viruses and pirated applications

Yeah, but all of the worst stuff is usually undetectable.

No-cd exes ARE cracks. That's what a crack is. A modified version of the original protected exe.

I agree with everyone here that says wipe the hard drive. An anti-virus only gets rid of the common stuff. If your system was that infected, there's almost certainly something left behind that isn't being detected.

Most piracy is deadweight loss. I spend the same amount of money on games as I did before. Same for apps.
Bottom line, most people are not shelling out $400 for Photoshop, and they hate Gimp. Adobe losses out on $0 from them because they're just not buying it. Your best argument would be that maybe Jasc (maker of Paint Shop Pro [$100]) looses out.

Most people continue to buy quality products at fair prices. But it is indeed becoming a lot harder to peddle crap. Ask Norton.

 

There is............in your mind.

"Donations", look, from a developers forum:

"After one year of publication, my synth Alieno has received only about 15 donations,
but more than 15.000 downloads, summing up the various versions."

"I was asked by several people to put up a way for donations for my Oversampler ... I've yet to see a single donation."

"to give you an idea, my donation rate so far is about 1$ every 400 downloads.
for a total of 400 000 downloads over 5 years. "

"My donation rate roughly matches mdsp's (although my hosts didn't reach this most impressive "400 000 downloads" mark yet - just a measly 200 000 or so . "

"I faced a similar issue with a non-music piece of software I wrote. I used donations to start with and got none at all."

Link:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=216877&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

 

My best argument would be one that I write myself, thanks.

And ask musicians about "deadweight loss". And no, I'm not talking about U2.

 

Not just me, even dictionaries agree and provides different definitions on each of these words.

As for that developer, nothing's perfect in life. Freebies attract everybody, but most people are self-centered.

 

I'm glad you mentioned that
I have several friends who are in bands, one of which is signed to Island records. They've sold around 400,000 records, and you know how much money they've been generously granted by their label(who keeps %85)? a little over $300,000 spilt among 5 members, a manager, and a crew. Yeah.
They've made over ten times that on concerts and memorabilia like shirts, caps and shot glasses.
So I actually know what I'm talking about.
Do you?

Starcraft II is probably going to be the most pirated pc game this year. And yet it's also rather likely to be the best seller as well.
Quality companiess like Blizzard continue to grow and thrive despite this terrible wave of piracy. But for some reason only the crap companies are being killed by it
Fancy that.

 

I am a professional musician since 1979.

This is today's reality of touring:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment_and_arts/10220002.stm

 

I'm not talking about meanings, they are ethically the same.

 

Since you've been around so long you should know better than anybody that music sales now are far higher than they were in the early 90s and certainly through the 70s and 80s.
What was killing the industry back then vojta?
The music industry crafted some very clever marketing in the late 90s and saw cd sales spike. When the newness wore off and people became bored with boybands and pop princesses again, and returned to sales levels of the previous decade, it was blamed on piracy.

The best you could do is provide a link to a critically acclaimed yet unpopular singer with expensive poorly managed shows?

Your own article points out that her struggles are due to extravagance and incompetence:

How could she not know to do this?

She wants to do big elaborate shows with no money and no fan base. I wonder why she's struggling?
It doesn't say she stands to lose money. It's that she needs 20,000 up front to finance it. If she doesn't have the money, do smaller venues once, manage the money responsibly and then do a bigger wasteful tour like she wants to do.

I guess M.C. Hammer's problems can all be blamed on cassette tapes

 

Oh yes, it's her fault, keep stealing don't worry, she could sell caps and earn millions, like your friend's band. And the composers, arrangers, session musicians, sound egineers, producers, marketing people, CD factories' workers, people working at record companies' offices.........can they all go on touring selling caps?.

I don't mind who is killing the music industry. There are a lot of musicians that sell their records directly from their web pages and they are getting robbed all the same. Some lazy excuse for this?. Oh I know, don't tell me, it's because "people became bored with boybands and pop princesses" that you can steal them and being still a cool guy. It's all due to their "extravagance and incompetence" that robbering them is not really robbering.

It's always the same. You warez kids always end insulting and ridiculing the people you are stealing from. The problem is that you want all for free and thus even your excuses are cheap.

 

Have I claimed otherwise?

Funny, that's what the customers of those pirates say as well when they get their hands on the latest and greatest for free.

 

The funny thing is that, in this forum, if you write a four letters word it will be deleted. But it's OK to steal another person's work and laugh in his face. Like the Op, who claims to use a pirated antivirus where many antivirus companies have their official forum. Bravo, Wilders!.

 

I think you're getting a bit caught up in your zeal there.

Wilders isn't the moral police. They moderate what goes on on their forums, not what goes on in people's computers. Given that the OP neither asked for nor provided information about pirated software, and was asking a perfectly legit security-related question, I see no reason to erase his post.

 

Oh!, it isn't?. Let's check it out.........****!!!.

See.....it's automatic. I can't even read what I wrote if I edit my post.

 

Either you're intellectually dishonest, or you're suffering from a reading disability.

Setting rules for their own establishment is not called being moral police. They don't go after you if you spew your obscenities elsewhere. If you feel the need to reply to me, why not address what I really said instead of making up nonsense?

 

You are too kind.

 

we have all gone a bit off the topic here

First of all, i don't agree with pirating software, downloading music etc. People who made it, want to be paid for it, it doesn't meter how they split it after that. But i also understand that most of the people who do download music and movies, do that because they can't afford to watch it in the cinema or buy a dvd or buy an entire album of songs just so they can listen to the one song they like. So IMO the "least evil" option would be to go and rent a movie or chip in with your friends to buy a dvd and then you all can share that dvd and watch the movie (court said its totally legal, industries don't like it, of course if you don't distribute the content further on, especially for the profit). So much for the movies. Perhaps what music industries should do is to embrace the fact that good old days, where they could sell 10 crappy songs and 2 good ones for the price of 12, are gone. Now people just want to buy what they like and if the industries can't provide that, some one else will. As for the software, just find freeware, there is a lot of it out there, i use only freeware (OS came with the laptop). We all tend to get addicted to the "big names" and just can't get it that OpenOffice can replace MSWord, noname burner can replace Nero, it is ok to have freeware lite version of winamp and not the super-pro version, etc. I am not a gamer so i don't know much about that side.
Just my humble opinion.

 

Yes. But this is pretty fun reading. Actually most entertaining reading on this site in probably the past couple years, or more.

Everyone, please continue.