what shall I do?

[Simo Sorce]

Sorry Ricardo, but you have a very distorted vuew of the world imvho.

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 03:01, Ricardo Andere de Mello wrote:
> oh man... theory is a nice thing...

Law is not theory, it is very practical.
A complex society like us cannot live whitout laws.

Said that, I know there are some very bad laws, but it is not breacking
them that you make a good job, the right thing to do with bad laws is to
change them.

> but remember that hollywood studios could not avoid decss being
> spread all over the world.

Policy cannot stop mafia, or drugs sellers, or murders, so what?

>  And if you are capable of 
> playing DVD on your GNU/Linux box, you should thank little Jon. We know he 
> did something wrong (not actually from his country law, only americam law), 
> but I think he did a VERY GOOD thing, because he enabled thousands of people 
> to watch movies on their computers.

I'm not sure it is illegal even in the US, as the decss has nothing to
do with copying a dvd, you can pick a DVD and copy it encrypted, then
take the copy and put it on a dvd player, and it will run perfectly.
DeCSS is used only to segmentate the market in 6 areas over the world,
and the practice seem also to be illegal and complaints have been made
to WTO.

> These rules works on court, but the internet has another rules.

Internet has the same rules as physical world, please do net get
childish ...

>  Is it hard to 
> understand this? If it is legal, it will be free software, if not, they will 
> call it piracy, but it will still exist.

Murders exist, so what?

> You can sue one guy, but can you sue the entire world?
> What is the point of being illegal?

Change the law, do not break it.

> In another example, reverse engineering was a normal learning process for 
> hackers, now everybody keeps doing the same thing, but just don't tells that 
> does. I don't know one hacker that at some point of his life does not reverse 
> engineered some proprietary software, just to see how it works, or to have 
> more balls at his pinball game.

1: reverse engineering is perfectly legal in most of the world and
protected by copyright law.
2: given point 1 I do not understand your point here.

> The "underground" will always exist, and the internet will guarantee it's 
> existence.

"The Underground" existed before internet too ...

> For each software protection created, 10 minutes later a new crack 
> is created. I'm NOT discussing if piracy is write or wrong. I'm just saying 
> that it exists for one reason: "People want access to information!".

So people should make their politicians change the laws to make it
perfectly legal, breaking law put you always on the wrong side.

> Here in Brazil, a music CD is about 12 dollars. This is VERY expensive for our 
> country. There are pirate CDs being sold for 1.5 dollars, a lot more 
> affordable for poor people. Who have money buy the original, who don't, buy 
> the piracy. If capitalism cannot solve digital exclusion, maybe piracy (and 
> free software) can.

High prices are not a matter of capitalism, they are a problem of lack
of real competitions.
CD Producers live in a complete monopoly so they make the price they
want, they are not subject to competition (this means they are outside
any form of real capitalism), as you cannot seriously tell me that you
can have competition beetwen different goods. If I do not like Madonna
(just an example), I'll not buy his CD even if it costs half the price
of my favourite singer.

Simo.

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