…a logical fallacy which asserts that given two positions there exists a compromise between them which must be correct.  [It] implies that the positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. This is not always the case. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy allows any position to be invalidated, even those that have been reached by previous applications of the same method; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position.

I added emphasis to a very important part of the explanation.  All you have to do to make something bad look good is come up with something even worse to compare it to.  And given the human capacity for imagination, that’s not such a difficult task.

You’ve probably heard of SOPA and Protect-IP by now.  Pretty much everyone who looks at these bills, outside of the entertainment industry, agrees on a few simple points:

1. These bills would give private corporations the power to censor the Internet
2. These bills are unconstitutional, as they violate the 1st amendment
3. These bills are evil and need to be stopped

Well, there’s some good news, and some bad news.  The good news is that as more and more people are finding out about them, they’re talking to their congressional representatives, and it looks like support for these bills is falling.  It’s looking likely that they won’t pass.

The bad news is the Golden Mean Fallacy.  Take a look at Stop American Censorship, one of the sites that’s working to coordinate the opposition to this legislation.  Check out the quotes down at the bottom, from experts on the subject.  I was a bit horrified to see multiple people saying, in effect, “the DMCA is OK, but this goes too far!”

That’s the Golden Mean Fallacy talking.  If we accept the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as legitimate, we’ve already lost.  It’s every bit as unconstitutional and every bit as evil as SOPA, and to be honest I’m  shocked that it’s apparently never been subject to judicial review on 5th or 14th amendment grounds.  You probably know of the 5th amendment as the one that says you can “take the 5th” in court, meaning that you have the right to not incriminate yourself.  But it also guarantees that you cannot “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  The 14th amendment reiterates the whole “due process of law” thing, applying it to the states as well as the federal government.

In layman’s terms, we have a guarantee, repeated twice, in the Bill of Rights that nobody can be punished for a crime without due process of law, which means (among other things) that they have the right to a fair trial.  This is just as important as a foundation for our freedoms as the First Amendment, and the DMCA tramples all over it.

How does a copyright act trample on the right to due process?  I know it sounds strange at first, but the DMCA is a strange law.  It allows copyright owners to send takedown notices to allegedly-infringing Internet sites, claiming that they are hosting infringing material.  Under the law, this material must be removed right away, unless the owner believes that no infringement is taking place and is willing to start a fight over it.

This may not sound too unreasonable, until you realize that it puts the burden of proof on the accused.  It throws one of our most sacred legal traditions, the presumption of innocence (aka “innocent until proven guilty”) out the window.  Now you’re guilty, by default and without a trial, until proven innocent!  You need look no further than chillingeffects.org to see the damage that this is doing, by allowing copyright holders to make false or exaggerated copyright claims and get away with it.  The presumption of innocence and the right to due process exists for a reason!

But the DMCA does even worse than that: it also allows the use of DRM technology.  Have you ever had a problem activating a program that you legitimately bought?  Something goes wrong and you can’t use it even though you’ve paid for it and done everything right?  Then you can see the problem here.  It’s like the takedowns, but even worse, as you have no way to fight it.  The DRM software is unaccountable.  If it has a bug, (and all software has bugs,) you’re not innocent until proven guilty.  You’re not even guilty until proven innocent.  You’re simply guilty, and screw the proof!  It doesn’t matter if you actually broke the law or not, the copyright owner’s interpretation of the law is enforced upon you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

So the worst thing about SOPA is not SOPA at all.  It’s the opportunity it provides for the Golden Mean Fallacy to legitimize another piece of equally-evil legislation.  Until the DMCA is repealed, and not only repealed but reversed, giving DRM technology the legal status it truly deserves, which is that of malware with no legitimate use, problems like SOPA will continue popping up again and again, because it’s built on the foundation of rights abuses codified by the DMCA.

Wikipedia is blacked out today, replacing its articles with a page urging people to contact their Congressmen in opposition to SOPA.  That’s a good gesture, but ultimately meaningless.  SOPA is getting enough opposition now that it’s not going to pass.  We’ve already won this battle.  What people need to contact their congressmen about is rooting out the source of this abuse.  “Repeal and reverse the DMCA,” not “stop SOPA,” needs to be the soundbite on people’s minds if we’re to truly protect our freedom in the Internet Age.

In fact, we have laws that specifically say that if someone breaks the law, I’m not allowed to punish them for it, even if I was directly harmed by their actions, because I don’t have the authority to enforce the law.  People who attempt to do so are known as vigilantes, and their actions are usually illegal, because vigilante justice is flawed in several fundamental ways.  First, it’s not always easy to know if you’ve got the right guy.  Second, even if you do have the right guy, you don’t know if there are extenuating circumstances for them having done what they did.  (This idea goes a very long way, even to the most serious of crimes.  It’s why there’s a legal distinction between “murder” and “killing in self-defense,” for example.)  And third, even if you have the right guy and you know that they acted maliciously, what you might think of as a proper punishment for the crime may be way over the top, especially if you’re the injured party.  This is why trials for particularly severe and shocking crimes are often held in a different community from where it was committed, to make it possible (or at least easier) to get an impartial jury with no personal stake in the matter.

What does this have to do with software?  Well, if you’ve been following DelphiFeeds lately, you can probably guess.

Both Andreas Hausladen and Primoz Gabrijelcic have been bitten by Delphi’s copy protection system in the last few days.  In fact, Gabr’s issue looks a whole lot like the problem I had with both Delphi 2010 and XE when I got them, which also required multiple calls to Embarcadero tech support to resolve.  Technically, this specific problem isn’t actually in the licensing system; it’s in the installer, which for whatever insane reason takes the serial number you feed it, validates it, and then proceeds to install the feature set specified by the pre-existing license file if there is one.  Then you can’t activate the product because the activation you give it doesn’t match what’s actually installed.  But we all know that Delphi’s installer is crap anyway.  It’s just one of those things we put up with because the language is worth it.

Things get a bit stranger with Andreas’s case.  According to him:

It took me hours to identify which function hook in DDevExtensions caused the problem. But eventually I found it. It’s the dialog that asks for switching the project if you edit a file that isn’t part of the active project or its dependencies.

Umm… OK, I must be missing something here.  What in the world does any of that have to do with product activation?  Also, how did this get past testing?  I know that Embarcadero does private field tests for updates before releasing them, and if I were to make a list of people I’d expect to be automatically invited to all such tests, “Andreas Hausladen” would be at the top of that list.  For this update to have been released without being tested against Andreas’s system (or that of anyone else with DDevExtensions, for that matter) indicates a serious breakdown in the process somewhere.

But all of this is beside the point, which is that the activation system should never have been in Delphi in the first place.  Such systems take the concept of the Rule of Law and laugh in its face.  It’s nothing more than electronic vigilante justice, and flawed in all the same ways.

As recent events have shown, a copy-protection system is easy to confuse and often doesn’t know if it’s got a real illegitimate copy or not.  And when it does, it doesn’t know if there’s a good reason for it or not.  (It’s pretty common among tech-savvy gamers to buy a legitimate copy of a game, then never actually install it but instead install a cracked version, simply to avoid having to deal with trigger-happy DRM.)  And most egregiously, when it (thinks it) detects an illegitimate copy, it reacts in a completely inappropriate way.  Instead of notifying law enforcement, whose job it is to deal with people breaking the law, or notifying the copyright owner, who could then notify law enforcement, (possibly after having a real human being check it and verify that it’s a real illegitimate user and not Andreas Hausladen,) it disables the program. This is something that no programmer has any right to do under any circumstances!

Let me illustrate what I mean.  I grew up on a farm.  We had some cows, and they were our property.  We could do what we wanted to with them–milk them, breed them, sell them, butcher them, etc–but we were also responsible for them.  We had to check the fences and barn doors to make sure that they couldn’t get loose, or we’d hear complaints from neighbors.  I don’t recall this ever happening, but if they’d made enough of a nuisance of themselves someone could have called the sheriff about it.  But if a neighbor had decided that the cow was making too much of a nuisance of herself and shot her, then we’d be the ones calling the sheriff, because she was our property.

Likewise, if I own a computer, then it’s my property, and I have the right to use it as I see fit.  I’m also responsible for its behavior.  If I choose to put a program on there that isn’t legally there, then the neighbor has every right to call the sheriff and let the legal system work it out.  But to preemptively shoot the computer, so to speak, by disabling its functionality, is to step way out of line!  In any other context, subverting a computer owner’s control over that computer’s functionality, against the interests of the owner, is known as computer hacking, and is a serious crime.  It’s true that this is legal in this specific case, but simply because abominations of law such as the DMCA turn common sense inside out doesn’t make it right.  This is a big part of why the DMCA needs to be repealed.  It weakens the Rule of Law that our cherished freedoms are built upon.

Perhaps more importantly to the parties involved in making these decisions, it also weakens the product’s sales.  These days, copy protection is considered a misfeature by customers, almost universally.  It costs sales from those who don’t want the hassle, and it doesn’t effectively prevent the product from being copied illegally.  Delphi is no exception; how long does it usually take from the release of each new version to the corresponding Delphi Distiller update?

Bottom line: If a computer’s owner puts a file on it, whether data or an application, of their own free will and choice, no third party has the moral right to cause the computer to treat that file as anything other than 100% legitimate, without due process of law.  Embarcadero needs to get out of the vigilante business before it costs them even more goodwill, a precious commodity that they can ill afford to lose right now.

Remember the 2008 elections?  The world’s moving so fast these days that that can feel like a long time in the past, but it shouldn’t be completely out of everyone’s memory yet.  When Barack Obama ran for President, one of the things he promised was to “take a back seat to no one” on Net Neutrality.  And he also pledged that there would be more openness and transparency in government.  But now the FCC is trying to sell us all out.

Instead of openness and transparency, they’re currently holding meetings behind closed doors with telecom corporations to decide what the rules will be.  Just as Congress did with copyright law from the 70s to the 90s, the FCC is currently in the process of allowing the very people that it is supposed to be protecting us from to write the rules!

This is a crime against the American people and needs to be treated as one.  Unlike a lot of political topics, Net Neutrality enjoys almost universal support among the American people.  This isn’t a liberal agenda topic or a conservative agenda topic; it’s something that We The People want.  All of us!  (Well, everyone except the telecom industry, who wants to be able to control how we communicate with each other online.)

Unfortunately, it’s starting to almost look like things are to the point where nothing but massive public outrage will get anything done.  But even though Net Neutrality is an issue that will affect all of us if we lose it, it’s not something easily visible.  Certainly not as easily visible as, say, a leaking oil well.  That’s visible enough to generate its own outrage.  Just point a camera at it, and suddenly all the turkeys in DC are falling all over themselves to demonstrate just how committed they are to fixing the problem.  That’s exactly what we need to have happen for Net Neutrality, but it’s not happening.

So I guess we’ll have to generate some public outrage of our own.  Get the word out.  The FCC is trying to hand the Internet over to the corporate predators it’s supposed to be regulating.  There’s a petition here that you can sign, directed at the White House and the FCC, but unless we get enough signatures to indicate serious public interest it won’t amount to much.  If anyone can think of a way to focus more attention on this issue, please put it into action.  Enough is enough.

Apple released the latest iPhone development license yesterday, and I suddenly find myself a lot less grateful.

In case you haven’t already seen, it contains the following provision:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Among other things, that means no Object Pascal for the iPhone.  At Delphi Live last year, the Embarcadero folks talked about “Native Delphi everywhere.”  Everywhere but the iPhone and the iPad, apparently.  Oh, and not on any phone that runs on Windows Phone 7 either; only .NET apps that use Silverlight or XNA are allowed there.  Google’s Android is only slightly better.  You’re “officially discouraged” from using anything but Java, but not outright prohibited.  (Language choice is alive and well on Palm’s WebOS, but phones that run on it aren’t doing so well in the market.)

This also slams the door hard right in the face of all the folks at the Lazarus project and the fascinating work they’ve done on Objective-Pascal, and it calls the future of the Delphi team’s cross-platform work into question.  With all of the blog posts about Delphi for the Mac in the upcoming “Fulcrum” project, it’s clear that Embarcadero is putting a lot of effort into making Delphi work on the Mac, and does anyone doubt that they had the iPhone/iPad in their sights as part of the long-term plan?

I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes this new policy so offensive to me.  Apple has every right to build the iPhone however they want to.  The design of the phone is their own intellectual property.  And they have the right to build an App Store as a centralized place to buy and sell iPhone content.  And if they own the App Store, it logically follows that they have every right to decide what apps people can offer on it.  The store’s their property, after all.  I’ve seen plenty of brick-and-mortar stores with signs that say “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason,” and this is just the electronic version of that.

But here’s where we come to a problem.  The design of the iPhone is Apple’s property.  The App Store is Apple’s property.  But the individual phones and iPads are not.  If Apple sells an iPhone to me, it is transferring ownership of the device from Apple to me in exchange for an agreed-upon sum of money, and once this transfer has taken place, they no longer own it.  It becomes my property, to do with as I please.  That’s a very simple, intuitive concept that anyone can grasp, and it’s been a fundamental principle of capitalism since before Adam Smith wrote the how-to guide:  as long as I do not use a personal possession in such a way as to cause actual harm to others, I can do whatever I want to with it.

This principle’s under attack now.  The only way to get a new app on your iPhone is through the App Store, or by uploading it directly from your Mac if you have a Mac and the iPhone SDK.  On my PC, I can go to some random website, download a new program and install it, but you can’t do that on an iPhone, even though it has a built-in Internet connection.  In effect, Apple has decreed you only theoretically own the iPhone; you don’t own the part of it that receives new applications.  That still belongs to Apple 100%.

Well, to be frank, that’s a bunch of crap.  Apple has no right to tell me that I can’t download an iPhone app from some random website and install it on an iPhone if I want to, and Microsoft has no right to say that I can’t write non-.NET apps for the Windows Phone 7 OS if I can figure out the bindings.  Any law that says they do have such a right is evil and needs to be repealed.

This isn’t just about the iPhone, or even phones in general.  This is about the future of personal computing itself.  What Apple’s managed to pull off with the iPhone looks a whole lot like Microsoft’s vision of the future, in which every computer contains a TPM chip that will place the ultimate control of the system’s functionality under the control of the owners of the software that runs on it, not the owner of the computer.  This isn’t some hypothetical bad future bogeyman that Richard Stallman is cooking up to scare people into using Free Software, folks.  This is what is really happening, right in front of us, today.

In any other context, taking control of the functionality of a computer away from the computer’s owner and using it against his will and against his interests is known as hacking that computer.  It’s universally regarded as a form of computer crime, and rightfully so.  But when DRM technology is involved, it’s not a crime; instead it’s a legally-protected “access control.”  That’s what the DMCA and similar laws in other countries are all about: they explicitly give copyright owners the right to hack your computer, at any time and for any reason, if your computer runs their copyrighted material.  And until this notion is reversed, and the use of DRM technology is legally recognized as the crime it is, we can expect to see the future of computing looking more and more like the iPhone.

It would seem that Apple has come full circle.  Thanks to Apple Macintosh, 1984 was not like “1984″. But thanks to Apple iPhone, 2010 might be.

There are few other things that have had such a fundamental impact on our development as a technological society. The only other technology I can think of that’s as basic to modern civilization as steel is electricity.

We’ve been using machinery to raise our standard of living ever since the Industrial Revolution, which began back in the late 18th century. Industrial steelmaking dates back to the same time. Benjamin Huntsman’s crucible steel technique, developed in the 1740s, pioneered the industrial manufacture of steel, making high-quality steel available (at a premium price) to the general public. About a hundred years later, Henry Bessmer developed a special forge, known as the Bessmer Converter, which was able to produce good steel much more quickly, requiring much less fuel, than Huntsman’s crucible process. The Bessmer Converter reduced the cost of steel to less than 1/7 what it had cost from the crucible process, turning it from a premium good to a commodity. The price of Bessmer’s steel was competitive with wrought iron, but it was much stronger and more suitable as a structural material, and the rest, as they say, was history.

However, in contrast to the complete triumph that the history of steel since Huntsman and Bessmer has been, the other side of the story has been a true tragedy for human civilization. It’s well-known that steel ha been around since before Huntsman’s crucible. The image of the medieval knight, clad in shining steel armor and carrying a big steel sword, is an iconic piece of Western cultural imagery. But steel has been around for a lot longer even than the Dark Ages. A crucible-style process was known in India dating back at least to 300 BC, producing an alloy known as wootz steel (or Damascus steel) that was highly valued in Europe for making swords. The secret to making wootz was held carefully, even as the process gradually spread over the course of almost 2,000 years. By the 18th century, it was being manufactured in at least 1,000 sites throughout the Far East and Middle East, but never in any great amounts, and the techniques declined, then died out completely at right about the same time as Huntsman independently developed his own version of crucible steel. Even today, the historical process for the production of wootz steel remains a mystery lost to the ravages of time.

From our modern Information Age perspective, it’s difficult to imagine such an important piece of knowledge being lost entirely. They had the printing press by then; it had been around for centuries. Why was the technique never documented, recorded and preserved?
A better question would be to ask why wootz steel had to be developed in India around 300 BC in the first place. As ancient as that is, the history of steel goes back much further. Some of the earliest known samples have been discovered in Africa of all places, dating back to 1400 BC. Steel was known to the ancient Chinese, and also to the Roman Empire, primarily as a military material, centuries before the time of Christ. Why did steel have to keep getting reinvented? And why did the technologies pioneered by Huntsman and Bessmer succeed in establishing industrial steel production when so many previous techniques had not? This is a very important issue, as the answer touches on one of the most important issues of modern society.

Compared to other metals known to ancient cultures, iron is very difficult to work with. It melts at a high temperature, requiring hotter flames than many primitive fuels were able to create. It oxidizes easily, and its ore is difficult to extract iron metal from. Steel is an alloy made of iron and carbon, but carbon tends to burn up at high temperatures. To make it worse, steel is only actually produced if the iron is mixed with a very small amount of carbon, in a very narrow percentage range. Not enough, and you get slightly harder-than-usual iron. Too much, and you get a heavy, brittle metal known as pig iron, which is basically worthless in industrial applications, except as an intermediate phase in certain steelmaking processes.

Getting it right is a difficult trick, especially without an existing industrial base, and the handful of times that ancient metallurgists managed to stumble upon the secret and realize what they’d ended up producing, they kept it to themselves as a carefully-controlled trade secret. Steel was a very valuable metal for military applications, and it was an incredible source of wealth to whoever controlled its supply. Sometimes the secret got passed on from master to apprentice or father to son. Sometimes it didn’t, and the secret was lost again until the next smith came along and discovered it.

This being historically true, an even better question to ask would be why Huntsman and Bessmer’s steelmaking techniques didn’t get the same treatment. The reason? Because they were living in England in a time when the British government, in an attempt to stimulate the progress of science and technology, had implemented a system of patents, allowing an inventor the exclusive right to produce their invention and profit therefrom for a limited time, under the explicit condition that the details of the technology be recorded and published. Interestingly, Bessmer’s industrial steelmaking process came out of patent production, and the technique was released to the public domain, in the 1870s. Karl Benz (as in Mercedes-Benz) created the Motorwagen, the first modern automobile, in 1885, built around an engine he developed in 1878.

Why is this relevant to modern times? Because techniques for manufacturing steel, one of the most fundamental pillars of an advanced civilization, have been known at least as far back as 1400 BC. If the technical knowledge to create it had been widely disseminated immediately, the Industrial Revolution would have followed soon after. Who knows how much further along we would be today? But due to repeated attempts to keep the technology secret, steel remained a valuable luxury material instead of the inexpensive commodity that eventually fueled the greatest, most fundamental technological and economic boom in human history.

In other words, valueless steel is far more valuable than valuable steel! This is the way patent (and copyright) law was designed, for exactly this reason: to enrich the public domain. Had the ancient smiths understood the potential of steel, their hoarding of the technology could be considered one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against humanity. But of course that was not what happened. It was just a standard case of short-sighted businessmen sacrificing more important considerations for immediate-term profits, a tragedy that ended up setting back the progress of human civilization by three thousand years!

Intellectual property laws were written for the ultimate purpose of enriching the public domain and raising the standard of living for the entire nation. The monopoly-on-production provision that people these days speak of as being synonymous with copyrights and patents was never intended to be more than a means to an end: a financial incentive to create new things that will enrich all of society.

There’s currently a treaty under discussion by several nations, including the USA, to significantly strengthen intellectual property protection and turn the worst excesses of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act into international law. It’s known as the Anti-Counterfeitting Trade Agreement, and it’s being drafted in secret. Only a few leaks have provided us with any clue as to what this proposed treaty states, and it’s worrisome. Modern short-sighted businessmen, spiritual descendants of the ancient steelsmiths, are lobbying their legislative bodies yet again for stronger protections on the exclusive production of creations they hold the rights to. They warn of dire economic consequences if the desired protections are not granted and enforced. But a historical perspective tells us a very different story. The tragedy of steel shows us that the consequences of proprietary technology being successfully protected are far, far worse.

Proprietary steel set mankind’s progress back three thousand years, without the benefit of strong encryption that could theoretically not be broken for millions of years. If this treaty passes, backed by modern technology to restrict the dissemination of information, it’s impossible to estimate how much damage it will do to technological progress and innovation. If you live in a country that is considering participating in this treaty, and you have any way to influence the development of laws, even something as simple as writing an email to a representative, please do so. The modern steelsmiths have gone too far, and this treaty needs to be stopped.

^*As the author, I grant unrestricted permission to copy and redistribute this article, so long as the content remains unchanged, or to translate it into other languages to facilitate distribution, so long as the original intent of the article is preserved intact.