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By Nicolas Lee |
In the beginning there was Bill. Before the beginning there was Steve Jobs. And before both was piracy - and it still haunts them both. How big is it? Why can't software be protected well?
SLICK LOVES TO PLUNDER BOOTY, although he refuses to wear a one-eyed patch. Despite the fact he has illegally copied more than 100 Sony Playstation CDs over the last year and maintains a hold of almost $3000 worth of cloned software, he still doesn't come to see himself as a software pirate. "Oh, it's stealing," the third-year computer science student says. "Of course it's bad...I consider myself a theft." He laughs sarcastically as he prepares to burn another compact disk into his collection. So comes the vast world of software piracy, where Slick, as he is known by his friends, is only one of the two-thirds of computer users worldwide who illegally copy computer programs at a cost excess of $11 billion to software corporations. Piracy, the software companies say, has been a gut-wrenching problem since the dawn of the computer age itself. And the history of combating the digital vigilantes, they explain, is almost without beginning. "People have been making illegal copies forever and ever," says Chris MacKimmie, a computer science instructor at Mount Royal College in Calgary. "It's what they call a nameless crime. They don't feel like they are hurting a person, they're hurting a nameless corporation." Even so, the computer industry has pushed hard to bring about stricter legislation since the very beginning of piracy. The problem, they say, is not only tracking down the 20 million businesses and homeowners who pirate software, it's in defining what is legitimate copyright protection. In Canada, the present Copyright Act dates back to 1924 - a time, of course, long before the imagination of present-day technology. At that time, copyright was meant more to protect the literary works of authors. When it came to technical designs, patent protection was more feasible. However, laws stated that to qualify for patent protection, the item up for patent had to have both "novelty" and "inventiveness." Novelty meant "something which hadn't been done before," while inventiveness meant, "an advance which would not come to be if an ordinary person put his mind to the task." In the case of software, proving either was evidently difficult. Copyright, though, didn't need to prove these things. But, since computer programs weren't mentioned in the Copyright Act, software companies, for many years, relied on the ingenuity of courts to gain copyright protection over their strenuous work. One early Canadian case which courts rewarded copyright for software was in 1986 when Mackintosh Computers, a computer-systems company, had copied a silicon chip design from one of Apple's Computers. In the Federal appeal, J. Hugessen held that the assembly code version of the program in the chip, as well as the versions in binary or hexadecimal notation, could be printed or written and was, therefore, eligible for traditional copyright protection. Within that context, it seemed that programs written with a language - be it BASIC or PASCAL - could have been considered a literary work. Mackintosh, however, argued that work should be "literary" only if it was readable by a human. Machine code, said Mackintosh, is really not like a book. But the Supreme Court disagreed. Although the code wasn't traditionally literary, they said, it was a translation or reproduction of the source code, which was a literary work. Today, laws regarding software protection are on the same principle. So do computer programers feel that is legitimate? Many software companies agree. They've even formed a watchdog group called the Business Software Alliance to push for harder laws. Its list of pirate-killers includes Microsoft, Lotus Development, Novell and other top conglomerates. Those are big ship captains. But even so, they've still found themselves in quite a tangled cannon-firing battle. The difficulty, says John T. Ramsay of the Macleod Dixon law firm, is that there are so many different functions of software that it is complicated to find a protection suitable for all of them. "Some aspects of copyright protection are appropriate and some of patent protection are appropriate," he says in his publication, Pirates Beware! "But each has failings or inappropriate provisions." Major changes in developers' favour eventually did come into effect though. In 1998, Canada's C-60 bill absorbed components of American copyright law, which was substantially more strict on software users. Canada, where 40 per cent of software was pirated at the time, was almost double of that of the U.S., at 25 per cent. The basic meaning to software users, though, has remained much the same since Bill C-60. In that law, the clause "the user may make one copy for backup purposes," still rings in the clutter of almost all "tear-me-open" software disclaimers. Nevertheless, large movements in the U.S. voice that software should not be copyrighted. Warez, a genre of web media associated with more than 4000 sites, distribute pirated software, along with hacking tools, MP3s and even source codes for coin-op arcade games. Even more, hackers swamp the Internet with downloadable "cracks," programs which disable expiration on demo software. Even "softlifting" - the sale of computers with unlicenced, pre-installed software - has gone up in recent years. But that might not really be bad news for developers. In fact, many computer users say that software companies deceive the public on ethics of the issue. Piracy, say the users, has always been silently recognized by software companies as a promotional tool for themselves. "They like people pirating software," says Darcy Grant, a system administrator at the University of Calgary. "They would like to make more money...but they know where to draw the line." Moreover, the message sent to users, he adds, is taken to the max. "When companies say that lots of jobs and millions of dollars are being lost, that's bordering on nebulas." In any case, it doesn't seem to matter to our Playstation plunderer Slick. "Software is too damned expensive," he says. "If I didn't do this I wouldn't buy it in the first place." Casually, he pulls his compact disk out of the CD writer and places it on his shelf. That's one more for the collection.
Microsoft Piracy Page: http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/ Piracy Movement: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html Piracy Movement: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html |
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