| |||||||||||||
Is Okular doing the right thing?Is Okular doing the right thing?Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:16 UTC (Tue) by MattPerry (guest, #46341)In reply to: Is Okular doing the right thing? by PO8 Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions
> "Implementing the spec as designed" is not an excuse for putative bad
> behavior here.
There's nothing bad about the behavior. Please elaborate if you disagree.
> If some portion of a spec called for program behavior that
You are comparing apples to oranges. There's is nothing malicious or harmful by setting a flag that says "I don't want this to be able to be printed, or text to be copyable."
There are legitimate reasons for restricting the copying and printing of documents. I work for a medical device manufacturer and we restrict the copying of text and printing of PDFs of our standard operating procedures. These are not restricted to prevent fair use by our employees but to make sure that there are not printed copies of older documents that are filed away and used by people for procedures. Such use of old documents can and have caused much expensive trouble with the FDA in the past. If an employee needs an older version to print, or needs text from an older version of a document, they can contact the document owner to get a copy of the content they require.
In this case, restricting the copying and printing enforces policies in our company that is intended to minimize costly mistakes.
> In this case, the decision to be made is whether a spec clause that will
No fair use rights are being affected. You can still take a screenshot of the content. You can still type in the text that you cannot copy. As I stated before, fair use does not mean convenience.
(Log in to post comments)
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 2, 2009 19:58 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Fair Use does not mean convenience. Free Software means convenience. Artificially enforced inconvenience is incompatible with the Free Software ethos. If you don't like what Free Software is about, what are you doing here?
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 2, 2009 21:51 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
Free software means you, as the user of the software, can do what you want - you can set the configuration option or you can rebuild the package to change default, just as you can decide that it's inconvenient that cp observes the system access rules and change it so it lets you copy files regardless of the permission bits, assuming it's a system that you can install your own kernel on.
Free software ideals don't define what the software does out of the box, just that you're allowed to change it.
Okular has kindly provided a configuration bit to let you change it without doing any programming. Say, "Thank you", don't say "But, you should do it my way by default and if you don't you're violating the ideals of free software."
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 3, 2009 18:19 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
I'm not talking to the Okular developers. They can do whatever the hell they want, and it's none of my business. I'm talking to the Debian maintainers of the Okular package, who signed an agreement to abide by the Debian Social Contract. These package maintainers are catering to people who are not members of the Debian community at the expense of people who are, in violation of that Contract.
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 3, 2009 23:28 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]
I don't think there's anything about the default setting of the Okular option that "violates the Debian Social Contract" or violates the DFSG, unless there's a lot of understood subtext that I'm not aware of as an outsider. The software is, to the best of my knowledge, appropriately licensed, modifiable, and redistributable.
But, as noted, I'm an outsider, and if the Debian community feels violated by the default setting of a user-changeable option, by all means, change it...
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 4, 2009 1:15 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link]
"I work for a medical device manufacturer and we restrict the copying of text and printing of PDFs of our standard operating procedures"
And how exactly does that enforce "to make sure that there are not printed copies of older documents that are filed away and used by people for procedures"?
Is Okular doing the right thing? Posted Jun 6, 2009 1:24 UTC (Sat) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
The word "enforce" is in general somewhat ambiguous about to what extent the object is absolutely obtained (see the variation in meanings given by a dictionary), but the post to which JoeF replies already makes clear (in more than one paragraph) that its author is aware that the software does not absolutely prevent copying.
(So the answer to the question how ... does that enforce ... is: it urges or causes (to quote one dictionary) that result both by informing the user that an author of the document has requested that the text not be copied or printed, and by requiring the user to go to extra effort to copy or print the document.)
The question under discussion is not whether copying is absolutely prevented (that question has already been answered both in the original article and in the post to which JoeF replies), but whether the software is effective in reducing costly mistakes, and whether there are any practical steps we can take to improve the tradeoff of preventing rare but costly mistakes against the cost of making it less convenient to copy when it is appropriate to copy.
(In this case, without yet having read the discussion in the bug report, I'd suggest that the dialog box could be improved by changing the text to An author of the document has requested not to copy text from this document., and going on to inform the user how they can nevertheless copy from the document. Adding a button to the dialog box would be something to consider, though the trade-off is that users don't then get much chance to think about the reason for the request. Again, I haven't read the discussion in the bug report.)
And more generally under discussion is how one might handle other cases where there is some desire to hinder some user actions ("limit freedom") to prevent harm or achieve some other desirable result.
|
|||||||||||||