On Piracy, Part II

Grok Headline matches for On Piracy, Part II

Two Part Essay on Software Piracy

Two Part Essay on Software Piracy 01/06/2004 04:25 AM
I have been a firm believer in purchasing software that I like. I really like the shareware concept and support...

Actual piracy on rise, response
orthagonal to RIAA's response to
"piracy"`

Actual piracy on rise, response
orthagonal to RIAA's response to
"piracy"` 01/27/2004 07:32 PM
Actual piracy is on the rise. That is to say, more people are boarding more ships with more guns and shooting more people and taking more cargo, all the while uttering more horrible cries of "ARRRRR."

Strangely, the shipping industry's response isn't to keelhaul passengers who don't tip well on ocean cruises, or to hull random pleasure boats, or to demand special bow-mounted lasers that vaporize any ship that gets within a hundred miles.

Around the world, more than 20 sailors are known to have been murdered by pirates last year.

Seventy are missing, presumed dead.

Other trends are also emerging: ships are now less likely to be hijacked for their cargo; attackers, possibly from militant groups, are seizing ships and ransoming their crew.

Link< /a>

John Lautner's Chemosphere: part
Jetsons, part Bond and vintage L.A.
Modern.

John Lautner's Chemosphere: part
Jetsons, part Bond and vintage L.A.
Modern. 04/07/2005 12:53 PM
The most modern home built in the world. "From the outside it looks like a spaceship you cannot enter. But if you go inside, it feels very cozy… very Zen and calming. Maybe because you are floating above the city, in the sky". John Lautner's Chemosphere residence is the product of a fortuitous union of architect, client, time and place. Leonard Malin was a young aerospace engineer in late-1950s L.A. whose father-in-law had just given him a plot north of Mulholland Drive, near Laurel Canyon. The only catch: at roughly 45 degrees, the slope was all but unbuildable. Lautner sketched a bold vertical line, a cross, and a curve above it. "Draw it up," he told his assistant. Now publisher Benedik t Taschen owns Chemosphere (NSFW), and after 20 years of neglect the house has been beautifully restored (.pdf) by Frank Escher.

Part Butler and Part Buddy, Aide Keeps
Kerry Running

Part Butler and Part Buddy, Aide Keeps
Kerry Running 04/28/2004 12:17 AM
Marvin Nicholson Jr. is the man literally behind Senator John Kerry, ready with an uncapped bottle of water whenever Mr. Kerry's throat runs dry.

New Form of Internet Fiction is Part
Story, Part Game

New Form of Internet Fiction is Part
Story, Part Game 06/05/2005 10:52 PM
Internet startup City of IF today launched a web site dedicated to “storygaming” – a new form of storytelling over the Web. Storygaming is a unique combination of storytelling and computer games in which players cooperatively play characters in a story guided by a human author. [PRWEB Jun 2, 2005]

Into the Itanium, Part 2
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Computer-
Processors/Into-the-Itanium-Part-2/ In
our la

Into the Itanium, Part 2
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Computer-
Processors/Into-the-Itanium-Part-2/ In
our la 12/27/2004 01:08 PM
DevHardware Dec 27 2004 4:25PM GMT

On Piracy

On Piracy 01/02/2004 01:09 PM

Many people who use pirated products justify it by claiming they're only stealing from rich mega-corporations that screw their customers, but this conveniently overlooks the fact that the people who are hurt the most by piracy are people like me.

Shareware developers are losing enormous amounts of money to piracy, and we're mostly helpless to do anything about it. We can't afford to sue everyone who steals from us, let alone track down people in countries such as Russia who host web sites offering pirated versions of our work. If you visit a few public "warez" sites, you're unlikely to find software from companies such as Microsoft who can afford to prosecute pirates - instead you'll find hundreds of shareware products written by people like me.

Some would argue that we should just accept piracy as part of the job, but chances are the people who say this aren't aware of how widespread piracy really is. A quick look at my web server logs would be enough to startle most people, since the top referrers are invariably warez sites that link to my site (yes, not only do they steal my software, but they also suck my bandwidth).

A couple of years ago I wanted to get an idea of how many people were using pirated versions of TopStyle, so I signed up for an anonymous email account (using a "kewl" nickname, of course) and started hanging out in cracker forums. After proving my cracker creds, I created a supposedly cracked version of TopStyle and arranged to have it listed on a popular warez site.

This cracked version pinged home the first time it was run, providing a way for me to find out how many people were using it. To my dismay, in just a few weeks more people had used this cracked version than had ever purchased it. I knew piracy was rampant, but I didn't realize how widespread it was until this test.

(As an aside, the only thing that prevented me from having this fake cracked version erase the user's hard drive was a sense of ethics - the same thing that's apparently missing from those who steal my software. This does illustrate, though, that you never know what you're getting when you download warez. Folks, if you're downloading pirated software, you're trusting EXEs hosted by people who brag about being criminals!)

Software crackers should be listed alongside spammers, virus writers and script kiddies as scourges of the Internet, because they make software more expensive and more invasive. Trust me: shareware developers such as myself really don't want to resort to things like software activation since it adds to our already oversized workload, but when we see thousands of people stealing from us, we're willing to do pretty much anything (wouldn't you?).

piracy

piracy 06/25/2004 05:12 PM
McKinsey Quarterly Jun 25 2004 7:13PM GMT

Privacy vs. Piracy?

Privacy vs. Piracy? 03/14/2005 05:27 PM
The entertainment industry certainly loves to raid ISPs these days. Perhaps it's payback for all those recent court rulings saying that ISPs shouldn't just roll over and hand out private data every time the entertainment industry suspects wrongdoing. Last week, they raided an Austra lian ISP and a Swedish one. The Swedish one was with the help of authorities (the Australian one wasn't), but it was still organized by the entertainment industry. However, in raiding the ISP and carting away lots of info, some are wondering if the raid violated strict data privacy laws in that country. It certainly raises some interesting questions in the light of all of the many, many data leaks over the past couple of weeks. If your data happens to be stored on the same server as someone who is breaking the law, does that mean your data is open to review from private sources?

The Piracy Pyramid

The Piracy Pyramid 01/03/2005 02:39 PM
Anathema, darknets, master rippers, and currys: The Shadow Internet. [via Volokh]

Pre-empting piracy

Pre-empting piracy 06/12/2004 12:00 AM
USA Today Jun 12 2004 3:06AM GMT

Piracy Paranoia

Piracy Paranoia 07/09/2004 01:12 PM
Fear and hope in a scare sheet from the movie industry.

piracy messages

piracy messages 06/05/2004 04:32 AM
a picture of the piracy-warning before the movie starts .. Gallery of movie copyright warnings .. Anti-copyright warnings in films

monochrom.at/piracy
track this site | 5 links

Piracy Protection?!

Piracy Protection?! 09/07/2004 03:36 AM
Many of us, including me, are the software developers. Many call ourselves 'indieware' developers. We develop software, formerly known as 'shareware', that allows people to download it, try it for some period of time (or with some features disabled), and, if the software looks and feels good, purchase it. After ...

Software piracy on the up

Software piracy on the up 07/12/2004 10:48 PM
Sunday Times South Africa Jul 13 2004 3:09AM GMT

The end of DIRECTV piracy?

The end of DIRECTV piracy? 04/15/2004 09:03 AM
The sky is falling! [some links require reg] The years of hacking DIRECTV's signal and pirating its program offerings seem to be coming to an end.

The Economics of Piracy

The Economics of Piracy 01/05/2004 11:35 PM

On Piracy, or, Nick Bradbury is an Amazing Idiot: This was written in response to Nick Bradbury's bit about piracy from yesterday.

...most people who pirate his software probably would never use it anyway, so they aren't costing him any money and they're providing him with free advertising.

This is a good point. I'm not defending piracy, but piracy costs a company money in only one instance: when a person who has the means and inclination to buy the software pirates it instead. I can get a pirated copy of Oracle, but that doesn't mean I've cost that company money, because if I couldn't pirate it, I wouldn't buy it — I'd use something cheaper or free.

Now, there are holes in this theory, of course, because if true, it essentially means that poor people can pirate anything they want because they couldn't or wouldn't buy it otherwise. But I get annoyed when Microsoft claims that piracy costs it untold billions of dollars a year. This is a little arrogant. Microsoft is basically saying that every single person who pirated their software would have paid full price for it if piracy wasn't an option.

This is patently ridiculous and Microsoft knows it, but big numbers make big headlines. If Office was suddenly un-piratable, would Microsoft reap a billion-dollar windfall from would-be thieves? Nope — Open Office would just saturate the market in a big hurry. When the only options are paying for it or finding a much cheaper alternative, 99% of pirates will choose the latter.

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FCC Cracks Down On TV Piracy

FCC Cracks Down On TV Piracy 11/05/2003 05:18 AM
CBS News Nov 5 2003 4:28AM ET

Piracy Works

Piracy Works 06/22/2005 02:20 AM

Kids on Piracy

Kids on Piracy 01/07/2004 04:35 PM

In response to Nick Bradbury's post on piracy, Aaron Swartz writes:

Nick has no innate right to have people pay for his software, just as I have no right to ask people to pay for use of my name.

Even if he did, most people who pirate his software probably would never use it anyway, so they aren't costing him any money and they're providing him with free advertising.

And of course it makes sense that lots of people who see some interesting new program available for free from a site they're already at will download it and try it out once, just as more people will read an article I wrote in the New York Times than on my weblog.

And what's this nonsense about warez sites only having shareware stuff and not stuff from Microsoft. In my experience with the biggest, easiest-to-use things, the opposite is true (tons of BigCo software, very little shareware).

And while it's true that EXEs can often do anything (because modern OSes don't have basic security protections like chroot, which has been in UNIX for decades), this is true of all software not just warez.

Yes, piracy probably does take some sales away from Nick, but I doubt it's very many. If Nick wants to sell more software, maybe he should start by not screaming at his potential customers. What's next? Yelling at people who use his software on friends computers? Or at the library?

Aaron then wrote these series of comments in response to Schoolblo g's post that agrees with Nick's view:

Chris is arguing what’s known as the sweat-of-the-brow theory of intellectual monopolies: someone who puts work into something deserves to control how it is used.

Taken to its extreme, this probably results in things you disagree with. (Michael Jackson has put a lot of money and work into his face. Can he charge people who distribute pictures of it? A newspaper reporter puts a lot of work into discovering a story. Can he charge people who repeat it.) And certainly, in the specific case of copyright, if Chris’s world was in place we’d have no libraries or video stores, and all the books at bookstores would be shrink-wrapped or behind glass.

By Nick’s reasoning, everyone who rents a movie from a video store or takes a book out of the library is a pirate, because they cost the author one potential sale (in the US, authors don’t get paid anything for library or video store rentals).

Chris, do you feel authors have a right to keep their book out of libraries? They worked hard on their book, shouldn’t they get to make the terms of use? If you don’t, how do you distinguish libraries from downloads? (It’s true that libraries don’t usually involve copies, but this is a practical distinction — quibbles like that don’t see like they’d interfere with a strong right.)

I spend months researching an important story. Finally, after great lengths, I confirm that Nixon’s team funded Watergate break-in, and I provide a chain of evidence to prove it. You run a rival newspaper and you verify all the evidence with your own eyes. Can you publish the story as well? I put a lot of work into that story, I don’t want you to copy it, even if you give me credit.

The fact that video rental stores are legal while peer-to-peer systems aren’t is an accident of law and technology. The law regulated copying while the computer systems required copies to do everything. If we had built our networks with superfast pnuematic tubes instead of wires, we could whisk CDs across them to share with others without violating the law at all. It’s hard to believe one system could be moral and the other not, simply because of this technological accident.

The fact is that there is no such morality behind copyright. Copyright is a recent invention, which originally only touched commercial publishers (of which there aren’t very many). This idea of their being some moral reason for it is even more recent. You won’t find it in any religion, or any old culture. It’s a silly idea, and it goes against our nature to share and build upon each other’s work.

What’s the moral problem with me downloading Nick’s software when there was no chance of me buying it? I get the software, Nick doesn’t lose any money and possibly gets some free advertising. It seems everyone is better off; how could this be immoral?

Yup.  That's how smart kids of 21st century thinks.  What a shame.

Aside from the lost profit and firmness of the moral ground piracy stands on, piracy undermines the soul of our young.  When you do something others consider bad, you start a ball of self-justification rolling so you can sleep at night.  So what if I burnt a house down?  No one got hurt!

Let this bullshit go on and, before you know it, the only acceptable answer to “Why can't I drive your car when you are not using it?“ will be an Uzi.

Microsoft reverses SP2 course on piracy

Microsoft reverses SP2 course on piracy 05/11/2004 12:10 PM
ZDNet May 11 2004 2:33PM GMT

Erasing $HOME For Piracy?

Erasing $HOME For Piracy? 09/10/2004 01:10 PM

The answer to video piracy?

The answer to video piracy? 01/11/2004 10:08 AM
CNET Jan 11 2004 9:08AM ET

Microsoft Piracy Wizard

Microsoft Piracy Wizard 07/01/2004 03:52 AM
Select a product below and specify the method by which you acquired it. Products acquired via retail purchase always come as individually boxed products. Products acquired with the purchase of a new PC will have different anti-piracy features than retail products. A Volume License acquired from an Authorized Reseller comes with fullfilment media containing a unique set of anti-piracy features

FBI spotlights digital piracy

FBI spotlights digital piracy 02/19/2004 03:31 PM
ZDNet Feb 19 2004 8:09PM GMT

file sharing = piracy? Not really.

file sharing = piracy? Not really. 01/16/2004 11:27 AM

An interesting Salon article: Is the war on file sharing over?:

If one is willing to believe the happy talk from music business executives, the tide has finally turned against file sharing, thanks to the get-tough tactics employed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Last fall, the RIAA began filing lawsuits against individual users of peer-to-peer trading sites, and the strategy, the RIAA says now, has paid off. The group is careful not to declare a final victory over file trading, but things are finally beginning to look up for a business long in decline, say industry representatives. After years of scoffing at copyright laws, Americans are finally beginning to understand the gravity of file trading's offense against copyright.

The article is interesting. But what I find most interesting is this automatic alignment that is made in the media discourse between file sharing and piracy. There are many, many uses other than those the RIAA defines as illegitimate for file sharing (note, I am not saying anonymous file sharing, although there worthy uses for that too). Sure, the media loves a good fight and that's why the focus on this comparison. But the uses of sharing should, can, and will move beyond those in dispute. And not just for files, either.

Why am I saying this? Well, can't you guess?

Stay tuned. :-)

The answer to video piracy... not quite.

The answer to video piracy... not quite. 01/16/2004 01:00 PM
While technology offers myriad promises, it also beckons us to recreate the wheel from time to time.

iTunes may not curb piracy

iTunes may not curb piracy 11/13/2003 08:44 PM

Speaking of Music Piracy ....

Speaking of Music Piracy .... 04/09/2004 03:57 PM
Digital music was supposed be a cheaper alternative to grossly overpriced CDs. But the companies controlling the industry are looking for ways to raise prices and boost their profits.

Studios Sue Retailer for Piracy (AP)

Studios Sue Retailer for Piracy (AP) 05/30/2004 10:10 PM
AP - Two Hollywood movie studios have sued an online retailer, accusing Technology One of defiantly selling DVD-copying software previously barred by two federal courts.

Classic Anti-Piracy

Classic Anti-Piracy 08/30/2004 06:52 AM

I had to laugh so how little things have changed just the technology. [worldo fstuart.excellentcontent.com/antipiracy.htm]

Studios sue retailer for piracy

Studios sue retailer for piracy 05/30/2004 11:23 PM
AP via New Jersey Online May 31 2004 3:27AM GMT

Are PCs next in Hollywood piracy battle?

Are PCs next in Hollywood piracy battle? 11/05/2003 11:40 PM
The FCC's "broadcast flag" mandate could have a wider-than-expected impact as TVs and computers converge.

FCC Moves to Stifle TV Piracy

FCC Moves to Stifle TV Piracy 11/05/2003 06:24 AM
The Federal Communications Commission passes a controversial mandate to 'flag' digital TV shows with special code to prevent consumers from sharing the programs over the Internet. Critics say the move will suppress innovation.

Germany slaps piracy tax on PCs

Germany slaps piracy tax on PCs 01/05/2005 06:46 AM
PC Magazine UK Jan 5 2005 11:08AM GMT

Piracy is Progressive Taxation

Piracy is Progressive Taxation 12/13/2002 02:18 PM
For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.

Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the kindness of strangers."

Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the continuous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the most popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a chance to build their own reputation and visibility, working with entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers and distributors of tomorrow. -- Tim O'Reilly

"zeldman.gogga"

Internet piracy a hot issue

Internet piracy a hot issue 11/19/2003 10:28 PM
EastDay Nov 19 2003 9:50PM ET

Want to know a reason piracy will never
be contained

Want to know a reason piracy will never
be contained 04/20/2004 03:15 AM
If you have traveled to any 3rd world country you will realize immediately why piracy will never be contained and...

Arrest over Spider-Man piracy bid

Arrest over Spider-Man piracy bid 07/01/2004 08:37 AM
A teenager in California is arrested after he is spotted allegedly recording Spider-Man 2 on a camcorder.
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On Piracy, Part II

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