Wouldn't it be just wonderful if everyone on P2P networks stopped downloading/uploading/illegaly distributing copyrighted works?
No. Not all of us buy into the whole "I recorded this song so I'm THE BOSS OF IT FOREVER" idea. I support free speech, and that means you get to speak freely even if the particular words (or bits) you're speaking were previously spoken by someone else.
Now, Independent artists artists who actually want to have their music shared can actually find a market.
Don't try to spin this as something positive. Those independent artists could already use Kazaa as a marketing/distribution channel.. the presence of Eminem and Madonna songs on Kazaa wasn't stopping anyone from finding independent music.
This won't make it any easier for people to find legal downloads, it'll only make it (trivially) harder to find illegal ones.
The last time I installed Ubuntu, it came with no support for WPA encryption, and the guides to set it up didn't work. That's a showstopping flaw for anyone who uses a wireless network, IMO.
It's their choice. Their content. Like them or hate them, it's up to them whether they want them shared or not.
Legally, that's true. Morally, no way. You don't get to suppress others' free speech (which is what copyright does) just because your business model fails when people are allowed to speak freely.
But on the other hand, I've bought more music than I otherwise would have, because P2P file sharing has exposed me to more music that I like. For instance, I didn't know who Daft Punk was a few years ago; after downloading a couple tracks based on a recommendation, I bought two of their CDs.
You can't say illegal downloads cost the industry money overall without knowing how many people buy more vs. how many buy less.
Which phone? With my LG phones (4400 and 7000), I've had no problem copying ringtones and phonebook entries back and forth to my PC, using BitPim and a cheap cable from eBay or Radio Shack. With the 7000, I can even send MIDIs and MP3s to the phone via email (if I want to pay 25 cents for something I could easily do for free).
Verizon isn't the cheapest cellular provider, but I'm pretty happy with them.
The above statement is utter bullshit. It's perfectly clear to anybody but a lawyer. To anybody with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE, common sense is only common sense. It's somebody trying to worm out of it with what-ifs and maybe-that's that's going to obfuscate it. Go try your word tricks on the captive audience of a jury - I and Plato believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth.
Good, so do I. What I don't believe is that "Don't kill anybody" is precise enough to cover all possible situations involving death. It's obvious that, say, following someone home and stabbing them is murder.. but what about leaving a dangerous construction project in your front yard that someone falls into, or walking past a dying person instead of giving CPR because you're late for a movie, or any number of other situations? You have to be precise if you want people to know which ones are considered murder and which aren't.
That's the whole point of having written laws in the first place. Without precise definitions of crimes, everyone is left guessing whether their actions will get them in trouble or not. If the law only says "Don't kill anybody", then just how far do you have to go in making your property safe for anyone who might walk by, for example? You don't know until someone dies and you're on trial for murder.
And don't browbeat me with your degree.
I don't have one. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer.
Why was a murderer able to make the ludicrous claim that eating too many Twinkies made him do it?
That has nothing to do with legalese, and everything to do with human error. Look, you're the one saying everyone has "common sense" and knows what words mean. If that's the case, why would a jury buy such a lame excuse? Anyone can claim whatever they want in court--and you can expect that someone who's facing a murder charge will say whatever he can--but it's up to the judge and jury to decide whether to believe it.
Sorry if you feel this cheapens your profession. I'm sure you'll get plenty of business, anyway.
Settle down, dude. I never said I was a lawyer; you seem to have assumed that anyone who can understand the complicated English writing we call legalese must have gone to school for it. It really isn't that hard.
The distinction being that computers, unlike people, *do* *not* inhernetly possess common sense; they only "understand" one and zero, on and off. [...]
Now for a law: "Don't kill somebody." I know what it means. You know what it means. Any twelve random jurors know what it means.
No, that's not true. What if you set up a dangerous situation and someone dies as a direct result of their own actions, but those actions wouldn't have led to death if not for you - did you "kill" them? What if you fail to take some action that would've saved someone's life? What if someone asks you to kill them? And who exactly is "somebody" - do apes or fetuses count?
You might have answers to those questions, but my point is, it's not clear. Any answer you might have is based on your own interpretation, and you can't be sure that anyone else (today or in the future) will interpret it the same way you do. That's why it has to be written out explicitly.
Then the punishment: Depends. How bad was this crime? You know what that means. I know what that means. But no matter what, nobody's going to open themselves up to litigation by arbitrarily interpretting how bad the crime was, so we have to categorize it [...]
Again, it's not as simple as you think. What if I think it's not such a bad crime because the victim was a criminal himself? What if I think killing an old person is worse than killing a young person, and you think the opposite? The purpose of law is to let everyone know which actions are legal or illegal, so they don't have to guess how some third party might interpret the rules.
we must rigorously define the laws and define the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions of the definitions until it's all a big wad of words you gotta pay somebody $500 smacks an hour to read, because nothing else short of torture would coerce anybody to do so
Whenever I hear someone say this, I think they just haven't taken the time to read the laws. It really isn't that hard if you know where to find those definitions (hint: the internet). It's just another form of code - they even call it code.
... it has its shortcomings when it comes to the application, as the parent suggested, of Common Sense.
So do computers, and therefore so does computer code.
If you show a nonprogrammer the code for a sorting algorithm, he might ask "Why do you need to write all that? Just tell it to put the items in order." After all, he can easily look at a list of numbers or words and put them in order.. it's just common sense.
People who complain about the lack of "common sense" in legal writing are doing the same thing. Laws have to be precise in their definitions of things that seem obvious, because what's obvious to you might not be obvious to your neighbor, or someone in another state, or anyone who'll have to interpret the law 100 years from now.
Programming takes the fantastically complicated task of explaining the world to a computer and renders it into the simplest possible form. Legal documents take the most basic common sense and render it into the most obfuscated and complicated possible form; the better to ensure that you will need to hire a lawyer to decode it and argue it in court for you.
I don't think that's the case at all. Law, just like code, is about precisely explaining how to perform an action, make a decision, or handle an event. You could take just about any law out of the Revised Code of Washington, for example, and rewrite it in your favorite programming language.
Legalese is denser than code, though. That's because laws are written and read by humans, and humans understand language differently than computers. If you wrote a function to implement a few paragraphs of even the simplest law, no one would be able to read and interpret that code as quickly as the original text. (But it'd be a lot easier to debug.)
I am absolutly certain that the founding fathers would not have eliminated freedom of speech for any reason.
Of course they would have. In fact, they did: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors [...] the exclusive Right to their respective Writings". Copyright is just as much of a limit on free speech/press as campaign finance laws are.
Come on, now. I'm talking about "walking away" from the artist in the sense of not pursuing their music through pirated downloads as an alternative to paying more than you want to for their recordings by purchasing a CD, using iTunes, etc.
I know. My point is there's a third alternative you're dismissing for no good reason. Listening to a song doesn't harm anyone; there's no rational basis to believe it's unethical to listen to something without paying for it.
But if you're ethical, you'll also admit that you don't respect that over-charging artist enough to want to listen to their music anyway, and skip the whole take-it-for-free part, too.
That doesn't make sense at all. You don't have to respect a person in order to enjoy a song they recorded. I think Michael Jackson is creepy and disgusting, for example, but I still like "Billie Jean".
Furthermore, just because you don't agree to someone's pricing terms doesn't mean you don't respect them. Respect is about more than just obeying someone else's wishes.
But your only ethical recourse is to stop doing business with those artists and the businesses they've chosen to represent them. [...] If you think the creators want to much for their time and creativity, walk away. But have the intellectual integrity to also walk away from their entertainment.
Ridiculous. What's next, am I also obligated to walk away from the guy on the street corner playing his guitar for tips? After all, he wants me to pay him. Am I acting unethically by fast-forwarding through TV commercials (or just changing the channel), instead of choosing not to watch the show at all?
There's nothing unethical about listening to a song. Once someone decides he's not going to pay for it, it doesn't matter if he listens to it anyway - the artist is in exactly the same situation whether he does or not.
Even if a pay service eliminated all of those and -fairly- compensated the creators, it'd still be super-tiny. In fact I doubt such a service could survive, considering how quickly a torrent would pop up on thepiratebay with their entire catalog.
So, there's no such thing as iTunes Music Store? Or is $0.99 a song (about the same price as a CD) not enough to "fairly" compensate the creators?
The fact is, it's already possible to download any music store's entire catalog from P2P, and it always will be. The stores' only hope is to offer their customers a better experience than they'd get from P2P.
Would you do business under the concept that you should make your money back but if a new way to make money came around the corner you should not profit from it?
OTOH, would you do business with a company that said, "If any new technologies are invented that people might be willing to pay for, we reserve the exclusive right to use them?" Would you vote for a politician who promised to grant monopolies over things that could easily be done for free, just so that they could make someone a profit?
I hope not.
Someone might be willing to pay me to help them cross the street. If it were illegal for anyone else to undercut me (by helping someone cross the street for free), I could make a lot more money, and it might create a whole industry of helping old ladies across busy intersections... but that doesn't mean we'd be better off as a whole. Even if more old ladies were able to cross the street safely, the loss of freedom would likely outweigh that benefit.
Likewise, the only reason these networks can charge for a show without commercials is that it's illegal for us to cut out the commercials from the free show and redistribute it, even though it's trivial for anyone to do with VirtualDub. Are we really better off because such a simple task has been outlawed?
You'll notice that the pay options are significantly smaller than the free options.
They're also less convenient. If you download a file from Kazaa, eMule, BT, or another P2P service, you can "preview" the whole song, not just a randomly chosen 30 second snippet. It doesn't tell you which computers or portable devices you can play it on. It doesn't stop playing if you cancel your subscription. And if your hard drive crashes, big deal, you can download it again.
And that in the same time you could just buy the CD and come out ahead.
At least until you stick that CD in your computer and see that it can't be copied to your portable MP3 player. Or even worse: it installs a rootkit, you can't rip any CDs, and pretty soon your hard drive is full of invisible trojans.
CDs are becoming less appealing over time, not more.
Warez traffic (let's drop this "darknet" term, I always think that it's an end-user-empowered network run over dark fibers) doesn't follow the typical 24-hour cycle in the traffic pattern. The number of legitimate hosts with such a traffic pattern is pretty small in my experience, so it's quite possible to spot the offenders.
An individual could still adjust his speed throttles during the day, forcing his client to follow a typical traffic pattern, as long as he knows what that pattern is. He'd have to be patient, but any eMule user already is.
We got evicted from our buggy IPX->TCP/IP bridge. We had to play Quake by shouting out the window to our neighbor who had a fax machine and knew a guy who had a 1200 baud modem. A screenshot would start coming in, and he'd say "It looks like there's a demon coming!" and we'd shout back, "Use the grenade launcher!" He'd write it on a piece of paper and fax it back to his friend, and the friend would fax back a picture of his character lying dead on the ground because he hadn't gotten our instructions in time.
Ah, those were the days. We used to get up at 9:30 at night, half an hour after we went to bed, play deathmatch 26 hours a day for 10 cents a week, and then when we were done, our Dad would cleave us in two with a lightning gun and dance on our graves singing Nine Inch Nails songs. But we were a family, and we were happy.
Furthermore, you don't have protections of freedom of speech with ANY organization except the government. I'm really tired of people claiming that they have "Freedom of Speech" every time they get in trouble for spouting whatever they feel like at [...] school [...]
You do have freedom of speech at public schools, because public schools are the government.
This is not "bringing" 3G to the US. We've had it for quite some time - CDMA2000 is a 3G technology. You can transfer data at higher than modem speeds via cell phone (1xRTT) just about anywhere in the country, and in most major cities, you can get DSL speeds too (1xEV-DO).
Last time I used Ubuntu, it didn't come with support for WPA, and the guides for setting it up didn't work.. I had to lower the security on my friend's network just so he could connect his own laptop to it. Just try buying a laptop today that comes with Windows and WiFi but doesn't support WPA out of the box.
No, the problem is that their business model does not take into account freeloaders, much less try to make use of them, and that is why it is obsolete.
Exactly. A solid business model isn't threatened by people who choose not to play along. You don't see retail stores going out of business because of shoplifting, for example, because stopping shoplifters is practical and nonintrusive - all you have to do is watch the people in your store. Stopping illegal file sharing, on the other hand, is a fantasy.
... my signature is on topic. It's an ultra-customizable IRC client, it's open source (although WeArab Chat refuses to release source code for their changes, in flagrant violation of the GPL), and it'll run under WINE.
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Wouldn't it be just wonderful if everyone on P2P networks stopped downloading/uploading/illegaly distributing copyrighted works?
No. Not all of us buy into the whole "I recorded this song so I'm THE BOSS OF IT FOREVER" idea. I support free speech, and that means you get to speak freely even if the particular words (or bits) you're speaking were previously spoken by someone else.
Now, Independent artists artists who actually want to have their music shared can actually find a market.
Don't try to spin this as something positive. Those independent artists could already use Kazaa as a marketing/distribution channel.. the presence of Eminem and Madonna songs on Kazaa wasn't stopping anyone from finding independent music.
This won't make it any easier for people to find legal downloads, it'll only make it (trivially) harder to find illegal ones.
The last time I installed Ubuntu, it came with no support for WPA encryption, and the guides to set it up didn't work. That's a showstopping flaw for anyone who uses a wireless network, IMO.
It's their choice. Their content. Like them or hate them, it's up to them whether they want them shared or not.
Legally, that's true. Morally, no way. You don't get to suppress others' free speech (which is what copyright does) just because your business model fails when people are allowed to speak freely.
If CD's were perfect audio sources for human ears, why make DVD Audio?
You've probably noticed that no one ever buys DVD Audio discs. For most people, CDs are perfect enough.
But on the other hand, I've bought more music than I otherwise would have, because P2P file sharing has exposed me to more music that I like. For instance, I didn't know who Daft Punk was a few years ago; after downloading a couple tracks based on a recommendation, I bought two of their CDs.
You can't say illegal downloads cost the industry money overall without knowing how many people buy more vs. how many buy less.
Which phone? With my LG phones (4400 and 7000), I've had no problem copying ringtones and phonebook entries back and forth to my PC, using BitPim and a cheap cable from eBay or Radio Shack. With the 7000, I can even send MIDIs and MP3s to the phone via email (if I want to pay 25 cents for something I could easily do for free).
Verizon isn't the cheapest cellular provider, but I'm pretty happy with them.
The above statement is utter bullshit. It's perfectly clear to anybody but a lawyer. To anybody with a CLEAR CONSCIENCE, common sense is only common sense. It's somebody trying to worm out of it with what-ifs and maybe-that's that's going to obfuscate it. Go try your word tricks on the captive audience of a jury - I and Plato believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth.
Good, so do I. What I don't believe is that "Don't kill anybody" is precise enough to cover all possible situations involving death. It's obvious that, say, following someone home and stabbing them is murder.. but what about leaving a dangerous construction project in your front yard that someone falls into, or walking past a dying person instead of giving CPR because you're late for a movie, or any number of other situations? You have to be precise if you want people to know which ones are considered murder and which aren't.
That's the whole point of having written laws in the first place. Without precise definitions of crimes, everyone is left guessing whether their actions will get them in trouble or not. If the law only says "Don't kill anybody", then just how far do you have to go in making your property safe for anyone who might walk by, for example? You don't know until someone dies and you're on trial for murder.
And don't browbeat me with your degree.
I don't have one. I'm a programmer, not a lawyer.
Why was a murderer able to make the ludicrous claim that eating too many Twinkies made him do it?
That has nothing to do with legalese, and everything to do with human error. Look, you're the one saying everyone has "common sense" and knows what words mean. If that's the case, why would a jury buy such a lame excuse? Anyone can claim whatever they want in court--and you can expect that someone who's facing a murder charge will say whatever he can--but it's up to the judge and jury to decide whether to believe it.
Sorry if you feel this cheapens your profession. I'm sure you'll get plenty of business, anyway.
Settle down, dude. I never said I was a lawyer; you seem to have assumed that anyone who can understand the complicated English writing we call legalese must have gone to school for it. It really isn't that hard.
The distinction being that computers, unlike people, *do* *not* inhernetly possess common sense; they only "understand" one and zero, on and off. [...]
Now for a law: "Don't kill somebody." I know what it means. You know what it means. Any twelve random jurors know what it means.
No, that's not true. What if you set up a dangerous situation and someone dies as a direct result of their own actions, but those actions wouldn't have led to death if not for you - did you "kill" them? What if you fail to take some action that would've saved someone's life? What if someone asks you to kill them? And who exactly is "somebody" - do apes or fetuses count?
You might have answers to those questions, but my point is, it's not clear. Any answer you might have is based on your own interpretation, and you can't be sure that anyone else (today or in the future) will interpret it the same way you do. That's why it has to be written out explicitly.
Then the punishment: Depends. How bad was this crime? You know what that means. I know what that means. But no matter what, nobody's going to open themselves up to litigation by arbitrarily interpretting how bad the crime was, so we have to categorize it [...]
Again, it's not as simple as you think. What if I think it's not such a bad crime because the victim was a criminal himself? What if I think killing an old person is worse than killing a young person, and you think the opposite? The purpose of law is to let everyone know which actions are legal or illegal, so they don't have to guess how some third party might interpret the rules.
we must rigorously define the laws and define the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions and define the definitions of the definitions of the definitions until it's all a big wad of words you gotta pay somebody $500 smacks an hour to read, because nothing else short of torture would coerce anybody to do so
Whenever I hear someone say this, I think they just haven't taken the time to read the laws. It really isn't that hard if you know where to find those definitions (hint: the internet). It's just another form of code - they even call it code.
... it has its shortcomings when it comes to the application, as the parent suggested, of Common Sense.
So do computers, and therefore so does computer code.
If you show a nonprogrammer the code for a sorting algorithm, he might ask "Why do you need to write all that? Just tell it to put the items in order." After all, he can easily look at a list of numbers or words and put them in order.. it's just common sense.
People who complain about the lack of "common sense" in legal writing are doing the same thing. Laws have to be precise in their definitions of things that seem obvious, because what's obvious to you might not be obvious to your neighbor, or someone in another state, or anyone who'll have to interpret the law 100 years from now.
Programming takes the fantastically complicated task of explaining the world to a computer and renders it into the simplest possible form. Legal documents take the most basic common sense and render it into the most obfuscated and complicated possible form; the better to ensure that you will need to hire a lawyer to decode it and argue it in court for you.
I don't think that's the case at all. Law, just like code, is about precisely explaining how to perform an action, make a decision, or handle an event. You could take just about any law out of the Revised Code of Washington, for example, and rewrite it in your favorite programming language.
Legalese is denser than code, though. That's because laws are written and read by humans, and humans understand language differently than computers. If you wrote a function to implement a few paragraphs of even the simplest law, no one would be able to read and interpret that code as quickly as the original text. (But it'd be a lot easier to debug.)
I am absolutly certain that the founding fathers would not have eliminated freedom of speech for any reason.
Of course they would have. In fact, they did: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors [...] the exclusive Right to their respective Writings". Copyright is just as much of a limit on free speech/press as campaign finance laws are.
Come on, now. I'm talking about "walking away" from the artist in the sense of not pursuing their music through pirated downloads as an alternative to paying more than you want to for their recordings by purchasing a CD, using iTunes, etc.
I know. My point is there's a third alternative you're dismissing for no good reason. Listening to a song doesn't harm anyone; there's no rational basis to believe it's unethical to listen to something without paying for it.
But if you're ethical, you'll also admit that you don't respect that over-charging artist enough to want to listen to their music anyway, and skip the whole take-it-for-free part, too.
That doesn't make sense at all. You don't have to respect a person in order to enjoy a song they recorded. I think Michael Jackson is creepy and disgusting, for example, but I still like "Billie Jean".
Furthermore, just because you don't agree to someone's pricing terms doesn't mean you don't respect them. Respect is about more than just obeying someone else's wishes.
But your only ethical recourse is to stop doing business with those artists and the businesses they've chosen to represent them. [...] If you think the creators want to much for their time and creativity, walk away. But have the intellectual integrity to also walk away from their entertainment.
Ridiculous. What's next, am I also obligated to walk away from the guy on the street corner playing his guitar for tips? After all, he wants me to pay him. Am I acting unethically by fast-forwarding through TV commercials (or just changing the channel), instead of choosing not to watch the show at all?
There's nothing unethical about listening to a song. Once someone decides he's not going to pay for it, it doesn't matter if he listens to it anyway - the artist is in exactly the same situation whether he does or not.
Even if a pay service eliminated all of those and -fairly- compensated the creators, it'd still be super-tiny. In fact I doubt such a service could survive, considering how quickly a torrent would pop up on thepiratebay with their entire catalog.
So, there's no such thing as iTunes Music Store? Or is $0.99 a song (about the same price as a CD) not enough to "fairly" compensate the creators?
The fact is, it's already possible to download any music store's entire catalog from P2P, and it always will be. The stores' only hope is to offer their customers a better experience than they'd get from P2P.
Would you do business under the concept that you should make your money back but if a new way to make money came around the corner you should not profit from it?
OTOH, would you do business with a company that said, "If any new technologies are invented that people might be willing to pay for, we reserve the exclusive right to use them?" Would you vote for a politician who promised to grant monopolies over things that could easily be done for free, just so that they could make someone a profit?
I hope not.
Someone might be willing to pay me to help them cross the street. If it were illegal for anyone else to undercut me (by helping someone cross the street for free), I could make a lot more money, and it might create a whole industry of helping old ladies across busy intersections... but that doesn't mean we'd be better off as a whole. Even if more old ladies were able to cross the street safely, the loss of freedom would likely outweigh that benefit.
Likewise, the only reason these networks can charge for a show without commercials is that it's illegal for us to cut out the commercials from the free show and redistribute it, even though it's trivial for anyone to do with VirtualDub. Are we really better off because such a simple task has been outlawed?
You'll notice that the pay options are significantly smaller than the free options.
They're also less convenient. If you download a file from Kazaa, eMule, BT, or another P2P service, you can "preview" the whole song, not just a randomly chosen 30 second snippet. It doesn't tell you which computers or portable devices you can play it on. It doesn't stop playing if you cancel your subscription. And if your hard drive crashes, big deal, you can download it again.
And that in the same time you could just buy the CD and come out ahead.
At least until you stick that CD in your computer and see that it can't be copied to your portable MP3 player. Or even worse: it installs a rootkit, you can't rip any CDs, and pretty soon your hard drive is full of invisible trojans.
CDs are becoming less appealing over time, not more.
Warez traffic (let's drop this "darknet" term, I always think that it's an end-user-empowered network run over dark fibers) doesn't follow the typical 24-hour cycle in the traffic pattern. The number of legitimate hosts with such a traffic pattern is pretty small in my experience, so it's quite possible to spot the offenders.
An individual could still adjust his speed throttles during the day, forcing his client to follow a typical traffic pattern, as long as he knows what that pattern is. He'd have to be patient, but any eMule user already is.
A buggy IPX->TCP/IP bridge? Ha!
We got evicted from our buggy IPX->TCP/IP bridge. We had to play Quake by shouting out the window to our neighbor who had a fax machine and knew a guy who had a 1200 baud modem. A screenshot would start coming in, and he'd say "It looks like there's a demon coming!" and we'd shout back, "Use the grenade launcher!" He'd write it on a piece of paper and fax it back to his friend, and the friend would fax back a picture of his character lying dead on the ground because he hadn't gotten our instructions in time.
Ah, those were the days. We used to get up at 9:30 at night, half an hour after we went to bed, play deathmatch 26 hours a day for 10 cents a week, and then when we were done, our Dad would cleave us in two with a lightning gun and dance on our graves singing Nine Inch Nails songs. But we were a family, and we were happy.
Furthermore, you don't have protections of freedom of speech with ANY organization except the government. I'm really tired of people claiming that they have "Freedom of Speech" every time they get in trouble for spouting whatever they feel like at [...] school [...]
You do have freedom of speech at public schools, because public schools are the government.
This is not "bringing" 3G to the US. We've had it for quite some time - CDMA2000 is a 3G technology. You can transfer data at higher than modem speeds via cell phone (1xRTT) just about anywhere in the country, and in most major cities, you can get DSL speeds too (1xEV-DO).
Ubuntu 5.10 is a dream compared to Windows.
Last time I used Ubuntu, it didn't come with support for WPA, and the guides for setting it up didn't work.. I had to lower the security on my friend's network just so he could connect his own laptop to it. Just try buying a laptop today that comes with Windows and WiFi but doesn't support WPA out of the box.
No, the problem is that their business model does not take into account freeloaders, much less try to make use of them, and that is why it is obsolete.
Exactly. A solid business model isn't threatened by people who choose not to play along. You don't see retail stores going out of business because of shoplifting, for example, because stopping shoplifters is practical and nonintrusive - all you have to do is watch the people in your store. Stopping illegal file sharing, on the other hand, is a fantasy.
... my signature is on topic. It's an ultra-customizable IRC client, it's open source (although WeArab Chat refuses to release source code for their changes, in flagrant violation of the GPL), and it'll run under WINE.