Re: 30 days trial immune to set clock back in time?

On Sep 19, 5:51 pm, Eric Sosman <Eric.Sos...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
bbo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Why are you helping people to create artificial scarcity?

     What is it with you and the phrase "artificial scarcity" today?

What is it with people showing up on cljp asking how they can make the
software they're developing less useful for people?

That's like
helping some hoodlums smash a bunch of windows, on the grounds that
the extra economic activity created when they have to replace the
windows makes this a net benefit to the economy, and when it just so
happens that one of the more enthusiastic hoodlums also happens to be
the local glass-maker's son.

     No, it's really more like a charlatan posing as an itinerant
football-inflator ... [lots of patent nonsense deleted], I'm sure you'll
agree.

Wrong.

Only instead of smashing windows, they smash our property rights in
our computer hardware and storage devices, and our freedom of speech
and freedom of transaction with other human beings.

     If you think so much of property rights, why do you despise
Tomer for attempting to protect his rights in the software he himself
created?

What are you talking about? I'd defend Tomer's rights if someone ever
broke into his place and stole a CD or something.

The problem is not Tomer's rights to his own property. It's his
attempts to enforce restrictions on what other people can do with
*their* property, in the peculiar case that it's their copy of
software that Tomer originally wrote.

THEIR copy. If they have physical possession of some sequence of bits
and bytes, and obtained it lawfully, it is theirs to do with as they
please. If they wish to use it for more than thirty days, or make
copies of it, that falls within their natural rights. Tomer wishes to
infringe on those rights, more or less by use of force. That is what I
cannot condone. Tomer's rights extend to his own property fence, his
person, and the objects he legitimately owns, and no further. If he
makes something, it's his. If he makes a copy, that's his. If he sells
or gives away a copy, it becomes someone else's, and Tomer attempting
to still exert some sort of "property rights" in it actually infringes
on the property rights of the actual owner, whoever Tomer sold or gave
it to, or whoever received it more indirectly.

I don't understand why people have so much difficulty understanding
these things. It's really pretty cut and dried, and nobody has trouble
with it in the case that it's a more ordinary good.

For example, if a furniture maker gave or sold me a chair, then sent
someone around thirty days later to break into my place and chop the
chair up into kindling so I'd have to buy another, that would be a
clear violation of my rights, and clearly vandalism. Nobody would
consider it justified because it let the furniture maker sell more
furniture.

Of course, you might be thinking instead of a rental, but a rental is
borrowing something that's scarce -- while you have the thing, nobody
else can until you return it. If you hold onto the chair, meanwhile
nobody else can use that chair. If it's a copy, though, and everybody
can easily have a copy, then there is no longer that problem.

Or perhaps you're thinking of repossession, if you bought something on
credit and didn't pay. But again, there's no logical justification for
software "repossession"; your keeping a functioning copy doesn't cost
anyone else anything, since they still have their copies. If you lapse
on your car payments, you have a car, the dealership doesn't, and the
dealership doesn't have the fair exchange for that car either. If you
have a copy of some software, the "dealership" has not been deprived
of the original, and can make more copies extremely cheaply -- so
cheaply that it's cheaper to run off another marginal copy than it is
to try to track yours down and take it from you. To the point that
this so-called "repossession" consists of trying to destroy, rather
than recover, the "missing" software.

It's frankly ludicrous.

 Or is it only *your* property rights that are important
in the grand scheme of things.

It is everybody's, as I have explained above.
.

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