Worthy of consideration is the potential of extra-judicial consequences for acts of web “piracy”. This deserves some clarification. Note that there are US & European encryption processes for DVD’s. The European version was cracked by a 15 yr old Norwegian and posted online a year or more back. At 78 k, this isn’t complex software. More recently, a kid who was caught for producing a version of the Blaster worm went to court looking for a plea deal.
Unlike smoking, these acts of youthful experimentation have consequences for others. Those who have gotten away with such acts find greater challenges such as cracking into webservers. Having dealt with trying to get rid an invader on a server I was responsible for I can attest that it was a headache I didn’t need. Fortunately this invader didn’t care about the website hosted there to the point of altering it’s content. Had I hijacked the code of of some hothead, there may have been the devil to pay for that transgression with little or no recourse.
The point here being that regardless of your moral or ethical feelings about utilizing tools, content, etc. developed by others; the price for doing so could be high.
Update; 8/1/09
For those who download music, I suggest they dump it on a usb drive, dvd, ipod, etc. Then put Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and Perry Como’s “Hot Diggity Dog” in their shared folder. This will fend off the Music Gestapo and free up their bandwidth from those seeking to download from their shared folder.
Filed under: Web Piracy
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Großer Pfosten! Dank für das Nehmen der Zeit, etwas zu schreiben, das wirklich wert Messwert ist. Zu häufig finde ich unbrauchbares Info und nicht etwas, das wirklich relevant ist. Dank für Ihre harte Arbeit.
Great post! Thanks for taking the time to write something that is really worth reading. Too often I find useless information and not something that is really relevant. Thanks for your hard work.
Ihr Lob ist willkommen. Das Material in den Blog kommt aus den Jahren des Schreibens zu verschiedenen Themen, die weitgehend mit dem Computer oder Internet in Zusammenhang stehen. Die Anstrengungen unternommen, um die bestmögliche präsentieren. Hoffentlich wird die deutsche Version dieser Reaktion verliert nichts in der Übersetzung.
Your compliment is appreciated. The material in the blog comes from years of writing on various topics that are largely computer or internet related. The effort is made to present the best possible. Hopefully the German version of this response loses nothing in translation.