home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
-
- PIRATE.
-
- 1. A person who reproduces copyright material without permission.
- Usually by hacking away any copy protection. The cracker.
-
- 2. A person who distributes the crackers illegal work.
-
- 3. A person who infringes another's copyright or other business
- rights by using the crackers illegal work. The user.
-
- Now let us look at these in a little detail.
-
- 1. This person is altering the copyrighted material and ending up
- with a program based on the authors original code, but not the
- authors work. This person has therefore infringed the authors
- copyrights. The process of removing any copy protection, esp. for
- internet software usually ends up with the hacker placing backdoors
- into the program that he or his pirate group may access the users
- computer at will. This enables the cracker or pirate group to access
- new software that they can crack by taking it directly off another
- users computer. If this program was serial numbered or had a keyfile
- then it will appear that the user has given away their registered
- software freely to the pirates.
-
- 2. This person is the worst of the three. He is making available
- the pirated software for any other person to use. The "wares" site
- will usually be part of a pirate groups setup and monitored. This
- way any person that accesses this site is logged and the pirates will
- usually take as many other people down as possible if they are caught.
-
- 3. The person who accepts and uses the cracked software. usually, without
- their knowledge, also providing the pirates with new products to crack.
- If the user stopped using the pirated software, a few things are likely
- to happen;
-
- a, The crackers cannot access any new products to crack as they will
- not have any hacked programs on the users computer to access his /
- her machine.
-
- b, The authors of legal software will sell hundreds of new copies that
- would otherwise not have been bought. This will encourage them to
- produce better products as they will no longer need to spend as much
- time improving their copy protection.
-
- c, The crackers will get bored and may direct their talents to writing
- new software themselves. Again this will benefit everyone.
-
- d, The distributer will no longer have anything to distribute. Where
- there is no demand, there is no supply.
-
- e, The Amiga will move away from the image of being a platform for cheep
- pirated games.
-
- f, The user will feel better in him / her self that they are using legal
- software and therefore helping the Amiga market and not helping to kill
- it as they are now.
-
-
- Take a look @ http://www.the-awa.u-net.com/ and look in the exclusive/bonus.html
- there is a link there to "save our platform" you WILL find this of interest I hope !
-
- Gus Haines.
-
-