copyright and data havens

[Mats Bergstrom]

rishab at dxm.ernet.in wrote:

> factories). It's not going to be easy to find a country more willing and
> able to ignore international copyright law (Berne Convention etc) than China;
> however, despite howls of protest even China is likely to knuckle down 
> eventually. What may be likely is distributed piracy markets, such as 

In the foreseeable future (10 years?) there will exist jurisdictions that,
even after signing this or that convention, will be more or less lax
about pursuing violators. Thus I still believe, despite China's awaited
submission, that the Internet and 28.8 modems (and abundance of disk space)
are real threats to holders of copyright who want to protect every penny.

Encryption (by the way, how long might it take to IDEA-encrypt a 2 MB
.zip file? I never tried) will make it practically impossible to find
and prosecute at least private copyright abuse. They won't use thumb-
screws to obtain the key to your SecureDrive just on suspicion of
infringement (except possibly in Singapore). The present situation,
as we all know, is that few people are willing to pay for such software
as games if they can get a (cracked) version for free. I think this
attitude will expand to most software. The real war will be faught
between protectors and crackers (since it is usually not convenient
to export an opened, installed version to another system - and more
so the bigger and directory-spreading the program is). Actually, a
sort of data haven for cracks already exists. If you live in a
jurisdiction where cracks are illegal to advertize (let alone use)
they can be hard to find on your local BBS, but with an Internet feed
(or long distance modem calls) it's no problem at all. (For those
who don't believe in the shareware concept I recommend the Norwegian
nag-eliminator 'Buster' - although you need the registered version
for the latest versions :-)

Mr La Macchia got caught. How many didn't? Look at the IRC Undernet:
wArEz-bots all over the place - and I bet the net.cops are lagging
in bot comprehension (unfortunately, so am I...). And there is talk
about this Secure-IRC.

Mats