Russell Beattie

More than a week after sending this email to Copyright Abuse at Yahoo, I've gotten no response whatsoever. I know Yahoo's a big place, buy my only conclusion is that Yahoo wants to ignore the problem or actually endorses Software Piracy:

Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 03:24:28 -0800 (PST)
From: "Russell Beattie"
Subject: Yahoo Groups Pirates
To: copyright@yahoo-inc.com

Hi,

I'm a little annoyed at the amount of pirated Symbian application files that are available right now via several Yahoo Groups. I'm sure this is against some sort of TOS at Yahoo, and I'm hoping this is the place to report this abuse.

The worst group is 7650-soft which is dedicated to pirated applications, cracks, etc. and has a variety of pirated apps in the Files section of the group. Also Nokia7650 and Nokia7650UK also both have files as well.

I hope you do something about this, as the abuse is pretty rampant.

Thanks,

-Russell Beattie

Now before anyone gets on me about being self-righteous or puritanical. I have NO problems at all stealing from Microsoft or even Adobe or copying most MP3s, because for the most part these companies are huge - especially the $40 Billion Borg - and get most of their money from corporations. But if you check out some of the Symbian sites like All About Symbian you'll see that the vast majority of developers for the Symbian OS right now are small developers in various small countries like the Czech Republic or Thailand. The fact that Yahoo is just allowing all these cracked files to sit on their servers is just killing the independant Symbian developers. It's really taking money out of their pockets and more akin to stealing than any other type of software copying I've ever seen.

I've talked about Piracy on Symbian before, but just as a recap check out this thread at AAS on the subject. You can see some of the problems trying to protect your code. Since these apps are usually a few hundred k in size, it doesn't take someone too long with a hex editor to find the places to change the code to get it working without serial numbers or other protections.

The really, really sad thing is how many jerks are arriving at my site looking for "cracks" for Symbian software on Google. Check out my referrers page and see for yourself. Idiots. I'm seriously thinking about changing my pages in response to Google quieries that look for these things to just a simple rant on why they should go buy the software and support the independant developers.

-Russ