Talk To a Convicted Warez Guy 1404
Chris Tresco is one of those evil "software pirates" cybermoms warn you about. He was a sysadmin at MIT, and also a member of "the secretive Internet software trading ring known as 'DrinkOrDie'" who got caught by the DoJ's Operation Buccaneer, got convicted, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison on August 16. Chris has a little time left on the outside before he goes away and has agreed to spend some of it answering your questions, so ask away. (Usual Slashdot interview rules.)
Do you wish you'd raped someone instead (Score:4, Insightful)
Why did you trade? (Score:2, Insightful)
It was fun?
It was a polical statment?
It was for profit?
Liked networks over CD?
Never though about it?
OpenSource (Score:2, Insightful)
Piracy Justification (Score:4, Insightful)
Blue Byte released an amazing game called "Incubation: Time Is Running Out," which sold moderately well...but not enough to cover their original expenditure on the product. They then released an expansion pack, "Incubation: The Wilderness Missions," which was the first product ever to use SafeDisc. The mission pack outsold the original game by 1.5x.
How can you justify piracy when so few titles break even on their development costs?
Re:Was it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Take the syllogism: "All New Yorkers must be Americans."
(So are you saying that if you're not from
New York, you're not from America?)
Given that the guy's an MIT student, we can safely assume with a reasonable degree of assurance that he's a smart cookie.
"All MIT students are smart enough to understand the consequences of illegal actions. He was an MIT student. Therefore, he's smart enough to understand the consequences."
The contraverse is not neccessarily true. Don't twist his logic like that. It fails.
Re:The Economics Of Warez (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, one of the most requested serial numbers requested (in a mac channel) is the sn# for Ircle, the shareware client most apple users use that has a 30 day limit.
However, the ppl that pirate warez rarely use the products for more than a week (unless it's a game), if in most cases, use them for non-commercial purposes since businesses usually need to be legit.
Personally, I don't see warez as a huge financial problem for *large* software companies. The people that use them are small-time users who would never be able to afford them, they build a userbase of people that use their products for corporations (that pay for lots of licenses), and retain the marketshare of the product (adobe/quark), (office/claris/openoffice), etc.
Legality vs Morality (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you find most people are more concerned with the morality of software piracy, rather than the legality? (e.g. piracy is bad because its morally wrong rather than piracy is bad because it's illegal)
Re:The Economics Of Warez (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see a justification in stealing something becuase you feel the price is too high. Only in this industry does that mode of thinking seem to carry any weight.
Well, in this industry the cost of duplication is zero. I'm not defending software "pirates", but I wish people would stop equating copying bits on a hard disk to theft of physical goods.
What kind of time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Was it worth it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Do you wish you'd raped someone instead (Score:5, Insightful)
There are other idiotic sentencing issues...you can spend more time in prison for bringing a natural harmless plant over an imaginary line than you would if you held someone at gunpoint and robbed them. In the latter case, the person could be traumatised for rest of their life, looking over their shoulder every time they go out. In the first case, well they might feel the urge to eat some junk food.
It depends who the crime is against really. If it's big business like the RIAA, software companies or the alcohol & tobacco lobbies, you are in trouble. Harm a real person, you'll be out by Friday.
Regarding your fate: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stealing? (Score:1, Insightful)
Bandwidth at universities is like electric cars. It is free and clean. The universities are just power hungry pigs that ripoff everybody. The fiber is in the ground and was payed for long ago.
Okay, I fogot the other stupid arguements the redboxers/environuts have for their self justification, but if anybody else can remember more please respond to this post with them!
Thank you
The Open Don Knotts guy
Re:The Economics Of Warez (Score:2, Insightful)
Their are a TON of ways you can steal without it being a physical good. If I hack a university and enroll myself classes, free of charge, I would consider that stealing.
Re:Couple questions (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not only illegal to steal code, it is wrong.
I also think the closed proprietary model of software development is wrong, but the same laws that uphold their proprietary licenses uphold my GPL and BSD licenses. If it is wrong for people to violate those licenses (and I think it is), then it is wrong to break a EULA from Microsquish or whomever.
We do not ALL do it. There is at least one person who does not (and I'm willing to bet thousands if not millions of others).
Re:You have it backwards. (Score:5, Insightful)
Particularly a few years ago, when the web was new and everyone and his brother suddenly needed to manipulate images, Photoshop was the leading (but by no means the only) photo program out there. But it was way too expensive for Joe JPEG to buy to crop his pics for his website. What to do?
What Adobe did was turn a blind eye to casual piracy, while pursuing corporate users who didn't pay for Photoshop. Letting individuals pirate meant that no other, lower-cost program emerged to compete with the Industry Standard - and those freebie programs that come with scanners etc. went nowhere.
Result: legit buyers didn't have a $49.95 program they could buy to run their websites, or at least there was no obvious choice. So they all forked over (and continue to fork over) the bux for the real thing - $599 new IIRC. More revenue for Adobe, and less competition!
Re:Do you wish you'd raped someone instead (Score:2, Insightful)
"Sometimes to get your point across, you have to advocate the position you're fighting."
I'm the person who posted the question. I know a few rape victims; the closest friend I've ever had was raped when she was 6 years old - now, 35 years later, it still affects her. She's attempted suicide more times that I can count.
Software piracy doesn't tend to invoke the feelings family members and loved ones of the victim who want to wait outside the prison and beat the living shit out of the rapist!
You're right, it doesn't.
It also doesn't destroy the victim's self esteem,
Nor does it screw them up for most of their life, preventing them from having a 'normal' relationship.
It also doesn't cause them to contemplate (and sometimes attempt) suicide.
So why does someone who copied a few bits warrant more punishment than a rapist?
Anonymous is for good reason
Yes, but you'll probably never know what that reason is.
and the COWARD shoe fits!
I don't see you posting your real name and address here.
Re:Do you wish you'd raped someone instead (Score:3, Insightful)
On a side note, I saw a story on the news last night that several people arrived on the scene of an attempted child kidnapping. They managed to get the two children free from the kidnapper, and kicked and beat him until the police arrived. While I don't condone vigilante actions, this is probably the roughest punishment the kidnapper will face. I'm sure he'll get minimal jail time.
Another story I saw was that a police officer was killed during an alleged road race. An earlier death of an innocent member of the public in a road race resulted in a minimal sentence for the driver. The government's response to the problem of road racing is to educate the public as to the dangers of driving at such speeds. As in many cases, they're completely missing the point. Justice and punishment is supposed to be about making someone think twice before proceeding with a crime. To do this, they should convict a driver of manslaughter or murder (you can argue the differences), take away their license for a long period of time (20+years) and throw them in jail for a long period of time.
A third story that has been progressing was the case of an illegal Japanese immigrant who abandoned her babies in her house for ten days while she went out clubbing and partying with her boyfriend. The children died of starvation (and probably other effects from not eating or drinking). The news programs proclaimed that the Government's support system failed this woman, and as a result two children died. No, the system didn't fail. The woman failed. She received something like seven years in jail less the year she has already served, so she will probbaly be out in about six years.
All of these stories took place in Canada.
At what point did people decide that responsibility is no longer theirs? When you drive, break the speed limit and receive a ticket it's not the fault of the Police or the Government. It's your fault for breaking the limit. You can't turn round and complain that the Police are being too heavy handed.
I'm sick and tired of Justice systems no longer being about Justice. I'm sick and tired of hearing people laying the blame elsewhere. Responsbility for your family's lives, your life and the life of others around you is in your hands. Don't blame anyone else for it. Next time you try to jump a red light, or the next time you speed pass a pedestrian crossing the road, reflect for a second what might have happened. Could you live with the guilt of killing someone due to your impatience?
If you haven't guessed, I'm a carless pedestrian, and I'm tired of drivers trying to run me over as they can't wait for more than 5 seconds while I cross the road.
Rant over, but not finished.
Re:Sharing != Piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
No, we need civil crimes with stiff judgements for people whose only crime is depriving another person of some theoretical income.
In the end, this is probably better for taxpayers, copyright holders and defendants alike.
Re:Couple questions (Score:4, Insightful)
This is, quite frankly, bullshit. Yes, copyright laws do impose an artificial scarcity on intellectual property. This is because there's no way to provide a direct, capitalistic means of accounting for the real scarcity in intellectual property -- the scarcity of time, effort, money, and talent required to initially create the work.
This scarcity is why I personally haven't made any blockbuster movies or software projects requiring hundreds of man-years. If this scarcity didn't exist, we wouldn't care about copyright because we could easily and instantly produce comparable goods.
People who argue against the government-supported artificial scarcity generally aren't recognizing that it's that very same scarcity that causes the artificially scarce goods to be viable in the first place. If you get rid of copyright, the artists from a video game will probably go into something less IP-dependent like the advertising industry (which still has IP ties, but it could demand payment in advance, and the revenue stream would indirectly be the sale of their customers' tangible products). The programmers would seek employ at traditional companies needing IT staff. Sure we'd have some amateur/hobby free games, but nothing like the heavy-duty, multi-year efforts that we're accustomed to.
In short, until we come up with a way to create many quality games for free, copying them for free doesn't solve anything.
Re:Stealing? (Score:1, Insightful)
He's not going to answer this question. If he does, he's copping to another crime (assuming this wasn't one of the charges he's already been convicted of). I suggest that, even if this question gets moderated up to a 5, the editors don't send it, because the answer will just be "I plead the 5th".
Re:Couple questions (Score:3, Insightful)
c - Chris
Re:Pirating software is like... (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is a resounding NO. If you rebroadcast their material, substituting your own ads, you have profited by infringing copyright. Motive in copyright infringment cases is very, very important. If you do not profit from infringement, the violation is not as serious as if you gain profit. Additionally, profitting from copyright infringement leaves you liable for damages equal to or greater than the profit you gained by infringing someone else's copyright.
It's not theft. It is copyright infringement. They are two dramatically different things, although the major software and media companies would have you believe otherwise.
Again, you are incorrect. If you produce goods similar to, or in many cases as identical to (in any case where patent, trademark, or copyright do not apply), someone else's and place your own trademark upon it, you have done nothing wrong. If, however, you place another's trademark upon it (implying that it was produced by the other manufacturer), you are guilty of trademark infringement. Alternatively, if you use a patented invention and do not pay patents to the patentor, you are liable for patent infringement claims. Similarly, if you duplicate a copyright work, you are not guilty of stealing from the author; you are guilty of infringing upon his right to control copying of his work.
The only reasons one could proffer the arguments above, that I can see, is 1) simply lack of education regarding U.S. law. I am not a lawyer, but I do believe I have a sound understanding of laws where they affect my day-to-day life. There are also 2) those paid to have that viewpoint. Hilary Rosen and others are paid part to promote these views of copyright infringement as theft. To promote an alternative view disagrees with the corporate agenda, and this disagreement would most likely eliminate their sources of income.
The fundamental problem with the thinking comes about because of the nature of what we're dealing with. Information is trivially reproduced, even when spoken. I suggest you study the history of copyright, to fully understand the nature of the laws. Today, we have a society where such information can be reproduced for (effectively) free. It's my personal opinion that Copyright is a doomed concept. However, we have not come up with a suitable reward yet for authorship to promote the science and arts that is not Copyright. Until we do, we will be stuck with this system that so obviously maps so poorly to reality.
There are certainly cases where the line between copyright infringement and theft is very blurred. For instance, if one breaks into a computer system and makes copies of information that were never intended to be made public. One has obviously violated copyright in that case, since U.S. law regards all authorship as copyrighted. Is it theft? In that case, I don't know; just as "breaking and entering" is considered "breaking and entering" (vandalism and trespass, if you prefer), if you don't steal anything for entering, but instead copy important documents, you've not stolen the documents, but made copies in violation of the wishes and reasonable expectation of the holder. The company or individual never intended to release the information to the public for profit (the point of copyright), the information was reasonably expected to remain private, and consent for this action was implicitly denied. In that regard, information violation seems more analogous to rape than theft: one has expressly violated the wishes of the holder of the information, taken nothing from them, but used them in a way inconsistent with their will. Copyright infringement on released goods, however, is similar to using a hooker for her intended purpose, but refusing to pay her. One has no implied contract, the other does. The penalties for rape are spelled out in the law, and include government-sanctioned prison time. The penalties for not paying your prostitute are the same as for not paying any service person: if your bill is not paid, you are sent to a collection agency, which then may take you to court to seek damages. It is (often) not treated the same as theft, since the "goods" (a service) are intangible, you have not deprived anyone of anything except time invested (which has value, but is again intangible and cannot be stolen) and potential profits. In some cases, particularly where the one infringed upon believes the intent was to defraud (once again, fraud law, not theft), they may seek criminal remedies. Most don't, though, because by so doing they are depriving themselves of a potential customer, getting bad press, and preventing the infringer from quickly paying the damages by depriving him/her of income.
Note that the paragraph above is entirely my opinion, and not really part of my initial refutation. I simply think that most software companies and authors would do well to remember that they simply sell their time for money. Their "product" is a service, and our current model of copyright attempts to treat information as a tangible good, which it is not. Those prepared to acknowledge this fact (as Microsoft seems to be doing with their license renewal services) will probably do OK as the economy transforms to take advantage of new realities. Those who insist on treating intangible as tangible will eventually go out of business as realists (the customers) begin to treat it as the intangible, inherently value-less thing it is.
A few links for you to peruse:
Fundamentally, it's a thorny issue with a whole lot of ramifications. Those who attempt to cast copyright infringement as a black and white case of theft are intentionally misleading you as to what is going on. It is its own legal domain with its own remedies and penalties, entirely aside from traditional laws regarding property theft. There is no such thing as "intellectual property": there are patents, trademarks, and copyrights which give rights to works based upon a well-established but sorely broken legal framework.
Re:How serious was your crime? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to "improve your skills as a SysAdmin", then feel free to setup your own box and break into it all day long. Hell get a friend to set it up and you can go back and forth trying to break into each others setups.
While the Slashdot community doens't like to admit, cracking (for the most part) is a crime. Defacing a web-site is the real world equivalent of boarding up the front of a store. Sure its just temporary, but its certainly not good for business now is it?
THe mere suggestion that we as society should just tolerate it (boys will be boys after all) is simply ludicrous. If this guy didn't want to go to jail he shouldn't have broken the law. These laws exist for very real reasons.... take responsibility and don't try to justify illegal actions because its "educational."
Hell by that logic I should go out and rob a few banks because I might want to one day work in the physical security industry.
Re:I'm not the devil but I play his advocate on tv (Score:2, Insightful)
C'mon. Relativism is a slippery slope and this is not a good season for tray sledding.
Re:I'm not the devil but I play his advocate on tv (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people wish to say something like "We can't favor one person's morality over the other" without accepting the full implications of that statement. Namely, if each person gets to decide right and wrong, then we lose the ability to judge any action as wrong, no matter how horrific.
That said, I don't pretend to have all the right answers about which things under which circumstances are right, wrong, and optional. But until someone convinces me otherwise, I am going to assume that the categories exist, and do my best to figure out what things go into which.
Re:I'm not the devil but I play his advocate on tv (Score:4, Insightful)
The key to any moral system is recognizing that people have different moral values, that those differences can be legitimate, but still being able to make value judgments regarding which action is correct for a particular situation. Any hard and fast rule will cause problems, but the recognition that people live differently is not the same as total moral relativism.
How horrible is this, is that even a legal arrest? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rant/Personal Opinion below >>>
Personally, I think it's all a bunch of b**ls*it. I'm a software developer, I work for a national software company and I write my own stuff. Do I get offended or angry if someone cracks something of mine. Not at all. Why? Because if I was that concerned about someone pirating my stuff I would have been more careful with coding the protection. I mean, the entire software development corporation structure wouldn't have existed if people couldn't 'crack' or reverse engineer software. They wouldn't have modded a PDP and added instructions Digital asked to put in the next PDP, Microsoft wouldn't have existed because QDOS wouldn't have (QDOS was a ripped copy of CPM), Compaq wouldn't have been able to create an IBM Clone of the XT, there wouldn't be an Adobe Photoshop for sure, cause someone probably would have claimed the rights to all the filtering algorthms, and whoops, Xerox with the mouse as wel. And what's sickest of all is that now these companies are banking on core foundations of software and technological development not being legal. The fact that I can take any
I know my software will always be cracked, and in a way I'm glad it does because it helps me make my software better, and I know that people actually want what I'm working on. But laws should not be placed for the ignorance of companies like Microsoft and Adobe. How many banks do you walk into that hasn't a high grade hard to defeat security system? I believe software companies need to start programming their software with the same ideas, instead of trying to enforce crapola like this. Maybe that's why I've been slowly moving to the open source ideals, I'm fed up with all of it.
This isn't meant to cause a flamewar, just wanted the convicted to hear the opinion of one of his so called 'targets'.
illegal software (Score:1, Insightful)
i drive 90 - 100 mph to work in kansas city, obviously the speed limit is 55-65 mph. am i breaking the law, yes, do i care, no. a coworker smokes pot, illegal, you betcha, immoral, in my opinion yes, do i care, no, am i gonna narc, no way.
simple rules in life:
1. mind your own business, and others do same
2. you do the crime, you haveta do the time
3. you roll the dice and ya takes ya chances
Re:Prove me wrong. (Score:3, Insightful)
Something ain't right.
Kintanon