The law is wrong, as are the makers of it. «Criminal Copyright Infringement» is as flawed as filing «file sharing» under «criminal act».

Killing someone is a crime.

Sharing is not.

The law has been settled to criminalize file sharing under the term «copyright infringement». Using that as an argument is flawed from the ground up.

And as for «profiting from the work of others», I leave you with the question: should one pay the manufacturer of his screwdriver/hammer/lawnmower each time they’re used to make something useful to others?

Wrong analogy? But the copyright infringement law that you raised is all based on that very same, wrong analogy.

I happen to license most of the software I write under BSD-style licenses, but I fully support the rights of others to license their works as they see fit. I am also greatly in favor of both civil and criminal penalties for illegally profiting from the works of others.

I would not be surprised if there is some information we are generally not privy to (for somewhat obvious reasons) that would basically tell us that the FBI and other organisations are in general 50/50 or better in favour of public interest vs private interests. Regardless, crimes reported have to treated in a somewhat fair process regardless of who they involve. This is beneficial because it means Joe Richbanker is not supposed to get preferential treatment over Joe Shmoe. Whether or not this actually happens is probably debatable and should continually be investigated.

It surprises me that people go to great lengths to keep pirating when the apps only cost a few dollars (the most I’ve paid is $9.99 for an Apple one, $4.99 for a GTA game which is like incredibly reasonable considering the quality of those games). The updates situation is exactly the same on iOS (and makes using pirated software risky as always). When you have a pirated app you cannot update it because the store cannot verify you purchased it (IMO this is fine). So instead you have to wait for a person to dump the latest version of said app. Apple could honestly do a lot of things here to remedy the situation but they figure that piracy is low on iOS in particular because it *requires* jailbreaking and the amount of jailbreakers is insignificant compared to non-jailbreakers. The jailbreaking community as a whole is vehemently opposed to piracy of any kind. Tools like Clutch (which I have contributed to) and AppSync are put forward strictly for reverse engineering purposes and nothing else.

Honestly for right now I cannot think of a mobile app that would cost more than $15 that would be worth it. There is a $1000 law school app in the app store IIRC but that is kind of a normal-looking thing; it is just now digital. Maybe an iPad/tablet game, but right now the platforms are still too limited as a whole to justify charging more than $15. It has to be *extremely* good.

It is still an open question (with real implications economically speaking) of what to do with said people. They are often mentally ill (this is often brought-on by being homeless and not getting care) and they get into a mindset of ‘world is against me’. Some outright refuse real help on (food, healthcare albeit limited) on that idea.