Shiny new blogger posts brilliant take on software piracy

Hot out of the gate and fresh into the blogosphere comes Matthew Federico, a fellow North Carolinian and I think that after just a few posts, his blog is promising some good things. Like this essay he just posted about video game piracy, and he covers all the bases rather eloquently...

Stealing is bad. Stealing is something you just don't do. You don't go into a candy store and just steal that Hersey's Kiss. You don't take what is yours, and you only get possession of something when you hand over your hard earned cash for it. You work hard, you spend hours after hours doing whatever it is that you do, you get your paycheck, you pay your taxes. You pay for insurance and food and gas and electricity and your cable. After all that, then you get to spend your hard earned money on anything you please, if that suits your fancy.

It's a system that makes sense. That is how economy works, in a nutshell. We all make a service or product, we get money, we pay for our essentials, then we buy our luxuries. And who made those luxuries? Why, somebody who was making a service, just like you.

So, what does our morale upbringing tells us when we think of stealing? Why, we remember that it is almost like we are stealing from ourselves. Thus, stealing is wrong. One hundred and one percent, all the time, always, and forever...

Mash down here for the rest of Matt's thoughts.

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Software pirate sentenced by government to use Windows

Scott McCausland pled guilty to uploading Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith onto the Internet a day before the movie's release in May of 2005. He received 5 months in jail and then 5 months home confinement. As part of that part of his sentence, McCausland agreed to have some tracking software installed on his computer.

There's just one problem: McCausland is a Linux user, and the government doesn't have any tracking software that runs on Linux.

So now the government is making Scott McCausland use Microsoft Windows, or else don't use a computer at all.

If they make him use Windows Vista, would that violate the Geneva Convention?

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Gonzales, "attempted" software piracy, and Inslaw/PROMIS

Let me get this straight...

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wants to make "attempted" copyright infringement a crime.

Among other things, Gonzales is calling for life imprisonment for software piracy.

It logically follows, then, that the entire frickin' U.S. Justice Department - and a damn huge chunk of the rest of the federal government - should be sentenced to life in prison for its continued piracy of the PROMIS software.

To this day, the Justice Department has not paid Inslaw a dime for what was proven in court to be a clear case of software piracy by the federal government.

If this isn't a grandiose case of "chutzpah", I don't know what is.

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