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> property theft is wrong. It sure is, and those people should promptly return their stolen Photoshop bits to the front door of any local fire station so Adobe

> property theft is wrong. It sure is, and those people should promptly return their stolen Photoshop bits to the front door of any local fire station so Adobe can put them back into their bit warehouse and ship them to paying customers next day air

23B1 2y ago
It's about character as much as it is about value.
akoboldfrying 2y ago
It's not property theft by most definitions, but it's still harmful in much the same way as property theft is harmful -- and in exactly the same way that me watching you type in your password is harmful, even though afterwards you still know your own password.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  One of our two mental models of property theft is incorrect: someone downloading Photoshop does not deprive Adobe of its ability to sell the Photoshop it manufactured to someone else And I adamantly disagree with your password analogy if for no other reason than your password scenario creates temporal harm (assuming I do not change my password, of course) in a way that someone pirating version 1.0 does not automatically give them access to 1.1 or other product lines. In fact, I'll see your temporal factor and raise you: if someone pirates a product on Monday, and then buys the product on Tuesday, should they be jailed on Wednesday? I'm eventually going to be sorry that I waded into this discussion, but I found the stolen bits == property theft so absurd I wanted to mock it, and now it seems this thread is somehow doubling down on false equivalences. Piracy can be morally wrong for taking food out of software engineer's mouths, but one should not lump it into breaking-and-entering just to ratchet up the "look at how bad it is" factor
  - 23B1 2y ago
    No, I think they're the same. Probably they feel different to you, depending on who you're stealing from, but ripping a DVD and putting it up on the internet during the theatrical window can really hurt filmmakers – who already make peanuts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of_the_theatrical_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of... One person breaking and entering is bad. But in my example, this person broke-and-entered and then gave all of my future earnings away to literally everyone on the planet, thanks to the multiplicative power of technology – that's an outrageous violation.

23B1 2y ago

It's about character as much as it is about value.

akoboldfrying 2y ago

It's not property theft by most definitions, but it's still harmful in much the same way as property theft is harmful -- and in exactly the same way that me watching you type in your password is harmful, even though afterwards you still know your own password.

mdaniel 2y ago
One of our two mental models of property theft is incorrect: someone downloading Photoshop does not deprive Adobe of its ability to sell the Photoshop it manufactured to someone else And I adamantly disagree with your password analogy if for no other reason than your password scenario creates temporal harm (assuming I do not change my password, of course) in a way that someone pirating version 1.0 does not automatically give them access to 1.1 or other product lines. In fact, I'll see your temporal factor and raise you: if someone pirates a product on Monday, and then buys the product on Tuesday, should they be jailed on Wednesday? I'm eventually going to be sorry that I waded into this discussion, but I found the stolen bits == property theft so absurd I wanted to mock it, and now it seems this thread is somehow doubling down on false equivalences. Piracy can be morally wrong for taking food out of software engineer's mouths, but one should not lump it into breaking-and-entering just to ratchet up the "look at how bad it is" factor
- 23B1 2y ago
  No, I think they're the same. Probably they feel different to you, depending on who you're stealing from, but ripping a DVD and putting it up on the internet during the theatrical window can really hurt filmmakers – who already make peanuts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of_the_theatrical_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_distribution#Shrinking_of... One person breaking and entering is bad. But in my example, this person broke-and-entered and then gave all of my future earnings away to literally everyone on the planet, thanks to the multiplicative power of technology – that's an outrageous violation.