Hi,

I'm currently ripping a few of my own CDs to put on my mp3-player. It could have been someone elses CDs or it could have been mp3s that I've downloaded from the net. Piracy is so rampant and there's so many p2p-network out there nowadays, so I'd like to hear your take on software-piracy in Shadowrun:

Does it exist?
What gets copied?
What are the rules about it?
Who tries to inforce the copyright laws?
Are it all done over the matrix or do people have other venues for it?

Stuff like that; do you think piracy is an issue in 2064?


Adhoc

You know they bootleg BTLs. BTLs are unfiltered simsense (kinda like a movie I guess, but you're in it). I imagine that people still bootleg music as well. I don't see it having gone away. I don't know if SR3 ever released it, but in SR2 there was a book that dealt specifically with celebrities and that type of thing. If I were to try finding your answers, reference that...I can't remember what it was called but someone will chime in with the title. Sorry.

My take is that the corpos enforce copyright laws everywhere they can, putting the pressure on the govs in the process.
Now, there is the problem of the 3rd world countries, where piracy is not only a business, it's often the only way the poors can afford music, videogames or movies. And there is a twist: the corpos want to sell to those poors too, but they can't dump their prices too low in such an internationalized market, so they bootleg their own products, semi-officially, to cut the loses... I'd see that particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia/south China, infamous for their widespread piracy.

Source code is easy to come by, but it accounts for 30% of program cost. With how expensive those programs get, that's nontrivial.

~J

I suppose it's also worth pointing out that, unlike today, Renraku can 'award you' a free tour of their programming suites where they're currently working on Super Motorcycle Ninja Rampage IV. Then, as soon as you cross that line, they can shoot you dead for software piracy. Throw on that they can 'accidentally' release an easily copied, pre-release version of shield 4, which, most unfortunately, tends to brainfry the user under certain circumstances will make deckers think long and hard about what they plug into their head.

sota63 had some info on virtual art and how to pirate them.

as for pirateing, its a issue not often coverd in rpgs (just like incompatiblity).

why you can sometimes buy the source along with a working object copy of utilitys is that your not buying a legal item, ever. if you have a legal account on a host then you dont need any utilitys unless your trying to perform a action that your account dont allow.

piracy will allways happen. you can only hinder it, never stop it compleatly. my guess is that corporate court and corp strike teams are what makes piracy in SR hard. if they can find you then either dissapear or die or gets sent to corp jail for x number for years with bubba the troll as your cell-mate.

allso, the software os that we have today only realy showed up with the pc and cheap hardrives. now how about a jump back to chip based os that only run specificly signed software? a bit like what the TCPA and NGSCB is supposed to do. whenever you connect to a matrix resource then the host checks your system and determines the signatures. if you download anything then the suff is wrapped in a encryption so that if you try to read it of the memory and transfer it somewhere else then it would refuse to run. therefor you can upload something to a computers memory but you cant download from that memory.

and SR uses chips for storage of stuff. this allows for a active media that detects a install and then locks itself until it can verify that the system you installed on dont have a copy present any longer and it will then allow for a new install. i recall a similar system being used on a set of disketts from microsoft. every install would alter a file on one of the disketts. after x number of changes it would refuse to do any more installs. now consider this being done inside a black box chip where you dont see every file on it but rather get a menu when inserted into a computer where you have the option to install if the chip allows it.

security must be multiplayerd so that if one layer (copy protected chip,signed files) failes then the next one pick up (cops and corporate court).

One ponders on whether the megacorps would have wisened up to the concept that they should be selling media services, rather than media products.

You often make more money off service-based fees than you do selling products. And you can't pirate services. (Well, you can, but it's much less critical than in a product-based business)


-karma

well given that they seems to be heading that way lately i would say yes. why allwo a person to have music stored on this home device when it can be streamed as a service? your own made to order tv or radio channel maybe?

I totally agree Cochise, but I would have to say that the further you ignore todays tech. and pretend it never happened...just takes away the fun of roleplaying this game IMOO. It is kinda like saying Use your own imagination but don't go too far because we didn't think of it back then. The problem is basing it off of the Real World to begin with is where the troubles are. They just made it easy to begin with by doing that instead of coming up with an elaborate explanation on the entire world.

I, too, agree with Cochise, especially when you throw the Crash into the mix. Yes, the SR world might have had p2p networks like we do pre-crash though afterward they would have to be recreated to work with the new networking technology. While I wouldn't limit a creative player who wanted to use this idea in game, I think I would try to describe the p2p network in a way that didn't seem like a carbon copy of current technology.

Maybe the network exists on an "invisible host" so that it cannot be traced. Such a host might exist as a distributed system on a number of hosts using IC protected tunnels (sixth world VPNs) to communicate between the different host nodes. In this way, the systems are decentralized. Could take it one step further and say that they exist only in the memory of the hosts invovled so if the host goes down, the record of the existence of the network goes down, too.

Then, maybe the network hops from one host to another (sort of a Teleporting SAN I suppose) so that it's hard to find from one day to the next. Once you're on the host it could look like a Middle Eastern bazaar or market day in a medieval villiage or perhaps a shopping mall complete with store fronts and advertisements for jobs, etc. While you're on the invisible host, your datatrail would shift from one actual host to the next as you move from section to section on the invsisible one so that those who are using the network cannot be traced similar to how the network itself cannot be traced.

'Course, you shouldn't make it a one-stop-shop for all your decking needs. And if you want some fun, the sixth world RIAA/MPAA could raid the place while your characters are jacked in. What happens if one of the actual hosts goes down while you're part of the invisible host? Could be fun to put together

Another thing you'd have to introduce with such a market are the bug rules, tucked away in Matrix p. 81. Just about everything open-source on the market there would have a decent chance of being fairly buggy, and any of the high-Rating programs would stand to be *extremely* buggy.

Overall, though, I really doubt that P2P networks and open-source software will be nearly as widespread in the 2060s as it is today. Most open-source and P2P networks today rely on corporate sloth and legal tricks to keep themselves safe, neither of which will apply in the Sixth World. Today the number of downloaders is high because the consequences are remote and usually difficult to enforce, but in SR it is disturbingly easy to simply make someone dissappear without too much real effort by a mega. They'd probably even have legal backing for such a move; I'd be very surprised if a worldwide and much more strict version of the DMCA hadn't come out decades earlier and was routinely being enforced by then. The days of hiding behind "Fair Use" or foreign countries were over for the software pirate the moment the corps took over the courts and gave themselves extranationality.

The ting about open souce is that with so many people working on it bugs are easily found and weeded out. Generally, open source programs have a much better track record in this regard than their proprietary counterparts.

One idea is to treat open source programing in a manner similar to ritual magic, adding the programing skills of every decker who works on the project to the approperiate tests. With potentially hundreds of programers checking the source code this rule would go a long way toward eleminating bugs. Of course, the Corps would try to stop it using Shadowrunners if they can't buy out the project. Or, it is possible that they changed the international copyright laws to make open source projects illegal and I'm sure the megas wouldn't mind laws that specify only corporations can hold copyrights.

Even closely-coordinated programming projects just get the average skill of the entire team. Open source isn't some magic bullet that helps people program together; in practice, most contributions on any given project come from a very small number of people.

Simple or heavily-used open-source software tends to be comparatively bug-free. Complex and/or specialized software tends to be a mess.

~J

With how copying/uniqueness works on purely digital equipment, such as decking utilities, it's pretty clear that the majority of hardware, in Shadowrun, employs some sort of advanced integrated DRM scheme that takes a lot of effort to circumvent. I'd imagine, given that fact, that copyright infringement is dramatically lower in Shadowrun.

DRM isn't the issue.
Psychotropic Black IC labeled "yellowsubmarine.mp3" is what would really kill P2P networks.

Which is actually an excellent point. How many people (corporate or otherwise) with such things would it take to kill filesharing, even if it were possible? IC, worms, etc. can be significantly more destructive in SR than they can in real life (destroying hardware and, under some circumstances, the unfortunate user).

~J

So... the actually legally valid and growingly prevalent process of using encryption/access schemes to control the reading, modifying, and copying of digital data is irrelevent... but using Black IC to kill people who download audio files is more on-topic?

Even assuming someone's using a DNI for that kind of thing(and why they'd bother, I couldn't imagine), do you really think that any municipality, or other corporation, is going to stand for a corporation releasing what is essentially a deadly digital plague onto The Matrix? That's a can of worms no one would ever open. The ramifications and fallout from it would be apocalyptic.

I’m at work reading in a tiny window. Can overlooking a single post please be excused?

That being said, there’s no need for DNI to get your expensive hardware damaged something fierce, and everything you said about it being too extreme applies to Shadowruns, too. If it doesn’t get traced to the corp, no problem.

Also, audio files I could care less about. It's the Programs that would get this treatment.

~J

indeed. they were nearly apocalyptic last time; everybody's probably pretty gunshy around spreading virii in SR.

I'd argue that 'internet' type matrix priracy is actually less a problem in 2060+ than real life 2004. The matrix and having a connection to the matrix is much more dangerous to the common person than it is for today's internet. Its sorta a reverse situation, CORPS pirate stuff/ideas/whatever they can from matrix connections through the trid/household appliances from your average joe. Nowadays the average joe can pirate stuff and feel cool and invulnerable to being caught. But when your own trid squeals on you for downloading copywrited materials, it'd be harder to do unless you're an actual hacker/decker type. The average joe/family/whatever in 2060+ has little to no idea how much they get probed by their own stuff, and have apparently been conditioned to think "Wow, this is really convenient! My TV knows my favorite types of shows, my fridge knows when I have to order new food, my toilet knows when to send me to the doctor!"

And if you're a 'true' hacker/decker type, why the hell would you waste alot of time pirating music? The books flavor the decker as someone who likes the risk, or showing off their leet skillz. Pirating music or low end stuff, would be beneath them. Something they might do for a buddy, but probably not something they'd invest alot of time in themselves.

yeah, but you don't get that problem (yet) on bittorrent networks. and by the time you do, there'll probably be another type of p2p network out there that doesn't.

Understand context?

Let me quote my esteemed colleague, again.

hey, it might be porn. i'd download it anyway, just in case!

most "pirates" are also not going to have a datajack, making the black IC kinda useless. besides which, why would any corporation open itself up to litigation like that? black IC is very, very illegal; the corps can ignore that when they're on their own systems (since they make the laws there), but uploading it onto the systems of other corporations and governments? bad, bad juju.

and, actually, i disagree about how proficient most "pirates" will be. i know kids in 4th grade who are nearly as proficient with computers as i am, and i've been working in tech support for four years (first in the army, now as a job to tide me over until college). i don't see that trend dying out by 2060.

Go on Kazaa, look up something that's new and fresh right now. I can guarantee at least half the hits are nothing at all but names that are there to create more downloads.

Most pirates you know are computer literate. Doesn't mean they all are.

tanka, i didn't say that most of the pirates i know are computer literate. what i said, in an admittedly roundabout way, is that computer literacy is rising very quickly, and that the average "pirate" of 2060 is probably going to be very computer literate (compared to today).

and grey IC is also illegal, Toptomcat. all IC is. so are worms.

i don't think you're aware of the way p2p networks work, nezumi. by definition, you're downloading from any number of different systems, not just the system that uploaded the file originally. as well, putting a file on a p2p network ensures that it will propogate.

Aside from the day to day stuff. Lets say I have connections in Shadowland. Or the Nexus, or something bigass like such. Whats to say that someone didnt program them selves an (effective) analyse 3 (lets call it whatdafuckisit.exe, a relitivly simple program, at 27MP) ,and decided that it worked so well they should give it away, post it to SL, free for download and usage. Now, why would anyone in their right mind go BUY something, black market or not, by Mitsu.(who makes the worlds best Analyse programs, but whatdafuckisit.exe is just as good) for ¥8,000?

tanka, you're not hearing me. i'm saying that the computer users of today are largely illiterate, compared to the users of 2060. yes, i know computer users today are stupid. but that's a trend that's changing very quickly.