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TransGaming Tagging Downloads to Combat Piracy
SeanTobin writes "It seems that TransGaming is implementing a new watermarking system to combat piracy. For now it seems that every tgz of Cedega 4.0.1 is individually tagged, and this has been frustrating Gentoo users who (like many others) like to be sure their archives are unmodified. Is this the future of software downloads? Is this tiny loss of personal privacy worth the increase in TransGaming's security?" Update: 08/16 17:42 GMT by S : There's an official response on the TransGaming forums indicating: "We can confirm that Cedega 4.0.1 included some basic watermarking... The objective behind the watermarking was to deal with some peer-to-peer piracy issues that we've been seeing over the past several months... We have suspended the watermarking feature for now and Gentoo users no longer need to be concerned with work-arounds."
> Drug laws: Because idiots can't handle themselves and commit crimes and such while using them or to gain use of them, recreational use of certain drugs is against the law. Similarly, the issue with alcohol and tobacco (of course, there are health issues and who has to pay the bills in there too).
Some countries deal differently with this particular issue. Despite popular belief, allowing certain recreational use does not result in more drug abuse, rather, it seems to cause better control over drug abuse because you can isolate it from recreational use a lot easier.
Examples of countries who permit recreational use of at least certain drugs are the Netherlands and Belgium.
In case of drug related laws, I'd suggest considering a change of law indeed to concentrate on abuse, and leave recreational use alone.
Its not like current laws are preventing anything, they just make sure that recreational users do have to deal with criminals if they want their pot or whatever, increasing the actual risk of abuse.
> Gun laws: Because idiots use them to commit crimes, people who have legitimate recreational uses for guns (target shooting, hunting, etc.) are penalized.
I do see why you'd want to keep track of potentially dangerous items while allowing their use for specific purposes. It seems to me that gun control laws actually serve a purpose (we can argue about their implementation tho)
> Speeding: Because there are folks who refuse to admit that they don't know how to drive fast (and therefore speed and cause accidents), there are laws that penalize us all. (Yes, I know that there are more complex decisions that go into traffic speed laws, but this is an example.)
Because most people do not know how to drive fast, this rule seems to serve a practical purpose. You should consider however that there are countries out there which do not impose speed limits on part of their roads. The results of that seem to suggest that in certain cases that isn't a problem for safety, on many cases it is. Germany is an example of such a country.
The argument of having the majority pay for some fools might hold in cases where the measures are actually acomplishing something, but imho they do not in case of copy protection, and neither do they in at least one of the examples you gave.