BSA spreads anti-piracy propaganda in Stellenbosch.

It saddens me that the words “piracy” and “pirates” are more commonly used to refer to copyright violation than to plundering seafarers these days (If only people focused so vehemently on the criminals raping our coasts as on virtual theft). The first sign that somebody has no clue about bootlegging software and what it entails, is when they start raving about the “evil internet pirates”, “virus infected counterfeits” and “piracy induced hardware damage”.

First of all, let me say that I am dead set against using unlicensed proprietary software and believe it is illegal. Most game and application developers spend years pouring sweat and blood into their creations, and if they demand compensation, they damn well deserve it. However, organizations like BSA and RISA(holy crap their website looks horrible) is to piracy what Lord Cutler Beckett is to Pirates of the Caribean, or in other words: self-righteous fear mongers who don’t give a damn about the consumer they are trying to “protect” from illegal software. The BSA’s only concern lies with its multi-billion dollar sponsors like Microsoft.

Anyway, that is enough of a rant for now. You can read about the bogus piracy statistics the BSA spreads here, here, here, here, here and here.

The BSA’s big, white van, with its scary satellite dish was spotted in the Stellenbosch Student Centre’s parking lot recently. There was a bunch of previously disadvantaged kids walking around in anti-piracy t-shirts (I fail to see how the BSA concerns these poor kids who can’t even afford computers, let alone R2750 copies of Vista.). And some students thought it would be funny to stick pro-piracy propaganda on their van. My friend sent me the following picture, sorry about the terrible quality.

Apparently they stuck posters with the highly controversial cracked AACS key “09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0″ (not that it has anything to do with the BSA ) , “Microsoft is a pirate”, “The pirate bay” and other random images on the truck before the BSA kids returned and gaped at the pictures in confusion.