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If that is worth pointing out, it's also worth pointing out that phreaking, as opposed to "piracy", is not a victimless IP-crime. "The most typical use of a bl

• wpietri 14y ago
  They strike me as equivalently victim-y. In both cases, the industry would count the harm as the full market value of anything consumed by the criminal. Whereas the criminal would argue that they weren't going to be paying anyhow, so the industrial player is unharmed. And for both, there's no problem for anybody if it stays a minority activity, but if the behavior became a widespread norm it would destroy the industry.
  • mseebach 14y ago
    No, they're not equivalent. With piracy, there is zero marginal cost to the content owner. There is the theoretical lost sale at most. When phreaking, you're consuming a scarce resource. Maybe the resource was underutilized, but you can't know that. Either way, you're actively depriving the owner of the resource the usage of it.
    • wpietri 14y ago
      I didn't say they were equivalent, just equivalently victim-y. In both cases, when it's a small fraction of normal use, then there was no appreciable impact. You couldn't know that phone phreaking had zero impact, but given that the phone system was engineered around very peaky load, your odds were very good. Casual phone phreakers weren't a serious problem. Commercial ones were, I'm sure. But then so are commercial pirates.