Comments on: New student file sharing horror

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 01:34:08 +0000

They aren’t putting the people who inflate figures (both losses as well as actual retail of products) on the street. They should be.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:03:17 +0000

Probably illegal (hasn’t actually been put to a legal test anywhere, AFAIK), but definietly OK.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:01:51 +0000

Maybe the other lie to pollsters.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 09:45:16 +0000

I swear these knuckle draggers amaze me. Every one of them is out to count up the totals of “damage” to their particular little niche. Any sort of way to fluff the totals, pad the bill, or inflate the damage is fair. I think everyone of these groups learned their basic techinque from the public relations of the police. You know the ones you read about in the paper, hear about on the news; that such and such happened and netted a million bucks of drugs or whatever. Now-a-days these inflated figures are a victim of their own splash effect. No one pays any attention to the lowly several thousand dollar bust. Doesn’t get any notice, has no splash, doesn’t justify the police’s pay off the taxrole, isn’t sexy enough unless it is in the 7 and 8 figures.

So honesty is never figured as part of the deal when estimating how much the total is. It is understood that it is inflated figures from the get go. Funny thing is when called on about it, all of a sudden there is nothing inflated. What? Lie to the public? How about we put it in the right context and just go ahead and say these same erronous figures and false studies are presented to lawmakers around the world when the corporations demand that something be done to protect every last nickel of profit. That bills and laws are written based on the data provided to show that some sort of damage is occuring. Lets face it, saying that a college student made off with a college promotional software at $20 value instead of the inflated price of $300 just doesn’t have the same sex appeal of a social software Robin Hood.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 05:51:56 +0000

every student knows its illegal they just dont give a damn. just like the cartels dont give a damn of how many people they put out on the street because of their lawsuits.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 23:55:59 +0000

The BSA has always been frowned upon in France, bad manner, they try to piss off public (state-owned) companies (and private ones too of course) but here cops don’t like some private company to “steal” their work

Now, I wonder _only_ “half” the students ??? Damn, the other half is surely billionairs’ kiddies rich enough to spend $1000 a month on 0’s & 1’s, be it software/game/music/video/books
My money still goes better to hardware manufacturers (it’s expensive enough thanks to the patent/IP system…)

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 20:54:46 +0000

When calculating the estimate of the ‘losses’ (They say ‘losses’
instead of ‘unrealized revenue’ because it sounds like one dark night, someone in black clothing broke into and stole things out of their warehouse.) they use the MSRP for the software in question, not the price you’d pay at Staples when it was on sale, plus you also got a rebate, nor would they factor in any kind of volume licensing plans that all of the large software vendors have available. So every copy of Windows XP Pro that gets keygened and cracktivated is duly recorded as $299.00 in the sacred “Piracy Loss Ledger” that’s taken out and ceremoniously waved at the media, government officials, and school children in a most pompous and indignant manner.

Furthermore, their calculated ‘installation base’ does not take into account all of the ‘give away’ product that’s distributed to the development community through channels like MSDN and TechNet by M$, for example. Most of Big Software have something similar. I’m sure many of these wind up getting counted as ‘pirated’.

Basically it’s what you’d expect from the BSA: A big load of crap, indignant protestations not withstanding.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 19:59:28 +0000

“More than half of US college and university students think itâs OK to swap or download digital copyrighted files”

Tsk, tsk. Advocates of filesharing clearly need to work harder on the other half.

Chris

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:28:52 +0000

Beth Scott — BS — hmmmm. Ironic.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:32:26 +0000

The BSA is full of BS. The reason why Beth Scott was indignant was probably that the Economist hit the nail on the head.