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I don't think "honorable software" is a great idea. Laws and social mores change all the time, but software could be forever. What if, in the 70s, the first c

• williamcotton 11y ago
  >What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now. The kind of baked-in enforcement DRM that you're talking about is very different than the honorable notions I'm talking about. Royalties were also called honorariums for a reason. The publisher who is sharing profits with the author is honoring their intellectual labors. The idea is not to restrict information flow but to promote equitable financial activities. This is already how platforms like Spotify work but the mechanics are opaque and dysfunctional, if not only because they're built on mechanical notions from the 20th century. That means, if I make something, register it, and then I sell 20% of my ownership to someone else, if the software that you write looks up who the owners are in the registry and then pays out directly to the listed owners, then your software is honoring the contract agreeing to the exchange of ownership in intellectual property. I'm not at all talking about a situation where software will stop people from acting in certain ways, rather just talking about ways in which software can facilitate our existing systems of intellectual property through the public sharing of information about assets and their transactions between private owners. >I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms. "Code as law" is how Spotify, YouTube, or Facebook already work. They are software applications that adhere to the law and already engage in legal profit making and trade. I'm not suggesting that code should ever be used in place of the existing legal systems! I'm just talking about public accounting software running on a decentralized consensus engine! You're reading way too much in to what I'm saying here. Straw-men abound. > Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful I agree 100%! But there is room for software to interface with the legal process. It's called a separation of concerns. I wouldn't want BitTorrent to have any concept of digital ownership. That doesn't mean we can't build modular code that does have a notion of digital ownership while also adhering to the BitTorrent protocol. If you'd like to email me at my HN username at gmail, I'd be happy to have a phone or a FaceTime conversation so we can both better explain our positions. I'm not exactly sure what your response has to do with what we're working on but I'm sure we could figure it out pretty easily with a friendly conversation! > This is really an article into itself It's understandable that you misinterpreted me because I didn't define the terms nor the context for "honorable" and "enforce". If I had instead chosen to write an article I would have positioned these against the kind of "rootkit DRM" notions from the Slashdot era that you're assuming I'm in support of. I'm working on another article that explains these concepts with more clarity. :)