[WikiEN-l] Google Books class action lawsuit

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/5  <WJhonson at aol.com>:
>> Charles a few things.
>>
>> You do not need to be in the US to read a Google Book.  There is a thing
>> called proxy or super proxy or something of that sort, which will mask where
>> you are, and thus allow anyone to read a book as if they were in the US.
>
> That is probably illegal, though.

Or at least a violation of the Terms of Service.

I dislike such advice that takes the form of 'oh, that's not a
problem, just <do technically involved thing> to bypass an issue'.

Yes, and we could defeat any DRM just by randomly guessing the
encryption key or hand-soldering a chip we fabbed ourselves to fool
the protocols; does that mean we shouldn't worry about things like DRM
because there's always some way to work around it? Or heck, we could
just disable editing entirely - that way anyone wanting to edit will
have to exploit a buffer overflow or remote server hole before they
can modify the SQL tables; this will guarantee that only those people
who really want to edit will edit, and isn't that a good thing?
Clearly the Foundation's expenditures on user-friendliness are a
waste.

Technical possibility is not real possibility. The differences between
these humorous examples are ones only of degree, not kind.

-- 
gwern