Codesmith-
I don’t really think I’m all that misguided, but I am open to the possibility that I am. I’d love for an honest debate on the subject.
I’ll start of by conceding points where you’re correct:
1)While technically I believe my use of the words “civil disobedience” was correct (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience ), there is obviously no moral equivalency between the gross injustices fought by such people as Dr. King and Ghandi, and me breaking copyright law because I feel that in this particular case it is unjust.
2)I’ll agree that Microsoft has in many ways toned down from it’s extremely anti-competitive behavior of the last decade. The BS that they did to break compatibility with DR-DOS (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS ) was abysmal. I look at things like their key role in the TCPA (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Compu...atform_Alliance ) as an upcoming egregious offense, (
http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html ) but obviously that hasn’t happened yet.
Next we have the point where I think we agree but it wasn’t clear given how either of us stated our arguments:
1)Piracy stifles innovation. Both of us seem to believe this, as you brought up what happened on the Atari ST and I have my ethics about pirating games still commercially available, and/or less than 5 years old.
2)The DMCA is a bad law. Anybody who doesn’t believe that needs to do some reading.
The only point where we seem to disagree is in regards to the DMCA:
I do not believe that me pirating 2 pieces of software (Windows/Office) is the driving force behind the DMCA, nor do I believe that the DMCA was ever simply an anti-piracy bill. I believe the DMCA was written the way it was intentionally so that it could be used as you well observed to make it illegal to refill your own ink cartridges. From the ground up the DMCA was a piece of anti-competitive weaponry. The music/movie industry had a lot to do with the DMCA as well, which is why watching an encrypted DVD is illegal on your Linux box. I suppose your argument is that it takes pirates like me to be the pawns needed to motivate the public into allowing such a bad law to be passed, but I would argue that it was the pirates of entertainment (movies, music, and games) that we’re needed as the catalyst. Can you possibly argue that the public felt so bad for Microsoft that they let the DMCA come to be? I guess your logical counter is that piracy is piracy, which is a fairly defendable point, but when it comes to linking piracy of Windows/Office to the DMCA I just don’t see it.
So back to my point as to why pirating Windows and Office is justifiable, it comes down to two things, closed API’s and closed file formats. I believe these two things to absolutely go against allowing market forces to work because of vendor lock-in (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in ). I believe that in the case of Windows in particular the vendor lock-in is so flagrant and pervasive that it is down right criminal. Until Microsoft is forced disclose enough information that competing operating systems can run programs designed for Windows without any problems, the continued piracy of Windows is justified. In the case of office, I’m more hopeful that it won’t be long before the piracy of Office is no longer justifiable. OpenOffice is a damn fine office suite and it’s only problem is mis-rendering roughly 10% of the .doc files I through at it. If the OpenDocument (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Document ) format starts to become the more accepted file format to the point where people are using MS Office to make OpenDocument files which are absolutely interoperable with OpenOffice then there is no longer a problem.