Are Warez Right? Created 18 years ago2005-11-29 15:15:34 UTC by fourthgen

I have been writing my own software recently and this thought came across my mind.

Are warez right? Is it stealing?

The main reason for this is because I have been writing my own stuff and I know how much hard work it takes. I know look at warez in a completely different way from before. "It's stealing." Thats it. Even if the company in question i M$ or any other rich company. You don't steal money from a bank just because they have lots of it and they probably have some to spare do you? (or maybe you do)

Yet even though I think of that for software I still "borrow" music, from my friends all around the world. Same for movies. Maybe this is just a phase I am going through..........?

Anyway I just wanted to see your opinions on it.

You don't steal warez, you merely copy it.

Big difference there.

You don't steal warez, you merely copy it.
Big difference there.

Enough said there

What about forging money? You are not stealing anything there are you?

On the internet copying = stealing unless the creator says otherwise.

No but if you use the money you could say that your steeling the things you "boght"

I think that warez are still illegal and considered "stealing".
even downloading free music, films is considered as stealing.
Imo - posting warez is bad.
Downloading them is'nt good, but it ain't stealing.

And I know, what ya' mean, 4thgen. Creatin software is definately hard work..

My opinion, if you somehow support a company or a musician. Like buy?n a band T-shirt or one of the companys many softwares. Then i think it?s ok to download there work, the prices on everything is to high, you can?t buy everything you need/want from them.

and downloading isn?t stealing, if you steal the things you stole isn?t still in the place you took it from. if you TAKE something from someone else it?s stealing, if you copy it, you both have it

I can't say that I can see any way that warezing isn't stealing. In many cases, most people don't care. I think it'd be amusing to know how many people here failed the Windows Geniune Advantage test.

Forging money is an interesting point. I suppose whatever you buy is legitimately morally owned unless whoever you gave the money to is unable to pass it on. Then it's theft. Doesn't mean that forgery isn't a problem. Forge in moderation, fellas. Well, 'cept for IDs.

On the subject of music downloads: I don't bother with illegal copies because the quality is so poor, nor with legal copies of the same lousy quality but with the added bonus of DRM making it impossible to ever play what you paid for. Half the songwriters and singers whose CDs I do buy are probably dead anyway, and the other half get about 1% of the cost or something piss-taking. It's not a good system, but there's nothing else really.

Oh whatever, lol
My parents buy half of everything me. But your right. everything is way too expensive, which is why i download music. And again youre right. it does come out shitty half the time.
I think it depends on what you do with your copied stuff. if you copy artwork that wasnt done by you, and say it was.. then thats stealing. if you copy it because you like it, then make sure people know who really made it.

It looks like all the people here who don't consider warez as stealing never got their own HL CD-key stolen ...

Warez is fine.

sorry, forgot to add "nor built their own stuff ..." too ...

Actualy, purely economicaly seen forging IS stealing.

The amount of money a country does have needs to be equaled by a product of value, one of the most popular ones is gold. If you print extra money you inflate the economy as happend with german before WWI. If you do this on big scale the money wont be worth a dime.

GRR, downloading music and software is illegal.. when you buy a CD, it is a Single-User Liscense (unless otherwise noted). At no point do you ever "own" that software.
You are violating contract by copying music and giving it to your friends, thus you are stealing liscenses.
I agree that software is way too expensive, and I can admit to downloading warez on occasion, but to say that it isn't stealing is a lie.
I think using peer to peer music sharing programs is crazy. If you want to share with your friends, that is one thing,(I know I said it was illegal) but connecting with complete strangers to share music is just wrong.
Yes, I understand that there is a one in a million chance that you will be caught using pirated software, but that takes none of the severity away from it.
It is wrong.. don't do it

The problem goes in circles: software/music is more or less expensive, so piracy and p2p are born. Companies start to lose money, so they have to raise the prices even more. Which means more people will be likely to search for a copy.
Companies have also forgot about their target audience. Even though there are a lot of grown up gamers, some people still cant afford to pay those prices, and their parents are not willing to buy them since they are no longer little kids. A difficult age indeed.
And there's the big question. If it's so easy to copy a CD, how can they have those prices? We would have to analyze real numbers. Like for example How many legal copies of HL2 have been sold and how much money that means. Compare it with how much they spent making the game, etc.

thats one vicious cycle. That would only inspire much more drastic ways to get the music/software...

Uh... my thoughts about warez..
It's wrong. It's stealing. Yes. But, I still do it, and I still run a server hosting thousands of illegal files, and I regularly use BitTorrent and Peer to Peer programs.
Why? Cause it's easy.
If I could steal a pizza from my computerchair, taking virtually no risks at all of anyone seeing me, and no one actually noticing the pizza was gone, cause there's an infinite number of pizzas, I'd steal a pizza every day.
It's pretty much the same as not paying on subways, trains or buses, or whatnot.

The chance of getting caught is very slim, you save alot of money out of it and no one notices it.

As for music, I actually don't think downloading it it wrong, since if you buy the CD, the band gets close to nil of the profits. To support them, one should instead go to their concerts or buy their merchandize, or simply donate cash.

I do both actually: I warez and I buy. I find that if I've discovered a program/band that I really enjoy and like I may fork out money for it. I have this particular opinion concerning music: I buy CD's that I've downloaded first and really liked simply because I like having the CD's (and I can create 320kbps MP3's).

With games, most of the time its a hassle to warez it: most don't work, others need cracks and with cracks comes viruses (if you're not smart of course). I may get a new game in a h@x0r version, then when the price goes down I'll buy it (picked up Vice City pretty cheap, now I've got a proper backup - same as Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb). With music and games, most of the people behind them deserve money - hell, I'm partly in both of those industries (kinda) so I have an idea of how difficult it is for some.

With games, most of the time its a hassle to warez it: most don't work, others need cracks and with cracks comes viruses (if you're not smart of course)

You obviously can't warez properly ;).

What you do is DL the trial and crack it, silly!

If I could steal a pizza from my computerchair, taking virtually no risks at all of anyone seeing me, and no one actually noticing the pizza was gone, cause there's an infinite number of pizzas, I'd steal a pizza every day.

LOLOL! Me too ZL, Me too

@Ant: I agree. If I find a band I totally love, I will shell out for the cd(s). Plus you can't always find all the tracks, which includes many obscure good ones, that if you're really into them, you wouldn't want to miss.

P2P is good also for finding all those B-Side, live and unreleased stuff that would be impossible to find because they're on rare editions/old-school records. I think, in this respect, there's nothing wrong with it. I myself have bought all the Foo Fighters albums, two Radiohead albums (gotta buy the rest) and a Queens of the Stone Age album. I'd be more than willing to buy some eels ones and a couple of Elliott Smith ones too (they're rather hard to find )

What you guys don't realize is that cracking software to release warez versions, if the software has any coding method to protect it is fairly difficult in itself. It's like coding the program, perhaps.

Keep in mind at places like VALVe the devs get paid anyway, so its not like you're stealing their pay if you warez one copy. 1, 10, 20 people dont matter in terms of warez. It's in the 10000's where you get the real issue.

I don't buy CDs - Because as ZL said little goes to the actual artist. I buy decent software and games that are reasonable and I use/play a lot. As for software like 3DSMax where Discreet (Autodesk now) licenses it mainly to 3D studios and other commercial or industrial production houses and developers for $3000 a pop, their policy is generally you can freely use their software as long as you don't make money, in which case you should buy a license to legally sell your works. One person or a hundred people taking copies for personal usage or applications such as for Uni projects really doesn't matter to them, because its not their core userbase, and otherwise these people couldn't afford it anyway and would go to another company, which may sway them for purchasing products in the future when they do begin to make money. On the other hand, if those 100 people steal a game which is popular then they do lose something because that is their core userbase.

On the subject of music downloads: I don't bother with illegal copies because the quality is so poor, nor with legal copies of the same lousy quality but with the added bonus

What quality do you consider poor? 96, 128, yes. 192? 2XX VBR? Most of the items on my playlist are VBR-encoded in some capacity in a range from 19x-29x. And that's not bad quality, in my opinion. The best ones I've got are some 320's that I ripped from some friends' CDs and a couple I did buy, although I have some copies from the interweb that are 320 as well. You just have to look.

Oh whatever, lol
My parents buy half of everything me. But your right. everything is way too expensive, which is why i download music. And again youre right. it does come out shitty half the time.

Your parents generally won't pay for stuff when you turn 18 =( - Be glad while you can! ;P

The amount of money a country does have needs to be equaled by a product of value, one of the most popular ones is gold. If you print extra money you inflate the economy as happend with german before WWI. If you do this on big scale the money wont be worth a dime.

True. One example of this is Macedonia's economy. The fact that they haven't made any arrests for forgery in their country is crazy, considering that forgery of their currency is one of the largest forms of crime in their country.

I mostly don't care at all when it's software. But when it comes to music, I feel that if you like the music and want to hear more of it in the future, then buy the goddamn cd. I buy music to support the bands.

I think it has to do with the fact that I know who's behind the music. I don't know the names of those who worked on [insert random software] so it's a lot easier to just download it without paying.

If say, 7th wrote a program that could do something great, something that I could need, then i'd buy it. If it was some random dude in korea, I wouldn't care at all. It's easier to steal from someone without a "face".

What quality do you consider poor? 96, 128, yes. 192? 2XX VBR?

224-256kbps Vorbis. Always.

Sari: well thanks :).

Quote:
The amount of money a country does have needs to be equaled by a product of value, one of the most popular ones is gold. If you print extra money you inflate the economy as happend with german before WWI. If you do this on big scale the money wont be worth a dime.

True. One example of this is Macedonia's economy. The fact that they haven't made any arrests for forgery in their country is crazy, considering that forgery of their currency is one of the largest forms of crime in their country.

I havent read anything thing on that, cant imagine it happening so close(relativly). Though offcourse in Germany they dropped the current value and secretly made new ones in newyork, nobody knew about this so people wherent screaming to get rid of there money. When the money arrived they immidiately started using it, i recall people being able to change there cash in and gain a standard amoun of the new currency.

If it's so easy to copy a CD, how can they have those prices? We would have to analyze real numbers. Like for example How many legal copies of HL2 have been sold and how much money that means. Compare it with how much they spent making the game, etc.

Its not the compying of the cd, imagine this:

A poor african farmers sells his coffee beens to a merchander, for lets take 3 cents. The merchant wants to make profit above this so he sales it to a big dealer for 5 cents. The dealer sells his load to starbucks(amrican coffee store). Wich then transports it across the atlantic, adding a 2 dollars to the price. Then its being transported to the factory for the grinding. This adds up another 50 cents. The last line will be to the store wich after that will add up another bit to make profit.

This process is in dutch called: Toegevoegde waarde, or added value. With this example i only showed the real basics, because you get taxes, and other costs to it.

This is how a price is determined by the economy, though the governement can influence this by giving people profits on certain products.

Another way to control the price is the main distributer, lets take as a example EA. in the very first chain in the link above they add 10 bucks/pounds/euro's/yen to the product/game. Each of the other chains will still want there profit and add up there costs. Eventualy this will all come back to the costumers wich then downloads it.

This illegal downloading is called the black market, i believe we can apply the laffer curve to it(laffer=american economist from the reagan time). This curve shows the tax income compared to the height of it in % and the amount of people whom work white.

Yeah yeah, im rattling on, but im following a economical study at the moment.

I do both actually: I warez and I buy. I find that if I've discovered a program/band that I really enjoy and like I may fork out money for it. I have this particular opinion concerning music: I buy CD's that I've downloaded first and really liked simply because I like having the CD's (and I can create 320kbps MP3's).

I totally agree concerning music and books, however I wouldnt think twice about stealing applications, etc, since they are pretty intangible anyways (when software cases get fancier I might )

I could probably spin some anti capilalist excuse, but the fact is that I don't consider stealing software as a crime unless its somethign I couldnt do without. Therefore they never lost my business in the first place so noone is out of pocket.

i hate warez.. seriously. Its wrong, its illegal and its stupid.

The sudden torrent of people downloading illegal music in the past three years or so is really damaging the music industry.
Stealing software is also really bad. Imagine you had spent years designing a software product, that had cost you a lot to produce, how would you feel if people started downloading it for free and you made no prophit?

Just stop. it really pisses me off and i cant believe so many of the people i really respected here do it. its sad and pathetic.

It's reality. Go cry.

And, for all I care, the commercial music industry can die twice.

What is "Warez"? :S

You obviously didn't read any of this thread, otherwise you'd have a fair idea, idiot.

Sharp as ever, Mr. Mephs.

Everyone are confessing...

Yes, I still use warez sometimes. I know a handy address that helps a lot in looking for it.

Usually the games I'm warezing aren't available in Poland or come at a huuuuge price (for Polish standards.)

I download music, but I don't get whole CDs. I download the song or songs that I like to hear. I'm not going to go buy a cd when the money hardly goes to the artist and I only like three of the songs. No way.

idiot.

Didn't you notice that until now?! :
Retard...

For the rest of what you said, no, I didn't understand anything of the thread, that's why I asked? :

Madcow:

[quote][url=http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+warez&btnG=Google+Search&meta=]Definitions of warez on the Web:

* Widely used to denote cracked or pirate versions of commercial software. In other words, illegal pirated software.[/url][/quote]

Just read at wicky.
Warez is teh sucks!

Imagine you had spent years designing a software product, that had cost you a lot to produce, how would you feel if people started downloading it for free and you made no prophit?

Let's say that I get a picture in .qwerty format, and there's only one program that can open the file.

I wouldn't run out and bun a program I'd only use to see one image.

Therefore they never lost my business in the first place so noone is out of pocket.

I sometimes think that way. Most of the time, the alternative of getting a pirate version of a game IS NOT buying an original copy. The alternative is just not buying it at all. But chances are people like the game and spend some money in its sequel/s

Speaking for myself, I spend lots of time downloading legal game demos. Most of the games are not worth buying the full version. For example, I just played the Quake4 demo, and I'm glad I didnt risk buying the game.
The people who are really doing something ilegal are the ones that crack games and distribute ISO files.

Average users download them because its easy, and its free: Imagine someone in the street is giving out free water bottles. Ignoring that and spending your money in a shop buying the same water bottle would not be logical.

I think instead of people having to pay for something there should be more open-source versions of it.

Look at the success of GIMP and OpenOffice

go fuck yourself, ZL.

i've always thought of you as an un-funny annoying pest but nah, your just a deep-down asshole who believes his views must be right. sad

Whoa, where did that come from?
Well, I've always thought of you as, plainly, an idiot. So, we're even.

lets eat cake..

sorry. i got wailed on today by 5 older guys. im pissed off and sore.