http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Plant&oldid=284536162

With all respects to your first poster, Dave, I digress. I find it to be quite ironic that you are not only the best writer I’ve ever known, you’re a damned good network engineer, which in my humble opinion, is a few notches higher than a sysadmin. (I can say that, because YOU know where I came from) ; ). It is possible to be amazing at more than one thing in life.

And second, if the huge growth in pirated material represents a corresponding significant decrease in legitimately acquired material, or if it has grown in a vacuum from which no purchase was ever made. That is, these are the same kids who had no money to buy books before, thus the net impact is not as bad as it seems on first glance.

Piracy has no sound moral defense: it’s pretty straightforward, theft is violation of the law. Those who cannot afford should simply do without. However, this does lead to increased competition to deliver content in a way that is both affordable and instantaneous, so maybe we’ll continue to see Kindle / iTunes / etc. services spring up all over. It is cheaper to pull an eBook off a server in the cloud than it is to cut down a tree and stamp it with ink.

I would actually be in favor of more lawsuits against pirates and shutting down The Pirate Bay and friends. That’s an unpopular opinion among the entitled generation but I think as we get older and find the earning power to buy things we want, we care less and less.

I can see it now: you’re on your deathbed and while your wife is holding your right hand, you’ll be typing your last blog entry on the latest iPhone with your right hand.

“Hey guys, this will be my last blog entry. The doctors say I could go any minute now. I just wanted to say I love you all and appreciate your support throughout the last 80 years I’ve been blogging. I also want to tell you all where my Gold is located. You can find it in the Castle ARRRRRRRRRRGH!!!……”

In my own defense, keep in mind that the majority of Commodork took place before I was old enough to drive. To say that a bunch of pre-teens probably have wobbly moral compasses is the understatement of the year. I think it was Bill Cosby who said that a two-year-old, were he able to, would kill you for a cookie.

There are two differences that I see between “then” and “now” — one, that technology is allowing people to “take” things at an exponentially greater rate with little chance of retribution, and two, that as people who buy things die off and the majority of people are downloading stuff for free, anyone attempting to create content (music, movies, books) and trying to sell it is going to be in trouble.

I haven’t commented on my future plans because I was going to make another post out of it, but I’ll just say this; I’m going to write until the day I die. If I can make a living from it, that would be awesome. If I can break even doing it, that’s okay too. If it ends up costing me money … that won’t stop me from doing it either.

I had pirated games for the C-64, mostly traded from kids at school. In regards to what you wrote in Commodork, I wouldn’t describe your actions of distributing games as “casual” in any sense. I’d liken you to the Pirate Bay of the OKC area. You took pride in getting the newest titles out the fastest and reveled in the notoriety that it gave you. It seemed to give you a sense pride that you were supplying an area with free games.

If the market is as you see it in 10-15 years, people who make things for solely for money will stop. People who make things because they enjoy making things will continue. That will be the way things change. So it goes!

I enjoyed reading your book. I’m not trying to make an argument for or against piracy. But I would argue if you suggest what you (and thousands of other kids) were doing in the 1980s wasn’t the same because you couldn’t afford software. But I guess you kind of stated that as well in your last sentence.

And, yes, absolutely, my opinion has changed both with age, and from looking at the problem from “the other side of the fence.”

– You mentioned reasons young software pirates used to justify their actions. that’s pretty much the rationalization bank robbers and other crooks give themselves just before they commit a crime: “It’s no big deal, the insurance company will cover the cost”, “the money I take from their register will be replaced in a day” and so on. A lot of crooks have this huge sense of entitlement and they feel they deserve the money because of the harsh times in their lives. Wouldn’t surprise me if software pirates do the same thing.

– I tend to think the attitude of today’s kids are the same as they were when I was a kid. The only thing that has changed is the technology. When I was in high school – long before there were CD’s and mp3’s, we would pirate music all the time. Instead of using computers we used turntables and cassette tape recorders. I would record all sorts of my friends albums and they would record my albums in return. At one point more than three quarters of my music collection were pirated. I also pirated books, although it took a lot more work. For a while I worked at my dad’s office and he had a nice copy machine. I was borrowing this book on transistors from the library and I used the copy machine to make a copy of the 500+ page book. It took a while but I got the copy and it cost me nothing (cost my dad a ream of paper – shh! Don’t tell him!). University students would routinely photocopy sections of their friends textbooks to save a buck or two – until the Universities got wind of it and strong armed the local copy machine centers and libraries to monitor and prohibit such activity. When my friends worked for a book store they would return paperbacks to the publisher by tearing off the covers and mailing the covers to the publishers (saved a lot of money in shipping). The rest of the books got tossed – theoretically. I got over a hundred stripped paperbacks for free that way. So did my friends.

– I imagine the first software piracy happened long ago, perhaps as early as the 1960’s when software was sold separately from the hardware (up until then they were usually bundled together). Perhaps some student working for some company with a computer would “borrow” the tape and take it to his university and install it on that computer. I can’t imagine it was a major problem in those days but it became a big problem for Bill Gates when he introduced his first Microsoft product: BASIC for the Altair computer. Piracy was rampant and Bill figured that 90% of the Altair BASIC copies in circulation were pirated. In the early 1970’s personal computers were seen as a way to liberate people from the corporate enemy (I kid you not). “Computer Power to the people” was a common slogan mentioned in homebrew newsletters at the time. You never really heard about it because it never got much press: it was limited mostly to the few in the computing hobby at the time. However, that attitude was prevalent amongst the hobbyists and it fueled the whole philosophy that software should be free.

– I remember reading articles in hobbyist magazines more than thirty years ago about how paper books were obsolete and would soon disappear. Many predicted the end of newspapers and paper books before the end of the 1970’s. Foolishly optimistic, yes, but they had the right idea. It was just that the technology wasn’t ready yet. (Arthur C. Clarke wrote the book “Imperial Earth” where the protagonist would read books and articles using a tablet about the same size as the Kindle 1).

In summary, what I’m saying is this is not a new problem, it’s just that the technology has made it so much easier to pirate books and music then ever before. Will paper books completely disappear? I doubt it but I expect a major change in the industry in the next year or so. This is a bigger revolution than the iPods and selling songs online. We may see a large number of publishing houses, magazines and book stores go out of business in the next five years. Interesting times ahead – but not necessarily in a good way.