"Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging." As always, be sure to read these with a bag of salt on your desk.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-07-30
Strange, when I saw the title of your post and your nick I was pretty sure I'd have to mod it down.
Eventually, I did the opposite :-)
Not because I share your view - as a matter of fact I couldn't disagree more! No, I like your comment because it leaves the door open to a rational discussion.
Most comments on this matter sound like
"You are EVIL! PERIOD!"
without any 'because' or 'I think'.
Speaking of 'I think':
I think we should probably take the discussion about the moral status of 'pirating' software to OSNews' 'conversations'.
If you use OSNews v4, that is.
This way, the discussion would be ON TOPIC and we wouldn't have to restate or re-restate our respective opinions in every second thread but could simply link to the conversation ;-)
Member since:2005-07-02
Do you mean legally, or in common conversation? In the first case, no. Nothing was "stolen" per se. However, you would be guilty of industrial espionage. I don't know what the correct term is in this case, but I'm pretty sure it's not "theft", "burglary", "larceny" or any of the sort.
In the perspective of common conversation, the use of the term is acceptable, but that doesn't make it more accurate.
It *is* information. It doesn't have any distinct physical existence, and it is more than just raw energy - it is energy arranged in a coherent, logical manner. You may not agree with the term, but it is the correct one. What do you think the acronym IT stand for?
So, if electricity powers machines but not humans, it shouldn't be considered "energy" in the human sense of the word? That doesn't make any sense. Digital data is information; again, that is the correct term, whether you agree with it or not.
I don't pirate music, films or games. I work in the video games industry. Still, that doesn't change the fact that piracy *isn't* theft, and a video game *is* information. You don't need to change the meaning of words in order to decry something that is already illegal. Just stick to the facts.
Member since:2006-06-21
It's how you use the information and what you do to get it that should (maybe) pe punished, not the simple fact of owning it.
In your examples, there are several negative actions. Breaking into another's computer or personal space is severely frowned upon by any society or community. If you obtain my personal info it depends on what you do with it, but generally you'd have to break some law to get to them. And the right to privacy is a fundamental right (or ought to be), which you'd be breaking.
And so is copyright. I'm not saying "information wants to be free" (which is silly, ofc). Creators deserve to be compensated for their hard work.
But you cannot force people to do so. This is where the fundamental differences between information and physical goods come into play. We cannot go on on treating intellectual goods and information as tangible and try to use the same rules. It simply won't work. It just gets us into more and more of a mess if people insist on saying things like "stealing information" and "intellectual property".
If you can't enforce something than it is useless to try and perhaps we should all think about alternative means of dealing with this. How about letting people pay for information of their own accord? Set their own price, work on the honor system? I frankly don't see why that would be more utopic than the notion that you can control every last bit of information once you release it out there.
Member since:
2006-07-04
I think the piracy discussion has gone off topic, but you said something that is a pet peeve of mine:
"Nobody's stealing anything. You can't "steal" information. Breaking copyright is not stealing, because software and music is not potatoes. You are infringing upon certain rights that have been granted to the author. It's more like using someone else's parking spot than stealing. But even that's not a good analogy, because that person only has one parking spot, whereas you can create infinite copies of software or music with almost zero effort."
If I'm running a company and I hack into my competitor's computer system to obtain internal business information, but leave the information intact so my competitor still has access to it, have I "stolen" trade secrets, or not? Or what if I obtain copies of your personal info (medical records, credit card number, social security number, etc), have I now "stolen" that info? It's certainly not 'merely' "copyright infringement". Sorry, I think the idea that one can't "steal" information is bull.
Actually, you used another pet-peeve of mind, which is the notion that anything that consists of bytes qualifies as "information" and nothing more. I dont' think that an OS, computer program, video game, or any kind of software qualifies as "information". If I pirate a video game, what "information" have I obtained? The bytes making up the video game don't inform me of anything. They inform the computer on instructions to perform, but that's not "information" in the human sense of the word. I think certain people like to classify all pieces of digital media as "information" to devalue them and dismiss the hard work it took to create them. As in, "Information wants to be free, and all software is nothing more than information, therefore all software should be free. QED". On the contrary, a video game, or any software program, or music, or movie, etc, is a creation of humans, not merely information discovered and/or gathered by humans. But this is off-topic too.