Why?

Intellectual property. It's like saying stealing an idea or violating a patent is okay.

Your not stealing anything material, but you are stealing potential profit from someone who worked hard for something.

Stealing is stealing. You're taking something you're not entitled to. This is not a difficult concept + everything Cow said above.

I'm playing devil's advocate here:


potential profit <> actual profit.

What difference does that make? It doesn't make it legal.

Stealing a candy bar from a corner store is robbing the store of potential profit because the owner didn't get to sell it. You can still get busted for it.

The concept of intellectual property is apparently beyond you. But that's okay. I'm just going to copy your site -- I mean, it's only 1's and 0's. I'm duplicating it -- not removing the original file from where you got it.

You call it plagiarizing, I call it borrowing.

You really like my site that much? :p

the sad part is that before p2p you never heard about intellectual property. No one cared. Now, Intellectual property concerns are trampling on fair use rights.

The DMCA is another thing that I want destroyed. It stifles long-term innovation just so companies can jealously guard their short-term copyrights.

Books? Art? Movies? These did exist before peer-to-peer came out, and there were lawsuits involving them. Peer-to-peer software has simply brought violation of intellectual copyrights to the main public, allowing people to commit it behind the veil of internet anonymity.

You're still evading my point -- you consider plagiarism wrong, but stealing songs isn't equally wrong?

Yeah, because copyrights didn't exist until people started stealing music

Plagarism is when you take someone's work as your own. when you download a song, you're not claiming it as your own. It's no different than using a copy machine at a library to get a page out of a book.

There's only 3 ways people will ever see this, and they will never be convinced otherwise, no matter how wrong they are.

1) Pirating is wrong, it's all wrong, it's not cool or amazing or rebellious, it's wrong

2) Pirating in certain cases is acceptable

3) Pirating is cool lolz wtf omg FBI!?

I guess the best thing to do in the situation is that if you don't like the whole authentication thing, is to simply "Screw Half-Life 2 & Valve".

If you don't like it, don't buy the product.

Simple, really.

Poor analogy, since there's a difference between a sample and a product in its' entirety. Copyright law entitles you to copy 10% of the book and use a small clip (a few seconds, I think) of a song for your own use without requiring explicit written permission. Anything more requires that you either pay for it or get permission.

You seem to be missing that fact the plagiarism is a form of theft as is acquring a copy of a song or program. All plagiarism does is describe what you're stealing, so I would suggest against trying to make a point using semantic arguments.

Alright, Alright, I'm tired of this.


On your old comp, you can login to authenticate HL2 on your account.

Then, go into offline mode, close steam, now, go into the steam folder and copy clientregistry.blob, copy it to the steam folder on the other PC. done.

congradulations.

(that or you could just hook up your PC to the net for a few minutes. Is that really that hard?)

The day people need software is the day the nail is finally driven into this coffin that is humanity.

You don't need software. It's not food. It's not air. It's not water. It's a luxury you pay for. It's someone's work.

I'm going to call a spade a spade here.

You're a hypocritical *******.

zul wins

Hey buddy, whats this thread all aboot?

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Whine. Lots and lots of whine.

haha, valves anti-piracy protection will get a slap in the face once i steal my copy of HL2 from a store... suck on that one.

other than that, this thread sucks... everyone seems to go insane over nothing.

[edit - i advise everyone to go out and steal a copy of HL2 from a store instead of a website... prove to them that their protection suxbad]

Page, unfortunately you've fallen down without a leg to stand on, and to that end...



Stealing is stealing is stealing is wrong.

Oh, and student discout is damn reasonable - I got MATLAB through my uni for £50 (about $90 US). It might sound like a lot of money, but it's been a lifesaver. It's a $400 US program.

TOLD.

Depends on whether I can trust a company. MMORPG creators don't ask for personal details to register the game to a person, they ask for personal details to match the credit card number in order to charge money. Anyway, if an MMORPG company had a history of being cracked and having information stolen, I sure as hell would not sign up with them.

<3 Martyn.

I don't like activation methods myself. It's asking the software developer permission to use their product after paying for it. But I can see the potential to stopping piracy.

It seems that nowadays that to be viable in the software industry, I have to work for a large company or distribute my software under the GPL. Both are not toaly adverse to me but, should I want to make a program and try to sell it, it will be not an easy task. And I would really hate to see my program listed in a cracking site.

And PW, it does surprise me to learn that you support piracy and support Republican ideals. To play on political stereotypes, we're money grubbing, greedy b******s. Piracy is something we DON'T want.

What if someone really "needed" one of your website designs and didn't want to pay?

This isn't entirely true. I work for a very small company (about 5 employees). I work as the lead software developer but we don't distribute our software, we use it to provide a service. Think of something similar to Yahoo Stores, where Yahoo provides a web service to people that want to sell stuff online but don't have the knowledge to set up a server, shopping cart software, register domain names, get an SSL certificate, etc.

There are plenty of small software shops making money, too - http://fogcreek.com/ http://vbulletin.com/ http://sourcegear.com/ to name a few.

Personally, if I started selling software, for instance most of those are web-based software companies, I would definitely run searches on google and go after people that have the software installed but don't have a license. However, this wouldn't be that important if I was making decent money - you have to think of it like this:

I can spend 4 hours a day tracking down and eradicated piracy (which doesn't net me any more money) OR
I can spend that 4 hours a day improving my product, doing marketing, or working on new products (definitely will net more money)

I'm definitely not saying that piracy is right - I hate it, but I think these companies that spend so much money fighting piracy are missing the big picture.

Yes, but you're also supposed to be very egocentric. You want to pirate other people's stuff but you don't want them to pirate yours.

Brian, I'll have to ask this, as I'm probably remembering it wrong..... but you didn't have to fill in any personal details to create an account at Steam, did you? Only an account name, a password, an e-mail adress and the CD Key(s) of the game in question. At least, that's the only information that I can find when I quickly check my account details in Steam.

I just wanted to ask you if you really believe that HL2 MP is not crackable? SP will be cracked. That's sure. And I am pretty sure there will be somekind of emulated "Steam-Server" for LAN. (I heard about something like that for NFSU that doesn't even support LAN at all... it is some tool that plays server and so you can play on LAN) I think this can be adopted for use in the internet as well.

I don't know if this NFSU thing really worked and if there is something like that for the internet.

It'd probably be a bit difficult, perhaps even impossible to make such a tool for the internet where people can play anonymously. (Perhaps some "Server" that is located somewhere in Russia or some other country that doesn't care for piracy that somehow lets the clients join without any ips beeing saved?)

And I don't know much of pirating, I bet the pros will have some creative ideas to crack it.

So. The essence of my post is only, that nothing is uncrackable. I never heard of any software that was uncrackable. And this won't change. Is Windows XP uncrackable? Is NWN uncrackable?
I don't know if a cracked NWN is playable online. But I know that it occured allready some times that I couldn't join games because my CD Key was used. And I bought it.


And now a little personal note.... I don't want any software where I need an internet connection to authentificate or something similar. Nor do I want pirated software. And I can't afford some software like Photoshop. That's one cause why I switched to linux. =)

I didn't sign up for Steam, hell no! Even an email address is too much. What happens if my email service gets disconnected and I lose my password? Oops, can't play or upgrade the game! What a load of crap. Anyway, I don't want HL2 anymore (the commercials made it seem vaguely interesting but this authentication stuff is a definite "no"). I'm just worried at where this is taking the industry. Like I said, if Railroad Tycoon 7 did something like this, everyone would point at laugh. But because of all the HL fans, people actually take STEAMing piles of crap like this seriously.

My stance is not so much political as it is personal. I personally resent these companies for what they have been doing and the methodology that they have been adopting. (steam, activation, etc.)

Ironically, people will probably be driven to piracy as these measures get more and more intrusive. these countermeasures only serve as an inconvenience to legit users, whereas the warezers have a vast supply of cracks and keygens available to bypass the protections entirely. More and more people will begin learning this and will probably start to use keygens and cracks to avoid these intrusive protections.

the point is, the companies CAN'T WIN. If they can build it, the warezers can crack it. They can build things like steam, but warezers can reverse engineer the program enough to neutralize these protections. It is inevitable. They can't beat the warez community, so they may as well give up.


And I feel like I'm being actively targeted here just because of my views. Dj Yoshi admitted to pirating a few things, and you haven't sent much criticism his way as opposed to me.

You're grasping at straws here. This is a case of apples and oranges. I don't release my designs until the client pays up. Once i receive my payment in full and ftp the site, my contracts usually stipulate that I give up the copyright of the work to my clients, but I reserve the right to display the work in any way that i choose.

So, if it gets stolen and replicated, its my client's problem, not mine.

...I think you took his analogy way too literally.

That's how software works unless you steal it.

Why do you guys defend this anti-piracy thing so much? It's not like its in your best interests to care, the companies are probably not giving you anything to make you feel this way. What's in it for you?

If you asked the average person about piracy, they would likely not give a s***. They would probably take warez if you offered it to them, but they wouldn't care enough to debate the subject.

I feel the way I do about it b/c I want the software market to return to the way it was in the pre-p2p days. Things were so easy back then. It's probably not going to happen, but that doesn't mean that I have to agree with what the companies are doing.

I'm against piracy because I'm currently spending a lot of money to study so I can work in the software industry in a few years. I don't want lazy ****s who can't pay for software getting me laid off.

True, but I don't make them give me a serial number or make them crawl to ask permission to use the site I built for them.

It's just a proof of purchase. It's like you waiting for your client's check to clear before delivering his site to him.

This is so hilarious. You're defending the source of the problem, saying that it's the solution. The reason people (like me) can't use their keygens is because *******s who don't want to shell out the $20 for the game used a keygenerator that came up with my keygen and registered it.



Quoted for personal relevance. This is the exact reason why I despise people who warez.

Actually in this case many people have purchased the game already but they can't play the game. Imagine if your client paid you but you decided not to give him his goods until a later date. I bet that would piss him off!