The US Copyright Office has just spoiled the fun for that elite cadre of hackers known as Jailbreakers.  Where’s the satisfaction of breaking and entering an Apple iPhone if the authorities tell you it’s fine, be our guest.

But that’s pretty much what happened today, according to Nicholas Deleon of Crunchgear.  The Copyright Office’s decision took him so aback he was all but speechless:”This is easily the biggest tech news I have come across in quite some time—we’re talking years here.” he gasped. “I’m actually going to need a few moments to digest all of this.”

For you boring law-abiding hardworking taxpaying nine-to-five citizens, Jailbreak is a technique for hacking an iPhone to free it from Apple restrictions. “Because the iPhone is far from flawless as Apple created it,” one website explains it, “thousands of iPhone users have flocked to Jailbreak in search of iPhone changes and improvements. iPhone has been held back by limited customizability, text message privacy issues, and a lack of multitasking capabilities. But Jailbreak can solve all of these problems with apps and fixes available in Cydia and Installer. Cydia and Installer are the unofficial “App Stores” of the Jailbreak world. Developers create apps and tweaks and different utilities and upload them to these package managers, which organize everything into categories. The differences between Cydia and the App Store are the lack of an app approval process, and the lack of access limits on the iPhone software — i.e. you can do things Apple did not design the iPhone software to do.”

Is Jailbreak legal? Well, it is now. At least in a number of ways, says Deleon. According to rule updates created by the Copyright Office under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, six classes of jailbreaking are now exempt from prosecution:

1. Defeating a lawfully obtained DVD’s encryption for the sole purpose of short, fair use in an educational setting or for criticism
2. Computer programs that allow you to run lawfully obtained software on your phone that you otherwise would not be able to run aka Jailbreaking to use Google Voice on your iPhone
3. Computer programs that allow you to use your phone on a different network aka Jailbreaking to use your iPhone on T-Mobile
4. Circumventing video game encryption (DRM) for the purposes of legitimate security testing or investigation
5. Cracking computer programs protected by dongles [defined as "hardware that connects to a laptop or desktop computer for the purpose of copy protection or authentication of software"] when the dongles become obsolete or are no longer being manufactured
6. Having an ebook be read aloud (ie for the blind) even if that book has controls built into it to prevent that sort of thing

Before you rush to hack that antenna problem in your iPhone 4 you might want to consider advice offered in a tutorial by iPhone Apple iPhone Review

1. *The folks at Apple know what they are doing. They have not enabled multasking — the ability for apps to run in the background, simultaneously — most likely because it is a huge battery drain. By controlling the user experience, Apple ensures that your iPhone “just works,” and you don’t have to worry about managing battery life or any other technical details.
2. *Jailbreak could (maybe?) brick your iPhone. “When someone develops something for an Apple product and that development isn’t sanctioned by Apple, you run the risk of it not working as it should, conflicting with the device itself, or just all-around bricking that iPhone,” warns Chris Pirillo, who prefers not to Jailbreak his iPhone because “my iPhone just works already.” But I have never heard of Jailbreak completely ruining an iPhone. The consensus at this forum seems to be that the chance is “extremely slim.”
3. *Every iPhone update from iTunes disables Jailbreak. Every time Apple comes out with an update for iPhone, they find a way to prevent hackers from cracking the code again. Hackers then scramble to Jailbreak the iPhone again and release the new methods. That means if you like to download Apple’s iPhone updates, you are going to have to figure out each time how to Jailbreak your iPhone yes again. Do you really want to play this cat and mouse game?
4. *Jailbreak might increase your risk of getting a virus on your iPhone. The only two iPhone viruses ever reported have spread across iPhones that have been Jailbroken. That’s not to say the iPhone platform as Apple built it is totally secure. In fact, some say compromising an iPhone’s security is “child’s play” (i.e. easy).
5. *Jailbreak voids your iPhone warranty. If your iPhone is bricked because of Jailbreak, or if your iPhone has another problem and it happens to be Jailbreaked, your warranty becomes void. I once saw a sign at the Genius bar of The Falls, Miami Apple Store that warned customers not to Jailbreak iPhones or they would void their warranties. Harsh.

Richard Curtis

If you think clearing permissions is a nightmare today...

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Once again it’s time to play You Be the Agent.

Today’s question is, How much is one line of poetry worth? Not a lot, you say? Suppose you represented the Robert Frost estate and someone requested permission to use the line “And miles to go before I sleep” in an anthology. Still think it’s worth nothing?

That’s the kind of question that comes up daily in every literary agency. But with the introduction of digital technology, decisions that were once fairly cut and dried have become head-spinningly complex. Marc Aronson, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, stated the issue cogently: “In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.”

What does Aronson mean? “Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print,” he writes, “it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books. After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated. We’ve all heard about the multimedia potential of the iPad, but how much will writers be charged for film clips and audio? Rights holders will demand a hefty premium for use in digital books — if they make their materials available in that format at all.”

Aronson thinks it’s high time for a new permissions model grounded in the realities of the digital paradigm. “Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads.” Though accounting for sales under this system might at first seem daunting, the micropayment management such as Paypal is already commonplace.
Aronson is onto something. Expect to hear more about it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

“The envelope, please”, that trite phrase used to announce the winner of an Oscar, took on a new meaning when some five thousand individuals received notices that they were being sued for illegally downloading the Academy Award-winning film The Hurt Locker, Ethan Smith reports in the Wall Street Journal.  The recipients had copped the film using BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol.

Unlike the lawsuit brought against music downloaders by the Recording Industry Association of America, this action was brought by one producer, Voltage Pictures LLC. In fact – and mystifyingly – the Motion Picture Association of America distanced itself from Voltage’s action. A spokesperson wrote that “The MPAA and our member companies have absolutely nothing to do with these lawsuits.”

Suing end users is fraught with dangers and imponderables.  For one thing, it’s bad public relations. Smith cites that RIAA subpoenas were served to “very young children, old people who said they didn’t own computers, even a dead person.”

Nevertheless, such actions are a sign of how outraged copyright owners are about having their work robbed. The RIAA was willing to incur a PR black eye in exchange for intimidating would-be thieves.  And perhaps they did, especially when those would-be’s learned that it had cost one defendant $675,000 (see File Share This for details).

Suing file-sharers is not like suing your neighbor for running his lawn mower into your car. “The process of suing people for downloading can be complicated and costly,” Smith reminds us. “After the relatively straightforward task of recording the Internet protocol, or IP, address of each person offering a piece of media, the plaintiff must learn who that numerical address belongs to, generally by sending a subpoena to the Internet service provider associated with it.”

We’ve had lawsuits against music downloaders and now we have one against film downloaders.  Are e-book downloaders next?

If victims of piracy have any say about it, the answer will be a resounding Yes. And there are a lot of victims. Are you one of them? Does your blood boil when you see yourself ripped off and your mugger laughing at you? Maybe you will take heart from the Wall Street Journal’s account, which you can read in full here.

Richard Curtis

In an attempt to roll back the tide of digital piracy, England’s Parliament recently passed an act designed to disconnect service to households where copyright infringement is taking place. (For background read Brits Fiddle While E-Pirates Dance on Authors’ Graves)

Though it might prove to be an exercise in futility, the law attempts to recognize and punish Internet lawbreakers where it really hurts: clamping their feeding tube. The US government does not seem to consider e-piracy to be worth so much as a shoulder shrug, though illegal downloading of copyrighted musical, literary and artistic content has become as widespread as China’s.

Cory Doctorow, an unrepentent apologist for file sharing – a practice favored by content thieves because it operates just inside the boundaries of the law – believes that Britain’s statute will not fly. In a blog posted on the Guardian’s website, he contends that customers whose juice is turned off will simply seek other illegal means to download content without having to pay for it. “Those who download most avidly will simply change tactics,” he argues.

Doctorow’s position is based on the assumption that given a choice, people will choose to break the law.  I am far from certain that that at base humans are no damn good. If that were true it would be impossible for legitimate businesses and governments to function.

Of course, obedience to the law must of necessity be reinforced by fear of punishment.  Surely Cory Doctorow doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that? A healthy respect for the law is the foundation for any worthwhile human endeavor including those that Doctorow himself is engaged in.

A commercial model based on reasonable sanctions seems far preferable to Doctorovian anarchy: faced with the prospect of having their monitor go black, most customers will opt for paid, legitimate service.

It is vital for the sake of our blossoming e-book industry to appeal to the better nature of consumers of digital content – while combating those who flout the law and seduce others to do the same. As for the latter, we will have a lot more to say in due time.

You can read Doctorow’s argument here and decide which side of the angels you choose to be on.

Richard Curtis

On the heels of antipiracy legislation passed by the British, Canada is considering a bill to go after digital thieves, according to Steven Chase of The Globe and Mail.

“The bill,” Chase writes, “”would go after the big fish in Internet copyright infringement, giving copyright owners stronger legal tools to shut down ‘pirate websites’ in Canada that support file-sharing and introducing a separate criminal penalty of up to $1-million for serious cases where commercially motivated pirates crack digital encryption.”

The government is going after smaller fish, too: “Breaking the digital encryption on a movie DVD – even if copying it for personal use – would make individual Canadians liable for legal damages of up to $5,000 under a tougher copyright law proposed by the Harper government Wednesday,” writes Chase.

The proposed legislation distinguishes between deliberate code-breaking and more common (and impossible to control) practices like “backing up the contents of a music CD, home recording of TV episodes for later viewing or copying legally acquired music to a digital player.”

Details in Tory bill cracks down on copyright pirates.

Richard Curtis

“What might at first seem an arcane matter — precisely when to put a movie for sale on cable systems and at what price — has been the subject of ferocious debate in a film industry that so far has stopped just short of embracing the digital revolution.”

Does that sound familiar to you? Denizens of the publishing industry will recognize the answer instantly: It’s about “windowing” movies.

While the book industry debates the timing of e-book releases of print books, movie companies are trying to figure out the best timing for cable release of theatrical motion pictures. A big difference between the two industries, however, is that the movie business now has US government “permission to activate technology to protect new releases from being copied if they were sold through video-on-demand systems before being issued on DVD.” This according to Michael Cieply of the New York Times.

Cieply writes that the Federal Communications Commission okayed technology called ’selectable output control’ that “can reach into a customer’s home video player and turn off its video outputs while a pay-per-view program is being watched, to prevent the program from being copied.”

The technology reflects the ire of movie theater owners “who have been fiercely protective of the exclusive period during which they have customarily served up the major studio pictures,” the Times article explains.

You can easily replace the players in this story with “Publishers”, “Authors”, ” E-Books” and “E-book Retailers.  The difference is, the book industry doesn’t have “selectable output control” to regulate windowing – bookbiz-ese for withholding – release of e-books, either legitimate ones or the pirated version.

Read details in Filmmakers Tread Softly on Early Release to Cable

RC

There’s ASCAP, there’s BMI, and now there’s…um…Milun Tesovic?  Well yes.  Tesovic’s MetroLyrics.com hopes to give those established music licensing organizations some serious competition.

Both BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) are in the business of licensing and distributing fees and royalties on behalf of composers and lyricists. But some business has fallen in the cracks thanks to the Internet. “For songwriters and their publishers…, the ubiquity of lyrics on Web sites presents both opportunities and problems — especially when it comes to getting some of the sites to pay royalties for use of the lyrics,” writes Joseph Plambeck in the New York Times. “For decades, printed song lyrics lived in relative obscurity, relegated to album sleeves and sheet music. And until now, they provided no significant source of revenue.”

Enter Milun Tesovic. When he was 16 he saw the Internet as a possible ally in the struggle to identify revenue generating opportunities in lyrics. Now, eight years later, MetroLyrics “drew about 13.5 million unique users in March and generated close to $10 million in revenue in 2009.” reports Plambeck.   Tesovic shrewdly elected to bring third-party aggregators into his fold, instead of treating them like adversaries.

There’s a lesson to be learned for publishers trying to put book pirates out of business: if you can’t lick ‘em, partner with ‘em.

Read about Tesovic and some other lyric-hunters in Lyrics Sites at Center of Fight Over Royalties

Richard Curtis

The Department of Justice, the FBI, a consortium of comic book publishers, and Florida law firm Katten Muchen Rosenman has shut down pirate website www.Htmlcomics.com.

The operation, said the law firm’s press release, is “believed to have been the largest, best-known and most easily accessible website of its kind, producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue. By April 2010, the website claimed to have an average of 1.6 million visits per day and more than 6,630,021 pages of comic books offered for unrestricted viewing. Ridding the Internet of such a large source of pirated content is a major victory for the comic industry and the publishing industry in general.”

Not officially named in the action is author Harlan Ellison, a righteous and relentless pursuer of pirates whose action against AOL resulted in an important settlement.  Ellison’s  properties were among those purloined, according to the author, and the footprints leading to Htmlcomics’ door bear the spoor of Ellison and his “Flying Blue Monkey Squadron”, friends and wellwishers who keep an “eye on the street” and may have assisted the FBI in locating the superperp.

The press release in full is reprinted below, or you can click on it here.

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May 5, 2010
Download PDF
LOS ANGELES – Comic book pirating website www.htmlcomics.com has been shut down and all of its servers confiscated, following an FBI search based on a warrant alleging criminal copyright infringement. The FBI investigation was performed in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice, a consortium of comic publishers and their legal counsel, a team of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP attorneys specializing in the areas of intellectual property, publishing and comics, as well as local counsel in Miami.

Prior to the combined efforts of the consortium and the authorities, Htmlcomics was believed to have been the largest, best-known and most easily accessible website of its kind, producing rampant copyright infringement on a daily basis and depriving artists and publishers of hard-earned and much-needed revenue. By April 2010, the website claimed to have an average of 1.6 million visits per day and more than 6,630,021 pages of comic books offered for unrestricted viewing. Ridding the Internet of such a large source of pirated content is a major victory for the comic industry and the publishing industry in general.

Htmlcomics creator Gregory Hart, 47, acquired pirated copies of more than 5,700 series of comics spanning every major comic publisher in the United States, and made them available for public viewing on his site. The comics could be viewed from cover to cover and page by page and the infringing copies were reproduced on Hart’s servers and publicly displayed without authorization. Titles available included Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, The Simpsons, Futurama, Avengers, Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Dilbert, Peanuts, Catwoman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Hellboy, Star Wars, 300, Predator, The Mask, Iron Man and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, among thousands of others.

The FBI’s Tampa Field Office headed the investigation leading to the warrant. The consortium of publishers cooperating with law enforcement include Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Bongo Comics, Archie Comics, Conan Properties Int’l LLC, Mirage Studios Inc., and United Media.

Katten has one of the nation’s premier, full-service entertainment and media practices, providing comprehensive domestic and international representation in the entertainment industry. The firm’s entertainment and media attorneys consider themselves partners with clients from concept to completion. When litigation becomes necessary, the practice represents its clients aggressively and effectively, in matters involving intellectual property issues, contractual and business tort disputes and distribution rights issues, among others. Katten also provides representation to entrepreneurs in business and personal matters. The firm’s entertainment attorneys pride themselves on providing cutting-edge, creative solutions to complicated problems.
Related Practices

* Entertainment and Media

* Intellectual Property

About three weeks ago Randy Cohen, the Sunday New York Times columnist who guides the morally perplexed in a feature called “The Ethicist”, told a supplicant that there was nothing unethical about downloading a pirated e-book version of a Stephen King novel so that he would not have to lug the heavy hardcover around on a journey.

Cohen’s grounds for blessing the customer’s patronage of the pirate site were that the legitimate e-book version was not yet available, and besides, the customer had paid for the hardcover and was therefore entitled to help himself to whatever e-book was at hand, which in this case happened to be a stolen one.

Though we think of ourselves as judicious we reacted to Cohen’s advice with unwonted intemperance. We were almost unanimously supported by a host of indignant people, many of them authors who had no need of an ethics counselor to distinguish between right and wrong. However, one author, John Scalzi, took exception and defended The Ethicist. Scalzi’s rationale goes like this: “You bought the book once and I got paid once; after that if you get the book in some other format for your own personal use, and I don’t get paid a second time, eh, that’s life.”

We’ve had three weeks to review all the comments and reflect on the position put forth by the Cohenim and Scalzistas in the hope of finding some redeeming values that we overlooked in our initial hotheaded reaction. We’re sorry to report that we have found nothing to alter our sense that their views are pernicious and stupid. (Oops! There we go being intemperate again.  There must be something about apologists for piracy that brings out the mean spirit in us.)

Our feelings about all this were reinforced by an eloquent comment submitted by Tony Burton, a writer and publisher of Wolfmont Press. As we’re not content to let this issue disappear from our front page we’re printing it in full below with Mr. Burton’s permission.

**********************************

My first thought is, if this is an ethicist speaking, then the blind truly are leading the blind.

Situational ethics. It’s OK to do something wrong in certain situations. So, it’s OK to speed way over the posted limit if… what? If you are late for an appointment? If you are fleeing from a raving lunatic? If you have to catch a plane? Breaking the law, breaking the established rules, just because it makes life more convenient for you is unethical. As someone else noted, just because I have purchased a ticket to see a movie does not make it legal or ethical for me to secretly videotape the movie while I am in the theater.

As to the comment that “you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability,” what malarkey. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the level of acceptability of “the Ethicist” is so low that just about anything meets it, as long as apparent and immediate harm are not seen. It’s not unethical, then, to throw a single candy wrapper out the window. And if everyone who eats a Snickers bar thinks that way, the landscape will be plastered with wrappers. It is an insidious way of thinking, that “it does no apparent harm, or so little harm, so if it is convenient for me it must be OK even if it is illegal.”

It’s OK to steal a little bit. It’s OK to tell just one racist or homophobic joke, every once in a while. It’s OK to view child pornography in the privacy of your own home because, hey, you didn’t pay for it… just managed to find it on a file-sharing network and after all, it’s not YOU who coerced that child into doing those things, and even if you hadn’t downloaded it, the child would already have been molested anyway, right?

Yes, I’m being extreme. I’m being extreme because it’s too easy to accept unethical behavior when you candy-coat it. Call it what it is: dishonest, immoral, illegal, and UNETHICAL. That anyone intelligent is able to rationalize it into something else is somewhat frightening, because it is so easy to move from this sort of “harmless” theft to something worse, and every time you succeed in convincing yourself that you are OK, that you are in the right, it just makes it that much easier to do something more heinous. And that someone in such a position, writing for the NYT where so many thousands of people can use his words to justify their own unethical behaviors… it is reprehensible.