Is illegal copying of software theft?

If I take a DVD with a piece of software on it, without the owner’s approval, then everyone would agree that it is an act of theft. But if I only copy the disc’s content, or download it over the internet, and thus do not deprive the owner of any physical object, is it still theft?

The most basic understanding of theft would be when you take possession of someone’s physical property without that someone’s approval, be it a car, a wallet, or some jewels. Prototypically theft involves touchable things, but it can also extend to nonphysical things. For instance, you can illegally empty someone else’s bank account without actually moving any physical coins or money around. It would still be theft, even though no physical objects are involved. In both cases, you would have deprived the rightful owner of something of value.

But can the concept of ‘theft’ be extended to illegal copying and downloading of software? Clearly you have not deprived the owner of anything physical or even digital. You have merely copied it. The software itself is still there in its original place, so how can it be theft?

If I steal a physical DVD with software on it, it is not the disc itself I want. It’s the content of the disc that I want. If I illegally copy or download it, I’m after the same thing. The fact that I’m not taking the software with its physical container/carrier seems irrelevant to me. I have illegally transferred something into my possession that doesn’t belong to me. I have thereby also unduly benefited from someone else’s property. I have infringed on the legal owner’s right to control it’s distribution. Does this amount to theft? Instinctively I would say yes, it does.

Now, I can understand if people object to this. It’s common to treat words and their meanings as fixed points in the universe. If you have a fixed concept of the word ‘theft’, and try to apply that to illegal copying/downloading, then you would naturally conclude that illegal copying is not an act of theft because you’re not depriving the owner of the thing you’re making a copy of.

But words and meanings are not fixtures. Nor should they be treated as such. The world around us changes all the time, and so we must constantly re-negotiate our vocabulary to match it. Otherwise our language would eventually be useless.

The meaning of ‘theft’ relies on (at least) three concepts, namely, property, ownership and possession, as well as on how those concepts are transferred between keeper and taker. When the idea of theft was originally thought up (an occasion now long lost to history), there were no digital products around. Now there are. I can have ownership and possession of a physical thing like a car, and I can have ownership and possession of a digital product like a piece of software or a digital recording.

A piece of software cannot normally change hands in a physical sense, only copied. That is, while you can transfer the ownership of software, you cannot physically transfer the property itself. You can copy it and then delete the original, but unless you transfer the software’s physical carrier/container, the software by itself cannot be transferred.

If the concept of ‘theft’ depends necessarily on the illegal transfer of the property itself, it should by implication never be possible to steal digital products. To me, there’s something wrong, and obsolete, about that. In principle, anything that can be possessed can also be stolen. It really isn’t that much of a stretch to re-think the idea of ‘theft’ to include illegal copying/downloading. We need to focus on theft as an act of illegally taking possession of a property, and only that. The physical transfer of the property itself does not have to be involved.

I should perhaps emphasize that I’m not talking about the legal definition of ‘theft’ here. I’m trying to understand a colloquial usage of the word ‘theft’, in particular my own. And to be quite frank, I’m not even sure that I’m all that categorical about it. Perhaps we do need a new word for this. I guess my only point is that it’s at least not impossible to think of illegal copying/downloading as an act of theft.

Mobile phones for literature, or m4Lit

A new form/genre of literature has emerged, namely, stories intended to be read on mobile phones, also known as m-novels.

Leveraging the popularity of mobile phones, the m4Lit project has launched the first mobile novel of its kind, or m-novel, in South Africa. Kontax, which follows the adventures of a group of teenage graffiti artists, is made specifically for mobile phones, and is available in both English and isiXhosa. It is being released chapter by chapter on a daily basis, with the first chapter already out.

m4Lit’s press release states:

The m4Lit pilot project aims to explore whether teens are interested in reading stories on their cellphones, whether and how they write using their cellphones, and whether cellphones might be used to develop literacy skills and a love of reading. Enter Kontax, an m-novel written on commission from the Shuttleworth Foundation by prize winning ‘mobilist’ Sam Wilson. Kontax is an m-novel made for mobile – and from 30 September readers will be able to access the dynamic teen narrative from their WAP-enabled cellphones, or from their computers. Every day another exciting chapter in the mystery plot will be told, with 21 chapters rolling out over 21 days. Teen readers will be invited to interact with Kontax as it unfolds on their cellphones: they can vote on and discuss the progressing plot, leave comments, download wallpapers and finally submit a written piece as part of a competition, with airtime prizes available for winning submissions.

You can read more about it at the m4Lit project blog, or you can read the still-ongoing novel itself, titled Kontax and written by Sam Wilson.

I guess it won’t be long before we can read a whodunit mystery on twitter.

Where are all the good yellow highlighters?

I use highlighters almost daily, and I have grown very fond of the yellow ones. They are usually not too garish nor too dark to ruin a text. The yellow markers also allow you to fotocopy a page without rendering marked bits unreadable, unlike the blue, green and orange ones. In addition, yellow markings seldom bleed over to the other side of the paper. The other, darker colours often do, especially with thin and/or low-quality paper.

However, not all yellow markers are good. The ones at sale here in the Göteborg area (west coast of Sweden) are next to useless. I’m talking about brands like Timing, Bic Brite Liner, and Pentel Handy-Line, which seem to be the only ones sold around here. Their yellow markers are either too glossy or too light, and the markings rub of very easily. After not very long (usually within a year), the yellow markings have paled and become completely invisible. What exactly is the point with marker pens like that?

A few years ago, there was another brand of marker pens at sale here. They were called Accent and were made in the US. Their yellow marker was a bit darker than that of the other brands. Not too light, and not too dark. It was somewhere in-between glossy-light yellow and too-dark orange. It was almost ochre. Markings I made five years ago are still visible and show no sign of either rubbing off or paling. I want those highlighters back in our local stores!

Animated logos and other stuff on DVDs

Like most people, I am grateful for all the magnificent DVD releases we have seen over the years. It is absolutely wonderful to have home access to all kinds of great movies, TV shows and music concerts, and most of them in very good quality, too. I have a lot of appreciation for the people and companies involved in the making of those DVDs, which often come with a whole bunch of interesting, high-quality extras.

Having said that, I have one issue with them. It concerns most DVDs on sale, and it’s all those stupid things you have to sit through to get to the good parts. Sometimes the DVD starts with a copyright notice that locks up your DVD player. At other times, it happens when you press “play”. Although I can understand why they think they must include it, in reality it’s utterly pointless. Those who pirate DVDs are already aware of the fact that they are doing something illegal. They don’t need to be told that. It might as well say “Don’t feed this to your cat”.

But my gripe is not with the copyright notice. It’s all the other idiotic crap I have to sit through. Sometimes it can get pretty crowded at the front of a DVD. First there are animated logos for all the production companies involved (usually several). Then there’s a short movie telling me how bad stealing is, followed by trailers for other DVDs*, after which I often get some kind of animation leading to the DVD menue. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll get the DVD from Hell which contains all of them.

OK, so why not just skip them? Unfortunately, very often the useless cannot be skipped or even fast-forwarded. Somewhat luckily, with some DVDs, you can pop it in, go out for a cup of coffee or a beer, have it run all the annoying stuff on its own, and when you return, the menue is nicely displayed on the screen. But not seldom, you cannot do even this. Quite a number of DVDs stop at various locations, forcing you to chose “enter” and “language”, so you’re stuck sitting there after all. On more than one occasion, I’ve actively avoided DVDs I know have these forced stops.

It’s perhaps OK to sit through it once, or even twice, but enough is enough. It’s like I’m being punished for being a paying customer. Indeed, all those forced logos, messages, trailers, and the annoying stops do nothing but create bad blood between the DVD makers and their customers.

(Note * = I have to point out that I actually appreciate the trailers, but only if I can chose to watch them at my own time. I don’t want to be forced to watch them. My living room is not a cinema. Watching movies on a DVD is not the same social event as “going to the movies” where the trailers function more naturally as a warm-up to the main event.)

Catholics and child abuse in Ireland

And the Catholic Church is at it again. This time it’s the horribkle story of the Christian Brothers and their exploits in Ireland. From BBC News we can read that:

An inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland has found that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys’ institutions. It also found physical and emotional abuse and neglect were features of institutions. Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff".

The nine-year inquiry investigated a 60-year period. About 35,000 children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses up to the 1980s. More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse they suffered physical and sexual abuse while there. …

The five-volume study concluded that church officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders’ paedophiles from arrest amid a "culture of self-serving secrecy". It also found that government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

The Irish Times succinctly summarises the situation with: "abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system."

Further down the BBC News page we can also read that there will be no criminal charges brought on any of the clergy involved.

The findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions – in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report.

That there will be no prosecutions is absolutely astounding, but clearly in line with Catholic ideology (and in this case also that of the Irish state), which seemingly is to protect the perpetraters and piss on the victims. Obviously it is more important to protect the "good name" of Catholicism than to right a wrong.

According to a BBC Panorama documentary aired a few years ago, covering up child abuses is a long-standing tradition within the Catholic Church. The current Pope Benedict has been instrumental in this concealment conspiracy for years. In the London Evening Standard, we can read that:

In 2001, while [the current Pope Benedict] was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church’s interests ahead of child safety. The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.

Systematic child abuse is obviously nothing new among the Catholic clergy. Eamonn McCann of the Belfast Telegraph provides a historical perspective in his column:

The oldest known instruction to Church officials, the Didache, dating from the second century, commands, ‘Thou shalt not seduce young boys’. The earliest recorded gathering of bishops, the Council of Elvira, in 309, spelt out 81 Canons, of which 38 dealt with sex. Among those excluded from receiving communion were ‘bishops, presbyters, and deacons committing a sexual sin’, ‘those who sexually abuse boys’, and ‘people who bring charges against bishops and presbyters without proving their cases’.

Why would the Church have mentioned such things had they not already become problems?

No doubt, Pope Benedict will continue to do his utmost to protect the interests of paedophiles and child abusers, rather than to do the right thing, which would be to help bring the perpetrators to justice.

His God must be really pleased with him.

Music for Darwin 200

I have entered a piece of music into Myriad’s 21st Sample Tunes Friendly Contest. This year’s theme is "Evolution", in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The closing date of the contest if May 31, so if you’d like to enter, too, there’s still time.

There’s quite a lot of hullabaloo re Darwin this year, being an anniversary and all. Actually there are two anniversaries. Not only was he born 200 years ago, his book On the Origin of Species first appeared 150 years ago. Hence there are special editions of magazines, Darwin-themed conferences, documentaries, all kinds of special events, and so on and so forth. Most of these can be tracked via The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online, one of the most useful sites on the web.

Anyway, back to the contest. The name of my contribution is "Natural selection: a prelude to evolution". You can see the score here, where you can also listen to it by clicking the play button. In order to do so, however, you must first install the (free and unobstrusive) Myriad Music Plug-In.

The piece is performed by digitally simulated instruments. There’s a flute, a grand piano, an acoustic guitar, a cello, and three percussion instruments (maracas, cabasa, triangle). I suppose that makes it a quintet, as you would need five people to perform it. The melody and its various permutations, although not entirely original, turned out quite satisfactory. The percussions tap out a deceptively irregular rythm, which may sound odd at first. But it’s not entirely random. If you listen carefully, you can hear a kind of "intelligent design" underlying it. (No, I’m not a loony creationist.) In fact, the rythm is based on a quote from Darwin himself, namely "I have called this principle … Natural Selection" (fr. Origin of Species, 1859) — hence the title of the piece. I know this last bit sounds as if it doesn’t make any sense, but trust me, it does.

For realz!

Have you ever wondered what the Z in for realz is actually doing there? I have. The dictionary form of the phrase is for real, without a final Z.

There is a (formally) similar expression, for keeps, in which the S is historically a plural marker. Apparently, the word keeps is short for keepies, and originates from some sort of game in which players collected marbles. The ones one won, one “kept”, and these became known as keepies. Possibly the phrase for keeps has contributed to the formation of for realz by way of analogy. Although admittedly, it sounds a bit far-fetched.

The Z in for realz seems clearly to be a plural marker (i.e. plural S), but why has it been added at all? There doesn’t seem to be any plurality involved in the semantics of the phrase, not even metaphorically. (It means ‘in earnest’, ‘really’, ‘truthfully’.)

We may get at a solution if we look at phrases like many thanks and many apologies, in which there clearly is a plural S on each respective noun. But here it makes sense. You can easily think of many acts of thanking or apologising, so here the plural meaning is semantically justified. The assumption is, of course, that the more you thank or apologise, the more sincere you are. However, when we say many thanks, we say just that. We don’t usually go on actually thanking multiple times (although that may happen, too). The point here being that the plural forms’ major function is to intensify or emphasize the act of thanking or apologising, not to mark a plurality of acts as such (which in these phrases would only count as a minor, secondary function).

It is conceivable that it is this intensifying function of the plural S that is being used in for realz. Hence in this phrase at least, English plural S seems to have developed a function devoid of plurality. If that really is so, then it would be interesting to see if this intensifying S pops up elsewhere in the language.

(Another explanation would be that there’s some cross-linguistic interference going on, namely, from Spanish de veras, in which veras is a plural noun with a Spanish plural marker S. If that’s the case, then it would seem that English has incorporated the Spanish plural S as an intensifier, and again, devoid of plurality.)

How much is every other?

On a recent math test for Swedish 7th graders, one question asked: How many percent is every tenth? (Hur många procent är var tionde?) You’d think the answer is a straightforward 10%, but is it? Several students have had difficulties with that particular question. Why?

In order to arrive at 10% you have to assume infinity. The question requires you to imagine a situation where you can pick every 10th apple (for instance) out of an infinite amount of apples. Hence it requires a certain level of abstraction that isn’t necessarily intuitive, because in reality no one has an infinite amount of apples to chose from.

In fact, the expression every Nth can correspond to a whole number of varying percentages unless you have been taught to assume infinity. For instance, every 4th equals 25% only when the total amount is either four, eight, twelve, any other number divisible by four, or else if the total is (the hypothetical) infinity. If the total is, say, five, then picking every 4th apple may only give you 20%. That is, { 1, 2, 3, 4=pick, 1 }, leaving you with four unpicked apples, namely, the first three and the one remaining after the one you picked. If the total is seven, every 4th equals a mere 14.28%, i.e. { 1, 2, 3, 4=pick, 1, 2, 3 }, or one out of seven.

If the total is:	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	…
then ‘every 4th’ equals:	0%	0%	0%	25%	20%	16.7%	14.3%	25%	22%	20%	18.2%	…

An important point here is that every Nth is not the same as a Nth. While a 4th always equals 25%, irrespective of the assumed total, every 4th does not, simply because every Nth is unit-based, meaning it counts only whole units. That is, you don’t cut up any "remainders" as you would if you were to chose a 4th of all apples.

I don’t have any statistics showing how often students experience difficulties with this seemingly uncomplicated question, but I know that at least some do. This is undoubtedly a tricky question, if not a trick question. Answering it in the expected way is in any case a cultural feat (i.e. you have to be taught to assume the abstract concept of infinity) just as much as it is a logical or mathematical one.

Fake Rock

Believe it or not, but I have just released an album! Woohoo! I’m an indie artist! You never expected that, did you? Ha!

The album is called Fake Rock and appears under my anagrammatic nom-de-plum, John Miaou. It’s wholly instrumental, save some simulated choir bits. Indeed, all sounds on the album are digital simulations of real instruments, which accounts for the album title. Guitars, keyboards, piano, accordion, trumpet, flute, cello, bass, cymbals, timpanis, and so on, are all fake. I suppose I could have gone for pure electronic sounds only, but I didn’t. Maybe I will on the next album.

The advantage of using simulations is that you don’t have to deal with moody musicians and egos — other than your own, of course. The album is thus also unfiltered by performers’ interpretations, and contains pure compositions. It is music per se subsistere. Or should that be per se esse? Or just per se? Why not music a se? I never could get Latin right.

Anyway, just so there’s no doubt about it, it’s a darned good album. At least I had endless fun making it, although a certain amount of agony was involved, too. But hey, all good art comes from suffering and pain.

Fake Rock clocks in at roughly 40 minutes (classic vinyl length!) and contains twelve tracks:

• Two purple minutes (MIDI version)
• Duh Duh
• Suite 3122, pt. 1 : Verona
• Suite 3122, pt. 2 : Milano
• Suite 3122, pt. 3 : Genoa
• Suite 3122, pt. 4 : Roma
• Street smart
• Four bars
• Piano walk
• Walking guitar
• Will I ever hear from you again?
• Frantic Christmas

The music was composed and created using Melody Assistant, an impressively versatile music programme sold by Myriad Software, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in making their own music. The finished album was subsequently self-published via TuneCore, a US-based service offering digital distribution to, well, anyone. It’s especially useful to all unsigned fringe artists, indie acts, amateur musicians, home composers, and unsignable musical riff-raff like me!

The Fake Rock album, or any of its individual tracks, can be purchased through iTunes if you live in Europe or the US. It’s not yet available elsewhere, unfortunately.

Don’t say he’s foreign

Here’s an odd bit of language usage.

What qualifies something or someone to be of a "foreign persuasion"? In its most literal interpretation, you would expect it to refer to someone being influenced by a foreigner, a foreign nation, or otherwise something foreign. After some googling, it seems clear that that is in fact also how many people use it.

However, the phrase has another usage, too, and an odd one at that. For some people, it’s a roundabout way of referring to foreign (and foreigner?), as when writing about "films of the independent and foreign persuasion", or the "foreign persuasion in NASCAR" (referring to foreign-born drivers). Can NASCAR drivers be persuaded to become foreign-born?

In those contexts, "foreign persuasion" doesn’t refer to any particular opinions (as in Christian persuasion), or people who have been persuaded into believing or doing something. It’s simply used as a tortuous alternative to foreign.

When did foreign become a derogatory word in English?