From Lost and Found, by Matt Milligan.

Edited 6 Sept 2005: I've been meaning to update this article for days, and I've been irresponsibly lax in not doing so. It has been pointed out by a reader that what the MPAA has done in Delhi is in violation of the Indian constitution, and will inevitably be overturned by their Supreme Court. This is a very good thing. That said, that the MPAA managed to convince a magistrate to authorize something that violates Indian law doesn't make me feel much better about the situation.

The Motion Picture Association of America is concerned about piracy -- specifically, about people pirating movies and distributing them on bootleg DVDs and over the internet. They're so concerned that they have even set up a space on their website where they publish press releases about the war on digital piracy. These press releases are usually in Microsoft Word format, occasionally in PDF format, and proudly announce all the victories that Hollywood has achieved in its never-ending war against the people who illegally sell their product at a price much closer to what most of it is actually worth.

A PDF of a press release for July 26, 2005, for example, positively crowed about four lawsuits they filed in Waco, Texas against individuals who were illegally downloading and swapping movies online using peer to peer software. A Microsoft Word version of a press release for July 28, 2005 describes similar action taken against three individuals living in Rochester, New York.

Reading through these press releases, one wonders if the MPAA might be encountering a problem in regards to scale. Only four people? Only three people? Doesn't it take an awful lot of time and effort to catch people in the act of piracy? Isn't a three or four person lawsuit a rather unsatisfying return on your investment?

The MPAA apparently thinks so, because a press release issued on July 27, 2005 reveals a new, more efficient method of catching pirates: get a judge to give you the authority to search anywhere you want, in an entire city.

The city in question? Delhi, India, population 13,782,976.

That's right: the city has homes and offices for 13,782,976 people, and the MPAA can tell the police to search every single one of them. Just in case.

From General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington.

If you're reading this site it's unlikely that you're someone who is new to the Internet, but they're out there. Every day, more and more people are signing up and taking a look around... and what they find is usually strange, fascinating, frightening, and largely incomprehensible.

(And pornographic. Let's be honest... you can't swing a cat in the internet without hitting porn, and if you try to swing a cat there's probably someone out there willing to pay to see you swing said cat on a webcam. So yes, new users will find porn. A lot of porn. Whether they're looking for it or not. And eventually, if they've been on the net long enough, the porn will come looking for them.)

The internet can be a shock to a lot of people, but this shock can be minimized when more experienced users take them in hand and give them a basic structure to work from. To that end, and as a public service to my readers and the people they know who are taking those first, faltering steps as they peer into the great digital abyss, I would like to impart one of the great truths I have come to know over my many years online. This truth, known as "The Laws of Gender Discernment," can be summed up as follows:

Everyone you meet on the Internet is a man... with one exception.

From Kernel Panic, by yours truly.

Just a very quick note, since I'm working on a much longer, more complicated article going up on Friday: last month -- July 14, to be exact -- the MP3 file format officially turned ten years old.

In related news, yesterday I broke a hip while yelling at those damn kids to get off my lawn.

When landmarks like this come around, it's tempting for people to start pontificating on the significance of the event. For example, next year, when Help Desk turns ten years old, I'll be tempted to look back and ruminate on all the vastly important and ground-breaking work I've done, like...

... um...

... well, I'll worry about it next year.

My point is that the MP3 file format turning ten is just the kind of milestone that provokes people in the know into coaxing out Deep Thoughts Concerning the Significance of the Event as it Pertains to History. And sure enough, over on CNET the technology editor for MP3.com wrote an article called "Top five ways MP3 has changed the world."

As it stands, the article is almost entirely wrong. Not because the points he lists didn't happen (though a few of them are... odd), but because he makes the common mistake of giving the tool all the credit.

From Superosity, by Chris Crosby.

The Free Software Foundation has announced that they are working on an update to the GNU General Public License. The proposed revisions aren't available for review yet (and won't be until early 2006) but they're already talking about a few of the changes, and one change in particular is provoking a lot of worry and speculation. The FSF is trying to downplay the extent of the changes, but at the same time they come across as just a little bit defensive when it comes to defending their right to update the license.

One particular change is causing some concern both within and outside of the free software community, and only time will tell if this change is going to go into the actual revision, or be abandoned as part of the FSF's own "practice movie." If it does get included, however, it suggests that the FSF is narrowing its focus. Some of its ideals aren't co-existing very well, so one of them is getting downgraded from "core belief" to "looks nice on paper."

Ideological triage: the unfortunate result of a successful revolution.

From Alice! by Michael McKay-Fleming.

What does a schoolyard bully practicing spin control at its most fundamental level have to do with the rest of this article? It illustrates what is becoming standard operating procedure in much of the computer industry: if someone writes something you don't like, threaten to beat them up. And to cover your bases, put that threat in writing as part of your product's license agreement.

There are plenty of companies that do this, and not just in the computer industry... but to start us out I'm going to pick on Microsoft.

Why pick on them, you ask? Because it's Microsoft. What a silly question.

From Soap on a Rope by Bob Roberds.

On August 2, 2005 Slashdot posted an odd submission about an article in IT Managers Journal describing a study that showed that IT workers in the United Kingdom are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Well... duh.

Next issue: IT Managers learn that their employees prefer eating lunch to troubleshooting faulty routers.

My Dear Brian,

Though it has been some time since our last lesson, I am pleased to note that you are employing our greatest weapon -- the blurring of the distinction between license and ownership -- to great effect. I am concerned, however, that you are viewing this as our ultimate objective. While it is true that we would prefer a monolithic computing model that focuses on our products driving the rest of the industry, this is only one of our aims. We have another, larger, grander goal that we are pursuing on a completely different level of the industry, and if successful it will enable us to profit whether we manage to consolidate the industry or not.

In our market -- in any market -- corporations live and die by what they can and cannot sell to their customers. We are successful because we are good at marketing our product. We are doubly successful because we have successfully obscured what our product is.

My Dear Brian,

Perhaps our greatest achievement to date has been our ability to convince people to spend enormous sums of money to purchase software that they do not, in fact, own. The idea of product licensing has so thoroughly saturated the computer industry that no piece of software exists without one -- the government even created a license to cover unlicensed programs, which it calls "public domain."

Of course you understand the idea behind the software license, but permit me to explain it nonetheless, simply to satisfy my own rhetorical aestheticism. In our industry, the sole owner of a program is the person who programmed it, unless he specifically transfers those rights to someone else. At Ubersoft, our programmers sign away their rights to the bounty of their work to us -- a sacrifice they are reimbursed handsomely for. Therefore, any software that comes out of Ubersoft is owned by Ubersoft, and is ours to do with as we wish.

We are not in the business of selling software, we are in the business of selling our permission for someone else to use that software. This is extremely advantageous for us for many reasons, but one of the most advantageous (and most deliciously ironic) is that despite the fact that the customer owns nothing, he feels as though he does.

Each customer, despite the fact that he is licensing our software under our conditions and on our terms, feels as though the operating system on his machine belongs to him, the word processor that runs on that operating system belongs to him, the e-mail program that is integrated with that operating system belongs to him, and the web browser that he uses to download naughty pictures from any number of web sites in that eternally useless entity known as "The Web" belongs to him as well.

In fact, unless he is a programmer himself, every single piece of software on his machine is owned by someone else. If he is required to pay nothing for it, and can use it in any way he chooses, it is only because the license attached to the program gives him explicit permission to do so. If he may make innumerable copies of that program and hand those copies out to anyone he pleases, it is due to the authority of that very same license and nothing else. Even the free software community relies on the strength of software licenses to protect their much lauded flexibility and "open" development environment.

As I said, this is well known to you. What you may not know is how, exactly, this came to be.

My Dear Brian,

I chuckle at the thought of your first reaction to this letter -- I am almost certain that you opened the envelope expecting to be fired, due to "thought-crimes" or other some such accusations of disloyalty to Ubersoft. In fact, I am pleased to tell you the truth of the matter is quite the opposite: you are being promoted.

Yes, your recent questions regarding our methods of doing business have drawn plenty of attention. And yes, in many instances such questions are grounds for termination of employment. In fact, in most instances, such questions are grounds for termination immediately... this ensures that the Ubersoft Marketing division functions as a single unit, with no appearance of dissension ever reaching the public's eye.

Your questioning, however, has been different from the norm. It shows a unique desire to find the methods behind the apparent madness of our industry. It shows a desire to learn, and the ability to accept the consequences of possessing that knowledge.

That is why you are receiving this letter.