Alastair’s Place

Software development, Cocoa, Objective-C, life. Stuff like that.

Mike Gibson, You Should Be Ashamed!

OK, so I found this little gem:

REQ: iPartition 3

Yes, that’s right, someone is looking for a pirated copy of one of our products, in this case iPartition 3.

Only in this case, this someone is Mike Gibson. How do I know? Well, easy really; look at this Dave Matthews Band “fansite”, or on the gibsonweb.net wiki where it helpfully links to Mike’s blog. Yes, Mike is EmptyG and EmptyG is Mike; check out the ICQ and AIM addresses if you don’t believe me.1

Software isn’t the only thing Mike is happy to pirate, either; there’s a copy of David Pogue’s book iPhone: The Missing Manual on Gibson’s iPhone page (there’s no link to it because you should buy it if you want a copy; what you shouldn’t do is download it from Mike Gibson’s website).

And just in case anyone doubts Mike Gibson’s pirate credentials, he’s probably also got himself an illegal copy of VMWare Fusion2 (if the site I found the original post on is to be believed, where he was thanking someone for posting a link to a copy on a file-sharing site). And he recommends two other Mac-specific piracy forums, again on the same site. I’m not going to be specific about those because I don’t care to advertise them. Finally, you’ll note from the above that Mike has made 3,608 posts on the piracy board I took that screenshot from.

So if you’re wondering what a software pirate looks like, here he is, with girlfriend Dana (who I’m sure had nothing to do with any of this). If you live near Encinitas, CA, near San Diego, you might even see Mike on the street.

And Mike, if you’re reading this and wishing you had been more discreet3, you’ve missed the point entirely. You shouldn’t be trying to get hold of illegal copies of other peoples’ hard work in the first place. If you want a copy of iPartition 3, you can buy one like everyone else.

As it is, I’d say you’re hoist by your own petard. You should be ashamed.

1 You may feel I’m being a little unfair singling out one individual here. Perhaps that’s true, but my purpose here is really to make software pirates realise that they don’t have total anonymity on the Internet. Nor do I think that this in any way violates anyone’s privacy. All of the information here is publicly available, and it’s that way because Mike Gibson made it that way. 2 It’s impossible to be certain, without access to his machine, or to the logs of the file-hosting site’s servers. And he’ll probably delete it when he sees this. I have copies of all of the pages from the piracy sites, of course, so modifying those pages would be rather pointless. 3 The fact that Mike wasn’t more discreet is a simple reflection of the fact that people feel untouchable on the Internet. They know that there is no effective copyright enforcement, for the simple reason that there is no practical legal method by which it could be achieved.