Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by twobat 2364 days ago
People go on telling everybody about "legal" cracks because their lives are not affected.

If it meant hackers stole everything you own and worked for in your life so far you would think twice how legal this is.

1 comments

A jailbreak isn't a crack, and the idea that it's a crack is ludicrous. iOS has had hundreds of jailbreaks. There's no financial incentive: it's just freeing a system.

Further, the idea that software piracy is stealing is also absurd, for an entirely different reason: copying is not stealing. Sony still had the original copies.

Beyond that: I already do release all of my source code under libre licenses. Copying isn't stealing, and I've lived my life as a testament to that.

iOS Jailbreaks are immensely valuable because they let you access the user’s data, hence why they’re literally sold for millions these days.
Stealing is taking someone else's property without due permission. That applies to intellectual property, it doesn't have to be physical.

Now you can use the stupid libertarian argument that you're just "moving bits around" or "moving numbers around" (and math is not illegal). But do that do much and you'll find that society's answer is to move particles of lead in your general direction, at high velocity.

I'm not a libertarian at all, actually. Intellectual property is a reasonable idea, but it only makes sense when forced upon producers instead of consumers, and a lot of what people deem as intellectual property is in reality something that should have patents on it. Patents expire, copyright doesn't meaningfully.

Stealing is taking someone else's property without permission, as you said. However, copying doesn't take it away from them, and jailbreaking literally doesn't do anything but apply a patch to your existing bits. That's the farthest thing from stealing you could imagine, and your argument falls apart with just the tiniest bit of poking.