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Warezed SoundForge Files In Windows Media Player

Posted by timothy on from the let-the-bsa-sort-it-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes "German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called 'Deepz0ne' who happens to be one of the founders of an audio software cracking group called Radium."

2 of 1,001 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lessons to learn by VistaBoy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Technically, under the law, they ARE a singular entity. That's the entire idea behind a corporation: the company is a seperate entity, and if any part of the entity breaks the law, the entity as a whole can be sued for it. It allows for individuals to evade financial consequences if their company is held responsible for something.

    For instance, let's say I start a company, and that company's product ends up causing a lot of accidental deaths. Instead of the individuals that compose the company being sued, the company itself is sued, and money can't be taken from the individuals...just the company. It lowers the risk of starting a business by making sure that only the business itself can be financially destroyed, not the individuals behind it.

    However, on the same token, every employee of Microsoft is a representative of Microsoft as a corporation. "Some dude who worked at Microsoft" who used a cracked copy of Sound Forge is a representative of the company, and by breaking the law, the entity of Microsoft as a corporation is responsible for breaking the law.

  2. Infringement of patent, not "stolen code" by rufusdufus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh fer christ sakes quit being so melodramatic; the case was about a hashing patent [that stac bought]. Essentially Stac claimed to own any algorithm that looks up matches in LZ compression in O(1) time and won on that basis. The code was not the same or even similiar, in fact, totally different algorithms, only similarity was run-time efficiency.