> I thought this is technically impossible, and it will never happen
I always hated this meme/mindset, because if you dig in to the history of them you'll see that their original purpose was to collide. They were labels to identify messages in Apollo's distributed computing architecture. UID and later UUIDs were a reversible way to mark an intersection point between two dimensions.
Any two nodes in a distributed system would generate the same UID/UUID for the same two inputs, and a recipient of an identified message could reverse the identifier back into the original components. They were designed as labels for ephemeral messages so the two dimensions were time and hardware ID (originally Apollo serial number, later 802.3 hwaddress etc).
I think a lot of the confusion can be traced to the very earliest AEGIS implementation where the Apollo engineers started using “canned” (their term, i.e. static or well-known) UIDs to identify filesystems. Over time the popular usage of UUID fully shifted from ephemeral identifiers where duplicates were intentional toward canned identifiers where duplicates were unwanted and the two dimensions were random-and-also-random.
That's not why people use JDownloader. There are plugins for every popular file-sharing site that automate navigating download pages, handling countdown timers, and pausing for ratelimits.
A few millennia too late for that: the “mark of the beast” is just money — “so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark”. How does one buy or sell without money? Otherwise we would call it bartering.
People who don't believe in copyright shouldn't be punished for "breaking" it.
Corporations believe in copyright so if they "break" it they should get punished for breaking rules they made up themselves.
Generally the law should be more strict for corporations than for real people.
edit: People downvoting can you argue why you disagree? I do think it's fair for the law to be more strict on the powerful rather than on the powerless.
I think this is an easy distinction to make: copyright is bullshit and knowledge should be free. I have no problem with pirates sharing information freely. I do have a problem with a company taking someone else's work and profiting from it. The only thing worse than copyright as it exists is copyright that can be selectively ignored when the powerful will it. Attempt to use copyright to promote Free software with the GPL? Ha, nope, copyright for me and not for thee; I'll train on your code and sell it back to you. You want to preserve access to a game or film that's unavailable or unplayable? Time to send the C&D and destroy you. Only bad things are possible.
Until we progress as a society to the point that we can put this system behind us we should at least fight to make enforcement uniform. In fact, uniform enforcement is probably a good starting point for arguing for abolition, as the pain of that enforcement is felt by proles and elites alike.
All security is security through obscurity. When it gets obscure enough we call it “public key cryptography”. Guess the 2048-bit prime number I'm thinking of and win a fabulous prize! (access to all of my data)
I wonder how they must have felt to have coded a 9/11 scenario of Arsenal Gear crashing into the Twin Towers, and then watched it actually happen a few months later.
At least that was cut from the game. I remember that episode from The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files spin-off series, where they stopped the (inside job) hijacking of a commercial airplane from crashing into the twin towers, which aired just a few months before the attack.
I only watched it a few years later, and I had to double check the airing date.
There is not only one copy. There are many copies under Konami's control. It is also fully up to Konami if they want it to eventually become public or if they just want to delete it and have it never revealed. That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution.
> That is the decision that they themselves have the power to make and leaks like this is stripping them of their creative rights over distribution
Fuck yeah, that's exactly why this leak is a great thing. It should belong to everybody. “Konami” as an entity is not even comprised of the same people that worked there when MGS2 was created. Stop personifying corporations as singular entities.
You are entitled to think that people's hard work should belong to everyone after X many years. Stealing it is not something to celebrate as it is a deeply malicious action. Konami being made up of different people does not mean that they don't own still own it and have control over it. While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them. Konami by definition is a legal person (法人) so I do not see anything wrong with personification of it.
You have it precisely backwards. Culture belonging to the people is the default, natural state, and copyright is an unnatural legal fiction that should only be tolerated insofar at it produces a net positive in terms of promotion of the arts and sciences.
Unfortunately, the whole intellectual property concept has been co-opted by big business for rent-seeking.
I don't think the Konami execs are at a board meeting saying, "we can't fund another Metal Gear sequel because it will just become public domain in 20 years."
Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't. It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have. Copies of the game have been released for people to play to directly experience the game.
>unnatural legal fiction
It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created. If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
> Culture may belong to people, but intellectual property like source code doesn't.
> It is extremely natural for someone to have ownership over what one has created.
Intelectual property is an oxymoron, and no oxymoron can be natural. Only scarce things can be property. Making non-scarce things (e.g. binary code) act as property is conflict-seeking behavior that often results in the violation of real ownership of others.
> It's protected by NDAs for the express fact that it doesn't become part of what the people have.
NDA do not protect IPs. While they restrict the flow of information, they are still contracts, and bounded by their limits as such.
> If you make a beautifully designed pendant someone can't just steal it from you and claim that they are "archiving it" and want to experience culture.
Yes, someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design on the basis that they own their own pendant materials. To prevent that is to violate their private property rights and, in some cases, their right to live.
Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership. Intellectual property is a subcategory of property. It isn't an oxymoron.
>NDA do not protect IPs.
But they do indicate intent.
>someone can "steal" (copy) my beatiful design
I was talking about the physical object. They may think it is of such importance that it should live in a museum instead of as your private property. Other people believe that a museum could preserve it better and they think they know how best the pendant should be used than its actual owner.
> Abundant things can be property too. Property is about ownership.
The legally and ethically relevant concept of ownership is about dealing with mutual exclusivity of material resources and avoiding its conflicts. Abudant things, in this context, do not have mutual exclusivity and, as such, are not ownable in a natural sense.
> But they do indicate intent.
And?
> I was talking about the physical object.
Sure, but we are talking about IPs, not real property, so I fail to see how this example is relevant.
> While archival sounds like a noble goal, in practice it is an excuse used by people who want to steal copyrighted works and take advantage of them
“Take advantage” of them by restoring cut content, fixing bugs, and porting them to platforms that Konami never would. I am very excited for MGS2 to be taken advantage of.
> A thief would be excited to eat the food they stole
I don't concede that the act of sharing this code is stealing, of course. The act of helping one's fellow man is a good thing. You've made your stance clear, and the very cogent and fairly conclusive arguments people have made against your stance don't seem to land, and I have no interest in repeating that exercise (and neither do you, I'm sure).
But this phrase stood out to me, and in particular that you would choose food as an example. You could've used any other example, like a new hat, or a baseball bat, a tricycle, a mirror, and so on. But you chose food, something people need to survive. Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you? What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
>Is the case of stealing food not at all morally ambiguous to you?
It is not ambiguous in the least. To me part of being human is being able to ignore one's natural instincts and make one's own actions. If someone is stealing food either they are no better than an animal, so they should be locked up like one, or they are antisocial and want to commit malicious acts in which they should be punished.
>What about the case of a young mother stealing diapers she can't afford?
To me this clearly is also wrong. Either the father needs to be working more so they can afford them, or the mother should create them herself instead of resulting to stealing them. The age of the mother makes no difference as basic harmful behavior like stealing is taught and understood at a very young age.
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