True. The suicide example is a good one. I agree that my statement was too broad. Still, the original poster's statement that I was replying to was giving any even worse argument. Only a slight excuse though.
Thanks for coming up with a good example of why I was wrong.:)
in Asimov's works, the laws of robotics were discovered, not designed
Is that statement really true? It contradicts my knowledge. One example I could think off was ths short novel "Little Lost Robot" where the first law is modified.
I have to admit that I am a little rusty on this topic as it is a long time since I read Asimov.
he government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes
How come goverments around the worlds have so large debts in that case. It totally contradicts what you are claiming. The truth is that most money in world is debt created by private interests when they loan out money to people, companies and even goverments.
There is another approach, which has been repeatedly tried here in the UK, and at least once in the US (AT&T), which is to try to turn a natural monopoly into a competitive ecosystem. This always fails.
If you want a real competitive ecosystem, you have to recognize that infrastructure is a natural monopoly and let the goverment handle that, while service on the infrastructure can be rented by private companies.
As service providers can put more negotiative pressure on the infrastructure maintainer (goverment) than any single person, this can work out quite well compared to having a single goverment owned service provider. This isn't to say that it always is the best solution, but it can work out quite well.
An alternative, which I am personally in favor of is more competition within the goverment itself. The real problem with goverment is that it doesn't have any competition so it stagnates. It becomes difficult to weed out the inefficent parts and improve the parts that can be improved.
Having smaller, but competing departments is one option. Having resources dedicated exclusivly to improving efficency of goverment operations is another.
They then launched it once, couldn't figure out what to use it for, and then forgot about it. In my opinion, there is no legitimate argument that can be made for the case that the above situation cost Adobe any money whatsoever.
So you claim that not a single Adobe Photoshop has ever been pirated on a system instead of being payed for? I never claimed that the loss would be big. I completly agree with the grandparents assesment of the 1:1 sale to piracy ratio being insane. And in cases like Adobe Photoshop the ratio is indeed very low. For some products it may even be zero, but that is the exception.
Of course, the argument used by some overly enthuiastic pirates would be that piracy also stimulate sales. However, that is a strawman argument. If piracy wasn't possible, Adobe could still give out sample copies in any way they wanted and in a much more controlled way to stimulate sales optimally. Of course, they probably wouldn't and would lose customers because of it, but that is because of bad business, and not because piracy is in some way more profitable.
Actually, there is a way in which piracy can prove directly profitable to a company, and that is the snowball effect. If someone begins pirating, let's say tv shows, from rival companies, the person in question will become more likely to watch tv shows and therefore more likely to buy tv shows from the company that can now make profit. The difference from the above paragraph being that multiple companies are involved so the controlled way of stimulating sales doesn't work optimally.
Of course this is all in the short term. In the long term, it is more difficult to say as you get secondary economical effects such as piracy encouraging industrial efficency which could very well lead to a bigger industry or a smaller one. It is only possible to speculate about such things though.
Piracy will however cause lost profit compared to if piracy was impossible. However, just as you said not at a 1:1 ratio, and most likely far far far from it, as any extra money would mean less money spent on other goods. Also this doesn't imply that having strict copyright just to increase profits is a good thing.
In fact, copyright reminds me somewhat about russian plan economy. Just like we could point and laugh at the inefficencies of plan economy, Non-capitalists can point and laugh at the inefficencies of the whole IP system. OK, maybe not so much laughing considering that most live in capitalistic systems that implement copyright.
The ability to share information without restrictions is incredibly powerful. Having people who willingly share information is even more powerful. How much does society lose daily because of not only copyright and patents, but also trade secrets, secret company and goverment dealings, deceptive marketing and more. I wouldn't even dare to guess a number.
And when you don't face those things you will have it too good to go looking for trouble. It is the perfect setup for authoritarians and they know it. Only thing they have to worry about is going too far, because you don't want to add the straw that breaks the camel's back.
The problem I see is that Bittorrent has its scaling issues already - popular torrents (which should in theory be faster) take forever to download.
There is nothing to say that popular torrents should be faster. This is a misconception that is spewed by know-nothings that don't understand the protocol. As long as you have a critical size on the swarm (~50? peers) and the data is distributed even among the peers, your average download speed is pretty easy to determine.
It is your upload speed plus some bonus from seeders that is spread out over all downloaders. If you get less than that, you should blaim your torrent client that isn't greedy enough and if you get more than that, other people's torrent clients aren't greedy enough. And when I say greedy I am talking in the free market way. Not leeching, but making informed trades using tit-for-tat or similar algorithms.
If you have a bad upload on your connection, you will get bad speeds unless there is some super seeds to support you. It is as simple as that.
Multicast would work very well with incredibly popular streams. If a 1000000 people in a country are watching something it makes perfect sense.
However, when you have a 1000 streams with 1000 people watching each it no longer makes as much sense. WHen the clientele becomes spread out enough the efficency wins from multicast is countered by the restrictions it imposes.
Now, with video-on-demand (and live streams), the whole Tit-For-Tat system no longer works. In this situation, peers must obtain pieces in order for playback.
Not completly true. With video-on-demand it is enough that you get the occasional later piece that you can trade for more common earlier pieces. Of course, as clients are prioritizing the earlier pieces the tit-for-tat will be less efficent. Not useless though.
Still, give-to-get is is a natural extension of tit-for-tat when you are seeking to improve trading efficency and can't rely on evenly distributed information among peers.
In a streaming situation, I would imagine that everyone's client would be set to prioritize the chunks in order.
The key here is to maintain a good balance between earlier blocks that are more immediatly needed and later blocks that are less common and therefore easier to trade.
and download speeds would start out really fast, and gradually taper off
The biggest misconception of bittorrent is that seeders are somehow what makes it good. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Bittorrent is about using trading to ensure that you get bandwidth equal to what you give. This can only be done while you are actually downloading. When you have finished downloading, good netizens will usually seed back as much as they downloaded, but the problem is that seeders have little possibility of differentiating between people who share and leechers beyond using statistics from before they become a seeder (which I don't know any client that does).
In a swarm with only downloaders and no seeders and where the swarm as a whole have access to the whole file, each client should optimally download at the same rate as they upload. With a low upload rate you will simply not be able to download very fast.
There are ways to encourage seeding back what you take. The simplest way is what bittorrent trackers use, getting the statistics from each client and using that to determine ratios. This can however be cheated. Also, ratios are only useful in bittorrent situations where you are willing to ban those with bad ratio.
Allowing clients to track other clients in the long term is another more technical way to handle it. E-mule is known for this and technologically a good example. Still, as the e-mule priority system has been implemented in a way to discourage trading, which basically conflicts with the whole point of using credits in the first place, it is not a good practical example.
I think TRUTH is more important than HASTE, don't you agree?
Even haste isn't a problem, because as you implied, the whole problem of vote count is parallizable with minimal overhead. Atleast as long as you make sure to count the votes at the voting locations.
And just as importantly, this is why you seperate the executable code from other executable code.
I should be able to install a program without having to grant it any rights. It should only have access to its own program directory and its own configuration directory, nothing else. And that should be the default.
Any extra rights like bulk access to user data files and internet access should be granted on a per program basis. Access to single files can be handled by user verified access via file dialogs. The security risk a program poses should never go any further than any rights I grant it, and in the majority of cases that should be none or very few.
I should be able to take number of malware applications, and install them followed by an uninstall and they should all be gone. If they aren't, that is the fault of the operating system.
The rights for a program to make changes to other programs or parts of the system should also be heavily restricted. And it should be impossible to hide a program in the system. One program, one directory, one installation entry.
Would this help for the dumb users that just click on anything without understanding. No, but those users are already a lost cause. The real problem is that even power users that have a good understanding can install a malware that ruins the whole system with a single misclick. That is simply not acceptable.
Requiring a password to do some stuff is simply not enough. There simply needs to be more steps between a no access program and an all access program.
Oh, they care as soon as it is THEIR "privacy" that is infringed. Just like they care if it is THEIR "free speech rights" or THEIR "liberty" that are infringed.
You have the right to privacy as long as you don't have anything to hide. You have the right to free speech as long as you don't say anything that will offend me. You have the right to liberty as long as you don't do anything that offend me.
And what always fascinates me the most is how so many people can't see what is wrong with the previous paragraph.
Imagine if you couldn't write stories containing lesbians, because that idea was currently copyrighted. Or maybe you could use lesbians unless they behaved in one of many specific ways. For the full list you would have to check the copyright office where all copyrighted ideas are stored, written in a format that is supposed to make the ideas so hard to understand as possible. Also, if you actually check the copyright office you would be more liable to get punished if you wrote something infringing. That is basically how patents works today.
One argument used to argue for patents is that of disclosure. If we don't allow patents, ideas will get lost and disappear forever. There are however problems with this argument. First of all, most ideas are easily copied/replicated by observation. Humans are very good at reverse engineering things. Also, patent documents are usally so badly written from a technical point of view that it is better spent effort to actually reverse engineer it. Not to mention that reading patent documents is discouraged/forbidden by most companies because of the risk of liability. Finally, in the case when it isn't completly obvious by observation, like with certain production processes, such ideas are usually managed by many people and will rarely if ever get lost by obscurity.
The best argument for patents is the same used for copyright. That it provides extra rewards to create intellectual property, funneling more people into the IP industry. However, just as with copyright you have to ask yourself if the price of monopoly is too big a price to pay.
"The first-sale doctrine as it relates to computer software is an area of legal confusion. Software publishers claim the first-sale doctrine does not apply because software is licensed, not sold, under the terms of an End User License Agreement (EULA). The courts have issued contrary decisions regarding the first-sale rights of consumers"
So the real answer is that the whole thing is a big mess with the laws being vague leading to lots of money being spent on defending/suing and having judges make contradictatory decisions depending on the judge and court.
Really, how are ordinary people supposed to understand all laws when even the judges can't understand it. I give congress an F on the current copyright law as it stands.
WoW is the purchase of the license to create an account and a monthly service fee. You are not charged for the media.
The usual excuse by companies for charging for the game is that charging for the game pays for development costs while the monthly fee pays for the service. That they also charge for expansions is further evidence of this. Really, this is the typical coorporate hypocrasy.
They can't eat their cake and have it too. Oh, I guess big companies can nowadays, because they have more rights than ordinary people.
but at the same time thinks government run health care would be a great idea.
I don't know where you got this idea.
There are probably a lot of slashdot people that fully supports goverment health care and which most likely also supports goverment postal service on similar reasons.
There are however also a huge bunch of economic libertarians on slashdot that would cry at the goverment doing anything but providing military/police to defend their precious property rights.
And then there are people in between that are simply looking to find the best solutions and compromises to complex problems.
I've never had a single script-kiddie or bot directly bother me in any way.
I have. Bots running around in an area killing every single mob (quest mobs btw) so that it takes far longer to get the quest item to drop. And that doesn't even mention how much botters ruins the server economies.
I have no problem with people cheating in single player games, but cheating in multi player games does affect me. Still, the copyright part of this judgement is pure bullshit. I do think the "tortious interference" part has a leg to stand on though.
Remember, Blizzard has already taken down bnetd in the US. It isn't a far stretch to extend that to any reverse engineered server.
What this case and many other similar ones proves it that the US copyright law is on incredibly shaky grounds. And with shaky ground I mean that the whole law is so open to interpetation that judges have a hard time making consistant decisions from case to case.
The whole thing needs a huge rewrite to put more clarity in each part. Of course, at the same time I feel very afraid of any such a rewrite happening with the current lobbying powers in the US. You could bet that big business would get the better deal out of it.
This one I could buy, but honestly, isn't that between the customers and Blizzard?
Actually, there is laws against interefering with contractual relationships. Specifically look up "tortious interference with contract". I am in now way fit to judge if this is the case here, but I can atleast see the possibility.
Which law prevents this? The program seller is not in a contract with Blizzard, hence there is no contract to breach
Look up "Tortious interference with contract". It is exactly what the second and more solid part of the judgement is about.
The first part which is the whole copyright part is a mess, mainly because copyright law as it stands is a complete mess that can be interpeted in wide ways.
See, that's where people are wrong. WoW subscribers are not paying for the software, but the license to use it. The software is Blizzard's property (don't take my word for it, read the EULA).
Each player should own the content on their discs as they legally bought it in the store. That is the first sale doctrine.
If Blizzard only charged monthly fees and delivered the software to you as part of that, then the contract would have a far stronger meaning. It would no longer be a sale, but rent. But that isn't what is going on. Blizzard is selling the actually game disc separatly and before any contract takes place between parts.
I still think the second part of the judgement is valid though. The "interfering with contractual relationship" one.
No one is whipping them, holding a gun to their heads, or threatening their families if they don't fix your computer.
Depends. If the choice is between starving (or having your family starve) and working in a factory under inhumane conditions, is that not basically the same as holding a gun to their heads.
Of course, that is not the scenario with indian it workers that have good education as well as getting offered jobs with good working conditions and locally good salaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that not a false negative ?
True. The suicide example is a good one. I agree that my statement was too broad. Still, the original poster's statement that I was replying to was giving any even worse argument. Only a slight excuse though.
Thanks for coming up with a good example of why I was wrong. :)
insurance companies to pay equal retirement benefits to women as they do to men
I don't get what this has to do with the grandparent post. There are no such thing as false positives in insurance payouts.
in Asimov's works, the laws of robotics were discovered, not designed
Is that statement really true? It contradicts my knowledge. One example I could think off was ths short novel "Little Lost Robot" where the first law is modified.
I have to admit that I am a little rusty on this topic as it is a long time since I read Asimov.
he government has found that it can simply make more money out of thin air and spend it on government programs to generate votes
How come goverments around the worlds have so large debts in that case. It totally contradicts what you are claiming. The truth is that most money in world is debt created by private interests when they loan out money to people, companies and even goverments.
There is another approach, which has been repeatedly tried here in the UK, and at least once in the US (AT&T), which is to try to turn a natural monopoly into a competitive ecosystem. This always fails.
If you want a real competitive ecosystem, you have to recognize that infrastructure is a natural monopoly and let the goverment handle that, while service on the infrastructure can be rented by private companies.
As service providers can put more negotiative pressure on the infrastructure maintainer (goverment) than any single person, this can work out quite well compared to having a single goverment owned service provider. This isn't to say that it always is the best solution, but it can work out quite well.
An alternative, which I am personally in favor of is more competition within the goverment itself. The real problem with goverment is that it doesn't have any competition so it stagnates. It becomes difficult to weed out the inefficent parts and improve the parts that can be improved.
Having smaller, but competing departments is one option. Having resources dedicated exclusivly to improving efficency of goverment operations is another.
They then launched it once, couldn't figure out what to use it for, and then forgot about it.
In my opinion, there is no legitimate argument that can be made for the case that the above situation cost Adobe any money whatsoever.
So you claim that not a single Adobe Photoshop has ever been pirated on a system instead of being payed for? I never claimed that the loss would be big. I completly agree with the grandparents assesment of the 1:1 sale to piracy ratio being insane. And in cases like Adobe Photoshop the ratio is indeed very low. For some products it may even be zero, but that is the exception.
Of course, the argument used by some overly enthuiastic pirates would be that piracy also stimulate sales. However, that is a strawman argument. If piracy wasn't possible, Adobe could still give out sample copies in any way they wanted and in a much more controlled way to stimulate sales optimally. Of course, they probably wouldn't and would lose customers because of it, but that is because of bad business, and not because piracy is in some way more profitable.
Actually, there is a way in which piracy can prove directly profitable to a company, and that is the snowball effect. If someone begins pirating, let's say tv shows, from rival companies, the person in question will become more likely to watch tv shows and therefore more likely to buy tv shows from the company that can now make profit. The difference from the above paragraph being that multiple companies are involved so the controlled way of stimulating sales doesn't work optimally.
Of course this is all in the short term. In the long term, it is more difficult to say as you get secondary economical effects such as piracy encouraging industrial efficency which could very well lead to a bigger industry or a smaller one. It is only possible to speculate about such things though.
Piracy will however cause lost profit compared to if piracy was impossible. However, just as you said not at a 1:1 ratio, and most likely far far far from it, as any extra money would mean less money spent on other goods. Also this doesn't imply that having strict copyright just to increase profits is a good thing.
In fact, copyright reminds me somewhat about russian plan economy. Just like we could point and laugh at the inefficencies of plan economy, Non-capitalists can point and laugh at the inefficencies of the whole IP system. OK, maybe not so much laughing considering that most live in capitalistic systems that implement copyright.
The ability to share information without restrictions is incredibly powerful. Having people who willingly share information is even more powerful. How much does society lose daily because of not only copyright and patents, but also trade secrets, secret company and goverment dealings, deceptive marketing and more. I wouldn't even dare to guess a number.
And when you don't face those things you will have it too good to go looking for trouble. It is the perfect setup for authoritarians and they know it. Only thing they have to worry about is going too far, because you don't want to add the straw that breaks the camel's back.
The problem I see is that Bittorrent has its scaling issues already - popular torrents (which should in theory be faster) take forever to download.
There is nothing to say that popular torrents should be faster. This is a misconception that is spewed by know-nothings that don't understand the protocol. As long as you have a critical size on the swarm (~50? peers) and the data is distributed even among the peers, your average download speed is pretty easy to determine.
It is your upload speed plus some bonus from seeders that is spread out over all downloaders. If you get less than that, you should blaim your torrent client that isn't greedy enough and if you get more than that, other people's torrent clients aren't greedy enough. And when I say greedy I am talking in the free market way. Not leeching, but making informed trades using tit-for-tat or similar algorithms.
If you have a bad upload on your connection, you will get bad speeds unless there is some super seeds to support you. It is as simple as that.
Multicast would work very well with incredibly popular streams. If a 1000000 people in a country are watching something it makes perfect sense.
However, when you have a 1000 streams with 1000 people watching each it no longer makes as much sense. WHen the clientele becomes spread out enough the efficency wins from multicast is countered by the restrictions it imposes.
Now, with video-on-demand (and live streams), the whole Tit-For-Tat system no longer works. In this situation, peers must obtain pieces in order for playback.
Not completly true. With video-on-demand it is enough that you get the occasional later piece that you can trade for more common earlier pieces. Of course, as clients are prioritizing the earlier pieces the tit-for-tat will be less efficent. Not useless though.
Still, give-to-get is is a natural extension of tit-for-tat when you are seeking to improve trading efficency and can't rely on evenly distributed information among peers.
In a streaming situation, I would imagine that everyone's client would be set to prioritize the chunks in order.
The key here is to maintain a good balance between earlier blocks that are more immediatly needed and later blocks that are less common and therefore easier to trade.
and download speeds would start out really fast, and gradually taper off
The biggest misconception of bittorrent is that seeders are somehow what makes it good. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Bittorrent is about using trading to ensure that you get bandwidth equal to what you give. This can only be done while you are actually downloading. When you have finished downloading, good netizens will usually seed back as much as they downloaded, but the problem is that seeders have little possibility of differentiating between people who share and leechers beyond using statistics from before they become a seeder (which I don't know any client that does).
In a swarm with only downloaders and no seeders and where the swarm as a whole have access to the whole file, each client should optimally download at the same rate as they upload. With a low upload rate you will simply not be able to download very fast.
There are ways to encourage seeding back what you take. The simplest way is what bittorrent trackers use, getting the statistics from each client and using that to determine ratios. This can however be cheated. Also, ratios are only useful in bittorrent situations where you are willing to ban those with bad ratio.
Allowing clients to track other clients in the long term is another more technical way to handle it. E-mule is known for this and technologically a good example. Still, as the e-mule priority system has been implemented in a way to discourage trading, which basically conflicts with the whole point of using credits in the first place, it is not a good practical example.
I think TRUTH is more important than HASTE, don't you agree?
Even haste isn't a problem, because as you implied, the whole problem of vote count is parallizable with minimal overhead. Atleast as long as you make sure to count the votes at the voting locations.
And just as importantly, this is why you seperate the executable code from other executable code.
I should be able to install a program without having to grant it any rights. It should only have access to its own program directory and its own configuration directory, nothing else. And that should be the default.
Any extra rights like bulk access to user data files and internet access should be granted on a per program basis. Access to single files can be handled by user verified access via file dialogs. The security risk a program poses should never go any further than any rights I grant it, and in the majority of cases that should be none or very few.
I should be able to take number of malware applications, and install them followed by an uninstall and they should all be gone. If they aren't, that is the fault of the operating system.
The rights for a program to make changes to other programs or parts of the system should also be heavily restricted. And it should be impossible to hide a program in the system. One program, one directory, one installation entry.
Would this help for the dumb users that just click on anything without understanding. No, but those users are already a lost cause. The real problem is that even power users that have a good understanding can install a malware that ruins the whole system with a single misclick. That is simply not acceptable.
Requiring a password to do some stuff is simply not enough. There simply needs to be more steps between a no access program and an all access program.
Oh, they care as soon as it is THEIR "privacy" that is infringed. Just like they care if it is THEIR "free speech rights" or THEIR "liberty" that are infringed.
You have the right to privacy as long as you don't have anything to hide. You have the right to free speech as long as you don't say anything that will offend me. You have the right to liberty as long as you don't do anything that offend me.
And what always fascinates me the most is how so many people can't see what is wrong with the previous paragraph.
Imagine if you couldn't write stories containing lesbians, because that idea was currently copyrighted. Or maybe you could use lesbians unless they behaved in one of many specific ways. For the full list you would have to check the copyright office where all copyrighted ideas are stored, written in a format that is supposed to make the ideas so hard to understand as possible. Also, if you actually check the copyright office you would be more liable to get punished if you wrote something infringing. That is basically how patents works today.
One argument used to argue for patents is that of disclosure. If we don't allow patents, ideas will get lost and disappear forever. There are however problems with this argument. First of all, most ideas are easily copied/replicated by observation. Humans are very good at reverse engineering things. Also, patent documents are usally so badly written from a technical point of view that it is better spent effort to actually reverse engineer it. Not to mention that reading patent documents is discouraged/forbidden by most companies because of the risk of liability. Finally, in the case when it isn't completly obvious by observation, like with certain production processes, such ideas are usually managed by many people and will rarely if ever get lost by obscurity.
The best argument for patents is the same used for copyright. That it provides extra rewards to create intellectual property, funneling more people into the IP industry. However, just as with copyright you have to ask yourself if the price of monopoly is too big a price to pay.
When you buy the box at the store, you are buying the license key to play wow and they also give you a copy of wow to install.
Ok, I know that I shouldn't reference wikipedia, but this isn't a thesis I am writing so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine/
"The first-sale doctrine as it relates to computer software is an area of legal confusion. Software publishers claim the first-sale doctrine does not apply because software is licensed, not sold, under the terms of an End User License Agreement (EULA). The courts have issued contrary decisions regarding the first-sale rights of consumers"
So the real answer is that the whole thing is a big mess with the laws being vague leading to lots of money being spent on defending/suing and having judges make contradictatory decisions depending on the judge and court.
Really, how are ordinary people supposed to understand all laws when even the judges can't understand it. I give congress an F on the current copyright law as it stands.
WoW is the purchase of the license to create an account and a monthly service fee. You are not charged for the media.
The usual excuse by companies for charging for the game is that charging for the game pays for development costs while the monthly fee pays for the service. That they also charge for expansions is further evidence of this. Really, this is the typical coorporate hypocrasy.
They can't eat their cake and have it too. Oh, I guess big companies can nowadays, because they have more rights than ordinary people.
but at the same time thinks government run health care would be a great idea.
I don't know where you got this idea.
There are probably a lot of slashdot people that fully supports goverment health care and which most likely also supports goverment postal service on similar reasons.
There are however also a huge bunch of economic libertarians on slashdot that would cry at the goverment doing anything but providing military/police to defend their precious property rights.
And then there are people in between that are simply looking to find the best solutions and compromises to complex problems.
I've never had a single script-kiddie or bot directly bother me in any way.
I have. Bots running around in an area killing every single mob (quest mobs btw) so that it takes far longer to get the quest item to drop. And that doesn't even mention how much botters ruins the server economies.
I have no problem with people cheating in single player games, but cheating in multi player games does affect me. Still, the copyright part of this judgement is pure bullshit. I do think the "tortious interference" part has a leg to stand on though.
Remember, Blizzard has already taken down bnetd in the US. It isn't a far stretch to extend that to any reverse engineered server.
What this case and many other similar ones proves it that the US copyright law is on incredibly shaky grounds. And with shaky ground I mean that the whole law is so open to interpetation that judges have a hard time making consistant decisions from case to case.
The whole thing needs a huge rewrite to put more clarity in each part. Of course, at the same time I feel very afraid of any such a rewrite happening with the current lobbying powers in the US. You could bet that big business would get the better deal out of it.
This one I could buy, but honestly, isn't that between the customers and Blizzard?
Actually, there is laws against interefering with contractual relationships. Specifically look up "tortious interference with contract". I am in now way fit to judge if this is the case here, but I can atleast see the possibility.
Which law prevents this? The program seller is not in a contract with Blizzard, hence there is no contract to breach
Look up "Tortious interference with contract". It is exactly what the second and more solid part of the judgement is about.
The first part which is the whole copyright part is a mess, mainly because copyright law as it stands is a complete mess that can be interpeted in wide ways.
It should also be noted that "World of Warcraft" is, in fact, a service.
Then, why do people buy game discs in stores. Sorry, but that goes against the idea that the game discs themselves are a service.
World of Warcraft is both purchase (the discs) and service (the monthly access to servers)
See, that's where people are wrong. WoW subscribers are not paying for the software, but the license to use it. The software is Blizzard's property (don't take my word for it, read the EULA).
Each player should own the content on their discs as they legally bought it in the store. That is the first sale doctrine.
If Blizzard only charged monthly fees and delivered the software to you as part of that, then the contract would have a far stronger meaning. It would no longer be a sale, but rent. But that isn't what is going on. Blizzard is selling the actually game disc separatly and before any contract takes place between parts.
I still think the second part of the judgement is valid though. The "interfering with contractual relationship" one.
No one is whipping them, holding a gun to their heads, or threatening their families if they don't fix your computer.
Depends. If the choice is between starving (or having your family starve) and working in a factory under inhumane conditions, is that not basically the same as holding a gun to their heads.
Of course, that is not the scenario with indian it workers that have good education as well as getting offered jobs with good working conditions and locally good salaries.