MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-02-22 |
| FROM | Billy
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] Young Man
|
a tearjerking NYT article about warez....
On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 07:57:40PM -0500, Ruben Safir wrote:
>
>
>
> Trying to Keep Young Internet Users From a Life of Piracy
>
> By JOHN SCHWARTZ
>
> Then law enforcement agents seized 129 computers in 27 cities recently
> in a coordinated assault on online piracy, they focused much of their
> effort on colleges like Duke, the Massachusetts Institute
> of Technology and the University of California at Los Angeles.
>
> They were probably too late.
>
> As children have access to computers earlier and earlier in their
> educational careers, experts in piracy, hacking and other forms of
> Internet mischief say that any effort to tackle the illicit trade in
> digital goods - including video games, computer software, music and even
> movies - should be looking at a younger crowd.
>
> "By the time we get them, they already believe it's right," said
> David J. Farber, a professor of computer science at the University
> of Pennsylvania and the former chief technologist of the Federal
> Communications Commission "If you're willing to bootleg music, you're
> willing to bootleg anything."
>
> In fact, America's rush to the online world has created an enormous
> population of ever-younger computer pirates, say experts in the
> field. They compare the situation with giving every student a car without
> providing drivers' education classes.
>
> "We've got to focus on preparing kids to use the Internet in a safe and
> responsible manner," said Nancy E. Willard, director of the Responsible
> Netizen Center for Advanced Technology in Education at the University of
> Oregon. She has prepared course materials and guides for teaching computer
> ethics in secondary schools to help them meet the requirements of the
> Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000. The law, which requires
> schools and libraries to use filters or similar technology to protect
> children from objectionable materials, also requires an "Internet safety
> policy" to prevent "unauthorized access, including so-called `hacking,'
> and other unlawful activities by minors online."
>
> Online, the searching and trading for wares goes on day and night. In an
> online discussion last week using technology known as Internet Relay Chat,
> the "warez" channel, or chat room, was busy. Warez is slang for software
> that has been "liberated" from encryption. On the channel, rapid-fire
> bursts of messages requesting digital goods - games, DVD's, business
> software - were interspersed among the random comments and insults:
>
> Queball: "Anyone know where I can a copy Sybex virtual lab . . ."
>
> Porrin: "-at-find 3d studio para *pc*."
>
> Nellie: "Anyone here have save the last dance movie. msg me."
>
> The patter and trading are constant, yet this is small time. Far bigger
> players operate quietly with vast storage and bandwidth, cracking the
> copyright protection that keep the strings of ones and zeroes that
> underlie everything from the video game Tomb Raider to the movie "Harry
> Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and making them available in a limitless
> five-finger discount store in the ether.
>
> The recent raids focused mainly on the networks of hard-core traders in a
> handful of groups with names like DrinkOrDie, which tended to trade for
> fun and not for profit. Among the computers seized were ones belonging
> to business executives and administrators of computer networks.
>
> Unauthorized copying and distribution of software is a global headache
> for the industry, which claims that more than a third of all business
> software used is pirated, according to an annual report commissioned by
> the Business Software Alliance, a trade group. In fact, the situation has
> improved markedly since 1995, when the figure was closer to half of all
> software. In the United States the figure has dropped to 24 percent, the
> lowest rate in the world, because of a vigorous education and enforcement
> efforts and until recently a strong economy.
>
> Over all, the cost of business software piracy alone was $11.75 billion in
> 2000, the group reported, although this amount assumes that any illicitly
> used software would otherwise have been bought by users.
>
> The greatest incidence of software piracy, according to industry experts,
> occurs in business, where many employees of a firm will share a single
> copy of a program. Internet trading pales by comparison, said Bob Kruger,
> vice president for enforcement at the Business Software Alliance. But
> it constitutes "the biggest threat in the future," he said, "as people
> become more accustomed to getting digital works online."
>
> The software industry does not break out the statistics for piracy in
> higher education, but "anecdotally, we see a lot of activity coming out of
> university areas," said Ric Hirsch, senior vice president for intellectual
> property enforcement at the Interactive Digital Software Association,
> the trade association representing computer and video game publishers.
>
> Eugene H. Spafford, a professor of computer science and director of
> Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information
> Assurance and Security, said if students lack the ethical preparation
> when they begin using the Internet, things quickly spiral out of control
> when they reach college, where they have lots of free time, peers they
> want to impress and high bandwidth.
>
> That is to be expected, Professor Spafford said, since college is a
> time for testing boundaries. "We do encourage them to try new things,
> meet new people," he said. "It's not that surprising that they try to
> break some of the bounds, and not just in computing."
>
> But fixing the problem would be expensive and intrusive, he said. He
> questions whether the monitoring required might be worse than the disease.
>
> "When you have one person who goes bad out of 40,000, do you want to watch
> that other 39,999 to catch that one?" Professor Spafford asked. "To find
> the people doing the bad things might involve violating the privacy of
> all those other people. As a society is that the kind of trade-off we
> want to make?"
>
> Professor Farber agreed. Closely monitor students, he warned, and
> "pretty soon you'll be looking at what they write and what they read."
>
> Some experts say they wish the corporations pushing for ethical behavior
> among customers would show more of it themselves.
>
> Many students bristle at the newest legal tool for protecting copyright,
> the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It has been criticized as heavy
> handed, tipping the balance of copyright law away from principles such
> as fair use.
>
> Many also note, Professor Willard said, a federal court ruling that
> Microsoft (news/quote) had abused its monopoly power.
>
> That is how "Incursion" sees it. The Internet name belonged to a college
> student from Texas, who was looking for games recently on the Warez
> channel. The student said he generally pays for the software he uses but
> does like to sample the goods before buying. "If I feel it's a quality
> game," he said, "I'll buy it."
>
> Asked whether using software without paying for it is wrong, he replied,
> "depends what you consider wrong." Pressed for further explanation,
> he wrote, "A monopoly is wrong."
>
> Taking apart rationalizations like that one are part of what Professor
> Willard tries to do in materials that she has prepared for teenagers.
>
> But she added that the argument has power - and that recklessness
> and rebellion are not just part of adolescence but of the American
> character. "We applaud the U.S. patriots," she said, "who hacked onto
> the British tea ship and destroyed their product."
>
> Ultimately, time might be on the companies' side. The environment changes
> so quickly that even would- be pirates say they find it hard to keep up.
>
> Jeremy, who goes by the online name "Xelsed" and asks that only his first
> name be used, insisted that he did not trade software any more - which
> did not explain what he was doing in the Warez channel typing "!gimme
> stuff," a request he saw others type and which he figured could lead
> to offers. Even if he wanted to, though, he was out of touch, he said,
> having not visited the site in several months.
>
> The old formula for a request for software - typing "/xdcc" and then the
> name of a program - did not seem to resonate in the current slang. "Now
> I really dont know what to do," he types in the hasty, error- riddled
> style of instant messages. "I have to face the fact that well i'm dated."
>
> Jeremy said he was 27 and out of college and added that he feels he has
> outgrown the warez world.
>
> "To be frank," he wrote, "I think its probably alot easer to buy the
> game then to spend the hours neccacery to make `friends' and get into
> the sceen."
>
> ____________________________
> New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
> Fair Use -
> because it's either fair use or useless....
____________________________
New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
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