vujà Dé vs Piracy

Piracy Concerns

 For decades altogether there has been a trade off between the so much familiar Windows and the uh! so Geeky Linux. I don't take sides or justify either of them, but the concern is that at most of the instants and over and over again we've chosen the cheaper, easily accessible and the unofficial over the ethical, proper and most importantly the Costlier. And I was amazed to find that in India people don't even know what they are doing, And yours sincerely doesn't even remember how many Ubuntu iso's he has burned and distributed thinking this may help, but the only product is: Why bother?, Whats the difference between that so tough to learn copy of yours and this one you I have! .Its not that this kind of piracy is just limited to India or it is due to poverty or any such thing this blog shows a live example where Bill Gates himself agreed of watching pirated movies on You-tube himself, amazing isn't it!! Interesting part of the Microsoft story: I saw shops hanging cardboard signs written on them "Windows 7 available", I checked my wrist watch and it said 20 OCT 2009, two days before the Windows official release date, I was like :-O.... Microsoft even said "we love Microsoft piracy on China" , because in exact words of one of my friend, software piracy helps windows:

Do you know why Wind-blows still survives and Linux is not considered (for many)... That's because piracy exists... If there will be a full on no piracy law... Win-blows' days will be over... And then Linux will be considered among the mainstream OSes.

Even big companies as Microsoft get laid before such large scale piracy problems, Microsoft has been seen providing free software to counteract piracy. Every one is affected with this kind of piracy, authors of books, soft-wares, photographs, its not limited, things are worse with intellectual property data theft.
There has been different approaches to stop piracy, keys, online activation, DRM, anything, everything, has been done, but as they say, "build a more idiot-proof system, and bigger better idiots will appear!"
I've seen many of my friends get frustrated of intellectual property theft. The most interesting part is that people are devising social methods to counteract these problems and amazingly they help! Some even made themselves believe that their e-books being pirated doesn't necessarily means they are losing money,it may even mean that they are getting more money out of their product. One of the authors even complained that some people asked him to mail them the PDF copy of his book and as he mailed them the other day his books were distributed all over the net! The situation is that Cory Doctrow and Roy Osherove provide the links to download their own books on the net for free!! There's also a software, which reminds us to be on the right side, every-time someone tries to pirate it.

Piracy Initiative. Courtesy:labnol.org

I've seen, almost all of the time there's one, at least one open source or freeware alternative (like LiVES, Avidemux, Virtualdub, GIMP and many more), and for all fields and most of the times open-source's have satisfied me more than enough (Stellarium, Celestia etc). But for most people, how does that make any differences. One comment from a friend about the concern:

Indian world is just hanging on this piracy thread, I mean the cyber-cafe's and all... No international music (most of them)... No unreleased movies and many things like exposure to Windows, Photoshop and many other soft-wares can be imagined without piracy.

Due to their deep concern Indian Govt. has started implementing the open-source (Linux) initiative, this brings hope to lives of people, this makes those thousands of coders work just for nothing, just for the sake of making this world a better open-source or at-least non-pirated place to live!
I wonder, do those coders out there sitting in the Microsoft and such other labs intentionally leave Loopholes!?, so that this continues. Is it a marketing strategy to let their soft-wares get publicized, I've never seen a Hackintos, at least not yet!
So we should be aware of this piracy and the privacy(at least read once, what you accept!!) thing and make people aware of its consequences and try to avoid the Piracy. Be aware, Use Genuine, at least think of it we have got ample options!!
 
Thank you, subham. Photograph courtesy: pirate bay, labnol.