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?
As Portuguese I can totally relate to what is happening in Angola.
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.
I think it's actually happening all over the developing world. Same thing was (is) happening in Romania.
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.
Intellectual Property pricing schemes do more than make it hard to empathize, they foster active anger.
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.
I am from Brazil, when I was young, I pirated HEAVILY, and frequently without being even aware of it, there was legal legit stores selling pirated stuff and even paying taxes for it, maybe unaware too that it was pirated...
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?
That's been Adobe's business model for a long time, and a very clever one at that. Let Photoshop be pirated all over schools and unis, reap the enterprise benefits when the graphics designers who only learned Photoshop are getting hired.
For all the hate Creative Cloud gets, I love it as a hobbyist. I have a subscription for I think $10 or $20/month and even though sure I could save up and have purchased the software one-time outright, but last time I looked at buying a boxed copy in a university bookstore it was somewhere around $700. That's just not possible for someone who only uses photoshop for some of the stuff that GIMP tends to suck at, and only quite rarely
Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
Yup! I've chosen to buy several things that I pirated as a kid now just because I was able to pick it up then and now I have an income and these things are accessible!
I always wondered why MS, which benefited from a similar modus operandi, abandoned it so drastically. When the internet got good enough that sharing software became feasible, they introduced online activation, basically pushing people towards alternatives.
They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.
Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh.
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.
I don't disagree with #1 (cf my other comment in the thread regarding Adobe's MO). But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.
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.
I write snarky comments targeting opinions that express my thinking in a concise and funny (for me at least) way.
Then you come and tell me to fix my attitude, directly judging my person. At no point did I judge you or used ad hominems.
>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.
> Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?
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.
I agree, and this was poor wording on my part. I just wanted to point out that this side of piracy ensure that a large part of the population would not benefit much from it because it won't bring them any good (e.g. education, practical knowledge, etc) while providing easy ways to waste away their energy.
The outcome of downloading research papers or educational content is not the same as downloading entertainment.
How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?