Remember Rich Internet Applications (RIA -- not to be confused with RIAA)? Three years ago, they were the new hotness, with frameworks like Cappuccino, SproutCore, and (less buzz, but just as interesting) GWT getting their fair share of virtual ink. They promised desktop-quality applications in the browser with better development methodologies. GWT let you develop and debug your web app in java and then compile to javascript. Cappuccino (from a group of former Apple employees) re-implemented the Cocoa/OpenStep libraries and even the objective C language in javascript. And SproutCore copied Cocoa ideas, but with javascript/ruby sensibilities. Apple liked SproutCore enough to hire the developers and used it instead of Web Objects for iWork, iCloud, et cetera.

But then what?

GWT is still around and developed, but they've moved on to the next big thing, i.e., dart.

280 North, the Cappuccino developers, was bought up by Motorola a year ago for $20 million.

Strobe, the primary developers of SproutCore, were bought up by Facebook a couple weeks ago.

Since these projects are all under Free (MIT, Apache, and LGPL) licenses, they won't disappear (in fact, they're still receiving minor updates). But when their primary (or only) developers get bored or cash out, it's safe to say they'll soon stagnate, which is a shame, really.

I was told I get a cookie if I write in my journal.

I support the notion of copyright, and I advocate paying for legitimate versions of a product instead of resorting to finding it from some source that may be illegally distributing it, in spite of how easy the latter can easily be done today. I find the concept of unauthorized file sharing to be nothing short of utter disrespect for the notion of copyright, and do not abide by it or tolerate it in my own household.

In an effort to try to take back some of their business model. recording associations have lobbied governments for stronger laws with regards to copyright infringement, and one of the things that strikes me in particular, and what I wish to talk about here, is the concept of anti-circumvention provisions in such laws.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, anti-circumvention provisions as it applies to copyright law refer to extensions to copyright that forbid the importation or distribution of any technology that could potentially be used to circumvent copyright.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that this would seem to mean that computers that are programmable by the end user might also become illegal, there's something even more serious at stake:

Human thought.

You see, when you remember something, you are, in a sense, creating a copy of that experience for your own private use... if the work happened to be protected by some sort of copy protection, that simple mental act would render one technically, albeit utterly unenforceably, guilty of infringing on copyright if there were no exemptions for private use copying.

Copyright *NEEDS* exemptions for private use copying.

It's been a while since I've darkened the door here. What with all the shifts to a different account, then Multiply, then a few of the "Social Networking" experiments. So I just got a hankering to come back here for a night.

RE Politics: I still hate them. We have a different sort of president this time around and he's making some of the right moves and plenty of wrong ones as well. But I accept that no president will ever satisfy me at all. They're all idiots. At least this idiot won't attack anyone unprovoked. But... that's about all I have to say for that

RE The Economy: We played with fire believing that the economy could be ballooned out infinitely and this is where it got us. However, there is a part of me that wonders what other financial games on the global front were more stealthily responsible for the problems we're seeing. The economy is like the water system in a house. I think someone else on the planet just turned the cold water onto maximum and we're getting scalded in the shower. My money is on China.

RE tonight's Perseid Meteor Shower: Every fucking year on the peak night of the Perseids, we get massive cloud cover. EVERY FUCKING YEAR SINCE 1998 when I first started paying attention.

RE Facebook: Yeah. I'm there. Mostly for personal and professional reasons. It has it's ups and downs. But damn I'm feeling old now. I've been through quite a few "social networks" this place included since 1989. 20 years of social networking and seeing that same stuff repeated over an over and over... Tonight's rerun: the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment seems to be all the rage on Facebook.

RE Operating Systems: Still using Linux. I prefer to actually know how a computer works vs. being completely trapped by a lack of knowledge when a more "friendly" system breaks in a way that can't be tweaked or fixed by a non-coder like me. However, I am pretty impressed with the Windows 7 trial so far.

RE Career: Everything is up in the air now. My organization has experienced massive budget cuts from the state of Ohio. So there is a high likelihood of layoffs this year. We're already foregoing any raises of any kind. But that hasn't been enough to meet the shortfall. So who knows what will happen. I'd love to get out sooner rather than later. Need to bone up on the application and interview processes. I missed out on a rather nice job possibility because I sent my printed resume via snail mail and that organization no longer accepts that format. Had I read the super small fine print at the very bottom of the page with application instructions, I would have found that the online application is NOT optional.

RE Art/Music: I've had zero time to spend on this ever since becoming a parent. By the time I have late night time, I'm too mentally tired to give it a try. But I need to persist. I've had just a few short victories in the past five years. Sadly where I used to be able to spend 6-12 hours on making full songs, I now have just barely enough time to get about a 20-30 second start and then I have to go to sleep. The choice is between being a good dad or a good artist. Right now I choose being a good dad. My kid needs that more than I need an artistic outlet.

So that's my semi-state of the union address. Hope anyone who is still here and reading is doing better than they were a few years ago. And if not, I wish you the best of luck in the coming years. I'll check back again. Someday.

I'm reporting that yahoo is reporting that reuters is reporting that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the IBM and Sun acquisition discussions have collapsed. That could indicate that SUN wants more money, or it could indicate that SUN's financials are worse than expected. In Q4 of 2008, they had a loss of 209 million.

Here is a summary of what I would like to see in copyright.

• It is useful to break up copyright infringement into two categories. The first is state of a copy, and the second is the actual act of infringement. The latter is defined in terms of the former.
• A copy of copyrighted content is an infringing copy when it was made without permission of the copyright holder and the copy is currently not otherwise exempt from infringement. Note that exemption from infringement applies to particular copies, not to the individuals creating them.
• The act of copyright infringement is the creation of an infringing copy.
• The concept of fair dealings currently part of Canadian copyright law should remain and copies which meet those criteria remain exempt from infringement.
• A copy made for the personal and private use of the person making the copy should be exempt from infringement. This exemption should apply to all copyrighted works, not just music. A levy may be charged on blank media to compensate artists for this exemption.
• The aforementioned exemptions to infringement should only apply as long as the copy from which a copy is made is not itself an infringing copy, or, if the copy from which it is made happens to be in another country, would not be an infringing copy if it were located in Canada (but still only remotely accessible to the person making the copy).
• An exemption from infringement should last for as long as the criteria that allow the copy to be exempt from infringement holds to be true. If it changes during its lifetime, the exemption may cease to apply, and the copy becomes an infringing copy. The creator of that copy should in that case also be guilty of copyright infringement. This does not affect the status of any copies that may have been made from the copy of the work before it became infringing. Once the criteria for an exemption is lost from a copy, it cannot qualify for that exemption again later, even if it should once again meet the criteria for the exemption.
• Transmitting, sharing, lending, selling, or renting any copy of a copyrighted work to anyone else, or merely offering to do any of these, irrevocably voids any notion of personal and private use that might otherwise have applied to that copy, and the corresponding exemption to infringement along with it. If the copy is then found to be infringing, the creator of it shall be guilty of copyright infringement.

  All of the above mean that downloading copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer service that has not received any authorization to distribute it is illegal, since the copy that the service is providing does not qualify for a personal use exemption on account that it is being transmitted, that copy is infringing. And since one is making a copy of an infringing copy, the new copy is also infringing. It also means that lending your original CD's to your friends is legal, since although the personal use exemption won't apply to the CD's, the creators of those CD's had permission to create them in the first place and so they don't require a personal use exemption to not be infringing on copyright.

• Knowingly possessing infringing copies of copyrighted content should be considered a crime related to but still separate from copyright infringement and may carry similar penalties. If one does not know that copies they possess are infringing, they shall not be considered guilty of this crime, but once such knowledge is gained, any infringing copies must be surrendered to the authorities upon request, and at their own expense, but without any further penalty. Copies so surrendered are to be summarily destroyed, just as counterfeit currency would be. If one discovers that they possess infringing copies that they did not formerly know were infringing, not surrendering such copies to law enforcement for destruction upon request, for any reason, shall be considered equivalent to the crime of knowingly possessing the infringing copies.
• If a person creates a personal use copy of a work and this copy is misappropriated from him or her without their consent, explicit or implied, they shall not be considered to have committed copyright infringement, although the misappropriated copy shall be considered infringing. Anyone found to be possessing such a misappropriated copy, will be guilty of knowingly possessing an infringing copy of a copyrighted work and may be guilty of other laws as well (such as theft, unauthorized computer access, etc). A person who does not cooperate with law enforcement upon request in finding the person or persons who had evidently misappropriated the copyrighted content will be considered to have implicitly consented to these actions and the personal-use exemption to infringement will not apply.
• The act of copyright infringement must be deliberate. If a person is found to be committing copyright infringement without intent, they must surrender all copies of infringing copyrighted works to the authorities, at their own expense, but without any further penalty, and shall be expected to immediately cease and desist from the activity that was causing the infringement. If they are later found to have not complied, they should then be considered guilty of copyright infringement. Neither ignorance of the copyrighted status of a work nor of copyright law itself should be considered acceptable reasons to be ignorant of copyright infringement.
• Copyright holders may, if they desire, create mechanisms that make it more difficult or inconvenient for the end user to create copies that may be exempt from infringement. No legal framework should exist for preventing anyone from bypassing such mechanisms, however, unless the person can also be found to be guilty of infringing on copyright by creating an otherwise infringing copy.
• Copyright needs to be of finite scope. The duration of a copyright ought to depend on the nature of the work, but no copyright duration should ever be greater than 50 years. Once a copyright expires, the work transits into the public domain.
• Copyright law will not assist anybody in protecting any interests that they have in formerly copyrighted works that have gone into public domain. They may be freely copied by anybody. A publisher is not under any obligation to continue to provide access to public domain content, however... the onus for distribution, if any is desired, falls on the shoulders of those who desire it.

Eric Raymond, gasbag and/or Open Source leader, recently claimed the GPL is no longer needed. "if the market punished people for taking open source closed, then why do our licenses need to punish people for taking open source closed? That is why I don't think you really need GPL or a reciprocal licenses anymore. It is attempting to prevent the behavior that the market punishes anyway.".

He has a point. If Open Source is truly a better development model, then it will beat closed source on its own merits and doesn't need viral clauses.

Flame on!

Here's a set of requirements I have for an ebook reader that I would find useful:

• E-ink, e-paper, or some other passive reflective display. This makes not only for a device that is more legible in bright light than any computer monitor, but also means that battery life is determined by how often one turns pages, not by how long the unit is left on. In fact, such a unit would have no real need for an "off" switch at all.
• Has a full 8.5 x 11" display. Not merely the form factor for the device, but the visible display must be capable of showing a full letter-sized page at one time without shrinking it at all
• Utilizes a mini or micro-USB connector to charge the device and also to transfer content to it. The USB connection should appear like a removable storage device with a common filesystem to any operating system that supports usb-based drives.
• Able to contain user content and display PDF's. I have many books and articles already in PDF form and can view them on my computer, but the ability to view them on a screen that's as easy to read as paper would be far preferable.
• Able to use standard SD cards for content. Removable, replaceable, and an already highly recognized standard, SD cards would allow one to be able to expand their collection of electronic books beyond what might be contained within the device itself.
• Replaceable battery. When the rechargeable battery finally does die, it's important to be able to replace it without having to go and buy a whole new unit
• Touch-screen. Whether this is touched with a finger or pen is irrelevant, but a touch screen could eliminate the need for lots of controls on the margins and could enable the device to have an only marginally larger form-factor than its display area. A virtual qwerty keyboard could even be put on the display for user text input.
• Priced at a level that is commensurate with consumer electronics. I don't want such a device priced at $1500 or so... for that price, I might as well just use a laptop. The above features must be packed into a device that can retail for under about $500USD.

The above items are all must-haves, and I will not even consider purchasing a unit that does not have all of these features. Although some (I suspect most heavily the last one) may seem far-fetched right now, I am inclined to believe that advances will eventually be made that could make all of the above quite achievable in the very near future. The first company to accomplish this in a reliable device will be getting my business and I have little doubt that such a feature set would grab the attention of a lot of other people as well.

And in order of preference, here is a wish-list of items that I would like in the reader. They will not affect whether or not I get one, but a device with these features is more likely to get my attention. I would also be willing to pay a bit more for a device with these features.

1. Rugged. Able to withstand being dropped or possibly even stepped on without damaging the unit or affecting its usability.
2. Waterproof. Able to be utilized outdoors even in inclement weather or possibly even while one is in the shower without damaging the device or its electronics. It should even be possible to accidentally drop in a bathtub, for example, and retrieve it and it continues to work normally. Obviously with this requirement, things like the aforementioned USB connection and SD card slots would have to be sealable inside a watertight compartment within the device.
3. Color. Should be self-explanatory

The above requirements have been on my wish-list for an electronic reader for some time now, and I had actually originally expected to see such devices on the market in or around 2009, but in light of all the new readers have come out recently without one of them even sporting a real 14" diagonal screen, I'm suspecting it might still be another couple of years yet.

Not all that long ago, the governing party in my country (Canada) has reraised the subject of making copyright control circumvention on digital works illegal. Now while I do not for a moment abide copyright infringement, I find myself compelled to point out that this proposed law that would make virtually all copyright control circumvention illegal is an inherently bad thing, not only for consumers, but possibly even for the copyright holder. It even raises a question of the integrity of a governing body that would choose to bring such a law into existence.

A key problem with this sort of law is that if a blanket law is utilized making copy control circumvention on digital works illegal (even making certain exceptions, such as for security or law enforcement purposes), then one cannot legally obtain any tools to bypass such protection unless one is employed in industries that are associated with the exceptions, and from that it is almost inevitable that digital content producers will start putting digital rights management on all produced works from that point forward to lock down their works.

An advocate of the proposed law might wonder how this could be a bad thing, so I am compelled to point out that this sort of thing would mean that a user would not even be able to copy a song to his ipod, for example, unless the publisher of the work had specifically allowed it. Worse, the publisher might allow it to be copied to an ipod, for example, but not happen to allow it to some competing technological device. This is vendor lock-in at its finest and the only way it can be resolved is to not disallow any end-user the privilege of copying a work for their own private use at all. Making circumvention illegal would limit the availability of circumventing technologies, which would in turn deprive the consumer of the very ability to excercise what might have otherwise even been perfectly allowable by the copyright holder but the copyright holder did not have the ability or forsight to support.

Additionally, there is the issue of public domain. Although efforts in the U.S.A. have created a means of extending the duration of copyrights indefinitely, fortunately such mechanisms have not found their way into Canada. When a digitally encrypted work has its copyright expire after the requisite amount of time, if laws prohibiting circumvention were passed, then there would remain no legal means to access tools to decode the encrypted work at all, even though it no longer is protected by copyright! After all, if removing digital encryption on copyrighted works is to really be illegal, then any tools that one might use to defeat such encryption must also be illegal, even if the use of that tool would not in any way infringe on copyright in a particular circumstance.

Another problem with this sort of law is that it will, in the end, not be heeded by a lot of people. Just as certainly as people willfully and quite frequently speed in spite of laws against it, there will be a segment of people who will likewise disregard this law as well. Rather than controlling piracy, the people who are committing copyright infringement on a large scale will go on unhindered, while the private home consumer is metaphorically handcuffed, being legally prohibited from being able to copy any copyrighted works even for their own private use.

In a hypothetical scenario that can only be described as ironic, there is also the problem of a copyright holder who might have chosen to use encryption initially but then later changes his mind. The exact same laws which would keep the end user from copying such a work for themselves could potentially even prevent the copyright holder himself from removing the encryption! Not only do consumers face vendor lock-in, but copyright holders might as well, locking people into a decision that they have absolutely no legal means to back out of. Although admittedly, a copyright holder being locked out of being able to copy his or her own works as he chooses seems unlikely, it's still quite within the realm of possibility.

Of course, a supporter of such copyright control legistlation being in place might want to argue that if copying for private use is made exempt so that tools to bypass encryption are still legally available, then people will abuse that privilege to commit copyright infringement. I would put it to such a person that such infringement will occur regardless of laws put into place. While it may have the potential to create a perceived lull in the amount of piracy that appears to go on, in reality the people who would be committing the most copyright infringement would simply have to move their activities further below the radar to continue their practices. In the meantime, the average consumer is immensely affected, having absolutely no legal means whatsoever at his or her disposal to make a copy even for their own private use, which I might point out even has an explicit exemption to copyright infringement for music in the Copyright Act of Canada (as an aside, it is my own personal view that personal and private use should be an exemption to copyright infringement for all types of copyrighted works, not merely music).

Finally, and probably the biggest issue with this law is that it is largely unenforceable, except when a person may happen to have done something that makes their actions known to law enforcement. The law should, of course, apply equally to everybody, so it would seem strange for any governing body to want to pass a law that they not only know they cannot fairly and justly enforce, but actually cannot possibly even have the *intent* to do so, as the only way to fully enforce it would be to spy on people while even in their own homes. If there is no intention to go after the private consumer who is merely copying a work for their own private use, even if they are breaking copyright controls to do it, then why on earth should there be a proposed law that implies they would do exactly that? The only answer that I can think of that makes any sense is that the law is only some sort of hand-waving exercise to present the facade of the government trying to do something about what I do realize is a very serious problem in our political and social climate today. I would sincerely hope that our country would consider its integrity a higher priority than that.

I do not, as I said before, abide any form of copyright infringement. I fully maintain the position that people who commit copyright infringement of any work should face not only a civil suit by the copyright holder in cases where damages are applicable, but legal consequences as well (on the order of ever-increasing fines for repeat offenders). However, I cannot for any period of time abide our government wanting to enforce new laws whose ineffectiveness will only create far more problems than it attempts to solve.

Yup, you heard me right... what is sure to go over like lead balloon with people who've persistently demanded that copyright infringers aren't actually stealing anything, I reiterate it again, copyright infringement is theft.

And I don't just mean by technicality, or even just legally, I mean quite literally... that is, utilizing the notion that whatever one steals from somebody else the original possessor no longer has, or has as much of.

No, I'm not going to argue that it's stealing the actual work, because the author still has that, nor am I going to argue that it's stealing because one is depriving the copyright holder of potential income, which is a tenuous argument at best and the exact same thing could be said of completely legal competition.

What one is stealing by committing copyright infringement is some measure of the exclusivity that the copyright holder was supposed to have in being able to copy the work. After all, since exclusive by definition means that nobody else is doing it, you cannot possibly argue that the copyright holder really still has exactly the same amount of exclusivity over copying their work if somebody else was also doing it without their permission, right? In fact, about the _only_ way exclusivity isn't really affected in some way by somebody else copying the work is either if one had explicit permission from the copyright holder to make the copy; or, simply by virtue of the fact that it wouldn't actually affect anyone else, if one happens to never share it with anyone nor offer to distribute the copy to anyone else in any way whatsoever, for the lifetime of the copyright. Now, with a file on that contains a copyrighted work that is on one's home computer, utilizing a mechanism that allows it to be accessed freely by other people who connect to one's home computer doesn't exactly fit the latter criteria unless one is also prepared to file charges against people who may be discovered to have accessed it for acts of computer trespass, so unless one had permission to do so from the copyright holder, then doing so deprives the copyright holder of some of his or her exclusivity on copying the work, and is therefore stealing.

By that token, therefore, it becomes likewise ethically questionable simply to download copies of copyrighted materials from sources that were not authorized to distribute such copies by the copyright holder in very much the same way that it is wrong to knowingly buy or otherwise obtain goods that were originally stolen.

One may be certainly welcome to have the opinion that there shouldn't be any sort of exclusivity with copyright, but that's not the way things actually are. In fact, without exclusivity, there's not really any point to having a "right to copy" in the first place, so copyright becomes moot.

It is at this juncture, I would expect that a person who still insists that copyright infringement is not ethically wrong would protest my points, by possibly arguing that this 'exclusivity' isn't anything real, and therefore the holder isn't deprived of anything, although the insubstantialness of something does not diminish its potential importance to some people. Who are we to decide what may or may not be valuable to some other person?

Om fact, about the only way one can sustain any sort of argument that this exclusiveness shouldn't matter is if they are to offer up the notion that copyright itself is a moral outrage, censoring the free exchange of information by persons who may choose to do so. That may be an argument for another time, but I trust I have made my initial point... that at least by the very definition of what copyright is supposed to be, infringing on copyright actually involves taking something away from the copyright holder. Something that we, as a society, continually grant him or her merely by respecting it.

Of course, there are doubtless people who would argue that because this exclusivity is intangible, it can't really be stolen.

But what if somebody is tapping into your internet bandwidth without your consent, or perhaps your power? Neither of those are tangible commodities, but the fact that somebody is taking away some of a finite resource without consent of the person who is responsible for it would seem to make that theft. Tangibility has nothing to do with it... the only thing that matter is that the resource is not infinite in supply.

And a copyright holder's exclusivity is *NOT* infinite... it is only as wide as their distribution capacity - if everyone within the copyright holder's distribution capacity were copying the work without permission, then the copyright holder would have no real exclusivity at all.

So what does this mean, exactly? Well, it means is that that actual damage to the copyright holder's exclusivity for any single copyright infringement is pretty tiny... probably imperceptible, in fact. It can reasonably be argued that this imperceptibility is why personal use copying should reasonably be permitted, since it has no real impact on the copyright holder's exclusivity to determine who is going to make copies. When one distributes an unauthorized copy to someone else, however... particular if they do it via a medium that permits theoretically unlimited copying, such as putting it in a folder on their computer that they knowingly allow everyone on the Internet to copy from, the net damage to the copyright holder's exclusivity starts to mount up... and becomes not just perceptible, but potentially causing measurable damage to the rights and reputation of the copyright holder.

Copyright infringement is theft... and in most cases, it is a very cowardly type of theft... being done in secret, where the chance of being caught is negligible. Teaching that it is not theft only gives people less ethical incentive to respect copyright - something that exists to promote the arts. Why should people who value that disrespect it?