Jeff's Junk

You have to expect people to correct you when you say something that is wrong like "downloading [xxx] is like stealing [yyy]".

Running a redlight != speeding.
Copyright infingement != theft.
Making a photocopy of a magazine != stealing a magazine.

You made legal claims that were false. The crimes committed are not the same in America [and many other countries] nor would they be prosecuted the same in America [and many other countries].

I do not know where you are from. You say there is no difference there, but I am not familiar with your laws, so I'm not saying you're wrong about your legal system, just that in many countries, what you said is very wrong.

And your claim that people who download the game would have bought it is wrong (I know at least 1 person who proves this rule and surely you know someone who has downloaded a Britney Spears song but would never think to consider buying it). Your claim that nobody who downloaded the game will also buy it is wrong (I know of a least one person who proves this rule, MANY Europeans who preordered the game are downloading it due to the 10-day wait they are currently enduring).

Your moral claims may be completely correct but many (most?) of your factual analysis is incorrect and, if you care about the true at all, you should welcome those who correct you (and correct those who are wrong with facts, not incorrect statements).

Well, here's one thing to consider. I never would be the professional designer/developer I am today if I didn't use 'extended evaluations' of Photoshop, ColdFusion server, and various other softwares over the years, including VisualStudio.NET, SQL Server and other such high-end Microsoft products. I now own my own MSDN Universal subscription, but I never would've gotten into the position to be able to do such things w/o borrowing a few programs from work and the Internet over the years.

I'd go as far as to say that for designer and developer applications, hobbyist 'warez' is very good for their business. Microsoft recognizes that and is presenting the Express line or products to make it easier, and legal, for that particular market. Other companies really should take notice.

Now, games and what not... no such benefit to the company.

Zk: you should do a poll and see if pirated games lead to game purchases. In my experience (not as a pirate, I own/play/download no games but my friends do), pirated copies are closer to Express versions than your pirated Photoshop copies. the PS copies are 100%, pirated video games rarely work online and are thus the 'sample' that get people hooked and cause them to buy Halo to play online instead of by themselves.

The Record industry, near the end of the cassette tape era, estimated that 1/4 of their sales were due to people who had casette copies and wanted the real thing, a far cry from the "home taping is killing the industry" cries that dominated the 80's (and continue today in new forms).

There is some truth to that. Especially, as you pointed out, in online gaming. Usually something that can be taken care of with a good CD-Key generator. (Except in the case of MMOGs. In that case, piracy is rarely even an option.)

And while warez usage of Photoshop might not always turn into a direct sale from that particular person, it does mean there's a lot of people using it and making it that much more likely to be used by a company they work for. (And companies are *usually* better about buying their software. If not.. you can always snitch. *rolls eyes*) These applications are often seeing a benefit from (individual) warez, whether they recognize it or not.

"Your moral claims may be completely correct but many (most?) of your factual analysis is incorrect and, if you care about the true at all, you should welcome those who correct you (and correct those who are wrong with facts, not incorrect statements). "


What is the point of having laws if they allow people to get away with morally corrupt acts by splitting legal hairs? Theft != copyright infringement maybe true but few people believe that their legal system hasn't let somebody down at some point. Why can't people stop hiding behind legal semantics and take a step back and say "is what I am doing right or wrong?"

"What is the point of having laws if they allow people to get away with morally corrupt acts by splitting legal hairs? Theft != copyright infringement maybe true but few people believe that their legal system hasn't let somebody down at some point. Why can't people stop hiding behind legal semantics and take a step back and say "is what I am doing right or wrong?""
... because then it's not clear what everybody's talking about. Realize that people participating in this 'discusion' are not from the same country, and it might come as a shocker, but the US laws are not the laws of a lot of other countries (and vice versa).

The whole refusal to just use the right semantics makes this whole 'debate' a weird way of venting some steam as it seems.

Oh, and what's morally right is NEVER a guideline for what is LEGALLY right. What americans find 'morally right' is not in sync with a lot of other countries and vice versa.

As I said before: Piracy, or better: copyright infrigment, is bad. However if you don't have the decency to call it copyright infrigment, what is 'piracy' then? copying a dics? copying a file? running a program? sharing a file over the network? oh, all of these? What if I embed a piece of GPL-ed code in my application without saying I did. That's also copyright infrigment, and of the same kind as running a copy of Doom without a license. If you think it isn't, you don't have a clue what piracy really is. THAT's why it is so important to define what's discussed so you can focus on how to solve it, instead of what someone finds morally right.

Frans,
I agree with you as far as the legality/morality disconnect goes and I also realize that American laws end at the border. Which is precisely why I find the whole "this is copyright infringement but not theft" to be a straw man argument.

Here is what it comes down to for me. Is somebody getting screwed out of what they expected to get when they put their creation out in the market place?

Because "right" and "wrong" have different meanings depending on the context Justin. In some places it is "right" to put mayonase on a hamburger, in most civilized places that's "wrong' however. Everyone knows that ketchup and yellow mustard go on a hamburger. ;)

Some countries handle copyright law differently than the U.S. does. So what you may consider theft may only be copyright infringement in a !U.S. country. But, even you said it yourself Jeff. When you stated the consequences for discovering someone had copied your software without paying for it you said you'd "sue them", not press charges. "Sue them". You can only sue in a civil court and you can sue for just about damn near anything. So you obviously don't consider software piracy to be illegal or you would have said "press charges". But what charges would you press? burglary? Battery? Forceable sodomy? Jaywalking? What statute applies towards software piracy?

I consider downloading a game without buying the physical media or paying for it in some manner de facto stealing. I also think I have the right to make a back up copy of the physical media my software comes on since my license to use the software is not dependant upon the physical media. In other words, if my CD-ROM breaks (like it did with my first copy of Unreal Tournament) I want to be able to instal the software from my back up copy. Same with DVD's, if someone spills acetone on my Spider Man DVD (my wife is no longer allowed to do her nails near the DVDs and I have to keep my DVDs in their cases) I should have the right to have a back up copy of my paid for copy of said movie. That's fair use. Fair use has a place in this dicussion because the same copy mechanism that allows a warez king to distribute the latest version of Doom3 allows me to make a fair use backup copy of Doom3. By getting rid of the warez kings ability to copy the game, we remove my right of fair use. That's like saying, "Well the KKK put up a website denoucing blacks and encouraging people to kill them so we better let the government take control of everything published in the U.S. on the web". Just because some people abuse their rights, doesn't mean anyone has the right to take away my rights.

I didn't pay for my copy of Windows XP Home. I got it for free for doing a useability study at MS. It cost too much so I didn't buy it. I'm not spending $500 on MS Office, so AbiWord goes on my machines at home (they're mostly Linux machines anyway). Just stating my personal position before Jeff accuses me of being a pinko commie who's out to steal music and thinks all property must be communal.

Fair Use has reared its ambiguous head again. Why does shutting down warez sites rob you of fair use? Nobody is guaranteeing you access to warez sites when you purchase a game so the expectation that they will exist isn't reasonable. And since you specifically mention that its there for legit backup purposes the argument I'm trying to make doesn't affect you.

"Because "right" and "wrong" have different meanings depending on the context Justin"

Stealing a loaf of bread to feed your family. That is case for context. Downloading Doom 3 because you don't have $55 dollars on hand doesn't have alot of wiggle room for contextual interpretation (note that I specifically state somebody has shown disregard for compensating the producer, this isn't a fair use thing.)

"What is the point of having laws if they allow people to get away with morally corrupt acts by splitting legal hairs?"
Because, at least in America, we do not punish moral infractions as crimes on a 1:1 basis.

Is lying morally wrong? Is it illegal? Should it be?
Is disobeying your mother wrong? Is it illegal? Should it be?
Is downloading a shoddy mp3 of a song I have on CD in the next room morally wrong? Is it illegal? Should it be?
Is marrying more than one woman morally wrong? Was it always? Does "morally wrong" change over time? Should it? Who decides?

Morals != laws.

If you don't want us to attack that straw man, don't set it up for us. If it's not part of your message, don't mention it. If you only want to discuss morals, don't discuss laws. If you say something that is wrong (even if off-topic), you can not say that we shouldn't correct you. And vise-versa.

For the record, I never said copyright infringement nor theft were morally nor legally okay. I was just correcting your incorrect assertions regarding them being equal.

I have no problem leaving the legal system out of the discussion altogether since it fails people so often. I whole heartedly agree that morals and laws are not the same, but everybody was zeroing in on the letter of the law that they lost site of the actual argument.

Jeff's complaint was of a moral nature and not a legal nature. People use the intersection of morals and laws as a dodge or a justification. And as far as the changing of moral standards over time goes was it ever okay to grab somebody's wallet and take a 20 out? Will it ever be okay? Actual fair use aside whats the difference?

Piracy != Theft. In ye days of old when pirates were swashbuckling dudes with parrots, piracy was theft, but its not today. We use two different words for the acts for a reason. I can't describe the difference any better than Frans' did in the response to the first post in this series (http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff/archive/2004/08/02/206421.aspx#207356)

What we're talking about is what rights to do have to the liscensed use of the work at hand. That's what fair use is. Although shrinkwraps tend try to imply otherwise, all rights not specifically and explicitly reserved for the content creator are reserved for the consumer - its the root of all modern law. And even if the EULA on the shrinkwrap explicitly does pretend to reserve certain rights, the courts have historically ruled that doesn't neccesarily make it the case.

Honestly, morality doesn't play into it very much at all, because the liscensing of media is not something society has agreed on in the slightest. Media rights as we know them today are a new invention, having only been invented by Congress around 1910 to figure out how to keep musicians in business when recordable records were invented (Before that, everyone read books at libaries - its hard to imagine more public sharing than that). Media rights until about a decade ago revolved around a physical media which you could loan, trade and exchange. Digital rights are a new idea - Congress hasn't approached them yet and society at large is just now beginning to think about them at all. If you ask a dozen different people at random on the street what they think, and each of them gives you a very different answer, you can't even begin to make a decision as to what is socially moral.

Like I've said before, if we were talking about the Doom3 version for the XBox, this would be a moot topic. I don't have to buy a different copy of the game for my girlfriend so she can play it too, just like I didn't have to buy a copy of the DaVinci Code for myself either, since I could just read hers.

This isn't a moral rationalization for "stealing" - its simply an indicator that we don't know what's right or wrong in this field yet. I think most people would agree that being able to go online and download a game or a book or music from someone you don't know completely anonymously and without regard for the copyright owner is probably wrong. But that's on a macro uncontrolled distribution scale. I think at the same time, if you asked 10 people on the street, "Is it okay to install a game you bought on your girlfriend's computer in addition to your own", I think 9 out of 10 of those people will respond with a resounding "Yes". After all, that's what we do with everything else, so why is software any different.

Look at iTunes - you can share music you buy with something like 7 or 10 other machines, even if those machines aren't yours. Look at the new Tivo model, being able to record live tv and distribute it to up to 10 different PCs. Media companies know that sharing exists and that everyone expects it, and the businesses that excel at what they do in the digital age are the same ones that are embracing that.

Software companies obviously want people to buy 1 copy per 1 user, sometimes even multiple copies for 1 user across multiple machines. Just because that's what's fiscally best for that company doesn't mean its what's right for society, and it certainly doesn't mean its what's morally correct for society. No one today thinks that AT&T being forced to allow competitors to manufacture phones to plug into the AT&T wires was a bad decision - it created huge new booming markets that advanced technology and benefitted consumers, and increased AT&T revenue ultimately. Similarly, no one disputes that the decision that consumers could be allowed to own VCRs - in fact, the very people that sued claiming it would destroy them now sell more movie tickets than ever before, AND make an additional 120% gross profit over box office receipts on the medium they tried to destroy. Not to mention the obvious benefit for consumers.

Right and wrong doesn't really have a place in this argument yet. The social morals of tomorrow are defined by the laws of today, and the laws of today are defined by combining user rights (on both the consumer and inventor's side) with economic forecasting. Most of us are hazy on this issue now, but perhaps 20 years from now, this is the default distribution model of software. I don't know, and neither does anyone else.

"And even if the EULA on the shrinkwrap explicitly does pretend to reserve certain rights, the courts have historically ruled that doesn't neccesarily make it the case."

If that was true everybody with illegal licenses of MS products would be able to fight fines levied by the BSA.

"Honestly, morality doesn't play into it very much at all, because the liscensing of media is not something society has agreed on in the slightest."

I'm going back to the legal aspect of the argument for moment here. I hate to break it to you but just because you don't agree with the laws on hand doesn't mean society hasn't decided. This society is governed by laws, whether good or bad, so from a societal point of view it has been decided. Not to add undeserved weight to the agument but abortion is one of the most polarizing topics out there. Millions disagree at a personal level but since it is allowed (in most forms) legally it has been decided at the societal level. That is not to say that laws won't change but for the here and now it has been decided.

"Digital rights are a new idea - Congress hasn't approached them yet and society at large is just now beginning to think about them at all"

DCMA, it may suck but Congress has approached it.

"I don't have to buy a different copy of the game for my girlfriend so she can play it too, just like I didn't have to buy a copy of the DaVinci Code for myself either, since I could just read hers."

But software is unique in that you can both utilize it at the same time. The delay in use of the book is the trade off of not buying your own copy (unless you two happen to be sitting next to each other for all you nit pickers out there)

"Look at iTunes - you can share music you buy with something like 7 or 10 other machines, even if those machines aren't yours."

That is part of the contract, Apple has deemed that to be okay it doesn't have anything to do with warez.

"Media companies know that sharing exists and that everyone expects it, and the businesses that excel at what they do in the digital age are the same ones that are embracing that."

That maybe true. But that doesnt mean you can arbitrarily force sharing on company that has chosen not to embrace it. Mentioning any business benefits to sharing or advances in technology only rationalizes what a content producer has specifically rejected when they worded their EULA. Just because you say to yourself "this will be good for them in the long run" doesn't justify your actions.

"Right and wrong doesn't really have a place in this argument yet. The social morals of tomorrow are defined by the laws of today, and the laws of today are defined by combining user rights (on both the consumer and inventor's side) with economic forecasting. Most of us are hazy on this issue now, but perhaps 20 years from now, this is the default distribution model of software. I don't know, and neither does anyone else."

I myself know what theft (or whatever bullshit legal term somebody applies) is. I don't have to wait 20 years to figure out what right and wrong is. If the rest of society does then that doesnt bode well.

Jeff, all I have to say is amen brother. Preach on!

Capitalism is the greatest economic system the human race has ever discovered. But I'm just a little worried that an entire generation is growing up in complete ignorance of why or how it works. So many retards. Lets hope that age brings them wisdom someday, otherwise are society is f-----.

An yes, a quote from Ayn Rand is definitely in order...

"There was a time when men believed that 'the good' was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that may seize my property simple because they need it--well, so does any burglar. There is only one difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act."

"If that was true everybody with illegal licenses of MS products would be able to fight fines levied by the BSA."

Microsoft's shrinkwraps have held up pretty well to date, but Microsoft also has a very smart legal team that wrote those EULAs - there are plenty of other companies who have had their EULA struck down in part or backed off prosecuting abuses of their EULA because they were pretty certain they would lose.

"I hate to break it to you but just because you don't agree with the laws on hand doesn't mean society hasn't decided."

They have decided. 20 years ago. See my response to Jeff here (http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff/archive/2004/08/03/207283.aspx#207365">http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff/archive/2004/08/03/207283.aspx#207365) and here (http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff/archive/2004/08/03/207283.aspx#207365">http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff/archive/2004/08/03/207283.aspx#207365). While those cases do not specifically target digital rights, the Supreme Court hasn't changed its tune yet - not to say they won't, but until then, the law is more friendly than most software companies would like you to think.

The DCMA is Congress approaching the digital rights problem, but the DCMA does not affect copying at all - the DCMA is entirely about circumvention. Under the DCMA, its illegal to develop a technology to circumvent copy protection, but its not illegal to copy something if there is no copy protection scheme in place. By my understanding, the DCMA also only applies to technical circumvention schemes, so writing a program to generate keys to break MS software violates the law, but copying the CD key from the sleeve on someone else's box isn't. The INDUCE Act is targetting that form of copying, but it hasn't been passed yet (and God-willing, it won't ever).

I'm not condoning stealing CD keys off Usenet, I'm just saying the law hasn't approached that yet.


"But software is unique in that you can both utilize it at the same time. The delay in use of the book is the trade off of not buying your own copy (unless you two happen to be sitting next to each other for all you nit pickers out there) "

By that logic, my girlfriend can install Doom3 on her box so long as she isn't playing it at the same time I am. Software companies say even that's wrong.

The whole argument in the other thread started when I said that I'd play Doom3 for free using a friend's CDs, but I wouldn't copy the CDs. By the time-sharing argument, I'm allowed to do that (and btw, I agree I'm allowed to do that) because he can't play Doom3 while I'm using his CDs, and vice versa, but some posters thought that was piracy.

"That is part of the contract, Apple has deemed that to be okay it doesn't have anything to do with warez. "

Fair nuff, that's one company's policy and not law. But it is an indication of the priorities of consumers. Apple did a number of studies that showed that iTunes users stopped pirating music off of p2p networks, so they seem to have developed a model that keeps users honest. If consumers don't buy a model, supported by law or no, it'll fail - you just can't make a felon out of 75% of a nation's population. On a similar note, the government had to allow the law to be completely redrafted because the consumers didn't accept it.

"That maybe true. But that doesnt mean you can arbitrarily force sharing on company that has chosen not to embrace it."

Tell that to Blockbuster who forced Nintendo to accept the idea of game rentals. Legally, Nintendo couldn't stop them despite the fact that it interfered with their right to reproduction and distribution of their work. As it turned out, game rentals caused a massive surge of business in the gaming industry and made billions of dollars for lots of different parties - I think if you look back historically, at every point where fair use won out over a companies attempt to wrest control away from consumers, the resulting oppurtunities that became available caused an explosion of new business and greatly expanded the market for the original product.

Sorry, I got "Jeff" and "Justin" confused above; I thought they were the same person.

Shannon: I think you're confused... I didn't say anything about laws or that anyone would buy something that they stole. I was arguing quite the opposite. I gave no "factual analysis," only my opinion. Perhaps you should re-read the previous posts.

Scott: Can you show me where I called you names? If you can't show me, why don't you stick the the discussion?

I think Justin pretty much poked holes in everything Steve had to say, and rightly so. Mob rule doesn't justify stealing. Gas prices are too high, but if I gas-n-go, I can get to know the county jail and lose my license.

It's staggering first that some of you want to play a game of semantics, especially the nonsense that piracy isn't the same as stealing, but you can't with a good conscience tell me that it's OK for kids to download Doom and play it for free.

It is a moral issue, and if "society" didn't have a position on it, we wouldn't have laws and international treaties governing it. Because some piece of IP may be digitally duplicated perfectly does not mean you are free to do it. If you believe it does, that's exactly why we have to deal with DRM, copy protection and product activation in the first place. None of those "solutions" would exist if IP rights were respected.

Gabe,

When did consumer rights become uncapitalistic? The Telecommunications industry has exchanged somewhere near a trillion dollars since AT&T was forced to allow competitors the right to create products which attached to its network. Today the movie industry sells more movie tickets than ever before at a higher price than ever before, and despite that, the majority of their profit comes from tape and DVD sales, an invention they didn't want. Audio tapes outsold records on the order of 17 to 1, making the music industry really glad they didn't win the lawsuits allowing tape recorders.

For those EQ players out there, Sony used to make it impossible for a player to sell their character to another player. After the realized it was impossible to crack down on, they realized "Hey, these people are willing to plunk down $1000 on a pre-built character, I bet they'd pay another $40 to switch servers to get away from the people who know they aren't the real deal" - Result. Sony made an extra couple mil in a year on that policy alone (if I remember correctly, it added up to being something like 7% of their gross operating profit on the game last year), Ebay made hundreds of thousands of dollars on commisions, and several player auctions sites went from being hobbyist sites to profitable multi-million dollar enterprises just by allowing people to trade ficticious assets (I don't understand it either).

I'm not advocating making software free, although the companies that embrace that approach aren't doing too shabby for themselves right now. I'm just saying that the more rights you give consumers, the more money they spend. I think its hard to get any more capitalistic than that.

Trick question. Who do you think suffers the most from Photoshop piracy among individuals and hobbyists, Adobe or Jasc?

"By that logic, my girlfriend can install Doom3 on her box so long as she isn't playing it at the same time I am. Software companies say even that's wrong."

Again we are back to fair use which implies that a license fee was paid at some point and therefore fair use can be justified and license agreements may need to change as a result. My whole beef is content producers who see nothing when somebody grabs whatever app off the net.

"If consumers don't buy a model, supported by law or no, it'll fail - you just can't make a felon out of 75% of a nation's population. On a similar note, the government had to allow the law to be completely redrafted because the consumers didn't accept it."

Market acceptance doesn't negate laws, the market has overwhelmingly accepted alchohol sales but that doesn't make drunk driving legal.

"Tell that to Blockbuster who forced Nintendo to accept the idea of game rentals."

But Nintendo did get paid for each copy that Blockbuster acquired. They may have saw what Blockbuster was doing and been unhappy but nobody robbed them of the value they placed on those games when they put them on the market.

Shrink wrapped licenses are not valid in in the EU. Just a FYI.

"Market acceptance doesn't negate laws, the market has overwhelmingly accepted alchohol sales but that doesn't make drunk driving legal."

I agree market acceptance doesn't negate laws, but the analogy is silly. Drunk driving laws have public safety considerations in mind, the government interferes with individual rights in the name of public good insofar as safety all the time. Also, while people may like alcohol, people across the board hate drunk driving.

That said, keeping with the alcohol analogy, market acceptance forced Congress to redraft the Constitution to repeal less than 13 years after the original amendment was passed. Most texts I've read on the era have widely acknowledged that had people not been drinking alcohol anyway, Congress would not have acted so swiftly.

"But Nintendo did get paid for each copy that Blockbuster acquired. They may have saw what Blockbuster was doing and been unhappy but nobody robbed them of the value they placed on those games when they put them on the market."

Really? Nintendo was trying to sell games to people for value X. Blockbuster bought copies of the games and rented them to people for value X / 10. Players would rent a game and then not buy the original because they'd already beat it, which Nintendo contended was causing significant economic damage to their business model.

Of course, Blockbuster won, and the result was that 10x the households bought Nintendos because the cost per game played had effectively increased - this in turn spawned the production of more games which in turn increased console sales, and eventually a whole slew of serious competitors in the industry. The end result - gaming consoles are in every household (sometimes multiple), consumers have thousands of games to choose from, and the game industry grosses over 6 billion dollars in game sales per year in the US alone.

"Again we are back to fair use which implies that a license fee was paid at some point and therefore fair use can be justified and license agreements may need to change as a result."

I actually think we agree more than we disagree. We both agree downloading software off Usenet is bad. I just submit that swapping and lending of media on a small scale is fair, and based on prior historical evidense, very health for the industry.

s/effectively increased/effectively decreased

"cost per game played had effectively increased" is backwards.

One last point. A young 'hobbyist' (let's say 15-20 years old) downloading a pirated copy of something like Photoshop or VisualStudio (3D Studio, Illustrator, whatever) is actually the best investment for the companies that make that software. Typically, money isn't really being lost at that time, since the chances of them buying it at that time are very slim, but there is a very real potential of money lost in the future when they're in now programming in Java instead of C# or in a position to recommend software purchases for a company. Or, worse.. they're working at Macy's instead of being a graphic designer.

This person will have experience and knowledge with something they normally wouldn't have been able to and that translates into cash for the software companies.

Where piracy actually hurts the software companies (for apps, not games), is when people mass produce copies and sell them or when companies don't buy the licenses they're required, etc.

Like I said earlier, the only reason I'm even in a position to buy my MSDN subscription, or recommend to my company that they buy X number of licenses for ColdFusion, Photoshop, VisualStudio, is because I had access to learn that software before I was ever able to purchase it. My early piracy earned all those companies way more money than they ever lost on me not buying their software to begin with (which, is $0 lost since I would never have been able to buy any of that originally.)

Not everyone learns in college.

The problem is, software costs a lot to make, but it's value to the user is significantly less than what it costs.

So vendors try to charge what it costs to make and it's just ridiculous for consumers.

If milk vendors sold a gallon of milk for $50, people would steal milk and you know what, I'd probably think that was OK because pay $50 for milk is tantamount to theft.

Software vendors need to figure out how to not charge ridiculous amounts of money for software. Until then, people will steal.

$12-15 for a CD = bad
$200 for an OS = bad
$50 for a game = bad

Oops, I mean:

"selling milk at $50 is tantamount to theft of the consumer [bilking them unnecessarily]"

not

"milk is tantamount to theft".

I never buy software. It's free on the net (IRC). Why should I? I just keep it at home and never bring it into work. Well almost never. I only use it for educational purposes. Since I'm almost poor it's just a matter of survival for me. I have no choice but to learn my trade using software and I am not going to pay for it - no way. I live underground and always will. Never file for taxes. Never pay for software. No drivers license and no insurance. Haven't had insurance in my entire lifetime. Duhhhhh - how do you think people lived before 1900???? How could they have survived without insurance? lol Dont need that either. Since I have no assets no one thinks of suing me and wouldnt get anywhere if they did. I can skip town faster than you can say ? Where'd he go? But I am not wanted by the law - just a few bill collection agencies. I live and survive in spite of the system's weird laws. I skirt them and their cops. Haven't been caught in 30 years and intend to keep on keeping on this way forever. You really think MS is suffering because of me? I dont care. Let 'em suffer. lol Live and let live. Survive and prosper. No one leaves the planet alive so enjoy it while you can. Software or no software - who cares?

Those of you that believe that piracy is theft have it wrong. If it were truly theft then why call it piracy? It is a contention of "The Man" to keep his wallet fat. First point. You open the software no return policy. What other industry has this perk. Drive a car off the lot & cant return it..COME ON.

What about poetry. Ever read a poem to anyone. Did you send the artist a check?

With technology comes change. Was the car not the rip of a covered wagon? Good thing someone didnt patent the 4 wheels idea. No other software is hacked more than MSoft. Bill made 34 billion this year. If stealing truly has this result rip me off now please.

Having lived for twenty years as someone that was only copying the odd cassette for friends, the getting of a computer unleashed a side to me I didn't realize I had. On the one hand I feel compassion for those that put in much work, and then live with the thought that their work is being enjoyed by some that have not paid for it. On the other hand I've been a thinker most of my life, and from a philisophical point of view, I think the internet has given people a chance to start putting life's record straight.

People didn't express their natural desire to experience something without any thought of money when the internet wasn't around. They can now, and the evidence shows that they do. Stuck in the middle of this is the angry developer. But I know that life can be ruthless whilst change is occurring. The future, as far as I can see, is that we will need to rethink the whole idea of bartering/money as a way of experiencing life's pleasures.

Would it really solve anything if laws get really tough on internet piracy? Will it really make people see that they were "wrong" to download that bit of software or music? I don't think so. Laws never really capture the natural inner motivation. Those on top, and able to make laws will obviously want to profit from that situation. Now the internet is balancing out the idea that someone can invent CDs and charge a fortune for reissuing old songs, becuase something else has cvome along to offer the user an alternative, a free one.

This legal market and underworld market is not just about who gets the cake. It is also fuelled by some hard to express desire that we are here, not to struggle and have to make money before we can experience, but that Here and Now can be worked out amicably between all people, meaning we can find a system where someone won't feel left out because they cannot afford to keep up. In the larger scheme of things I do feel more compassion for the down and outs, the poor etc, than I do for upset developers.

From all this angst I think people will see the light. As has been stated, it is not the answer to hold 75% of a nation's population accountable for a law that obviously isn't in touch.

So, piracy is not the end of the road, but the energy it sometimes takes to re-shuffle a pack, whether so called crackers are aware of what they are really doing or not.

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You dare me to answer that? O.K. then, how's this for an answer;

If i want it, i'll take it, O.K.?

No i wouldn't go into a shop and steal, because i will get caught, right?

But with trackers like The Pirate Bay, its so damn easy!

£10 for a CD, or £0? Let me think about that for a minute.

I go to concerts, movies, and i buy console games.

I pay the big companies wages!

All I, and millions of other pirates are doing, is taking what is rightfully ours.

The only reason that piracy is such a big issue nowadays is because companies know that the times when they can charge extortionate prices for items that cost pennies to make are coming to an end, and I for one welcome the change, and assist in ushering it in by seeing things i want, and taking them. Great, no?!