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The BSA Going After IRC Warez Channels
Nova The BSA is
cracking down on the IRC warez channels. I tend to think that its sorta like a game of wac a mole, you squish one channel, and another will pop up. But then again, I'm not selling any software (or for that matter, pirating any).
don't get too worked up about this: it's just a wheeze to get into the papers..."Evil Internet Ruins Business" "Pirates use bit of internet also used by paedophiles - shoot them both"
that sort of thing
quite clever in a pandering-to-clueless-journos sort of way
I think the Boy Scouts of America should stick to tying knots.
Why worry about US piracy.. Go worry about china and their CD houses.
Keep'n it Real,
-Malachi
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
..really well. After all, trafficing in warez completely stopped after "Rusty'n Edie's" BBS was busted in 1993.
-=Maggie Leber=-
Actually, a lot of punishment in the legal system works the same way -- more as a deterrent to others than actual reformation of the "wrongdoer".
*Sigh*
I remember considering myself quite the little pirate back in the late 70's early 80's copying out my TRS-DOS and Apple games... trading them over 100's of floppies... :)) but I started to understand the harm I was doing to the programmers... I was cheating them out of recognition and $$$$
Then I started learning how to program and realized the ramifications of what I was doing, I felt like crap after a couple of my programs that were picked up by BYTE magazine and the like for some contests had the source listed on the magazine.. yeah I had a little recognition (not bad for a 7th grader to get a letter from Broderbund
Now Fast Forward to our Free-as-in-beer vs. free-as-in-speech software movement.
Granted I like picking up free stuff, and testing it out.. But now if I REALLY like something I'll go buy it. Case in point, I picked up half-life after borrowing a friends CD for a week to test it out.
Nothing is really going to crack down on piracy and warez on a full force level IMHO except a shift in how the end-users perceive themselves. Do they want to respect others, or just believe that they are getting a one-uppance on everyone else.
Now that I'm done rambling.... what's next?? going back to the days of the little cryptic disks (aka Bard's Tale III and AD&D games) that you had to match up the words and symbols or look up the nth word on the nth sentance on the nth paragraph on the nth page??????
OKOK -1 me allready I've rambled enough
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
This is probably off-topic... but this is one of the reasons I switched to Linux/opensource products. Why pirate when you can get GPL's software -- legal yet free products, which often is higher-quality than commercial equivalents? Before I knew about Linux and opensource, I was a frequent WaReZ visitor... (How else would a poor penniless student be able to afford the latest games and apps on windows?) Not anymore, because I've found better things. (ie. opensource software). IMNSHO warez channels are for those poor people oppressed by the "M$ regime" who have no choice but to pirate in order to survive. Let them see the beauty of opensource! :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
I write software, and I make a living off selling my software. When I see someone pirate _any_ form of software, it makes my teeth cringe, knowing it's maybe my paycheck they're taking away.
And don't start saying 'Microsoft is plenty rich, I don't need to buy their software'. You forget about the economic roll when you say this. Think about the companies that make money from Microsoft: Printers, CD-ROM duplicators, software wholesalers, retailers, etc... They all lose money if you pirate software.
IRC Channels? There are so many warez servers out there, and most of them are run by kiddies who have no clue. If we start busting them, they'll be afraid. One less opportunity to obtain illegal software.
On the other hand, if I buy a car and that car crashes and does not perform as I expected it to, I will return the car to the dealer for a total refund. And if there is only one car dealer in the world and I have no choice but to buy their car, well, that's another story. Bottom line: some people pirate software because they don't have any choice but to use that software, but they feel they're being ripped off by paying hundreds of dollars for crap.
Seriously, if someone pirates commercial software and offers it for sale (or for free) on a public forum, it's hard to feel sorry for them if they get caught.
I'm also having trouble shedding any tears for those who buy or download warez. If you want to get unsupported, unmaintained, bug-ridden software for which you don't even have the source code to either fix or link to newer libraries, that's your business.
Given that the alternative is to download Open Source for free, have it maintained for free, have the source for free if you need it, and have all the features (and sometimes more) than those commercial closed-source warez packages, I think anyone who does that needs to check into the cost of white jackets, but that's just my opinion.
If you get caught with warez, when you could have been using an Open Source alternative for less and gained more, legally, what's to complain about? It was your choice. Nobody pointed a gun at you and said "You Must Pirate Office 2000!".
Yes, there are unusual cases (such as "Frontier: First Encounters" and "Elite"), where there are classic programs which simply don't exist on the commercial market any more, and for which no Open Source equivalent has ever been written. These I can understand, and I doubt any commercial vendor would chase up on these. If they did, they'd get a lot of ill-feeling from the people they depend upon for sales, without making a single cent more money.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Money? The members of the BSA aren't in the business out of the kindness of their hearts, and it's arguably not in their interests to be ripped off.
They can likely pursue the big distributors -- such as folks who spam with ads for illegitimate CD's, or those who distribute "w4r3z" on their own sites, through FTP, HTTP or SMB -- through other means, since they're more obvious. A relatively stable, high profile increases the chances of detection.
OTOH, IRC person-to-person transactions are less likely to be logged and harder to note unless you've actually got either help from the admins, or somebody else watching at the time.
I'd frankly be surprised if industry folks weren't watching IRC and USENET for years, or at least occasionally checking the Moron Muster (when that was still being maintained). This helps one nail the clueless folks on the cheap...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The BSA knows as well as you and I that cracking down on 1337 w4R3z h4X0r5 in IRC channels will do nothing whatsoever to combat the "problem" of software piracy. At best, raking IRC chanels will net you a few 12 year olds trading copies of software they'll never use like baseball cards.
The real "threat" to the BSA in terms of lost revenue is organized, commercial piracy, and they know it damn well. Even if you somehow counted up all the Hotline and IRC transfers of pirated software, you'd come nowhere near the supposed billions in revenue they "lose" every year.
What the BSA is doing is playing the Public Relations game. This is all a big, flashy show intended to attract a lot of attention and give us all warm fuzzy feelings about them combatting software piracy. At the same time, this is intended to distract us from the real issue: they're powerless to actually do anything about it.
Large scale pirates duplicate and re-package software en-masse, and sell it. This is what the BSA should be worried about. This is also very hard to track, and even harder to prosecute because (to my understanding) it occurs primarily in other countries.
Busting script kiddies trading video games on IRC and claiming this will help stop piracy is like busting a stoner for posession of a dime bag and and claiming this will stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country. It just makes no sense.
Anthony
^X^X
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Which right were you talking 'bout here?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Agreed, but politicians are no longer representative of the public - it is not by the people for the people it's so the politician can have a career. In other words, they want to make everyone feel good... warm and fuzzy. Dumb idiot voters in the US of A don't seem to care about the obvious.
... deal with it and do what the hell we say.
...
And when the people do speak out the government punishes us, an example would be I-695 the government looses control of a relatively small amount of money - the end driver is positively effected BUT the government is forced to cut idiotic programs instituted so that the politicians get votes...
Unfortunately they won't do that - they are in the business of staying in office, I mean hell they can make Millions by listening to lobbists and the like.
So what do they do? Punish the individual - the voter has spoken, and there will be repructions. The voter has elected not to protect programs such as transportation, education, Ferry service, [which is a very important form of mass transit in Western WA] and state funded bus systems.
They forget that we elect them, and theat when the people have spoken they have spoken
Human rights are another issue - people, private citizens can be killed by the federal govt to protect "National Security" - have you ever thought about that? Half of us Linux geeks run ssh - which can be "detremental to national security"
I am about pissed off with Big Brother, they have no right to be doing what they are - I always thought we lived in a government structured to represent the people at large - not special interests or large fat cat company interests. But then again, I'm just a punk to these elitist pigs, and I don't know anything about what it 'really means'.
What it really means is that the government needs to stay out of our business, and we need to remember to not ask them to step into them.
"Anyone who thinks that they can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet to commit copyright infringement had better know that the law gives them no quarter," continued Kruger.
Surely if you're hidden by the anonymity of the Internet, the law doesn't know who you are, so it gives them lots of quarters.
I guess he meant to say "partial anonymity", but then it's not very hard to have total anonymity if you really tried.
This will have no effect on piracy overall. But I expect to read about a bunch of students losing their computer equipment, getting kicked out of school in some cases, and that kind of thing. In some cases they may not even be guilty.
It's not that I condone piracy. I just hate the fact that the BSA is probably going to come down hardest on the people doing the least damage and would have a bright future otherwise. But the BSA has to justify it's existence in one way or another if they want to continue siphoning their "share" from the technology boom.
If they bust kiddies that are just being kiddies, the punishment should fit the crime. A small fine, maybe some community service. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Save that for the big bad pirates are totally devastating the software industry.
numb
--
Let's talk about game piracy. I apologize in advance to all the game programmers out there whom may be offended by this rambling comment.
:-)
I'm sorry, but I just don't see how "Warez" can hurt a companies bottom line by that damn much.
Let's say you publish a game that's not pirated.
Figure how many units you sell. Now, add the fact that your game is pirated. How many less units do you sell? My answer: not that damn many less, probably more.
Your game is more popular, reaching a wider audience (warez d00dz have friends too) who may possibly buy the game. But, even if they don't buy the game, if they'd never been exposed to it, they sure as hell wouldn't have bought it previously.
In other words, the only time you lose money from a pirated game is when a person who would have been a buyer does not buy.
Of course, in reality there's no way to measure that. So, instead, they estimate total copies of the game and say,"Hey! All those people would have bought it if it wasn't pirated! No fair," even when this is clearly bunk.
I have pirated many many games. There is not one that I kept that I wouldn't have bought. I bought Quake. I didn't buy Q2 (i didn't like it, so deleted it). I would NEVER buy a game without first pirating it and playing it for a week. Because all too often you play a game for a day and a half, realize it's total crap, and delete it. At least you're not out 50 bucks this way, eh?
Yes, game companies deserve money for their work. No, they do not deserve my money if I'm going to delete the game in 2 days. If I don't play, I won't pay. Plain and simple.
I bought Warcraft. I bought Starcraft. I bought Quake1. I'll probably buy Quake3, but I'll damn well pirate the whole game first, just to be sure I'm not getting ripped off.
Now I admit, many people who might otherwise buy the game won't, because they get the pirated version. But not as many as the game companies want you to believe. Most of these pirates are kids with no spendable cash in the first place. Just remember that.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
(Keep in mind one of the big menbers of BSA was Microsoft)
The effect of this BSA action will be:
The public trading will go down.
BSA will then go to its members and say
"See how hard we work for you! Piracy is down! Give us more money."
The 'small time' pirate has nothing to worry about. For, if s/he is caught, what is the court going to do? Bankrupt them? That is why piracy continues. Until the software industry adopts a 'no tolerance' policy, AKA suing EVERYONE who pirates, forcing local DA's to press charges, the piracy will continue.
The NEXT group to go after the IRC channels will be, the Recording industry. When bandwith gets great enough, the film industry. (College campus trading of films show this)
And when IRC becomes burdonsome, yet another on-line method of swapping bytes will happen.
Its a loosing battle for the producer of bytes. The only way for them to make money is to offer better service. And, with Microsoft held up as the model of how to be a software company, I don't see quality or service improving anytime soon.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I guess I have outgrown warezing but I remember it from my younger days. Nowadays, I don't fancy warezing that much but there is a soft spot in my heart for kids who trade warez, because it could have been much worse.
Most warezers are probably between 10 and 20 years old and in an age where hormones flow and one has to oppose adult society in one way or another. Some kids find that opposition and rebellion in drugs or violence, while others trade games and expensive office-cd's knowing that the big corporations hate them and that they have the (albeit small) risk of getting busted by dumb cops.
As all rebels they form subsocieties where they have their own "secret" languages and codes. Warezers are not unlike hackers, crackers, addicts, rednecks, etc in this respect. This gives them a place to belong to which is important in that age I guess. But warezing by kids is really mostly harmless compared to alternative ways teenagers have rebeled earlier and a lot healthier. (OK, maybe staying 20 hours a day in front of a monitior is not awfully healthy :-)
Leave the kids alone and go after the corporations and government-offices who pirate programs. Though, BSA, is probably not an organisation that appeals to intellect so expect raids on #warez* channels.
I remember a well written and level headed article by Dave Pogue in an older issue of Macworld. He talked about some kid named Jake who had cable, a burner and heaps of warez and traded them freely. Talked about Hotline and IRC aswell. The interesting thing to note was that since Dave had a good idea of what this was really all about, he shared my viewpoint. Software companies don't lose hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars a year to piracy. With warez kiddies it's more like collecting baseball cards. Instead of having Babe Ruth's rookie card, they have the newest gamez or 3d Studio Max plugins. What do they usually do with them? Not a damn thing. So how can software companies lose money to people who get their programs but never install them? For warez kiddies it's all about bragging rights. Sure, there's a small percentage of warez traders who actually use what they leech. And a percentage of these guys go buy the programs they can afford which they used for free until they liked them enough to buy them. Half Life is a good example. It's internet play was so broken after being cracked alot of people loved it and went and bought the full game. I know I've done this type of thing on one occasion, and will do it again. I'm not ashamed. I think fully functional demos are wonderful (hats off to Macromedia). Whatever your take on this, you should realize that it's gonna happen no matter who steps in. There have been so many FBI operations in the past to take down warez traders, and guess what. Whoever falls gets their place taken by someone else. As long as computers exist, and software costs money, this will go on. If you use warez, do the right thing. Buy something eventually.
When I was in high school I pirated some games, more as an act of rebellion (and because I had almost no money) than anything else. Many weren't very playable without the manual. Once or twice I may have actually gone through the effort of xeroxing a manual to a particular game, but that costs money too, so why not just buy the damn thing to begin with. It generally it wasn't worth the trouble, so the pirated game usually ended up rotting on the shelf and was never being played. Someone compared this to trading baseball cards -- a very accurate analogy IMHO.
It didn't take long to learn that piracy was at best useful for previewing a game which, if it was good, I went ahead and bought in order to have (a) the original media and (b) the docs necessary for really effective play. Piracy is a juvinile behavior most people quickly outgrow, for pragmatic reasons having nothing to do with draconian laws or big-brother gestapo organizations such as the SPA and BSA.
Ironically, the gaming software industry probably came out ahead financially in the additional game sales that resulted from our piracy at the time, however inappropriate or illegal it may have been. The makers of Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, and Quake (id) as well as the makers of Descent obviously learned this lesson and put it to very good (and very profitable) use, as have others.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Most respected? {shrug} Depends on your audience. Talonsoft (turn-based wargames), SSI (ditto, and the "Gold Box" series...), Jane's (military simulators), Blizzard (RTSgs)...
Well, almost everything has been pirated on this campus, but they're not all equally popular (at least judging from what I recall seeing when in the dorms.)
"Doom" found itself in the PC clusters before its official release; heck, there were even USENET bug reports/support pleas for the registered version ('tho not from CMU, IIRC) -- not smart when the developers read the NGs...
"Doom II", then, had a fairly receptive audience who already knew what id was capable of beyond "Commander Keen"-type games; and, for whatever reason, FPS games are were, are, and probably will remain popular -- witness "Half-Life", the "Quake" series, and so forth. Some of them are likely still popular; OTOH, I'm not sure I ever saw a "Duke Nukem" game in the PC clusters, suggesting that it just didn't appeal to the local FPS fans as much.
Same thing for the RTS market -- I've seen far more *craft here than, say, C&C. Why? Presumably taste. Piracy probably didn't boost C&C's much here, and may have hurt 'em (if people decided that they *wouldn't* buy the game... heh.)
*shrug*
It all suggests that it's not completely one-way; that if it's not that popular, it might not be pirated as much. And if you're cynical, you may consider that piracy can also depress sales by letting people know early when your product bites...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
"BSA has filed a lawsuit against twenty-five individuals allegedly participating in the 'warez4cable' IRC channel"
I assume "participating" in an irc channel means more than your presence there, otherwise they wont get far with this lawsuit. Secondly, I dont think a log of the channel will be considered criminating unless you break down a door and actually find the software at someones house. A channel log where a guy says he will send a piece of software to another one is not proof that the transfer did in fact occur.
I assume transfers are done by DCC which establish a direct connection between clients anyway - so checking server logs wont do much good either.
The thing they -might- do is to go after the ops, trying to scare people from running channels like this, but I dont really see this working. An Op can be no more responsible for what people do (hidden) on the channel than root on your server can be for the content of your mail.
So - that means we are left with "sting" operations, infiltrating the channels and bust people that seem active. The thing is - you only catch small fish like this.
so, lots of smoke and no fire? Atleast that has been the rule so far in related issues.
-- gunzip-howto.tar.gz
As far as I can tell most frequenters to warez channels are younger people, often in their early to mid teens. They are going to have a fun time cracking down on the thousands of 12-18 year olds exchanging software on IRC, as most of these people would not feel bad about putting a DoS against the BSA site in a while loop or being otherwise annoying to the enforcers. They also have by invitation channels and will kick enforcers out. The BSA will have a fun time. An analogy is that lone 60 year old teacher you all remember from elementary school who would come break up the schoolyard fight, and then have the fight turn on them.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
At the request of slashdot readers and warez channel operators, the SPA has raided the BSA and found numerous discrepencies in their software licenses.
In a bizarre coincidence, BSA agents raided the SPA offices simultaneously, noting a nearly identical percentage of unlicensed operating system and office-type software products.
All joking aside, Joe's Business Inc. probably uses WAY more illegal software than any warez kiddies. Most of the warez and cracks I've seen are just people trying the software out, or looking for a little excitement. Often the cracks only work for awhile, and the sw crashes a lot and they give up.
On the other hand, I've been in companies with hundreds of computers, all running software installed from the same set of CDs -- companies making upwards of $20M or more a year.
So give me a break -- this group of idiots (the "BSA") is just giving a small group of people a hard time to publicize the issue and get their name in the press.
The 'net needs more privacy.
Honest people with enough money can and will pay for software; the booming software industry is a testament to this.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The problem comes in when you're as big and mean (read the findings of fact!) as Microsoft or the record companies. It's not about the little guy anymore. I figure piracy doesn't hurt a megalith like M$ nearly as much as, say, its stock losing 25% of its value, no matter what they say (keep in mind that most of Microsoft's employees have stock options); as a matter of fact, it keeps Microsoft in clover because the unlicensed copies sell licenses for other copies, generally by either word of mouth or skittishness on someone's part. The fact that Microsoft's products are (generally) highly proprietary and of mediocre structural integrity doesn't help, either. And the record companies try to keep their subjects at bay by slapping excise taxes on blank media, suing people (even the artists themselves!) that try to distribute work their artists recorded in a way Mr. Executive doesn't like, screwing artists on royalties, and trying their best to eliminate MP3. Also, the stuff they put out isn't that great; most CDs in the past few years have at most 2 or 3 good songs on them, the rest is filler, and since singles aren't common anymore, you generally have to get all of it and pay through the nose for it.
To sum up:
-lee
PS: The BSA has a reputation of being in Microsoft's pocket. I've seen horror stories of BSA making people with any unlicensed software do multi-thousand-dollar "upgrades" to Microsoft products, or face a possible 7-figure lawsuit. They're evil.
I'm having trouble thinking of many more categories of game, so either I've never played this 90% that Open Source doesn't have, or that 90% isn't 90%.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I hear a lot of Microsoft money changed hands (i.e. bribes to local gov't officials, "donations" to government offices) in order to do these raids.
...just because he happened to be a foreigner
Do you have anything to back up these 'bribes'? Could they instead have been payments Microsoft made to the local law enforcement for their assistance in the raid? This is a pretty common thing, as far as I know. Microsoft hasn't the right to do a raid, and law enforcement doesn't always have the time/money to spend on such a thing, so the companies offer to reimburse the law enforcement for their expenses or pay their officers overtime. This seems logical and has nothing to do with being 'bribed'...
The problem is, they're too clueless
Clueless or underfunded? Really, if they're that clueless, you should write them a letter and send your resumé. They should be DYING to get their hands on you, since you're clueful, unlike anybody they have on staff right now, right?
Umm.. It sounds to me like this is an issue with your local newspaper, and not with those responsible for the raid.
I knew people who could ship you Microsoft Office CDs in quantities of thousands,
Wow, you are l33t. Were you saying this to enhance your credibility in this thread, or just to show us how long your warezpenis is?
You failed in both respects.
And the raids didn't touch ANY of the big fish, just the small, end-of-the-line shops.
You have to start somewhere...
but this time they're turning away anybody who looked like a suit
Wow you're right, law enforcement really is stupid. Can you believe they're not smart enough to approach them on their own level? I mean geez, you think they'd figure out that they're not supposed to wear suits on a sting operation...
I know for certain it has nothing to do with bandwidth. Downloading the Quake demo is going to be a heck of allot quicker to download than trying to download a huge 60MB compressed pirated game file.Why do you need the entire game to discover how the gameplay is on the first level?
:-)
You don't. You need the full game to determine how good the gameplay is on the other 30-40 levels.
Of course a company is going to release the best or more hooking, addictive part of the game as the demo.
You need the full game to determine if you can beat it inside that week.
If I can beat a game in a week (can some, others not), then I don't want it. Because that meant it was pretty easy and therefore something I'd delete. I won't pay 50 bucks for a product with a shelf life of 1 week.
If the netplay is good enough, I'll go all out, buy the game, just to have a copy on a cd, on a permanent medium. To have documentation. In the case of Half-Life, as someone pointed out, to get a key to play on network servers. (I bought Half-Life.. EXCELLENT single player story and game, but way too hard at the end.)
And if you pirate games just to see if you like it why don't you just read a on-line game review of it or just download the demo? I doubt they go through all the hard work to make a demo just for you to pirate the entire game.
Did you read anything I said before? These things tell you nothing. Reviews are worse than useless, because often they're simply hype. The demo is worthless as an indicator of the rest of the game play (excepting most of id's games).
You liken a demo as to test driving a car. But when you test drive a car, you have the whole car; you don't have 3 wheels, half an engine, and no seats.
Anyway, the comparison of stealing software to stealing a car is pointless. A car is a physical object. Software is not, unless you want to talk of bits being physical. Show me a bit. Hold it in your hand. Lick it, go on, I dare you.
Let's assume, for arguement's sake, that no matter whether I pirated a piece of software or not, I would never have bought it.
If I then steal a game, then delete it, without having ever run it or played it, is it theft? Answer me that question. Either way you answer, you're still wrong.
Now, if I do run it, play it for 1 minute, then delete it, is it theft?
How about playing it for 2 minutes? Three? Where do you draw the line, personally? What defines theft? What have I stolen? From whom? Where is the monetary damage? I couldn't have possibly bought that software anyway, mind you.
Just something to think about.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You're right. There isn't a way to catch everybody, but they can always try, and so long as they continue to nail person after person for breaking the law, they'll continue doing it, as I hope they would.
Would you honestly want them to just give up because they can't catch everyone? With that type of attitude, our entire criminal justice system would collapse.
And what "rights" are we losing as a result of the BSA cracking down on warez pups? I fail to see how you link this with your little "war on privacy, war on human rights" bit.
There's a lot of talk on this thread about how "WaReZ channels are okay because..." or "WareZ running hurts industry because..." when it's not that simple. Sure there are going to be some responsible folks who "demo" a game illegally via IRC and then go out and purchase it, just as there are those who don't. Would these people have been exposed to the game in the first place if it hadn't spread prolifically across the net? What is the net effect of sale losses due to small time pirating vs increased revenue due to free advertisement for the game spreading itself across the web? Is that measurable or quantifiable in any way?
There are so many ways in which this equation for "lost profits" due to piracy can be skewed or manipulated to support one side or the other. It's all just meaningless conjecture without hard data to back up these claims, and a decent way of interpreting that data, all personal anecdotes aside. Of course companies are going to due something about piracy if they percieve they're losing profits, and of course users are going to defend their rights to "free" software in whatever thinly veiled way they can.
There are pros and cons to piracy from both a coporate and an end user point of view, though coporations would probably deny this. Piracy spreads the particular software package's meme and brings it to the users consiousness as effectively as any other medium (print ad, TV ad, etc.) which can direct interest to the company and next time you're at the software store or shopping on-line you're more likely to buy that product. But piracy unchecked will undermine the software profit margin, prices will go up and more draconian software protection measures will be inplemented. A certain balance must be struck. Anyone who believes that piracy is all bad or the converse has a much too simple view of the dynamic here.
Copyright Control Services tried to do the same thing with audio warez, with little to no success. The fact is that there are no real means to shut down these irc channels. The servers are wide and far, the channels limitless, and irc warez hounds have the upper hand when it comes to IRC related technology.
And what does it take to get a shell in a country that rejects international copyright? Not much. What is the BSA going to do then, with no legal grounds for stopping it?
I can see channels like #warezdcc and those vanishing for awhile (but not for long) and I doubt many in the warez community consider the BSA much of a real threat. I know the audiowarez community regards the CCS as a joke, and they pretty much are.
The trick is how dirty BSA will play and how close to skirting entrapment they will come, much like CCS. Setting up fake FTPs, faking logs of what is actually on a ftp, etc. None of this will stand up in court btw, computer logs are not exactly what you need to succeed at burden of proof!
The sinister mister earache.
I don't hangout in "warez" channels but I must admit that I do pirate software that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars. I just recently "pirated" HP unix. I don't have a license nor will I purchase one. I also pirated several versions of Apple's MacOS (why I don't know). I've told several large companies that if they didn't help me get a multi-thousand dollar operating system or application that I would pirate it. Some chose to be decent and help while others had their software pirated just like I told them I was going to do. Hey, I'm just a guy who likes to fuck around with interesting hardware and learn new operating systems/apps. I'm not costing these huge software makers anything because 1.) the software cost for just the operating system alone almost always exceeds the value of the hardware and 2.) I would not spend $1500 on an a piece of software because I don't have $1500 just laying around to totally waste it that way. Now I might buy an O2 with $1500, but if it doesn't have Irix on it, either SGI is going to give it to me (or sell REALLY cheap), or it's getting pirated.
I know a lot of people here like to bitch about Sun, but I think their current offerings of Solaris for non-comm. use is a step in the right direction. They know that hobbyists will not spend a large sum of money for something they'd just like to toy with, and it has the positive effect, for them, of making Solaris more widely known to the public, and hence more likely to be recommended in a commericial setting by those who've had the chance to get to know it a little.
I really think it's the BSA who needs to grow up a bit. Pirating a $50 game is a little lame, but then again I can't imagine just going into a store and blowing $50 on something and having it turn out to be total shit. You don't buy a car if you can't test drive it do you?
The big thing that pisses me off about these people like the SPA/BSA is that they go after people with force. I'm not hurting anyone so therefore no one better try and hurt me. Force deserves force. I hope someone teaches them a good lesson.
- I hear a lot of Microsoft money changed hands (i.e. bribes to local gov't officials, "donations" to government offices) in order to do these raids.
You know, I hear you molest cats. That's the thing about rumors, they are rarely true.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Now I use Linux. I don't have ANY pirate software here, although I did disable a nagware message on a program or two. The only program I'd even CONSIDER buying [a registration key to] is "blender" anyways. (and IMNSHO it's WELL worth the price. Even though it would be really simple for me to crack, I refuse to do so on ethical grounds, it's just TOO GOOD.)
But then maybe I'm getting soft in my old age ;)
Besides, what you think of a game is your opinion. Whilst you are entitled to your opinion, that does not make it fact.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Freeciv is far from lame. Have you seen it? Get a clue, please.
Security is only as powerful as the people included. You can encrypt, but that doesn't stop anyone from just joining the network, gathering IP adresses and becoming a nark.
You do not understand.. He is not talking about security through obscurity. He is talking about a system where *statistical* security is inherent, i.e. there is nothing I can do to keep them from busting me, but the system is such that it dose them no more good to bust me then anyone else and it requires a LOT of work for them to bust everyone.
Example 1: My friends and I all run daemons which talk to each other and broadcast lists of Warez/MP3s that are available. Now, my friens have friends who I don't know and I can requests files from their lists through my friends, but I do not know the identity of the system from which I am ultimatly requesting a file.. just the ``direction'' it lies in, i.e. which one of my friens I need to send the request to. It is a network with a totally local network routing system. Finding everyone on the network is craploats of social engenering.. hell if you don't mind it being a bandwidth hog you can set it up so that there is not even any way to count how man systems are on the network.
Example 2: Move files at random between diffrent machines.. anyone can put any file into the network and anyone can take a file off the network when it is physically sitting on your machine, but no one can prove that you put a file on or removed it. Now, you the sysadmin should be protected by common carrier status since there is no way for you to monitor the traffic that moves through your site.. well.. execpt for those 50 burned CDs of music you leeched of the network as it moved through your system.. but hey your shit is your problem.. encrypt it or soemthing.
Piracy can be made safe.. and it's not really to hard.. the hard part is making it safe and user friendly. Maybe Example 1 + a CDs catologer for people to make requests for you to rip CDs you own.. now that would be cool.. especially if it was all automated. The daemon just requests that you insert bla and it rips it.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
ok ok I admit it.. You got me. :)
As I was re-reading this I realized the inevitable was going to happen, catch myself in my own words.
True enough. I borrowed a CD Which is the same as copying, which is piracy... But mayhaps the entire system should change. would my friend then have to pay for a multiple user license if I went to his house and used his program???
OK I realize this is going over the edge, but thanks for the insight. I DO agree there are much better things for the government agencies to do than to go pound on warez channels...like try to remove there anterior regions from their posterior region
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Exactly my point..... Yes. I agree... except as I found in a lower posting, I just do it via borrowing, not downloading.
Same thing with shareware... I won't even try to stay on top of a soapbox when it comes to shareware....
what % of people do you think ACTUALLY register WinZip or CuteFTP, etc.......
Yes you should try software before you buy. I whole heartedly agree... but as you and I both seem to do, if you are going to use it, show your appreciation and buy it.
But I also feel that individual piracy is not a major issue, I'm more worried about the international piracy. I've heard from some friends of mine in Belaruse that you can get software for around 20% of the going price in the U.S. Do you really think these are legitimate copies????
Do yourself a favour.. Go to the next computer show... take a CLOSE look at the CD you're buying
does it have an "educational" license. Does it say "not for release in the U.S.?" I've found this to be true not only for games, but for full blown OS/office suites/ etc....
Thanks for your time and efforts in getting through my rambling
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal