131–140 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Naaah. If you're doing it for profit, and running a big duplicator farm or selling things online, it can make sense for it to be a criminal offense. But the laws are not crafted that well.
If it's morally right to do for free then it's also morally right to do in exchange of money
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…
If you don't mind me asking, what motivated you? Were you afraid of law enforcement ever catching up? Was is just pure scene cred it even that did not matter much?
Aside from cred, there were a lot of like minded people and back then it was hard to find locals who were into computers/tech, so it was sort of a social network of sorts on IRC back then, I made real friends that I still keep in touch with today, so in a way it was a shared social activity.
One fun anecdote: When I was like 14, I got on a PBX 1800# call with some folks in a group I was in and it kind of blew my mind that I was talking to someone in Israel. It was like the world opened up. That is not novel today, but back then the idea of socializing and sharing ideas with people across the world in real-time (for free) was extremely exciting. Keep in mind back then long distance cost per minute, as did much of the dial-up internet.
About law enforcement: not much. Because I did see that minors were usually spared any real consequences, I mainly avoided anything that involved profit (though I once unwittingly bought a stolen modem for cheap, when it's that cheap you kind of know). There was an uptick of paranoia when Kevin Mitnick was busted (in the town I lived in), but for the most part we weren't doing the same kinds of crime he did (some of the folks I knew were, one ended up in prison for ~13 years). I also stopped being involved when I turned 18, which was a smart move. I got a visit from the FBI or state police (I don't remember) once, and my parents nearly shit a brick, and gave me a stern talking to because they were freaking out, but it turned out they were looking for a flasher who had been going around on Halloween! whew!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes." Multinational corporations definitely do. They'll register themselves in a country with a cheaper corporate tax burden then argue that their income / sales is generated from that country rather than their actual country of origin. Thus reducing the amount of tax they have to pay in the US (or UK, etc).
Irrelevant due to Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI)
Countries like UK have for instance DPT (Diverted Profit Tax) but it is discretionary and our tax man tends to look away.
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…
If you don't mind me asking, what motivated you? Were you afraid of law enforcement ever catching up? Was is just pure scene cred it even that did not matter much?
The reason was the juice. The excitement of sending stuff around the world before everyone else. I never cracked on x86 just a little bit with 6809.
I was a courier in late 90s(anyone recall FlashFXP). Fall of 1999 is when isonews.com(some old schoolers here will remember this website) got their homepage owned by the FBI. I left the scene that day.
When I first got in the Internet back in the 90s I thought warez was pronounced like Juarez the town in Mexico. To this very day when I see the word that's what it sounds like in my mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind me asking, what motivated you? Were you afraid of law enforcement ever catching up? Was is just pure scene cred it even that did not matter much?
Initial motivation was being a teenager without enough money to buy all the new computer games coming out. From there, it was partly just excitement using new technology that was relevant to the scene (Linux, high speed networks, cool ANSI art). In general scene cred was a big motivator. I also ran a BBS, and being well known in the scene also meant that artists made you great art for your board for free, which was a…
Thanks for sharing!
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.
This is why I never understand people who get mad at ‘lenient’ sentences for crimes. There are no crimes I would commit where, say, 1 year in prison wouldn’t be a deterrent but 5 years would be. If the point of prison is to deter crime, then adding longer sentences isn’t going to change anything.
If punishment for stealing was cutting my hand, I'd definitely not risk it.
Note: I'm not justifying harsher punishments for copyright infringement and I think an appropriate punishment for theft would be forced labor where the profits go to repay what was stolen and some more.
In a just world copyright infringement would not be theft: the only thing we should charge is whoever breached their contract with the source and redistributed the content.
It shouldn't be easy to persecute copyright infringement, it's a "natural tax" of the market: if your content is so popular you can't track who is redistributing you obviously made a boatload of money.
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…
There are quite very different open-source licenses. Copyleft licenses do depends on copyright, that is true. On the other hand, typical non-copyleft licenses are in my opinion much less dependent on copyright.
A world without copyright does in my opinion not correspond to any open-source license that I am aware of: you are allowed to reverse-engineer and distribute any software that you want and you must not forbid this to any person using your software or any work derived from it, but nobody is obliged to provide any source code.
In my personal opinion such a license is a gap in the "market of open source licenses", so if some reader feels inspired to create such an open-source license, I utterly encourage the respective reader to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's never made sense for copyright violations to be a criminal offense.
Naaah. If you're doing it for profit, and running a big duplicator farm or selling things online, it can make sense for it to be a criminal offense. But the laws are not crafted that well.
They should repay the damaged counterpart if they can prove they had a sales contract in place.