254 DEAR HACKER

254 DEAR HACKER

complaints just like mine. At least one petition has been started, but

I doubt Sony will alter or update their software. If anyone has any alternatives or answers, I would love to hear about

them. I just hope I don’t hear, “You shouldn’t have gotten a Sony.” It’s

a shame that such amazing technology should be so incredibly limited because of baseless corporate fear.

Thank you for your great magazine. semicerebral

This is a brilliant example of corporate stupidity shooting itself in the foot. Instead of encouraging people to use technology to be innovative, thereby creating all sorts of new markets they could capitalize on, they choose instead to stifle such innovation due to fears of losing money. We wish these dinosaurs would simply go back to the analog world and leave the digital technology for those who truly want to work with it. We’re confident more companies will come along who don’t cripple the technology, especially when more people like yourself make their presence known.

Dear 2600: As recently as a year ago I had about the same opinion on piracy as

revanant in his letter in 20:2; piracy is fine if it is just to “test out”

a product. However, I’ve reached a stage now in my life that I am designing software and I finally understand why that idea is wrong. When you pour your heart and soul into something like a big project, the finished product is a part of you. It is something you created and therefore own. If I want my work to be freely available, it is; if I want my product to cost $1,000,000 per license, it will because it is mine and

I get to decide if/how anyone else gets to use it. It is wrong for someone to take what is mine under their own terms. I think that our freedom to create and to decide how our ideas are shared is fundamental, and software piracy deprives us of this right.

eigenvalue Of course it’s wrong for someone to take your hard work and leave you with

T H E M A G I C O F T H E C O R P O R AT E W O R L D

this with a dose of reality. If we were to decide that each of our issues should cost $1,000,000, does that mean that anyone who obtains it for less or, heaven forbid, steals it outright, is guilty of stealing a million dollars? Maybe in our opinion, but nobody else would go along with it. And by pricing something so high above the reach of individuals, we’d be setting it up so that people would have to find some nefarious way of obtaining it. In other words, we’d be fools to be surprised and we’d have nobody to blame but ourselves when people don’t play by these rules. Of course, there’s no way we could ever get a magazine into a store with that kind of price. Software companies manage to come up with incredible markups as do record companies and that’s a significant reason why so many people are not only reluctant to pay their prices but also completely unable to. It doesn’t make it right but nobody should be surprised when it goes this predictable route.

Recently, a filmmaker friend of ours wanted to buy the new version of FinalCut Pro to edit his movie. He went to the Apple store prepared to shell out the $1000 it cost. But he wanted a guarantee that it would work on the MacIntosh he owned before he paid for something that couldn’t be returned. They told him that if it worked on a Titanium (the most advanced and expensive machine they sold), that they wouldn’t be liable for any problems he encountered on a cheaper machine. In their words, it was his decision not to upgrade and buy a new machine. The decision he wound up making instead was to buy the program off the street for $50 and never use Macs again after this project. (And yes, the program wound up working on his machine which meant that Apple would have made the sale if they had shown some support of their customers.) Now there’s no question that

he ripped them off since he didn’t pay them for the program and in fact wound up paying someone else for it. But who set this situation up? Has Apple earned any- one’s sympathy with this kind of behavior?

There are ways of keeping customers and ways of losing them. And that, despite everything else that’s going on, is the real bottom line.

Dear 2600: The RIAA’s opinions on file sharing are so over exaggerated. Who

are we feeling sorry for here? The people whining about piracy are some of the richest people in the world. I’d bet if this was some poor starving artist finding their music online, they’d probably take it as