Printti 8/1985, pages 10 and 19 https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelittaako/16395917939/in/album-72157650920073675/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelittaako/16580928532/in/album-72157650920073675/ --- From the Honeywell Jesse Jameses Are a Different Thing (Original title: Jesse Jamekset ovat asia erikseen) Honey, the Printti magazine's electronic form, has a separate area for piracy-related topics. There has been plenty of discussion over the last two months. We publish the best bits here. The condition for publishing the texts were fixing the grammar and leaving the users' names out. -- Pirate clerk? When we visited one computer store in Helsinki, we got to witness the current state of piracy: you could play the pirate version of Flight Simulator II at the desk! The clerk didn't interfere. -- Statements If copying is harder or more expensive than buying the original, there is hardly any piracy. Those who want to prevent copying should invent new protections. Those who like cracking protections will be happy too. Let's sell software so cheap that copying isn't worth it. Those who want to prevent copying should work in collaboration with lawmakers to clear the current messy situation. When there's unclarity it's useless to start threatening people. There shouldn't be any clauses preventing copying software meant for home use. Such written agreements are common in the case of business software, since you can sue based on a breach of contract instead of the copyright law. There is no protection that can't be cracked. Cracking is fun. Thus, there's cracking for the fun of it, not because of the quality of the game. -- Lee was difficult I've copied several programs and never came across as difficult one as the floppy version of Bruce Lee, which took me more than an hour to crack. By the way, who's so crazy as to buy software from pirates? -- Small and big crooks In my opinion it would be necessary to make a distinction between Jesse Jameses who copy for themselves, and M.O.B. who sell stolen goods. Copying isn't that free after all, since it takes a lot of time to learn a new program. -- I don't get it If I make a copy of an original tape and sell the original to a friend, is that right or wrong? -- What, what what? If distributing a copy is forbidden, then is distributing a copy of a copy that too, or even more punishable? -- Pirate sales In my opinion you can't make much money by selling pirate copies. Everybody gets enough programs by just swapping, so there's not a lot of audience. Furthermore, in my hometown kids sell games for one or two marks per copy! It makes an old veteran sad. -- The German Way I watched some friends play a game and it was of course a pirate copy. At the beginning of the program there was a nice little moving text saying "German Cracking Service presents". In addition, there was a list of programs that would soon be available from them. Does anybody know if it's really this professional? Do they know these companies in Germany, if the copy was made there in the first place? -- Forbidden by the law? Even if the copyright law did, according to one interpretation, allow making a backup copy for personal use, wouldn't the license that follows with programs forbid it? I don't remember the exact wordings, but they are something like this: by buying this software you agree on not copying it etc. Are these, mostly foreign, clauses in effect here? In other words, do you breach a contract if you copy? -- A written agreement A software license is an agreement and only the stakeholders, the buyer and distributor, can sue based on it. If it's a written license and signed by both, it's a clear case. However, there is no evidence that the licenses based on just buying something would be binding. -- Use your common sense The reason why the copyright law doesn't apply to these technical things is that lawyers hardly understand anything about technology. In the case of copying it's better to trust your common sense than a lawyer. -- Death penalty Personally I think piracy should be illegal and punishable by death in about three years, when MY software appears at stores... -- Who's in charge? All proper moralists, who themselves surely don't have any "backup copies" from their friends, were highly offended when tips on copy protection removal started appearing in this discussion thread. Of course copying hurts many software developers (or more correctly: software distributors' profits) and that's not right. I like copy protection removal, because it lets me modify programs for my own use. In that case those instructions are ok. More questionable are various do-it-yourself instructions published by various magazines, where you plug gadgets into a wall socket. Many inexperienced tinkerers are even in the danger of death in those cases. Is the magazine that published the instructions responsible for the death of an innocent hobbyist? -- Discipline or M.O.B. Piracy is small (an big) boys' play with a serious subject. We here live on the border in world scale. No importer will probably go bankrupt if they sell only a few hundred copies of a game, even if there were thousands of pirate copies in circulation. They get their profits from overpriced hardware anyway; it's harder to copy. And parallel importing isn't that profitable either. What makes copying more serious is that because of effective crackers some productivity software never arrives here. If a friend gives you a copy or sells it for the price of a floppy, then go ahead but don't leave any documentation behind. If the prices of pirate copies start getting closer to the originals, your organization might start attracting interest. A couple of dudes happen to overhear what you and your pal discuss and when you've sold a copy they mug you. It would be best if there was a software market based on reliable agreements. Then you wouldn't need copy protections at all or the instructions for making a backup copy would reside on the floppy. For example with Multiplan there is a way to copy everything else but the startup code. This way your original floppy doesn't "wear out". In the age of binding agreements you could expect the prices to fall, since you wouldn't need to make your profits out of the first hundred copies. Thus, don't copy, you may burn. Into ashes. If you buy copies, don't leave traces. Oherwise there will be M.O.B. After all this, I wish you a smooth sailing in the agreement-based future where pirates and other crooks hang from the ship's yard. -- Piracy increases hardware sales Wh do they hunt pirates even though copying increases hardware sales? I know many who have bought a Commodore 64 simply because there are so many copies available. You could compare the moral of copying to Robin Hood: you rob from the rich and give to the poor. You make a copy and pass it on almost free, that is. Some copy just to get as many games as possible, like others collect stamps. Copying is a fun hobby. -- Am I a pirate? I've received a lot of copied commercial games from my friends. Initially there were only a few, but now almost 100. Am I a pirate because I swap the games? -- Response to the above It's a good question. I don't know anybody who wouldn't have at least one copied program. Therefore, all Finnish youngsters must be pirates, I suppose. -- Yadda yadda Calm down! Copying music records and tapes must be much more common than some fun programs, so there's too much noise about software piracy. Almost anybody who listens to music has at least a few copies of records or tapes, but nobody's at war with them or tries to put them into jail for that. -- On the lack of copy protection It could be that many games and productivity software never entered the market because protection is so hard to get right. A program only enters the market when they've solved the protection issue. These days protection dongles that you plug into the RS port have started appearing, and the program won't work without one. They may work for a while until someone fixes the program so that the dongle is not needed. And we're back where we started from. -- And on protection Or someone figures out how to make the dongle and sells the schematics with one mark a copy. And we're back where we started from. *** These comments on piracy and its various forms came from PRINTTI readers, not from the editors. Both the magazine and Honey are still open for discussions on piracy and other questionable phenomena of the microcomputer world.