Yea, in the end rationality will win out. How long it will take, anybodies guess of course.
Oh how I long for that…
Going Galt? what does that mean? 
The fount of this term is the philosophical novel “Atlas Shrugged” written by Ayn Rand.
Here are some write ups about this 
I don’t think that the above statement is true in many cases. Are you saying that of the hundreds of thousands of people who downloaded and watched Avatar, not a single one of them would have seen the film in the theater if there was no other way to see it?
All those users who download and pirate Photoshop - not a single one of them would buy it if it wasn’t so easy to steal?
And can you really say that all of these ‘potential’ customers are benefiting the authors/artists in some way? Most software or movie producers prefer a paying audience to a theoretical ‘potential customer’.
Your whole premise is that there is no harm, and some good coming from all of the piracy. But, if that was the case why don’t all content producers take that mentality?
Why does Sitepoint invest in trying out piracy prevention programs if what you say is true. Why doesn’t every artist give away their goods for free?
Can you really claim that only those who wouldn’t pay for something in the first place would bother to steal it? Can you say that those very same people (who would never buy the content, only steal it) are worthy potential customers?
Regardless, doesn’t the producer of the content have the choice about whether they choose to offer it for free or not? Or do you feel that you should make that choice for them?
Some software is freeware. Some shareware. Some must be paid for. The manufacturers of the software decide what is best for them, as does the consumer. That is, except in your case where you have decided that all of them should give it away for free.
With respect, I think this is a backed-in rationale, another example of the desperate need for an ethical basis for stealing.
Absolutely, Jake! I couldn’t agree more. Sagewing’s comments (on the first few pages) are bang on too.
This thread has been quite an eye-opener, I suspect, for many people - and not in a good way. I almost can’t believe what I’m reading in some of these posts.
Some of these self-serving, cynical, greedy justifications of theft, puffed up with confused political theories, dodgy legal nit-picking, unproven marketing theories and liberal helpings of whiny self-pity and envy just indicate to me the existence of a huge underclass of people with no morals, no backbones and no money. Poor people. Underachievers. People who can’t be trusted. Failures. Don’t leave your wallet lying around…
Books, films, music and software are not essential to sustain life or facilitate employment. They are luxuries. The answer to being poor is to work harder and smarter so you can afford these luxuries, not to cling like a parasite to the backs of other people. And the theory that illegal downloaders would mostly not have bought the product anyway, so the producer is not losing anything, is irrelevant.
It all comes down to morals in the end. It really does. The attitude that ‘I’m going to take it for free, because the owner can’t stop me’ is nauseating to decent, honest people.
Unfortunately, due to the scale of the problem (ie the huge number of dishonest chancers in our society), producers now have no option but to adapt and make the best of the situation, but the fact that many producers are, in a sense, giving in doesn’t justify the bogus arguments of the piracy supporters.
Paul
If nations around the world held national referendums and let the people (not the politicians) decide whether music, movies, and other works should be allowed to be copyrighted and for how long, what would happen?
I would wager that most people would vote to abolish copyright protections or at least reduce them. Instead of 70 years beyond the creator’s death, maybe only a few years.
In the United States, at least, copyrighted works eventually go into the public domain. The information is at the Wikipedia link below. When a copyright expires, would it still be theft if music or movies were freely traded without paying royalties or buying them retail? Copyright protects exist only at the will of the people.
Copyright protections for one year then into the public domain, I say. *&^% the greedy musicians, actors, and producers!
Also screw those greedy web designers, programmers, copy writers, graphic artists, and photographers. After you produce a website design, software application, a movie, a song, a photo, or an article you can keep control of it for 1 year - after that anyone who wants it can just ‘take it’. Do we really want that?
If the maximum value of a piece of work is the amount of money that you can make over a year, then we are effectively putting a limit on how much people can invest into something and make a profit. This seems like an odd approach
If it has a price, and you’re not paying for it, it’s theft.
Free is free. Not free is not free.
There’s no other reason or rationalization justifying theft. You can’t “test drive” something that wasn’t intended to be test driven. If a book has “free trial chapters”, then those chapters are meant to be test driven. Everything else outside of that offer was not meant to be test driven, and there is no reason that you can or should.
Sagewing is being polite. This is just a completely retarded comment.
I know musicians who have been working “the circuit” for years. They only make a little money from gigs and promos. They rely on sales from the cd’s and/or digital downloads to make ends meet.
Imagine your friend in that situation. Try stealing from a friend.
Now imagine a gang stealing from your friend.
Yeah. That’s exactly what you’re trying to justify.
So, the question is, is downloading a digital copy of a copyrighted work stealing?
If you go to a friends house and bring a book back home with your friends permission, did you just steal something?
If you are chatting on IM, and you friend mentions that he just read an awesome ebook that he purchased legitimately, then your friend sends that ebook to you, did you just steal?
What if you were chatting with several of your friends, and they all got the ebook as well? Was that stealing?
What if it’s a really big file, and your friend creates a torrent so that you can download it easier?
If sharing between friends is not theft only when you share a physical object, then we live in a very sad world.
Thus, if you share a digital file with friends, where is the point it suddenly becomes theft? Oh, and how do you define ‘friend’?
Too be clear, I am not supporting illegal file sharing. I just believe that sharing between friends is fine. Thus, the main question, is when does sharing between friends become theft?
Copyright infringment isn’t stealing, it isn’t theft. It’s copyright infringment. It’s illegal. But calling it something it isn’t just muddies the issue, and makes it harder for people to make reasonable judgments about it. If the record industry started saying music pirates were breaking and entering, or physically assaulting them, it would be no more true than saying they’re stealing. It’s a different crime, enforced by a different section of the criminal code.
When you steal a loaf of bread from a store, the store no longer has the loaf of bread. That’s theft. When you make a copy without the copyright owner’s permission, they can still make copies of it, they just might be deprived of some income that the state has chosen to guarantee them as a reward for making the content in the first place. Not theft.
</rant>
Rather an amusing attitude to have, throwing people into a category of right and wrong without accounting for circumstance or trying to understand the reason why they behave in such a way (and rather than just critiquing them for that behaviour, working out how to convert this “free” audience into a profitable model) is the very reason why the media industries and software companies are no closer to understanding how to best to deal with the issue which let’s not fool ourselves, occurs within a statistically significant proportion of the population. You can throw around as many self-serving opinion pieces about these people as you like but clearly the current model of serving information to the people isn’t working and criminalizing the general population and referring to them like their soulless demons isn’t constructive.
I used to work as a software developer and my entire pay-check was in the hands of those who paid for my software, I already stated my works were pirated from here to china, I’m at the very end of what “you” would quantify as suffering from the rot of civilisation. Yet I managed to make my business profitable, not through cease and desists, not through legal hounding, and certainly not through moaning… In this thread I’ve acknowledged molona’s argument and others “self-justification” for their acts, and stated my sympathy for people who are in certain positions. does this make me some kind of untrustworthy, un-moralistic failure? I don’t pirate anything, every piece of music, media and software on my machine was paid for in full, and I’ve come to accept the reality of what technology has brought us. As you are from the UK I would love to hear whether you’ve ever ripped a CD to your MP3 player or computer, because as denoted earlier under UK copyright law, that would make you one of the very people your so quick to criminalize, perhaps you haven’t done that (even to this day), but most people have done so… and I expect if we looked hard enough at any persons behaviour we could find some aspect to which they have violated a law or too in their time.
Yes it is stealing, it is the stealing of intellectual property. Period.
But in the world of collectivism and rolling over the rights of the individuals and the creators, I am really not surprised at the audacity of thieves to claim that taking is their right…
Today I saw a woman read a magazine while waiting in the line at the supermarket, she put it back before paying for her goods … that’s when I pulled out my tazer and arrested the *** out of that sorry deadbeat underachiever.
/end sarcasm
Anyone who drives over the speed limit (and I’m gonna assume that’s almost everyone at some point) has broken a law. But worse, far, far, far, far, far worse is the fact tobacco is legal.
/end prioritiesareinorder
These threads are everywhere. The only problem is they are biblical in statistics. Nothing is ever proven anywhere, it’s just one side vs another, both claiming to be righteous.
/end generalisation
SP, give us the results of your campaign give us something unbiased and honest with which to further educate ourselves about the impact (positive or negative) of filesharing and attempts to stop/promote/whatever it.
Off Topic:
What I meant about Jake was simply that he will not know what he will do until he sees himself in that situation… which hopefully it will never happen.
Yes, I do. 
But I’ve been on both sides (no, no, I don’t create anything more than tutorials and manuals for my students but I did work in the Editorial world for a while) so I don’t have things as clear as you have
Now what is this you’re saying. If that turns out to be true then I’ll use the right that no-one can’t take away from me - the right to stop producing. And I’m sure I’d not be the only one.
The system is getting obsolete. As things like TV a le carte and personalised radio channels grow on the internet, the regular and still used copyright system will be obsolete and it will need to changed. People may pay a monthly fee to have those channels, as they do today but… you don’t think that it would work forever, do you?
Theft is theft and it is illegal, however morally there are grey areas.
As a developer I often need to purchase software licenses for client sites. There are occasions where I’ll need to modify / extend said piece of software. Legally I must purchase the license first, however for numerous reasons this is not always an option. I may need to see the code-base before I can quote my client and to ensure the software is suitable.
I’m sure I’m not alone with this, I could make noticeable losses if I didn’t fully research the software.
I also purchase a lot of books. Books are a little bit different. There a many reviews, samples and articles available to look at before purchasing any book (same goes for music, movies). The only thing I begrudge when It comes to buying books is paying extra for an ebook copy. I already own the book, why should I pay extra to read it on the train with my iphone?
Best Regards, George
Don’t be that extremist. He’s not saying that but it also true that some people download stuff just because they’re curious and want to check out… but they will never be customers or potential buyers. Furthermore, some of them do finally come buyers.
In the same way that there are people that download things because they will never pay for it if they can get it for free. And a whole rage of other types in between.
There are all kind of people in the world, and you seem to be determinated to put everyone on the same boat
I’m having a hard time following your logic. I wasn’t putting everyone in the same boat, I was disputing a comment made by another poster who asserted that “downloads do not equal lost sales, but downloads can lead to new fans who are then potential customers.”.
I felt that his statement was both unsupportable and didn’t make a strong argument for unauthorized use of protected works, and I think I made that statement fairly clearly.
I went on to remark that even if his statement were true, it doesn’t answer the question about who gets to decide what terms are applied to the product that they produce and sell.
Say I decide to write a piece of software and I decide to sell it for $1000, with no trial period at all. I hire an expensive market research person who tells me that my target audience is unlikely to steal the software, and that anyone who does steal the software is unlikely to pay for it. And, that consultant predicts that for this particular software package, a freeware or shareware model is not likely to be the most profitable for me.
Let’s say that I decide that I trust the marketing consultant and decide to price and protect my software accordingly. It’s my software package, can’t I decide how I want to sell it?
Last month I had a huge plumbing job that I needed bids on. Out of 9 plumbers who I called, 2 or 3 of them wanted me to pay about $30 to have the job estimated and wouldn’t come out for free. That is their choice, although in this case I didn’t want to pay it.
Should we apply this mentality to other fields? How about footwear? In NYC, a legitimate pair Nike sneakers costs much more than a counterfeit pair. Should we say that anyone who wants to should be able to produce, sell, or buy a pair of counterfeit Nike’s because it’s helping to drive the Nike brand? Whose decision is that?
If you try to apply this mentality to tangible goods, or any kind of goods that aren’t simply easy to steal, then it gets complicated and suddenly these ethical contortions become harder to swallow.
How about iPhones? If I can make a working iPhone in my garage, can I start giving them away for free? That brings potential customers to Apple.
How about linux? can I make unlimited copies of that and distribute them? Oh yea I can, because it’s licensed that way intentionally.
my suggestion: save your money and don’t pay for the lawyers and these companies that do nothing but send “take down” notices, they will rarely gain any results and from those you do you will then try to sue for what millions they don’t have?
being in the software business, my WinnerTweak program had been pirated many times, all I do is change the mechanism within the program making the keygens and cracks useless. Going around and suing people isn’t really an answer. If you publish good quality work you will get paid and yes your work will be stolen by those who will never pay for it. So who cares? It doesn’t hurt your sales.
your logic is very faulty, you make incorrect comparisons and they don’t add up. again with pirated works you don’t get the full benefits. For example: I pirate a game, I can play it but I cannot play it online. You see? If i pirated the game and then play it and like it I say “ok its worth the money” and buy it, if i bought it and played and it and said “this game sucks” I couldn’t return it.
I am not in defense of piracy but I will say that those who pirate wouldn’t buy your product otherwise.