I'm Pirating the Next Version of Windows
littlebitofcode.com
littlebitofcode.com
In the current climate, it's this kind of blog post that undoes a lot of the good work people are doing around protesting SOPA/PIPA. For those with a very simple view of copyright, saying you're going to 'steal Microsoft's IP' because you've been inconvenienced is just evidence that Something Must Be Done and the proposed law is a Good Thing.
I'm not commenting on whether pirating Windows is ethical. I'm just pointing out that sometimes you'll have to ditch a lot of software to ditch Windows.
If the software you need only runs on Windows then you should pay for Windows. Those that can move to Mac, Linux, etc and get away with using Wine or other alternatives should. The markets for alternative OS'es will grow then more people will be able to move.
Sounds like you are stuck on the Windows environment. You should stay and pay for Windows. There's nothing wrong with that.
No idea whether or not it's a good replacement as I've never used either.
Adobe will cross-license Mac Photoshop for you. Have to talk to a person, deactivate PS, and fill out a destruction form.
Use your Windows only software in there
Secondly, I'm pointing out that a lot of people have spent money on licenses for Windows software that has a Mac/*nix equivalent. (I haven't personally, but this applies to a lot of people.) If you have hundreds or thousands of dollars invested in those licenses, switching away might not be financially viable.
If either of these situations applies to you, I sympathize with your complaints about Windows and its licensing system.
If I find it necessary to move from the Mac to something else, as much as I hate it I will cut the cord and not worry about the software investments that I have made.
If you have an application that only works on Windows, then you need to either (a) deal with the Microsoft Tax and all that implies or (b) yell at your software vendor and tell them you want alternative platform support.
What I mean by this is, while Notepad.exe may run flawlessly, SolidWorks doesn't.
The worst thing for Microsoft would be a strict enforcement of copyright: people would be running to alternatives.
This strikes me as a valid ethical position, though I happen to think things are more complicated than that.
People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.
This, on the other hand, doesn't make sense. You seem to be assuming that the invariant is that the user will not be paying Microsoft. And that might be true for you. If you're not going to be sending any money to MS no matter what, then yes, using MS products helps them somewhat.
For the author of the article, however, the invariant is that he will be using MS products. Since he's going to be using their products in any case, when he is fed up with their policies and decides to pirate instead of purchase until they get fixed, of course this hurts them.
If you want to argue that nothing is invariant, and that the best way to hurt MS is to both stop purchasing and stop using, well, of course that's true, but it's not relevant. What the author is talking about is simply stopping paying for something until it gets fixed; whether he still uses it or not is of very minor importance to MS next to whether or not he pays for it. His goal isn't to destroy MS or make them irrelevant; on the contrary, he just wants a better customer experience.
What's more important than whether he pays for it is whether everybody else will still pay for it.
If everyone around you use Windows, you probably have to still use Windows in order to be able to collaborate with them. And you don't even have to think about open standard.
The more people around you use other OS, the more you are likely to think about using platform-independent technology. Then the more likely you are to be able to move to other platform since there are less and less fraction of people holding you on Windows.
The author using Windows gives everyone around him the inertia of moving to other platform. He is part of the reason why most people knows how to use only Windows.
And then when big company wants to buy a platform they will chose Windows because most people use it. And big company will pay. And big company will buy more expensive software and extra support.
"If you don't like it, then don't use it" is pretty useless advice in this situation.
But most people aren't ready or capable of learning a whole new operating system they have to install and manage themselves (unless Linux comes preinstalled on the computer). And most importantly, almost everyone uses certain software for which there is no equivalent on other OSes.
Now consider a certain user who is completely fed up with the way Microsoft has been (mis)treating their paying customers and doesn't want to support this behaviour with his money anymore. If you're not opposed to piracy "on principle", which is fine but ends all discussion before it can even start, then pirating Windows seems like a possible (yet illegal) solution.
I buy all my software but I still can't really blame them.
If that's too much, though, I'd recommend just using either http://office.live.com or http://docs.google.com. They're easier to use, the files don't get lost, they have all the features students will need, the documents auto-save, they're available on any computer with an internet connection, it's easy to share the documents (read-only or read-write) online, and the services are free. I've set my daughter up to write all her papers online, and it works great.
If you haven't tried http://office.live.com, you should check it out. It's really a slick.
I think the "more right" reaction would be to complain about this, at increasing levels of hierarchy, rather than support a monopoly that will push the $119 bill on other families who might be worse off. Either way, I don't blame them for not wasting too much time on it.
I see why it won't happen: Many pirates can't wait until a 99% feature-compatible competitor emerges. People who don't want to buy Windows or Photoshop can also not just throw money in a Kickstarter pot instead (imagine how much $$$ that would be?!) - I can't see a good competitor emerging without iterative market forces.
A tragedy - I would love to work full-time on a killer product pitted against either of them, but I just can't see how it fits into the scheme of the market. :(
Gimp would be a good competitor to Photoshop if it could just get a ton of focus on usability. If you want to "fight" Photoshop, that would be a good place to help out.
I think the GIMP stinks and I would still honestly dedicate myself to it for a small salary. I would madly dedicate myself to it if I were to sell it commercially and with perfect copyright in place, because then my "salary" would depend on my merits. But I won't, because I know everybody is used to warezing Photoshop by now. (FWIW, I spent a long time being the target of laughter and facepalms by not warezing Photoshop but supporting cheaper alternatives instead. There's even a social push to do it now.)
Maybe this will work again once we have perfect DRM in the disguise of SaaS, but that's a day I fear for different reasons.
Can I pirate a copy, because it is getting damn ridiculous. What do you say?
TV shows are a great example. I cut my cable about a year ago and haven't looked back since. I refuse to pay a premium for channels packaged together that I never watch.
Currently, I use a combination of Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Zune Marketplace to fill my content needs. They provide a great user experience but the pricing structure/availability is lacking. Most shows available on Prime, Apple Tv, Zune are only available for purchase. What if I don't want to purchase them? Why can't I rent TV shows just like I rent movies? I have never been one to purchase and own content since I usually don't watch things more than once. I pay to rent movies all the time from Apple TV and Zune via Xbox.
Hulu Plus is great, but they have a fraction of the content I would like to watch. Basically, there's not a perfect solution yet but I refuse to go back to cable. Here's what I would like to see:
1. Charge me per view, don't sell me the content to own.
2. If the margin is too thin for the rental model, throw an ad in there...I won't mind. (Hulu plus does this)
3. Let the content producers sell their content directly to me to increase margin. This can be done by the content producers creating apps for Xbox, Roku, etc.
4. Make all previous seasons of shows available to me for rental to increase revenue.
5. Use these awesome new technologies to create deeper experiences/interactions with the content, which will open up new revenue streams.
The one and only time this is true is when something is pirated pre-release, thereby causing an actual financial impact to the rightful owner. You'll also find that there are court cases backing this line of reasoning up.
I'm not sure what your "secret treasure map" example has to do with either theft or copyright infringment.
Your SSN and details are all intellectual property too!
If a crook fools a bank into giving them money, the bank is the victim of the theft. It should be one of the banks primary responsibilities to authenticate the parties to whom they give out money. But if the crook is good enough, it's fair to say the bank is the victim.
But instead they say "you are a victim of identity theft" in order to make you the victim.
..You could also make the case that it deprives you of the ability to use your own reputation.
If I copy something of yours, the impact to you is zero.
Using unlicensed software
copyright infringement
downloading a torrent
pirating
..among others.
None of them roll off the tongue as nicely as "steal" or "thief", but copyright infringement is just as illegal as stealing.
The industry groups have been campaigning for years (with great success) to ensure they mean the same thing. They do not.
Please don't fall into their trap.
This is all kind of off-topic to the OP, and doesn't address why people should or should not pay for their software, music, and movies, but I think theft or fraud is an accurate term to use.
When does the act of stealing occur? If I download a torrent and then delete it without watching/playing/listening, did I steal it? If so, then does that mean repeatedly copying the file to and from an external hard drive is repeated theft?
Does it become stealing only if I make use of the material? If I buy the movie and show it to ten house guests for free, are they thieves? They didn't pay to watch and the author would have preferred it if they did. If they aren't thieves, why would they become thieves if I uploaded ten copies to each friend instead of showing it to them in my living room? Of course, I would be infringing on the author's legal copyright, but I don't see where any stealing can be definitively identified.
In terms of quantifiable impact, I think there is a clear ethical distinction between flipping bits on a disk and taking possession of material property.
You're depriving another of something that is rightfully theirs, control over their creative content.
Yes, but "control over creative content" is a nebulous concept that bares only a thin resemblance to things that we can determine are absolutely present (or not present, as in the case of theft)
Let's not get pedantic here, lest we devolve into discussing what "to steal the spotlight" means.
This is exactly my point. I don't think the difference between "to steal the spotlight" and "to steal a spotlight" is a pedantic distinction.
Of course, the ethical difference is probably larger than simply double. To use an old saying, let us assume that:
potential sale = a bird in the bush
access to physical product = a bird in the hand
a bird in the hand = 2 * (a bird in the bush)
a bird in the bush = x * (a bird in the hand + a bird in the bush)
a bird in the bush = x * (2 * a bird in the bush + a bird in the bush)
a bird in the bush = x * (3 * a bird in the bush)
a bird in the bush / 3 = x * a bird in the bush
1/3 = x
With piracy, the RIAA has lost the potential sale to the individual pirate. However, they still can sell the same DRMed AAC file to someone else. With our theft example, not only has Toyota lost the ability to sell to the thief: they've also lost the ability to sell that car to anyone else in the world. Therefore, if
X = likelihood of sale to one individual
X * world population * price
X * 1 * price
First of all, relatively pricing should not matter. By your logic, if Toyota's price was suddenly 0.5 * price, then stealing just got two times better! What's wrong is wrong.
Second, your equation does not do justice to math. If your definition of X is the same as mine (i.e. average likelihood an individual will buy this item, independent of the world population) then you're saying Toyota's lost income can potentially be GREATER than the price of the car.
In clearer terms, if
dX / d(world population) = 0
lost income = X * world population * price
Where does the logic break down? Well it seems you've modeled the world's purchases of A SINGLE CAR as independent of each other. (In other words, you've modeled the lost income if Toyota had a car stolen by every human in the world.) What you really want, for n people, is
X*P + (1-X)*X*P + (1-X)^2*X*P + ... + (1-X)^(n-1)*X*P = P*[1-(1-X)^n]
So now the comparison is between (1 - (1-X)^N) and X. In the case of software like Windows 7 where relatively few people will go for a free alternative, X is pretty damn high. I won't argue that it's greater than (1 - (1-X)^N), but it's nowhere near your estimate of 7 billion.
In all seriousness, I definitely agree that the "relative virtue" of digital theft is better than other forms. But, as you acknowledge, there is indeed a loss of value.
Yes, welcome to adulthood.
Just because it's not stealing doesn't mean it's not illegal. You can't call anything that's illegal "stealing". It's piracy, which is illegal, but a different act than stealing.
People who started calling piracy stealing are the same people that cannot accurately understand what is actually happening, and people who benefit from calling it stealing instead of correctly portraiting it as it's own crime.
The desensitized image of piracy that people have is somewhat close to the way some people have a desensitized image of credit card fraud. The image that you're hurting a faceless corporation, and not an actual person. Introducing the moral part in an action that doesn't accurately portray a victim is the hard part. When stealing it's easy because you can relate and imagine the victim of an action.
Certainly the last time I downloaded a TV program I did using BitTorrent, rather than boarding the content producer's boat and taking it with force.
Pirate, verb, sense 3:
The unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work - to pirate software
Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: "thieves stole her bicycle".
Here's a link: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/piracy
How can you OWN a number ? It doesnt make any sense to me, and I'm a software developer that makes products.
Its like saying, "I own the file represented by 23445353568893534534565767525454546422223346445646" and you have to pay me use that number. Sounds pretty dumb when you really break down this entire intellectual property issue
The only reason for the tap on the shoulder is the effort by the industry groups to get people to conflate the two things. I hate seeing people be tricked, especially by such an odious organization :)
The general gist of the case is that a man made a business out of pressing and selling Elvis records without distribution rights. Because of this, he was indicted for (among other things) distribution of stolen property and conspiracy of the same.
The supreme court struck down all of the stealing charges, with an opinion that (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here): "Copyright implies a more complex set of property interests than simple theft".
The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of [section] 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
I was questioning the validity of your (albeit informal) research, that people don't find deprivation to be a key aspects of the meaning of theft.
Yes, earnings. When you grow up you will need to work and earn money and pay bills and balance a checkbook and without "piracy" (meaning stealing) controls, your Internet usage will be even higher than mine as you grow older.
Allowing "theft" be defined as depriving someone of something turns pretty much every crime in existence into "theft". Maybe we should just have 1 commandment - thou shalt not steal?
The difference is that if I steal your car, you have to pay to replace it. If I duplicate your car unlawfully, you still have a car but now so do I.
I understand why taking a CD from a HMV is stealing, because it deprives the store owner and content owner from making profit from their expense.
I don't understand why people call it stealing when I don't deprive the content owner/publisher from making profit and causing them no expense.
Copyright infringement isn't stealing just like it also isn't rape or murder. That doesn't make it right, but it definitely make it different from theft.
I remember before it was called stealing, because we were doing it without mass attention on a young internet. I've learnt to gloss over stealing and theft when reading about piracy because I've always seen it as hyperbole because I knew the net before was labeled that. I put it in the same basket as hacker vs. cracker, as much as I wanted everyone to know the difference - they don't care and its a boring argument.
It seems (correct me if I'm wrong) that people have been exposed to copyright infringement == stealing from so much media for so long that it is accepted by default. It didn't used to be this way.
It rolls right off the tongue.
http://allthingsd.com/20110826/apple-pulls-the-plug-on-tv-re...
That's almost $50 for an entire series. What's the average amount of time someone would spend watching TV series per night? An episode of this, an episode of that, 3 or 4 times a week. Suddenly you're spending vastly more than cable.
That's more than a modern box set will cost you, e.g. Boardwalk Empire, just released is selling for $40 on Amazon.
Yet they spent $5million per episode, that's a lot of views to just break even, plus the server hosting costs and vendor marketplace cut to make.
The whole thing is overly complex, per item rental is too complicated, a fractured marketplace makes subscriptions poor, the time drip model that studios and channels used to use is dying, but they won't let it go.
I think it'll be 5 to 10 years before we finally see a decent resolution to this where actually paying is less hassle than piracy.
It is not an easy thing to convince publishers that no DRM is the way to go, yet the music companies reluctantly agreed. Considering Apple is the number one retailer of music, ahead of Wal-Mart, this seems to have worked out quite well.
Rentals are hard to market because in the digital domain you have the same media file as you would if you had "purchased it", only the licensing is different. Charging hotel-room prices for movie rentals will not translate to many sales. Netflix has the right idea for rentals. Low-quality streaming, flat rate pricing.
Amazon broke through with DRM free MP3 originally.
As for the App Store DRM, I'm not sure how that's any different than Steam, which everyone seems to agree is a great model for both customers and developers.
Apple's App Store and Steam both allow you to install the same application on multiple devices.
I'm not sure if you can point to a better model that's been successful in the past. Some indie developers have done alright with DRM free games, but they depend on community goodwill to keep themselves profitable, something a large corporation has a much harder time doing.
Surely one reason for Netflix, Hulu, etc is to aim to provide a single point of access. Without this, you'd have to sign up to an account at HBO, Fox, Universal, Everylabeloutthere, then download each of their apps to get at the content.
That is, until Mr Entrepreneur creates a service that scrapes, aggregates, links to, or otherwise makes it easier to access all these content producers from a single site. The content producers might even decide that hosting, billing, and all that coding takes too much, and outsources it to Mr Entrepreneur. That hosting, billing, and coding costs Mr Entrepreneur, so he'll want a cut to cover costs, and some more to provide a profit incentive. Still, as a single point of access, tempting the producers with the promise of its big user base, the service can negotiate bulk licences…
And so, we're back to where we are now, where you access content through an intermediary, and pay for the convenience.
Capitalism comes in for a lot of criticism, but arbitrage and innovation is one of the things it does well (as long as there is balanced competition and regulation.)
That said, just because that's the way things are done now, that doesn't mean it's right. There is always scope for things to be done better, and for some of us, that ease is provided by torrents and such.
http://www.twopotscreamer.com/images/when_you_pirate_mp3s_yo...
This is especially odd, since you can do exactly that with a one-year TechNet subscription. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy/hh4429... So it's not like they don't have the infrastructure ready.
Thus the who piracy economic argument is broken in three ways:
1) Folks who pirate software won't pay full price, sometimes they won't pay any price. So the economic 'loss' from piracy is either '0' or the area under the curve described by units pirated vs actual purchase price.
The loss is 0 if you use the reasoning that if there were perfect piracy prevention, none of these people would have paid for the retail version.
2) The cost of protection adds additional production costs (printing unique product code stickers and adding them) adding additional steps to boxing/shipping, adding additional activation software and its testing.
3) The additional cost of support when legitimate users like this guy call support to have a human you're paying anywhere between 10 and 25/hr to 'solve' this persons install/operation problems.
Folks who have done the math, with real numbers (and Lotus comes to mind), determine that they earn more money by not including DRM on the product. When Lotus first announced they were removing DRM from their 1-2-3 product they mentioned that nothing they had done had ever slowed down the availability of pirated versions but had added additional support burdens every time.
And in business if the value I'm able to produce with software is governed more by my exclusive ownership than my skill with it and other professional skills, then it's probably a good idea to find another line of work.
It seems the author's only significant complaint is that they don't provide him with updated slipstreams to download. It's true - he'd have to make them himself with the free tools they provide. Maybe they should provide public updated slipstreams, but this hardly seems like a valid reason to refuse to pay for the software.
- the automatic activation failed
- my product key is said to have been pirated
- the phone support for registration is now fully automated, and just rejects my phone activation.
- the machine won't load whole subsystems of windows until is activated (you can monkey your way around from the IE instance you can launch from the activation dialog, but your system is not fully functionnal)
- I am searching for how to get a human to deal with the situation
You won't be able to fix that without reinstalling or using a crack. The phone activation will work but you need to change product key. There is an article of Microsoft support site on how to do that actaully.
However, it's a problem with your XP Media... are you 100% sure that is a legit copy of windows? Where did you get it from?
1) maybe the guy I bought it from was not legit - I asked him lots of questions before going through with the purchase but that's about as much as I could (or would be willing to) do,
2) Using what I believed to be the correct, legal process, I created an install disk and looked up the key for my existing OEM install, which I used to reinstall a fresh instance without any of the HP nonsense the machine came with,
3) For a couple days I had an install using the same key on a VM to test something with IE9.
Any one of those things could be the problem and they were decisions I made, Microsoft didn't force or manipulate me. But here's the thing, at the end of the day what I have is a really obnoxious machine and if I had just bought a Mac (off of eBay even!) or installed Linux instead, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this. You're right that the Microsoft experience isn't so bad, if you follow the rules you're probably going to have a bare minimum of hassle, but it is still so much worse than the competition on this front.
I think your machine has to have a Windows sticker with the key if it shipped with an OEM license.
This is the point that gets under my skin. You can't ask a commpany to actively maintain staff to support a 10 years old OS. But then, it shouldn't put DRM or activation processes that have fail cases needing active help for products that have long life spans (I know, planned obsolescence and etc.., but still).
This is a problem I don't have with other OSes, and it just looks bad in comparison.
To answer your points,
1) the license I am trying to use was acquired a long long time ago in a previous iteration of my company. It seems it would be a big hassle to retrieve who/how it was bought... That's bad resource management. But now I can't imagine it was stolen or frauded in any way.
2) Windows XP on a virtual machine was a choice among others (say win 7 with a separate physical machine for e.g.), and I needed time to try the install, knowing that activating an install that would be trashed afterwards would not be good. Now, this situation might be an answer, but otherwise it was a quite usable environment.
I usually do this with new PCs that have Windows pre-installed, so I don't have to deal with crapware.
Though it's very likely to be a very bad idea anyway. As has been pointed out elsewhere a large majority of such activation disabled software is loaded with rootkits and other malware.
The point is that it's OK from a legal point of view, as long as you use your original serial number for the same windows edition.
I 'swapped' discs back when Windows 7 SP1 came out. I got the update off SA and the updated ISOs as well.
Should you have to prove you actually bought a license of that OS, you should have
a) the invoice & warranty papers of the computer it came preinstalled on and being used on - if preinstalled; possibly the restore disc as well if there is one b) the invoice, the original (damaged or not) disc and the box of the original windows kit - if bought separately as a windows install kit
Those are required to prove that you're the rightful owner of that Windows kit. I don't know if you can resell a PC with Windows on it.
Microsoft is very silly to make people jump through so many hoops. Especially when the pirates enjoy a better service.
Also, they should offer downloads to people who got the OS preinstalled on their machines. Apple is giving people this serice under the form of network restore since 10.7.
So the pirate version would always be pirated in the judge's eyes, even if you had paid for a license for a legit copy as well. They won't let you use the legal license you acquired to cover a pirate copy. Or something like that, anyhow. There are always lots of funny little details that can make a big difference when dealing with law.
MS insists these hoops are needed.
The author, after years of giving MS money and jumping through hoops decides to stop giving them money, and stop jumping through the hoops.
The author is trying to tell MS, in the post and with the lost sale, that the anti-piracy measures are totally counter-productive, and have pushed a paying customer into a pirate.
>"if I have to go through the hassle of pirating it to get a working copy, I will not be paying for it"
Yet his whole argument up to then has been how much easier 'pirating' the OS is. In short he just doesn't want to pay.
If it were about ease of use he'd send them the money somehow.
also, based on my own experience, you can activate windows 7 on multiple computers with the same key just fine (got 1 key through msdnaa, wanted to get another to replace my academic home premium because i needed/wanted the backup functionality and xp mode. but when it took my schools msdnaa admin more than a week to respond, i just used the key i already had. at some point i'm sure i'll switch over to the new key that i eventually i got, but i don't see a reason to do that until windows starts hassling me).
Unethical, probably, but sometimes that solution is easier than dealing with MSFT's support. A friend of mine purchased a copy of MSFT Office 2011, but it wouldn't work. He called the support several times and they couldn't offer him a solution so he finally gave up and decided to just pirate it. Ten minutes later he had a working copy of office 2011 on his machine.
I own an XP Pro license and bought the upgrade edition of 7 Ultimate. Reformatting would require installing XP, upgrading to the latest service pack, then "upgrading" to 7. Giant PITA.
There really is not a good substitute for Quickbooks Enterprise. And I forgot Regex Buddy. I downloaded Patterns off the App Store, but it's a poor substitute. Regexes aren't pretty, but if you are hacking on something a quick regex can do a lot for a little.
EDIT: I just re-read this, and thought it sounded a little too negative toward Pixelmator. I think being a good 60% solution in relation to Photoshop is a huge accomplishment, and that Pixelmator is great software. It is absolutely worth the money. It is a very competent intermediate image editor, and would be $30 well spent for anyone. The criticism is mainly directed toward the lack of some esoteric advanced features, and my curmudgeonly desire to have it work exactly like Photoshop, since that is how I have edited images for the last dozen years.
Well, I guess you can, but you're stretching your ethical credibility.
Stealing is not one of them.
I know I'm beating this horse fairly hard, but it's something that people need to be aware of.
The "IP infringement is not stealing" line is just what people say when they want something for nothing and they don't want to feel bad about inflicting financial damage upon the original author.
That doesn't make any sense. I don't think anybody is seriously arguing in this thread that copyright infringement is correct or ethical - what we're instead arguing is that, despite the best efforts of the *AA groups, "stealing" is a different crime than "copying without permission". The fact that there's a supreme court case backing this line of reasoning up (in plain language, no less) makes this conflation of terms even less forgivable.
Call the crime what it is.
>When I create software and someone "takes away" my ability to earn income from it..
Except if I copy something of yours without permission, I haven't taken away your ability to do anything. And I challenge you to prove otherwise.
TL:DR; it doesn't matter what semantic games you try to pull, if you're a cheap bastard you're still an ass.
Not trolling: incentives and processes are basically the same for any entity distributing precompiled binaries, from MS to Symantec to Skype to Apple to Canonical. They don't do it because of the potential for huge reputation hits... exactly like most people in "the scene".
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Then it is your decision whether to buy a license or download an activator (which you can download after installing all the antivirus programs in the world)
Keep in mind these ISOs are already modified to get around the built-in copy protection in the stock version.
Granted, flashing your BIOS with random binaries floating around the internets is just as bad, if not worse, than installing random pirated binaries, but it's a lot easier* to check whether or not a 512KB dump is exactly the same as the version given out by the manufacturer's site with the exception of a section of non-executable address space than it is to check to see if the only modifications to a 4.2GB ISO are on activation-related components.
For tomorrows readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS#SLIC
* Easier, for people who know how to diff hexdumps and BIOS firmware...
Are people insane?
I might not have ultimate faith in Microsoft, but comparatively I have zero faith (and a lot of suspicion) of what are essentially bands of thieves among piracy groups.
I engaged in casual piracy when I was a teen out of necessity, though I never felt the need to invent justifications. In my adult life, though...pirating executables is the domain of the naive or the ridiculously trustworthy.
If anything, the scene is demonstration that a completely open, self-regulated market can function in at least some sense. Maybe one group doesn't have any strong disincentive to posting a corrupted release, but other groups have a strong incentive to discredit them, and reputation is valuable (as much as anything can be in a free economy). There is a fairly effective web of trust.
You can't be sure, of course, but then I can't be sure that my "legal" software won't install a rootkit behind my back either-- or if I am, it's because I'm going on the word of criminals who are trying to redistribute it.
And somehow, I've never been infected by this. It's my conclusion that, much like the *AA groups nonsense comparisons of piracy to theft, the security threats are overstated by companies in an attempt to scare people straight.
It's been at least 5 years with not a hint of fraudulent use of my ID or payment info.
I have, however, been victimized multiple times by corporations being negligent with my data in the same time period. Sony and whatnot.
Kind of interesting that it's safer to download random untrusted OS code from the internet than to give my information to a "safe" corporation...
In any case, it's an interesting thought experiment but it gets absurd quickly when realized. How do you know you're not infected right now by a "really good rootkit"? Unless you wrote the compiler by hand, compiled every bit of the OS by yourself, wrote the firmware for your hardware using the same compiler, etc etc etc, you can't be 100% sure.
You can be reasonably sure, of course. 99% with a few juicy trailing 9's for good measure, but not 100%.
It's the same way you can't objectively prove you're not dreaming right now.
This pretty much sums it up. I couldn't agree more.
And anytime I upgrade hardware or even want to move my install to another computer, the activation is so fast and easy. I don't see how anyone could make the claim that pirating Windows is easier than installing a legitimate copy.
However, when you get on the wrong side of it, it is a pain in the ass of Lovecraftian proportions. I don't know if it's my luck, choice in hardware, or what, but I've had perfectly valid (retail!) keys start throwing WGA errors after working fine for a few months. After spending literally hours on the phone with someone who speaks broken english, I took my crippled XP install (this was back in the pre service-pack 2 days where failing activation meant you got locked out after a few minutes), went to a torrent site, and downloaded an activator.
2 hours (spent on the phone in a fruitless endeavor with the best of Indian tech support) and 5 minutes (spent downloading and running a crack) later, I finally was able to use my bought and paid for software.
After that, I pulled down an ISO with the service packs and cracks and other goodies slipstreamed in (XP Ultimate Edition by Johnny, still exists out there somewhere), burned it to a disc, and haven't used "legitimate" channels since.
Microsoft does not have my permission to use my CPU cycles and power to inflate their antipiracy metrics.
I wont say which program is it because I do not condone piracy, but it is widespread in the internet.
I agree that Microsoft should remove all anti-piracy stuff in their products. It only makes their products more expensive.
1) You will always have an outdated installation disc so whenever you want to do a install you're stuck with hours of system updates.
2) Losing your install disc means your SOL.
3) The activation process is not always painless. Whenever you have to call their activation line you are wasting time.
Video games and music appear to be the only ones who have solved this with solutions like Steam, Good old Games, iTunes, Amazon Music.
Netflix, and the like, are a good step forward but they still suffer from lack of content which leads people right back to pirating.
Bank robbers have a 'better experience' of a bank if they're not caught too.
The average seeded copy of Windows on the pirate bay or the likes is crappy. Cracks sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the copy comes with a load of crappy software. Sometimes the cracker changes the Windows theme (not sure why he is doing so). And sometimes everything goes smooth until some day I get a problem because my version is not genuine.
I don't install my OS on a daily basis. My average Windows OS install keep up with me for 3-5 years. I wouldn't be bothered to spend some time activating the software. So far, the activations for my MS products was easy, fast and simple.
I've never had as hard a time activating stuff at the OP, though. When I buy a new machine I always order the restore disks (why do Mfg's think it's ok to not include these and charge customers for obtaining them?), and I've yet to run into restore disks that automatically install the crapware that came on the hard disk.
Right now, I'm in the middle of an epic battle with Adobe to get a refund. I bought an educational version of the CS3 master collection back in 2007 when I was in college. I tried to upgrade it because a chat representative said I could, but they were wrong.
After calling their support line 10 times, spending 2-3 hours of my life either on hold or talking to them, being told twice they would call me in X hours and them not calling, they have still refused to honor the deal. It has been the worst customer service experience of my life.
At this point, it's up to some committee at Adobe to decide whether I should get my refund. Like, really? It's that hard of a decision? You told me X when X wasn't true. Give me my money back! Quit being tools.
Anyways, I'm hoping I get it. It's a lost opportunity for them though. They could have said, "Hey, we screwed up. Here are three licenses. We value your business and hope you'll stay a loyal customer." Then, they could have kept my money, and kept me as a customer. But that's not what they did.
Going forward, I really don't think I'll be buying Adobe products anymore. Not because their products are bad. It's that they're over-priced and their customer service sucks.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/windows-7-iso-x86-and-x64-offi...
The official solution is to buy an additional copy of the Windows license which will provide you with a new download URL.
I knows this because I complained to the @microsoftstore twitter account: after purchasing 2 copies of Windows (the crapware-loaded OEM version, the clean one from MS store) I had no intention of purchasing a third.
For some reason they simply couldn't allow me a second download, and sent me a physical disc, which arrived about 6 weeks later, by which time a pirated Windows 7 was working fine.
However
"Be kindly informed that the availability of the software download, purchased at the Microsoft Store, is limited to one year.
Please understand that as you placed your order more than one year ago, Microsoft Store does not have access to your order and cannot reset the download link."
I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.
Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.
When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.
iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?
Your trusting a .ISO image from a random website, how do you know there is not time bombed malware pre-installed?
Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
You don't have to use torrents. You can get a direct download of vanilla Windows 7 ISO's hosted by Microsoft: http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-fro...
> Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?
Nope, there's a workaround built into Windows because the OEMs strongarmed MS into adding it. You can get a piece of software called the Windows Loader that will activate Windows using this workaround with just one click and a reboot: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24901-Windows-Loade...
I assume they keep a record everytime they issue a license either to an OEM or wholesaler etc and if your using a keygen they could simply check their database and find that such a key was never issued.
If you use a key that was already registered to someone else then surely they know because your computer name/username or a hash of your hardware config (I assume this info is sent to windows update) will be different.
You run the same risk anyone who used the old FCKGW key ran. I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, I'm just pointing out that many, many people were willing to do just that. And they won't blink at the similar risks in this new workaround.
As for updates, they can get those too. However, MS might be reading their mail and all they type if they use a "cracked" version of windows without an original serial number.
However, his point is 100% valid. The need for serials / activations is giving people enough reasons to skip buying Windows and pirate it or simply install Linux.
If Windows would've costed 50 USD everywhere and had a milder "security" system, they'd be selling at least 5-10 times more copies.
Some countries have all sorts of big and small taxes which drive the prices of the windows licenses up by 10-40% and some shops also add their own profit margins. Having them be so expensive in the first place doesn't help at all.
"You're trusting..."
[...]
I agree with that line, correction added. :-)
I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion the day it came out but then had to do a clean install a couple of months later.
Instead of using my out-of-date installer I downloaded the latest version of Lion and did a clean install. No waiting hours fro system updates because my install medium was old.
i know its not exactly microsoft's fault their os gets so much bloat.. but the experience i was getting from new machine was nowhere near the one i am getting after the clean install.
If you want to make your point just go ahead and complain, send a written letter move to another vendor (I Have). Stealing, And i will call it that because it is stealing, is not a legitimate nor a logical reaction to crappy service.
The entire internet philosophy, IMO, was build on trust and a certain code of honor if i may say (at the risk of sounding corny) breaking that breaks the internet. Imagine people just screwing up Wikipedia because they think Jimmy Wales did something wrong in their opinion or because an article of their got removed or whatever.
Piracy has always been, and will always be, a thing of the internet. think of it as a wicked charm. I will not encourage eradicating it. To be honest i have used pirated software to evaluate when vendors wont offer evaluation options. But then i would go and buy the damn license, because: 1 - it is the right thing to do, regardless. 2 - If i like something, paying for it will support the vendor to continue on making the stuff i like.
I personally do not like the way Microsoft does business, i dont like their products and i think they are arrogant pricks but if i need to use windows (god forbid) i will still pay for the damn license.
This was true for video games, where the copy protection schemes often resulted in a bad experience for paying customers.
But for an OS, having to enter a product key once doesn't seem to harm the experience as much as possibly getting a rooted kernel would.
I think, in general, there aren't a lot of good reasons for grown-ups to not pay for the commercial software they want to use.
A bit of a rant, but I am getting a bit tired that, still as we enter 2012, what does the paying customer get for his troubles? You don't live in country xx? You can't see/listen/buy online content yy. Although definitely in music and games there has been progress, I could still add hundreds of more examples.
And what currently is the envisioned answer to this flawed business model? A set of laws that will inevitably alter some of our more dear democratic principles. Not to mention the economic fallout.
On a side note, I can't help wondering my thoughts to the teen-sex debates in the US, where some people hopelessly cling to abstinence measures which in theory, work fine. Whereas in practice, there seems to be quiet some empirical evidence that young people, well, just do it.
Seriously Microsoft, drop the activation scheme. It's not necessary and causes nothing but frustration for your end users.
Startups are hard enough as it is, no need to make them harder.
The investor should ask "and why are you using that platform?" and then make an evaluation based on the answer. Anything less and you have a pretty bad investor. Best to keep away from such people.
That means free access to all of MS software. It's actually a really amazing program.
* AFAIK you are licenced to use the software for development and testing purposes ONLY. Not internal use (see the BizSpark FAQ, even though other BizSpark materials seem to imply otherwise).
* Except you do get a production 2 proc SQL Server licence, and Windows Server licences... However you may not be able to use the licences with some hosting providers (due to their licences with Microsoft, or just unfamiliarity or complexity overhead).
* The BizSpark websites are a time-wasting labyrinth whenever you must update anything (might have improved?).
* There are so many catch-alls to prevent "misuse" of the licence, that it looks as though you can't legally use any of the software... although in spirit you can use it and Microsoft isn't going to chase you... (at least that was how I read the licences last time I looked but IANAL YMMV).
On a related note why bother to use Windows if you don't plan on purchasing other Windows-only software? Is the author also planning to pirate Visual Studio and the like as well? If no Microsoft software is being used why not try Linux or Mac?
Or are a complete edge/outliner case.
There are many options to solve this issue (ex: the native VHD boot, VirtualPC, HyperV).
Telling Microsoft to remove activation is a knee-jerk reaction that helps no one.
You can even run Linux as the Host OS.
I write and sell software, and activation is absolutely critical and responsible for at least half my revenue.
And your point about MS not knowing what it's doing...
If the activation system was useless, and had no effect on revenue, it would be gone the next day.
I've been a legitimate customer since Windows 3.1, and I've only had to activate by phone 1 time. It was painless.
Having to re-activate because of hardware upgrades (new motherboard, etc) is also not unusual. Again, I don't see why a PAYING customer should be be punished by forcing the user to go through some stupid activation system, when pirates don't have to deal with the activation system.
Just because the activation system hasn't negatively affected you doesn't mean it hasn't negatively affected many, many paying customers. Why should I get treated like shit for being a paying customer, when I could get a better user experience by pirating Windows?
The really long activation keys I've run into are not from MS and are ones you can cut/paste (ie, not the ones used to install the OS fresh).
Go down about half way. It's actually 54 digits, not 100. But the IVR isn't 100 percent accurate, and I have found I usually have to enter at least a few of the sets multiple times. And the voice system is one of those unskippable ones, so you can't just start entering numbers again right away after it detects a mis-enter. You have to listen to a 30 second message about re-entering the key first.
I'm done with this company now. I bought a Mac, and I'm not coming back.
(I'm a MS employee but I was doing this at home with my "I'm a customer" hat on)
In any case, it's not a problem for me anymore, as I now only run a pirated copy of Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my Macbook for testing on.
In case apocalypse happens (ehum, my ISP goes down for 24h) i know i can still get a computer up and running without problem if i have to.
This is why i still use the MSDN account from many employers ago...
YOU CAN DO THIS with MSDN -- Why not make the MSDN model the way everyone receives their copy. Also, stop selling me CDs or DVDs - put them on USB sticks.
There are subtle issues with pirated installations that can cause serious issues when things start to go wrong. (Speaking from experience)
Claiming that you have the moral authority to pirate it is just wrong, doing so re-enforces the need for MSFT to have even stricter anti-piracy measures.
Given the large distribution of the Windows OS (this isn't boutique software with a small customer base), it really doesn't make much sense that it's so expensive. If the price was lowered significantly ($50 maybe?), I think MS would see piracy numbers go down and sales go up more than enough for them to remain profitable.
Bought windows 7 online. Had to download it through windows special download manager which took ages, then gave me some exec that I couldn't burn on a CD... I had to pirate it.
According to this article and many others, we all "pirate stuff" because it's "easier than the paid model"... well, the same goes for driving a car.
I would much rather just walk into my underground parking lot, hotwire a car, and ditch it once I got to my destination. But, I have morals.
I am not likening stealing a car to copyright infringement, only pointing out the reasoning that "I pirate because it's easier to do so" isn't really a moral/valid point.
It's easier for me to kill you instantly with my gun than it is for me to reason with you about a topic I don't care to reason about, too.
Unless you really can't live without the next version of Windows, don't use it at all. Keep with the current version for as long as you can (I'm still on XP on the only Windows machine I have) or switch to an alternative (this may be the route I take when I next rebuild).
I'll be rebuilding that desktop machine at some point this year and what-ever OS goes on the new build I hope will not need reinstalling for a few years (so I'll have to upgrade from XP as it drops out of security update support early in 2014). I'm trying to decide to go for Windows 7, or just go completely Linux - currently the Linux option is winning in my mind.
Pretty much the only reason I still run Windows on this home desktop is games. I use OpenOffice for my own documents, and when I need access to MS Office, Visual Studio, and so forth from here I simply VPN+RDC into my machine at the office these days. The rub is that lately I've not been playing that much (I've not had time) and there aren't any games in the near future that I could name as being something I'm waiting for (I'm done waiting for HL?EP3 - if they release it before I leave Windows-land then I'll pre-order, if not then they'll only get a sale out of me if it runs on Linux fine), with PC gaming apparently going in the "beg and jump through hoops or we won't let you play" direction (http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/01/17/1838237/ubisoft-has...) I can see myself simply refusing to buy any new games from the major publishers even if I do keep Windows, and most of the games I have played much of recently could probably be implemented in browsers soon enough (if not already) at which point the choice of underlying OS becomes irrelevant.
So my position is: if I buy Windows 7 in the next six months it may well be the last Windows license I personally purchase. If I don't, then XP will have been (unless you count the Windows 7 Starter license that came with my netbook but currently remains unused). Either way I won't pirate it: it is a buy or don't decision. Heck, if I decide to not keep up-to-date games wise (and decide that I'm not likely to be bothered by losing access to the games I've bought previously) then I'll not only save £80 for the Windows license but I could save a chunk getting a less flashy GFX card too (I'm only upgrading that in this build to get a card with 3 or more outputs that can be used concurrently).
Pirating will just tells them that you want their platform but don't want to pay, using something else tells them that you can live without them and if they want you not to live without them then there are things they need to change.
It's the Windows version of the DVD flow diagram[1] that explains why a pirated movie file is much better than the DVD. I rip all DVDs I come into contact with, and borrow friends DVDs just to rip them. Even if I had time to watch them without ripping I wouldn't want to.
Just look at the Android/Iphone app market. 99 cent apps are still not convenient or cheap enough for many users, so they pirate it.
This is why I feel that all of these excuses are bullshit.
Of course, just as you'll always find DRM apologists who find Ubisoft's insanity still isn't enough. That's not really a segment of the population worth discussing with though, since they won't buy either way (either because they don't want to, or because they just don't have the money, I was once that impoverished student).
What you can rely on are numbers and the results of those who thought convenience was a major reason[0] for piracy and tried to fix it. And what do you find out? That Steam and iTunes turn out to make money. Who'd have thought?
> This is why I feel that all of these excuses are bullshit.
Oh, bad apples are sufficient to dismiss out of hand anything that comes even remotely close to something they could say?
Well I guess you can trivially be dismissed as well, then.
[0] preempting your strawman, I did not write "the only reason".
Eh, it will never be enough for 100% of the users, sure -- there will always be some percentage of pure leeches. But this guy seems pretty reasonable. Enough for him seems like a good threshold for generating revenue from your userbase.
How about you either deal with it or not use Windows. If its that much of a pain then there's no reason to use it. Come on. How do we not see the blatant excuse to pirate something here?