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Operation Fastlink Cracks Down on Warez
An anonymous reader writes "Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations.
Among the groups targeted by Operation Fastlink are well-known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X, all of which specialized in pirating computer games, and music release groups such as APC. The enforcement action announced today is expected to dismantle many of these international warez syndicates and significantly impact the illicit operations of others."
The only "impact" will be "we have to start using VPNs, boys!"
I love how Ashcroft and his Copyright Enforcement Militia makes these pirates sound like the Mafia by using terms like "syndicate. Think about it: almost all "nfo" files have pleas for FTP sites for 0-day distribution. If these "sydicates" have to beg for machines and bandwidth in an "nfo" file, how omnipotent can they really be?
The feds are just taking care of their corporate masters, that's all.
Trolling is a art,
One will pop up for every one they push down.
We don't have the right to distributed pirated works online. How does this story fit in this category?
About raiding an Arizona school?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You mean I can no longer spend 5 days downloading a poorly cracked game that I can't play online? That's a real shame.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
its nice that you make the government out to be the bad guys here, but I'm a game developer and I'd really like to stay in business thank you. With piracy so rampant, game developers NEVER see royalties and its harder and harder to scrape togeother enough cash to make a good game nowadays. Its up to you. Buy games and support the govenment in actions like this and have a healthy game biz, or pirate away and watch all the best developers go under.
I've never heard of any of these "well known" groups.
I guess this must mean that we've already solved all those pesky problems with rape, murder, assault and those other violent crimes, not to mention terrorism and the ongoing drug war, so now we can move onto things like busting 1337 W4R3Z D00DZ.
Wow, whether it is people selling pipes that might be used to smoke marijuana, or kiddiez running "FTP my w4r3z!!!!" sites, Ashcroft won't back down from a hard fight.
Ashcroft doesn't dance, smoke or drink. I think he has too much time on his hands.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Calling someone with a four digit Slashdot ID new.
i can't believe they could use the phrase 'international warez syndicates' with a straight face.
As soon as you bop one in the head, two more pop up.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It could take HOURS for new groups to deal with the hole created by the loss of these groups. The humanity.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Well, since The Humble Guys are still alive and well, and were big even back when I was wee lad, I don't see any big impacts. The chiense stores in china town, still sell cheap re-printed DVD's, and I can still buy bootlegged smokes down at the local diner, I don't see how this is going to effect anything.
Come to think of it, isn't Razor 1911, and a few other "big players" still in the game? I guess they are "un-touchables"... Piracy might be seriously diminished one day, but it won't happen until the NWO anyways..
Mod +5 Drunk
CD key for WAREZ monkeys
http://www.narvakitchens.com/quake3cdkey.jpg
This is Earth.
There is no solution. We just muddle along the best we can and as far as I can tell, capitalism seems to give the most people the most opportunity to make their lives into whatever it is they want.
Unfortunately, some people still get screwed. See line #1.
Whatever you say, this is "big" .nl boys though they were safe from the law, but looks like the US has done a bit of leaning..
Seriously "big"
Every single major "elite" warez site in the netherlands is gone.
FairLighT are gone, for those of you who don't know FairLighT ( FLT ) they're one of the two main game releasing warez groups. People within the scene are scared, this is a bad day for warez.
Also, this is the US Governments doing, up untill today the
For pointing out that there's a huge overseas mp3 server illegally serving 12.8 gigs of mp3's in Iraq that Ashcroft should take down immediately - probably run by Evil Doers!
You have to wonder if the civilian contractors they're using to hunt these people down have community mp3 servers at work. If so, what do they listen to? Wagner?
And yet... don't the owners of intellectual property rights -- such as Linus Torvalds -- have the right to expect sufficient attention to be paid to their own law enforcement needs?
If the Linux kernel got hijacked and put into, say, some other Well Known OS illegally, can you tell me that nobody around here would making any "John Ashcroft should drop the hammer on these guys" remarks?
I don't doubt that some favors exchanged hands to get this kind of attention marked as a priority at Ashcroft's level. But keep in mind that the same law that works for them works for everyone else too, no matter how lop-sided it may seem sometimes.
The BBS(Cyberspace BBS) I frequented here in the Grand Rapids area has always been (and still is) very careful about only allowing shareware and freeware software into the file libraries people can download from.
The original owner's wife's ex-husband called the FBI and told them Cyber had pirated software and child pornography available for download. So the FBI raided. AFAIK, they didn't damage anything, and left once it was demonstrated that the file libraries were clean.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Some of you techno-toads need to get your head out of the web and realize that technology isnt the solution to EVERYTHING.. Not only does john law have the capability of breaking a lot of VPN's, but he doesnt really need to.
these guys storm offices and houses, they pull you from your keyboard before you can lock it out, they have "agents" work the chat networks and so on, becoming "friends" and insiders of these "syndicates".
Its very difficult to carry on this type of illegal activity through a structured or organized manner against the deep deep deep resources of both the sowftare industry and the goverment. The only way to battle them is for hugely distributed and un-localized distribution....
basicly P2P... now P2P with strong encryption and trace-blocking, along with various other privacy protections distributed across enough users is a much more difficult thing to kill. These pirate groups are asking for trouble by making themselves targets.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I've gotta agree with all the people pointing out that this should not be in YRO, and I'm glad to see that this community has a decent percentage of people who agree this is the right response from the FBI. For the rest of you, what's it going to take to make you people happy?
Step 1: They tried busting people like Ed Felten for talking about piracy tools. This was genuinely evil, and we bitched, saying "they should only go after the pirates, not people talking about tools that might be used for piracy."
Step 2: They started busting the pirates themselves. They handled it in a fairly Snidely Whiplash sort of way, but it is definitely within the bounds of the spirit of the law. And you all bitched, saying, "these are just home users, the real problem is the piracy rings."
Step 3: The crack a bunch of piracy rings. This is totally in line with the spirit and proper use of copyright. If some company were doing something similar with GPL software, we'd go after them and we would win. Please try to retain what remains of your credibility - don't bitch when organized, premeditative law breakers get their comeuppance.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money. If they give away free medicine to kids, it's to improve their image so they can make money. If killing 8,000 people in Bhopal will make them money, you better hope you don't live in Bhopal. Making money is the purpose of a corporation.
I think that part of what's needling you is that corporations are being granted some of the rights that individuals enjoy, yet they exist only to make money are not subject to the same constraints that individuals are. You can't throw a corporation in jail for murdering someone. You can throw the CEO in jail if he screws up badly enough, but it's a little tougher when you remember that corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions. Also, a distributed decision-making process and distributed accountability reduces each individual employee's share of the guilt to the kind of manageable level that allows for some really spectacularly bad shit to happen.
A lot of people who otherwise believe in laissez faire and the free-market are troubled by the zaibatsu-style mega corporations because they have grown large enough and influential enough to circumvent many of the normal free-market checks and balances.
The Dalai Llama
... I am not an economist, but watching increasingly smaller numbers of people control increasingly larger numbers of increasingly limited shared resources is making me increasingly worried...
My sig could be your sig!
You know, a lot of people here seem to be saying what you said, and to a degree, that's true.
However, if the government keeps sending these groups to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, that's going to stop or at least trickle off at some point. We're not exactly talking about the Mafia here. If a continual crackdown occurs to the point where if you put pirated software out for distribution you have a high likelyhood of being passed around a cell block to earn cigarettes for someone much bigger than you are, it's going to seem like a much less attractive activity to most sane people.
Right now that's probably not happening, but if there was a real threat of law enforcement getting involved... shit, most geeks are afraid of girls. You don't think they're going to be even more afraid of lonely, burly men?
> 10 countries and the United States
I thought the United States counted as a country too.
10 year old geek (probably YOU):
Mom, can I have $120,000 so I can
learn autocad and 3d studio and
visual basic and oracle and....?
Mom: No that's too expensive dear
How long before we can afford it?
Mom: after we win the lottery maybe.
Firefox &
You:
A.) Participate in piracy, so this pisses you off.
B.) Have a beef against Ashcroft, so it just ruffles your panties to see him cracking down on illegal software piracy.
There is absolutely, 100% nothing wrong with the government cracking down on this. Slashdot wants to pretend it's some sort of miniscule, "gray area" problem, but it's millions of users all trading warez and making it harder to sell software.
Why the hell do you think PC sales are so low, and so game companies are turning to consoles? Don't give me the "games were better in the olden days" spin, because we've got everything from Far Cry to Invisible War to SimCity 4 to Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 to...you get the picture.
"Copyright Enforcement Militia"...this is such propaganda bullshit that I can't believe--no wait, I CAN believe it got modded up. A post bitching about the emotive use of the word "syndicate" yet emotively using "militia." Nice!
Let's all pirate the fuck out of Doom 3, shall we? I'm sure John Carmack won't mind. Will he?
Don't forget the part about placing value judgements on people based upon how much, or little, they made for themselves. It might look wide and free, like the sea, but there is a very fixed path to follow; freedom isn't real if all options but one have negative consequences attached.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Okay, I'm seeing a lot of people railing (once again) against the government for enforcing the law. If this operation was targeted at the people downloading the pirated software and music, I'd be joining in - that's a huge waste.
But the government action is against those that are producing the cracked software and providing the music for download. These aren't your typical kids playing at sharing music. These are people who know exactly what they are doing, and, while they have a myriad of reasons for doing so (some even mildly admirable), they ARE breaking the law.
So I'm reading this, well, garbage that people are posting about honor among pirates. Well, whatever. I'm sure that's true for some segment of that population. But who gives a damn? Who are these people really benefiting? Is this REALLY a valid way to protest the pricing structures and horrible crap that these companies are producing? And even if it is, these people, again, are aware the the consequences of this type of protest, and I feel no need to get worked up about it.
I guess my point is - I'm GLAD that my government actually attempts to enforce the law. I wish they did a better job, which includes knowing how and when to enforce the law. At least this time they got it right, for once. 'Course, that's assuming that the press release is even reasonably accurate.
I certianly have the RIGHT to have the crack and keygen to any software I legally own.
..
in fact it's the first thing I download after buying it. so I know that in 4 years I can still use that which i OWN. Games or apps that need Key's and/or authorize to a master server are crappy to the user. and the first thing I do is remove that crud so I am ensured that my legal purchase cant be stolen from me by the corrupt developers or companies that think that I no longer have the right to use an app that I bought 5 years ago...
Yes I'm one of those evil people that buy something that works and stay's there. Lightwave 5.5 instead of being a lemming and buying the upgrade every year (Yes I'm evil and making programmer's babies starve!) and Yes I have my dongle and origional manuals. I also have all the keygens and cracks for it... which were NEEDED to make it work under windows 2000 and XP.
so you know what, screw off. there are LOTS of legit uses for cracks and keygens. and I reccomwend and point EVERYONE I know to the sites to get their keygens and cracks for their legal software
if you are a developer and add that crap to your app, then you suck and I really hope I piss you off to no end.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You know why I use those cracks ? To crack my own game, that i legally bought for 40+$. Why do I do that ? Because I usually play more than 1 game at a time, and I have only one CD. You know what happen ? Every freaking game is asking to see its own CD in the drive. Result : early break down because you opnen and close so much the CD door. Personally I think those guy were sparing me the money, that game developper/distrubutor make me lose on hardware early retirement. I guess I will have to search for those crack a bit more "deeper" now. But I will certainly not give up on the possibility of not having to play CD-Toaster wioth what i legally bought.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
How about
(0) The use of the term "piracy" the the alleged entertainment industry to descibe the free distribution the items they sell is spurious bullshit.
Anything can be made a crime if you pay some group to pass a law to make it one [see also: marijuana laws];
Grow up you punk-ass media whore.
"Stamp out crime; change the Law."
"The Internet is made of cats."
The big record companies and our own legislature have pirated our rights to free speech. I'll concede that it's worth compromising free speech by granting exclusive copy rights to writers/performers so that there will be an incentive for people to create. But those rights should only be short term. The founding fathers stated something like 14 years with a one-time 14 year extension. Things happen *much* faster now, so those terms should be shorter, not longer.
When they stop infringing my rights, I'll start caring about theirs.
Since we're reappropriating terms with long-standing meaning and context, why not warp the biggest and baddest one of them all, and just call it "content murder".
Theft requires the loss of a physical object (implies a degree of uniqueness and singularity for that object) from its owner, and piracy is essentially armed robbery on the high seas. Both involve physically depriving someone of physical things. Software (and music) is not physical. The media they are on is physical.
Next thing you know, Microsoft will start calling the adoption and existance of open source software "theft" (i.e., installing OpenOffice), because it deprives them otherwise of a sale of Microsoft Office, they'll start trying to harrass and make difficult those who use open-source versions of software products that they make (OpenOffice, Dia, Linux) in many ways (such as only allowing "licensees" to develop converters for their file formats, and any OSS app that can read a Word document must be violating IP restrictions SOMEwhere).
I feel sorry for the artists, but they've been taken for a ride by the radio-music industry for a long time. They just sound like prostitutes defending their pimps most of the time anymore to me.
The only thing being lost immediately is a potential sale (yet, oddly enough, there is not a complete relationship between the copying and loss of sale. There are probably more than a few Delphi developers, for example, who cannot shell out $3000 for Delphi8 Architect, yet they can get the evaluation CD from Borland and find a keygen for it. It may be just enough for them to use it to develop a project or two that they can sell, and then buy the full version. It is hard to learn and develop a program in something like Delphi in only 30 days...)
The funny thing is, that at least in Microsoft's case, they turned a blind eye to it for so long in order to grow their marketshare and develop MS Office addiction that only now are they trying to clamp down on essentially casual copying, because they cannot go after those who do it on an industrial scale (Ukraine, Russia, SE Asia, etc).
Oh well.
Actually, information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No, it doesn't.
It hates that.
fs
Interesting that they only had 12.8 gigs... they must be new
Even in the years between the first gulf war and the second, many soldiers in the field had enormous communal stashes of MP3s.
Saudi Arabia, for example, was notorious for confiscating anything/everything coming through customs that looked remotely suspicious, or violated islamic law in any way. This included fitness magazines (showing skin between the neck and ankles == BAD), CDs or DVDs with racy covers, any/all pornography, bibles or non-muslim religious tracts... you name it. This customs search even covered US troops rotating into country to participate in Operation Southern Watch (enforcing the Iraqi no-fly zones and defending the KSA's hide).
And yet... the people they had inspecting bags at the customs tables had clearly never seen an external hard drive, and they never searched laptops... so digital music/movies made it in no problem, and were immediately shared among the deployed soldiers and airmen. Yes, it's illegal, but it was great for morale... and somehow I can't see the MPAA/RIAA getting upset. After all, It's not like you can just run out and buy all their music/movies in the middle of a fundamentalist islamic nation (and soldiers might even buy better copies when they returned home, particularly if it was something they liked and/or had never heard before).
Besides, gathering evidence would be impossible... Saudi Arabia doesn't even issue tourist visas to non-muslims. How do you possibly track all the little LANs soldiers set up? How do you get the military to let you monitor their base network (hint: NOT going to happen). It would also be absolute political suicide to go after soldiers. Can you imagine the magnitude of the public relations backlash if the RIAA/MPAA prosecuted? Squeezing fines out of a bunch of homesick grunts just trying to survive and have a taste of home makes Ebeneezer Scrooge look like a philanthropist.
That'd be be like prosecuting grandmothers and children (Oh... hmm. Nevermind)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
While I'm mostly in agreement with your points, I'd like to try and hone your argument a bit more.
Number 3: Piracy is driven by overpriced CD's
The RIAA lost a judgement because they colluded to artificially inflate the price of CD's. At one point, CD's were extremely cheap. I remember buying CD's for an average price of 10.49 or 9.99 Canadian, about 6 bucks US at the time. That price in Canada has now climbed up to an average of 18.00 (almost DOUBLE).
Guess what: I buy the same number of CD's now in a year as I used to buy in a month Becuase
1. I'm buying DVD's (over 150 now)
2. I'm buying diapers for my baby (not in my 20's anymore)
3. I've replaced all my vinyl and cassettes.
4. The number of artists creating music that I enjoy has decreased significantly.
I am the RIAA's worst nightmare, because I prove that they distort the facts to suit their purpose. I don't download MP3's but my CD buying habits have decreased by 80% annually. They lose probably 1000 a year because of me...
There are thousands more like me. I just think it's a bit ridiculous that the governments of the world have swallowed the content industries argument so wholly. We are going to lose control of our open systems and hardware becausse of what is basically a lie, that mp3 sharing is the downfall of the record industry.
I see I've gotten offtopic here, so I'll get back into it. As I mentioned before, I think you're pretty much bang on in your post. I just think number 3 might be stricken out of it to make it that much more effective.
Okay, that's an amusing list of arguments, many of which are actually made by some of the kids online. I get the feeling that your intention is to suggest that these are the only arguments for widespread distribution (a straw man argument), but *shrug*, maybe I'm just misinterpreting. However, one of the arguments you're mocking isn't quite as obviously wrong as you suggest.
I've never heard of a parking infringement, but I suppose. I do hear "illegally parked" or "parking violation" (which was what my last parking ticket read). Those are perfectly reasonable terms, after all, one is illegally parked and one has violated parking laws. I'm perfectly fine with copyright violation or illegal copying. Both are accurate descriptions of the crime. Copyright infringment is arguably more accurate (since you're infringing on exclusivity granted to someone else), but violation or illegal is certainly nice and accurate.
Piracy, on the other hand, isn't terribly accurate. Piracy's has multiple definitions and those different definitions are governed by different laws and punishments. Many people (myself included) feel that we need to reconsider our intellectual property laws, that perhaps they've become unbalanced and no longer serve the common good. It's important to have accurate language in such a discussion; colorful terms and phrases like piracy cloud the issue. Those people and businesses interested in maximizing the power of copyright deliberately chose words like piracy and theft because they know they have emotion impact, it's easier to get people to agree with ideas like "theft is wrong" without having them consider the details of what they are agreeing too. If they used words and phrases like illegal copying they know that some people will step back and ask, "why is the illegal? What is the real harm?" This sort of misdirection is unnecessary. I certainly believe that copyright law is a good thing. I would be against abolishing copyright law or eliminating enforcement. However I arrived at those conclusions through reason and the facts, not through emotional arguments and colorful phrases. Shoplifting a CD is a very different action from downloading an illegal copy online, trying to confuse the two is a false analogy. If copyright really is right why not defend it without descending into logical fallacies?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
They have? That's news to me. When I got my first CD player in 1985, the average price of a new CD in a record store was $12. In 2004, the average price of a new CD in a record store is $18. Now, granted there are bargain-basement $5.99 CDs these days, as well as sale-priced new releases at the $12 or $13 price point, but as a whole, CDs aren't cheaper today than they were nearly 20 years ago.
Does that excuse "piracy," or "theft" or whatever you want to call it? No, it doesn't, but let's ratchet down the level of nonsense in the rhetoric used here. "Stealing" isn't the right word for making an unauthorized copy of something. The original still exists and can be sold to someone, and "piracy" is a loaded word with completely inappropriate connotations. How about we just call it "unauthorized copying" or "copyright dilution"?
I've always had a problem with software and entertainment industry estimates of losses due to unauthorized copying. First, they assume that every copy illegally-made represents a lost sale, which is nonsense. If a 15-year-old kid has 8,000 songs on his hard drive, there's no chance in hell that he would have bought those 8,000 songs if he hadn't had access to them for free. He might have spent anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks on music, but there's no chance he'd have bought 600 CDs worth of music at $15-$18 a crack ($9,000-$11,000).
And here's another thing: Twenty years ago, my friends and I taped songs off of FM radio and played them in our walkmans. Or we'd dupe our LPs onto tape and trade copies with each other. I easily had access to ten times as much music as I could afford to buy, but in spite of record industry whining, I bought *more* music because of that practice, not less.
One study stated that that kids and adults alike who used the original Napster were more likely to buy music than people who didn't. Numerous studies have shown that there's zero correlation between "piracy" and the decline of sales for the music industry. Is it any surprise to people that the last year of sales increases for the music industry was the last year that the original Napster was in operation?
This is not an apologia for listening to music without paying for any of it. It's simply a realistic look at what's really going on. The record industry has its head up its ass and always has. Suing and prosecuting your customers is bad for business.
Software "piracy" is different, but not *that* different. Much of the software industry used to accept that "piracy" was just another form of marketing. Microsoft has always given lip service to stamping out "piracy," but until they had established a monopoly, they did virtually nothing to prevent it before the fact because they knew it was easier to convert a "pirate" into a paying customer than it was to get a skeptic to buy from you in the first place. Most people these days will automatically use MS products, so now Microsoft puts copy-protection technology in its products to force people to pay up-front.
Is making an unauthorized copy of music or software theft? According to the law, it is. However, there needs to be a middle ground between the "information wants to be free" left and the Ashcroft search-and-seizure right.
Most people would gladly reward artists and programmers for their work. That's how shareware works, and it made Phil Katz a substantial amount of money before his death. So how about we find new ways to reward creators of content, instead of finding new ways to criminalize what people have done for decades?
Don't misunderstand me. There are true criminals out there who are selling counterfeit or other illegally-copied versions of products (such as music and sof
Since we're reappropriating terms with long-standing meaning and context, why not warp the biggest and baddest one of them all, and just call it "content murder".
"Intellectual Genocide"
P2P IS THE ARTIST HOLOCAUST!
You have some good points, but some things should be clarified..
3.) Most CD's are quite overpriced and the public now realizes this. Allow me to plug Mangatune.com Reasonable price, actually supports the musicians. (:
4.) Copyright duration is way to long and it is having a dramatic effect upon society
5.) Legitimately free music/whatever as advertising is nevertheless a valid business model to gain popularity.
6.) Artists are, in fact, getting ripped off due to the perceived need to cut a record deal to "get known." They would be much better off thinking like entrepeneurs.
7.) "Giving stuff away on the Internet" is not a business model, but it can be part of one if done correctly. Look at Homestar Runner as example: free cartoons that got so popular that the authors now make a living selling plush dolls, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. It would never have succeeded as a pay-for-content site because it has to compete with Cartoon Network, the Simpsons, and the like..
8.) Not everyone is looking for a free ride. The fact that people are more than willing to pay for concert tickets but many now hesistate to buy CDs says more about the market than morals. People are simply putting far less value in recorded music.
9.) In a purely capitalist, laisez faire economic system, there is no such thing as copyright. It's not an assumption or requirement. That's not to say that it's always bad, but rather that there are plenty of natural ways to make money that do not involve artificial government institutions. Open Source has already succeeded in this field; independent music/film is still on its way.
10.) For the majority of human history, it was a right. Copyright is a modern experiment. It may or may not last long term. My guess is that a fairer balance will be struck.
11.) What signifies greed is the motivation, not that they are exercising their legal rights. Numerous studies have shown that P2P and other bootlegging has a minimal effect on profits, while significantly expanding the spread of content. It is more likely that the 'cracking down' is more out of fear that they are losing control of the traditional distribution channels.
One of the unfortunate things that has happened to the OSS movement is that a lot of the loudmouth advocates for it don't understand what it's really about.
Absolutely. In my definition, Open Source is about meeting software needs in the most efficient way possible. That does not always mean a free ride. Open Source is about turning an artificial "manufacturing" market into a labor market, the latter of which allows full, unrestricted motion of the "invisible hand of the market." Capitalism works best with many buyers, many sellers, and minimal cost of entry. That is what Open Source enables.
They view it primarily as a means to get free stuff, and then they turn their eyes from the free stuff to the non-free stuff and think to themselves "maybe I'm entitled to get that one for free too"
While I agree that many mistakenly see OSS as "free lunch," I don't see your secondary point in any true OSS advocates.
As someone else beautifully pointed out with regards to Slashdot:
Obviously, the only thing that would make warez sites and online piracy organizations morally objectionable and properly subject to sanction would be if they distributed, sold or bartered binaries for derivative works of GPLed software in violation of the GPL.
You may not be a troll but you're definitely delusional.
Ripping apart all the freebie-seekers from the podium of OSS self-righteousness still doesn't validate the blatant lopsidedness and anti-competitive behavior of the reigning software giants.
I agree, there are lots of lazy snobs out there that feel that everything should be given to them on a silver platter without requiring any effort on their part. However, it is still a moral fact that the current laws and regulations favor people who already have enormous bank accounts, squash any newcomers with better ideas (or force them to be absorbed), and continue to feed wealth to companies who pattern themselves using the bully tactics of _real_ syndicates like Microsoft.
There is no way that you can possibly argue that the current laws foster progressive competition, positive diversification or a "share the wealth" attitude. It's all a pyramid scheme.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Maybe where you live but copyright infringement is not a crime in my country (yet), it's a civil matter. Therefore "illegal" is not accurate, it's flat out wrong and it serves the purpose of making people fear sharing with their neighbour because they think they could go to jail. The correct term is "unlawful". For example, slander can be unlawful but it cannot be illegal. You can be sued for slander but you can't go to jail (how obsurd would that be?) Copyright infringement is the same.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Allright.
Fairlight has been around since C=64 days.
The earliest Class release I can recall is Quake (it even had it's own installer with chip-tunes built in).
Is UCF dead too? how about RiSCiSO?
The crap thing really is going to be that all good the no-cd cracks/patches will be gone.
I still buy games from the store. And to be honest, I always install the game, then go searching for a patch/cracktool so I can put my originals back in the box, and on the shelf.
I paid for Windows XP Professional, but got a keygen anyway so i'd still have my original box/key packed away safely. Call me wierd.
If you lose your Everquest registration key, is EA going to give you a replacement so you can install? hell no, you've got to go buy a new copy, or download a keygen...
I actively search the $10 and under bins at Best Buy/Brandsmart for games that I wanted to play but just felt they cost to much. Case in Point --> Enter the Matrix.
I bought ETM the day it came out. (The same day Reloaded came out in the Theatres). It cost me $50. 2 weeks later it was down to $39.99. 2 *MONTHS* later and it's a fucking $20 game!
I also got my first CD player in 1985, and I remember CDs being $18 or so, but I probably lived in a more expensive part of town than you, figuratively speaking. Let's use your $12 number to save time. $12 in 1985 dollars is about $20 in 2004 dollars; if prices hadn't gone down, we'd be paying $20 per CD today.
I understand the concept of inflation. But please remember the CD player that I got in 1985 sold for $260. It held one CD at a time, wasn't portable, didn't have a remote control and didn't have anti-skip shock protection. Today, CD players with those specs cost $20. Why? Improvements in manufacturing, reduction in the cost to produce CD players and the biggest reason: economies of scale.
For some of the same reasons, the CDs themselves also cost less to produce today than they did in 1985. The difference between 1985 and 2004 retail pricing of CDs is other record industry costs. In 1985, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, et. al. weren't getting huge guaranteed contracts for albums that don't sell. Record companies today are paying Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera big bucks up front for records that are supposed to earn enough money to pay for all the marketing costs that get poured into marginal acts like Creed.
The problem is that record companies only know how to sell you what you bought last time, so innovation has been completely eliminated. They force-fed us more clones of Britney Spears until people stopped buying those CDs. In their rush to find the next Avril Lavigne, they completely missed out on the concept of finding quality artists recording quality music, so Norah Jones sneaked her way to selling 18 million CDs with virtually no promotion by her record company.
CDs cost more today because record companies changed their business models. Instead of finding and developing lots of inexpensive new artists and allowing the market to decide what's a hit, record companies today insist on pushing the same crap they sold us last year until we stop buying it, and they spend a fortune in promotions to try to reverse the inevitable declines. When we stop buying stuff we're tired of, the industry blames "piracy" for their decline in sales. But the real reason we stopped buying music is because they stopped publishing music we wanted to buy. How else do you explain the success of Norah Jones and the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou?
You make some excellent points and you are absolutely correct that CD players and CDs are marketed in radically different fashions. Specifically, CD players are now commodities. The marketing spend for CDs is perhaps at its highest point ever.
Naturally the record companies say that piracy is 100% to blame for the decline in sales over the past few years. Slashdotters will quickly point out that it's everything but piracy; they also have some good points but I think many of us are "ignoring the elephant" a little too much. Both extreme viewpoints are self-serving; it allows the record companies to proceed with suing pirates with little remorse, and it allows Slashdotters to "share" all the music they can get their hands on without losing any sleep.
In the middle are the various research and analyst firms who specialize in analyzing markets. Several firms which I trust state that piracy is absolutely, definitely, part of the problem, but not the entire problem. The economy and competition from other sources of entertainment (such as the rise of the DVD market) are often cited by analysts as other principle factors.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
(2) See point 1.
(3) Price is only brought forth as an argument by people who did not think things through. The fundamenal cause is the fact that the whole process of "manufacturing" and "distribution" and "ownership" of information is a lie. Information is not an object that can have an "owner" and thus is not subject to a simplistic world-view concocted by one Adam Smith, otherwise known as capitalism.
(4) The whole idea of copyright is sheer lunacy to begin with. Discussing its length is like arguing over the type of brush you would use to paint the Moon green next Tuesday while standing on your porch. The fact that it is accepted as a de-facto "wisdom" is truly sad and depressing.
(5) Yes. And no, the author has no "right" to be selling "his" music. The only "right" he has is to perform the music he (or others) composed. If he can manage to get people to come hear it and they agree to pay at the gate, there is his source of income. If he is not good enough for that, he should get a day job. I will never get tired of saying that "art" is defined as a willingess to express ones thoughts and feelings in a way that others find it inspiring and moving. The very expression is its own justification and reward. It is not a "job", never you mind "industry". Art can be sponsored if it is particularly good and thus freeing the artist to pursue her creative urges. But it is not a business.
(6) Many "artists" (I use the term loosely since you seem to include all sorts of talentless commercial-jingle hacks in this) were mislead into believing that "art" is a career. That one can make a killing on it. Unfortunately its a lie designed by people who were in the business of marketing and distribution of their works. For a time it worked and was technically feasible. Not any more. Digital age has finally exposed the fundamental fallacy of "art as business" ideology.
(7) Neither one is a "business" model. Although one can make money around services based on free things, it is up to that person's business talents and other external conditions. Free stuff on the net is called Information. Information, due to its properties, is fundamentally not capable of being "owned" by anyone.
(8) Live performance and other equivalent labour can be monetarilly rewarded by the attending audience. Having the performance recorded once and then getting paid million times by having someone elses (fully paid for) equipment perform in your place, based on information embedded in a piece of plastic, is a form of fraud. Never you mind claiming that said piece of plastic is yours to control even though the sucker paid for it.
(9) You can easilly control access to live performances and thus ensure payment. You can sell t-shirts and all sorts of other stuff leveraging your name recognition. You can use your name recognition for advertising purposes. Thats capitalism. "selling" information that cannot be "sold" is a just con-artistry.
(10) You better believe it. Dissemination of information is not only my right, it is one of the most fundamental and un-alienable rights that trump most other gibberish that passes for "rights" and "laws" these days. Information = thought. And if you think that I will give up my ability to freely exchange thoughts and ideas so that a bunch if greed monkeys can get rich, you got another thing coming. While I understand that "capitalist" mentality is that "making profit" takes precedence over everything else in the universe, luckilly most of us do not subscribe to this lunacy.
(11) Noone can demand free enterntaiment. The consequence of information being not a "thing" that can be "owned" is that enterntaiment over digital media in exchange for payment is not viable. That is the logical downside of sticking to one's principles. Fortunately, the need for
Really, do you think sniffing traffic and breaking into "warez" machines played an integral role in these busts? I doubt it.
The real problem (or the real solution depending on your point of view) is that warez groups are nothing without an audience. They are also nothing without new crackers, suppliers, distribution sites, hangers-on...
Its a problem with a social solution primarily and a technological solution secondarily. As what good is a VPN network of warez creation and distribution if you can still have one weak link, one infiltration, one "Donnie Brasco" to blow your whole house of cards down.
Encryption and authentication and access control are terrific for protecting your assets, only when you have a strong legal system to take over when there is a breach of authority/conduct.
And while I certainly would not put people who pirate software in the same criminal class as those who manufacture and distribute drugs, run prostitution rings, or fraudulently manage mutual funds... what they are doing is against the law in most of the world -- and they are organized.
http://windows.scares.us
I might be dating myself here but I remember the days in the mid- to late '80s of dial-up BBSes (bulletin board systems). Since there was no Internet at the time the BBS was the place for people to build communities online. Some large ones had racks of modems and phone lines coming in. But many were small boards with maybe four lines at the most.
As you might expect there were dating boards, just plain social boards, and of course porn boards. But the most exclusive ones were the pirate BBSes--also known as "elite" boards. You had to know a current member or the sysop to get access. And then you had to contribute by uploading software that you might have access to.
In these early days it seemed like many software developers used elite BBSes as free beta test groups. Those who downloaded the software (often taking hours even on the superfast Telebits and USRs) would test it and post any bugs, feature-requests, etc. There was even a super-elite board that I heard about based in Alaska where only the big name developers were allowed.
It was from that experience years ago where I think that some software piracy can/should be acceptable. What high school student can afford the $650 for Photoshop? But a pirated copy can train this student for work in the future, and the company that s/he will work for will provide a legitimate copy. Businesses is where most developers (with the exception of games obviously) make their money.