01.03.10
Convicted Monopoly Abuser Sends Partners to Prison
Summary: Microsoft is sending partners from India to jail and also hiring from the East in order to lower expenses that are wages
THERE is nothing more absurd than a criminal company sending others to prison while managing to stay out of jail or decommissioning. Almost exactly one year ago we wrote about Microsoft sending Chinese businessmen to prison and now this is happening in India:
i. Software company MD arrested for piracy
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested two persons on Friday, including the managing director of a Delhi-based software company, allegedly for carrying out piracy of Microsoft products.
ii. Partner Cheats on Microsoft
We have been covering Microsoft a lot lately. But for all the wrong reasons these days. First it was the unrest amongst channel partners in the East and North East regarding the arm twisting technique to increase sales. Now it is about the Microsoft Gold Certified partner KK Solutions in Delhi, which the brand caught recently counterfeiting not just the software but also all the certifications.
This is a sure way to drive sellers to GNU/Linux, as Microsoft recently found out in China. In India too, as Microsoft is finding out, this war on so-called ‘piracy’ (it is not piracy*) is having a negative effect.
Related to the above we also have this news:
H1-B Enrollment Up At State Colleges
[..]
As the state lawmakers head back to Olympia this month, we take a look at how one bill passed last year is playing out. The bill granted in–state tuition to foreign professionals and their families. Many of these are H1–B visa holders who work at places like Microsoft and Amazon. Since the law passed, new enrollments among this group have shot up at the UW and at community colleges around the region.
We last mentioned this here or here. █
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* When people do not like something, then they tend to assign to that something a bunch of words with very negative connotation. In the case of “piracy”, murder and rape are implied. Even the word “terrorism” is said to have been cheapened by overly extensive and broad use. Today in Slashdot we found: “Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture”
The direct link says, ‘”With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away,” Alexie added. “It terrifies me.”‘ What does that have to do with “open-source”? Nothing. The headline says that “Digital piracy hits the e-book industry.” Open source is wrongly being associated with copyright infringement. Our reader Oiaohm says: “They are looking for someone to blame. [...] Problem is projects like wikibooks is cutting in on there normally easy payday jobs [...] Then projects creating open source text books. So writers of conflicting items with open source find no one prepared to pay for what they have made.” Goblin says: “I don’t think they are trying to blame, I think its merely ignorance and lack of understanding on their part.” Oiaohm says “it’s a mixture” of those two factors. “I.e. open source project cutting into the markets, then normal people who don’t give a rats about copyright doing there normal thing. Copy protection in media has been a losing battle. Expect authors of books to get more hostile to the open source world. Think how may books the Wikipedia has undone. I cannot say fear [of] open source based documentation is groundless.”
As newspapers are already hostile towards Wikipedia and FOSS-like economics, this explanation makes sense. These sources devalue the older ones. A lot of resistance to DRM comes from FSF and the same goes for defense of P2P (where Free software is often obtained, especially GNU/Linux distribution torrents). The RIAA/MPAA (MAFIAA for short) openly complained about the FSF more than once for no justified reason.
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NotZed said,
January 3, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Hah, book pirates! Even these people can’t stick to their nomenclature. I thought `pirates’ were the ones who made ‘unauthorised reproductions’ for profit?
The real pirates in the book industry are the criminal cartels who print them. Since ancient times they’ve held society to ransom over the information and entertainment books contain. First by restricting who could read, who could write, then who could print.
After a few thousand years of technological progress we as a society FINALLY have a chance to break free of these shackles. It’s cheap, it’s fast, it offers perfect reproduction, and nobody needs to get nailed to a tree or burnt at the stake to make it work.
And the best they can offer? Provide crippled books at about the same price as the printed versions. That you can’t wipe your arse with a digital Dan Brown novel makes it at least 50% less useful than a printed copy for a start.
The demise of the big publishing cartels cannot come soon enough, and if a few authors get hurt along the way, I think that’s a small price to pay for society as a whole. Someone will find a way to make fair money out of it in the end.
(And someone suggesting Stephen King or their ilk should be ‘worried’ about ‘piracy’ is a complete farce. They’re still going to sell a shed-load of their shovelware, and they will not be struggling to feed themselves from their ‘art’.)