Do not forget next weeks meeting.
What will happen when ordinary people get hold of removable storage which holds these levels of data, will they swap and sell removable storage "discs" to each other containing vast collections of pirated material. If the hard disks industry prediction about increases in disc capacity are correct, by 2010 hard disks will be that big. To help find the answer we can look at the present, remember the computers indirectly mentioned at the beginning of the ARCtical, their programs were only a few KB in length. You could easily hold thousands of them on a single CD-ROM. As we know this has been happening for years, e.g. the emulator CDs. People do not even need to buy it from some dodgy person at a car boot sale, they can walk in broad day light into a number of shops to buy them for a few pounds. Ironically a chain of shops doing this is a music shop chain. In the past when the chain started doing this they were owned by one of the big five music companies, who are now so rightly angry about the pirate music websites.
How do the shops get away with it? Well as the programs are so old the commercial value is low, i.e. they no are longer sold, companies cannot be bothered going to court. They equally cannot be bothered to put the programs into the public domain, thereby encouraging piracy. Legally taking the trouble to make the software freeware puts users (who have saved some software from extinction) in a better position. Basically the copy write laws as they now are at 100 years are far to long, copywrite for software could be cut. Ignoring Babbage, computers have only been around for about 50 years, if books had an equivalent copywrite period it would be thousands of years long. Another option is that software that is no longer sold, after a few years becomes freeware automatically and the company responsible has to provide the software and its source, say on the Internet.
In the case of arcade machines of the same period they are also emulated but I have almost never seen someone selling a CD containing the machines ROMs. This is because the companies that produced the arcade games have used the law to protect their copywrite. I said almost, as usual some companies have gone bust, so leaving their games effectively unprotected. None of this stops the emulators themselves from being sold or given away.
Legal threats to commercial software?
Some free software people see a linkage between piracy and freeware seeing them as two railway lines to the same destination, no charge for software. Freeware software is a legal alternative to piracy if you are poor (no more arguments that you cannot afford software, thats why you pirate). However commercial OS software (and more so in the future, application software) is being increasingly squeezed between freeware and the monopoly software. While freeware may act as a form of quality and price control. Already people are calling for RISC OS to be made open source and similar is happening on other platforms. Wintel is not the only threat to our platform. Freeware tools for doing piracy are appearing including GPL ones, some have legitimate other purposes, but not all do. In the past RISC OS was (and still is to a large extent) protected by being given to you as part of the machine and because it comes on ROMs. Shareware seems to be built on the assumption that people will not pay and will therefore use it illegally, it makes breaking the law easy.
Commercial softwares own response to piracy can be damaging as well as helpful, e.g. software stopping working when you upgrade your motherboard, dongles, having to use the original removable storage program load time can cause several different problems, etc. While PC user have to agree to long usage agreements or return the software. Fortunately English and Welsh law says that unreasonable conditions can be ignored. It would be a bad situation for legal uses to have difficulties useing their software, thanks to copy protection, while the pirates can ignore all this. We do not want to be in a position where the freedom of freeware licences are something to envy. A Linux user returned Windows and asked for his money back, but that is another story.
I like to think that RISC OS users do less piracy than other computer users. Though honesty is not the only reason, because if you do not know any other users you cannot pirate from them. We should not allow members of the increasingly important user groups (such as RUNG) to slip into piracy. As has been shown, this is now just one form of piracy, will RISC OS users increasing follow others computer users into piracy?
In some countries over 90 percent of software are pirate copies. People from these sometimes poor countries say USA software companies are rich, and that it is fine not to pay them. However as we RISC OS users know not all software is written by these companies. It seems one act of piracy leads to another, and computer virus control is less. RISC OS companies need every pound they can get to develop their products further. Already over a third of software in the UK is illegal, so what can be done to stop piracy?
When I started writing Replier, it was a program that adds > to the beginning of each line of text for replying to RUNG News, which uses the output of !unhtml. Then I looked at the output of version 1.15 !unhtml, it had duplicate characters, a bug. So I wrote htmreplier which does the job of both and does it better. Version 2 (this version) can handle tables to a small extent. Run htmreplier from the same directory as the issue of RUNG News which you want to reply to. You will be asked the name of the RUNG News file, then a RISC OS text version (including ‘> ’ at the start of lines) will be created. It will be a file named reply, with filetype text. This program could form the basis of a text browser.
Next Physical Meeting | 16th November at the back room of the Billy Bluelight Pub, Hall Road, Norwich Norfolk. 7pm to 9.30pm. |
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First IRC Meeting | To be decided, may not happen. |
Other Events | To be decided (probably having a stand at a local computer show will be the first event). |
RUNG bank balance : £10
If you have something computer related that you want or want to sell then email RUNG NEWS and it will be put into the classified section.
Future Issues : RUNG News gets cryptic.
Please send material for this magazine, you are almost guaranteed that it will be published. How about reviews of other RISC OS magazines and products. Advertising space is available. You can contact RUNG at planet14@boyznow.net
Acknowledgments : Diana Mills, for proof reading