Apple’s OS X Leopard sets torrent world on fire, pirates rejoice
By Nelson Ireson
Major torrent sharing sites are seething with traffic from people seeking pre-release copies of Apple’s latest OS, but experts expect the piracy to die off once the official release comes.
Analogizing to the torrent frenzy surrounding Microsoft’s release of Windows Vista, Wired’s David Kravets opines that when people are basing their digital lives on an operating system, they’re willing to pay good money to make sure it’s legitimate. That’s a fair point of analysis, but Microsoft is still trying to get the massive number of pirated Windows XP users to license their copies through its Get Genuine Windows Agreement program. And this is six years after its release.
Whether pirates will keep their stolen copies, and whether others will continue to download Leopard once it is commercially available, it’s absolutely certain that doing so is not just risky in terms of your personal digital life, but totally illegal. The RIAA and MPAA have done their best to taint the torrent method of downloading itself, spamming the Internet with fake torrents of movies and songs, most heinously in the recently exposed Media Defender scandal.
But it’s not the method of distribution that’s the problem — the BitTorrent network is a very democratic method of sharing bandwidth and distributing files. It’s the content that’s being distributed. No matter what your definition of fair use is, owning and using a pre-release copy of a proprietary operating system isn’t fair game.
Perhaps it’s just a measure of the lengths die-hard fans will go to get a peek at the latest, greatest offering from Apple, a company known to produce some rather enthusiastic followers. Or maybe the rampant theft of Leopard via torrent sharing sites is just an indication that piracy isn’t so much a problem that can be fixed as a condition of the modern Internet and a society that seeks instant gratification without consequences or cost.
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October 26th, 2007
wow, “DUH!” simply isn’t enough to cover this obtuseness of this article.
November 19th, 2007
“No matter what your definition of fair use is, owning and using a pre-release copy of a proprietary operating system isn’t fair game.”
Sure it is fair game. Check some Linux philosophy:
“Don’t programmers deserve a reward for their creativity?”
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
“Won’t programmers starve?”
I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
December 10th, 2007
Apple doesnt deserve anyone’s respect. They use free software, paint it shiny and sell it. If you want an up-to-date system you have to pay. If you want to run it on your computer, you cant, you need to buy Their computer, which of course they also over-price.
Nah honestly i dont have any respect for them. In fact they make me want to throw up.
February 2nd, 2008
Joe:
You might want to consider reading the GNU and BSD licenses carefully and re-think your statement. There’s nothing in *either* license that forbids selling distributions of the software. Do companies like Sun, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, and PC-BSD (to name a few) make you “want to throw up?”
FreeBSD and Debian Linux are just a couple of examples (out of literally hundreds) of completely free (as in beer) distributions of software that have been running strong for well over 10 years each, and it seems quite likely that those projects are still going to be producing open source software for at least another 10 years.
February 2nd, 2008
The point in my last paragraph, by the way, is that if you want free, you’ve got free.
But the fact that Apple is building proprietary extensions on top of open source does not deprive those projects of anything. No theft is involved when copying bits. Furthermore, Apple is certainly not filing off copyrights or otherwise claiming the software as their own invention. So where’s the crime?
To the contrary, they’re rather loudly and proudly stating that they are *using* open source. As a result, 1) many of those familiar with open source bought Macs and 2) it shed light on the fact that such software exists for those that weren’t aware.