Quote:
Originally Posted by manning1  Nuno_F
but in my view with respect to say we gotta have dongles cos of hackers is
replaceing one problem with another.
"lock up your daughters" approach just doesnt work.
neither did chastity belts . always someone around willing to break in..lol. |
To my thinking, I would say that we have a perfect example of what
happens when you don't take steps to protect your intellectual
property from theft and mass illegal distribution. It's the business
that we work in .. commercial music.
The combination of an unprotected high-fidelity source format and a
relatively high-speed worldwide distribution / dissemination medium
made it possible for the "bad apples" to make it easier to obtain
and use the media without license than it did to go to Tower Records
(or wherever) and buy it legally.
The result has been the near devastation of the commercial music
industry. To me, while we can lambaste the studio system for its excesses,
it has hurt nearly everyone in the business. Every time I hear of another
studio closing, or some very talented people getting out of the industry
altogether, it is a direct result of illegal file-sharing.
Now one can certainly argue that the industry did not respond quickly
enough to create franchises like iTunes.. but that eventually did happen...
but you still have rampant illegal file-sharing that continues to depress
the overall music market.
The fruits of this practice are ubiquitous. Listen closely to the stuff that's on the radio or wherever. The quality
of the product has gone down significantly. Not everything has suffered,
but the mean of the music product sounds significantly worse than the
pinnacle of the studio system (pick your date between 1977->1990).
Everyone, including the listener, has been compromised by this practice.
The exact same thing would happen if companies like Waves, Digidesign,
Steinberg, etc. etc. did not take steps to protect their software from the
likes of Pirate Bay, etc.
Any arguments to the contrary must (to me) explain why the same thing
that happened to the music product would not happen to the music production
product.
There has always been some degree of illegal use .. FM "album" based
radio would play albums for the cassette crowd to record. But the fidelity
sucked and the ability of the recordists to replicate and distribute that
product again wasn't practical.
With the internet and file-sharing / peer-to-peer sharing systems, the
effect is logarithmic. That is a crucial difference in your operating system
analogy.
Also, the chastity belt analogy doesn't quite hold because the "illegal user"
can't duplicate your daughter and take a cut on each generation thereafter.
At least not in 2009 ;-)
To belabor the point: yes, the crackers/pirates are a very small
minority of DAW users .. but, the Internet / bit-torrent, etc. greatly
amplify their ability to do harm.
For this reason, while I admit that a dongle is sometimes an inconvenience ..
( like when I leave it at home and have to drive back to get it ) i
accept their necessity .. because I know what would happen without
them.
jeff