rishab@dxm.ernet.in wrote:
factories). It's not going to be easy to find a country more willing and able to ignore international copyright law (Berne Convention etc) than China; however, despite howls of protest even China is likely to knuckle down eventually. What may be likely is distributed piracy markets, such as
In the foreseeable future (10 years?) there will exist jurisdictions that, even after signing this or that convention, will be more or less lax about pursuing violators. Thus I still believe, despite China's awaited submission, that the Internet and 28.8 modems (and abundance of disk space) are real threats to holders of copyright who want to protect every penny. Encryption (by the way, how long might it take to IDEA-encrypt a 2 MB .zip file? I never tried) will make it practically impossible to find and prosecute at least private copyright abuse. They won't use thumb- screws to obtain the key to your SecureDrive just on suspicion of infringement (except possibly in Singapore). The present situation, as we all know, is that few people are willing to pay for such software as games if they can get a (cracked) version for free. I think this attitude will expand to most software. The real war will be faught between protectors and crackers (since it is usually not convenient to export an opened, installed version to another system - and more so the bigger and directory-spreading the program is). Actually, a sort of data haven for cracks already exists. If you live in a jurisdiction where cracks are illegal to advertize (let alone use) they can be hard to find on your local BBS, but with an Internet feed (or long distance modem calls) it's no problem at all. (For those who don't believe in the shareware concept I recommend the Norwegian nag-eliminator 'Buster' - although you need the registered version for the latest versions :-) Mr La Macchia got caught. How many didn't? Look at the IRC Undernet: wArEz-bots all over the place - and I bet the net.cops are lagging in bot comprehension (unfortunately, so am I...). And there is talk about this Secure-IRC. Mats