Educating Youngsters About Piracy

Colin Winters writes: "The New York Times has an article that is a follow-up to the recent raid by the government on pirates in universities. Some professors believe that "By the time we get them, they already believe it [piracy]'s right." An interesting read. There's also an interesting bit on how business software is now 1/3 pirated, down from 1/2 in 1995. In America, it's only 24%. From the way companies like Microsoft whine about piracy, I'd assumed the figures were increasing, not decreasing."

Comments

Re:Legal vs. Right

[13013dobbs]

But so long as companies like Microsoft abuse their position, lie to consumers, produce broken software, knowingly release bug-ladden insecure crap, and otherwise mistreat the public it is difficult to defend, on moral grounds, striking back at the evil empire.
My dad bought a Christler in '86. It was a piece of junk. Do you think it would be OK if he went to the factory and stole a few cars? Oftentimes when I eat at McDonalds, I get the shits. Is it moraly correct for me to hop over the counter, grab a bunch of food and run out the door? RedHat sold me a CD with an exploitable copy of WU-FTP. Can I steal a bunch of CDs or a development server from them?

Certainly there are those, perhaps even the majority, who pirate for entirely selfish reasons. But there are those who pirate because they see it as striking at a morally bankrupt corporations heart.
I would bet that the percent of people who pirate for moral reasons is less than 5%.