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Copy That Floppy? Go To Jahannum (Hell)
andrewdm writes "The Business Software Alliance has a new partner: the grand muftis at Al Azhar in Cairo. The New York Law Journal has an article explaining the new holy(?) alliance between the BSA and the highest religious authorities in the Egyptian Sunni Islam sect. The clerics issued a fatwa (holy edict) against piracy, saying it is "the worst type of theft and prohibited by Islam." What's next? The Pope denouncing mp3's as mortal sins?" The worst type of theft, indeed.
How about Richard Stallman denouncing non-"free software" as the same?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Shouldn't that be "THEY MADE DUPLICATES OF MY ELECTRONS!!!"?
And some stuff for the lamness filter.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
The worst kind of theft? Even worse than the kind of theft that deprives the victim of the object you've taken? The stuff folks will believe...
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Ahh, this is too good - finally the future takes a twist even Bruce Sterling couldn't predict.
But seriously, this is actually pretty impressive: the weight of Islamic law behind software theft. I'm not familiar with the situation in Egypt, but in a lot of places (like Saudi Arabia) the penalty for theft is having your hand cut off. First left, then right.
You heard me right: people may be getting their hands cut off for pirating software.
As I've said before on the dot, our choices, in the long run, are
1> To comply with Copyright Law as it stands, whether we like it or not.
2> To change the law to something sane.
It's very much like the War On Drugs - Marijuana is simply not very harmful, grows everywhere, and our jails are full of people doing time for selling a dime bag: even an irrational, impossible-to-enforce law can still ruin lives.
Copyright is heading towards being this kind of an issue, and we need to take smart action to prevent it before we have college students going to jail for their MP3 collections.
And poor muslim bastards losing their hands over a pirated copy of Word.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Yeah, only difference is Stallman isn't a dogmatic leader to 2 billion people (see here for statistics). You wouldn't believe how much power over the masses the Pope has. I've seen people flock to the streets and wait for 2-3 hours just to catch a glimpse of his holiness passing by (yes, 2 hours waiting for a 5-second sighting). And people absolutely refusing to compromise on ANY point the Pope has decided on, is totally frustrating.
Plus, RMS's views are definitely more open to debate than the Pope's (or the church's for that matter). No chance of me getting excomulgated for saying RMS is an asshole (which i don't think he is, but anyway).
But then, I consider the BSA a terrorist organization. Terror IS their weapon
Hold on there cowboy. I hate the BSA as much as the next person but they are *not* a terror organization. Saying so makes you sound remarkably like the talking heads on tv and the politicians who attach the 'terrorist' label to anything they don't like.
the BSA is an organization that uses fear and extortion to accomplish it's goals, remarkably similar to terrorism eh? The parallels stop there. The BSA accomplishes its goals within the law. Sure the law might be horribly flawed, but the BSA does work within it, and if they break the law they do pay.
What the BSA does not do is send suicide bombers, assasinations, bombs, planes, and violence to kill and murder innocent people.
Call them whatever you like; asspirates,jack-booted thugs,cum-guzzling gutter sluts,- whatever, but terrorists they are not.
Willing to abide by legal licensing agreements
Does this include the GPL?
I know, flame away, dock me a point, but the same people who whine about attempts to keep people from "pirating/breaking license agreements" will be the same ones who blast Sony for not following the GPL to the letter.
"piracy works as a disincentive toward developing IP that requires a substantial amount of time/effort/money"
Not sure if I completely agree with that, although I do see your point. Think about it, though: Video games are copied alot, yet the video game industry is very healthy despite a poor economy. You'd think that the Game Industry would be pushing the SSSCA, but they're not. They understand that some people are going to steal stuff, not much they can do about it without costing them way too much money. Their goal is not to stop piracy, just slow it down while their window is open.
As for 'robbing the world of future discoveries..' I may not be interpreting that 100% correctly, but it seems to me that when it publically known how to build something, that isn't the end of that product. Lots of companies make network cards, they're still doing fine.
As I said, I may not have fully understood your point. I apologize if I gave it the wrong meaning. I just think that saying it's the worst kind of crime is overboard. Even in the worst case scenario, we, as a society, will pull through. It's not the same as robbing a country entirely of all it's food.
"Derp de derp."
But, my guess is that the editors think we (the American/European majority here) should care because:
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
At a time when the USA is threatened with "holy war" by organized Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists, the BSA induces Sunnite clergy to declare the same thing on copyright infringement?
I am not a muslim but there is a big difference between Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists and Islam itself.
Islamic terrorists are a group of people who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam. True, they have the support of some members of the clergy but that doesn't make the religion itself evil.
Your analogy is more like saying the Pope is evil because there are anti-abortion terrorists who take his words about abortion being a sin very literally and commit acts of terror against people who don't behave according to their wishes.
So is GW evil for meeting with the Pope while visiting Europe? Is Italy guilty of harboring an evil terrorist?
I'm sorry, but this to me is rather like Stalin giving Hitler's genocide policy an endorsement. These same Islamic clergy refuse to unequivocaly condemn the actions of Bin Laden.
Are you sure of that? Do you have a source you can point me to which mentions the Egyptian Sunnite clergy and a refusal to condemn Bin Laden? Or did you just pull that out of your ass based on reports of some members of some clergy in some muslim country refusing to condemn Osama?
Mmmm.. Donuts
I think that seatbelt laws are better example than Marijuana, but it's all the same thing. The wrong thing is being attacked. Same goes for the "War on Terror". We're attacking the end result of some serious problems. 'Terrorists' would not exist if it wasn't for crappy foreign policy that pisses people off. Killing the terrorists (which is what the war on terror is) doesn't do anything but kill people and piss them off more.
Same goes for seatbelts, we write tickets to people for not wearing seatbelts, instead of convincing people at a young age that wearing seatbelts and protecting your own life is a good idea, but that because in this country (the United States), and many others, you are free to do as you wish as long as it doesn't harm OTHERS, then you don't have to wear your seatbelt if you don't want to, but it is a good idea.
I think I lost my train of thought.
What?
The BSA accomplishes its goals within the law
Hmmm, sort of. I'm not so sure their lobbying tactics could stand very close scrutiny under election financing laws, or other rules that regulate how politicians can be influenced. The problem is that everyone in the Capitol seems to have a somewhat fragile roof so they better keep all stones unthrown.
The BSA tactics do seem less mortal than the terrorists. However, consider how many people are unemployed worldwide because the sofware cartel keeps their prices artificially high. At the very bottom of the pyramid, how many people are starving to death? No, of course, people who use software at work do not starve when unemployed, but what about the housemaids or gardeners they could not employ? Everything is connected and wealth does trickle down, even if it's not PC to say so.
IANAM, but I wonder what would have happened if who ever actually bound and transcribed the first copies of the Qur'an had declared publishing rights and refused to allow the distribution of low cost copies or even public prayer.
If they had today's laws then the words might have passed into the public domain some 75 years or so after the Prophet rode to heaven, but presumably the actual author (Allah) isn't dead (Nietzsche aside) so they could try to hold on to it indefinitely.
Okay, that may be a silly way of looking at things, and I guess you could say that Allah or Muhammed would'nt have allowed this, but seriously, shouldn't religous scholars and men of god be more aware that ideas are not really property (or at least not the property of man)?
The concept of intellectual property is a (useful if done right) legal fiction constructed to encourage innovation (patents, copyrights) and reduce deception (trademarks). Even if you send people to jail I don't understand how breaking such artificial and clearly secular laws can be considered so fundamentally sinful.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
This is a really sad thing. Religion has a very bad name in Western civilization due to the many atrocities and lesser injustices committed in its name. Please people: don't confuse the religion of Islam (or Christianity or Buddhism or ...) with these ridiculous petty power plays. If you are curious, look at any original religious texts and you will see a lot of reasonableness that just isn't reflected in the behavior of the clergy/priesthood/whatever. A really interesting statement about this problem is at: http://www.bahai.org/article-1-1-0-1.html - pick your language.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Sounds to me like the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing--especially since copyright law does exist (http://www.agip.com/laws/saudi/c.htm).
I just had a long, emotional, drawn-out argument with the newsgroup rec.music.makers.songwriters over this very issue.
It's my opinion that piracy, murder, and theft are three very different, distinguishable offenses, and have to be treated as such. To call piracy an act of "theft" is just as dishonest as calling drug use an act of "terrorism".
The crime of theft has very definite implications. Theft always causes the victim to lose property. Property carries value, so value is always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator.
The mechanism of piracy is much different. Piracy does not act on existing property; it may or may not deprive the victim of future sales, or of the ability to make money in the future. There are acts of piracy which cause no financial harm at all; the pirate, for example, who illegally copies a piece of software, doesn't understand it, can't get it to install, and deletes it, can hardly have been said to have done harm to the company. Therefore, unlike theft, value is not always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator. The size of the victim's estate remains constant; the size of the perpetrator's estate grows.
Thievery is the act of illegal taking; piracy is the act of illegal copying; murder is the act of illegal killing. You can argue semantics and say that killing is the taking of life and copying is the taking of information, but I believe that to take - that is, to transfer ownership from one party to yourself - is very, very distinguishable from killing and copying.
Are there any real-world implications of this semantic debate? I think we're seeing them right here. This islamic cleric is issuing his fatwa against piracy not based on the harms of piracy, but based on the harms of theft. Falsely associating one concept with another prevents people from really reasoning out the implications of each concept. Let me put it this way: if piracy were legalized, much of corporate capitalism as we know it would be over. But if theft were legalized, society as we know it would be over.
There is a BIG ethical difference between stealing someone's real property, and refusing to acknowledge that a copyrighted work *is* real property. I'm not saying that one is ethical and the other isn't; I'm saying that there's a difference, and we'd better be prepared to tackle the two abstract concepts separately.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I'm not convinced that terrorism (or more correctly jihad) is really a product of our foreign policy - the wars between Muslims and Christians predate the foundation of the United States by around a millennium - and the issues have not changed much: control of the Holy Land.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Unfortunately taxes I pay may well go to pay your hospital bills if you're badly injured or support your family if you're killed. In this situation, when you're going to be spending my money, I get to have a say in whether you wear a belt or not. Now, if you had a law that said you didn't have to wear a seat belt but if you didn't you had to pick up all of the tab for any injuries to yourself and you're dependents couldn't claim for support from taxpayers that's fine by me. You want this "right" you have to accept the responsibility.
development.lombardi.com
Illegality is not part of the definition of terrorism. Terrorism is using tactics the promote fear in the general public to force leaders to do what you want. What the BSA does is promote fear in the minds of the leaders so they pass laws that force the public to do what they want.
You heard me right: people may be getting their hands cut off for pirating software.
Upon reading this post, I grew suddenly very sad. As a young kid, growing up, I pirated Sierra games because I had no idea they could even be bought. It was my love of these that made me a programmer, and now, a purchaser of games that I enjoy.
I hate to think of kids in Egypt getting severely punished for being curious.
Many people in the West invite countries like China into the WTO so that they will learn from us.
The BSA is exploiting the worst of the dogmatic leaders in other countries, and is ultimately exploiting the most innocent.
This is a really sad day for people in the software industry.
The level of political bias on slashdot is absurd.
Text from the original post:
"What's next, the pope banning mp3's?"
"The worst type of theft, indeed."
Not to mention various posts about how muslim clerics intend to mutilate/castrate those who pirate software, etc.
A strong argument can be made that pirating is immoral. Islam is a religion that absolutely forbids theft, and taking the product of someone's labor without paying them could easily be construed as theft. Instead of positing counter-arguments, the slashdotters make all kinds of statements as if the prohibition is crazy, fundamentalist, or insane.
Pirating software could be seen as immoral from many more standpoints than the fundamentalist one. Piracy clearly violates many philosophical principles of ethical behavior. For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
Let me answer one or two objections that are very common on slashdot. I am not a lackey of the software industry, or a hireling for Bill Gates (my favorite), or a secret agent for the RIAA. Even if I were, it logically changes nothing.
There are many reasons to critice Islam:
You might say that - in tenet at least - it is intolerant of homosexuality. But then, last time I checked my Bible or a Torah, so were Christianity and Judaism.
But to accuse it, in general, of supporting Bin Laden is outrageous.
I am the first to say that the 'West' is too tolerant of intolerance in the name of tolerance.
But broadbrushed comparisons are outrageous and racist.
I would be laughed down if I said "If Hitler was a vegetarian, all vegetarians must be out to kill Jews, right?" But somehow, when it comes to Islam, the difference between the particular (a person) and the general (a set of religious beliefs, that - last time I checked - did not believe in the taking of innocent life).
Please, please, please... stop extrapolating from a label.
--- My dad's political betting
~ wavy lines as I shift into a new timeline ~
9/11/2022: 19 terrorists, operating with the support of Osama Bin Valenti and Yasser Rosen (well, at least the Israelis and Palestinians sorted out their differences ;-), defeated security checkpoints, boarded, and took control of, four 747-class unmanned-aerial-freighters (UAFs) containing full loads of Celine Dion CDs and Pauly Shore DVDs, and flew the aircraft directly into the chip fabs of Intel, AMD, the main offices of the Free Software Foundation.
The fourth aircraft, its target unknown, was downed harmlessly over water when a skilled hacker on the ground figured out what was going on, and managed to succesfully reverse-engineer, decrypt, and override the terrorists' jamming signal, regaining partial control of the aircraft using nothing but a CB radio, a Pringles can, a laptop, and an old 802.11b card. "Yeah, it was scary, but thanks to the fact that I was able to pick up on the basics of programming by kindergarten, and I had to reverse-engineer some arbitrary code samples for my high school entrance exams, it wasn't too hard to figure out how to take the plane back. Thank God they repealed the DMCA, or I'd have never had the chance to develop these skills. I only had a couple of watts of transmitter power, and I didn't have enough time to set up a distributed computing network to crack the entire protocol, so all I could do was point it over water and send it down before my batteries ran down. They can't win. All their base are belong to us!"
The 20th hijacker, Zaccarias Eisner, is still at large. Authorities in the previous administration had, in fact, detained him in 2013, but had been forced to released him under direct order of Attorney General Hollings.
The final transmission from one of the doomed freighter aircraft was recorded as "I say to you that the universal Turing machine is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Taliban Stranglers are to women home alone without their burkhas! Free Software has made our industry bleed and bleed and hemorrage! We shall not stop our jihad against the Great Satan of fair use!"
Noam Chomsky, commenting on CNN from the Shady Hippy Retirement Home, said "[...]we have to look past the destruction of our information technology industry and find the root cause of the cycle of violence - the Supreme Court's 2004 declaration of the DMCA as unconstitutional, and Congress' failure to pass the CBDTPA or any of its variants by 2005 - followed by the rapid rollout of broadband wireless P2P meshes networks, all led to the collapse of the Hollywood's business model, the consequent radicalization of members of the Hollywood media elite, ultimately leading to the tragic events of 2022. It's all still America's fault."
President Stallman and Vice President Raymond, along with Senate Majority Leader Torvalds, (they settled their differences in 2009, as Mozilla 1.0 finally shipped as part of the "Really Really Unified Distro" :-) broadcasting from an undisclosed location, issued a joint statement: "You are either with us or you are with the Hollywood Cartel."
House Minority Leader Gates, and Senate Minority Leader Ballmer issued a joint statement: "Although we differ from the administration on the point of free software, we agree with them on the fundamental issue - the trillion-dollar technology industry cannot allow itself to bow down to the $60B entertainment industry. Sure, we'd prefer you be using .WMA instead of .MP3 or .OGG, but today is no day for partisan games. The bottom line is that if you don't download your indie music for free -- if you're still paying $29.99 for copy-protected Britney Spears and Celine Dion WAV files -- then the terrorists have won."
~ wavylines ~
Well you have to remember that the same people issued a Fatwa saying that people who kill civillians are still martyrs!!!
I wonder what's next?
Specialization of the tool is irrelevant. More relevent is the cost to develop the software, the cost to reproduce the software, and finally the number of users whom those costs are divided amoung. Few users, higher price to recoup costs. Lots of users, lower price. (And if the price isn't low enough, and the famous "invisible hand" is working, a competitor will emerge. Sadly, there are lots of things prevents the invisible hand for working...) Flash, Photoshop, and 3D Studio Max are extremely specialized in terms of their market. The market for a general office package is orders of magnatude larger.
Mind you, not knowing how much it cost Microsoft to develop Office, I can't say whether Microsoft Office is overpriced. My point is simply that comparing it to products with significantly smaller markets is a bad idea.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
I'll start by saying, I am a muslim myself.
...) or ex-USSR friendly (Syria, Lybia ....)
In my quite long experience, I have discovered one could get any 'fatwa' from anywhere depending on how much you can pay, or how much pressure you can put on.
99% of muslims in the world live under dictatorship's of one kind or the other and of varying degrees of terror. The 1% left live in the west, like myself, where we are free.
In those dictatorships, friendly or not to the west, 'holy' institutions are part of the big ruling 'minority'. Anything they say cannot be taken seriously under any circumstances.
They are usually used for internal consumption. Do not forget that in most arabic/muslim countries we have 'analphabetism' rates of 50+ percent. These fatwas targets those and even those who can read/write but are too stupid to check the 'Kuran' (Bible equivalent for muslims) for themselves, or simply think about it.
As a matter of fact, you will be able to get a 100 different contradicting 'fatwas' for the same question depending on which type of dictatorship you ask: is it US-friendly (Egypt, Saudi Arabia
Now if the Catholic Pope did something like this, I'd find it sadder because he IS free! Our guys (muslim authorities of any kind) would say the sky is not the sky and swear Earth is flat if asked to do so, because they are either corrupt of are terrified of saying otherwise!
You are right. In fact it can not be classified as theft due to the fact that nothing has actually been stolen rather it has been copied. That is not haram (forbidden) in Islaam at all.
As a sunni Muslim I beg to differ with the opinion of Al-Ahzar. For something to be haram in Islam there has to be some prior example for it in previous laws from the time of the prophet Muhammed; from which an analogy can be drawn. For example we can say that cocaine is haram because it is an intoxicant and intoxicants are haram due to prior examples, even though cocaine was not known in the time of the prophet.
In this case there is no, afaik, prior example for any sort of intellectual property law. In the time of the prophet there was a lot of literature, especically poetry which the Arabs were very fond of, and none of this was ever protected by any sort of ownership law.
However, there are two things that are haram in Islam which Western intellectual property laws are meant to protect against. The first is trying to pass off as someone else and the second is breaking an agreement (which perhaps could be a EULA).
However, in the example of the EULA, there still has to be some sort of prior example that such an agreement is valid before third parties have to agree to it. For example, I can't make up a law saying "by standing in the rain you agree to pay me $1,000,000 bucks" because I don't have the right to do that. In this case, because intellectual ownership hasn't been proven under Islamic law the EULA has no place.
In conclusion, there are many Muslims (sunni and others) who would go to the other extreme and say there is no basis for intellectual property laws in Islam and in fact that they go against some of the basic principles of Islamic life like putting the welfare of the community before the individual and not hoarding money or knowledge for oneself. To me Islamic law would make everything Open Source.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'