5 ms·

This stomps on motivation to develop any novell code, because for all the years of hard work you put into r&d, there will alway be a lot of people who are just

by abpavel 11y ago

This stomps on motivation to develop any novell code, because for all the years of hard work you put into r&d, there will alway be a lot of people who are just waiting for something to slip through your fingers, so they can steal it and call it theirs.

evilsocket 11y ago
I don't see how publishing a research without disclosing specific details about the app itself or any kind of "crack" could stomp on motivation to develop something ... unless you trust in "security through obscurity" of course ... which was proven more than once to be a fail :)
- abpavel 11y ago
  So what should I do? My patents have limited geopolitical enforcement jurisdictions, whereas the Internet is global. Plus, I'm deemed evil, even though It's not easy to create something novel. MP3 patent https://www.google.com/patents/US5812672 https://www.google.com/patents/US5812672 was nice, and enforced time to time, but for a small startup the barrier between the abyss and land is just a step away.
viraptor 11y ago
Just like continuously breaking all the DRMs stopped any new movies from being produced, right?
- evilsocket 11y ago
  ^ THIS ^
- pink_dinner 11y ago
  Multi-billion dollar movie studios are much different than a small company releasing an Android App. They can handle the loss and make it up with licensing deals. The small company will go out of business in an already ridiculously difficult market. It only pushes out the small companies and makes way for an app store environment where only large companies can survive. The exact same thing happened with the music industry over the past decade (filesharing was supposed to help the indy artist..or so many, like you, claimed)
- Natsu 11y ago
  You just reminded me of how much of the 09 F9 11 02 9D number I still remember after all this time.
  - abpavel 11y ago
    Everyone remembers that number, but you didn't use it for profit. I'm talking about purposefully reverse engineering a piece of software, to build an internal version of the solution, with direct impact to the inventor, not a global corporation. And it's not a web or a games or a movies or a piece of music.
    - Natsu 11y ago
      Corporations are made of people, too. (Though in a way that somehow reminds me of Soylent green...)
- golergka 11y ago
  Not blockbuster movies, no. But all the small indie games (not indie superhits your hear about!) both for iOS, Android and PC are typically have 10x, 100x more downloads on Torrents than purchases. Same goes for small label releases on Beatport, Bandcamp and Juno: they get hundreds of individual sales on those sites after the tracks are out on trackers. Don't know about movies though; but in the industries I'm familiar with, it's the little guys who get screwed mostly, not the big ones.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    You just agreed with the fact that the motivation to produce new code didn't die - indie games have to be written in the first place to end up on torrent sites. Breaking the DRM and torrenting does not stop people from writing new ones. Regarding the ratio of purchases/downloads, the argument goes back to the usual questions: 1) if the torrents didn't exist, how would the number of purchases change (i.e. are those lost sales, or were they never potential sales to begin with); and 2) what's the promotion channel for indie bands? I purchased a lot of music because I heard about it from someone who had a pirated copy. Now at least we've got Spotify discovery, Google music tailored radios, etc. working for us, but it's still not a lot.
    - golergka 11y ago
      1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down. 2) For the mass audience, streaming solutions (99% of that being youtube), have completely replaced piracy. However, if you noticed, I'm not talking about mass audience, it stopped buying music anyway. I'm talking about Beatport, Juno — shops especially targeted at DJs, who have very different purchasing patterns, and usually different ways of learning about music as well. A significant part of modern electronic music labels have stopped doing digital releases altogether, going vinyl-only, and piracy is one of the main reasons.
      - Ntrails 11y ago
        >1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down In the case of most games, sales are steadily decreasing over time anyway - so it'd need to be a pretty marked step down to remove the possibility that they're simply following trend. It'd be interesting trying to account for that in an analysis. Anecdotally, I have several friends who torrent games by default - but they legitimately wouldn't buy anyway (to quote "lol at buying videogames in the year of our lord 2016").
- abpavel 11y ago
  Just by global warming being solved by you being cold today, right? You know, the world is a bit larger than Games/Movies/Musics/Web. Like seriously, try some fluid dynamics, or neutron leakage. Just because it's expressible in software, doens't mean that a script kiddie next door with his fingers still sticky from the unclosed pornhub tab has to have all my life's work.
duncan_bayne 11y ago
I upvoted for discussion, but I actually disagree. Consider Web development as a major counterexample.
- evilsocket 11y ago
  mmm would you please elaborate?
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    You pretty much publish everything related to your job if you're a web developer. People are continually creating awesome things as web developers, despite their source code being out there for everyone to see. There isn't a "copyright violation holocaust" happening as implied by the top comment.
    - abpavel 11y ago
      Well, obviously, I'm not a web developer. Nor am I a music producer, nor a film maker. As the world becomes increasingly more digital, more technologies can be expressed as code. You all like MPEG-4, but many patents are involved there, such a http://www.google.com/patents/US6092120 http://www.google.com/patents/US6092120
    - tyingq 11y ago
      Should be interesting to see what webassembly does to this existing ecosystem.
- onion2k 11y ago
  I believe there's more profit-oriented piracy of SaaS based businesses than traditional software. It's rare that someone will take an app, crack it, and start selling it under their own brand. People clone apps but in general they've remade the code entirely by looking at the software and coding their own version. Conversely however, I do hear about companies that have taken someone's SaaS app by dumping the front-end code, and building their own backend, and releasing it with absolutely no changes to the elements they've stolen. This may be due to my filter bubble making it so I hear more about web apps (I write web based apps) but anecdotally it does seem that SaaS is not a protection against piracy.
kuschku 11y ago
You realise that you never had any copyright to your algorithms, etc anyway? If you spend years of R&D on algorithms, patent them. But boilerplate code can neither be patented nor copyrighted (except in its source form, but the binary, for example, can’t), so you never owned anything to begin with. Disclaimer: This is just a general info about EU law, this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.
- abpavel 11y ago
  But I do have a patent, in multiple countries, and have legal advice. How is that suppose to stop people like the op? He clearly didn't bother with any of it, and EFF is on the side of crooks like him. So I spend all my fortune on R&D, spend another fortune on legal, and the result is that my kids have nothing to eat, because there is always a way when none of it means squat. Whether it's RCA ripping off Farnsworth, who has to fight all his life to protect his invention, or Edison blatantly stealing from Melies by simply changing the titles in his movies and swapping French text for English.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    > Whether it's RCA ripping off Farnsworth You realize Farnsworth ripped off Braun? Also, if you have a patent, you can always sue. That’s not an issue.
  - waspleg 11y ago
    I'm a card carrying EFF member. The EFF supports Internet Freedom and Privacy (those things go hand in hand). Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right. I've yet to see them do anything I disagree with as someone who considers those points very important.
    - slededit 11y ago
      > Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right This is a very dangerous attitude to have regardless of who it concerns.
cyphar 11y ago
Why does your novel code need to be proprietary?
- abpavel 11y ago
  Because I've invented something unseen before, spent a fortune developing a method, patented it, also spending a fortune on legal, and don't want script kiddies to mooch off my talent that easily. I have a sense of proprietorship and want to own something. Patents mean jack squat to people like op, and I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. If I invoke my patent, I'm deemed "evil" because I have a patent, and will have to spend lifetime in courts protecting my invention. If I compile, I'm deemed "evil" because there is no such thing as innovative code.
  - dkopi 11y ago
    > and don't want script kiddies to mooch off my talent that easily. We all "mooch" off of other's talents. That's the beauty of our industry. We get inspired, we share, and we base our works on the works of others. That's why its so important to pair huge investments in R&D with awesome business people. Don't obsess about protecting your inventions. Obsess about getting your inventions out there, selling, supporting, and custom tailoring it for what customers really need.
    - abpavel 11y ago
      > Obsess about getting your inventions out there That's what I want to do, but all of the legal advice I got was to do otherwise. At first I thought that losing all that you've built in an instance was a rare event, but the more I talked to business owners and lawyers, I haven't gotten a single advise to release it in any way that would put it outside of my control. And the thing they cited is almost exactly of what OP describes: once someone else has your code, the whole world has it. And it hurts that I careless about the code - it can be rewritten in a million ways. What I care about is what code does, and the multitude of GloboCorps working on the same issue in vane, and their ability to reproduce our work in months once they understand the secret sauce.
hawleyal 11y ago
Flamebait

by abpavel 11y ago

evilsocket 11y ago

I don't see how publishing a research without disclosing specific details about the app itself or any kind of "crack" could stomp on motivation to develop something ... unless you trust in "security through obscurity" of course ... which was proven more than once to be a fail :)

abpavel 11y ago
So what should I do? My patents have limited geopolitical enforcement jurisdictions, whereas the Internet is global. Plus, I'm deemed evil, even though It's not easy to create something novel. MP3 patent https://www.google.com/patents/US5812672 https://www.google.com/patents/US5812672 was nice, and enforced time to time, but for a small startup the barrier between the abyss and land is just a step away.

viraptor 11y ago

Just like continuously breaking all the DRMs stopped any new movies from being produced, right?

evilsocket 11y ago
^ THIS ^
pink_dinner 11y ago
Multi-billion dollar movie studios are much different than a small company releasing an Android App. They can handle the loss and make it up with licensing deals. The small company will go out of business in an already ridiculously difficult market. It only pushes out the small companies and makes way for an app store environment where only large companies can survive. The exact same thing happened with the music industry over the past decade (filesharing was supposed to help the indy artist..or so many, like you, claimed)
Natsu 11y ago
You just reminded me of how much of the 09 F9 11 02 9D number I still remember after all this time.
- abpavel 11y ago
  Everyone remembers that number, but you didn't use it for profit. I'm talking about purposefully reverse engineering a piece of software, to build an internal version of the solution, with direct impact to the inventor, not a global corporation. And it's not a web or a games or a movies or a piece of music.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Corporations are made of people, too. (Though in a way that somehow reminds me of Soylent green...)
golergka 11y ago
Not blockbuster movies, no. But all the small indie games (not indie superhits your hear about!) both for iOS, Android and PC are typically have 10x, 100x more downloads on Torrents than purchases. Same goes for small label releases on Beatport, Bandcamp and Juno: they get hundreds of individual sales on those sites after the tracks are out on trackers. Don't know about movies though; but in the industries I'm familiar with, it's the little guys who get screwed mostly, not the big ones.
- viraptor 11y ago
  You just agreed with the fact that the motivation to produce new code didn't die - indie games have to be written in the first place to end up on torrent sites. Breaking the DRM and torrenting does not stop people from writing new ones. Regarding the ratio of purchases/downloads, the argument goes back to the usual questions: 1) if the torrents didn't exist, how would the number of purchases change (i.e. are those lost sales, or were they never potential sales to begin with); and 2) what's the promotion channel for indie bands? I purchased a lot of music because I heard about it from someone who had a pirated copy. Now at least we've got Spotify discovery, Google music tailored radios, etc. working for us, but it's still not a lot.
  - golergka 11y ago
    1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down. 2) For the mass audience, streaming solutions (99% of that being youtube), have completely replaced piracy. However, if you noticed, I'm not talking about mass audience, it stopped buying music anyway. I'm talking about Beatport, Juno — shops especially targeted at DJs, who have very different purchasing patterns, and usually different ways of learning about music as well. A significant part of modern electronic music labels have stopped doing digital releases altogether, going vinyl-only, and piracy is one of the main reasons.
    - Ntrails 11y ago
      >1) Judging by experience of many friends in game industry, the moment a non-free game appears on torrents, sales go down In the case of most games, sales are steadily decreasing over time anyway - so it'd need to be a pretty marked step down to remove the possibility that they're simply following trend. It'd be interesting trying to account for that in an analysis. Anecdotally, I have several friends who torrent games by default - but they legitimately wouldn't buy anyway (to quote "lol at buying videogames in the year of our lord 2016").
abpavel 11y ago
Just by global warming being solved by you being cold today, right? You know, the world is a bit larger than Games/Movies/Musics/Web. Like seriously, try some fluid dynamics, or neutron leakage. Just because it's expressible in software, doens't mean that a script kiddie next door with his fingers still sticky from the unclosed pornhub tab has to have all my life's work.

duncan_bayne 11y ago

I upvoted for discussion, but I actually disagree. Consider Web development as a major counterexample.

evilsocket 11y ago
mmm would you please elaborate?
- fapjacks 11y ago
  You pretty much publish everything related to your job if you're a web developer. People are continually creating awesome things as web developers, despite their source code being out there for everyone to see. There isn't a "copyright violation holocaust" happening as implied by the top comment.
  - abpavel 11y ago
    Well, obviously, I'm not a web developer. Nor am I a music producer, nor a film maker. As the world becomes increasingly more digital, more technologies can be expressed as code. You all like MPEG-4, but many patents are involved there, such a http://www.google.com/patents/US6092120 http://www.google.com/patents/US6092120
  - tyingq 11y ago
    Should be interesting to see what webassembly does to this existing ecosystem.
onion2k 11y ago
I believe there's more profit-oriented piracy of SaaS based businesses than traditional software. It's rare that someone will take an app, crack it, and start selling it under their own brand. People clone apps but in general they've remade the code entirely by looking at the software and coding their own version. Conversely however, I do hear about companies that have taken someone's SaaS app by dumping the front-end code, and building their own backend, and releasing it with absolutely no changes to the elements they've stolen. This may be due to my filter bubble making it so I hear more about web apps (I write web based apps) but anecdotally it does seem that SaaS is not a protection against piracy.

kuschku 11y ago

You realise that you never had any copyright to your algorithms, etc anyway? If you spend years of R&D on algorithms, patent them. But boilerplate code can neither be patented nor copyrighted (except in its source form, but the binary, for example, can’t), so you never owned anything to begin with. Disclaimer: This is just a general info about EU law, this is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer.

abpavel 11y ago
But I do have a patent, in multiple countries, and have legal advice. How is that suppose to stop people like the op? He clearly didn't bother with any of it, and EFF is on the side of crooks like him. So I spend all my fortune on R&D, spend another fortune on legal, and the result is that my kids have nothing to eat, because there is always a way when none of it means squat. Whether it's RCA ripping off Farnsworth, who has to fight all his life to protect his invention, or Edison blatantly stealing from Melies by simply changing the titles in his movies and swapping French text for English.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Whether it's RCA ripping off Farnsworth You realize Farnsworth ripped off Braun? Also, if you have a patent, you can always sue. That’s not an issue.
- waspleg 11y ago
  I'm a card carrying EFF member. The EFF supports Internet Freedom and Privacy (those things go hand in hand). Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right. I've yet to see them do anything I disagree with as someone who considers those points very important.
  - slededit 11y ago
    > Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right This is a very dangerous attitude to have regardless of who it concerns.

cyphar 11y ago

Why does your novel code need to be proprietary?

abpavel 11y ago
Because I've invented something unseen before, spent a fortune developing a method, patented it, also spending a fortune on legal, and don't want script kiddies to mooch off my talent that easily. I have a sense of proprietorship and want to own something. Patents mean jack squat to people like op, and I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. If I invoke my patent, I'm deemed "evil" because I have a patent, and will have to spend lifetime in courts protecting my invention. If I compile, I'm deemed "evil" because there is no such thing as innovative code.
- dkopi 11y ago
  > and don't want script kiddies to mooch off my talent that easily. We all "mooch" off of other's talents. That's the beauty of our industry. We get inspired, we share, and we base our works on the works of others. That's why its so important to pair huge investments in R&D with awesome business people. Don't obsess about protecting your inventions. Obsess about getting your inventions out there, selling, supporting, and custom tailoring it for what customers really need.
  - abpavel 11y ago
    > Obsess about getting your inventions out there That's what I want to do, but all of the legal advice I got was to do otherwise. At first I thought that losing all that you've built in an instance was a rare event, but the more I talked to business owners and lawyers, I haven't gotten a single advise to release it in any way that would put it outside of my control. And the thing they cited is almost exactly of what OP describes: once someone else has your code, the whole world has it. And it hurts that I careless about the code - it can be rewritten in a million ways. What I care about is what code does, and the multitude of GloboCorps working on the same issue in vane, and their ability to reproduce our work in months once they understand the secret sauce.

hawleyal 11y ago

Flamebait