It has noted that a few threads have been appearing regarding obtaining serials or downloads of pirated software.

It is quite simply illegal to do this, and most importantly harmful to the Pistonheads site to be involved with any piracy. FAST and BSA take a very dim view of organisations that do not do everything in their power to ensure that piracy does not occur or is encouraged.

I refer you to the "Rules of Posting" that each one of you see every time you post (on the left of the preview screen) and the following rule:

Rule 2 (ii)
That encourages, incites, solicits, promotes, or provides information about illegal or criminal activities (including pornography, terrorism, explosives, weapons, drugs, programming viruses, computer hacking and copyright infringement)

It may be worth having a read of the entire rules just to refresh your memories: www.pistonheads.com/gassing/rules.htm

So, in short, don't do it - if you have to, do it via PM - that way its on your head.

Cheers

Neil

Personally I am very much against pirating software.

I do however often recommend software that is free, please note that this software is under the GNU public license or the BSD license and is free to use and free to copy.

Please read this: www.gnu.org/ for full information for the GNU license.

This software includes Linux, of which includes Kubuntu, Ubuntu, RedHat, Debian, and such applications a KDE, Gnome, Fink, Gimp, OpenOfficem Koffice, Pan, VLC, Apache etc. With GNU licensed software you are protected by the license unless you contravene the terms. In this case the terms encourage copying. This is quite rare - always read the license.

Now read the Windows Vista or MS Office End User license agreement - you probably got this with your PC - or go to Microsoft.com to read it. Sometimes you can use an additional copy for personal use, sometimes not. Lots of software is restricted to one machine, one user etc - it is one way of protecting the money supply: i.e. if you like a game or the developer, thank them by buying it with money.

Additionally there is enough top quality free software around if you look - it is often not necessary to copy stuff, in general better stuff is written by people who actually want you to copy and distribute it - even down to flight simulators!! It is possible to run an organisation or home with entirely free and legal software, just like Ernie Ball.

Have to admit the last two things I downloaded from tortuga were actually... *gulp* legal. Mechcommander Gold and Mechcommander 2, both have been released free of charge/copyleft, you can even get the source for MC2 from MS.

The case I remember was an FTP server being harassed because the bot they used saw 'office' in the filename and issued a C&D/violation. The full filename was as you say openoffice-<version number>.rpm (it wasn't even a Windows version).

Amusingly or not, the legal firms solution to the problems was to advise them to stop distributing OO.o rather than reprogram the bot.

"Yaaaaar!"