[Novalug] EFF to Security Researchers: Tell the W3C To Protect Researchers Who Investigate Browsers

Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org
Wed Mar 30 09:08:22 EDT 2016


On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 08:32:18AM -0400, Bryan Smith wrote:
> So IP holders or even their end-users should have _no_ way to track IP usage?

No.

But we're not going to agree on this, because I think the idea of IP
"usage" is completely meaningless.  And further, the idea of IP -- mostly
-- is also meaningless.  So I think it's unlikely we'll agree on DRM
because we're coming at this from different philosophical endpoints.
(e.g., If I could snap my fingers and instantly abolish all forms of IP,
I'd do so without hesitation.  If I'm reading you correctly, you wouldn't.)

If you wish to characterize that as absolutist: okay.  I don't think of
it that way, though.  I think of it as a recognition that the world
functioned quite well, producing scientific, literary, musical, etc.
masterpieces, long before it became caught up in the idea that everything
had to be owned, controlled, licensed, tracked -- and profited from.
And there are other people -- *many* other people -- who are at least in
loose agreement with that viewpoint, which is why we have the Creative
Commons, SciHub, the GPL, arXiv, the Free Culture Foundation, and myriad
other efforts, some overlapping, some disagreeing, some experimental.

There are a lot of reasons I've come around to this viewpoint.  To pick
just one at quasi-random, look at the amazing amount of damage that Elsevier
has done to academic publishing and research:

	https://www.techdirt.com/search.php?q=elsevier&search=Search

---rsk



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