Difference between "legal" crack and illegal crack?

[Joe Forster/STA]

(Thread moved to the GCW Support forum; hopefully, it's the least off-topic here.)

@DABhand: Yes, if a country's law explicitly states that you may make one backup of your legally purchased software (such as in Hungary) then you CAN make one, no matter what the publisher said. If they try to kick your ass for it, Hungarian laws will protect you: they shouldn't have sold the software with such a license in the first place anyway.

Why was mp3search.ru - a site that carried millions of MP3's first for limited but free download and later for download at extremely low prices - such a pain in the RIAA's and MPAA's and whomever's ass? Because it was legal in Russia! Those American idiots probably blackmailed the Russian government (an embargo here, a veto there) and this is how they managed to get that site closed. (Of course, it's working again, with a different name and a slightly different policy so never mind... )

There's something about the GNU Public License that came to my mind but I don't remember it well for a quote...

By the way, your misunderstanding probably comes from the fact that you only know countries where laws are quite similar to those in your country. If there was a truly communist country where there were, by the law, no patents, no copyright, and actually NO PROPERTY then it would be obvious to you, the seller of some product, that your product would be "stolen" - which word already sounds strange in a country where there's no property, right?! - at the very moment you sold it to someone living in that country: your software would be copied in infinite amounts and your "physical object" products would be disassembled and replicated as needed. (Does that sound familiar? In the cold war era, Russians copied everything from the Western countries they managed to get their hands on. Which is why the so-called "CoCom list" was made: a product export embargo from Western countries to the Soviet bloc. The same is going on in China right now... Hehe, both are/were "accidentally" the two greatest bastions of communism.) To avoid this, you (or, most probably, your government) would have to sit down with people (not the government! there's no government in communism!) living in that country and make a compromise: they have to obey YOUR laws in THEIR country. Now, doesn't that sound weird to you?!

But, as a better example, there's a very obvious cultural clash between the so-called Western and Eastern civilization. Because of the behavior of the USA - not only military but also cultural -, Iraq publically announced that they don't give a shit about the copyright of American software (or any American product? don't remember) and are going to "pirate" them without end. As a counterattack, if I'm not mistaken, Iraq is now on the USA's software export embargo list: you sell software from the USA to Iraq and the FBI/CIA will fuck you in a second. As Iraq's own laws have priority over the contract between any individuals/companies if at least one of them is Iraqi, this was admittedly the only thing the USA could do about this problem...