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I'm not kiba, but I share those sentiments. Nevertheless, I do pay for things in some cases. I paid for OS X, for example. Long ago, I paid for copies of SuS
by randallsquared 18y ago
I'm not kiba, but I share those sentiments. Nevertheless, I do pay for things in some cases. I paid for OS X, for example. Long ago, I paid for copies of SuSE and RedHat.
The principle that sharing is not theft is much deeper and more important than whether I downloaded from iTunes or thepiratebay. If we don't get past this, the future will be mostly reinvention of the past, in the manner of GNU reimplementing Unix.
We need to move to a culture where content creators understand that it's up to them to charge for content directly, and that they cannot control what people do with that content once they've sold it.
- pj 18y agoIt's not sharing. It's stealing. If the users of BitTorrent created products of equal value to the products they steal with BitTorrent, then perhaps it may be considered sharing, however, the vast majority of BitTorrent users create nothing and consume everything. That is not sharing. That is stealing. Consumers should reward producers for production. Any other system is doomed to failure and BitTorrent creates those in any market for digital products. It's really super simple. The fact that this community would down vote me for expressing such logic is all the more reason to believe that "hackers" need not be rational.
- kiba 18y agoTheft is the depriviation of men's property, not of potential profit. The copying and digital distribution of work cannot qualified as stealing because there is no property being stolen. Nobody is depriving anyone of their ability to watch, copy, sell, and modify these movies. This is very simple logic. The fact that you wish to deflate these actions of copying and distribution with stealing is disingenuous.
- pj 18y agoCall it whatever you want. If you copy and distribute things that look exactly like U.S. currency, would that be rationally justified in your world?
- randallsquared 18y agoYes, but a currency system based on intrinsic value would solve that problem, and have other beneficial effects as well, such as curbing runaway inflation (well, except that that's really the same problem, just official instead of unofficial counterfeiting).
- kiba 18y agoYou are talking about messing up a tool that is used to perform economic calculation. Intentionally introducing calculation chaos into the economic system is a far different issue from who should have the right to copy, modify, and distribute digital goods. It is obvious I would condemn counterfeiting as abusing the monetary system.
- rms 18y agoIt has been established so many times on this board that copyright infringement is NOT stealing that I would recommend against even bothering to have this argument. You're right, the other argument is disingenuous.