Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
This discussion is interesting because first of all, everyone seems to be on the same side: using tools to circumvent license checks with the goal to pirate content is wrong (both legally and morally) and should not be encouraged.
The question appears to be, should it be allowed to name such a tool without regard to its very nature? There are two aspects to answer this. One is the legal aspect. Unless someone could prove me wrong, I'm convinced that naming the tool is not a crime. Skim through today's IT news and you'll see plenty of references to specific hacking and cracking tools and methods that were used to hack a target. If there was a law against naming such tools, mainstream news coverage would look different.
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 maintain that someone who wanted to find out more about how to break a license scheme is not going to visit MobileRead; rather he'd go to other communities and platforms (starting off with a Google Search). In fact I am convinced that the vast majority of our users is not interested in active piracy (other than to discuss the theoratical aspects of it).
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. 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.
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To me, this app seems exactly the same as Alf's tools. If I buy something, I don't want it phoning home and refusing to work unless it can connect to a server somewhere. I buy non-DRM'd software for my PC, but for my phone I often don't have that choice. Apps like this would let me use a much greater range of software, just like Alf's tools let me read books from a much greater range of stores.
The argument that it makes pirating apps easier but Alf's tool don't is completely illogical. Of course Alf's tools make pirating ebooks easier. And of course there are many, many avenues to get books illegally if we choose. But we don't, because we're decent people who pay for what we buy. I'm not sure why in one instance MR seems to feel that MR members are reasonable adults and in the other instance that they're greedy thieves.
Cracking tools are cracking tools. They both facilitate the same behavior, and trying to claim otherwise simply based on content seems very silly.