7 ms·

Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. While most people will just use it for piracy, I'm sure a good few will end up contributing to Wikipedia as well.

Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. While most people will just use it for piracy, I'm sure a good few will end up contributing to Wikipedia as well. How many of today's hackers got interested in computers through pirated content first?

cdubzzz 11y ago
Amen. The reason that I am able to use Photoshop effectively (enough) today is split up rar files in AOL emails and Hotline (:
- scrollaway 11y ago
  That's been Adobe's business model for a long time, and a very clever one at that. Let Photoshop be pirated all over schools and unis, reap the enterprise benefits when the graphics designers who only learned Photoshop are getting hired.
  - cdubzzz 11y ago
    Yep. Creative Cloud subscriber through work right here. Well done, Adobe.
    - zodPod 11y ago
      Yup! I've chosen to buy several things that I pirated as a kid now just because I was able to pick it up then and now I have an income and these things are accessible!
    - earlz 11y ago
      For all the hate Creative Cloud gets, I love it as a hobbyist. I have a subscription for I think $10 or $20/month and even though sure I could save up and have purchased the software one-time outright, but last time I looked at buying a boxed copy in a university bookstore it was somewhere around $700. That's just not possible for someone who only uses photoshop for some of the stuff that GIMP tends to suck at, and only quite rarely Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
  - toyg 11y ago
    I always wondered why MS, which benefited from a similar modus operandi, abandoned it so drastically. When the internet got good enough that sharing software became feasible, they introduced online activation, basically pushing people towards alternatives.
    - Periodic 11y ago
      They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.
pjmlp 11y ago
As Portuguese I can totally relate to what is happening in Angola. Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so. All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software. Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit. Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff. Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed. For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps. I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.
- oblio 11y ago
  I think it's actually happening all over the developing world. Same thing was (is) happening in Romania. The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.
  - awakeasleep 11y ago
    Intellectual Property pricing schemes do more than make it hard to empathize, they foster active anger. So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating. Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them. It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld. That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.
logicrook 11y ago
Oh, this is so true. Get free access to Wikipedia, use it to download the latest popular movies. This is going to make them really clever.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  90% of your comments are just snark. You need to fix your attitude.
  - logicrook 11y ago
    Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh. However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people more informed, but the bulk of piracy is part of the problem. 1) It's diverting considerable effort that could go into free software. If you had to either pay for Photoshop or use a free solution, Gimp and Krita would get insanely more resources. In other words, piracy is a key element in closed-software dominance. 2) Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. So sharing research papers is not the same thing as what commonly falls under the "piracy" moniker. That's what that snark meant.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      I don't disagree with #1 (cf my other comment in the thread regarding Adobe's MO). But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all. Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too. Oops. That was snark. :)
      - logicrook 11y ago
        I write snarky comments targeting opinions that express my thinking in a concise and funny (for me at least) way. Then you come and tell me to fix my attitude, directly judging my person. At no point did I judge you or used ad hominems. >But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all. I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do? Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades. Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody. Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument. As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.
krylon 11y ago
> Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. That was my first thought, too. Ignoring the legal issues, that is pretty clever.
- zodPod 11y ago
  > If we can't get the internet for free. We'll build our own internet! Pretty damn clever, for sure! Now Wikipedia is just a network for them!

cdubzzz 11y ago

Amen. The reason that I am able to use Photoshop effectively (enough) today is split up rar files in AOL emails and Hotline (:

scrollaway 11y ago
That's been Adobe's business model for a long time, and a very clever one at that. Let Photoshop be pirated all over schools and unis, reap the enterprise benefits when the graphics designers who only learned Photoshop are getting hired.
- cdubzzz 11y ago
  Yep. Creative Cloud subscriber through work right here. Well done, Adobe.
  - zodPod 11y ago
    Yup! I've chosen to buy several things that I pirated as a kid now just because I was able to pick it up then and now I have an income and these things are accessible!
  - earlz 11y ago
    For all the hate Creative Cloud gets, I love it as a hobbyist. I have a subscription for I think $10 or $20/month and even though sure I could save up and have purchased the software one-time outright, but last time I looked at buying a boxed copy in a university bookstore it was somewhere around $700. That's just not possible for someone who only uses photoshop for some of the stuff that GIMP tends to suck at, and only quite rarely Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
- toyg 11y ago
  I always wondered why MS, which benefited from a similar modus operandi, abandoned it so drastically. When the internet got good enough that sharing software became feasible, they introduced online activation, basically pushing people towards alternatives.
  - Periodic 11y ago
    They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.

pjmlp 11y ago

As Portuguese I can totally relate to what is happening in Angola. Back in the 80 and 90's you could hardly buy real software for home computers, even if you wanted to do so. All tapes and floppy disks that were sold in shops and bazaars across the country were counterfeit. Lisbon and Porto were probably the only two major cities were some shops selling real original software. Only software being sold for the enterprise was legit. Fast forward to 2016 and those bazaars and shops selling counterfeit software as legit are long gone, but everyone has a friend that knows where to get stuff. Open source has helped to reduce that, but many still don't care, because they want the real software that everyone is using and in times of crisis are not going to pay what companies are asking for. Even when explained how production costs in software are distributed. For example, the majority uses Android and WP, as not everyone can afford an iOS device. Those that can, usually jailbreak it shortly afterwards, with the purpose of installing pirated apps. I bet no countryman is going to contradict me, that even in 2016, it is possible to get the usual CD and DVD listings at the university from fellow students, from shops around the corner that provide the desired set of software, in spite of police efforts to track them down.

oblio 11y ago
I think it's actually happening all over the developing world. Same thing was (is) happening in Romania. The thinking is: why buy it if I can pirate it? Especially when it costs something like 1% of my monthly income (for just 1 MP3) or 20%-1000% (for software). Even the most ethically minded tend to think: who loses if I pirate it? Most of the times these products come from faraway corporations making billions of dollars (frequently more than the whole GDP of the country you're living in). It's hard to muster empathy for that.
- awakeasleep 11y ago
  Intellectual Property pricing schemes do more than make it hard to empathize, they foster active anger. So far we've discussed people in less wealthy eurozone countries choosing between paying a significant portion of their income and pirating. Thats bad, in a way we're describing tools that cost nothing, but are priced in a way that whole economies don't have practical access to them. It gets worse when you consider places like Africa, where every electronic record of an idea is priced out of reach. Can you imagine if your whole country was basically denied access to reference materials, textbooks, and popular culture? The very ideas that could allow you to work your way out of poverty are withheld. That is really the boot of the privileged stepping on the neck of the poor. And people feel it and understand that.

logicrook 11y ago

Oh, this is so true. Get free access to Wikipedia, use it to download the latest popular movies. This is going to make them really clever.

scrollaway 11y ago
90% of your comments are just snark. You need to fix your attitude.
- logicrook 11y ago
  Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh. However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people more informed, but the bulk of piracy is part of the problem. 1) It's diverting considerable effort that could go into free software. If you had to either pay for Photoshop or use a free solution, Gimp and Krita would get insanely more resources. In other words, piracy is a key element in closed-software dominance. 2) Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. So sharing research papers is not the same thing as what commonly falls under the "piracy" moniker. That's what that snark meant.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    I don't disagree with #1 (cf my other comment in the thread regarding Adobe's MO). But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all. Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too. Oops. That was snark. :)
    - logicrook 11y ago
      I write snarky comments targeting opinions that express my thinking in a concise and funny (for me at least) way. Then you come and tell me to fix my attitude, directly judging my person. At no point did I judge you or used ad hominems. >But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all. I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do? Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades. Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody. Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument. As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.

krylon 11y ago

> Nice and creative use of a restrictive system. That was my first thought, too. Ignoring the legal issues, that is pretty clever.

zodPod 11y ago
> If we can't get the internet for free. We'll build our own internet! Pretty damn clever, for sure! Now Wikipedia is just a network for them!