I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to an FTP server and a cracker would go to work removing protections, it usually took hours or less, unless the protection was novel. They'd usually push a release without a lot of large assets (FMV, cutscene type stuff) to make releasing it faster, and follow up with a full release after it was all packaged up.
I saw lots of folks get arrested/busted back in those times, and there was a key difference of outcomes for two groups: adults vs minors. Minors always got a slap on the wrist/fine (I remember TKLP from was it... RoR? had to pay out $1200 to AT&T for hacking a PBX... because he was 14 or so), and adults got sent to jail and had their lives ruined. I stopped being involved just before turning 18 and it was a very smart decision in retrospect.
> I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair.
None of it's fair.
A servile government, with license to use force/incarceration, bent on defending putrid industrial system that hordes as much rights for itself as it can? That has extended copyright to 70 years, by crook & by hook? The whole thing is a sham, a disgrace to the human spirit, a scourge upon the earth.
The damage numbers are all made up. These people get punishments exceeding those of violent crimes. It's all deeply unfair & unjust & immoral. The system debases itself by being a mean, cruel, unjust bastard with no remorse to adults. It's pathetic & weak & servile to the worst aspects of society (corporate cultures). Asshole Jack Valenti piece-of-shit RIAA lawyers & trashbag DRM systems are a heavy foot of injustice stomping down on the face of society, forever & ever. It's all woefully biased brutally against society & social possibility, for the greed of very few.
Alas there's seemingly next to no representation for the human cause. Patents & IP rights grow, & seemingly little curbs them, ever. The proprietarization of knowledge & intellect ever expands, a system unable unwilling & uninterested in checking the expansion of intellectual ownership. Fucking shit show man. Fucking awful. Fuck all this.
And, this unjust behaviour with intent, like lies do, hurts not like a mere blow, but like erosion of goodwill and trust of everyone, including unborn yet children of all paths of life.
At least for the US, the life ruining part is the very low barrier access to background checks. Unlike the 1980's, where only huge employers could look into your past, now everyone can see everything you've ever been arrested for, even if you hadn't been convicted. It's very difficult to find any employment at all now, and even harder to find something that isn't minimum wage.
As I understand it, in other places, like Australia, employers don't do a background check exactly. They send the job description and the candidate info to a government agency that just answers back "yes" or "no". So that, for example, a hacking conviction might disqualify you for some jobs, but not ALL jobs. And you have some idea beforehand the kind of jobs you might have success passing for. The offense is very specifically weighed against the job description, and not just some HR person's delicate sensibilities.
To me, barring some extreme exceptions, it's not fair for punishment to extend beyond what you were sentenced to. There's also peripheral issues, like the plea bargain system, which gives prosecutors lots of leverage to "convict" people that are either innocent, or guilty of a lesser crime than they plea to.
Background check companies in the US scrape public access government websites, too. There’s a great chance that if you have the same name as someone listed on those websites and in the same geography you’re going to get false matches. An Evan Anderson close to my home was involved in a hit-skip car crash and it has come up in searches that have been done on me. Fortunately I was told about it and able to produce documentation that showed it was a different guy. I’m lucky.
I had a similar thing happen a few years ago when I bought my house. There was a guy the same age as me with the same name who had defaulted on his mortgage, and I had to sign a statement saying I wasn't him. The funny thing was, I looked up the house he abandoned, and it was basically identical to the house I was buying, down to the ornamental plum tree in the front yard. Presumably got built in the same wave of development in the 70s.
To add to the Australian landscape in this discussion:
- only convictions are assessed against, not arrests.
- only relevant convictions are assessed against.
- most states expunge convictions after a certain number of years. Those convictions will not ever be considered in any job application ever, nor any court case. There are some small number of exceptions.
- your record is as tightly held as a state secret.
- there is no third party access to records beyond police and courts.
- there are no for-profit prisons with quotas. I don't believe there are many, if any, for profit prisons at all. They are looked down upon.
- the judiciary is well educated, career accomplished, is not voted in, and has an expectation of continued professional development.
- the judiciary tends to be more progressive than politicians, focusing on interventions and improvement rather than incarceration, where appropriate and possible.
In the Netherlands when a job requires a background check - for example working in fintech - the employer is only permitted to request information directly related to the industry, e.g. financial crimes.
Unfortunately this does not avoid them using "3rd party" services but it is refreshing to know employers can't have a data trawl from the Government.
I think it depends on the case. Some of the leaders of those groups were basically using minors like myself as cover in the same way street gangs did, and doing a lot more than piracy. I think the folks that got hit for their actual fraud deserved it, but folks that just cracked and released games were unfairly targeted, very few profited from it, and I think a profit incentive is where I consider the crime to be more relevant, but I'm not a lawyer :)
Thanks for your comments. I've been pirating one way or another for a couple of decades. Always always saw the crackers as someone who did it for anything but money.
I never could wrap my head around long prison sentences. Even assuming a truly humane prison (not a reality in many places), which rehabilitates inmates well, it's hard to map a year, five years of prison on a crime that happened in one moment in time.
The way decisions, actions, arguments and repentance work in real life, as regularly seen with children, is usually on a short time frame. If you really need to punish someone - questionable in itself - maybe bring back the whip, but let people walk with a clean record the next day. If people can't be put back into society, they could be subsistence farmers with a netflix account in a fenced in plot of land or something. A significant change in scenery, and some forced lifestyle changes could be OK as part of a judgement
I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I consider (myself) and most people I know to have been children at 18 and up to several years older than that. But it's not like people wear their "maturity" levels on their forehead, so the justice system has to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere.
Not saying it's ideal, and individual circumstances have to be considered, but it's the best a crude system can do.
It is not just the justice system. After 18, you are given full citizen rights, but you also get the responsibilities that go with it. It is crude but fair.
There are exceptions, adults may have guardians and are effectively considered minors if they have mental problems for instance, and in some cases, children can be emancipated. But these are usually for extreme cases.
> I think in general it is fair, but the very arbitrary 18/not-18 cutoff doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I saw some neuroscience research once that indicated you don't really mature until your early 20s.
That said, in some cultures you are considered an adult at about 14 (mostly hunter gatherer cultures that lack the insane complexity and fundamental weirdness that we have right now).
18 seems a good rough split-the-difference, but equally, in an ideal world it'd be 21. That said, most people wouldn't want to wait that long to do responsible adult activities like drive cars too fast around the place, vote for the people who do the best job of lying, and consume borderline-lethal quantities of alcohol ... :-)
Even under the ancient - and extreme - jurisprudence of 'an eye for an eye' then this is clearly not fair unless a cracker actually ruined people's lives.
I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence. The penalty goes up until crime rate comes down. It makes sense I guess, it’s not meant to be a trade - much less a fair one - but to stop/reduce crime.
Edit: That said, super heavy penalties for what are often victimless crimes might not be good for society overall - might be better to allow the existing offence rate for that crime.
Not really. It is the risk of getting caught that is a deterrent. If jaywalking was a capital offense but only one person in 300,000,000 a year got arrested and convicted for it, it wouldn't put a huge dent in jaywalking. Whereas a fine of say $75 and a 95% catch rate will pull jaywalking down to almost zero pretty quickly.
Is that true? Crime across the Islamic world is remarkably low despite many countries being much more unstable. East-Asia, another region with generally harsh punishments is very safe. Like, even large Chinese cities with over ten million citizens and incomes far below what you see in the West have very low crime rates. Not to speak of more comparable countries lke Singapore.
I mean it's not Narnia, you can ask people who live there. I've spent a lot of time in the MENA region. The countries of the Arabian peninsula who are comparably wealthy to the US are practically crime free. When I lived in Amman, the capital of Jordan when the population was a quarter(!) refugees, other than some petty theft in touristy places violent crime isn't really a thing. It was a safer place than a significant amount of American cities.
Of course you can, but that isn't necessarily a reliable source.
For instance in the former soviet and satellite states people felt like there was no crime, because of propaganda despite the fact that there was a huge amount of it.
Depends on the crime and the punishment. I'd like to see the data you used to make this claim, since looking at many single cases it is certainly not clear that your claim is true.
>I think the penalties of many laws weren’t made with fairness in mind but deterrence.
It's a very common misconception that laws prohibit a given action. Getting straight to the point, they don't and can't: Mere words on paper can't stop a swinging fist, per se. The pen is not mightier than the sword.
Rather, the point of laws is deterence by consequence. You can swing that fist, and no piece of legalese can stop you in your endeavour, but that piece of legalese can and will stipulate the consequences for swinging that fist. The hope being the consequences will convince you to not swing that fist. The pen is not mightier than the sword, but the gavel can be mightier than the sword.
18 year olds are called young adults for a reason. I think it’s harsh to do it to 18-21ish year olds but over 25, maybe, but over 30 you know what you’re getting into. If you want to live that kind of life you have to except consequences. Ideology isn’t going to save you.
The same applies to scams, drug dealing, and other nefarious activities.
I don't think I even knew back then (didn't care!) but from Wikipedia it's interesting!
> "The group was founded as Razor 2992 by Doctor No, Insane TTM and Sector9 in Norway in October 1985 as a Commodore 64 software cracking group. Shortly after, they changed from 2992 to 1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal."
Next question might be what is 2992? My best guess is it's b00b in little endian hex?
If you don't mind me asking, what motivated you? Were you afraid of law enforcement ever catching up? Was is just pure scene cred it even that did not matter much?
Initial motivation was being a teenager without enough money to buy all the new computer games coming out. From there, it was partly just excitement using new technology that was relevant to the scene (Linux, high speed networks, cool ANSI art). In general scene cred was a big motivator. I also ran a BBS, and being well known in the scene also meant that artists made you great art for your board for free, which was a nice benefit if you wanted a cool aesthetic on your BBS.
Aside from cred, there were a lot of like minded people and back then it was hard to find locals who were into computers/tech, so it was sort of a social network of sorts on IRC back then, I made real friends that I still keep in touch with today, so in a way it was a shared social activity.
One fun anecdote: When I was like 14, I got on a PBX 1800# call with some folks in a group I was in and it kind of blew my mind that I was talking to someone in Israel. It was like the world opened up. That is not novel today, but back then the idea of socializing and sharing ideas with people across the world in real-time (for free) was extremely exciting. Keep in mind back then long distance cost per minute, as did much of the dial-up internet.
About law enforcement: not much. Because I did see that minors were usually spared any real consequences, I mainly avoided anything that involved profit (though I once unwittingly bought a stolen modem for cheap, when it's that cheap you kind of know). There was an uptick of paranoia when Kevin Mitnick was busted (in the town I lived in), but for the most part we weren't doing the same kinds of crime he did (some of the folks I knew were, one ended up in prison for ~13 years). I also stopped being involved when I turned 18, which was a smart move. I got a visit from the FBI or state police (I don't remember) once, and my parents nearly shit a brick, and gave me a stern talking to because they were freaking out, but it turned out they were looking for a flasher who had been going around on Halloween! whew!
When I was a kid, my dad worked for the government in a handful of fairly remote places, and even though I could dial in to places like TOTSE and The WELL, it cost a ton of money in long distance fees. As a result, there was always incentive to get access to 1-800 numbers that did things like give you a telnet prompt or a modem in a different city. I remember the first time I got access to a network that had internet connected hosts distributed around North America, and I sent an email across the country that arrived in the blink of an eye. When I saw that I was like, "Who the hell is paying for this...this dedicated high speed phone call that's probably been running nonstop since I was in kindergarten?" It didn't occur to me that by the late 80s and early 90s, a "phone call" was really more of a metaphysical fiction than anything else.
I didn't do any cracking, but I was a teenager in the late 90s and I share your thoughts on the way that computers and the internet eventually opened up my experience. I ended up making friends with any internet café owner in my city because that was the only reasonable place to use the internet before broadband.
Happy to share! I ended up working for an ISP at 16 so I could have T1 access and free ISDN at home. I was lucky the scene provided motivation to teach myself Linux and sysadmin stuff, which is where my career ended up going at the time.
The reason was the juice. The excitement of sending stuff around the world before everyone else. I never cracked on x86 just a little bit with 6809.
I was a courier in late 90s(anyone recall FlashFXP). Fall of 1999 is when isonews.com(some old schoolers here will remember this website) got their homepage owned by the FBI. I left the scene that day.
1999 was still pretty early! iSONEWS launched in December '98, but really it was the spring of '99 when things really gained momentum. The domain seizure was 2003.
As a 15yo in the mid-90’s I was a member of and courier for a group called FaTe. Did it all over a 28.8k and later 56k modem. It was so much fun and I never once considered actually getting caught - it never felt real and the friends made along the way were worth it, at least in my case. Went to college and gave it all up. Studied a science but came back to IT and get paid today off of the skills I started learning back then.
Hope you guys are all using VPNs. I wasn't busted for piracy, but almost lost my freedom (even though I was a minor) for other computer related 'stuff'. I will neglect to say anything more for 'reasons'. :)
IIRC the statute of limitations for the CFAA only has a statute of limitations of 2 years, but there are so many other laws outside the CFAA (and copyright, etc.) that you can violate.
I was a minor and it was 30 or so years ago, I don't think I'm at much risk. I think it was an interesting time in tech and worth sharing some of the details of what went on. Also, most of the people that served time weren't busted because of piracy alone, they were often involved in some adjacent crime like trading credit card numbers, buying/selling stolen equipment, malware, or some other fraud.
I imagine there are a bunch of us "Scene kids" around, Everyone I know that got arrested were the for same reasons. Ironically most of us ended up in very interesting positions / senior positions at a lot of modern companies. Our general rule of thumb was, don't make any money. I often wonder if there are old boxes sitting in storage around universities all over the US, that contain a ton of releases that have been lost to time.
I was in a situation at age 14. It was before the CFFA act so I was very, very lucky. And it helped that police back then didn’t really know what they were doing when it came to computers. But it scared my straight. Never did anything like that again.
That anti-profit motive is exactly the one I followed as well! Yep I remembered so many of the boxes we uploaded to were wired into a university network in random closets in MIT and other universities.
Yeah we had FXP hosts on most of the east coast universities. Those were the days of just having fun. Ironically it's the knowledge and experiences of being in the scene that quasi got me into working for the government and those letters agencies. I was fortunate that the only real trouble I caused was met with education and support rather than a harsh response. If I was born 5 years later with the slow deployment of ZERO tolerance policies I would have been screwed.
I still give back though, I have a few racked servers that are out there sharing torrents (all legal data), and run a bunch of crawlers for archive.org etc. It's as close as I can get these days to the olden days.
"The server bit the big one, the head of the Education dept. knew who I was and what I knew, and "arranged" for me to go to work for her. I reloaded the server, got all the terminals set back up, and showed her how to run things more efficiently. I had been working there for about a month, and she was getting ready to go on vacation for a week. Two days after she left, they rounded up myself and two other guys that worked in education and shipped us off to "the hole" at Butner Low Security Correctional Institution. They wouldn't tell us why, what we were being shipped for, nothing. Come to find out, the Associate Warden and the head of the education department didn't get along, and the AW had arranged to have us shipped while our boss was on vacation because she and one of the instructors that worked under the Education Director thought they had something on the ED to get rid of her.
So, from the end of August to the end of October of last year, myself and my cell mate got to sit in a room about 9ft. x 15ft. with a solid metal door that had a little narrow window looking out into the hall and a small slot that they opened to hand you your food tray."
Once you're in prison you lose any rights to any fair type of trial and punishment and you can be subjected to awful things that weren't part of your sentencing, like isolation or sensory deprivation in pitch black cells for no reason at all other than the warden didn't like the department head that you did work detail for. It's a broken system for so many reasons. People don't leave prison rehabilitated, they leave prison broken down and even more vulnerable.
This was my experience of prison: the random exercise of power by petty screws or prison civilian workers. It didn't take much to cross them or their egos.
I'm pretty sure that I'd have stopped with just probation, yes. Having the feds raid your house, confiscate all your gear, and put you through the hell of their investigations for a year was enough of a wake up call for me.
The gap between a sufficient punishment and what he actually got is the harshest reality in all this. It's very similar to what people have gone through for small marijuana related offenses.
This is why I never understand people who get mad at ‘lenient’ sentences for crimes. There are no crimes I would commit where, say, 1 year in prison wouldn’t be a deterrent but 5 years would be.
If the point of prison is to deter crime, then adding longer sentences isn’t going to change anything.
It is interesting to see the raw visceral reaction to the DC council attempting to reduce prison sentences for crimes committed in the city. Congress even got involved to make sure it didn't happen, which has not happened in decades. Apparently a 14 year sentence for carjacking is not enough deterrent, it must be 20 years according to Congress, the President, and even the mayor of DC.
That’s all politicking. There are lots of states with lesser penalties for the same crime including plenty of red states. Republicans just see this as another facet in the culture wars they can use to scare their constituents.
Deterrence is an aspect. So is justice. Justice means punishment for the wrong-doer. It needs an independent arbitrator as whenever someone is punished, they feel it too harsh and whenever someone is wronged, they feel the punishment too lenient.
Not suggesting the punishment in this case was fair or just. I’m an ex-hacker who got very lucky to not end up with criminal charges when I was 18. I have great empathy for what Shane has gone through.
If I am a thief and I know I'm just risking one year in prison I may as well keep stealing. If I'm stealing I'm already a lowlife - Worst case scenario
If punishment for stealing was cutting my hand, I'd definitely not risk it.
Note: I'm not justifying harsher punishments for copyright infringement and I think an appropriate punishment for theft would be forced labor where the profits go to repay what was stolen and some more.
In a just world copyright infringement would not be theft: the only thing we should charge is whoever breached their contract with the source and redistributed the content.
It shouldn't be easy to persecute copyright infringement, it's a "natural tax" of the market: if your content is so popular you can't track who is redistributing you obviously made a boatload of money.
People do things because they get something out of it and most will weight the risk of penalties vs the benefit. A long sentence would probably be harder to justify in the minds of would be offenders.
Because deterrence and rehabilitation aren't the only purpose of prison time. Protecting society is another. You don't ever want a Ted Bundy back on the street, because rehabilitation is probably impossible, whatever is messed up in his brain to make him like that is there for life. These violent sociopaths must be locked up forever. Admittedly, these people are a small proportion of all people in prison.
> You don't ever want a Ted Bundy back on the street, because rehabilitation is probably impossible, whatever is messed up in his brain to make him like that is there for life
Juries do not have the “right” to ignore the law. Juries are required to follow the law as set forth in the judge’s jury instructions. Their job is just to determine the facts and apply the law to the facts. As a legal matter, nobody gives a shit what twelve random people think about the law enacted by the democratically elected legislature.
“Jury nullification” therefore isn’t a “right” it’s a loophole. It arises from the fact that there is nothing a court can do to enforce a jury’s obligation to follow the law in a criminal trial. That doesn’t mean the obligation to follow the law doesn’t exist.
When you consider the fact that police are lying sacks of garbage, you don't need to nullify anything. You just find the state's witnesses non-credible.
I think most will admit, they have a bias to believe agents of the state. This preconceived bias should be treated no different than a preconceived bias to the contrary.
Jury Nullification, aka The Citizen's Veto, is a necessary consequence of the rights enjoyed by the citizens. It might not be a right, but it is a valid form of lawfare. It is a tool we should use to undermine bad laws.
That bad laws exist is, in my opinion, undeniable. I mostly have in mind, currently, the drug laws that have imprisoned tons of recreational users for the high crime of smoking a doob. The mere choice to partake is not unethical and should not be illegal. We should not expect juries to uphold these laws. We should make the jobs of prosecutors absolute hell if they want to ruin someone's life for doing something that is not unethical. Jury Nullification, aka The Citizen's Veto, is how we do that.
I get the appeal, but this is a super dangerous precedent. If we ignore the law and allow juries to convict or acquit based on their personal preferences, what safety do you have when the public hates you but you've broken no law?
In terms of capabilities, not at all! Juries can totally do this even today.
This is kinda what I was trying to point out: the precedent that juries should evaluate guilt before the law (instead of their own standards) is the main reason juries work as an institution.
Just as we can see the huge issues with other institutions failing (e.g. election certification breakdowns, bias in news, fraud in peer review), there is a risk that bypassing jury instructions can ruin that precedent on which the legal institution is built.
When I first got in the Internet back in the 90s I thought warez was pronounced like Juarez the town in Mexico. To this very day when I see the word that's what it sounds like in my mind.
Over lockdown I watched a lot of films from the 40s, 50s and 60s. This was a common pronunciation in America back then. The current pronunciation becoming standard is quite a recent thing.
I would hazard a guess then that perhaps (1) you are under 30 years of age; and (2) primarily hanging around with IT people who have learned US pronunciation.
While this may be emerging as a 'new norm' among younger and more IT-fluent crowd, it's historically abnormal in Australian English. For evidence, see for instance https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/route... ... noting that Aussie English follows UK English in nearly all matters, and that the Macquarie Dictionary (which is the reference dictionary of Australian English) does not, unfortunately, have a free online edition.
The little box that does the internet is sending IP packets along appropriate routes; it's routing, so it's a router. The name is pronounced the same way as "route" [1].
The tool that cuts grooves in wood, well, it seems that's from "root" meaning to dig, [2], so one would think it ought to be pronounced the same way as that, but things aren't always that simple.
There are multiple valid ways to pronounce that word across different localities :)
Here in Australia, it's commonly pronounced in a way that rhymes with "shout". Which is for the best, as "root" is local slang for sex, so calling a device a "rooter" will bring to light all sorts of connotations.
Naaah. If you're doing it for profit, and running a big duplicator farm or selling things online, it can make sense for it to be a criminal offense. But the laws are not crafted that well.
Says your own novel legal theory, which has as much basis as trying to tell the cop that's pulled me over that I'm a sovereign citizen.
> They should repay the damaged counterpart if they can prove they had a sales contract in place.
We give monopolies on copying to encourage production of high quality yet easily-copyable work. If someone can just immediately start selling the good without any of the production costs, that's no bueno for society. It's the free-rider problem.
Uuh. Free software would be to differ. Commoditization of intellectual property enable people to do useful productive work as a hobby. And everyone gets encouraged to work with the strongest stream collaboratively.
Free software is one option that is enabled by current copyright. In many cases, there's sufficient incentive ("fame" or marketing, lowered shared maintenance burdens, etc) to make it happen. I have a ton of diff that I've gotten into free software and have had maintainer roles and lead projects.
But I don't exactly think you're going to make a blockbuster movie or AAA game as free software. Some things cost money in a way that any other incentives aren't going to pay it back.
I'm the last person to defend corporations. That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes." The corporate income tax rate imposed by the federal government is 21%. Employees pay income and social security taxes on top of those earnings after. From the moment a company earns income until it lands in the hands of employees the government can take as much as HALF of it. This includes everyone on salary. Execs would be wise to issue themselves stock so they "ONLY" have to pay 15% or 20% (LTCG) as their "income tax." Companies can reduce their tax burden by engaging in behaviors which the federal government has deemed worthy or risky and incentivizes those behaviors with preferential tax treatment. For instance the R&D tax credit. It means that organizations that invest in qualified research and development activities to incentivize innovation and growth (as defined in Internal Revenue Code section 41) may be eligible for a general business tax credit.
No, wages, salaries, payroll taxes and contractor expenses, along with most other expenses, are subtracted from gross profit to make net profit, which may undergo further reduction in various charges (depreciation, etc) before being subject to tax, and then various tax credits may be applied that reduce the corporate liability further.
Double taxation occurs when a corporation is subject to corporate tax and then pays a dividend, which is after tax, but counts as income to the investor. There are arguments to be made that this is fair or unfair.
> Double taxation occurs when a corporation is subject to corporate tax and then pays a dividend, which is after tax, but counts as income to the investor. There are arguments to be made that this is fair or unfair.
Even calling it double-taxation seems like BS. Generally, we tax at the point of exchange: income, sales, etc. Money moves around endlessly. It's taxed when the consumer pays the corporation (often twice! sales and income), when the corporation pays the shareholder, when the shareholder dies and gives it to their kids, when the kids buy a house, when the homebuilder pays their contractors, etc. etc. etc.
I don't disagree, but S-corporation profits are only taxed once, regardless of distribution, and C-corporation profits are taxed on the corporate tax bill even if distributed in a dividend to shareholders. It's a little peculiar.
It's the concept of a corporation as a fictional person that is source of the peculiarity. If it's a fictional person, with its own assets, income, and expenses, then it pays taxes. It serves real humans by providing a place they can safely pool their investment.
S corps are more extensions of a real human than separate fictional entities.
Still. The corporate tax rate is way lower than personal tax. In my country some workers pay over 50% tax on their income, while corporation they work for pay 10% or less if they have good accountants.
Every US person pays for taxes on capital gains and income tax at some point and those taxes ain't zero for executives of large corporations. Not even close. This extreme focus on taxation of corporations is bizarre. Eventually corporate profits need to be used by people. Companies cannot buy houses and living properties for executives either unless there is a legitimate business purpose rolled in somehow. You can try to bullshit the IRS but they will come down on you like a bag of bricks if you feed them a load of crap.
Much of America never pays such taxes and has no such investments. About 40% (? IIRC) don't have $600 saved.
> taxes ain't zero for executives of large corporations
Taxes on wealthy are relatively low, in part because capital gains, the source of revenue for the wealthy, are taxed at a lower rate than income, the source of revenue for working class Americans.
> This extreme focus on taxation of corporations is bizarre.
I don't see the argument. Corporations pay relatively low taxes, and it has a large effect on other Americans who lack government services and have to pay more themselves to cover the corporations' share.
> You can try to bullshit the IRS but they will come down on you like a bag of bricks if you feed them a load of crap.
The GOP cut IRS enforcement to the bone, and it was restored only ~1 year ago.
> If the combined rates were much greater it would create an incentive against creating c-corps.
This argument isn't sound. If high tax doesn't create an incentive for creating corporations, then it also doesn't create an incentive for people to work and be productive.
Now the taxes are pushed on the workers that have to pick up the corporations tab.
It may have worked in the past where corporations had high head count and were not outsourcing, but now governments rather than working to correct that imbalance, they increase workers' taxes.
We can see this system is slowly collapsing as your can tax the workers only so much before they feel like slaves and stop working.
I am not following your reply. Consider that you face two options for organizing your business activity-- you can operate it as a pass through entity of some kind (s-corp, sole proprietorship, etc) or you can operate it as a c-corp. The c-corp path will result in double taxation, corp tax and LTCG. But the combination of the two is a similar rate to the tax on income (e.g. 21+20% vs 37% top marginal).
Cranking the CG or corp tax rate even higher will result in more businesses with less diverse ownership, even if only on the margin, which would result in increased wealth consolidation.
> That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes."
Multinational corporations definitely do. They'll register themselves in a country with a cheaper corporate tax burden then argue that their income / sales is generated from that country rather than their actual country of origin. Thus reducing the amount of tax they have to pay in the US (or UK, etc).
Reading about the topsites really takes me back. STH, ET, FS, HDS. These were famous acronyms! It was hard to get an account and you had to work hard to keep it. As a courier, I remember ending up in all sorts of groups so I could "pre" (be the first to upload) new releases. It's nice too to re-read the Netmonkey Weekly Reports. This was a weekly scene 'zine that kept score and documented all the drama.
"The federal prison system is probably over 90% drug offenders. Most of them are about as smart as a salt lick, and the staff, from what I've seen, isn't much smarter. "
If you were looking for yet more proof to add to the pile that the fed was and is using anti-drug politics to throw anyone they want in prison.
20 years later I still use a copy of the Starcraft I from them.
The original version requires a CD and a CD drive just to boot. Maybe it could be emulated but as a kid I wouldn't have money to buy the original in my country. Blizzard eventually made a young kid happy, I've later bought the games to support them.
Still remember my original SC cd key from installing it on all my friends computers back in the day :) 4015-29374-2985 probably will always be rattling around there somewhere. Useless information taking up space.
My childhood hero. Sad to read what he went through in prison. The warez scene is still active and there's no slowing down so this bust doesn't really mean shit. Shoutout to the OGs RELOADED, SKIDROW, RAZOR, PARADOX,CODEX.
Wow! When you say "OGs", and then follow it up with a list of THE actual "OGs" like that? *Nostalgia for those childhood days of dialup modems and all-night long downloads…*
> The principal criminal statute protecting copyrighted works is 17 U.S.C. § 506(a), which provides that "[a]ny person who infringes a copyright willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" shall be punished as provided in 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Section 2319 provides, in pertinent part, that a 5-year felony shall apply if the offense "consists of the reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500." 18 U.S.C. § 2319(b)(1).
It is a rather low bar and doesn't take much to get to distribution of material that has a retail value of more than $2,500. No "overestimation" is needed there.
It would be reasonable to debate if $2,500 is too low of a threshold - but for the law as written, no overestimation is needed.
I'm not a lawyer, but how does the "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" apply to this guy, when he apparently didn't make any money from that?
> The Act effected six principal changes to criminal copyright law. First, the NET Act expanded the Copyright Act's definition of "financial gain" to include the receipt (or expectation of re ceipt) of anything of value, including other copyrighted works.24 Second, in addition to willful infringement for commercial ad vantage or private financial gain, the Act criminalized the repro duction or distribution, in any 180 day period, of copyrighted works with a total retail value of more than $1,000.25 Third, the Act said that evidence of reproducing and distributing copy righted works does not, by itself, establish willfulness.26 Fourth, the Act changed the punishments for criminal infringement. For infringements of more than $1,000, the punishment includes im prisonment of up to one year and a fine.
This was passed in 1997 which is what he was convicted under.
No Electronic Theft (NET) Act - Amends Federal copyright law to define "financial gain" to include the receipt of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.
Sets penalties for willfully infringing a copyright: (1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain; or (2) by reproducing or distributing, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, one or more copies of one or more copyrighted works with a total retail value of more than $1,000. Provides that evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
Extends the statute of limitations for criminal copyright infringement from three to five years.
Revises Federal criminal code provisions regarding criminal copyright infringement to provide for a fine and up to five years' imprisonment for infringing a copyright for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, by reproducing or distributing, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, at least ten copies or phonorecords of one or more copyrighted works which have a total retail value of more than $2,500.
Provides for: (1) up to three years' imprisonment and fines in infringement cases described above (exclusive of commercial gain intent considerations); (2) up to six years' imprisonment and a fine for a second or subsequent felony offense under (1); and (3) up to one year's imprisonment and a fine for the reproduction or distribution of one or more copies or phonorecords of one or more copyrighted works with a total retail value of more than $1,000.
Requires, during preparation of the presentence report in cases of criminal copyright infringement, unauthorized fixation and trafficking of live musical performances, and trafficking in counterfeit goods or services, that victims of the offense be permitted to submit, and the probation officer receive, a victim impact statement that identifies the victim and the extent and scope of the victim's injury and loss, including the estimated economic impact of the offense on that victim.
Directs the U.S. Sentencing Commission to ensure that the applicable guideline range for a defendant convicted of a crime against intellectual property is sufficiently stringent to deter such a crime and adequately reflects consideration of the retail value and quantity of items with respect to which the crime against intellectual property was committed.
---
Note that (2) in the second paragraph is an or, doesn't require commercial or private gain and the expansion of "personal gain" to include "got access to other works."
That sorting is pretty odd, and not really the thing for someone who doesn't know about the demoscene. For instance LFT's safe VSP demo was really high up. I understand why, it was a really important technical proof of concept and it explained something that had bothered demo coders for decades, but it's not a terribly interesting demo to watch. What impresses demo coders isn't necessarily the same that impresses the rest of us.
Some of my favorite classic demos are "Sound Vision" by Reflect, "Desert Dream" by Kefrens and "Enigma" by Phenomena. All demos that were popular enough in the 1990s that they reached me and my brother's Amiga by way of modems and swapping. They're all very enjoyable without knowing much about the coding challenges.
I'd say my favorite modern Amiga demo is "Eon" by The Black Lotus. For C64 the good modern demos are too many to count (and by comparison, the 80s era demos aren't terribly interesting), but I think maybe "Lunatico" by LFT is my favorite. Again it's one that doesn't require coding knowledge to appreciate.
This was always special to me, especially as a metalhead- they managed to capture the emotion of this song / part of the song so well, tech and style, fantastically combined.
Always love how they timed the surprising animation of the mask at the end (maybe face, don’t remember right now) too a smile in time with the emotional lift at the end of the song…
Gotta watch it later in full blast! :D thanks for reminding me!
One thing to keep in mind is that it's not just about the visuals, but about how they got those visuals to work with ridiculous limitations. As an example, "debris", the current top-ranked entry, has a total file size of 180kb and was released in 2007!
I mostly follow the PC scene, and I'd recommend checking out demos by Fairlight&CNCD, MFX, Kewlers, Orange, Still, Quite, Logicoma, and if you're into those then check out other groups that get 'greets' from these ones (a section of many demoscene productions where groups greet each other by name). Pretty much everything can be found on pouet.net.
Here's a YT link to one of my favourites: 'Number One Another One' by Fairlight and CNCD:
Razor 1911 still has some presence in the demoscene. But though they share the same origin and may know each others, they are distinct from the cracking group.
Some guys are still releasing warez with the Razor1911 branding. Currently they are the only ones with a working (albeit wonky) Windows Store DRM crack.
Takes me back to my BF1942 days, careening around maps in planes and tanks. I was dirt poor. I usually had to get a ride to the video rental store to rent console games. I'm thankful to have kept busy thanks to these groups. It kepted me interested in computers and exposed (a little) to software dev. ...and awesome music! Man, the music...
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish or implement ideas.
I've been on board the "patents need to be repealed or significantly toned down" train too, but, the legitimate counter-argument that I see is that it's going to lead to a rise in "corporate secrets" style stuff.
If they can't legally stop people from republishing IP, then they'll make it hard. Denuvo, other DRM, or just go to fully streaming-only for the first year or two after launch. Want to play Battlefield 6, subscribe to PS Now. And this will likely hit PCs harder than consoles since de facto there have been near-zero hypervisor breaks of any relevance in consoles since the PS4/XB1 era, everything is signed and encrypted and TPM'd to death.
AMD's SVP for datacenter and embedded has talked about how their Secure Encrypted Virtualization and other security features are actually coming from work on consoles, to the datacenter market these days. And now there's Pluton coming up too (although apparently there have been some serious breaches in TPM 2.0 very recently that may ruin a lot of the pluton work as well, we can look forward to windows 12 I guess!).
So far, the EU hasn't been willing to apply their rulemaking on iphones to video game consoles yet, and tbh that is a far more noxious case of "you don't own the hardware". And that's what PCs might turn into if IP law vanishes, the practical security measures would ramp up to compensate. And no, consoles aren't being sold at a significant loss in the way people think they are. PS5 is sold at a profit, Xbox Series consoles might be sold at break even or a small loss, or it could just be hollywood accounting for the purposes of making a legal argument at the trial to get apple's ecosystem broken open. They had a financial interest in being able to argue that the ruling shouldn't apply to them and that their equally-locked-down app stores shouldn't be subject to competition or user freedom in general.
> If they can't legally stop people from republishing IP, then they'll make it hard.
Alternatively it changes the game on how things are built. Building in public becomes the default, lowering the cost for all.
You'd expect a short term variance (downward) while the system adjusts, but in the long run it'd be much cheaper to produce great works, since your material costs will be lower (no royalties) and you wouldn't burn resources on the security and bureaucratic hoops you have to go through today to build and integrate ideas.
Monopoly profits would be finished though. So yes, <1% of the population would arguably be worse off. (I'm in that group, btw).
I think the "building in public" approach has been a failure though. Unreal Tournament didn't work. Crowdfunding can work, but I think people probably are leery of that for larger projects or studios without a track record of success.
And with a project like Unreal Tournament you're not going to get the flood of hat money and other MTX bullshit that currently feeds studios. Even if you want to pay for a game pass, I can just give myself the game pass on my own local copy, and get all the same stuff right?
I'm not entirely saying that (Jim Sterling voice) "triple-A gaming" dying is the worst thing in the world mind you, but, we'd be talking about some really tectonic shifts in how things get built and I think the pot of addressable money is really a lot smaller.
Hopefully it would lead to more passion projects and not just the death of the industry.
Like I said I think patents have been a scourge, but copyright in the sense of owning the thing you wrote, is less problematic. Derivative works are the problem case that I've previously talked about though since I think humans go through our world deriving and remixing everything we see and touch and that's not a bad thing. And AI is going to make all of this very problematic in not-very-many years either, 5-10 years and AIs will be writing great software and making great creative works without significant human intervention.
Once we move past capitalism as a concept, then yes, by all means these things can go away too ;)
Tbh it does seem he was bit naive of what he was doing at the time and of the consequences. He wasn’t just some rando out there cracking software for personal use - he should’ve expected the government would be going after and throwing the book at people like him. It’s puzzling he didn’t take security more seriously or just stopped doing it entirely earlier.
The shocking part for me though was reading about how he was put with violent offenders and experienced being sent to “the hole”. Like what the fuck? Does the federal prison system not separate white collar criminals from high security prisoners? Honestly insane.
Would love to hear any stories from inside MYTH or CLASS, their rivalry pushed the whole scene forward. Their releases introduced me to.. well, all of this, and radically altered the course of my life.
Interesting, looks like state/feds inflate their win rates by just going after cases already won. Great way to inflates their numbers for political/financial reasons. Since many want a good win rate for public sector jobs. Or make their bosses/elected officials look like winners being tough on crime.
I'm sure there is a term for this, like cherry picking out of a basket of picked cherries.
> announced today that Shane E. Pitman, age 31, of Conover, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison by the Honorable James C. Cacheris, United States District Judge, for conspiring to violate criminal copyright laws as the former leader of the oldest game software piracy ring on the Internet.
Btw: Coming from Europe - this whole thing about doing a public press release about each sentenced person things seems a bit off. There's a balance to be struck - and I'm honestly not quite sure we're doing it right in northern Europe with our extreme privacy for convicted people...
For whatever it's worth, the disposition of the case on PACER says the sentence was reduced to 12 months. There's not much of a docket to read, because it looks like he immediately pled out.
> and I'm honestly not quite sure we're doing it right in northern Europe with our extreme privacy for convicted people...
The result will be that convicted people are additionally punished and shunned by society after their release. That's essentially just inviting vigilante justice and also makes it more difficult to live a crime-free life. But I suspect you knew that.
I wonder what balance you have in mind? Right now only famous people are the exception in northern Europe - their crimes and the result of their trials are generally published.
However in many of these countries the results of trials of ordinary people also often appear in publications, they just aren't mentioned by name. It seems to be mainly consumed as entertainment and publishing names is not really needed - any society that needlessly ruins people lives for the entertainment of others would be sickening.
You may ask: how to do background checks then? In many countries you can ask the police to certify that you did not commit certain kinds of crime. Your employer can't just check somewhere. These kinds of certifications are often required for jobs involving large sums of money and/or working with children, but cannot be required for other work.
I would guess a lot of that happens in the public for transparency reasons; if one reporter (or otherwise just curious citizen) notices that (as an example) the Honorable Cacheris starts sentencing more harshly than their peers, or letting off CEOs in their courtroom with a "stern talking to," then that would be worthy of an investigation
I'm sure the Justice Department's point of view of press releases is one of deterrence: "do the crime, do the time" or perhaps even "your tax dollars at work"
Love to see the might of US government successfully protecting copyright, but not _checks notes_ bank customers, airline customers, telco customers, housing customers or anyone else.
More like telling the whole world "you're not allowed to copy this, because I wrote it" and threatening everyone with imprisonment or fines if you do. So everyone has to buy it through him, or else. To feed his family.
That is what copyright law fundamentally is.
We all learn from other people, just because I came up with an idea, I cannot tell other people "you're not allowed to use it". It violates other peoples natural right to autonomy to do so.
I dont agree with Copyright and also dont think the punishment was deserved. I also did some cracking and keygens in the 90s (for fun, never released anything).
Nevertheless, my making argument against doing and condoning what this guy did is that, because of those type of actions today we have to deal with SaaS only software that is subscription based and stops working after the company folds (I can still use my Win16 copy of GetRight, thankyou very much).
We got into this sad state because of greed, from both sides of the counter.
No, for a fact, he MADE the lives of such families. If your small time software does not end up being PRE'd somewhere; it doesn't exist.
Without the marketing budget of large corporates; you could just forget about competing with them.
Is that quantifiable and verifiable? Are there interviews with software devs whose business was measurably effected by piracy to the point where their life was “ruined”? Genuinely curious to know.
Their lives weren't 'ruined', just like nobody's life is 'ruined' when someone (over multiple trips) shoplifts a few thousand (or tens of thousands of) dollars worth of goods from a large store chain.
But someone, somewhere along the way did lose some amount of money.
The fact that the sentence was only 18 months reflects that, somewhat.
That's a rather presumptive over-simplification of what effect software cracking had and has on employed programmers' livelihoods. It's not a direct 1 to 1 relationship between a cracked installation and lost sale, nor does piracy prevention guarantee market relevance. I don't condone consuming pirated software when OSS alternatives exist, but that's not out of sympathy to tech megacorps.
I like how companies conned the government to enforce what used to be a civil matter into a criminal matter. They don't even have to write a cease and desist letter. Evil genius.
It sounds like you need to spend some time doing some soul searching.
What do you think is served by that sentence of jail time? Disregarding that I think the law in question is outrageous - why is jail time an appropriate punishment? Is it fitting to imprison some one on the dubious claim that they impacted your profits? It does not seem to be a fitting or appropriate punishment, it seems to be ghoulish overkill to scare people from fucking with the money.
Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist.
If hes an anarchist then fine, but it looks like he wants laws that benefit him and not people that actually write software.
I read the whole thing and I still don't know why he did it. He says there was no money incentive and his work had no impact on piracy. What was its purpose then?
While it's possible that he did it for clout or as a FU to software companies, I think many people, including myself, pirated software in the early days of computing because the software itself was rare and cool. There were no demos back then to try software before you buy, and many people used software like Photoshop, Flash, 3D Max, etc for personal projects that made no profit. Even today, it's hard to justify paying $600 for a program that you aren't sure you actually like just to hopefully create some cool stuff to show your friends.
As for the "people that actually write software", I couldn't care less. It's been shown over and over that piracy never made the effect on thier bottom line that large software companies led many to believe. Simply put, people didn't buy these things because they considered them overpriced luxuries for simple hobbyists. The only choice was to pirate the software, or to never get to use it. As someone who writes software myself, I have no sympathy for people who want harsh punishments for someone who steals their stupid little program. Sure you put hard work into it, but so did a lot of people who offer their software for free. Generally, my thought is that these people are more upset that their software failed to make the impact that they thought it would or failed to generate the profit that they had dreamed of. Piracy was never at fault for either of those. They need to cope
I sell software, I wouldn't do it if I couldn't retain ownership of it.
I don't care how much work I put into it, I don't care how much money its worth. I don't care about its impact.
I create because it's mine and I control it. The hands that built it decide what happens to it.
I could paint the prettiest picture and then burn it forever and nobody has any right to stop me, no matter how many poor hobbiest art admirers wanted to see it.
I think you're painting with quite a broad brush. There are absolutely people who support copyleft because they do not want 'intermediaries' to be able to distribute binaries alone. e.g. GNU.
If copyleft means restricting freedoms on what you can do with software and preserving those rights on derivative works (GPL) - then 100% no, those people need copyright laws to enforce that.
With no copyright law I could take any GPL software, modify it, sell it as my own and nobody could force me to give up the code.
If copyleft means permissive (MIT) - then it's not a hostile environment. You are free to create and share permissive works with no hostility from anyone else.
I think his position is a little more nuanced than that.
>The bottom line, what I did violated the laws governing copyrights. I don't agree with those laws 100%, but they were designed by people with lots of money in their pockets to keep lots of money in their pockets, so I doubt they're going to change for the better any time soon. This is why I'm a huge advocate for the open source community.
I understood that to mean "the open source community specifically addresses the flaws in a system that it cannot itself abolish, so I support them".
I'm sorry, I have no patience for "rich man bad" takes on copyright.
Copyright law protects the smallest against the biggest. If some company comes and steals my product and outspends me on marketing, how do I fight back without copyright law?
Say someone stole the book I wrote and passed it off as their own - how does open sourcing it help me?
The chief purpose of the DMCA was to clarify legal liability and penalties for digital copyright infringement brought on by the disruption of the internet. How does that keep anyone rich? Who is that taking money from? Who is made poorer because people are able to create and sell their own works in the manner of their choosing?
The heart of the copyleft movement is not to remove all government regulation. You can have a problem with copyright laws in their current form while still supporting the copyleft movement.
To make what this guy did legal would require overhauling 300 years of law.
It's a ridiculous position. Especially given the hypocrisy in supporting copyleft, which lets people distribute works gratis with heavy restrictions, and ripping off other peoples work who didn't want any part of that, while getting mad that people aren't following the copyleft restrictions.
> Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist.
There are quite very different open-source licenses. Copyleft licenses do depends on copyright, that is true. On the other hand, typical non-copyleft licenses are in my opinion much less dependent on copyright.
A world without copyright does in my opinion not correspond to any open-source license that I am aware of: you are allowed to reverse-engineer and distribute any software that you want and you must not forbid this to any person using your software or any work derived from it, but nobody is obliged to provide any source code.
In my personal opinion such a license is a gap in the "market of open source licenses", so if some reader feels inspired to create such an open-source license, I utterly encourage the respective reader to do so.
I still do things for the thrill and because I can, and I'm well into adulthood. That's what makes life fun and interesting and there doesn't have to be a 'point' that anyone else understands.
But sometimes I still try to do things I can't - I currently have a broken wrist.
Copyright is about monopoly. That's the antithesis of freedom.
Copyleft is a hack that turns monopoly inside-out. All for one, and one for all.
Without copyright, copyleft would be fundamentally broken. But that isn't the whole picture: anything under a permissive license like MIT or Apache2 would see the same result they implement today. Those are part of "open source", too.
And we could certainly come up with a different system to maintain copyleft: we could make regulation that preserves a user's right to edit their software, and bans practices like DRM and intentional incompatibility. That's what I imagine the "open source movement" would look like if it were brought to an extreme logical conclusion.
> bans practices like DRM and intentional incompatibility
more restrictions on the road to copyright freedom
if restricting what people are allowed to do with software is bad, why does that make it acceptable to create more restirctions on what people can do with software.
once we have 1,000 pages of restrictions closing all the interop and drm loopholes - our software will truely be free
Only some free software licenses rely heavily on copyright law as their primary mechanism. Permissive licensing, or something like it, would continue to exist if copyright as a concept disappeared tomorrow.
While I am generally in favor of permissive licensing and accept the corresponding "yes, the code can get incorporated into other projects"...
That same copyright law protects my photographs. I am generally in favor of strong copyright laws.
There are also philosophies of software licensing that want to ensure that the user can have access to the code that uses my code. Under those philosophies, it is the protections granted by the limited right to prepare derivative works that allow that licensing to have teeth and enforce a copy left.
Without copyright, the GPL and corresponding licensing that is written with the desire to be able to guarantee the 2nd and 4th freedoms (access to the source for some product and ability to modify the code for that product) have no teeth and those cannot be guaranteed.
Permissive licenses are not public domain waivers, they usually have some other disclaimers of liability, a requirement to include that provision in all copies, etc. In a world without copyright, OSS devs will need to find another way to shield themselves from liability.
However, what would realistically happen in a hypothetical world without copyright, is that commercial organizations will stop most OSS development and revert to distributing obfuscated binaries.
> Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist.
Because they have more nuanced thoughts that you think ?
"A copyright law" is not a one thing.
DMCA doesn't touch OSS software for example. It could entirely go away.
Length of copyright protection could be 5 years from creation instead of 70y from authors death and it would do near jack squat to OSS software. Ye you could use 5y worth of unfixed bugs and ignore OSS license but that wouldn't exactly hurt most projects.
