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Are you a pirate?

Chill

22:36 / 17.07.03

Just wondering whether the posters of Barbelith concern themselves with the legalities of the software on their machines. So are you:

A) Fully paid up and so honest you pay for shareware or delete it after the allotted time.

B) A slimy software pirate, callously stealing from poor software developers struggling to make ends meet.

C) Geeky enough to know what "C" is... you insensitive clod!

D) I Don't know about software licenses, I don't care about software licenses - oooh look at the picture of cuuuute kittens I found. (post your own link to a kitten picture).

Yes. I admit that the kittens are a cheap trick to get some interest in this thread.

w1rebaby

22:56 / 17.07.03

I'm a ninja. I reckon so-called software "piracy" is far more of a ninja pursuit. The stealthy purloining of copyrighted material, the cracking of code without so much as an "ah-harrrr" or waved bottle of grog in sight.

Ech. I don't do warez. If I use shareware I tend to pay for it, because I have the money and they mostly deserve it. If it's something larger which I don't want to pay for... I use alternatives. For instance, while I could get a cracked copy of Flash without much trouble, I don't - if I want to do something, er, flash, I will use DHTML, Javascript, whatever. Similarly, I don't use Photoshop, I use the Gimp, I don't use MS Office (it's crap anyway), I use OpenOffice.

If you pirate and use an overpriced piece of software you are just helping the manufacturers by perpetuating it as a standard.

Fist Fun

07:25 / 18.07.03

I don't have any illegal copies on my machines at the moment but I have in the past. Kind of a grey area. I wouldn't go into a shop and half inch a book yet it doesn't seem so wrong to make an illegal copy. Probably because it is easier and there is less chance of being caught rather than anything about right or wrong.

Good point about not using overpriced commercial software. Although I don't think software generally is overpriced for the intended market. Otherwise it just wouldn't sell. Kinda impractical though. Such and such package might be expensive, closed source and limited - but there is money to be made there, ya know.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

23:20 / 21.07.03

Wyrd, I know, but if it serves the industry I'm in I kind of consider myself 'leagally exempt', and go right on with the whole illigality thing.

If it's totally throwaway, i get the guilts and buy it.

Like i said, its wyrd.

w1rebaby

23:26 / 21.07.03

if it serves the industry I'm in I kind of consider myself 'leagally exempt'

Actually, change a word to "if it serves the industry they're in" and that's the sort of thing that would make me pirate Flash.

I think that Macromedia benefit far more from inventive uses of Flash by b3ta etc than they would ever lose from missed licences. They should provide a "fucking around" licence... restricted use: making animations with kittens in them. If they actually cracked down on licence restrictions (somehow) they'd lose out massively.

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