I'm not opposed to this. I'm opposed to the West imposing its IP regime on the world. I'm supportive of Western copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets in the US and Western Europe. However, the concept of IP ownership -- let alone specifics of how its structured -- are a cultural and human construct.<p>Other countries should be free to figure out other ways of doing this.<p>Very little of this existed prior to around 1700. It's a relatively recent construct too (although there are some historical parallels).<p>I'm not at all convinced we'll make much progress as society if we impose our values on everyone, and expect everyone to behave the same way. There are fundamentals and externalities -- the war on Ukraine is wrong, and we should intervene. However, on something like having IP law, let alone breaking it up into copyrights/patents/trademarks, let alone stating durations and contexts of all of those, this just seems like overreach.<p>I feel like this is one of those places where corporate lobbyists managed to change people's values in a way which is quite unfortunate. People learn about IP theft in elementary school, it gets integrated into UN human rights documents, and something which is really culturally-dependent is viewed as universal. It wasn't viewed this way when I was a child.<p>Even little things make a big difference. We've gone from "copyright infringement" to words like stealing and theft. They're fundamentally different concepts which were intentionally mixed up. If I steal from you, you no longer have what I've stolen. If I copy your software, you still have it; I might just have deprived you of profits (if I had otherwise bought the software).<p>I'm not arguing against the IP regime in the US/EU, or for breaking IP laws. I'm just arguing we shouldn't force our IP regime on everyone else.
I'm tired of the TnT Russian team cracking my macOS apps. Both Lunar (<a href="https://lunar.fyi" rel="nofollow">https://lunar.fyi</a>) and rcmd (<a href="https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd" rel="nofollow">https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd</a>) are now available for free on macOS piracy websites.<p>I made many attempts at discouraging this through anti-piracy measures I learned while working as a malware researcher a few years ago. But if I want my apps to also be available on offline devices, there's really no way to combat this.<p>The apps are also targetted more toward power users which are more likely to know about cracked apps. This is really hurting indie devs.
Devils advocate: if the majority of business software is sold from the US and the US is refusing to sell software to Russia, what choice is there?<p>I’m sure the Russian government are using Microsoft Office, if they can’t legally buy it anymore then they must make the piracy of it legal: or they’re breaking their own laws.<p>Or they retrain on open/libreoffice. But that unfortunately has a poor track record of working.<p>As staunch of a FOSS advocate as I am, this is probably the sensible move for now. :/
As if they were enforcing jack squat currently??<p>It's well known that Russia is a safe haven for piracy & copyright infringment. Can't say that hasn't benefitted me quite a few times.
The author talks about access being shut off for subscription based softwares. I think this further highlights the danger of subscription based software (regardless of whether you think it’s being used for “good” in this context).<p>Also The Equity and Concourse Fonts used in this blog are by Matthew Butterick a famous Rackateer! Didn’t expect to come across it here
It might spur development of the FOSS alternatives, like Wine and ReactOS, FreeCAD and LibreCAD, GIMP and Krita, Octave and Sage, etc; for all kinds of the proprietary software that was blocked.
One should take this with a grain of salt. For now, it’s only a rumor.<p>And it may stay that way because there’re a lot of domestic software in Russia as well: you cannot legalize piracy without hurting your own IT.<p>The same was with IT industry support rumors last week: one (among several) of the leaked proposals was to remove taxes on salary for IT. It stayed off the table.
Honestly seems like a proportional response to the sanctions, which have gone so far as to steal the Russian government's deposits in foreign banks. Not that those sanctions are or aren't justified, but the west had to expect this in response.
Related: Qt disabled downloads for anyone that has a Belarus or Russian IP-Address. There are talks about why they blocked it currently going on at their public mailing list[1]. One argument that came up, is that the downloads are blocked, because Qt is also used in the military. My guess is that this will definitely strengthen other UI toolkits like Flutter in the future.<p>[1] <a href="https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-March/042288.html" rel="nofollow">https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2022-Marc...</a>
I'm really hoping that this could be the start of a worldwide IP reform (both copyright and patents). The idea of patents (limited exclusivity for disclosure) makes sense, but reality has strayed far from it. Likewise, copyright with its obscene and ever-expanding protection terms and lack of fair use protections in most countries is in dire need of a reform.<p>However, this might also backfire by pushing companies more towards making everything a SaaS subscription service so customers never have any code they could pirate.
This is interesting. It seems to be the way forward. I think it should be extended to everything including hardware and medicine. Free market. Free to copy, free to improve the work of others. Companies need to get creative; be the first on the market then sell contracts to users, sell subscriptions, loyalty programs... They don't need copyright or patent protection; they just need creativity and they need to build trust with their customers.<p>I don't believe for a second that this will harm innovation in any way. Big pharma dies most of their innovation using taxpayer money anyway... It costs them nothing so why would they stop R&D? If they did, some other company would quickly step in and do the R&D using government money...
Note this is about using pirated software. This isn't about breaking protection in software to allow it to be used. Breaking copy protection is still illegal in Russia.
just read this essay -- very impressive that the author wrote a PhD thesis in Russian language, and lived in Moscow. However, the essay does not support the initial paragraphs, it seems. This is a thin overview of a forty year development of digital media economy. While Moscow copy-shops in the early 2000s may draw rebuke now, I saw late 1990s Hong Kong and WOW was there a LOT of Pirated Everything. Probably I would guess, more than Moscow. Fast forward to 2022, and there is every bit of this, and more, with layers of economy involved like a soil analysis of the Amazon River basin.<p>Are US interests threatened by stopped-payment subscriptions to Office 365? Does anyone want to pay their Oracle monthlies? As noted in the article, a lot of Western big-name enterprise software was cancelled recently whether it is pirated or not.<p>Drastic circumstance are a trigger, but the world of software is not done evolving and plenty of the accusations here are not new. I wanted this essay to be more specific, and to get into more examples, but instead it glosses over large topics to come to a hasty conclusion.
The tech aspect of the sanctions deserve to be more scrutinized. The average Russian company certainly can pirate Windows (now legally), but now they have to worry about all sorts of backdoors and vulnerabilities that will expose them to their competitors. It would seem that the logical solution would be to adopt FOSS rather than pirate, at least for any serious professional work.
I expect we'll start to see software that will include code that detects Russian character sets, Russian timezones, Russian internet addresses and will refuse to work if unlicenced. Most likely they'll be able to bypass those but a significant majority won't be able to pirate due to lack of technical knowledge.
An interesting point from the history of GOG is that it originated from a market where piracy was the norm, Noclip has a great documentary about it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffngZOB1U2A</a>
Bye Bye Russian Translations.<p>Edit: I mean, who would support translations of a language where you're software almost 100% gets pirated.<p>Edit 2: Downvote, without a comment? That's not what i expected from HN.
Sci-Hub is Russian too :-)<p>I hope they will "liberate" software from the evil "billionaires" (they are called oligarchs in Western Media).<p>Nothing exposes the western hypocrisy more.
Dupe, link was posted 2 days ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30569648" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30569648</a>
So? They’re also bombing cities, shooting civilians, and mining refugee routes.<p>If software piracy even figures in your judgement of their actions there’s something wrong with you
Between this and the news they are now arresting anyone for posting or broadcasting anything they consider "fake news" (and shutting down BBC in Russia) they are in full culture collapse.<p>Anyone can see this won't end well and won't end anytime soon, what country is going to end sanctions while even one Russian soldier is still in Ukraine and for example it took TWENTY years for US to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. So likely still there until 2030 unless somehow Putin is replaced with sanity which is unlikely.<p>Now I wonder what country they will do this to next because they are already under maximum sanctions and they know NATO/US won't go in and won't even do a no-fly zone. So why not double down with yet another country?