Can Software Piracy Be Stopped?

Piracy (AKA Sharing?) Is sharing "stealing"?
Can Software Piracy Be Stopped?

Piracy = stealing. Sharing never is & never has been "stealing". This is just a marketing trick by greedy mogules who can never be satisfied with just a few millions of dollars. Remember all those "we are starving, our kids cannot afford their next meal!" ads by artists?

This is nothing but a baldfaced like & scam! I went to a Metallica concert recently (Lars, the drummer sued Napster in time past for "stealing" when it was only sharing what they already had!) The tickets were about $50 on average with some a lot more! There were over 100,000 people there to see them.

Tell me, does this sound like they are going broke if 100,000 + people at $50 a head (or more?) paying to get in ($500,000 +) for a single night, & knowing they do 5 tours a week or more at times?

No, they are not starving, & never have been. If they were so bad off, they would quit what they are doing & get a real job where they had to actually work in order to make $$$! I know how easy playing music is, because I played drums for a very good band for a few years. I was told a lot by people that they came just to hear how I played!

If you are asking can sharing be stopped, no it cannot. Every form of anti-copy has already been broken, including CSS encryption, laser lock, bad sectors, duplicate sectors, dummy tracks, region lock, sony arcos, etc. There isn't any way to prevent copying because the moment content is viewable & seeable in a form we can understand, it is already broken. It is that exact moment that a copy is easy to make.

All that it takes to break a copy is to know enough about how the anti-copy works to create the anti-copy. Sometimes, it is so easy that even that isn't needed. Using a different way to do things than the developer intended can reveal places they didn't patch software which enables you to use it again, like you intended.

All this talk about "piracy" makes me sick, since piracy is supposed to be about stealing, as in someone takes something that does not belong to them like a cd off a store shelf without paying for it.

If someone buys a cd, then they own the cd because they paid for it & can share it as many times as they want & there is nothing anyone can do about it. For those who claim, but there are license agreements, & they really do not own the cd, only the right to use it!

Here is my response. They do not sign a legal agreement before the sale, & since you are not even told or warned that this has a 10 mile long license agreement that would take 10 years to read & 100 to understand fully, well, even if it is 10 miles long, they bought the license agreement along with the software/games/music that was on the disk WITHOUT signing a thing.

Meaning, the disk AND the agreement becomes theirs to use as they will, so whatever they do with the license agreement, oh well, they bought it, so they own the license agreement too! It is not binding legally since they never had to sign it before making the sale!

And for those who decry people who buy software saying they are basically renting it, well, here is my response: IF IT IS FOR SALE, YOU ARE BUYING IT, NOT RENTING! Now, if you are renting, they should post a notice saying this software is for rent, & you do not own it upon paying for it. They will not do this, because sales will decline.

 This violates the truth in advertising/labeling laws since they are lying that you buy it when you are really renting it instead! It is falsely mislabeled & purposefully so! The law doesn't care these days what is right or wrong, as you may have noticed, but rather about who gives them a few million extra dollars!

 I personally to not feel sorry for these rich people in power, who spend billions of our dollars, even money that they do not have, but the poorer people are obliged to pay everything they owe or go to jail? I was victimized a few years back, & that is exactly what happened to me. Instead of allowing me to make payments as I worked, my mom had to pay $3,500 to clear me so I wouldn't go to jail for what someone else did! But the government can make bad loans, spend billions on wars built on false pretenses, & get away with things they would murder us for?

This isn't justice people, this is total mayhem!

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Hehe, that's a funny little story, rpgsearcher!

And yes, I agree. Piracy can't and won't be stopped.
Is it even a debate if everyone is on the same side?

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

The issue with piracy is that it's not only about getting free items. In fact, those who crack it *own the originals* in most cases.

There are two reasons it will never end.

1) Cracking is fun. It's a way to say "I'm smarter than you. There is nothing you can possibly think of that I can't circumvent." A direct example is when the Xbox 360 was released and Bill Gates claimed it was uncrackable. Within hours after the system's release there was already a video of someone who cracked it and was using a burned game. Why did he do it? Solely because Bill Gates challenged him.

2) Popularity. When someone (say Razor1911) cracks a lot of software they get the fame associated with it. Of course normal people don't know who these usernames belong to, but regardless the fame is still there.

And there is absolutely not even one piece of software that can't be cracked. And there never will be. "No matter how smart you are, someone else is smarter" plays a huge role here. It doesn't matter if you're the best programmer in the world, someone can dissect it.

The funniest crack I ever saw was with a program called SoftIce. This is a debugging program so it shows hex code and everything and allows you to edit things "on the fly" as the program runs.

Well, they released a 3 day or so trial of the software (it was $1000+ if I remember right) so businesses could test it out. And during the trial some guy used THEIR trial software to create a key generator for the program, and it worked.

That, by far, is to me the funniest crack ever done. Using someone's own software to crack itself.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

NO...
Every second man in this world is using piracy or warez. I'm one of them . The piracy it's outspread and nobody can stop it. Who wants to pay 100$ for a software when he can download it for free?

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)

Yeah... this is most definitely a NO.

In replying to the first poster, I think that if a company's product isn't up for illegal downloads and all that, it just means that the people that tries to copy softwares just didn't copy it, a hint that the product might be slightly useless and quite unpopular.

Piracy can never be controlled, because even when companies finds ways to stop their products from being stolen and/or sold illegally, the hackers will always find ways to get through the system. Just like someone in the above posts said, it just gets harder, but there are still loopholes in the system and hackers will eventually get through.

After all, most hackers are one step ahead of society... just like strains of flus and all that. New injections have to be replaced by even newer ones because of their mutation and newly gained immune system.

Comment/Reply (w/o sign-up)