About theft and piracy

[Cathartik]

pldennison, thanks.

capacitor, your point about the honesty of the RIAA brought something back to me… wasn’t it SIAA member company Sun Micro who was fudging damages in the Mitnick case? At the insistence of the Justice Dept., they tried to pass off the full cost of research and development for certain programs on his actions - far as I know, he downloaded the source code but did little else with it. Unless they completely reworked the program(s) from the ground up, for fear that he might leak the code or extort them, I can’t see how that justifies claiming full research and development costs. Security headache, yes, entirely new project? No.

These consortiums (RIAA, SIIA, MPAA) look out for their own best interests, in a “profits first, facts second” manner.

Case in point is the oft-repeated quote that CD sales fell during the Napster era - spurned on by the RIAA and found in numerous mainstream press articles. CD sales didn’t actually see a decline until after Napster was all but dead.

Now, one could argue that a process was in motion, but really - why are no possible alternatives considered? For example, DVD sales have skyrocketed at the same time CD sales have dropped - coincidence? Or could it be the success of one format has led to the decline of the other? I think it’s fairly obvious that when faced with a choice between a 25$ DVD movie or the 20$ soundtrack for said film, most people will choose the movie, if they can’t afford both.

For anyone interested, Janis Ian has done a follow-up to her popular and well-circulated article on file sharing (mainly audio/MP3 trading): http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html

I’m sure lots of people have perused it, but it’s a good read if not.

[D_Odds]

*Originally posted by pldennison *
Oh, but that’s it – that’s exactly what the MPAA and RIAA are, through legislation, trying to do! In fact, they are manufacturing software that can’t be used on some CD or DVD players at all. That’s what the whole DeCSS dustup has been about – allowing users whose only DVD player is a DVD-ROM on a Mac or Linux machine to watch their discs. That’s what the whole CD copy-protection hassle has been about – allowing users to listen to CDs that they bought on their laptop or desktop computers.

Essentially, manufacturers are trying to do an end-run around the entire concept of fair use, or of any use whatsoever.

Yes, I know and I don’t approve. I’m not defending their actions. However, as my Mom always said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right”.

So just to clarify again - a position against piracy and theft is not necessarily a position in support of the MPAA and RIAA.

[D_Odds]

Cathartik, let me be the second to congratulate you on an impressive SDMB debut. I enjoyed the article, especially the final note:

*Our representatives are not in Congress or the Senate because they want to make a better living. They’re there because they want power, and influence. Without the office, they have neither.
If they believe their actions will cause large amounts of the population to vote against them, no amount of money will be sufficient to buy their cooperation. If you let your representatives know, en masse, that you will not vote for them if they support ridiculous measures such as the bill allowing media companies to spread viruses on the computer of anyone “suspected” of file-sharing, and if enough of you tell them so, they will NOT work hand in glove with the RIAA.
We cannot possibly match the monies the record companies can devote to litigation, but we CAN threaten to vote those representatives who are in bed with them out of office. And ultimately, it’s the votes they care about. *

I support legal means of opposing the record companies, not false Robin Hood bull.

[ElJeffe]

I agree with pldennison; excellent post, Cathartik. And here’s a random piracy-related anecdote:

I do software development, and my company uses 3D Studio Max. We’re currently using v4, but we still have copies of v3.1, since a lot of our older software was made using it. Anyway, Max uses a dongle as its form of copyright protection. Unfortunately, the dongle makes Max extremely buggy - frequent crashes, corruption of files, you name it. (It’s lovely having your program crash in the middle of an 8 hour render, corrupting your file in the process.) So in order to actually get any work done, we have all downloaded cracks for Max. We own perfectly legal copies, but we had to break the law in order to get our legally purchased software to actually work. Three cheers for copyright protection schemes!

Jeff