RE: Bill C-61, the Canadian copyright bill.

Dear Jim Prentice,

I've been following recent developments regarding the new C-61 copyright bill. There are many things I don't like about it. Here are three.

1) It becomes illegal to copy DVDs for backups or for playing on another device.

I have recently started to move my DVDs onto a separate hard disk so that I can play them from my computer without going through the bother of finding the physical disk first. Essentially I have made a sort of crude movie jukebox. I find this to be a great way of watching movies.

I also make temporary copies of DVDs to my laptop for use on long flights or bus rides. Playing from the digital copies doesn't take up as much battery lifespan as playing them from disk. Also I don't need to carry around the DVD drive, not to mention the disk itself. This is especially useful since my laptop machine doesn't have a DVD drive.

I am concerned for people making copies of DVDs for use in their iPod movie player devices. While I don't do it I don't think this should be made illegal. I can see a time in the near future where it will be possible to put every movie I own onto one of these devices. I would like to see this doesn't become illegal.

I am also concerned about the parents who want to make backup copies of their children's DVDs because their children tend to destroy them. I think this is a reasonable, fair use.

2) The anti circumvention clauses.

All free and open source DVD players on linux are, to my knowledge, based on the DeCSS. This code was backward engineered to allow DVD playback on Linux. This would be made illegal.

From my understanding, the development of this code would be illegal. I'm not even sure that the use of this code is legal, therefore I'm not sure whether there's any way of legally playing DVDs on linux. I think this is a bad thing.

Putting linux aside for a moment, the breaking of CSS has opened up the possibility for me to make copies of DVD for the uses I mentioned above. In a very real way I owe these new capabilities to the breaking of the encryption. It looks like bill C-61 makes format shifting in general illegal and breaking DRM to do so doubly illegal.

I believe that DRM and encryption are examples of how digital technology can be used to create new business models. Digital technology, and the use of encryption, can allow the content producer to control how their content is consumed and paid for. Historically, this has been defeated by other who break the encryption and backward engineer their formats. Anti-circumvention legislation removes the ability of third parties to do this and tilts the balance of power in favour of content producers.

With DRM, piracy is a red herring. DRM certainly doesn't help stop piracy since all you need is one non-DRM copy to begin to circulate for all piracy to be possible. It is, however, a great way of getting people to pay extra for the ability to VCR programs for later viewing... Or to pay to re-buy tracks they actually own but need to buy again because their tracks all use a DRM for a type of player that doesn't exist any more.

Finally, I would like to mentions the Sony root kit incident. Sony's CD copy protection DRM was obnoxious and invasive. It used a root-kit style attack more common of trojan horse (computer virus) cracking attempts. It's buggy modifications to Windows has caused me personally to spend time fixing machines broken by its buggy implementation (known commonly as the Sony rootkit fiasco). In my opinion this sort of drive by virus-like behaviour from software should be illegal and not any attempt to circumvent it!

How to fix your desktop application

Ok, a quicky..

Google's calender, spredsheet applications, mail have started to displace desktop applications. Why? IMHO they suck. They try to be desktop applications but are nasty, buggy, pale imitations. They do have a few things that desktop applications can learn from.

1) No dang installation step. I've always hated installing applications. Is anyone here over 30? Can anyone remember installing applications on Macs circa 1992? The correct answer to that question, with a few exceptions, was no. You just dragged the application from the floppy to where you wanted on your hard disk. The only reason you didn't run the dang program directly from the floppy was it ran slow. 'm using windows XP and everything little thing has an installer. Step one to making desktop applications suck less, get rid of installers. Let's get a standard where I can run desktop applications from the web and cache them locally, please.

2) No load time. Web applications don't need to load. To be honest I'm still not sure why desktop applicati0ons have a load time... and I've been writing them for years! While writing Myster I tried to reduce the amount of time it took to load. In the end I managed to get it down to some reasonable fraction of what it took to load the java virtual machine but really it should have been even shorter.

Just what the heck is happening during a program launch anyway? The answer is the machine reads a block of computer instructions from the HD and starts executing them. This is actually quite fast.. even on windows. The trouble comes when these initial instructions start loading libraries and building tables and constants and loading the code that loads the preferences and reading from the preferences and loading parsing them then loading all the icon resources then displaying those. The list goes on and on. In the end, desktop applications take a long time to load.

If your desktop application takes longer to load than my perception of instantaneous, then you should be making it faster. If your application feels the need to present a splash screen it's taking too long to load. If your app takes longer to load than a typical web page then it's too slow.

3) Web pages can be accessed from anywhere. I'm not entirely sure why I can't access my home documents or application setting from another location. Part of this problem is that applications require an installer and I don't want to go through this heavy install process in order to access my information from another PC. The other part is because I have to find someplace where I can store my documents or setting in order to access them.

Web sites don't have this problem. In one of the weirdest examples or this I have ever seen, my web browser of choice has an option to store its settings remotely. The idea is that when I use my web browser on a different machine, the settings I usually use follow me there. Hurray! Now the three machine I use daily will be in sync. The thing is, in order to use this feature I have type enter a server to connect to to store my settings. Are you kidding me? I got this browser from a website.. A web site that appears to have no problem handling a bazillion downloads of said web browser every month, not to mention other page hits etc.. But it won't allow me to store my settings anywhere on its servers. Is this desktop application group think?

4) Platform compatible. The three machines I use daily are all on different platforms. I have a mac, a PC and a Linux box. I can view the same web sites on all. Desktop apps? Yeah, there are some ports but I would have expected that we'd have cross platform code by now. Java has been around for some time now and does it fine.


gumble grumble grumble..

So at work I'm currently working on a brand new desktop application product. I want to give demo/beta applications to people. I don't want to keep sending out installers to everyone what can I do?

Well, The application is in java so I use Java web start.

With java web start you go to a web page, click on a button or link, the application is then downloaded to your machine (if it's not cached there already) and run. The whole process is a bit quirky in practice since you have to click on a box acknowledging that you're downloading an application by someone named whatever.. but it works. Want to run it offline? Yep, you can do that too. It's like having a desktop application available from a web page. This application, also has roaming user preferences as well so if you go to a different machine, the preferences can follow you around via your login. Basically, it nails 3 out of the four things above. The startup time isn't the best.. I mean this is java, but it's still fast than open office, for example, so it's not bad...

yeah.. I can see this stuff happening.