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.