Educating Youngsters About Piracy

Colin Winters writes: "The New York Times has an article that is a follow-up to the recent raid by the government on pirates in universities. Some professors believe that "By the time we get them, they already believe it [piracy]'s right." An interesting read. There's also an interesting bit on how business software is now 1/3 pirated, down from 1/2 in 1995. In America, it's only 24%. From the way companies like Microsoft whine about piracy, I'd assumed the figures were increasing, not decreasing."

Comments

Re:Legal vs. Right

[13013dobbs]

But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
My dad bought a Christler in '86. It was a piece of junk. Do you think it would be OK if he went to the factory and stole a few cars? Oftentimes when I eat at McDonalds, I get the shits. Is it moraly correct for me to hop over the counter, grab a bunch of food and run out the door? RedHat sold me a CD with an exploitable copy of WU-FTP. Can I steal a bunch of CDs or a development server from them?

Certainly there are those, perhaps even the majority, who pirate for entirely selfish reasons. But there are those who pirate because they see it as striking at a morally bankrupt corporations heart.
I would bet that the percent of people who pirate for moral reasons is less than 5%.

Piracy is my birth right...

[iomud]

What I loathe are these kids on irc who think it's their birth right to every movie, game, and productivity application out there. They hardly even acknowledge that they're pirating software. I know people who have absolutely no legal games on their ill gotten operating systems yet somehow it's ok because "I wasn't going to buy it anyway". The people I know that do this aren't broke either, I almost wish they'd get busted just so they'd have to acknowledge that they're doing something that can have serious consequences. It just really grinds my gears when I go out and pay for a game ( I think 49.00 is reasonably priced ) and they pirate it and talk about how great it is, great but not great enough to buy?

YEAH, Lets educate them about copyrights

[argoff]

and how MS leveraged them to lock out innovation all over the map

and how the music industry has used them to lock out any distribution channel that they don't approve of

and how the movie industry is trying to use them to region code the whole planet, and used them as an excuse to try and put a 15 year old who wanted to play DVD's on linux in jail

and how they lead to laws like the DMCA that have nothing to do with copying, but everything to do with speech

and about how they call it piracy, as if those who copy are aken to those who board ships beat and kill people Yeah, I'm all for educating people!