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Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

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superboyac:
And if you think things are bad now ... just wait as these new SuperPACs grow. Thank you Supreme Court, great job you did. (sarcasm)
-db90h (March 09, 2012, 07:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
God bless Stephen Colbert for bringing those to light.

IainB:
It's not a smart-alecky comment at all. tranglos was addressing the underlying logic and philosophical argument being made. You're discussing realpolitik - which we all can appreciate is often different from what the law may actually say - even when it isn't flying directly in the face of it.
...
Naive and high-flown arguments? I should say so...
But they aren't the ones being made by tranglos. :)
-40hz (March 09, 2012, 06:16 PM)
--- End quote ---
Oh, sorry, I was not intending to suggest that it was a "smart-alecky" comment. I never for a moment thought it was. It made a very good set of points. I absolutely agree with the sentiments expressed by @tranglos in that statement, and someone probably had to speak those sentiments at some stage, as a moral/ethical principle or standpoint at least.

What I was referring to was the truth of the statement in the full quote. It has three parts:

* 1. There is no one right that trumps all other rights, not the free speech, not the freedom of assembly, not even the right to life. (A general but absolute statement, probably true - certainly as a principle to be upheld in a free democracy - with inherent and commonly understood assumptions in terms of the existing laws of the land.)
* 2. So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions? (A question as to why the converse/contradiction of the 1st statement could be true in the single case of property and copyright.)
* 3. When put like this, the position is untenable. (Therefore, the converse/contradiction of the 1st statement could not be tenable or true by implication.)-tranglos (March 09, 2012, 02:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
There is the important third part of the statement, which refers to and follows on from the first and second:
When put like this, the position is untenable.
-tranglos (March 09, 2012, 02:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
You see, clearly it is tenable - or at least it seems to be in practice - because this "untenable" situation has become and/or is still becoming enshrined in law. I think I gave a reasonable and brief explanation to the question:
So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions?

--- End quote ---
Why? Because the people pushing for this apparent contradiction want it and can achieve it if they push hard enough and "donate" enough to lawmakers/senators (QED) to do it.
Every day probably sees yet "another brick in the wall".
If it wasn't tenable, then it wouldn't/couldn't be happening, so the 3rd statement by @tranglos is invalid.

So, it is tenable in fact - and thus it would be a kind of "magical thinking" to believe that it is not.
It is probably a safe assumption that the majority of people reading the three parts of that statement quoted would nod their heads sagely up and down in agreement (I did anyway), certain of its truth.
But if you pause to look at it skeptically and ask "Is that really true? How is it substantiated?", then you can fairly quickly establish that it probably isn't true - though we would perhaps all like it to be.

How did it get to be so? By lawmakers and elected representatives being lobbied/"persuaded" by a powerful minority group to structure/restructure laws that enable the thing to be tenable (legal), even though the lawmakers/reps. would have probably understood full well that it went against the wishes and/or the best interests of the majority of the people (Joe Public) in the "free and democratic" system.
In such a system as this, of course, the wishes and/or the best interests of the majority of the people in this matter would seem to matter not one jot, and to have been pushed up where the sun don't shine.

nosh:
@db, it is estimated around half the PCs in the world use pirated software.
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/nearly-half-the-worlds-pcs-use-pirated-software-and-think-thats-a-ok-2011097/

If that pirated software doesn't bring the PCs it's on to a halt, doesn't have any other noticeable side-effects (like guzzling bandwidth), do you believe that the people who pirate care enough about what may or may not be happening under the hood, to go out and spend hard cash for something that they're currently getting for free?  

You used that as an appeal for people to stop pirating. I don't doubt you were sincere about the facts, but IMHO, you were saying what's been said a thousand times before and hasn't worked.

db90h:
I'm not trying to stop piracy, you misunderstand. I could care less if people pirate stuff, though I would prefer they didn't. I am just stating the real risks involved. Like others, I don't even go to great lengths to protect my own software, because I know it would be defeated no matter how much effort I put into it, and I don't want to inconvenience paying users. What I do care about is not having botnets of thousands of zombie PCs controlled by an anonymous person, thus giving him or her the power to DDoS whoever he decides he or she doesn't like that day. Of course, malware may not be used for DDoS, it could be used to steal their bank info or credit card data (something that is also very common). Lately, malware even does Bitcoin mining in the background, lol. It has gotten absurd.

Also, often times when I track down bug reports, the cause ends up being malware. These are annoying wastes of my time.

I'm no anti-piracy zealot. If people want to pirate, I simply suggest they take extreme precaution and be extremely careful with who they get the stuff from.

And you aren't really suggesting that malware is OK so long as it doesn't cause any harmful side effects, are you? Nah, surely not - seeing your last reply. No FUD here, just trying to tell people to be careful.

nosh:
Fair enough, but those "risks" are not seen as such by most pirates. It doesn't matter how many times and with what intention they're pointed out. In my experience, pirates will pirate while they can. But maybe you're had some luck in converting some people?

On the flip side, you may come across as someone who's trying to spread FUD, when all you're really trying to do is raise awareness.

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