71–80 of 231 posts
I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to…
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Full stop that should not be a criminal offense. Jailing that man for that sentence does not serve justice.
Why not?
What do you think is served by that sentence of jail time? Disregarding that I think the law in question is outrageous - why is jail time an appropriate punishment? Is it fitting to imprison some one on the dubious claim that they impacted your profits? It does not seem to be a fitting or appropriate punishment, it seems to be ghoulish overkill to scare people from fucking with the money.
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But it serves corporations that governments work for. and it's ironic that we pay for it while big corporations can avoid paying taxes as they please.
I'm the last person to defend corporations. That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes." The corporate income tax rate imposed by the federal government is 21%. Employees pay income and social security taxes on top of those earnings after. From the moment a company earns income until it lands in the hands of employees the government can take as much as HALF of it. This includes everyone on salary…
Double taxation occurs when a corporation is subject to corporate tax and then pays a dividend, which is after tax, but counts as income to the investor. There are arguments to be made that this is fair or unfair.
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Cracking software doesn't warrant hard prison sentences. That's a double negative for society.
He ruined the lives of many hard-working software developers who relied on selling their code to feed their families. This was back when programming was a highly skilled and difficult job that only a few could do, so cracking was even more harshly targeting people.
I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to…
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I'm sure there is a term for this, like cherry picking out of a basket of picked cherries.
Ruined a guys life because of overestimated profits. Ridiculous
> The principal criminal statute protecting copyrighted works is 17 U.S.C. § 506(a), which provides that "[a]ny person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" shall be punished as provided in 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Section 2319 provides, in pertinent part, that a 5-year felony shall apply if the offense "consists of the reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500." 18 U.S.C. § 2319(b)(1).
It is a rather low bar and doesn't take much to get to distribution of material that has a retail value of more than $2,500. No "overestimation" is needed there.
It would be reasonable to debate if $2,500 is too low of a threshold - but for the law as written, no overestimation is needed.
I'm pretty sure that I'd have stopped with just probation, yes. Having the feds raid your house, confiscate all your gear, and put you through the hell of their investigations for a year was enough of a wake up call for me. The gap between a sufficient punishment and what he actually got is the harshest reality in all this. It's very similar to what people have gone through for small marijuana related offenses.
That's why it's always important the jury be educated on their rights to decide verdicts however they see fit.
It doesn't serve society at all for this type of non-violent crime to result in prison time.
Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist. If hes an anarchist then fine, but it looks like he wants laws that benefit him and not people that actually write software. I read the whole thing and I still don't know why he did it. He says there was no money incentive and his work had no impact on p…
>The bottom line, what I did violated the laws governing copyrights. I don't agree with those laws 100%, but they were designed by people with lots of money in their pockets to keep lots of money in their pockets, so I doubt they're going to change for the better any time soon. This is why I'm a huge advocate for the open source community.
I understood that to mean "the open source community specifically addresses the flaws in a system that it cannot itself abolish, so I support them".