#Team air pirating software

#Team air pirating software

Not only that, this sort of control over what software our machines may or may not run will be a stepping stone towards greater governmental control over key technologies such as effective free software encryption, paving the way for total population surveillance.

That will of course spell the end of playful hacking as Hacker News knows it. They won't rest until every computer available to the public is locked down like a video game console. There is no other way for them to enforce copyright in the 21st century so that's exactly what they'll try to do. I'd rather sacrifice some jobs than watch gigantic media conglomerates take over the computing industry and destroy our computing freedom with their DRM. > Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. Despite 'crying poor', the music industry is now back to making more than it ever did in the era of $18 CDs, with more (and happier) customers. And it's also been shown that the majority of users will pay reasonable prices for convenient media access via subscription or purchase (Netflix, Spotify, ITunes, etc). Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. It's a clear abuse of the global justice system and a waste of its resources.ДЄnd all of that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs. He may indeed be liable for significant damages (I don't know) but the MPAA designed their attack knowing that the prosecution itself would inflict massive punishment (ending the company, incarcerating or confining the execs) before it ever got to court. Mis-using international racketeering laws and cooperation agreements between agencies to pursue online software pirates is not what these systems were created for.

The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge/jury). I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists).