Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 13th, ’23

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May 13th, 2023
















Canada Extends Copyright Protection for 20 More Years Under New Trade Obligation
Mia Rabson

There will be no new books, songs or plays added to the public domain in Canada until 2043 after the government squeezed in a change to copyright laws just before the end of 2022.

Until Dec. 30, copyright protection applied to literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works for the life of their author plus another 50 years.

But as of that date, an artistic work won’t join the public domain for the life of the author plus another 70 years.

The change brings Canada into compliance with a commitment it made under the new North American free trade deal to match its copyright protections with those in place in the United States since 1998. That deal gave Canada until Dec. 31, 2022, to fall in line and it beat the deadline by one day.

In a statement from the office of Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, the government said the change also puts Canada in line with many other countries, including those in Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia.

“Canada will continue to do its part to protect the interests of artists, creators and rights holders, while continuing to balance the needs of industry,” the statement said.

Public domain use means works can be republished or repurposed without seeking permission or paying a rights holder for the use of the work.

It’s what has allowed, for example, numerous adaptations, reprints, prequels and sequels for “Anne of Green Gables,” which joined the public domain in the United States in 1983 and in Canada in 1992.

Public domain also allows libraries, museums and archives to use works freely for research and historical purposes, including posting online archives of the important papers of politicians and world leaders.

Any remaining copyright on writings to or by former prime minister Lester B. Pearson would have been lifted on Jan. 1, under the old law because he died in 1972. Now that won’t happen until 2043.

It is not retroactive, but applies to any author, composer or screenwriter whose works would have been added to the public domain between now and 2043, meaning for 20 years nothing new will be added to the public domain in Canada.

That period affects novels by Canadian authors such as Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy, but also international writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Roald Dahl.

Writer associations have generally been in favour of the changes, saying the more assurance creators have to get paid for their work, the more incentive there is to create.

Academics, librarians, archivists and museums, however, argue that it limits their ability to access and use hundreds of works, most of which no longer have any commercial value.

“The reality is that the vast majority of works that enter into the public domain have very little, typically no commercial value anymore,” said Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.

“And that’s one of the reasons why many others are really troubled by this extension, because so many of the works may have historical cultural value, but don’t have commercial value anymore.”

Geist also disputes the notion the 50 year post-death time frame was stifling creation.

“No one is thinking of writing the great novel right now and might have hesitated for the last number of years because they’re heirs only got 50 years and they wake up this morning and think ‘now I’m really going to do it because there’s that extra 20 years of protection after I’ve died,”’ he said. “People just don’t think that way.”

He said the extra protection has a commercial benefit for a small number of people, and that could have been addressed with an opt-in clause, so rights holders of works that do still have commercial value could ask for an extension.

He also said it extends the limits on access or use of what are known as orphan works, those which the rights holder is not easily reached.

Geist also accused the government of burying the change, by putting it near the bottom of a nearly 450-page budget bill last spring. The government didn’t highlight the copyright act changes in any of its documents about that bill.

There was also no government announcement when cabinet decided in November to set the in effect date to Dec. 30, or when it did take effect. In all, the government issued 3,998 news releases in 2022 and not one of them was about the changes to copyright law.

“A lot of people are just literally waking up over the last couple of days to this issue and are shocked to learn this is something Canada went ahead and did, because it got so little coverage and attention,” Geist said.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9383379/c...tion-20-years/





DAZN Joins Anti-Piracy Coalition to Crack Down on Bootleg Sports Streams

Big media and tech companies are teaming up to take down illegal streams worldwide.
Umar Shakir

International online sports broadcasting company DAZN has joined a global task force that aims to shut down pirated and unauthorized sports streaming operations worldwide. The new group is operated by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), which counts giants like Amazon, Apple, NBC Universal, Netflix, Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros. among its members.

Unauthorized streaming sources can often be the only available option for people to watch certain teams and matches subject to complicated broadcasting deals, locked into high-priced bundles, and blackouts. With more tech and entertainment companies using sports as a sweetener for their services (NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube, MLS / MLB for Apple TV Plus, and Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime are a few examples), they have more reasons to collectively take issue with anyone popping up a free stream.

ACE as a whole had previously taken down IPTV-based service NitroTV, which allegedly charged users $20 per month in the US for a collection of unlicensed streaming content.

ACE was first formed in 2017 as the anti-piracy arm of the Motion Picture Association (formerly known as the MPAA until it dropped the second A in 2019). Now with DAZN, it consists of 53 big media companies.

DAZN, which has many international sports streaming deals from Premier League in Spain to NFL in Canada, joined the new ACE Sports Piracy Task Force alongside Qatari state-owned beIN Media Group. The effort comes after ACE announced it took down a Moroccan-based operation setting up unauthorized FIFA World Cup Qatar streams last year.

ACE cites that sports piracy eats away about $28 billion in annual revenue from broadcasters. The new task force expands on ACE’s worldwide foothold on piracy investigations, which it often collaborates on with governments.

The task force will pursue the criminal operators who are damaging sport at all levels,” DAZN COO Ed McCarthy states in a press release. McCarthy also goes on to claim that many illegal operations collect fans’ credit card info and personal data for other criminal uses.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/9/23...egal-streaming





Ed Sheeran, Once Again, Demonstrates How Modern Copyright Is Destroying, Rather Than Helping Musicians
Mike Masnick

To hear the recording industry tell the story, copyright is the only thing protecting musicians from poverty and despair. Of course, that’s always been a myth. Copyright was designed to benefit the middlemen and gatekeepers, such as the record labels, over the artists themselves. That’s why the labels have a long history of never paying artists.

But over the last few years, Ed Sheeran has been highlighting the ways in which (beyond the “who gets paid” aspect of all of this) modern copyright is stifling rather than incentivizing music creation — directly in contrast to what we’re told it’s supposed to be doing.

We’ve talked about Sheeran before, as he’s been sued repeatedly by people claiming that his songs sound too much like other songs. Sheeran has always taken a much more open approach to copyright and music, noting that kids pirating his music is how he became famous in the first place. He’s also stood up for kids who had accounts shut down via copyright claims for playing his music.

But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:

There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.

In the aftermath of this, Sheeran has said that he’s now filming all of his recent songwriting sessions, just in case he needs to provide evidence that he and his songwriting partners came up with a song on their own, which is depressing in its own right.

In the latest case, which just concluded last week, Sheeran said that if he lost he’d probably quit music altogether, as it’s just not worth it.

…when asked what he would do if the court ruled against him, Sheeran said, “If that happens, I’m done. I’m stopping… To have someone come in and say, ‘We don’t believe you, you must have stole it’… [i] find insulting…”

He went on, “I find it really insulting to work my whole life as a singer-songwriter and diminish it.”

Doesn’t seem like copyright helping to create incentives for new works, does it? It sure sounds like copyright stifling creativity and artistry. Elsewhere, he’s noted similar things, talking about how songwriters know there are only so many notes, and certain songs are going to sound somewhat similar to one another. He notes that actual songwriters all seem to get this.

“I feel like in the songwriting community, everyone sort of knows that there’s four chords primarily that are used and there’s eight notes. And we work with what we’ve got, with doing that.”

[….]

“I had a song that I wrote for Keith Urban, and it sort of sounded like a Coldplay song,” Sheeran added, referring the country singer’s 2018 record “Parallel Line.” “So I emailed Chris Martin and I said, ‘This sounds like your tune. Can we clear it?’ And he went, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. No.’”

He added: “And on the song I made sure they put, ‘I think it sounds like “Everglow,” Coldplay.’ But he was just like, ‘Nah, I know how songs are written. And I know you didn’t go into the studio and go, I want to write this.’”

Of course, with this latest lawsuit it wasn’t actually a songwriter suing. It was a private equity firm that had purchased the rights from one of the songwriters (not Marvin Gaye) of Marvin Gaye’s hit song “Let’s Get it On.”

The claim over Thinking Out Loud was originally lodged in 2018, not by Gaye’s family but by investment banker David Pullman and a company called Structured Asset Sales, which has acquired a portion of the estate of Let’s Get It On co-writer Ed Townsend.

Thankfully, Sheeran won the case as the jury sided with him over Structured Asset Sales. Sheeran, once again, used the attention to highlight just how broken copyright is if these lawsuits are what’s coming out of it:

“I’m obviously very happy with the outcome of the case, and it looks like I’m not having to retire from my day job after all. But at the same time I’m unbelievably frustrated that baseless claims like this are able to go to court.

“We’ve spent the last eight years talking about two songs with dramatically different lyrics, melodies, and four chords which are also different, and used by songwriters every day all over the world. These chords are common building blocks used long before Let’s Get it On was written, and will be used to make music long after we’re all gone.

“They are in a songwriters’ alphabet, our toolkit, and should be there for all of us to use. No one owns them or the way that they are played, in the same way that no one owns the color blue.”

He concluded the speech by saying he would never allow himself to be a “piggybank for anyone to shake.”

Good for him, though one hopes he’ll also help push for better copyright laws that would stop this kind of nonsense, and help lead to a broader rethinking of copyright in our time.

And… apparently, right after winning, Sheeran released his latest album (Subtract) based on a bunch of other challenges and traumatic experiences he’s gone through recently. It’s unfortunate that bogus copyright trials leading him to consider dropping out of the music world entirely added to the trauma.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/08/...ing-musicians/





There's a 'Volume War' Happening in Music

Lead vocalists have gotten quieter over the decades, compared with the rest of the band, according to a new study. A leading industry figure says it's part of the "volume wars."
Manuela López Restrepo

Who is he? A multi-instrumentalist, Grammy winner and Beyoncé usurper, Beck is one of the biggest names in alternative rock.

• Awards aside, he's also one of the subjects of a German study that has observed a shift in how modern music is mixed, and how vocalists aren't as much in the foreground of the mix as they once were.

• According to acoustic scientists at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, lead singers have been getting quieter over the years – in some genres more than others.

What's the big deal? As times change, so do our tastes for just about everything. The study was able to find this phenomenon across the board of musical stylings and flairs.

• Kai Siedenburg and his colleague analyzed the four highest ranked songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart between 1946 and 2020, along with top songs in the country, rap, pop, rock, and heavy metal genres. When they compared the loudness of singers to everything else — guitars, drums and more — they found that rock and metal had the most drastic shifts in volume.

• Interestingly enough, the several Beck songs observed in the study all had his vocals at a similar noise level, or even quieter, than the instruments. He says that result is the product of his own stylistic preferences.

• "I came up more in the indie rock genre, alternative music. And the ethos of that time was to really bury the vocal ... You didn't want people to hear what you were saying."

• The study featured Beck's 1996 hit "Where It's At" as a prime example of this trend.

Youtube Video

What's he saying? Beck spoke with NPR to give his own insight on the volume knob turning down over the years.

On the power of musical layers:

The track and the rhythm has to be at the forefront if you want to move people. As soon as you put the vocal up at the forefront, the track loses its energy and its immediacy and it becomes something else, which is why I think it suits jazz or folk.

But the minute you do that on a pop song, you kind of lose people in that connection to feel the energy of a track ... It loses a kind of visceral immediacy that people are conditioned to, and it will make the song kind of feel a little dull.

On how vocal volume can convey emotion:

I would say Adele is probably one of the best selling artists of the recent era of music. And I think her vocals are pretty loud. And maybe that's something that people connect to.

You can have an emotional connection to something that's just purely electronic, or like a heavy Led Zeppelin rock song where the energy and the power of the guitar riff are really carrying the song. But as far as connecting to what the person is singing, and that sort of emotional presence of a song, you would have to have the vocal louder. And that's probably part of Adele's success.

On how external factors have impacted this change:

There's a lot of volume wars going on as well. Like how loud people can get songs to be impactful. I think vocals have become a casualty of that in the last few decades.

So now we're in this kind of arms race of audio and sound and volume to get these tracks louder and louder. So, yeah, now I think we're at a point where, for the most part, it's the beat, a little bit of vocal, and maybe one little element of music in there. You know, this is a long way from the world of [The Beatles'] Sgt. Peppers, where there are orchestras and sitars and a million other sonic colors happening.

So, what now?

• It seems like our listening habits will only continue to evolve with the times, which could mean that sooner than later, we'll only want to listen to 15 second sped up music clips we've found on TikTok.

• And the scientists don't have much guidance for musicians aside from letting them do their thang: "They should just do what they do and generate the music they love."


https://text.npr.org/1174381307





Pearson Taking Legal Action Over Use of its Content to Train Language Models, as it Announces Own AI Plans

Pearson has already sent out a cease-and-desist letter over use of its intellectual property
Daniel O'Boyle

Textbooks giant Pearson is currently taking legal action over the use of its intellectual property to train AI models, chief executive Andy Bird revealed today as the firm laid out its plans for its own artificial intelligence-powered products.

The firm laid out its plans on how it would use AI a week after its share price tumbled by 15% as American rival Chegg said its own business had been hurt by the rise of ChatGPT.

Those plans would include AI-powered summaries of Pearson educational videos, to be rolled out this month for Pearson+ members, as well as AI-generated multiple choice questions for areas where a student might need more help.

Bird said Pearson had an advantage as its AI products would use Pearson content for training, which he said would make it more reliable.

However, he also added that the business was also monitoring the situation regarding other businesses using Pearson content to train its AI. He said Pearson had already sent out a cease-and-desist letter, though did not say who it was addressed to.

“We’re committed to protecting that IP and we’re following developments in fields such as music and photography with great interest,” he said.

“We take great efforts, and will continue to do, to protect our IP. We are in litigation with a company and have sent a cease-and-desist letter, but I won’t go into any further specifics.

“We’ve also been approached to license our IP and at the time decided not to go down that route. But there may be benefits of licensing our IP at certain circumstances.”

Bird also said it was usually easy to tell what a large language model such as ChatGPT has been trained on, because “you can ask it”.

Bird also sought to point out a difference between Pearson and Chegg, which focuses more on homework assistance.

“They are in a very different business to us,” he said. “We see a great differentiator between what Chegg are offering and what Pearson+ are offering.

“We’re in the business of helping you learn and improve your skills, not in the business of answering.”

He added that - as Pearson was in the business of learning - its products would be hard to replace.

“If all we had to do was read a set of facts in order to learn, there’d be no need for schools, colleges and teachers.”

Pearson shares are up 13.3p to 831.6p today. They are currently 3.8% below where they opened this time last week, before the steep slide sparked by Chegg’s warning.
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/...-b1079807.html





‘Don’t Copy That Floppy’: The Untold History of Apple II Software Piracy

A computer historian tells the story of one of the earliest copy protection battles of the personal computer era.
Laine Nooney

The following is an edited excerpt from The Apple II Age: How The Computer Became Personal, by Laine Nooney, and is published with permission.

**

Robert Tripp was starting out March 1981 with a mea culpa. As the editor and publisher of MICRO: The 6502 Journal, Tripp was in the unenviable position of having to pen an apology for running an ad for the disk copy utility program Locksmith. He started out by insisting on the obvious, that MICRO was “unconditionally opposed to the illegal copying of software listings, cassettes, diskettes or any other protected material.”

He likened the copying of software to the photocopying of a magazine and acknowledged that MICRO would have no livelihood if readers could simply get the content free or at minimal cost. He then went about surveying the “hidden costs” of illegally duplicated software, or “copywrongs,” as he put it, in a fizzled attempt at humor. According to Tripp, software piracy increased costs for consumers, added technical headaches, and, in the very long term, deprived developers of the royalties necessary to sustain themselves and their programming practices. “The only person who benefits from ‘copywrong’ is the thief,” Tripp wrote. “Everyone else loses in the long run.”

Tripp’s editorial was motivated by something that had never happened in the world of microcomputer journalism before: the threat of an advertiser boycott. The software publishers who formed a sizable contingent of Tripp’s advertising base were incensed over the Locksmith ad, which they believed served to enable software piracy. Released by the newly formed Omega Software Systems, an otherwise anonymous publisher with no prior products to its name, Locksmith promised to copy the “uncopyable.” In other words, it allowed users to make duplications of floppy disks that were otherwise locked by the varied copy protection schemes used by publishers as a loss prevention mechanism to thwart piracy.

Understanding why a group of software publishers might threaten to ruin a niche microcomputer hobbyist magazine over another company’s ad requires understanding the tangled net of industrial tensions that emerged between the producers and the consumers of microcomputer software in the early 1980s. As a consumer microcomputing market began to flourish, developers became alert to the risks software piracy posed to their burgeoning industry. If no one paid for software, they worried, who would bother to write it, and how would the industry grow?

Thus began the drama of copy protection, an industrial loss prevention practice wherein companies used a combination of hardware and software techniques to scramble the data on software media formats, typically 5.25-inch floppy disks, so that copying the disk was no longer possible by conventional means. While the goal of this subtle bit of friction was to throttle piracy, it also prevented users from creating backup copies of software they legally owned, or otherwise accessing the code itself.

Copy protection centralizes unique tensions around the status of software in the early 1980s, particularly with regard to its ownership. Was software a good or a service? Did users have a right to access the code itself or only its end result? Was preventing users from making backup copies a form of industrial overreach or even consumer abuse? No computer enthusiast magazine of the period, and no software publisher or consumer, went untouched by the roiling debate over copy protection.

There are no definitive answers to such questions, but putting a historical spin on the issue offers a richer query: Why were such questions ever concerns to begin with? As it turns out, the way people used their computers matters a great deal for understanding why copy protection (and copy breaking) became such a fiercely contested issue. Copy protection could interfere with personal computing’s most mundane operations—the quotidian ability to use your software. Taking seriously the claims of those who supported Locksmith, not to enhance piracy operations, but to make their own interactions with software more efficient, secured, or productive, we might consider Locksmith as a historical artifact to productively center the habits and practices (and challenges and frustrations) of what everyday computing looked like at the day of the personal computing era.
Software Piracy at the Dawn of Personal Computing

Understanding why software duplication was such a thorny issue during the early years of the commercial microcomputer software industry requires understanding the status of software copyright in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as setting aside internet-era notions of piracy. Whether our point of entry to a computational world was desktop computers or touchscreen smartphones, computer users of the twenty-first century have become accustomed to a computing environment where access to software is negotiated through proprietary, often cloud-based platforms—app stores by Tencent or Apple, Valve’s PC gaming distribution platform Steam, Google Drive’s Docs or Sheets, or Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Copying such software is difficult if not impossible, given that the software’s code is not physically in our possession.

Personal computers functioned differently in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike domestic computational technologies such as video game consoles or pocket calculators, the Apple II and many of its competitors were not designed as proprietary or closed systems. Indeed, the entire appeal of a personal computer was that it put computing power directly in the hands of users. It was essential that users be able not only to program on their machine but also to save and distribute the work they did. Such dynamics were also essential to building a software market that would compel the purchase of this inordinately expensive hardware. Consequently, flexible storage formats were desirable. Cassettes and floppy disks were relatively inexpensive, relatively durable, and gave users control of data. But that control cut both ways, since it gave users the ability to copy not just their own work but anyone else’s too.

Why Piracy?

Rationales for engaging in unauthorized duplication were complex. Users, such as their opinions can be documented, shared concerns about the limitations copy protection placed on both the practical usability of their software and the ideological, Hacker Ethic–style concerns related to software ownership and free access of information. Anecdotal and archival evidence indicates that there were explicit piracy rings large and small, often running out of local users groups or even software retailers.

Some users were not keyed in to the software journalism scene well enough to realize that disk duplication broke the law; others insisted no harm was being done as long as they didn’t charge for the copied software or that they could do whatever they pleased with their property. And some pirates ascribed to the notion that software prices were unreasonably high, especially when it was clear that some publishers were already raking in millions.

The goal of most copy protection efforts was not to prevent all piracy, which was technologically impossible; as one early computer user put it, “For any copy-protection scheme devised, some bright person somewhere will invent a way to bypass or break the protection.” Instead, the aim was to make copying commercial software challenging enough to dissuade casual duplication, the sort of escalating consumer bogeyman scenario outlined in industry-sympathetic magazines like Softalk:

Starting by making copies for enthusiastic friends, some personal computer users move on to cranking out tens to hundreds of copies that they nonchalantly pass on to their friends’ friends and mere acquaintances. Where scruples draw a line and a halt varies; but few who have gone this far can resist the opportunity to profit from their work, and they begin to offer “their” product for sale.

In the same feature, Softalk journalists extrapolated that if the average Apple owner possessed $100 worth of pirated software and Apple was gaining ten thousand new customers a month, then $1 million was being “siphoned out of the industry monthly.” This was the general party line most publishers, as well as mainstream journalists, took with regard to copy protection, insisting that without ways of preventing unauthorized duplication, “illegitimate copies of programs threaten the fabric of personal computing.”

How Copy Protection Worked

So under the defense of protecting the entire software industry, copy protection flourished in the early 1980s, becoming so widespread and so ingenious in implementation that it could be said to constitute a kind of vernacular industrial programming practice unique to floppy disks. But how did it work?

When, let’s say, an Apple II user wanted to copy a floppy disk, they did so using the copy routine software that came with their Apple II disk drive. Such activities are a world apart from the computer practices we know today, where files backup instantaneously to the cloud and we might shuffle them around with little attention to directory structures or actual save location. In the early days of the microcomputing world, moving data from one diskette to another was a command in the truest sense, a thing you had to tell your computer to do—while your computer, for its part, had to already have the underlying code for those commands loaded into its memory.

Copy routines assumed a standardized data pattern to all Apple II floppy disks, in which data was broken up into a complex but systematized array of sectors and tracks, with lots of specific rules governing how the data was stored. This meant data could only be copied from one floppy disk to another if it followed that pattern.

But what skillful programmers (and anxious publishers) also understood was that you didn’t need to follow the standard data pattern in order for a disk to be used or run—only for it to be copiable. In other words, data could be stored on a disk in any pattern a programmer desired, so long as the instructions for interpreting that unique pattern were also saved to the disk. Thus, through a variety of software techniques, developers and publishers could defy the “rules” of how disks were supposed to work.

Such manipulations were numerous, including everything from placing tracks between other tracks to changing sector data marks to moving the disk directory to laying out the data in a spiral pattern across the surface of the disk. Such bespoke data layouts didn’t create problems when loading or running a disk, but they did make it impossible to duplicate the disk using the Apple II’s copy routine software, because the disk drive’s copying commands presumed the standard data pattern. In other words, nothing in the Apple II could assess if a disk was saved in a nonstandard format. If data were not where they were supposed to be, the copy operation would fail, resulting in either an error message or a disk that appeared to have been successfully duplicated but would not actually work.

By manipulating these kinds of gaps in software logic, publishers of commercial software were able to use copy protection at scale to effectively prevent consumers from making duplications of commercial software. Copy protection could literally follow consumers out of the store and into their homes.

Peace of Mind

Locksmith, and software like it, got around the limitations of copy protection by enabling “BIT by BIT cop[ies] of your disk”—in other words, copying data one bit at a time, regardless of how it was organized on the floppy, rather than assuming a standard data pattern. This distinction in data duplication was what led this entire general category of utilities to be referred to as “bit copiers” or “nibble copiers.”

Importantly, Locksmith did not present itself as a utility to facilitate outright piracy. Rather, Locksmith claimed its functionality rested in the peace of mind it offered users, who would “no longer . . . have to worry about spills, staples, or magnetic fields that destroy [their] valuable diskettes,” so long as they duplicated their disks with the program. Locksmith based its sales pitch (and its $74.95 price point, or roughly $215 in the early 2020s) on the premise that the program would pay for itself in the time and money it saved users from having to wait for replacements or pay extra fees in order to obtain backup copies. Locksmith’s agenda was to offer computer users a tool to regain forms of control over their software that publishers desperately wanted to inhibit.

While publishers weren’t overly inclined to believe in Locksmith’s virtues, they generally underappreciated the very real grievances copy protection produced among consumers. Preventing disk duplication might have stanched piracy, but it also prevented users from making their own backup or archival copies of their software. Creating backup disks was a routine and often necessary practice for floppy disk users, ensuring they had a replacement in case any crucial data on the original disk became damaged. The fragility of floppy disks was significant enough that the Apple II DOS manual dedicated an entire section of its fourth chapter to “protecting yourself against disaster” by “backing up” your diskettes.

PROTECTING YOURSELF AGAINST DISASTER: Floppy disks are sturdy and reliable compared to some other ways of storing computer programs -- for example, on the backs of old envelopes. But it's still possible to lose or destroy all information on a diskette. A diskette may get scratched or damaged by heat; it may get lost, or a dog may chew it; someone may decide to use it as a frisbee at the beach; if a diskette isn't write-protected, it may accidentally get written over. And a diskette will eventually wear out -- a lifetime of 40 working hours is about average. **Moral** Keep more than one copy of a program around if you don't want to lost it. In computerese, "back up" any valuable program.

Such concerns were hardly hyperbolic. Stories abound of the unusual circumstances floppy disks found themselves in, forming a kind of micro-genre among early computer users. One Softalk reader documented blow-drying a floppy disk after his children spilled water on it, and another recounted having his disk get covered in ice cream after storing it in a kitchen cupboard during a party. One truly remarkable letter detailed a Rube Goldberg-esque set of events that resulted in floppy disks getting covered in suntan lotion and falling out of the back of a moving truck (with a few Q-tips and some rubbing alcohol, everything booted just fine).

Leaving disks on refrigerators, microwaves, or even too close to the computer itself could disrupt their magnetic field, while problems with disk drive alignment or maintenance or even the failure to use a surge protector could result in data overwriting. These kinds of user errors were common: 13 percent of a random sample of malfunctioning disks returned to the company Sir-Tech Software included forms of physical damage such as “peanut butter and jam particles, pencil marks, paperclip impressions, pinholes, and severely creased disks.”

Consumers who suddenly found themselves with a botched commercial disk and no backup had limited options. Publishers were generally amenable to replacing damaged disks, though policies varied. VisiCalc was fairly notorious in the early 1980s for initially charging $30 for a backup disk, along with requiring the warranty card. Customer service personnel at Brøderbund Software were so amused by a returned disk mauled by a dog that they photocopied the disk and circulated the image in their internal newsletter. Yet the process of getting replacements could take weeks or months, in addition to whatever costs the publisher might charge. While such issues might have been merely an inconvenience for users unable to play their favorite game, extended inaccessibility to programs like word processors, spreadsheets, or database managers could wreak havoc for businesses.

**

No one would win the war over disk duplication, but consumers almost certainly lost. Publishers would not risk their bottom line to make their software more usable. Certainly, disks would still become corrupted, get accidentally used as frisbees and coasters, stored atop computers or refrigerators, creased between books or filing cabinets or desk drawers. Disk drives would still spin out, overclock, eat their own software.

Yet lockout mechanisms would only grow more sophisticated, and publishers would devise endless programmatic curiosities to challenge those who sought to replicate software outside the industry’s oversight. Like all the commercial media industries that had come before, from books to music to film, the personal computing software industry would align in its interest that capital must be captured. In the standoff between publishers and consumers, unauthorized duplication was merely a tactic, a disorganized and uncoordinated effort to serve the software industry a thousand paper cuts from below.

What the software industry would devise, however, was a strategy, top-down. In April 1984, a confederacy of publishers, developers, and other industry actors pooled their financial support to launch the Software Publishers Association (SPA), a trade organization headed by the Washington, DC, attorney Kenneth Wasch, to protect and expand the internal interests of the personal computing software sector. By spring 1985, membership totaled over 120 firms, including Sierra On-Line, Brøderbund, and Activision, as well as the software divisions of traditional media publishing companies such as Bantam, Scholastic, Random House, and Reader’s Digest. Like any trade association, the SPA had aspirations to build its lobbying power, collect industry data, host annual dinners, and deck its membership with awards. But beyond these activities, the SPA’s greatest task was to end piracy.

No longer would software pirates, professional or casual, be chased after by individual publishers playing a relentless game of whack-a-mole. Instead, the SPA built an entire internal division dedicated to chasing piracy leads and set up a $50,000 copyright protection fund dedicated to the implementation of “a realistic, action oriented program to frustrate illegal copying of microcomputer software.” Adversaries included the individuals who copied and resold software for a profit; bulletin board systems that distributed or facilitated the distribution of computer software; user groups, businesses, schools, or universities that used unlicensed copies of software; software rental companies; and firms like Locksmith’s publisher, that “market[ed] software copying devices and programs.”

Endowed with the financial support of the software publishing industry, the SPA’s strategy was surprisingly bespoke. Rather than drag pirates into court or simply refer them to the FBI, SPA leadership preferred to shake down pirates internally first. The SPA became well known for its threatening letters but was also not above hiring private investigators or even conducting its own “raids.” In one instance, Wasch himself posed as a customer at a computer retailer in the New York area that was known for selling copyrighted software off the books, caught the employees in the act, and then worked out a deal with the company owners to not pursue damages in exchange for a $200 donation to the SPA’s copyright protection fund.

In another example, SPA followed the lead on a solo pirate working out of Irvine, California, which turned out to be a thirteen-year-old boy who may or may not have been selling illegally duplicated software. Restitution was made in the form of a handwritten letter: “I’m truly sorry about this. . . . I had no idea what ‘copyright’ meant, or what it is for, or the laws about it. My dad never explained this to me. . . . I realize now what a big mistake I almost made, and I apologize for what I did. I won’t ever do this again.”

What was valuable to the membership was not restitution for lost revenue but the chilling effect such behavior had on piracy. If the world of microcomputing, beginning in the mid-1970s, might once have been perceived as one in which users and developers were aligned in their interests, it took less than a decade for that to clearly no longer be the case. A pirate was a pirate, not a user or customer. By emphasizing unauthorized disk duplication as an indisputably illegal act, no matter the rationale, the software industry effectively cordoned off a part of the user base as bad-faith criminals.

Yet no publishing company or developer ever claimed it went out of business because of piracy. Rather than a fanciful nostalgic tale of anti-hero hackers making information “free,” attention to a history of use reveals other textures of the past: fried disks and overspun drives, heated phone calls between magazine editors, undercover stings, and people worried about their livelihoods, on all sides.

Whatever we may think of these editorial stances, publisher positions, and consumer pleas, it bears remembering that in long-forgotten software like Locksmith, we find a history of computing precisely about how people could use their computers, and a surprisingly human one at that.

—

The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney. Published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023. All rights reserved.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvb...oftware-piracy





Apple Just Lost its Lawsuit Trying to Ban iOS Virtual Machines

iOS VMs for research are legit, and legal, court rules
Craig Hale

Following a years-long battle with Corellium, Apple has been told by US courts that third-party virtual iOS devices are indeed allowed and that there’s nothing it can do to put an end to that.

Corellium markets itself as providing “never-before-possible security vulnerability research for iOS and Android phones,” and allows security workers to run virtual desktops and OSs for research purposes.

The court agreed, stating that Corellium “furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems,” but it’s likely that Apple has other concerns.

VMs for iOS

Ordinarily, the only way for a consumer to get their hands on iOS is to buy expensive Apple hardware, which has also been a requirement for developers. However, concerns have been raised that developers may also be able to use Corellium’s security-focused VMs to try out apps without having to acquire the right hardware.

“The duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances” meant that The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, according to a Bloomberg report (opens in new tab).

Corellium maintains that the simulator is primarily used by researchers, federal agencies, and defense contractors, and that there are clear differences between it and the regular distribution of iOS (via Bloomberg).

The duo faced a legal battle several years ago when, in late 2020, a Florida federal judge ruled that the “use of iOS in connection with the Corellium Product is permissible” (via The Washington Post (opens in new tab)).

Some reports indicate an element of vendetta could be behind the legal action, with Apple having failed to acquire the company in 2018 (via 9To5Mac (opens in new tab)). While this may play a small part in the case, Apple has long been notorious for the way it distributes its products, with third parties being very limited in numbers.

Apple did not immediately respond to TechRadar Pro’s request for comment.
https://www.techradar.com/news/apple...rtual-machines

















Until next week,

- js.



















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