From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Fri Mar 24 2000 - 13:27:47 PST
On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Did you knew that in the streets of Moscow, and even in on the MGU
> campus itself, they're selling CDROMs packed full with expensive
> cracked commercial warez, including relatively yummy stuff like
> Mathematica, statistical packages, CAD/circuit simulators, 3d
> renderers?
All of Asia is like that. IP rights dont exist, with some interesting
side effects.
Asia is a one-copy country for everything. I was greatly amused when
Microsoft made a big deal about launching Win2k in China. The one copy
was already there thanks to the net. Win2k+1 is aready leaked.
Net sales: 0. So why did Microsoft bother? Do they need a writeoff that
bad?
Have you noticed most all software is written in the US? Music, movies,
books too. You didn't think it's becasue Americans are smarter do you?
It's becasue everyone comes here to pay the bills becasue we have IP
rights. It's no wonder so little software is written for non-english
speakers.
No IP rights, no point in writing software/music/movies, no software
industry, no anything digital industry.
What boggles my mind is that rather then them enacting and enfocing IP
rights and establishing their own information age industries in other
countries, people here in the US are doing everything possible to get
rid of them. Napster for music, opensource(tm) for software, the list
goes on. We're demanding to be a one-copy country so geeks can join the
ranks of starving artists? And dont give me that charging for support
line, that's just a bubble enabled stock hyping scam.
Is anyone thinking ahead?
As an example of how the tide is turning, my cousins in construction and
my dad as a mechanic all make more then your run of the mill geek and
work less hours to boot. Now, they will never IPO and hit it big on
paper like the Taco Bell employees, but they make good money and don't
have to relearn everything every 6 months. Not to mention they don't
worry about an opensource(tm) project putting them out of a job. They do
actually have to leave the house to get to work, so I dunno if I could
handle it :)
Geeks better start brushing up on those resume skills that don't need IP
rights to pay the bills if things keep heading in the direction they
are. I'll go into construction, creating and building things is what I
do digital or not.
- Adam L. Beberg
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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