O O Ø O O O O
Death, Luddites, and the Canadian Way
5th floor, West Tower
C.D. Howe Building
235 Queen St.
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0H5
Cc: The Honourable Josée Verner, P.C., M.P.
Cc: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, Prime Minister
Dear Sirs, Madam;
I was thinking the other day about death, Luddites, capitalism, and copyright. (I know I should be thinking about other things—hockey, perhaps, or my Ph.D. thesis, but I do these things so others don’t have to.) In particular, I was thinking these things because they were all connected, and, as coincidence would have it, all related to an issue that is close to your hearts: copyright reform.
If you’re wondering what copyright reform has to do with death or Luddites, or indeed, why I would take the time to write a letter about the matter, then I need to tell you a story.
A few weeks ago, I set about to do my billing for the month. I don’t bill very often ( long ago traded my consultant hat for a Ph.D. candidate’s gown) but with the year drawing to a close, I thought it would be wise to actually send out invoices for the work I had done. That meant generating my timesheets from the time-tracking application I keep on my smart-phone.
Perhaps smart-phone is too strong a term for it. I use a Palm Treo 650—the hottest technology 2004 had to offer. It was my 5th in a series of Palm PDAs, stretching all the way back to 1998. Years ago I had trained myself to use a Palm PDA for everything, and even though the rest of the world has moved on to Blackberries and iPhones, I haven’t. Thats the Luddite part of my story.
One of the main tasks I use the Palm for is generating timesheets. Long before I was fixing software for Y2K, I purchased a set of applications that run on the Palm—Hourz Pro—from a now-defunct company called Zoskware. The tools did a great job of allowing me to track my time, and generate little CSV reports that I could then import onto my PC to do my billing. There were two main parts to the software: the application that ran on the Palm, and the software that processed it on the PC end.
It’s the PC end where death (and capitalism) comes in. Earlier this year, my last Windows PC died a slow and painful death. I wasn’t too concerned about it. I had switched to Mac around a year earlier, and didn’t use my PC for much. In fact, the only thing I ever used it for was to do my billing, a fact that I had forgotten, until it came time to generate my invoices.
Then it occurred to me: my PC was dead. Zoskware was dead. There was no way I would ever get a new version of the software to run on my Mac. The relentless march of the capitalism body count (in this case, Zoskware and the PC platform) meant that my old technologies were no longer any good to me. My data was locked-up forever, and I was going to have to invest in some new tools to do the same job I had been doing forever.
I was in trouble.
It was at this point that I put my 20-odd years of computer experience to good use. I hunted down the little data file on my Palm PDA, transferred it to my Mac, and reverse-engineered the file format. Several hours later, I had cobbled together a piece of software that was capable of extracting my painstakingly-assembled timesheets from my crufty old Palm software, and I was in position to generate my invoices.
Normally, this would be the happily ever after part of the story. But then last week, word came down the pipe that our party was looking to “reform” copyright—to introduce a Digital-Millennium-Copyright-Act-type bill that would “bring our copyright regime into the 21st century.”
Unfortunately, this bill would also have outlawed my reverse engineering work, since the data file I was operating on was somebody else’s intellectual property.
Of course, that somebody was a dead corporation, but that’s of little concern to the law.
Mr. Harper, Mr. Prentice, and Ms. Verner: capitalism is a harsh mistress. As more and more of our data becomes locked up in digital capsules, the ability to extract, convert, manipulate, and most importantly, reverse-engineer this data is essential, for our data’s sake. Companies go under. Reverse engineering is the most effective tool we have to ensure they don’t take our data with them.
Please work to protect our rights as consumers to reverse-engineer our data. Keep our digital consumer products open.
One day, your timesheets might rely on this freedom, too.
Kjell Wooding
December 11, 2007
OOØOOOODCCCLI
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Oh no. I thought Canada was supposed to look down its nose at our (many) mistakes? Why are they now importing them? Don’t sink to our level, people!
January 7th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Dear Mr. Wooding
We have reviewed your rant dated December 11, 2007 and advise that your claim that the ability to reverse engineer (HACK) said programming for the sake of data itself is nonsensical. Clearly, the only reason to do anything or to spend time on anything is for production of said capital.
Have your invoices been paid?
Thank you for your opinion. We are sure that you and your friends will vote for us (again) at the next election.
The Reform Party