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Unless the creator has explictly granted you the right to copy, copying is certainly theft in the legal sense and often in the ethical sense. Whether or not yo
by statictype 16y ago
Unless the creator has explictly granted you the right to copy, copying is certainly theft in the legal sense and often in the ethical sense.
Whether or not you agree with the legality of it is irrelevant, the fact is that it's illegal for you to make copies of software that you are not authorized to copy.
Ethically, it's not fair to the people who build these apps to be deprived of the revenue they would earn from your usage of it.
They don't have a right to your money, but then, you don't have a right to their software either.
- blahedo 16y agoYour second, third, and fourth sentences do not support your first. Copying software without paying for it (when the author has not licensed you to do so) is arguably immoral, often unethical, and nearly always illegal... ...but the claim of the gp was that it is not "theft" as such. Copying something from someone and taking something away from someone are not the same. Drawing a definitional distinction there helps us to have a meaningful debate about the moral, ethical, and legal dimensions; the only benefit to muddying the distinction is as a rhetorical tactic to confuse the issues.
- statictype 16y agoThe law recognizes unauthorized copying as stealing of intellectual property. This is not difficult to understand.