Well, it's a bit self-righteous, but it shows the difference between the old scene where cracking was a technical challenge reserved for the able, and the new sort of mass-market scene we have today.

I for one always cringe at the sight of technically illiterate friends who keep up with bad sitcoms through uTorrent without knowing how the file system (even the high-level abstraction of it) works.

When we debate IP law, hackers (rightly) accuse the establishment of not knowing the technological reality of the laws they push. Judges and media corporations legislate based on poorly construed metaphors of theft and ownership. But the majority of today's file sharers have no idea what they are doing---they live in the same world as the establishment. It doesn't hurt to remember this.

> I for one always cringe at the sight of technically illiterate friends who keep up with bad sitcoms through uTorrent without knowing how the file system (even the high-level abstraction of it) works.

Most embedded and driver programmers could say exactly the same thing about most application and web programmers.

There's not much difference between skilled software crackers providing free games to a bunch of clueless users and skilled encryption breakers/rippers/encoders providing free media to a bunch of clueless users.

The guy sounds like one of the hippies turned stock market drones. What he did in his youth was fine. What the damn kids are doing today is shit.

I am pretty sure you were commenting on the 'ethical' aspect but just to emphasize this: regarding the skills involved, cracking today's 'PC games' copy protections is a lot harder than ripping or encoding will ever be. The protections are constantly updated, coming with new ways of triggers and other advanced protection measures in every version, making existing tools and approaches break. It's a neverending war, crackers versus copy protections.

As far as ripping and encoding goes, there is definitely some 'skill' involved as well (especially in video ripping/encoding and ensuring the best or 'right' quality and resolution) but in a lot of cases, it is the same steps and combination of tools each time. If we're talking audio ripping, it is basically a one-click thing. You can't compare this to the amount of skills, time and hard work required for cracking.

And although today's protections are much harder than most of what crackers in the old days had to deal with, it has always been like that.

True, but the difference in difficulty level doesn't grant him the right to belittle today's forms of copyright infringement.

I don't really think so. I would say the movie industry is fairly well established, and don't need the same kind of availability to start selling DVD players in homes... By many accounts the PC gaming industry nearly died many times in it's infancy.

However his main comparison seems to be between "cracking games takes work and is therefore alright" vs. "ripping movies doesnt", which I don't necessarily agree with.