Jail for 'Robin Hoods' who cost Microsoft millions

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Actually, that's not entirely true. Your mom MAY have made that much money if she distributed the software electronically but the people who made cakewalk, which you later mention, don't make nearly that much off of it because it's specialty software. While they CAN earn that much a year it's WELL earned because of the skill and attention to detail REQUIRED to make software of any sort.

People don't spend years in college learning how to make this to let people steal their software.



Schools, libraries, businesses, and other public and large private entities are NOT their biggest clients. In fact I will say that they will not account for over half of all software company's clients. There is a such thing as software designed for a business, though, and in that case they would be the largest client on that software.

Yes, they are required by law to own the legitimate versions. SO ARE YOU!



Really? Why is the computer wholesale to the public market as well as retail market making such a killing? You're way off. Reverse those numbers. It has never been down to one out of twenty customers pirating software, it's always been about one out of five or six. It is a much larger problem then you think.

The people who pirate in large amounts do not have the patience to get the free alternatives and are using not having money as an excuse to steal. If you steal a candy bar from a store just because you want something sweet you will still be busted for shoplifting. Guess what! Proprietary software is a candy bar and is not free. There are people who make good food/software for free if you look hard enough.

If you cannot afford the software at it's current price look into a different type of license. Educational licenses work just as well.



http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004J ... 025904.htm



www.ebay.com



Cakewalk is only fifty bucks if I remember right. They suck, really? They're free. They work. They're legal. You have to spend extra time working them to get the same result you would get for fifty dollars.

Wait, I've posted this before. It's LAZINESS if you have to steal software! If you can't spend the extra time working with the freeware version of a piece of software either BUY the software or DON'T USE IT!



Yes, you'd dig through smut ridden crack sites to steal a piece of software that a company worked hard to make. Guess what bud...

I do music editing too. I have finale printmusic 2004. I paid fifty bucks for a factory sealed boxed version of it. I very likely will buy cakewalk, and a few midi to WAV converters with instrument samples. I will possibly pay upwords of 200 dollars once I'm done. I will mow lawns, repair computers, or get a job to afford all this. Why?

Simply because I'd rather support the continued developement of awesome software then to steal it.



No. Cracking a copy of software is just like stealing a library book for your own personal use. Using microsoft office to write a word document on the library computer and saving it to a floppy disk is like copying a poem from a book into your notebook.

Stealing is stealing. There is no defense for it, there is no justification for it. If you have to steal to get a piece of software then you should not use that software. I wholeheartedly agree with using a copy of windows on multiple computers THAT YOU OWN, or letting a friend have a copy of a game so you can play together. There is not harm in that, most games have CD-keys. The friend would only be able to play with you and may like the game enough to go out and buy his own copy.

There is no harm in using a copy of windows 2000 on multiple systems in your own house. This does not hurt Microsoft. You own a license. And I'd be willing to bet that because I was given a copy of windows 2000. (Friend's aunt upgraded to XP and gave a copy to me. As well as a business switched to OS/2 warp completely and gave a copy of win2K to an employee, my friend, and me, transferring the licenses) that microsoft really wouldn't care that I was using it on more then one computer.

Now, if I started passing out copies to anyone that walked by, or giving them away, or cracking them, I'm absolutely certain that they would have something to say for that.

However, stealing is stealing. Ripping 30 day trials of software and pirating them permanently is wrong. Cracking them so you can save the money to buy the real piece of software, in my opinion, is a gray area.

I agree with the poem for personal use analogy. However, there seems to be no point in arguing with Kitsume (which I probably spelled wrong). Software Piracy is illegal. However, there are thousands who do it. Do you really think Microsoft is going to be able to sue all the people who pirate their software? There would boycotts! Software Piracy for personal use is okay in my opinion. However, I disagree that schools and busineses should use pirated software; that would be mass software piracy, which is not only more illegal, but also a great deal more morally wrong.

John Prometheus Doe

I used to know a guy who worked at Adobe, and he told me that they were more concerned with Large companies/corperations as well as governments and government institutions ripping off their software, not the average starving artist that can't afford to come up with the $700+ that they ask for a lot of their software.

I also remember reading an interview with Larry Ellison of Oracle in a Linux Mag back in 2002 that pretty much echoed that sentiment, and added that because the average person that would use an illegal copy of it most likely wouldn't have any serious use for it anyways.

The concern is actually with the distributers of the pirated software, not the users. Their goal is to shut the pirates down, not go after everyone they can.

www.elderscrolls.com

Look at their new game, Oblivion, it's a very beautiful looking game. The graphics are astounding the AI ultra-smart, 50 hours of recorded dialogue just for "Hey, how are you" conversations.

Now, Jim Bob from the company decides to let the alpha leak. People get ahold of it. Bethesda finds out. If I were them I would sue everyone that would dare take two years of my life that I dedicated to writing a complex program, recording voices, troubleshooting, and other hard developemental processes.

What fogman fails to mention is that it is out of pure exasperation that the companies are not heavily prosecuting those that pirate their software, it's too expensive and no matter what they do they get their work stolen. Their view has changed from "Let's deliver the best darn program we can for the best prices we can" to "Toss out the next version, charge a bundle so we don't lose money, and start working on the next" due to piracy.

www.sourceforge.net Pick a program, any program. Look at it's sourcecode. All of that code is gone over manually. *ALL* of it.

You can get programs equivelent to proprietary programs for free, why aren't you respecting people's request to honor their years of hard work and pay so that they can feed themselves and fuel development?

Maybe it's because you just don't care, you want the software now and if you contribute to a problem that will grind technological advances to a halt, so be it. You're happy because you've stolen from 'the man', an imaginary person that sits in a tall building eating caviar and having exotic stripdancers parade around his huge mahagony desk, while in truth you've hurt John Doe down in a cubicle with hundreds of papers to go over for feature requests, two kids to take to soccor and baseball practice, a mortgage to pay, and a program to make before an impending deadline.

Now, if you'll pardon my language, many of us have seen pirates of the carribean, a heroic story of a pirate captain kicked off his boat, and chasing them back down with a few major plot turns and twists.

A good many of us have also seen Robot Chicken's Butt Pirates of the Carribean spoof, some of you believe that what you are doing is like the movie with rolling powerful music, hideously deformed undead creatures, and solidified bad guys. You're absolutely wrong. What you're doing is raiding the people who work an 80 hour week's butts so you can have your own fun.

It's just like walking into compUSA and walking out with an unpaid for hard drive.

Some of you'll say "But that's different!" and I'll cut you off with this.

Yes, it is. If you walk out of compUSA with a hard drive you'll get caught. They spend tons of money on security and drive the prices of their products up for everyone. Most software companies are just starting to put security features in, while many of them have had them for awhile.

Huzzah, let us turn the internet into one giant secured hole with all servers tracking 100% of anything we do online.

Or...how about you decide that you want to pay for the software you want to buy, get a minimum wage job, and buy a slightly older version. Sure it doesn't have that new shiny box and a couple of features, but it gets the job done, and you paid less then half of what you would have.

Psh, there's no defending it. Wrong is wrong is wrong.

Why not just get people to switch to Linux?

Awake, thread long dead! Haunt the forums for which thou wast created!

Good ideas are timeless.

Yep. I'm posting from a 2009 computer right now. Wish I had one of the old IBMs upgraded with new parts but now Lenovo has spyware from the factory.

Now you done got me curious about Linux again!

I generally order computers from Discount Electronics in Austin. When they arrive, I use the Windows distribution they came with to update the firmware, remove the hard drive to use for future firmware upgrades, put in a new drive, and install a different OS, usually Linux or OpenBSD. On this particular computer, I installed Qube OS to try out and then switched to a more conventional Linux.

How you liking Qubes? /// Lenovo has unwanted stuff for sure.

Wow, this was an impressive feat of thread necromancy bringing this back to life. To be honest its been so long that I didn't even remember this thread at all.

I have used Linux off and on over the years, but in the end I am still forced to rely on Windows for certain PC games which cannot run on anything else.

Real quality is ageless.

Fifteen years.

That must be a record for necroing on this site!

Note that one of the rules, found stickied on the "General Autism Discussion" forum is "Please don't post duplicate threads."

Shouldn't we see a lot more old threads?

In any case, it doesn't make sense to respond to an old thread with a new thread.

The odd thing is that I accidentally responded to another old thread the other day without realizing that it wasn't reasonably current. I don't remember how I even got to that old thread. My guess is that I did a search for something and was reading the thread when I decided to respond to it.

Your eye probably wandered down to that list of "Related Topics" that every thread gets including this one. This one's list only goes back to 2018. But sometimes the list can back several years.

You COULD make a policy of recycling old threads every time you want to talk about some topic thats a perennial favorite- like "Post songs that would make good autism anthems" - folks keep reintroducing that topic (and there is nothing wrong with it as a topic) when they could in theory go back years and find earlier threads on the same topic an then bump them up again. But threads are not like cardboard - theyre not made of stuff that needs to be recycled to save trees. And if you DO bump an ancient thread it would be good idea to acknowledge that you're doing that by saying something like "I know that this is an old thread, but the topic is still relevant".

I don't mind the resurrection of old threads, and I don't know what anybody has against them.

Back on topic, I don't mind piracy when it's at the expense of excessively rich and dishonest companies, and I don't like it that the criminal justice system busted those "Robin Hoods." I'm all for a bit of wealth redistribution to mitigate this situation where one person can snap their fingers and have their butt wiped for them while another has to wipe that butt (figuratively speaking). The pressures of poverty are horrible and it doesn't have to be that way.