111–120 of 235 posts
I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. It is black and white. It's theft. The issue of whether you shold steal in certain conditions is a separate issue, as discussed some in the article. But it is black and white, it's theft.
I’m just saying that it’s not all black and white. It is black and white. It's theft. The issue of whether you shold steal in certain conditions is a separate issue, as discussed some in the article. But it is black and white, it's theft.
I'm one of those people who would pirate just because I could. It was almost a game, trying to amass as much warez as I could, to the point that 90% of the stuff I got I either never used, or used only once. That changed over time. As my time became more valuable, I couldn't spend all day fiddling with software anymore. I became more focused, downloading only stuff I used a lot. And then it hit me: It would be far ea…
Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the longest time, cracking Photoshop was a 1 byte change. In effect, there was a conditional JMP. You patch the address of the good JMP to the bad conditional side. Voila: enter a good or bad serial, and it works. A bunch of us under +Fravia came to an agreement that this simplicity was intentional. I think we all can come to the conclusion to why that is... As to your supposition that no amount of 'junk' would s…
The CD burning product must have been CDRWIN, I remember the frustration of searching for a working crack for that one (as a poor student, of course!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, by this logic, BitTorrent piracy is a $0 problem? Doesn't sound right to me. Not that I'm really pushing the $495 figure either, mind you.
Actually yes, well actually approaching zero, and I realize it doesn't sound right. The cognitive dissonance comes from the economics of information, they work differently than the economics of goods. Imagine this thought experiment. Imagine there was a 100% fool proof copy protection scheme in China, and the only way to acquire Microsoft Office would be to buy it. Try to imagine how many people, who make $1000 in a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the longest time, cracking Photoshop was a 1 byte change. In effect, there was a conditional JMP. You patch the address of the good JMP to the bad conditional side. Voila: enter a good or bad serial, and it works. A bunch of us under +Fravia came to an agreement that this simplicity was intentional. I think we all can come to the conclusion to why that is... As to your supposition that no amount of 'junk' would s…
The CD burning product must have been CDRWIN, I remember the frustration of searching for a working crack for that one (as a poor student, of course!)
CDRWIN's author's rant and viewpoints against piracy, from March 1998
When all software distribution moves to the Internet (which it will
when high-speed fiberoptic connections because commonplace in the
future), the big developers like Microsoft and Sony are going to come
down hard on the pirates and WAREZ. These big companies are not going
to allow the Internet to become a "candy store" where software can be
stolen with the push of a button from the comfort of your home. If you
think that all of these "bits" are free, then try developing a really
good software product yourself and see how much money and time you have
to invest in it.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they need to say it is immoral--a position which may arguably be correct--and not say that it is stealing--a position which is intellectually dishonest and trivially shown to be incorrect. Choice of words here is very, very important. If you want to start staking out a moral claim on information, you damned well had better choose your message carefully.
It's semantics and is irrelevant every time this topic comes up because no one is actually talking about legal definitions. Pirates always seem to miss that it's a moral argument when they trot out these familiar lines (the irony isn't lost on me). Whether or not you're guilty of petty theft, shoplifting, larceny, or burglary is for your lawyers and the courts to determine. For me and others from my position it is mu…
To me and a lot of others, illegal copying is far more morally defensible than theft. If someone tries to call a person that pirate a thief, my immediate reaction is that the claim is not only flat out false, but offensive.
Copyright protection is an artificial government monopoly on an activity that does not affect your property rights, and as such it is perfectly defensible for someone to consider it moral to violate copyright. I do consider some forms of copyright violations morally wrong, such as selling copies, but I do consider a lot of piracy morally acceptable (despite the fact I don't engage in piracy, though I did some 20-25 years ago)
Theft is materially different because it deprives the owner of continued use of that which was stolen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people are honest about it and say "I just don't want to pay for it". But most people I hear justifying piracy feel entitled to it and don't think there's anything wrong. And what is dishonest about that? When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of h…
"When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life." A builder: - is hired by a single client - to build a house for many months - and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary, which is pretty much guaranteed (…
We need new software, because: a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright), b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation, c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).
If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.
If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private torrent trackers are also fuelled by this drive. The 'game' abstraction has been made so real with ranks, stats, leaderboards and so on. It really is quite amazing how willing people are to sink time into providing a service, moderating, sourcing, encoding (people sink LOADS of time into learning the finest details of x264), cracking, uploading and distributing all for for no material gain outside 'the game'.
I don't think it's just about the game. I believe many people involved in distribution of illegal content do it out of a genuine desire to share. For every released movie, every song, a book or a piece of software there exists a group of people with no means of accessing it in a legal way (and probably another, much larger, of people who can't afford it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some people are honest about it and say "I just don't want to pay for it". But most people I hear justifying piracy feel entitled to it and don't think there's anything wrong. And what is dishonest about that? When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of h…
"When a builder builds a house he gets paid for his work. If he wants more money, he has to do more building. He can't just sit back and take a payment every time someone enters that building for the rest of his life." A builder: - is hired by a single client - to build a house for many months - and is compensated throughout the engagement with an hourly/daily/monthly wage or salary, which is pretty much guaranteed (…
Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.
Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.
Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.
Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.