Comparing Software With Guns

Guns are legal in many different forms depending on where you live. Guns can be used both in legal and illegal ways. If I choose to use a gun to go hunting, it’s considered legal. Obviously if I choose to shoot somebody with a gun, it is illegal. So I as a person would be responsible for the illegal use of the weapon. Would the police blame the maker of the weapon for this murder? Would they be knocking on the doors of Smith & Wesson and tell them “Your gun kills people! You are to blame!”? No they would not.

Now, let’s say you made a DVD of your family and you found a way to use encryption on the disc. Years go by and you decide that you want to make another copy. So you decide to get some DVD burning software that can decrypt the disc so that you can burn another DVD. You would be using the software in a purely legal way. It’s your intellectual property and you simply want a backup. Well, good luck, because in the eyes of many judges, the software you would use to accomplish this is illegal.

I really don’t see the logic being applied to these cases. It’s how the software is used, not the software itself that is to blame! The person using it illegally should be the one prosecuted, not the software company. What’s next? Will we start bringing Google to the courtroom because it helps people find and download movies or music illegally? Right now I can use Microsoft software to copy some DVD’s. Will Microsoft be put on trial for that?

If there is a possible legal reason for a particular applications’ existence, it simply shouldn’t be considered illegal. Who knows, 100 years from now when DVD copies of Gigli are extremely rare and in high demand, movie studios may want to use DVD decrypting software to recover and redistribute the movie in a new format. Maybe that’s what these software companies need to start doing. Just advertise that the product is made for movie studios that wish to decrypt their own stuff. Or perhaps it would be easier to make guns.