An anonymous reader writes “German PC-Welt magazine reports that Microsoft used an illegal copy of SoundForge 4.5 (Google translation) for editing Wave files shipped with Windows Media Player. You can check that yourself by opening any file in the [Windows location] \Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav\ folder in notepad or other editors of your choice and looking at the last line. There you will find a reference to SoundForge 4.5 and also a user called ‘Deepz0ne’ [part of a cracking group]…”
Recently, I got to talk to a programmer who works for one fo the companies that the RIAA contracts with to deal with p2p filesharing (tracking users, fake files, attacking networks, etc). As we were talking, he told me how open source software he finds on SourceForge makes his life so much easier. At first, I thought, “o, great, thats the power of open source” but I quickly realized the irony of the situation. The software he was borrowing code from was GPL’d and therefore, by copyright law, he was obliged to release the source of software he developed using it. Of course, these companies have absolutely no intention of doing that. So the RIAA, in its attempt to enforce copyright law, is stamping all over it themselves.
That just goes to prove my view on the universe is entirely correct, at least in relation to earth and i this plane of existence.
You wouldn’t understand my views, but I’ll explain them anyways.
I. We are in a cosmic TV set.
A. Whatever happens to you that you like, is just to spite someone else on the giant sitcom called “Life on The Third Rock From the Sun (Universe 42 B)”
B. Whatever happens to you that is bad, is good for someone else and is ironic in some form, no matter how bad it was.
C. Anything wrong with the world, is an inherient defect in the product.
1) Murphy’s law, and
2) Any correlaries of the above
are derived from basic defects in the volume and contrast controls.
II. God, if it existed, probably was just a worker in Universe 1 A prime in one of their cosmic TV plants.
III. Any other ideas are entirely possible, just in a different universe. Mine is different from yours.
That’s not true. The terms of the GPL say that you must distribute the source code to anyone that you distribute the binaries to. It doesn’t say anything about who you have to distribute binaries to. He could modify the software for his personal use as much as he wants, and he’d never have to distribute his modifications. He could also distribute the program to everyone in the RIAA, but the source code would never have to leave the RIAA.
