Funny little story here. As I kid, growing up in Kuwait, dvds/games/etc were
very hard to come by (legal ones, that is). And they were prohibitively
expensive, the prices were really jacked up. For things like movies, they
were also censored.
So....on every street corner shop was a cardboard box or some such holding
hundreds of copied movies, games and software. When you bought a
playstation, you had your choice of 50 free games with it, or 200 (with a
small additional fee). I specifically asked for the legitamite copy of
Windows when I bought my first computer, and was given a burned cd.
When my friends and I needed anything, there was a nice antique shop down
south with a coffee room (Arabic style). Up in the second floor, you could
drink coffee and look at the antiques (which weren't), but underneath the
benches, in a slide-out drawer were binders.
Each binder was for a different type of media: DVDs, software, computer
games, playstatiion games, etc. You flipped through the binders and wrote
down the corresponding number on a slip of paper, and gave it back with your
coffee. The fellow behind the counter made some calls, and 5 minutes later;
voila! You had a bag with the appropriate discs in it.
Now, I'm not advocating it necessarily. It was more of a necessity at that
time; you could not watch movies without them being heavily censored without
it (purchasing dvds or in theatres). Most games and software were
unavailable in any other format, and the mailing system was so bad I ordered
cds & shipped them to canada to pick up once a year, because I knew then I
would actually get them.
Today, I've replaced my copied movies with originals. But you know what? I
bought them in college in australia, and they don't work on any dvd player
here! At least _every_ model of dvd player in Kuwait was region-free.
secondly, I've solved the software problem by going almost solely
open-source. A few copied programs I have lying around for testing (MS
Windows & Office), but I haven't used them in ages. And I've bought the few
Windows utilities I find indispensable (Flash Renamer and dbpoweramp).
And my solution for games, is that right now I don't even own a console, and
have not bought a game here in the states yet. Just running a SNES emulator
on Ubuntu.
So there's an interesting little story, covers a few different aspects of
what we deal with.
-Jordan
On 8/30/06, John J. Trammell <trammell+tclug at el-swifto.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 05:04:17PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, John J. Trammell wrote:
> [snip]
> >> Utter nonsense. In today's legal climate, regardless of your opinion
> >> of the matter, it is a prosecutable offense, and it is irresponsible
> >> of you to say otherwise.
>
> Looks like I am going to have to eat those words, to some degree. :-)
> In Mike's original post, as I read it now, he was both (a) clarifying
> that copyright infringement !> infringement. I have no disagreement with those statements, so I think
> we agree for the most part. I don't know why I got some other
> impression on my first reading.
>
> I still hold the opinion that copyright infringement is a really dumb
> thing to do. And the fact remains that in the USA, it is currently
> illegal.
>
> > It might be hard for you to accept this, but a law that equates
> > copying a file with stealing a purse is a very bad law.
>
> Not so hard for me to accept. One problem that I keep seeing is that
> the metaphors are inadequate--a photo of a purse doesn't let you *do*
> anything; it's a passive object. But an unauthorized copy of Windows XP
> turns a chunk of metal and plastic into a subsentient entity.
>
> --
> trammell at el-swifto.com 9EC7 BC6D E688 A184 9F58 FD4C 2C12 CC14 8ABA 36F5
> Twin Cities Linux Users Group (TCLUG) Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>
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