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Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

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Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#201

Post by TeMPOraL »

meritt wrote: post #116
hannibalhorn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.cd-rom/IPpvC20j2cM... 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…

I wonder how "how much money and time you have to invest in" putting in so many arcane anti-crack measures into your software as GGP[0] described.

[0] - Great Grandparent Poster? :D.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#202

Post by Symmetry »

paulhauggis wrote: post #70
Devilboy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing a car deprives someone of a car. Copying a car does not.

Identity theft is still called "theft", even though nothing is actually stolen. Piracy is more like counterfeiting. It's much worse than stealing. Stealing a TV only deprives someone of that physical value. Pirating software has the ability to destroy the value of the entire product line (why would someone pay $99 when they can just get it for free). The same concept also applies to things like the app store. Now tha…

Pirating software has the ability to destroy the value of the entire product line.

Given that Photoshop is still profitable for Adobe, this is objectively false.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#203

Post by TeMPOraL »

cremnob wrote: post #27
Devilboy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing a car deprives someone of a car. Copying a car does not.

This trope comes up every time piracy is discussed. The point is no one is talking about the legal meaning of "stealing" versus "copyright infringement". What people are saying is that it's immoral. The fact that a content company's product is easily stolen simply because the nature of his business means it is effortless to do through the internet doesn't change anything. If you go to a lawyer for legal advice and th…

> The fact that a content company's product is easily stolen

It's not stolen, it's copied. One of the dark-arts pro-copyright people used was to conflate those two terms into one word. We can still discuss if breaking someone's business model by copying is moral or not, but we really need to separate those two words and talk about them with extreme precision - especially given how heated the discussion is.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#204

Post by jdietrich »

keithpeter wrote: post #189
kstenerud wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make sense, considering that music production software tends to be viciously expensive, and music producers tend to not have much money.

and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism. Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.

The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#205

Post by jdietrich »

cageface wrote: post #140
kstenerud wrote: post #76

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…

It probably depends on the business, but I know several developers of music production software that can correlate huge drops in sales with the release of new cracks of their software to the exact day . I think we are a little too quick to assume that a pirated copy is not a lost sale.

I'd be curious to know who they are and what they're selling.

Audio software is a quite unusual field for all sorts of reasons, largely related to the huge divide between professional users and amateurs. The old school of pro-audio people can remember when a studio cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip and will pay pretty much any price you ask, even for quite trivial software. Your typical teenage dance-music producer is buying many of the same applications and will usually baulk at paying $99 for a cut-down version, let alone several hundred dollars for a full license.

It's interesting that really intrusive DRM techniques are broadly accepted - iLok is probably the most popular system, which requires you to buy a $50 USB dongle in addition to a very expensive piece of software. Again, experienced professionals who can remember tape see an iLok as a trivial inconvenience, but to a lot of younger people it's a total deal-breaker.

The music technology industry is part way through a weird economic transition. The traditional high-value professional market is dwindling away to nothing, but business has never been better because of the boom in amateur production. Firms like Native Instruments who have figured out how to sell to wannabe DJs and bedroom producers are shaking the money tree; A lot of very old and established names are struggling to keep the doors open.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#206

Post by keithpeter »

jdietrich wrote: post #204
keithpeter wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and there is resistance to using the free software alternatives, thus leading to a cycle where the free software alternatives don't get feedback/criticism. Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.

The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.

Well, some people seem to manage with these tools! And if more people were introduced to them, perhaps the feedback and number of interested coders would increase.

I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#207

Post by glomph »

rdl wrote: post #113
glomph wrote: post #102

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'.

All that stuff existed with TOPSITES, ftp, etc. before the torrent sites. The torrent sites are just the "retail" level of the game; the real players are getting prereleases, ripping, potentially cracking, and doing stuff on topsites.

Oh I know that it all existed before, I am just commenting on how prevalent it is and how much it is built in by design.

To be honest I think you are slightly out of date in thinking torrent sites are just the 'retail' level. The majority of pre retail releases of movies (CAM/R5/Screener/HDTV etc) these days are done by p2p groups. A huge amount of pre release leaks of bluray disks come from Chinese bittorrent sites. A huge proportion of games get uploaded to p2p sites before getting pred and many games are cracked by p2p groups before the scene groups get to them (with several notable cases of scene groups 'stealing' p2p releases).

The one area where I feel like the scene could be said to be in a different league is in preing TV, but even that is slipping with p2p groups uploading full .ts streams and itunes rips.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#208

Post by cdawzrd »

keithpeter wrote: post #206
jdietrich wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free software alternatives are all absolutely terrible. Ardour is the leader amongst free DAWs, and is very nearly as good as Pro Tools was ten or fifteen years ago. There's no good free sequencer, no good sampler, no good reverb. Audio software is just too niche and too difficult; It requires a lot of skills that are rare in the free software community.

Well, some people seem to manage with these tools! And if more people were introduced to them, perhaps the feedback and number of interested coders would increase. I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.

Until there is a open-source program that replicates what Ableton Live offers (seamless and easy-to-use integration of audio recording and nonlinear editing with MIDI production), no one will consider using an open-source tool.

The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#209

Post by Strom »

pyre wrote: post #177
Strom wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being first, or otherwise an interesting group means that FTP administrators want you to fill their servers with your releases. As a return, the group gets a bunch of unlimited use "leech accounts" to these FTP servers. A lot of money enters the scene via people who directly or indirectly buy "leech accounts" from these groups. These unlimited use FTP accounts give the buyer a very convenient way to acquire everythin…

So the FTP administrators are some sort of neutral ground, in that they distribute releases from a variety of groups. They are sort of the Warez Scene hosting providers? What are the incentives? Are these just people that have cheap access to fat connections, so the cost of running the FTP site is minimal? The ability to create 'leech accounts' for friends/family so long as they aren't sold (or is this also taboo)? I…

Giving out some accounts for free is generally accepted. So yeah, one of the main incentives for FTP admins is personal & friend access. Beyond that, it's about the prestige, I think.

Re: Editorial: "How piracy changed my life"

#210

Post by marcamillion »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #151
marcamillion wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe SOME people involved in doing it was for a genuine desire to share. Let me tell you, though, there are a lot of rewards from being "first". Either the first person to get your hands on a pre-release item, or the first one to rip it, or the first group to release it, or the first racer to move it the fastest to the top. It is beautiful in its simplicity - but there are many incentives to get people to be 'the fi…

What sort of rewards other than being known in the warez scene (not even under your real name). You can't buy anything with it or boast about it in public.

Well....one such reward is getting leech access to a very "l33t" top FTP site. i.e. you get access to 0-sec (brand, spanking new) stuff before everyone else - to do as you please.

That type of access is rare and people usually get credits to allow them to download what they want. The best people get unlimited access.

So, just like any community, there are some perks that bring prestige and status within the community.

Don't underestimate how valuable that is.

The foolish people would take that access and try to sell it - that's how you get busted and get into trouble.

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