Educating Youngsters About Piracy

Colin Winters writes: "The New York Times has an article that is a follow-up to the recent raid by the government on pirates in universities. Some professors believe that "By the time we get them, they already believe it [piracy]'s right." An interesting read. There's also an interesting bit on how business software is now 1/3 pirated, down from 1/2 in 1995. In America, it's only 24%. From the way companies like Microsoft whine about piracy, I'd assumed the figures were increasing, not decreasing."

Re:eBay closed auction I WON AND PAID for "piracy"

[Renraku]

Read the EULA that you agreed to by coming into contact with a person that owns the product. It clearly states that if Microsoft says so, then it is so. If you order products from their website, pay for them and everything, Microsoft pretty much has the right to say, "Its pirated software" and take your money, and possibly even prosecute you for being a pirate. Someone should show them what pirates are really like, and bust into their office and steal, raze and plunder.

Re:Teaching teachers not to violate

[Caez]

It is not a Loophole. That copyright law was made on purpose. It was made so libraries and schools didn't have to buy a copy of a book 2,000 times. (i.e. my highschool's population) They did this so teachers could copy certian parts of copyrighted works to use as teaching tools. If he copied the whole book, or didn't use it for educational purposes, however, it is illegal. If the {Redmond, WA based software giant} wants schools to use Window$ instead of pirating it or using Linux or even Macs, they should institute some policy like this. You have to buy a certian percentages of licenses per computer instead of 100% because most schools can't afford it.

It's not piracy, it's not stealing, it's inflation

[Penguinoflight]

"software piracy" isn't really piracy, and it's not really stealing either, because the origional product is still there. It simply is sealing value, something we consider inflation. Some people would even say it's not stealing very much value, because most people who "inflate" software woundn't buy the product.

Re:The Value of software

[numo]

The people buying computer games are not living on a $17/month food budget.
No. But where I live the new copy of MS Office XP Standard costs more than two average monthly net wages. And this is a country that hopes to get into the European Union in the next few years, not some thirld-world country.

The people know very well that warez is illegal, there is no big need to educate them. But until the economy grows enough the piracy is unavoidable.

Using of the alternatives is normally not an option because of interoperability. When our premier minister meets Bill Gates and is excited about how much he is "donating" when he gives the schools the software for much less price, we can only expect that the open formats don't have much priority in our country... Hell, the media of the neighbour state called Gates "the father of the Internet"!