Quote:
Originally Posted by mrkai
Anyway, he told us how he did it, and told me why: because he could. it was a challenge. It seemed a "waste" to him to NOT package it all up after all of the hours he put into it so that others might benefit, if they wished.
Now, this is...sort of robin hood logic to me, but I sort of just filed it away for awhile. He promised to behave and we got some R & D out of it all, so that was that.
Now, morally, this guy believed he was doing a service. He didn't seem to think it was wrong for us to sell our product...at all.
He also felt that people that paid for it should be able to move it to another computer without asking us first. When I mentioned that I did not agree because it was "my software" he simply said "so what do people get from you when they give you money, then? A promise?"
I had never looked at it like that, of course.
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I think this is a very interesting story, and at the heart of much of the "darknet" activity. Also note that if you had not had DRM (which you are now working to get rid of), this fellow would not have been trying to crack your product, and then wouldn't have had the sense that it would be a waste not to share his effort. That effort-sharing is a big chunk of what drives the darknet. Sure, there are probably people out there who just want to take without paying, but most of them think they
are paying in some way, by contributing their own materials to the darknet. I think this is misguided-- the content creators and others who help bring content to consumers aren't being compensated as they should-- but scarcity and challenge are what is driving this market. And I think the re-typing of HP7 (it wasn't scanned, it was
manually retyped from digital photos) is a classic example of this.
Calling darknet users "filthy scumbag thieves" or whatever isn't going to solve the problem of content creators being compensated for work. Trying to understand what drives the darknet and remove those drivers has a much better chance, IMHO.
And no, I don't think the darknet is driven by the crumbling morality of today's youth. The drivers are much more interesting, and much more possible to address.
Which is the only reason I keep participating in these discussions, despite all the name-calling and not-listening that goes on.