A new front has opened in the digital age’s war on copyright infringement. Israeli Internet surfers–used to uploading video clips of local musicians onto YouTube–discovered a few weeks ago that Unicell, a company which represents the digital rights of, among others, Sarit Hadad, Regev Hod, Koby Peretz and Lior Narkis, had closed their user accounts on the site, claiming copyright abuse.

This story is just one example of legal wranglings over the ambiguities surrounding music copyright on the Internet. The gap between performers and their fans is widening and deepening in the digital age: private users, who do not make commercial use of the content they upload, many times violate copyright law without even knowing it.

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It’s a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content. Sure, it sounds bad and Ars complains about it all the time, but come on—do anticircumvention laws really prevent real people in the real world from doing real things with their content?

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Meet Mark, an IT guy at a small company who occasionally has to renew licenses for the software utilized by the business. Recently, he had to activate a copy of PaperPort, the scanning and document management software from Nuance. In order to free up another activation slot, he had to uninstall the old one first while being online. Like most activation-licensed software, this doesn’t always work properly.

To resolve the issue Mark contacted Nuance’s support. To his surprise however, they didn’t want to help him straight away, instead asking him to take pictures of the CD in order to prove that the company owned a legitimate copy.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Mark told TorrentFreak. “After arguing with support for a while on how ridiculous it was, I still had to have the license within the day. To make a long story short I finally got them to unlock 2 licenses after 2 days of repeated calls and sending the picture of the CD multiple times.”

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Whether PC gaming is dying or not, one thing is certain: Piracy of PC games is a serious talking point for developers on either side of the debate. A growing number of developers big and small have become increasingly vocal about piracy rates for PC games. One developer, though, has finally put aside the complaints, the indignant state of mind, and is asking the pirates directly a simple question: Why?

Cliff Harris, an independent game developer with Positech Games, has put out a call to pirates asking for an explanation. Not seeking to turn around and refute the pirates’ reasons or to simply oust the pirates and turn them over to the authorities, Harris is earnestly sincere about learning what drives pirates to steal his games. Harris is asking for pirates to send him emails detailing the reasons why they are pirating games.

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