There’s been insidious ways to get cracked apps onto your iPhone without paying them before, but Crackulous — installable on a Jailbroken iPhone through Cydia — makes it drag-and-drop easy, quickly stripping the protection off of most any App Store app. What this means is that the knowledge required to distribute pirated iPhone Apps just became almost nill.
This irritates me. This is simply going to lead to an escalation of the Apple/Pwnage Team cold war… and while that hasn’t worked so well for Sony, Apple’s proving remarkably canny in preventing unlocks on both the hardware and software level. I’m in support of hacking devices, but not if the sole purpose is piracy… and that rankles even more when the only savings is a buck or two.
Crackulous [Hackulo via Engadget]
Here we go again…
* Levine on Abolishing Copyright: What We Would Lose, What We Would Gain by Stephan Kinsella
* Does Monopoly Create Wealth? by Jeffrey Tucker
* Does Innovation Require Property in Ideas? by Jeffrey Tucker (MP3 on FreeTalkLive)
* Authors: Beware of Copyright
* The Universals of IP Theorizing
* What is Your Attitude Toward IP?
c.f. the usual sounding off by Cory Doctorow and Jorge Cortell.
This is illegal copy of Crackulous. You can buy it legally at http://www.crackulous.net This version steals all your credit card info,and other sensitive data. iPhone users be very careful.
There are methods to verify the DRM integrity of your binary at runtime. I am torn about whether or not I want to implement them in my own applications. On the one hand, someone who steals my apps through this method is probably not a lost sale, since they’re not going to buy anyway. On the other hand, I hate to let people just steal shit from me. Conundrum.
Morality of the app notwithstanding, isn’t there some irony in the coder charging $10 for Crackulous? I mean, I’m glad he wants to get paid for his work, but then again, the people who distribute through the App Store probably want to get paid as well.
Copyright infringement, not theft. They’re not denying you anything you already had.
Indeed, good luck with that! Yet, SlySoft AnyDVD does brisk business empowering people with software to simply and easily “backup” their BluRay movies.
Copyright infringement has been considered to be piracy and theft for 200+ years (1771) and noted in the OED for about this long.
One would assume, given centuries of use, it is now sufficiently deemed appropriate for the term regardless of what the revisionists want to do to the English language.
Clif, copyright infringement has also NOT been considered theft for 200+ years. There is not a monolitihic view on the matter.
One would assume we don’t want large corporate bodies, or those sympathetic to their monopolistic desires, to dictate how we use language, surely?
Copyright infringement = theft is not appropriate: it’s a conflation for the purpose of making something sound more heinous than it actually is.
Finally, the OED is not the end of the matter, and is constantly adapting to a living language.
Sorry, if you people are going to argue semantics, then you are bound by the rules of the language.
As such, if the word means something, it means what it means it means. The OED is pretty much the rulebook of English…you don’t get to redefine something 200 years later just because it doesn’t fit your wrong beliefs.
Once again the hippies wave hands and split long hairs. Meanwhile one or more persons needs a punch in the nose for this thing.
CLIF: “[...]you don’t get to redefine something 200 years later just because it doesn’t fit your wrong beliefs.”
Are you arguing against me there, or your own position? (See: ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’ which existed more than 200 years before copyright was even a twinkle in the King of England’s eye.)