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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: Software Leasing
Organization: The Armory
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 1995 13:39:19 GMT
Message-ID: <D34BA3.394@armory.com>
References: <D2Lv28.JsB@armory.com> <3fjk9b$1q8@booz.bah.com>
            <D2nwnz.76A@armory.com> <26JAN199513265923@utarlg.uta.edu>
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In article <26JAN199513265923@utarlg.uta.edu>,
COLLINS,ZACHRY,SHAY <zsc0961@utarlg.uta.edu> wrote:
>In article <D2nwnz.76A@armory.com>, rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
writes...
>>In article <3fjk9b$1q8@booz.bah.com>,  <pole@sartre.ads.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>In article <D2Lv28.JsB@armory.com>, <rstevew@armory.com> writes:
>>>> Naw! This post above is just a commercialization of the net! He should have
>>>> his butt kicked. If *I* need some software for a short time, *I* just STEAL
>>>> it, and I recommend that others do too!!! You can just about find anything
>>>> among my circle of friends!!!
>>>> -Steve Walz  rstevew@armory.com
>>>> 
>>>
>>>I find it amazing that you consider "commercialization of the net"
>>>to be evil, and the person should be punished, but you recommend
>>>robbery as a morally superior activity. When you steal software
>>>you are not ripping off some mythical money manager, you are 
>>>stealing the jobs of the engineers who should be paid for their
>>>labors. Most of the cost of commercial software (that's stuff you're
>>>..excuse me one is supposed to pay for) is in labor. Labor means
>>>money paid to people.
>>>
>>>The government put a small fortune into starting the internet, 
>>>they are not going to continue paying for it.
>>>The net is not free, anyone who thinks it is is very naive; 
>>>and its users and uses change daily. Deal with it.
>>---------------------------------------------------
>>Software is overpriced because we are supposed to steal it. That is true
>>because the rate of infrastructure upgrade in this country relies on
>>computer-folk learning to use the new stuff on their OWN TIME and THEN
>>being a ready source of talent for industry and government! I didn't MAKE
>>it that way, but it IS that way!!! They overprice it to rip each other off
>>as much as the market will bear, (corporations). They never intended the
>>poor computer-folk, who could NEVER afford it, not have access to it, and
>>it would mean the death of over two thirds of all small start-up companies
>>to go fishing in their disk boxes for pirated stuff. Thus, because the
>>nation would colllapse without it, the laws about copyright with respect to
>>software are impossible and even undesirable in this country and others, to
>>even TRY to enforce!!! NOW! Shithead! *YOU DEAL WITH IT!!!* NOBODY is being
>>deprived of income, because LESS of their software would be purchased and
>>NOT MORE if they enforced their so-called ownership!!! NOBODY would fucking
>>know how to use it and it would never get even recommended to LOSER
>>managers and ownership!!! What you, in your yuppified glow of greed fail to
>>see clearly, is that you are being short-sighted and ignoring the existent
>>situation we all live in which has arisen due to market necessity!!!
>> 
>>There is not JUST something warm and fuzzy about the net hackerism re:
>>"The Free Access To Information". Humans have always been the most successful
>>when they cooperated and did each other the favors as they could, and have
>>always *FUCKED* themselves/everybody in the ASS when they DIDN"T!!!! The
>>market forces have spoken, in their wisdom, that it is both UNWORTHWHILE
>>*AND a *BAD THING* (tm) to interfere with low income software piracy!!! 
>>It's time for *YOU* idiots to get into congruence with the "Market Forces"
>>you seem to worship!!! If you want a fucking swimming pool, go dig one!
>>-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com
>>
>I must disagree with you Steve, and I don't appreciate your vulgar
>response.  Not only is your response directed at the person above, it
>is directed at me and any other person who writes software for a living.
>How could you think that software marketers put high prices on it
>because you are suppossed to steal it?  Have you ever thought about
>enrolling in a class so you could get a student discount on popular
----------------------------------
Ever thought about buying a Lexus, asshole? Figure in the cost of the
class! Also, you aren't displaying good understanding of feedback loops!
This whole society and its functioning is a monstrously parallel
internested feedback loop. It is no more "proper" to claim that software
would be cheaper if it was not stolen that it is to claim what I claim,
that it's price is both the cause and THE INTENT on the part of the market
forces that we DO steal it! Cause and effect in a feedback loop are not
discernable.
-Steve 

>software?  I think an assumption can be made that a student is probably
>one of the "poor folk" (as you put it), and yet mysteriously enough,
>I know plenty of students that can and do shell out the money for student
>priced software.  Besides the fact that you have openly admitted to
------------------------------------
I know plenty of students who don't have money! Why do YOU suppose they are
going to school!???! And as for stealing software, I see no MORAL argument
that suffices to say that you deserve, under market forces, to make any
more than you're making now for what you do! You're like alot of spoiled
Americans who want to get rich on a few cute ideas instead of by working
everyday a lot harder and actually producing what this country uses! All
you're advocating is a disguised form of lottery wherein wealth is "won"
rather than earned on a continuous basis! You imagine that if you produce
some interesting code that you shouldn't have to work everyday like normal
people! *I* know your type! "Intellectual property" is trying to sell pig
shit as pork after it's been through a few other people! In otherwords,
what have YOU produced for us LATELY??? If you work for a living, far out,
you're normal, you get a paycheck! You don't get to rest on your fat
laurels!
-Steve

>stealing copyrighted software (a federal offense) in a place where
>you will most likely be caught (the internet, after all, don't you
>think big brother is watching you as you type?), it IS morally wrong
>to take someone else's intellectual property.  Perhaps if there were
>fewer people in the world who take your view of software piracy, I wouldn't
>have to pay $450 for a compiler to compile programs which you
>and your buddies will pass around like a newspaper.  Do you feel you are
>exempt from federal law?  If you had ever legally obtained a piece
-------------------------------------
Of course people are exempt from any federal law that would cause the
demise of the government if it were enforced! They make laws to make
special interests happy. That they can't enforce them is a symptom that
their system is self-contradictory and they know it and don't dare enforce
what you seem to favor! You are simply not thinking about this one very
deeply! If you'd had sense to share the price of a compiler with twenty
other people and publish your work all through one entity, then you'd just
be smart!!! There's NO regulation that says a person who "owns" a compiler
can't compile twenty other people's programs for them and they sell them!;)
Lots of crap is called intellectual property! You might say something that
gives me an idea, and then whose is it? You might say something that others
would repeat or do variations upon. At the rate we are creating thought in
this country, within a decade or less, no copyright entity will even be
ABLE to contain it or accurately distinguish between plagerism and
derivative work! I predict it will die the death that copyright richly
deserves! You can't copyright everything. Humans are NOT all THAT original,
and with computers to help create it it would take three times as much
computing power to cross correlate it with all other works for plagerism
within the life of the humans concerned! And that would stifle human 
creativity way too much! Face it, copyright is on a downhill slide to
implausibility!
-Steve

>of software, you would find that only the first time you buy it
>does it come with a large price tag.  Upgrades are either free
>or inexpensive.  Would you consider it morally OK if someone stole
>your ideas at work, and used them to their benefit?
>-Shay
---------------------
Shay: Your response is that of a software developer, (as if I weren't), and
that of a naive idealist. Look not blindly at what you think is "right" but
at what happens, as it is the best guide to the nature of real world human
interactions. I mentioned what I did because of the market forces I see at
work and what paradoxes of your idealism that they repeatedly and blithely
have ALWAYS ignored as if they weren't even a concern! These market forces
must be looked at NOT merely from some parochial idealized view as limited to
sanctioned exchanges of software for money, but must be viewed in the
larger context of ALL of the ways they are used, even "illicitly", which I
assert has no real meaning when assessing the sociological, psychological,
and technological dynamics at work in trying to predict and explain what
HAS happened and MIGHT continue to happen and WHY it happens! If you went
to study a heretofore unknown culture, you wouldn't simply believe what
people told you SHOULD happen, or what they ASSERT DOES happen! You would
watch for what ACTUALLY HAPPENS as well! When something as widespread as
media copying of every copyrighted work occurs as it actually does
throughout ALL of industrialized society, we have to realize that our
institutions are simply too outdated to mean what we think they mean to us,
and we must consequently find another way of seeing!  

Now you aren't going to see a change in your income if copyright laws are
suddenly somehow rigidly enforced! There are only a certain number of
dollars chasing just so many goods, and we can't keep printing more to make
economic readjustments due to new products less painful! It is not as
though it is a zero-sum game, and the amount of money chasing goods or the
goods need remain the same, but it changes very slowly, and if it doesn't
change fast enough, then "special rules" are made within a culture that
everyone uses and abides by and yet all will deny they exist!!! Such a rule
is the rule of privacy of our personal "finds" among copyable works, as we
need to do! If you have never copied a CD to tape from a friend, or never
copied a CD to DAT and bypassed the copy flags, or never copied an LP
record to tape, or never used a copier for its most common use in America,
or if you have never recorded something off the radio or TV with a VCR, and
if you have never taken a picture of something where camera use was
prohibited, (many historical sites!), then you are NOT just an adherent of
the protection of copyrighted or otherwise licensed works, you are also an
enormous fool!!! Another "unwritten rule" is the provision of needs to
those not able to afford them. Now I know you may be stuck in a nice comfy
chair in the corporate mainstream where you can afford what you need, but
you REALLY must be a babe in the woods when it comes to people if you think
that most people are in a position to buy all that they need to get ahead
information-wise!! The information have-nots of this world already exist
and really don't care whom they steal from, as I do not! Due to life and
health circumstances and opportunity circumstances they are NOT as lucky as
you! They are OFTEN young, and they are old as well! I have helped many
older people gain access to the current world who could not have afforded
it without the trust and largess of people who have unregistered copies of
software which have literally thousands of "owners" and are proud of it! 
What you don't grasp is that while you pretend the world is a capitalism,
it has never worked that way and won't in future either; it is always going
to be a case of pay me now or pay me later for YOU to live in the kind of
society YOU want to live in, and the people you will always pay are those
for whom the price of your labor is prohibitive, but which they cannot live
without and genuinely live in the same time in history as do you without
doing this! This is true of medical care, child care, food (ever see a REAL
food riot, smartass??), schooling, taxes, etc.! Your pure capitalism you
pretend exists would fall in hours were not this "system" paralleled by a
different set of rules that go honored but quietly and in the breech for
countless numbers of people whose ranks are INCREASING!!! The universe is a
socialism, Shay, no matter what the lucky ones punch on their phony baloney
ballots at the polling booth! Get used to it, or it will eat you!

As for my possible deeds thus far, you are admonished that there are more
than legal remedies, Shay, but that there are extra-legal remedies as well,
and that you can't imagine who your talking to. You wouldn't have room for
those of us who have broken the unjust laws in this country if you built 20
times more jails than there are! Crime is not a symptom of criminality, it
is merely a symptom of injustice. In a fair society no one would bother to
break the law. It would be a ridiculous gesture. 

And as to my colorful language, there's simply another way in which words
whose meaning and use for emphasis you would be hard pressed to deny you
after all really DO understand, but they conflict with your obtuse and
ridiculously limited sense of "right and wrong". And as the Supreme Court
gave me the right to say in Cohen vs California 1968 December, and which
three very different high courts have upheld, I tell you this, Shay: Fuck off!
Have a nice day.
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com

