Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. While most people will just use it for piracy, I'm sure a good few will end up contributing to Wikipedia as well.
How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?
How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?
Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so.
All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software.
Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit.
Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff.
Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed.
For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps.
I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.
The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.
So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating.
Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them.
It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld.
That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.
For example, I paid what is equivalent today (inflation corrected) 17 USD to get the DEMO copy of Wolfenstein 3D.
And to me, paying 17 USD for the DEMO of Wolfenstein 3D, was the coolest stuff ever, because I could play it in first place!
When I heard of "doom", the "legendary game that is wolfenstein 3D but with green floors that cause damage and bloody monsters", I wanted it badly... All I could find about it was hearsay, no legal copies, even of a demo existed, no pirated copies existed either! The few people that played it was only on someone else computer, they described it to me, and I really wanted to see it, they described a technical marvel, something awesome!
My dad is a engineer, he was hired by Kia Motors to do some contract stuff for them, he found out that the CEO (or president, or some other extremely high level executive, forgot the details, I was just a kid) of Brazil Kia Motors had a imported legal copy of Doom, and Doom2, he mentioned to the guy, and he made a copy for me, 20 floppies.
I took care of them like if they were the most precious things ever, because floppies that I had were easy to corrupt, and Doom, and Doom2 was too priceless to lose, and it took too much work to get it (I ended visiting Kia motors with my dad several times, and helping a bit when I was allowed to, the total effort to get the thing was something like several months of visiting Kia a lot, nagging people, paying attention, helping install steel cable structures...).
And it was worth it, Doom was legendary as I imaginated in my head (even using PC Speaker audio, because a real sound car costed here about 20 times the monthly mininum wage), I wanted to make it too, I wanted to be a programmer able to create my own Doom, I needed to learn C, and whatnot, the game was fun, and working a lot to get that pirated copy was very worth it.
Then I wonder, what would have happened if Doom and Doom2 had some strong DRM that prevented the Kia executive from making a copy for me?
Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
That was my first thought, too. Ignoring the legal issues, that is pretty clever.
Pretty damn clever, for sure! Now Wikipedia is just a network for them!
However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people more informed, but the bulk of piracy is part of the problem.
1) It's diverting considerable effort that could go into free software. If you had to either pay for Photoshop or use a free solution, Gimp and Krita would get insanely more resources. In other words, piracy is a key element in closed-software dominance.
2) Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. So sharing research papers is not the same thing as what commonly falls under the "piracy" moniker.
That's what that snark meant.
Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too.
Oops. That was snark. :)
>But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.
I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?
Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades. Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody. Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.
Maybe my objective is to tell you what you should do and you shouldn't judge my objectives? I don't know.
There's assumptions you have to make if you want to have a healthy conversation. For example, the assumption that when someone enters a conversation as an active participant, they're not just here to waste everyone's time. That's essentially trolling.
> correlations
Just because you have "links between TV exposure and bad school grades" doesn't mean "TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles". If I told you there's a link between knife usage and missing fingers, would you tell me knives are made to reduce the average amount of fingers?
> a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.
If you don't want to be ridiculed and want your points to be answered seriously, maybe you shouldn't be so snarky all the time and hear people out when they tell you to stop.
You can't have it both ways. You can't be an arse to everybody and then expect them to treat you with respect.
They are made to make money. The ones that 'keep people as uneducated imbeciles' are an unfortunate byproduct.
The outcome of downloading research papers or educational content is not the same as downloading entertainment.