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Linux "is not piracy" Says Microsoft Lawyer
dipfan writes "Further to this Slashdot piece on the activities of the Business Software Alliance, the BBC reports on a European conference on piracy organised by the BSA. The good news is even Microsoft distinguishes between open source software and piracy; it quotes Microsoft's top in-house lawyer Brad Smith as saying: 'Linux is a way of developing software whereas piracy is copying.' The rest of the article is the usual panic-attack about the size of software piracy in general, and how this is holding back the software industry in Eastern Europe, according to Brad. Although the article notes the irony that despite all the piracy, software sales are forecast to grow from $50 billion in 2000 to about $90 billion by 2005."
No... Piracy should be defined as 'breaking the license the software was issued under'.
If they get away with defining 'piracy'=='copying', even in people's perceptions, the main distribution method of linux will be severely hampered. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone receive a burnt CD with 'Red Hat xx' scribbled with a magic marker, and they ask something like, "is this legal?". It just 'feels' like you are doing something dirty.
It is only illegal to copy it if you have specifically given up that right. As the GPL says, "Most lices are created with the purpose of taking away your rights..."
Lots of money will continue to be made in software simply because piracy is a pain in the tuckus. If you come right down to it, most software hasn't really gotten that much more expensive over the years.
;-)
Take games for example. They still usually cost around $50 bucks, just like they have for years. I pay $50 dollars for my tax program every year now because, after all, what's $50 bucks? 10 years ago it cost the same and we used to get 5 people together and pay $10 bucks each. Now we just buy it because it's more of a nuisance to pirate than it is to just pony up the cash.
Games are relatively cheap too. If you use a pirated version, half the time you're having problems like, "I need the latest 1.09 patch for such and such bug/feature but it breaks my 1.07 pirated no-cd version". It's just easier to buy it than it is to go surfing warez sites/kazaa, etc. My time is more valuable than that.....surfing for warez takes time away from gaming.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
Why do they insist on equating an illegal copy with a stolen copy. The "thief" in the stolen copy case has not deprived the owner of the copyright of anything, the victim still has everything he had before the "theft"
Here we go - in very tiny words for you, ok?
You go into a store. Software Product A is sitting on the shelf for $10.
You go around to your friend's house. Software Product A is copied to you for free.
Producer of Software Product A has now lost a $10 sale.
Whether you would have bought it for $10 or not is irrelevant - you made a copy, so it obviously has value to you.
Therefore, you are depriving the software company of their profit on that product.
If you disagree with this, then fine, disagree with the software company too - and DON'T USE or COPY THEIR PRODUCT.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
"We can't estimate how much piracy is on the net but in one day we found a million sites under a search for one of the codenames for pirated software," said a BSA spokesperson.
:)
I assume here they are referring to "warez". And yes, you will get a LOT of hits if you put that into a search engine. However, before you get TOO excited about it, understand that 99 times out of 100, you're more likely to find porn than pirated software if you actually visit any of those sites. Its a completely meaningless association.
The majority of "warez" trading is done through IRC or usenet. Yet those who are striving to rid the internet of piracy rarely mention these treasure troves. Certainly they get mentioned as the breeding ground for evil "hackers" and for child porn distribution, but as far as piracy goes, they tend to stay rather mum about it.
Could it be that their only real mission is one of sensationalism? They know for a fact that the average clueless newbie will do a hunt for pirated software on the web (because as far as they know, the web IS the internet), and will be disillusioned by all the porn websites, banners, and popups that they will figure its more trouble than its worth. They might trade with their friends and download some mp3's off Morpheus, but that will be the limit of their piracy activities.
However, if lots of news articles spent a great deal of time complaining about the rampant piracy on IRC and usenet and other places, then that clueless newbie might actually decide for once that a clue isn't such a bad thing and venture into that world. "What do you mean that IE can't go there???" But once entrenched in that world, they'll be very difficult to "retrain".
The public at large has been convinced by and large that child pornography and hacking are indeed "Bad things (tm)" and will probably avoid those places that distribute them. But software piracy hasn't reached that degree of evil in most people's eyes. So they will to some small degree actually seek it out. And deep down, there's probably an even bigger fear. Their preverbial sheep might stumble across something dangerous. "What's this here linux thing all about???"
ok. Fine. Mod me down.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Comments like yours do more to hurt than to help with this problem.
/. as the root of all evil then at least explain yourself.
/. or knows what open source is, doesn't know that Linux is an OS and not an idea or an action.
Ok, if you're going to mark
Secondly, Yes, a lot of people are under the impression that open source means "free as in beer" because it DOES! Look at Freshmeat or SourceForge and try to find some pay products. The percentage probably can't get measures in whole numbers.
Lastly, who the hell that reads
"The meeting was told that in 2000 the software industry in Europe lost $3bn to pirates."
I am always curious where they actually come up with these numbers. Some kid in his basement downloading a $3,000 software package hasn't actually cost the industry anything b/c he wouldn't have bought it anyway. Now if a company like IBM bought 1 copy of office and installed on every corporate desktop then I think that is a real problem. The real question is how many companys are really in gross violations of the current laws?
Why does the Topic say the lawyer said "is not piracy" when the text of the submission does not use these words? In fact, the text says: "Brad Smith as saying: 'Linux is a way of developing software whereas piracy is copying.'"
Could be just me, but I don't see the words "is not piracy" in there. We couldn't be bothered to use the actual words I suppose?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
"A healthy market leads to more attractive prices for consumers".
By this standard, I suppose the music industry and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the software industry are "unhealthy". In fact, this makes piracy look pretty attractive, unless these "attractive prices" are cheaper than "free".
Obviously, the reason we have piracy is *because* the current prices aren't "more attractive". Also, not everyone who pirates a program really needs it, especially not for the price that it is selling at.
This goes double for programs that have free alternatives; most people don't really need that new copy of Photoshop 6, but why bother learning about The Gimp when you can just pirate the industry standard? Actually, bundling free alternatives to commercial software would be a good way to decrease piracy, but I doubt that most companies would agree to this, because it might also decrease *SALES*, which is all they really care about. They don't care about their customers, just their money...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A million sites, 999,999 of which were links to other links with porn popups and redirects to another link page with 'vote for top 50 to continue' that takes you to another porn site. Yeah, great research fellas. Anyone can type 'warez' in a search engine and come up with crap, but it takes an honest effort and lots of digging to come up with sites that actually have anything.
Actually, Microsoft has every right to dislike its greatest threat.
The Linux kernal is more than just a better mouse trap. Its free software.
I believe we are seeing the beginnings of the third and last stage of software. An age where software is largely mutually beneficial to everyone. Much as math and sciences are today and have been for a long time now.
This stage is an unfortunate stage for software businesses. Because they can not continue to exist.
And its not just the threat of GNU and the large body of free software either. Its economics. Even though software isn't scarce, lets assume it is for benefit of argument.
What do you do when everyone has the software they need? This is the burden Microsoft has had for a while. So they play every trick in the book. Changing file formats -- more restrictive licensing -- regular upgrades -- huge marketing -- and the creation of new technologies. The hope is to obsolete the previous version of software.
Problem is that this provides almost zero benefit for the customer. Sure -- every so often someone gets a fringe benefit from a new technology. But usually, people are happy with the software they have now.
So, in economics, if the customer gets no benefit from a product, they won't buy it--right? And thats the future as I see it. "Piracy" is the least of their worries. Their business model is about to collapse upon itself.
And the GNU/Linux operating system represents this collapse all too vividly. Microsoft, there is no hope for you.
The funny thing is that so many of the fears of a World Government were that it would come from quasi-socialistic NGO's. But here, the multinationals are coming in and dictating the property model for other countries to use. What if a nation doesn't want to recognize IP as property? What does it cost Microsoft if an entire nation opts out? After all, most Russians and Ukrainians probably aren't getting *any* real benefit from intellectual property laws - how much Russian or Ukrainian-owned software do *you* use? (US companies employing coding sweatshops doesn't count - after all, the IP is owned and enforced in the US.)
the article is one of those "got press release, changed a few words, printed it" pieces of "journalism". here's what I wrote to BBC in reply:
1 951000/1951231.stm
Dear Jane Wakefield,
In the article titled "Net pirates 'threaten software industry'", posted at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_
on Monday, 29 April, 2002, 07:52 GMT 08:52 UK, you write down a few items that I don't consider to be entirely correct, and even more that are very one-sided.
Allow me to comment on some of these items:
> The warning was issued at a conference, organised by the Business
> Software Alliance (BSA), which attracted delegates from firms such as
> Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Symantec.
This sounds like an accomplishment with credits to the BSA, except that the BSA is funded by the firms mentioned, especially Microsoft. Once you check the speakers list against the BSA membership list, you realize that what appears to be a conference is, in fact, a PR meeting.
Pointing this out to the reader would have enabled him to take the points made by these "delegates" with the grain of salt they deserve.
> The meeting was told that in 2000 the software industry in Europe lost
> $3bn to pirates.
I have always been interested in finding out just how BSA and other "independent" researchers arrive at these figures. They don't tell. Any credible claim should name its sources, shouldn't it?
> This figure is thought to be only a tiny fraction of the amount of
> piracy that is going on every day on the internet.
If I interpret "tiny fraction" as less than 10%, I'm at $30bn EVERY DAY, or about 11 trillion per year. The GDP of the UK in 2000 was $1.36 trillion. So these people are telling you that internet piracy is a business 10 times the size of the whole UK economy?
Obviously that is, if you excuse the word, bullshit. The sentence does, however, create the impression that internet piracy is unbelievably huge.
Even so, $30bn is more than Microsoft's worldwide net profits, and a considerable percentage of the total net earnings of europe's software industry. A claim of this size better be substantiated by serious facts and sources. Where are they?
> "We can't estimate how much piracy is on the net but in one day we
> found a million sites under a search for one of the codenames for
> pirated software," said a BSA spokesperson.
One of the "codenames" is "warez" and does indeed return about 4,230,000 hits when put into google.
However, what kind of point does that make? "Buckingham Palace" returns 99,300 hits, but as far as I am aware, there is only one.
More to the point, a search engine just tells you how many sites mention a given topic. Ironically, the BSA's own websites, both at bsa.org and national sites such as bsa.de or bsa.org.tr appear in the above-mentioned search for "warez", because they use the "bad word". A majority of the "real" warez sites are just traps with pornographic advertisement. A little research would have taken an hour or two and been quite revealing.
Warez sites are very real. The BSA, however, having an agenda, is greatly exagerating both their number and capabilities.
Finally, here are a few choice quotes that should have really ticked you off to the fact that the figures are made up:
> The meeting was told that in 2000 the software industry in Europe
> lost $3bn to pirates.
[...]
> Europe has a greater rate of piracy than the US - around 34%
[...]
> It is forecast to grow from £35bn in 2000
Maybe math works differently in america, but even without a calculator I can see that $3bn isn't 34% of $50bn.
It sorries me when I see journalists lifting whole articles almost verbatim out of corporate press releases. It is especially not the kind of reporting I expect from a respectable news source like BBC.
For the record, I am a computer security professional with a telco company. I have been working professionally on the internet for over 5 years, and I have seen the warez scene both from inside (when I was a teenager) and from the outside now that I deal with people abusing our computer resources for these purposes or help the law enforcement agencies to track criminals through our systems.
Piracy is real, no question about it. The BSA, however, justifies its very existence by a gross exageration of the facts, and as a very interested party should not be believed too much.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org