Why Not To Use Pirated Software, Some personal thoughts for debate |
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Why Not To Use Pirated Software, Some personal thoughts for debate |
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Nov 12 2007, 11:25 PM |
Why not to use pirated or cracked software
Five reasons not to use cracked software: 1) It is theft and therefore illegal. 2) It results ultimately in fewer and more expensive software products. 3) It is a ‘poor’ way to repay the music community. 4) It is often ‘malware’ and can potentially damage your pc. 5) It is GMC policy not to condone the use or discussion of where and how to get/use ‘crackware’ and illegal filesharing. It seems opportune to write this now and pin it as a closed thread. I have and use a fair few pieces of music software - commercial, shareware and freeware – sitting on my music PC are sequencers like Reaper, Live!, Reason; the wave editors Audacity and Cool Edit; various soft synths including Reaktor, Sylenth, Pentagon and Atmosphere; two samplers Kontakt and Halion; and various effects and mastering tools including ones from PSP, Sonalkis, Har-Bal and Ozone. If I was to add up the cost of all of this and tell my wife it would probably lead to a divorce. If she knew how much I spend just updating these she would have a fit! All my software – not just music – however is legal. I don’t use pirated or ‘crackware’ – never have and never will. If I can’t afford some software then I will in the first instance attempt to get a shareware or freeware version. If none are available that I like then I wait until I have saved the money and then buy the software. I don’t have a high income so saving up potentially hundreds of Euros can take me a while and I often find it frustrating to have to wait. But wait I do and what follows are my reasons why I do this rather then use ‘crackware’. Moral and ethical considerations. I lecture in Ethics and Morals and one early lecture is a discussion that is extremely relevant to his subject. In it I argue (backed up by some philosophical heavyweights) that the rule that we should live by is basically one of ‘do unto others as you would like done to you’. Or to put this another way: if I steal then I must accept it without complaint if someone broke in to my house and stole all my guitars. ‘Crackware’ is theft and I don’t want someone stealing my possessions. In most countries software piracy is a felony – not just pirating software but having and using it. It is breaking the law. Like it or not we live in a society and as such should abide by its laws. The laws are there to help maintain and protect society so if you break the law by using ‘crackware’ then expect to pay the price. It seems that some view piracy as something ‘cool’ that they do as a mark of their ‘living on the edge’ of society or outside it. If you wish to live outside society then you should repay what you have had from it first. Curiously I have yet to meet anyone who has repaid society adequately for their housing, healthcare, education and so on. Music software is expensive to develop, test, debug and market. Many of the companies involved are small operations. Many make little profit and are often run by a few people who are just passionate about music. ‘Crackware’ eats in to profit both because it reduces revenue and because it means that the companies spend time and money implementing protection routines. Sooner or later someone pays for the lost revenue and increased costs – either the price of the product goes up and/or the company uses time implementing protection rather then coding new or improved products and/or the organization goes bust and/or the staff in the company are paid less or lose their jobs. So ‘crackware’ costs us all –for customers via fewer, more expensive products; and for staff in lost income and jobs. I’ve spent many years in and around the recording industry and am lucky enough to know a number of people and to have learnt from them. They have a passion for music, recording and technology. In my experience people are nearly always generous with their time and help and often view this as a way of repaying the help and advice they received along the way. If you look at the boards of the music software forums you can see many of these people providing help and advice. Music production and recording is a small community. Using ‘crackware’ isn’t stealing from someone unknown – you may well be stealing from someone who has given you help and guidance or from whom you might need to help in the future. Music production and recording is a community – a small scale society if you will. If you use ‘crackware’ then you can’t expect to be well received in the community. Take a look at the number of flames in the forums when someone using ‘crackware’ asks for help. Personally I never refuse to help but if I suspect the person is using ‘crackware’ then my help is restricted to advising them to read the manual or contact the software company. Technical reasons not to use ‘crackware’ Most ‘crackware’ is downloaded from P2P sites. These sites often include items which contain viruses, Trojans and other malicious code. If you use ‘crackware’ you are actively choosing to download and run potentially malicious code. Virus guards are not ideal for a DAW as most run in the background and monitor activity. Recording and mixing on a DAW takes time and an active, resident virus guard can have a detrimental affect on your pcs performance, slowing it down, reducing hard disc speed or activating when you least want it. Because of theft most music software companies now protect their software either physically – ie via a dongle – or through software through some form of password code. I stopped using and buying software that is hardware protected partly because I got fed up with losing the dongles and having to spend time searching for them. In some instances hardware protection can cause incompatibility problems with pc hardware or other software that may result in a pc crash, poor performance or software that runs irratically or not at all. So my choice in software is restricted to those that do not use hardware protection. Software protection is often some form of call and response system. For these systems I find that I have to keep a file of passwords, serial numbers and so on. Everytime I upgrade I have to dig the file out to find this information. Some of my software is locked to a pc component – the hard disc, network card and so on. If I change a component I then have to go through the task of re-authorising my software. Some software is coded to the original installation disc – lose the disc, or just don’t have it to hand, and the software won’t run. All of these methods require time that I would rather spend doing something else with. So protecting software doesn’t just end up in additional development time and costs and therefore a more expensive product. It also results in inconvenience and may reduce choice and cause technical problems for the legitimate end-user. Music software is in a state of continual development. The programs are often large and complicated and despite debugging a new version will often be followed up by a number of bug fixes and improvements or feature additions downloadable from the developer’s site. Access to these downloads nearly always requires product registration and so is not available to ‘crackware’ users. In a similar vein product registration is also nearly always required to access technical support. ‘Crackware’ has no technical support. Ironically ‘crackware’ that is ‘malware’ may actually cause technical problems. Very recently there have some threads about whether we can download the backing tracks and/or lesson videos from GMC. These are both the exclusive intellectual property of, and copyrighted to, GMC and if someone pirated them it would result in lost income for GMC. Without this income GMC might cease to exist and we would all suffer as a result: we would lose the lessons, the instructors would lose an outlet for their lessons and skills and all the work that Kris, Henrik and Maria have put in would come to nothing. I’m sure that’s not an outcome any of us would want. Software piracy is the theft of intellectual property and as such GMC cannot and will not condone it, or discussions of where to get or how to do file-sharing, cracked software and so on.[i] Cheers, Tony ps - stickied but open for debate. -------------------- Get your music professionally mastered by anl AES registered Mastering Engineer. Contact me for Audio Mastering Services and Advice and visit our website www.miromastering.com
Be friends on facebook with us here. We use professional, mastering grade hardware in our mastering studo. Our hardware includes: Cranesong Avocet II Monitor Controller, Dangerous Music Liasion Insert Hardware Router, ATC SCM Pro Monitors, Lavry Black DA11, Prism Orpheus ADC/DAC, Gyratec Gyraf XIV Parallel Passive Mastering EQ, Great River MAQ 2NV Mastering EQ, Kush Clariphonic Parallel EQ Shelf, Maselec MLA-2 Mastering Compressor, API 2500 Mastering Compressor, Eventide Eclipse Reverb/Echo. |
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Nov 15 2007, 12:35 AM |
Just to clarify some points in my OP and some of the subsequent posts:
I'm not a 'professor of ethics' (I'm assuming Radarlove that you were referring to me). I have a PhD in 20th C Philosophy and when I teach u/g students one course I teach is Ethics and Business Ethics. Amongst other qualifications I also have an MBA so I have a reasonable understanding of business economics and so on. Before any of us start to guess what business model Kris has - and I certainly don't know what the figures are and am not about to speculate - it's worth keeping in mind that piracy and file-sharing of GMC would undermine it. Contingency and 'worst case analysis' would almost certainly indicate that piracy and file-sharing would result in a loss of income to a point where the site would become unviable. What sensitivity analysis indicates as the probability to the worst case is though I can only imagine. The ethical principle is 'do unto others... ', it doesn't say 'don't steal' but that if you do then expect and accept both the consequences of your actions and the same to happen to you. This is a universal imperative - applies in all situations at all times to be logically consistent. The laws that we live by are morally based. Morals are not universalised but contingent - that is why different countries have different laws at different times. It is also why laws can both be broken and changed. As I've said rather then break them I prefer to work to change them. I worked my way through University - I come from a very poor family and I had three part time jobs on the go throughout my u/g. I was also an Honours 'A' student - graduated 2nd in my u/g year but I worked and sent money home to my mother DESPITE having to miss a lot of classes because I had to go to work. I worked full time whilst doing both my Masters and then again my PhD to support myself and my family. If I didn't work it would have meant that both me and my family would have gone hungry. I teach a lot of u/g and post grad students who also work for the same reasons. I have a lot of sympathy, and an understanding, of what it means to be a student with a low income. I don't however think that being a student entails a right to download and file share illegally. The argument that 'I don't have money and so couldn't buy it so I take it' is based in a modernist ideology of 'instrumental rationalism' and, at least to me, grounds why some sociologists refer to us as a narcissistic and egocentric generation. It happens to be both an argument and an ideology that I personal don't like. Minor point - allowing others to copy work in my University - and indeed other Universities that I know well - is an act of 'collusion'. In my University collusion would result in a hearing in front of the University Senate with penalties that range up to, and include, instant dismissal from the program affected and any other being undertaken at said time. I've heard for many years that those whose work is a vocation don't need to be paid as well as others because they 'do what they enjoy' and by doing so surrender their rights to a similar standard of living. Yeah right, in my book that is just another form of exploitation. They deserve the same rights and protection as everyone else and similarly software developers and coders and musicians also deserve the same protections under the law from piracy. Final bit for a while as I'd rather others debate the topic then me. To my mind a major reason why GMC is such a good site is because of all the time and effort that Kris has invested, much more then we perhaps realise and much more then we perhaps credit him for. I feel he does this not just as an 'income' but because he loves music and is seriously committed to teaching us. It's not just hard business economics at work here - there's much more. He trusts us not to misuse all that he has invested here and piracy would be a fundamental breach of his faith in us. (Apologies to Kris - this is my opinion.) Cheers, Tony -------------------- Get your music professionally mastered by anl AES registered Mastering Engineer. Contact me for Audio Mastering Services and Advice and visit our website www.miromastering.com
Be friends on facebook with us here. We use professional, mastering grade hardware in our mastering studo. Our hardware includes: Cranesong Avocet II Monitor Controller, Dangerous Music Liasion Insert Hardware Router, ATC SCM Pro Monitors, Lavry Black DA11, Prism Orpheus ADC/DAC, Gyratec Gyraf XIV Parallel Passive Mastering EQ, Great River MAQ 2NV Mastering EQ, Kush Clariphonic Parallel EQ Shelf, Maselec MLA-2 Mastering Compressor, API 2500 Mastering Compressor, Eventide Eclipse Reverb/Echo. |
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