Ordinarily I keep my political activities seperate to this blog. However I published an article today, on copyright, that may be of interest to developers and Micro ISV’s, particularly those residing in Australia.
It doesn’t state anything we haven’t heard many times before, as developers, but it is an opening gambit, in the public political sense, of mine on this issue. The objective is to raise awareness overtime and hopefully nip in the bud certain subversive influences I’m aware of, in the political scene here in Australia, in relation to this issue.
It would be fair to say that the average person, not producing work covered by copyright, would love to see copyright law fall by the wayside. Certain politically motivated elements certainly would as it suits their socialist agendas.
So, the article introduces the concept to the casual reader, makes mention of the usual semantic arguments we all love to hate when discussing the topic and acknowledges the role organized crime plays in producing cracks, serials and keygens targetted at piracy.
I won’t reprint the article here beyond a quote. You can click the quote below to read the full article.
Increasingly, individuals illegally downloading content with file sharing tools like Limewire, Kazaa and torrent tools like Azureas are being detected and prosecuted in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. It is only a matter of time before prosecutions become more common in Australia. The stakes (and the losses) are too big for companies and individuals producing intellectual property to ignore.
An ironic benefit, to the average person, from this enforcement is that by not using tools such as these they limit their exposure to viruses, trojans and malware which literally fill the services that offer cracks, keygens, serial numbers (often written serialz) and circumvention of DRM – Digital Rights Management, all of which aid in the copyright circumvention of owned music, video and software.
It is not illegal to have these downloading tools on your computer. They do in fact have legal and valid uses.
But it becomes illegal when they are used to access items without the permission of the copyright holder.
That many of the circumvention tools – cracks, keygens etc – are created by organized crime groups such as the Russian Business Network or RBN is also significant.
Scott Kane
