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The Australian Communications Minister is proposing "game changing" laws crack down on Piracy by forcing search engines such as Google to filter content results thereby removing the path people have to finding illegal content online.
[...] Under the proposed laws to be introduced to Parliament today, authorities will also be able to force search engines like Google to stop "unashamedly facilitating crime" by promoting pirate sites that allow internet users to illegally download music or films.
Graham Burke, chief executive of Australian film company Village Roadshow, last night hailed the new laws as game-changing for the industry while slamming Google for acting "as evil as Big Tobacco" in its online behaviour.
"We stand ready to be co-operative with Google. We see good Google and bad Google. But bad Google is as evil as Big Tobacco was 30 years ago. They know what they're doing. They know they're facilitating and enabling crime and it's time for them to clean their act up," he told News Corp.
He accused Google of "unashamedly facilitating crime" by taking people to criminal pirate websites.
Does the Australian government really need to give weapons to special interest groups to enforce civil laws the majority of people do not support?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday October 19 2018, @04:41PM (4 children)
Does causation run in that direction? Is it possible people pirated Office because they were familiar with it from work? If "free" was the only consideration, OpenOffice should dominate everything -- not only is it free, it is permissibly free.
(Score: 4, Touché) by mhajicek on Friday October 19 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
Where was Open Office in the 1980's when I was learning how to computer?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 19 2018, @05:35PM
It was at the afore mentioned Greatful Dead concert. The one with the 28 minute version of Amazing Grace.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday October 19 2018, @06:58PM (1 child)
The most common route to get a pirate copy was for it to be something you, or someone in your family, or extended family/circle of friends, worked with. So the fact that (for example) MS-DOS was widely used in business contributed to it being widely 'pirated' and then that in turn led to it being *even more* widely used in business as a generation of kids that grew up using pirated copies entered the workforce.
In terms of Office, specifically, it was WordPerfect that was most used, and most pirated; before that it was WordStar I think, but when MS started pushing their version one thing I remember very clearly was that they made it much easier to pirate than WP.
And that was actually a feat considering that WP had no copy protection whatsoever; indeed, like any decent program it encouraged you to keep backups of everything, including it! But what you really paid for when you bought WP was the manual. Ran about 600 pages iirc, oh and also the cardboard punchouts that you fit over the keyboard for a cheat-sheet. The program was for all practical purposes free as in beer - you paid for the documentation needed to really figure it all out.
Word wasn't nearly as functional, or elegant, or desirable in most ways. But it was fairly easy to get going without a manual and some cardboard cutouts. I'm hardly the first to suggest that the ease with which it was 'pirated' contributed to its rapid rise of popularity. IIRC internal Microsoft documents stating as much were leaked at some point in the mid-90s. They made a conscious decision to ignore the 'problem' for decades, in the expectation they would then be allowed to yank the leash and assert unprecedented control in the future, just as they are now doing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Friday October 19 2018, @09:06PM
That is a quaint lost technology that anyone younger than gen-x will have no idea WTF it is.
To help the kiddies, now-a-days if you have modded minecraft usually F7 will display the light level overlay. But how to memorize that? In ye olden days games came with cardboard sheets that sat on your keyboard with holes for the keys, and the cardboard had a nice label for "light level overlay" roughly lining up with your F7 key, so you'd know at a glance to hit F7 while learning muscle memory. Some overlays had multiple colors, some games had multiple overlays for different modes OR different keyboards. It was a cool era and a cool technology.
I remember the one for Microprose Stealth Fighter simulator was particularly nice circa 1990.