Ah, but piracy is Capitalism on a personal level! I have no issue with piracy of that sort of thing - I would never buy the software/music/DVDs anyway, I don't like wasting money on that sort of thing, so no loss of sales to the producer, right?
OK, so when you say you have no problem with piracy of software/music/DVDs, you really mean that you have nothing further to add to this conversation.
ab3a said:
This topic is drifting a bit, but the fundamental problem is this: Who owns the airwaves and what does this imply?
*snip*
Now some are actually contemplating whether people who may reverse engineer and build their own CODEC are criminals.
Nobody can own any portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, you're correct. To imply this gives everyone free range to whatever portion they want is to ignore the practicalities of living in civilization, where limited resources must be shared for everyone to utilize them.
I personally don't think an amateur or hobbyist trying to reverse engineer anything for the sake of knowledge and furtherance of the art(telecommunications in this context) is all that bad on an intellectual level, but the fact of the matter is, independent of what I or anyone else thinks, if what you are trying to do involves protected intellectual property, this type of activity constitutes a crime. Many hackers only work their way into protected networks just for the intellectual curiosity to see if they can do so, without causing any other harm other than the actual intrusion, but this is still a crime. Many people drive a few miles over the speed limit(even past cops running radar, who do nothing), but this act makes them a criminal abstractly.
I'm not talking abstractly though, I'm talking about what happens in the real world. Just like DVDs are a product, so are proprietary CODECS and other technology. Once XYZ company decides to create one(for the purposes of generating profit), what is involved? How many engineers and programmers and other specialists are involved in this creation? How many thousands of hours are invested in this design and creation, and then implementation? And testing to put it through its paces, and then how much time and money goes into turning this now finalized CODEC into a marketable product base with support systems and regular monitoring of how well it performs in the field? Now, add up all the time/money that was spent on this project, just to have some individual or group deconstruct their maybe years of cumulative work taken apart in a fraction of the time and then possibly distribute that out as if it were the fruit of
their short labors.
If I work in the pharmaceutical industry, and my company spends 7 years and over $10million to get a drug product approved for marketing, why should I the day after getting approval go out and tell everyone what our formulation is or all the steps to properly make it? That's ludicrous, and antithetical to running a for profit business. I can go out and buy any competitors product, break it down with my machines and some other qualitative/quantitative analysis, and reproduce that product myself, just like you suggest doing in a separate context. The only thing stopping anyone from copying and reproducing a product we invested time and money in to develop to
hopefully(not guaranteed) turn a profit in a few years after finally breaking even, are easily ignored IP laws. Anyone can still copy this drug product, but big pharma(along with smaller players too), who may spend 500 million on a single product pipeline, is going to protect that investment they made and the profits they hope to make with such legal fury that it will make your head spin.
My point is not so much to berate you for what you are taking interest in; I agree with the spirit of what you are doing, but this is how it is to someone who is not on the outside looking in.
