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Warezed SoundForge Files In Windows Media Player
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."
So when does it stop being 'opinion' that big companies don't give a shit about anyone else's "IP rights".
We bash MS, and get MS defenders countering with idiocy that makes it seem like it's all a battle of opinion over whether MS is a big bad company or simply misunderstood, or whether MS is a monopoly, or just highly talented, whether MS doesn't give a shit about IP rights while enforcing their own or they're just working within a business realm that they need to survive.
Sorry, It just keeps going on and on like this. MS using pirated software to develop & promote their media player. Indefensible from a company that professes to rely so much on IP, unless they're nothing but greedy hypocrites.
I'm going with the "nothing but greedy hypocrites" thanks
Just for kicks, do a content search on all *.wav files on your drive, searching for the string 'deepz0ne'.
You may run across more hits. That doesn't necessarily mean that the author of the software they came with used a cracked copy of SoundForge.
For example, the Digital Eel game "Dr. Blob's Organism" demo has the deepz0ne string in "powerdn.wav", but doesn't have it in any of the others. That makes me think they probably just grabbed a sound effect off of a (presumably) royalty-free sound effects library (CD/DVD/online), and that particular sound effect happened to be authored or modified in a warez version of SoundForge.
Similarly the mediaplayer sounds... whose are they, really ? Were they authored/modified by an MS Employee ? If not - where does MS's responsibility come in ? Do -you- check every asset you acquire in good faith belief to see if they may have been touched by a cracked piece of software ?
Oh really? Maybe you should tell that to Ernie Ball. I'm sure that little tiff with the BSA was all just a big misunderstanding.
YooHoo/2U2
The question it rasises is how much other stuff is in windows that has IP violations?
I've managed to get out of the IT/Windows side of things and more into embedded development, but, once upon a time...
I do recall that there used to be an admin kit that could be installed with NT 4 (yeah, this goes back a ways) that included a "better" command line interface and some typical tools like vi.
For some now-forgotten reason I "stringed" the vi executable and on the inside it was vim.
Much to my surprise (not) the "About" box listed only MS developers and MS version info -- not a word about the vim project.
So no, it's not the first or only time that MS has "embraced" foreign code without proper attribution.
Trusted by cats.
A couple days later they showed up in person to demand, with absolutely no diplomacy (like asking politely), that I remove my own personal keyboard (one of them old clunky IBMs because modern keyboards suck) because it was against company policy to modify hardware.
I thought this was crazy until you revealed that this was a defense contractor. They have good reasons (government paranoia) to forbid unauthorized hardware and software installs. I used to work at a company whose only customer was Lockheed Martin and which was in fact formed by Lockheed Martin. (They form little companies for themselves like this so they can pay crappy wages with no benefits for doing work that doesn't require a classification. The concept of a company with a single customer comes quite naturally to these people.) When I did work in the actual Lockheed Martin facility I had an escort badge. Every time I needed to take a piss, they walked me down the hall and waited outside the bathroom.
I'm surprised you didn't get fired for plugging in a weird keyboard. They canned me for opening a telnet session one day and sending an email home saying I'd be late.