Slashdot Mirror
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).
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."
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
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)
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
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 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.