[chaley]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Then there is the moral aspect. We don't want to encourage our visitors to pirate content. One could claim that just by naming a tool you'd passively assist a user in pirating content or software. That would assume that we are somehow the authority on the Net and that there are no alternatives to finding the information. Obviously, we are not the authority.

I think that in this case MR should be considered an authority. It is *the* authority on CC, and it is very reasonable to assume that someone would come here to check into how its licensing works. Furthermore, this very thread is the #4 result for the google search "Calibre Companion remove license check".

Is it immoral to just mention the name of a tool whose sole reason for existence is to circumvent license checks? The answer depends on your values, and since we are an international bunch with different backgrounds, our values will undoubtly differ.

In addition to the moral question one should consider accidental education. For example, cybmole learned that the app can remove in-app advertising. Such removal is arguably another form of piracy because it is denying the developer a revenue stream, in this case not to permit using the app but simply because the user doesn't want to see the ads. NB: I am not saying that cybmole actually did this, only that because of the reference he learned that he can.

I hesitate to make general community-wide decisions/guidelines based on my own moral judgement; instead I prefer to decide case-by-case. In this very case, it's not just the question whether mentioning an Android cracking tool is in accordance with our guidelines. It should also be considered that it was mentioned in a forum section that is dedicated to the support of a specific Android app, developed by a fellow MobileRead member, that can be cracked with the aforementioned tool. So there is a correlation and I think in this light for this specific case, it should be possible to find a common understanding that cracking tools ought not to be mentioned.

OK by me.