4 ms·

First you have to show how shooting someone is like copying a file.

• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• jayzee 15y ago
  No. I did not imply that. I am just saying that his logic does not make sense.
  • iamdave 15y ago
    "No. I did not imply that." I think you did the minute you made that analogy.
  • mkr-hn 15y ago
    You did it with a faulty analogy. The analogy compared a permanent physical harm to an indefinite harm. Two things have to be analogous to fit an analogy.
    • the-cakeboss 15y ago
      The argument he was responding to was unsound. The parent comment attempted to refute the claim that piracy is a legitimate problem by pointing out the ease at which it is done. Jayzee's analogy was never meant to compare shooting someone with sharing a song in terms of severity. Rather, it was demonstrating how flawed that line of thinking is.
      • nitrogen 15y ago
        The line of thinking isn't necessarily flawed. Digital copying is fundamentally different from any act that can be performed in the physical world, and no combination of analogies can ever do justice to that fact. Some of us who grew up in the digital world, and consider ourselves "citizens" thereof, want to see it allowed to develop independently of the arbitrary restrictions of the physical and political world. Regardless of the fact that servers and networks exist in physical locations, the actual subjective experience of using the Internet is like being in another place entirely, where those physical locations and borders cease to exist entirely.
• andylei 15y ago
  actually, you're looking at the wrong parts of the analogy. he's comparing guns to copying files and online piracy to murder. but i'll take the bait and show why online piracy is like shooting someone. first: they are both "unavoidable side-effect[s] of having easy and cheap" <something>. second: they both might be bad. shooting someone could be good (maybe that person is trying to blow up a school). it could be bad (maybe the person being shot is just a random person off the street). online piracy might be good (maybe it encourages freedom or exposes government corruption or something). copying a file might be bad (maybe you sharing this movie with all of your friends makes it impossible for the indie director to make further more movies). of course, you're also totally missing the point: just because something is unavoidable doesn't mean you shouldn't write laws to mitigate it. murder is unavoidable side-effect of human impulses. we should write a law saying murder is illegal. i actually don't think we should pass draconian laws to deal with online piracy, but that doesn't make the argument valid. if something is bad, we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.
  • rbanffy 15y ago
    > we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods. Wake me up when such methods exist. Right now they don't and politicians who represent a small group of copyright owners instead of a much larger contingent of content consumers are proposing bad laws to protect those who feed them. The analogy also breaks because murder or theft deprive someone of something (in the case of murder, something irreplaceable) while content piracy only deprives content owners of a sale they most likely would never make.