Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Is it safe to say we're in the middle of the Software Wars? The headlines have been littered with stories like this lately. From major open source contributors taking down their projects, to Apple, Adobe, and Blizzard.

It's only a matter of time until it's a critical piece of software that can cripple a nation or beleaguer it's people.

If you're looking for positives, maybe this will finally force people to rethink digital ownership.

It's serendipitous all these events are happening now for me personally. I was recently burned by a piece of very useful and well crafted software (closed source). I did a fresh install on my machine and went to find their website which to my dismay had completely disappeared! I followed whatever breadcrumbs were left and found a whole thing had happened while I wasn't paying attention where the copyright for this software was now in complete limbo and noone who had recently purchased a license could redownload it.

This is allegedly where the software exists now.

https://audiofile.engineering/

Which contains absolutely no trace of the program Myriad Pro.

This is the discussion from kvr about it.

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=525534

On the plus side I doubled down and learned SoX which I wrap up in some python now and it's fast, open source and others can develop on my efforts.

Also, I'm disappointed I missed the obvious "Softwars"

This is why whenever i think about buying software i check if they have a DRM-free version for Windows. 99% of the time this ensures i'll be able to use the software for years to come even if the company shuts down.

Proprieatary software are shortcuts, but infrastructure requires open source. That's the only durable software out there.

Same thing happened with Tridef. The company went under, didn't release a free version of the software, and now people who bought it legally have to resort to using a crack.

I'm not clear what software has to do with this. It's happening across all industries, here's a good roundup of a bunch of other examples:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/china-censorship-daryl-mo...

Is software special in this case somehow?

Because software has this weird status where you increasingly don't own a perpetual use right to the copy of the code you bought, and can have it revoked for reasons that have nothing to do with the purchase agreement. What if one day in the not too distant the electrical system on your car stopped working because an auto software update from that vendor (not the company that sold you the car perhaps) detected your name was on a DB of no-service-updates, and there was a critical big patched?

I wish local instances of SaaS were more common. As a consumer it doesn't fill me with glee that a company used cutting edge APIs and integrations that are hosted all over the place. It fills me with concern about their stability and I have to entirely forget about data security. Who knows where it ends up these days. Both physically and in administrative terms, on globally distributed servers and regarding which companies or countries have access to it.

No, this is about Chinese influence.

I've said it a few times, but it's worth repeating IMO: copyright is a deal, where a creator gets a time-limited monopoly in exchange for works entering the public domain.

If a company have arranged things so their work can't enter the public domain (eg DRM) then they should not get copyright protection, fundamentally it's wrong to get the benefit of copyright without giving up your work to the public domain.

This can be solved by a requirement to register an unhindered copy, whilst they're at it orphaned works should be made copyright free, IMO.

For a tangible example, imagine saying something pro-HK on an online multiplayer and losing access to your entire library of Xbox games.

From Microsoft's community guidelines:

"Under permanent suspension, the owner of the suspended profile forfeits all licenses for games and other content, Gold membership time, and Microsoft account balances."

And in 2019, saying things as asinine as "haha I banged ur mom" are enough to trigger such a suspension, despite the embracement of such an immature, tongue-in-cheek culture being tantamount to Microsoft's early success in the gaming industry.

My Steam games aren't much better off.

I'm glad to hear that others have the same opinion regarding software copyrights. I'd even go one step further and say that the source code must be included in that unhindered copy. Otherwise, the public's right to make derivative works from things in the public domain cannot be upheld.

> It's only a matter of time until it's a critical piece of software that can cripple a nation or beleaguer it's people.

Hopefully this pushes more people to use open source software.

This is not limited to closed software. Remember the Chef developer who got all political and deleted his github. This is the new norm in software it appears.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/20/chef_roasted_for_ic...

Luckily it was something that could be easily remedied.

I’m all for reform. I’d prefer we drop the whole notion of copyright but if we can just get sane terms with real expiration I’m on board.

This was the example I thought of:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

This is all great news for Sony and whatever physical medium the PS5 will use as a replacement for Blu-ray.

That doesn't seem like as big of a problem, because you, as the user of an open source library, can take steps to prevent such things from affecting you. Most places I've worked at have their own repos with copies of any maven/node/ruby/whatever dependencies used.

If the current administration is serious about the trade war, sanctions, etc. against China (which seems the case), I have to imagine that someone has thought about what it would take to cut off China from the rest of the Internet.

Obviously the fallout from something like this would be incredible, and I'm not advocating for it, but... do we even have the technical capability to do something like this? With the Internet being designed to be resilient, what would it actually take to do this? Can it be done by electronic means rather than by cutting cables / bombing ingress points?

They're already quite isolated by the great firewall, but it seems like cutting off everything at once could still be a powerful splash of cold water to the face. It's certainly not going to happen piecemeal when most companies are this spineless.

I just sold a video game disc for 3x what I paid for it because the company that made it went under, so it's no longer downloadable on any streaming service (XBL, PSN, Steam, etc)...

Legality-induced Digital Dark Ages. :-)

The US could refuse to talk to them by adjusting the routes to their IP ranges, that's about it. Everyone else that wants to talk to China could still do it, provided they make sure their routes for Chinese IPs do not go trough the US (obviously hard to do for a number of American residents, or some countries). This would still be circumventable trough a VPN that brings packet outside of the denied routing area.

The companies will say that they're still using parts of the old code in newer products covered by copyright, so this won't happen.

Besides, we'd have to have copyright periods on software of 3-5 years, 10 tops, for software copyright to even make sense. Not 70+, which is longer than any recognizable computer industry ever existed.

Or see yesterday's executive order putting sanctions on subset of Venezuelan population, followed by Adobe suspending accounts of everyone in that country. Think of entire occupations affected by this. What if tomorrow the tools for your job disappeared because some people on the other side of the world have a disagreement with your government?

Is source code covered by copyright at all if it's never published? I thought that was the bare minimum.

If they never release the source code at all, I think we're just screwed, legally anyway. The DRM was attached to your binary or stream (or book), not the original source material. We may not like it, but I don't think it's copyright you have to worry about when it comes to closed source code.

Under current law, copyright applies to any creative work, regardless of publication status. This leads to abominations such as Disney's Vault, intentionally restricting access to a work that is part of the public consciousness.

In my ideal world, if the source code is not placed under escrow and tested to result in the distributed binary, then there would be no monopoly given to that binary. Anybody is allowed to copy it to the fullest extent that they are able to.

I am assuming that this would be part of a wider reform of copyright. For the case you mentioned, already under current copyright law, creation of a derivative work does not prevent a work from entering into the public domain (albeit after an unconscionably long period of time). To prevent such a argument being made after the fact, source code should be placed in escrow at the time of publication, with copyright protection given only after it has been verified that the provided source code can reproduce the binary being protected.

This arrangement would also protect the public good in cases where the original company has gone bankrupt, or where the source code would otherwise have been lost.