This is true; I agree completely.

I'm actually a little amused this happened. Haha, because I said their women are ugly! Come on. How could that be true? Not ALL of them. Just most.

You actually can put kids who steal in detention centers with other delinquent kids. You can put them in with adults if they do something horrible enough. Myself, I'd rather they had to join the marines. I personally watched a girl go to jail for stealing a t-shirt from a retail store. It was a happy time for me.

You might be able to piss farther than me. Who knows? You'd have to arc it or something though. Can you do a handstand?

I understand why you'd rather have inhabitable winter year round. People in Maine love it.

Why do you ask me about my health? I don't even get that one. Is it because our health care system isn't socialized? That's the way I like it. Much like the situation with piracy, socialized medicine reduces the incentive for doctors to do a good job. I value that incentive. Good luck getting a doctor to perform a surgery any time soon. But I'll buy your medicine. That's a good deal .

My beef with calling piracy "theft" is the fact that while it may be immoral and potentially harmful to the owner of the IP, it's far too different from physical theft to be directly comparable. Physical theft is very straight forward; you take something from someone, they no longer have it and you do. But if you pirate, say a movie, what exactly has the pirate "stolen"?

The main issue for me when it comes to calling downloading of media theft is the fact that there are multiple LEGAL ways for a person to enjoy the very same product without paying a single dime for it. Take a movie, for instance:

I could watch it over at a mate's place. This copy may or may not be legally acquired, but practically (not morally) this makes no difference as I (not my mate) still get the movie experience while the producer gets no additional payment from my enjoyment. I could have pirated it instead, and the same result would happen. I get experience, the producer gets nothing. One is legal, the other is not, but the result is exactly the same. There is no equivalent scenario in physical theft, so the comparison is in my opinion flawed.

I could watch it on TV either at home or at a friend's place. You could argue that the TV channel has paid for the rights to broadcast the movie, so no loss is involved and the IP owner is compensated. But it makes no practical difference for the producer if I watch the movie or not, there is no difference in income either way. If I download a movie that has been broadcast on my TV, am I still a thief?

Keeping in mind that I can get the experience for free legally, I'd argue that downloading media isn't "stealing" the experience it offers, but the ability to freely access it as you wish.

And this is where my major beef with today's increasing amount of draconic DRM comes in, be it in games, movies or music. The producers try to limit the access to a product, the very thing that I, in my opinion, was paying for in the first place. Not the experience, because that I could potentially get for free legally by visiting someone with this product. I'm paying for being able to access this product at will, and suddenly they want to restrict access to when I'm connected online, to when I'm at the "correct" PC (the definition of which apparently changes at the slightest provocation when I upgrade a part in my PC or the installation gets borked), etc etc. Is it any wonder that many choose not to pay for an inferior product (restricted access with DRM) when the pirates offer unlimited access for free?

Piracy is a problem. How big a problem and the actual loss caused by it (aka people who would have bought legally if piracy was not possible) is unknown, and in my opinion blown out of proportions, and most likely less than the amount of money that has globally been spent trying to stop it, both in direct expenses and loss of sales due to intrusive DRM/lawsuits chasing away actual customers.

Seriously, drop intrusive DRM, you're not primarily selling an experience, you're selling access. Don't try to sell a product inferior to the "free" version, and start to make being a paying customer better than being a pirate. When you can offer superior access and service over what pirates can offer, that's when you'll truly curb the piracy that matters to you; the lost sales. Stopping pirates who have no means of purchasing your product legally might make you feel good about yourself, but it's a royal waste of time and money.

Ah well, now I'm just ranting. For the record, yes piracy is wrong. Piracy is not theft, it's piracy. You've lost nothing, but you've gained nothing either. It's like watching a soccer match through binoculars on a hill above the football stadium instead of paying for a ticket. I guess we should position snipers on the hills now to deal with the filthy thieves. Because that's what this measure feels like. Downloaded an MP3? That's 1 year in prison and a $200,000 fine for you, kid. Good thing we were here to stop your destruction of the livelihood of working men and women.

Exaggerated slightly for dramatic effect, of course. But yeah, monitoring the net traffic of billions of people in order to stop a (most likely) small amount of lost sales, yeah, that's kinda overkill in my opinion.

Who the hell thinks these kids have the billions of dollars between them to spend on legal copies of the 5000 MP3s they've downloaded last month anyway?

This is why I find it more similar to a kind of virtual tresspassing rather than theivery.

The Problem is that you have actually successfully defined the *difference*, in economic terms between piracy and stealing.

Because Customer Number 2 has *three* option - he can buy it, he can pirate it from the 'net, . . . or he can steal (shoplift) it . . .

Now - if he buys it, then customer number three has nothing to buy. If he *steals* it, then customer # three has nothing to buy *and* the store and publisher get no money for it.

If he *pirates* it, then Customer # three gets to buy his copy - and the publisher gets the exact amount of money they would have gotten if customer # two had bought it in the first place.

And that (while vastly simplified) highlights the difference between Piracy and Theft. You can't sell me the merchandise someone stole from you. You *can* still sell me the merchandise someone pirated from you. It's not a minor distinction - in economic terms, it's all the difference in the world.

Among other things, it means I still get to *buy* my copy of Galactic Civilizations II, and two expansion packs, no matter *how* many copies were pirated.

Pirate one copy or a billion copies, the market for *honest* buyers, goes down exactly 0%.

Jonnan

Ah! Well explained - I get your point there now
What about the other example, though? Granted that it's just as overly simplified as the first, if we assume infinite supply (as opposed to extremely limited supply, as in the first example), then shoplifting and pirating come to the same thing, right? I know that's not how it works, but could one say that piracy is theft at least in spirit i.e. the taking of something without due payment? (My position, to restate it, is that even if piracy isn't theft, then it is, morally - not necessarily legally - as bad as theft)

I'm inclined to agree with this.

However, if someone walks into BestBuy and snatches a copy of Windows Vista off the shelf and walks out, that is theft. But if they download it off the net, it's piracy. What's the difference?

So, are anti-piracy laws wrong, or will your no doubt righteous rage convince the authorities otherwise?

I also exceed the speed limit 90% of the time too, and my only justification for that is that I'm too god damn impatient to drive 45 mph.

And some of the bufoons around here would have you believe that somehow, piracy is worse than speeding.

I wonder how many people die needlessly each year just because people speed? You are right. No worse. But it's probably no better. I, for one, don't speed more than 5 mph over.

How about the virtual good known as money - it has no 'true' value in its cotton fibres. If I were to borrow a $100.00 bill and create a perfect counterfeit then return your bill, it doesn't cost you a thing, yet I recieve the full benefit of the bill. Now lets say I couldn't obtain the bill legitmately anyway, so everything should be cool...er...right?

I think the real problem is being missed.   Copyright/intellectual property laws are the problem the are out of control and need to be changed.  There is some merit to some of the laws but even most of those are taken way to far.

What if you were banned from the internet for the cracks, which are technically illegal in the US?

That said, I believe this law is completely unenforceable, especially in Europe, where they're more concerned about "hate speech" then Muslims beating defenseless women.

(sorry if some of my disdain for European government is showing, but I think it's well-deserved)