goodplay

Beginning with a partial solution to this problem is better than doing nothing at all. This sad state of affairs has gone on for far too long.

Wikipedia can be downloaded in its entirety in an easy to use package. For STEM articles, it's better than Britannica (and cheaper too).

Then let owners control whether it's enabled or not (by a hardware switch if necessary). As it currently stands, I can't imagine a benign reason that would drive intel and AMD to lock users out of their machines.

Mozilla can solve this problem the right way by doing what debian does when it wants to collect statistics: Ask users if they want to donate their information to Mozilla on first run or during the installer.

Recording users' behavior by default with informing the user clearly and giving him the option to opt-out is abhorrent, regardless of the benignity of the reason behind it.

Disclosure: I use firefox, but periodically strip all relevant hidden add-ons and disable all information sending possible.

It is, if the one master is less capable than the other.

Why isn't he thrown in jail, or why isn't the fence bulldozed down? Where I currently live (a somewhat well-off area), bulldozers (and self-entitled assholes) are a common occurrence.

I doubt failing to contact a server would circumvent DRM. Blocking their servers would only make their DRM scheme fail and prevent access to said copyright material.

Using the DMCA to protect company's defective and flawed DRM scheme does not constitute circumvention. As such, I do not believe that DMCA's anti-circumvention laws are relevant.

This has nothing to do with believing that we have right to other people's work without payment. The fundamental issue is that these publishers are allowing public access to their work than expecting to have some control over how it is consumed. Hanging your painting in a public park and then demand that people not wear sunglasses when looking at it, or demanding that onlookers look at it sideways would be absurd. Don't hang your paintings in public parks. Hang it in a private gallery, and make no-sunglasses a term for admission.

Publishers would be better served if they restricted their articles, by demanding payment upfront before serving the article, rather than unreasonably and unrealistically demanding that people consume their content in a certain way. Don't blame your users for your failed business model.

As a side note, Copyright is not the place where this issue should be tackled as no copyright is being infringed (Content is not being redistributed).

>This third party tool is making unauthorized edits to the New York Times' copyrighted material.

It's not a third party tool. It's a tool used by the first party (user) to modify information that was sent to him without effecting the publisher. I don't see how the publisher has any authority over what the user chooses to do with the information he obtained.

> I find it difficult to justify "We changed around your copyrighted work to remove stuff we decided we don't like." If you don't like ads, pay up or go elsewhere.

That's an interesting take on IP rights. By generalizing your argument, would you argue against newspaper snippets because a reader would only collect the article without adjacent ads? (with scissors made by a third-party, no less.)

> You do not have a right to anybody else's IP.

Fair use, Noncopyrightable items, old expired IP, and the public domain are all examples of rights I have to others IP. Rights have been - and I hope will continue to be - balanced between the concerns of IP "owners" and the rest of society to best serve everyone's interests. Tipping the scale in one side's favor like what you advocate here will disrupt that balance.

>1. Can IP be encoded as a way of dodging the DMCA? a: no.

This is false if the IP being enforced is trademark (which I'm not even sure is covered by the DMCA).

Agreed with seeking a legal solution instead of just relying on a techincal one, but if the problem is the string of characters, just hash those instead without hashing the whole host:

[HASH:1AB543.124A3CC4.1AB543]/ads