs to be abolished entirely. It's just a tool of social control that prevents people from sharing/studying things, and makes people die from diseases that we know how to cure (pharmaceutical patents).
Of course we do need art. But most artists are not protected by copyright, quite the contrary! They get extorted by producers and other mafia-like organizations taking their rights away and "eating" all their income as administrative fees.
According to official SACEM statistics, 66% of their registered artists (who pay membership dues) don't receive a single cent over an entire year. The Cour des Comptes (highest french authority for public spending) has published detailed analysis about the copyright mafia and how their 6-digit salaries really don't help artists make a living.
How to make a living is an issue in all of society, not just for artists. We should address this problem globally by making sure wealth is redistributed according to everyone's needs.
If I said "I make decorations but they cost more than people want to pay for them" I'd be told to get another job. If I say "I make art but I'm poor and starving" people feel sorry for me.
There are two types of art, one customers call art when buying it. The other that an artist calls art when lamenting that people won't buy it.
No. Don't mean to be ugly but when it comes down to it, it's not needed. It makes life more pleasant but isn't necessary for survival.
Which means it's somewhat out of balance for an IP protection scheme to exist that allows an entity to perform/create a work of art once and then sit back and collect on it for the next 150+ years.
Work once, get paid once. Musician? Venue commissions you, you get paid. Visual artist? Someone commissions you, you get paid.
Anything else is a benefit to one person or company at the expense of everyone else. A limited such benefit, per the original idea of copyright, is fine if society wants to encourage the arts. At what point is society oversaturated with "creatives" though?
That's why we don't have any great art from before the 1700s when copyright law was first introduced. Well, maybe one or two artists, like Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo and Rembrant, but the quality of their output was vastly inferior to all the many amazing works being produced nowadays. /s
Artists get paid for building a brand around their creations, not for making loads of pieces of the same thing. If someone were to copy one of his paintings, it would clearly not be of the same lineage.
>Artists get paid for building a brand around their creations, not for making loads of pieces of the same thing.
I think many novelists, filmmakers, photographers and songwriters would disagree. Piracy can affect their ability to earn a living from their work. Few regular people care about the "lineage" of their ebooks, digital photos, audio streams, video files, or mp3s as long as it's convenient and allows them to enjoy the artist's work.
Without copyright, most software probably wouldn't be written, most books wouldn't be written, most movies wouldn't be made, most music wouldn't be made, etc. I think the copyright term lengths are currently insanely long, so I can see good arguments for shortening them considerably, but I think abolishing copyright entirely would do far more harm than good.
Software patents on the other hand could probably be abolished without much ill effect (as they already don't exist in most of the world).
>Without copyright, most software probably wouldn't be written, most books wouldn't be written, most movies wouldn't be made, most music wouldn't be made, etc.
Copyright didn't exist forever, yet we have music and books from before then. Shakespeare was before copyright. Most of the best creatives create for the joy of creation, not for money. Like open source.
Shakespeare made a living from the performances of his plays, not the written documents. Musicians made money from performances too. Most famous historical painters and composers had wealthy benefactors that enabled their work.
Creative people obviously enjoy creating, but professionals are doing it to earn a living. Look at the books on your bookshelf and the movies and TV shows you watch. How many were made purely for joy with no expectation of making money? Maybe some, but not most.
I think in a world without copyright, the ways that creative people earn a living would certainly change, but I'm not sure it would mean it would be impossible to be successful doing those things.
Musicians already earn a large portion of their income from things other than sales of their albums - whether it's touring / merch / advertising deals. All of that could exist in a world without copyright. The equivalent might not exist yet for movies, but in a world where movies were freely distributable, someone would find a way to still make it a business. Maybe the giant blockbusters would go away, but maybe that's an acceptable price to pay.
The argument about musicians rings a bit hollow, as most musicians nowadays make their living as performers and shopkeeps, which I do not think is good for the state of the art at all.
> Shakespeare made a living from the performances of his plays, not the written documents.
But if there was no copyright, why did the Globe owners pay him at all? Just perform the old plays for free!
He was payed for creating something new, copyright was worthless because we did not live off selling old works.
Copyright couldn't help Shakespeare to create more or better plays anyway, he was limited by how much boot-licking the Queen was acceptable to the audience, and how many "obscene" stuff he could sneak in without angering the Queen or the Church.
Shakespeare was a businessman - he wrote plays for money. The Globe didn't run on the love of creation. Bach's work was entirely possible because he got hired by a rich guy who funded his creative output. You'd never have heard of him if he had to support all of the little Bachs on whatever coins he could get busking.
That just bolsters the point you're replying to. If Shakespeare was doing it strictly for artistic merit, and money didn't enter into it, that's an argument for copyright - since presumably there's far fewer people who are willing / able to pursue creative projects strictly for the artistic merit without any regard for income.
The fact that he was a businessman demonstrates that copyright isn't completely necessary to make creative works a viable business.
Plenty of those people depend on copyright law to prevent studios from stealing their scripts and producing them without paying the writer. Or are we supposed to against independent creators, and insist that artists return to the patronage system so we can eliminate copyright?
> Plenty of those people depend on copyright law to prevent studios from stealing their scripts and producing them without paying the writer.
Like that never happens now. How many independent creators did successfully sue a studio since copyright law has come into play? How many pitched a script to a studio, only to be rejected, and having the same idea rewritten on a spec by others?
Is it worth it to keep Steamboat Willie under lock and key?
Might as well tax the IP secondary sales and just give every living author with works registered in the Library of Congress a stipend.
I'll let the live theatre industry know they no longer exist.
Snark aside, I think there are people who make a living creating things that don't rely on copyright (music artists that make their living off merch and live shows, theatre as mentioned above), and even if there weren't, that's not particularly surprising because copyright laws exist - without them, there would be stronger incentives to discover other revenue streams.
Does live theater depend on having a resident playwright who doesn’t copyright their work? I missed that detail in the years I worked as a stage electrician.
Live theater absolutely depends on copyright. Do you think playwrights and musical composers just let all those theaters use their work for free and, what, work as cashiers at Trader Joe's?
Absolutely some people earn money based on selling rights to shows. But there's also profitable theatres that just do remounts, where copyright represents a cost, not a revenue source. At least where I am, the festival theatres remounting Broadway shows pull in more money than anyone producing anything original.
Where do you think those theaters redoing other people's shows get those shows? Do you think Broadways playwrights and musical composers do what they do so the show can run in one theater for a month then in every community theater in the country the next month, undercutting their market? Do you think the show producers would put shows on Broadway and in the West End if those were the economics of it?
According to this argument though, who would ever mount a Shakespeare play? The theatre down the street could rip you off at any moment.
Theatres remount things and profit from it. Theatres do original works without much intention of selling the rights later and profit from it. Obviously there are going to be a ton of examples where copyright is used to generate revenue, because it exists and why wouldn't you copyright something when there's no cost to doing it and potential upside. But there's plenty of evidence that live theatre would still exist without copyright.
I'm not sure you're fully understanding what copyright is. On the one hand, people see it as protection from unlimited copying. On the other, it's literally a way to allow others to license a work that society might otherwise decide belongs only to the creator or their patron.
Broadway might still exist. All the theaters, especially community theaters, across the country that don't have Eugene O'Neill or Richard Rodgers would have a terrible time pulling a full house if Bob's nephew wrote all the plays. If there was no way to protect the works made for Broadway, the incentive for people to spend the time writing, composing, arranging, designing sets, making costumes, and choreographing those shows largely disappears. The show can be redone down the street or in Omaha the next week, and all the money goes to the theater doing the ripping off. The show can be videotaped and shown on Hulu the next night, and all the money goes to Hulu.
Shakespeare's plays are beyond the time limits on copyright, which there definitely should be. They are also considered classics. The performance, believe it or not, can still be under copyright. You can't generally go in and record the performance and put out your own stream or DVD of it.
Maybe, but I think way more things would turn into web services instead of offline apps, and that that's where most of the resources would go. Subscriptions everywhere, and slow all-code-on-server interfaces. And there would be draconian contracts to try and prevent developers from walking out the door with the source code.
I think that's more or less happening with or without copyright. I don't have a single piece of standalone paid software installed on my computer (either it's open source and free, or it's something that connects to a service that I do pay for)
> most companies/organisations that use Free software don't contribute to its development
That is a big problem. But the underlying issue is competition (a pillar of the capitalist system) and we should address that instead of trying to fix surface symptoms. If there were incentives to cooperate for the interest of humanity instead of competing for private profit, there would not be a problem.
No, it's actually by design. When I write free software (I don't do it a lot), I don't expect anything of my users. There's no obligation on the user, and there's no obligation on from the author. That is the whole point. Other people may have other motivations, but for me, it's always been, ah, maybe this will help someone else out...
Also, a very important point: cooperation and competition are not opposed to one another. They are equally valid and often cooperation arises from competition.
That installer brings back memories. When I was a kid, I would wonder how it managed to render its own UI and look so different from all the other DOS executables.
Well, I suppose they do have the rights. Despite the one abomination that Adobe has birthed (Flash), I'm actually still a big fan, and subscriber. Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)
Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia.
Also, Flash gets a lot of flak, but it saved us from applets and ActiveX. It also enabled multi media content on a web that was not yet as standardised and functional as today's.
Acrobat reader on the other hand, is pure cancer, and has seen many security holes. PDF is useful, but there are far better PDF readers.
And Flash enabled such a rich multimedia experience on the web in a time when broadband wasn't to be assumed. I remember playing very in-depth games on Newgrounds back in the day via Flash, via a very slow 56k dialup connection. There's no way to replicate that experience these days (easily anyway). The tooling around Flash was all very impressive. Sure the web changed and people turned on Flash, but that doesn't mean it didn't fill a very important niche for a long time.
And of course After Effects is not originally from Adobe either, being bought through Aldus who in turn got it from CoSA. It's funny how much pointless early 90s computer trivia I still recall from playing with promotional CD-ROMs as a child.
As a perpetual license holder that got royally effed over by Adobe, I can proudly say Adobe will never see any money from me anymore.
For almost everything Adobe makes, there are other applications that are equally capable or sometimes miles ahead.
Photoshop for example seems to be stuck in the 2000s, everything about it is dated, it's slow (due to a massive code base with a lot of legacy baggage) and missing many features artists can take for granted in modern graphics applications.
They add fancy AI-powered features all the time while completely ignoring the basic productivity features which wouldn't even be hard to implement.
Tangentially related, I worked at Adobe around 2002-2004 on an Acrobat multimedia plugin that supported multiple media players: QuickTime, Windows Media Player, Real Player, and whatever other players were popular. I suggested we should support Flash too. Management was like "sure, whatever, it's good to support a lot of players, but don't spend much time on it."
Obviously this was before the Macromedia acquisition.
I used to hate on Flash in favor of the grand unifying standard that was HTML5 and JavaScript. Turns out we just exchanged one monopoly by another. And Flash actually enabled artists to do games and shit, as opposed to the idiosyncratic HTML/CSS scene graph attempts, canvas, WebGL, and audio/video sync crap still not matching Flash. Certainly, the web with Flash was more creative and fun.
We lost Flash because Steve Jobs didn't want another platform ruining his vice grip over iPhone. The battery life "issue" could have been fixed in short order.
Flash was light years better than the HTML + JS platypus we have today.
> We lost Flash because Steve Jobs didn't want another platform ruining his vice grip over iPhone. The battery life "issue" could have been fixed in short order.
Flash is notorious for being riddled with security holes.
Also none of the flash content was designed for touch and so it produced a garbage user experience.
>Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)
After Effects was one of the most astounding pieces of software I ever used, it's like pure computing + code + art working together as one.
But neglect and some missteps the past 7 versions or so have ruined it, it's all extremely single core constrained for no good reason and basic things like the playback with sound and basically broken at this point, no matter what the platform or system power it can't consistently play back a ram preview with sound without it slurring or cutting out completely.
Used to work perfectly on a Core 2 Duo 10 years ago, now it feels like a joke on a far more capable machine.
There's a whole secondary and very interesting story to be told here about the nasty relationship that has formed between copyright holders and these firms specializing in takedowns that cling to them like barnacles on a whale.
It's obviously tempting to outsource a job like tracking down copyright violations which doesn't play in to any of your business's competencies, but it also seems quite likely that the companies who provide this "service" typically do so in a way that looks good on a paper report that a manager at the host company receives, but doesn't actually benefit them optimally for the money they spend on it.
Takedown companies seem to go after violations that will net them the fastest and most reliable takedown rates. They want to run up the score so that they can say "last month, we took down 5482 violations of your copyright in Adobe Reader" or what have you. This means, largely, going after posts and uploads on sites that have "quick service" DMCA takedowns like Twitter and YouTube. You're not investing time on random websites that may or may not even respond. No human intelligence is required (indeed, even desirable) in this process. It's effectively humans being paid the lowest possible wage to do an automated job. In some cases I suppose it's probably fully automated.