Yeah, it's not theft and it's not a crime.

0/10, obvious troll is obvious

> It's *99 cents* [with a credit card], ffs.

Fixed that for you. Does everyone have one of those?

Your mentality is a good example of what's wrong with copyright today. You appear to believe that because "it takes time and effort to write code," it follows that a developer should be paid for every single copy of his code that is produced by others, completely regardless of the fact that in the digital environment, copies are non-scarce, effectively making them worthless. There is nothing, except for tradition (which has been totally invalidated by modern technology), to connect the ideas that "software takes effort to make" and "software authors must be paid for every copy." Why not pay them for the actual creation of the software in the first place, rather than after the fact?

I'm also interested in how a lot of people are "morally corrupt" because they disagree with your old-fashioned view of copyright. Care to elaborate on that?

> GPL... What is it? It is law based on copyright! So if you are violating via piracy you are violating the GPL.
One, the GPL is not a law. It's a software license.

Two, your argument doesn't make sense. Most piracy committed is noncommercial copying and redistribution. The GPL expressly permits this. If copyright law were amended to make noncommercial piracy legal, it wouldn't affect the GPL at all.

> Well you can't have it both ways! Either you accept the copyright or you don't.
Yeah, that totally isn't a false dichotomy, because it's totally true that the only options are to keep modern copyright law or throw it all out entirely.

> So payday finally rolls around and surprise, surprise, no pay check for you.
This is one of many bad analogies that often get trotted out in an attempt to bash pirates. When you work for somebody you essentially enter into an agreement to exchange your services for money. Your services are not something that can be copied at will; they are scarce, and there is therefore substantial monetary value in them. Compare that to something that can be pirated, which can be copied at will, which means that any given digital copy is, essentially, worthless.

So basically, your scenario is a bad comparison between something with unlimited supply and something with limited supply.

The source article didn't link to a login screen when I wrote this. Here's the right URL:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html

You make good points about the technical faults with the proposed measures. Another thing to keep in mind is that it won't be possible for the US gov't to meaningfully enforce this. They may be able to get the big providers- such as Skype and Microsoft's BitLocker (assuming there aren't already backdoors in that)- to comply, but there is plenty of FOSS encryption software which will easily be able to get around any attempt at regulation of this magnitude. The feds try to get the developer to rewrite the app? Cool. He leaves the country, or transfers control of the project to someone overseas. And how do they deal with the fact that the source code for the unbackdoored version is publicly available? Try to erase it from the Internet? Yeah, that's not going to work.

On the other hand... perhaps it's like the War on Piracy. You can never fully stop people from sharing files online, but you can make it too difficult and tedious for the average person to bother with, and thusly prevent it from becoming mainstream. Maybe they only want to target the big providers that service the majority of users, users who are computer-illiterate and neither know nor care about encryption. Us basement-dwelling geeks will still have our namby-pamby free software letting us have private conversations about how the government totally sucks, while nearly everyone in the country is digitally spied on...

If that's the case, then it's all the more reason to educate people about the dangers of the Internet and the value of cryptography.

Here's my own submission of this story, which for some reason isn't showing up in the Firehose or even in my submissions history:

http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=16610344

Check out my summary for more quick information on the issue.

Yeah, my bad.

What's that Internet law that states you can't create a parody of a fundie that someone won't mistake for the real thing? I guess that applies to parodies of copyright maximalists too.

> Who would fund the creation of new recipes if everyone shared them freely?
I honestly can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, because that's a really stupid question. It implies that sharing knowledge is bad for culture.

> By suboptimal you mean it shows a sales increase when steps are taken to reduce piracy which make it inconvenient for those who say that piracy harms no one.
No, it doesn't. It has one poster /claiming/ that sales dropped with the introduction of keygens and rose when she implemented antipiracy measures. It does not in any way represent evidence that piracy causes substantial harm overall. I already told you this, so please stop repeating falsehoods.

Keep in mind that the only damage done by piracy is from those who would have bought it otherwise. In the case of a $5 indie game, you may say that more would be inclined to buy it because of its much more appealing price (leaving aside the issue of game quality), but the indie game wouldn't have anywhere near the market exposure that the $60 professional title would have. Piracy helps these small indie games by spreading mindshare of the game, and if the game in question is good, more people will know about it and buy it. If the game developer encourages, accepts or tolerates sharing of the game, that will get them some goodwill from the fans as well.

> Why do you expect people to provide their work to you for free?

This is a bad question.

First of all, you can't make assumptions about my motives. Nowhere in any of my posts have I said that I pirate software. Don't make personal attacks in order to legitimize your own position.

Two, the wording of your question is biased towards copyright holders. I see questions like yours quite a bit, and I just now realized how slanted they are. Your question assumes that a copyright holder has to somehow go out of their way to provide their work for free, as you said, but in most cases of piracy the copyright holder has to do nothing at all except release the original work, which is what happens anyway. The phrasing of your question adds undeserved emotional weight to your position by implying that those evil pirates are forcing the poor artist to proactively do something which benefits only them and screws the artist. It's dishonest.

A better question would have been "Why do you expect to have access to the work of others for free?" but my first point about personal attacks would still apply.

> Of course, we watched gamecopyworld and friends for the first cracks to show up and literally the day the game got cracked, sales dropped like a rock.

You know, I've been following the piracy debate for a while, and I have seen this claim and others like it on the Internet many times. There are just two problems with them. One is that they're never backed up with any sort of data that inconclusively demonstrates that piracy killed sales; readers are forced to take the poster at his word. Two, they always start and stop with individual posts on various forums. If piracy were really a big enough problem that it could massacre sales of a game, information about it would be all over the Internet. As it is, I have -never- seen actual evidence that piracy is anything but an Internet boogeyman, or that it does any substantial harm, or that harsh copyright enforcement measures are justified. I think that the need for actual evidence on the antipirates' side is so great that anything solid at all would quickly become popular and well-known. Since there is nothing solid, I have to assume that claims such as "piracy kills sales" are misleading or just false.