(This was originally published in the UBC-O Phoenix student newspaper on Thursday September 10th, 2009, written by me)

There is a debate raging in the halls of Britain’s government, across the internet, and across many people’s minds. Right now, there is a growing movement for the British government to apologize to Alan Turing, posthumously, for their, to modern-day sensibilities, atrocious treatment.

Alan Turing is regarded by many to be the father of modern computing. His work formalized the concept of the algorithm(a way of solving a problem, like how to do long-division without a calculator) and many other things. One of the most important facets of his work was on that of the “halting problem”, which asks if there is an algorithm that can determine if another algorithm will ever complete, given a set of inputs. He was able to show that there is no such algorithm, that will work with every algorithm and set of inputs, in a fairly long and involved proof. He also developed the notion of a programmable machine(the Turing machine), able to emulate any other machine, only as long as that machine can emulate a Turing machine.

All of modern computing, from Facebook, to Halo, owes Turing a debt of gratitude for his work and efforts in designing computers, formalizing many of the important mathematics underlying modern computers, and demonstrating their use during WWII. For a time, Turing was responsible for the unit(known as Hut deciphering Nazi naval communications, and was responsible for saving many lives during WWII. He also designed the bombe, which was the key tool to breaking Enigma, the Nazi cipher. And he did all this before the age of 42.

Because it was at the age of 42 when Alan Turing died, of suicide. Two years previous, in 1952, Turing was outed as a homosexual, and under the laws of Britain at the time, tried and found guilty of being a homosexual. The punishment: castration. Turing was found guilty of the same laws that Oscar Wilde suffered under, only Turing chose to be chemically castrated, rather than go to jail.

These laws have since been repealed in Britain, and are now against the UN Charter of Human Rights, and against the EU constitution. What is happening right now, is that people want the government of Britain to acknowledge wrongdoing in their actions, not just against Turing, but against anyone that suffered under those laws, many of whom are still alive today. Over 6000 signatures have already been added to the petition regarding the apology at the time this article went to press.

Editors note: The British Government, on the same date of publication, offered up an apology to Alan Turing and the thousands of other gay men wrongly punished under this law.

(This was published in the UBC-Okanagan Phoenix student newspaper on Thursday, September 10th)
When school starts, during the initial rush at the bookstore, some people may notice a new form of textbooks. This is the “ebook” or the electronic book. The ebooks that we will see in the UBC-O bookstore are offered by a company called Coursesmart(http://www.coursesmart.com), which specializes in offering ebooks for textbooks. They’ve been around since 2007, and have over 6000 textbooks available.

E-textbooks provide several advantages over paper textbooks. For example, you do not have to carry around a 500 page, 3 pound textbook, in addition to a laptop and other matériel. Finally, our backs can breathe easy. In addition, the e-textbook saves on gasoline, since it doesn’t need to be shipped. As well, the e-textbook can save you significant money, always important to starving students, with the e-textbooks selling for half the price of the paper textbook. Coursesmart provides extensive tools to make their e-textbooks that much more useful, like search, go to page X, notes you can add to any point in the book, highlighting any section you wish, or undoing the highlighting, copy, paste, and even printing pages out on demand. These are certainly powerful tools, that many students have wished they had with the paper textbooks.

However, there are certain limitations to the system. You can only download your e-textbook to one computer, and there is little indication of the process for getting another book through Coursesmart if your computer hardware fries. On the other hand, you can choose to access the e-textbook through Coursesmart’s website, and have it available on any computer, as long as you have a supported browser. In addition, the e-textbook will only be available for 180 days, which is certainly long enough to outlast your classes.

To obtain and use e-textbooks, you must first check if the professor for your course is okay with the students using e-textbooks. If so, the book for your course will also have a second tag, listing an e-textbook for purchase. Then you inform the cashier you are buying the e-textbook, and follow the cashier’s instructions. You will receive a receipt with a code on it, and a URL to visit. This URL, at press-time, was http://www.coursesmart.com/redemption?coupon= where you place the PIN after the equal sign.

Follow the instructions at Coursesmart, and choose whether to download the e-textbook, or access it online through Coursesmart’s website. You cannot choose both. Downloading the e-textbook will require the download and installation of Coursesmart’s Bookshelf software. Both downloading and accessing the book through Coursesmart’s website offer the exact same functionality.

The other process is to sign up with Coursesmart directly, find the book for your course, and buy it through them.

There is also a limitation on printing with Coursesmart’s e-textbook. You can only print ten(10) pages at any one time, for a maximum of 150% of the total pages in the textbook. So if the textbook has 200 pages, you can print a total of 300 pages. Coursesmart acknowledges there may be a bug that occurs sometimes with printing, where a user will run out of their allowed pages, at which point, you can contact Coursesmart’s customer service to enable more pages to print.

Coursesmart’s e-textbooks provide a cheap, planet-conscious, weight-less alternative to expensive, dead-tree, and heavy textbooks. This, obviously, comes with some restrictions, which depending on the person can be reasonable, or completely unreasonable. Itis up to the students to decide what is the best option for them. It can certainly be useful to buy an e-textbook for a course that isn’t one’s major, but is still required by the university.

This morning, I saw a slashdot article, this one, where an indie game developer mentions the free-rider problem in regards to DRM. The problem is, there is a significant misunderstanding of the free-rider problem and how DRM deals with it(hint, it doesn’t).

The free-rider problem is an issue in economics and game theory, where someone is able to get a free-ride off of the effort of others. One example is where you have two trappers. Now, if both trappers work hard on their own traps, they’ll each come out ahead at about three resources each. However, if one trapper decides to poach the other trapper’s lines, then that trapper gets six resources. If they both poach, neither gets anything. Typical self-interest says that it is better to poach than to trap, as there is a possibility of getting more resources, for less effort. However, in terms of the collective interests of both trappers, its better if neither poaches. Because there is a very real risk that if both trappers poach, then neither gets anything, and this is an extremely negative outcome. Usually, people spend the effort, or the cost to get the benefits because of the risks associated with free-riding(like jail-time for theft and fraud).

So in terms of piracy, if everyone free-rides, then everyone loses in the end. This is fairly understandable to all pirates, regardless of reason. However, free-riders exist in any system where there will be a possibility of free-riding. Theft will always exist. Fraud will always exist. The incentives and motivations are too great. The question is, how much do the free-riders cost you, and if everyone that pirates really is a free-rider?

One of the central fallacies used by DRM proponents is that every act of piracy, is a lost sale. This is, frankly, wrong. Its a very complex situation, but it can be broken down. Lets consider a customer and an artist. The artist produces a work that is either good or bad. The artist only profits when someone buys a work. A customer, however, may have money, or may not have money now(student for example). So if a customer has money, and they choose to buy, there is basically two outcomes: where the work is good, and both benefit, or where the work is bad, and only the artist benefits. It can be hard to determine if something is worth buying these days with such varied tastes, and such varied levels of quality. Now, imagine if the customer with money pirates instead. There are three outcomes here. One where if the work is good, the customer will buy it or something else from the artist, and thus, both profit. If the work is bad, the customer will not buy anything, and thus saves their money. And finally, the customer doesn’t care, and doesn’t buy anything from the artist either way. This is where a lost sale happens. Not when the customer pirates, but when it doesn’t matter what the quality of the work is, they will still pirate the work.

There is also the alternate side, where a customer doesn’t have money now. This is what artists should be concerned about. Lets say the poor customer doesn’t pirate. They have no money, so they can’t do a lot of social activities, and so they basically end up bored. There are of course libraries and that, so we’ve changed the behavior of our customer to that of someone that contributes nothing negative or positive to the situation. However, if the poor customer pirates instead, there are four possible outcomes. The first is where the work is good, and the poor customer saves up/earns the money to buy from the artist. Both profit in that instance. Or, the poor customer spreads the word of mouth about the product, and gets others, with money, to buy it. This is potentially a situation where the artist can gather many new customers, because word of mouth is hard to quantify at exactly how much of a benefit the artist will gain. Then there is the instance where the poor customer discovers the product is bad. The poor customer profits, in that they don’t waste theirs or others money on a product not worth the money. And finally, the instance where it doesn’t matter, the poor customer will pirate anyways, and there will be no profit for the artist.

This can all be summed up by a simple picture:

Nash Equilibrium of Piracy

Basically, the artist fails to understand the motivations of the customer, namely that they don’t want to waste money on crappy works. So its to the customer’s benefit to pirate, even if they have the money, as the risks are minimized for them. For the artist, its to their benefit to produce something good, and worthy of the money. So unfortunately, what DRM does is it messes up this equilibrium, where customers end up spending money on products they want to buy, and the artists have a good incentive to produce good works. DRM forces customers to waste money, and the artist has spent a significant amount of money doing this. The costs outweigh the benefits, which to be frank, were dubious in the first place. The artist spends money and effort on a DRM system which is easily circumvented, as long as someone finds it worthwhile to do so.

This is done for a variety of reasons, ranging from the invasiveness of the DRM, to just the technical challenge of doing so. There is also a possibility that the DRM makes the product worse, and the pirates wish to work around this. By placing DRM in the way, the artist creates an incentive to break it. So either the DRM doesn’t get in the way, and works perfectly, or don’t use DRM.

Essentially, the way to deal with piracy isn’t DRM, but in making good stuff. If you make good stuff, and don’t place technical barriers in the way, you create a strong incentive for customers to pay for your work. Even better, instead of letting people evaluate the works via piracy, provide representative samples, that are constantly changed, 100% free, and good quality. An example would be providing two songs from an album, along with short samples of the other songs. This helps the customer see that it is worth the money on the album, especially if buying each song individually is more than buying the album. Or, just sell the songs individually.