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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 c
by 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 agoI 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.