I know some of you have been around for a while, so you may know what I am saying.
Once upon a time there was a website named CEwarez. It was a comunity that allowed the members to talk about whatever interested them, including the underground stuff. The website had links to copyrighted material, but the main enphasis was on trying the programs out, and purchasing what you found usefull. Yes, what some people did there was wrong, but as the larges and most reputable site it discoraged theft, helped police the theft by kicking them and warning the various FTP sites about troublemakers and leaches, and helped increase many developers sales by exposing potential customers to new software and encoraging them to purchase the software.
One day, some new developer that was convinced by relasing some third rate program he would quickly become rich found the site (not hard, it was listed on many commercial sites and all the search engines). This person (or persons) decided it was the pirates fault they weren't making money hand over fist, instead of realising that software developers usualy don't make much money (a fact many of you can attest to). This person started writing threatening letters to everyone, ISP's, name hosting services, the operator himself, etc... there was no imediate responce because there was nothing illegal going on at the website itself.
Unfortunatly, the site was not hosted on an IP belonging to the operator, so when the owner of the address recieved a copy of the letter the operator was asked to close it down, he immedatly did, as his relationship with the owner was more important to him than the site itself. Looked like a victory for the anti-piracy groups, at first...
Almost overnight dozens of new distribution chanels poped up, most of them without the enphisis on purchasing. Filesharing was moved away from filtered FTP's that encoraged responsability and comunity to IRC and Newsgroups that by definition of their one-sided nature encoraged leaching and file hording. Developers suddenly found their programs being passed around by hundreds of scriptkiddies with no morals and nobody encoraging them to support the developers.
Spam was one of these people that started a website to vill this void (actualy it was started shortly before CEWarez went down, but we won't worry about that for this story). Unlike most of the new sites Spam encoraged the style of the old CEWarez, where people supported good developers and discused wht was going on in the workd, instead of just stealing software. I'm not saying his site was opened because of some high morals, it was to meet with old friends from CEWarez and trade software. But the effect was the same. The community feel of the site attracted the recently orphened pirates, and encoraged them to be responsable with their stolen software, after all, if the developers don't make any money they go out of business, then who would make good, quality programs for them to use. over time this new site has become one of the largest communities for people to meet and discus everything from software to the recent world cup soccer matches, still encoraging everyone to purchase their software.
The moral of this story: Yes, the law is being broken here, but the devel you know is preferable to the evil you don't.
