SCN: Warez

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes  

====================  


(George Johnson, NY Times)---As computers become 
indispensable to modern life, the steepest learning curve society 
faces is not technical but philosophical. It is easy enough to learn, 
like a lab rat, to click a simulated button in a Web browser and 
download the patterns of symbols called computer programs. In a 
matter of seconds you are the proud owner of a new word 
processor, calculator or computer game - an invisible, virtual 
machine.   

Far more difficult is coming to grips with the nature of so intangible 
a possession. Throughout the world of the Internet, people who 
would never think of stealing a cellphone or a camera find it easy 
to justify downloading pirated software. For all the work that goes 
into designing these digital creations, they just don't quite seem 
like real things.   

Last week federal investigators raided campuses and high-tech 
companies across the country, seizing computers and hard drives, 
evidence against what they say is one of the largest software 
piracy rings. As part of a global sweep, warrants were also served 
in Australia, Britain, Finland and Norway.   

The pirates are accused of trafficking in "warez" (rhymes with 
wares), Internet slang for software that has been "liberated" from 
the protective encryption imposed by its makers and posted free 
for the taking. Seeing themselves as more Robin Hood than 
Captain Hook, the loose confederation of students, university 
employees and software company insiders was apparently 
motivated primarily by ideology - a belief that products consisting 
purely of information are somehow different from those you can 
hold in your hand. Like thoughts, they should be allowed to run 
free.   

The fate of the members of the group (named, for some reason, 
DrinkOrDie) and others who traded programs, digitized movies and 
video games through a Web site set up as a Justice Department 
sting operation, will be decided on legal grounds. But no judge or 
jury can resolve the deeper questions about the ambiguity of this 
ethereal something called information.   

How does one live in a world where there is no meaningful 
difference between an original and its copy? Where the menagerie 
of objects includes these curious concoctions called algorithms - 
symbolic expressions that don't lie still on the page but have the 
power to animate computer chips. Hovering somewhere between 
an idea and a mechanism, an algorithm is mathematics that stands 
up and does something.   

The conceptual confusion goes beyond software piracy, and 
beyond the debate earlier this year over the morality of Napster, 
the cyberspace nexus that temporarily turned a whole layer of the 
Internet into a vast dormitory jukebox. Where, in the broadest 
sense, does one draw the line between reality and its 
representation? And what if there is no distinction at all?   

Confronted by such ontological matters, the Supreme Court is 
currently considering the legality of virtual child pornography, in 
which synthesized images are becoming indistinguishable from the 
real thing. If living children are not involved in the image-making, 
has anyone done actual (as opposed to virtual) wrong?   

With the impending conflation of the real and the simulated, actors' 
unions are facing a future in which it will be impossible to tell filmed 
reality from ultra-high- resolution cartoons. Advances in cloning - 
the downloading and uploading of genetic data - are challenging 
bioethicists to consider the difference, if any, between a person 
and its duplicate. All across the societal map, people are struggling 
to get used to thinking of information as more than an airy 
abstraction, re-evaluating what is meant by reality. And what it 
means to steal.   

Within hours of the raids on DrinkOrDie, or DoD, as the group calls 
itself, messages poured into Internet chat groups like slashdot.org, 
a virtual watering hole for programmers and other technophiles. 
("News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" is its slogan.) Some 
participants defended "warezing" expensive software as a way to 
try it out before purchasing a legitimate copy - a practice another 
compared to breaking into car lots in the middle of the night and 
taking test-drives.   

But in this philosophical netherworld, crisp analogies are hard to 
come by. Snatching a digitally perfect copy of programs like Adobe 
Photoshop or Microsoft Office, which retail for hundreds of dollars, 
seems more like cloning a car and taking a joy ride while the 
original stays safely parked.   

Software liberationists contend that the crime is victimless - the 
people who use pirated software couldn't afford to buy it anyway. 
Or that freeing software is a blow against an Evil Empire whose 
Darth Vader is Bill Gates. And, some argue, since a program is just 
a recipe for getting a computer to carry out a task, copying it is like 
borrowing a recipe for chocolate cake.   

The dominant impression one gets from eavesdropping on the 
public conversation is that to the truest believers, warezing - if it is 
a crime at all - is one committed in an imaginary realm. The loot is 
no more real to the takers than the simulated treasure chest in a 
video game.   

But that seems destined to become the minority view. Slowly, 
generation by generation, people are growing accustomed to 
working with invisible tools. Computer hardware costing thousands 
of dollars is routinely abandoned as outmoded junk a few years 
after purchase, while the software and the data are carefully 
copied onto the new machine. Year by year, the furniture of 
existence - clocks, calendars, appointment books, records, 
photographs, novels, movies, even money - is slowly replaced by 
digital counterparts.   

As the substance behind these products leaks away, it becomes 
clearer that people have been buying and selling information all 
along. Binding it between book covers or shrink-wrapping it in 
boxes just camouflaged it while the world learned to recognize that 
something need not have heft to be real.   


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company  






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