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Copy That Floppy? Go To Jahannum (Hell)
andrewdm writes "The Business Software Alliance has a new partner: the grand muftis at Al Azhar in Cairo. The New York Law Journal has an article explaining the new holy(?) alliance between the BSA and the highest religious authorities in the Egyptian Sunni Islam sect. The clerics issued a fatwa (holy edict) against piracy, saying it is "the worst type of theft and prohibited by Islam." What's next? The Pope denouncing mp3's as mortal sins?" The worst type of theft, indeed.
Ahh, this is too good - finally the future takes a twist even Bruce Sterling couldn't predict.
But seriously, this is actually pretty impressive: the weight of Islamic law behind software theft. I'm not familiar with the situation in Egypt, but in a lot of places (like Saudi Arabia) the penalty for theft is having your hand cut off. First left, then right.
You heard me right: people may be getting their hands cut off for pirating software.
As I've said before on the dot, our choices, in the long run, are
1> To comply with Copyright Law as it stands, whether we like it or not.
2> To change the law to something sane.
It's very much like the War On Drugs - Marijuana is simply not very harmful, grows everywhere, and our jails are full of people doing time for selling a dime bag: even an irrational, impossible-to-enforce law can still ruin lives.
Copyright is heading towards being this kind of an issue, and we need to take smart action to prevent it before we have college students going to jail for their MP3 collections.
And poor muslim bastards losing their hands over a pirated copy of Word.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
But then, I consider the BSA a terrorist organization. Terror IS their weapon
Hold on there cowboy. I hate the BSA as much as the next person but they are *not* a terror organization. Saying so makes you sound remarkably like the talking heads on tv and the politicians who attach the 'terrorist' label to anything they don't like.
the BSA is an organization that uses fear and extortion to accomplish it's goals, remarkably similar to terrorism eh? The parallels stop there. The BSA accomplishes its goals within the law. Sure the law might be horribly flawed, but the BSA does work within it, and if they break the law they do pay.
What the BSA does not do is send suicide bombers, assasinations, bombs, planes, and violence to kill and murder innocent people.
Call them whatever you like; asspirates,jack-booted thugs,cum-guzzling gutter sluts,- whatever, but terrorists they are not.
Willing to abide by legal licensing agreements
Does this include the GPL?
I know, flame away, dock me a point, but the same people who whine about attempts to keep people from "pirating/breaking license agreements" will be the same ones who blast Sony for not following the GPL to the letter.
At a time when the USA is threatened with "holy war" by organized Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists, the BSA induces Sunnite clergy to declare the same thing on copyright infringement?
I am not a muslim but there is a big difference between Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists and Islam itself.
Islamic terrorists are a group of people who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam. True, they have the support of some members of the clergy but that doesn't make the religion itself evil.
Your analogy is more like saying the Pope is evil because there are anti-abortion terrorists who take his words about abortion being a sin very literally and commit acts of terror against people who don't behave according to their wishes.
So is GW evil for meeting with the Pope while visiting Europe? Is Italy guilty of harboring an evil terrorist?
I'm sorry, but this to me is rather like Stalin giving Hitler's genocide policy an endorsement. These same Islamic clergy refuse to unequivocaly condemn the actions of Bin Laden.
Are you sure of that? Do you have a source you can point me to which mentions the Egyptian Sunnite clergy and a refusal to condemn Bin Laden? Or did you just pull that out of your ass based on reports of some members of some clergy in some muslim country refusing to condemn Osama?
Mmmm.. Donuts
This is a really sad thing. Religion has a very bad name in Western civilization due to the many atrocities and lesser injustices committed in its name. Please people: don't confuse the religion of Islam (or Christianity or Buddhism or ...) with these ridiculous petty power plays. If you are curious, look at any original religious texts and you will see a lot of reasonableness that just isn't reflected in the behavior of the clergy/priesthood/whatever. A really interesting statement about this problem is at: http://www.bahai.org/article-1-1-0-1.html - pick your language.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I just had a long, emotional, drawn-out argument with the newsgroup rec.music.makers.songwriters over this very issue.
It's my opinion that piracy, murder, and theft are three very different, distinguishable offenses, and have to be treated as such. To call piracy an act of "theft" is just as dishonest as calling drug use an act of "terrorism".
The crime of theft has very definite implications. Theft always causes the victim to lose property. Property carries value, so value is always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator.
The mechanism of piracy is much different. Piracy does not act on existing property; it may or may not deprive the victim of future sales, or of the ability to make money in the future. There are acts of piracy which cause no financial harm at all; the pirate, for example, who illegally copies a piece of software, doesn't understand it, can't get it to install, and deletes it, can hardly have been said to have done harm to the company. Therefore, unlike theft, value is not always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator. The size of the victim's estate remains constant; the size of the perpetrator's estate grows.
Thievery is the act of illegal taking; piracy is the act of illegal copying; murder is the act of illegal killing. You can argue semantics and say that killing is the taking of life and copying is the taking of information, but I believe that to take - that is, to transfer ownership from one party to yourself - is very, very distinguishable from killing and copying.
Are there any real-world implications of this semantic debate? I think we're seeing them right here. This islamic cleric is issuing his fatwa against piracy not based on the harms of piracy, but based on the harms of theft. Falsely associating one concept with another prevents people from really reasoning out the implications of each concept. Let me put it this way: if piracy were legalized, much of corporate capitalism as we know it would be over. But if theft were legalized, society as we know it would be over.
There is a BIG ethical difference between stealing someone's real property, and refusing to acknowledge that a copyrighted work *is* real property. I'm not saying that one is ethical and the other isn't; I'm saying that there's a difference, and we'd better be prepared to tackle the two abstract concepts separately.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
The level of political bias on slashdot is absurd.
Text from the original post:
"What's next, the pope banning mp3's?"
"The worst type of theft, indeed."
Not to mention various posts about how muslim clerics intend to mutilate/castrate those who pirate software, etc.
A strong argument can be made that pirating is immoral. Islam is a religion that absolutely forbids theft, and taking the product of someone's labor without paying them could easily be construed as theft. Instead of positing counter-arguments, the slashdotters make all kinds of statements as if the prohibition is crazy, fundamentalist, or insane.
Pirating software could be seen as immoral from many more standpoints than the fundamentalist one. Piracy clearly violates many philosophical principles of ethical behavior. For example, Kant's categorical imperative: the software industry could not exist if everyone pirated, therefore those that do pirate are hypocrites, because in order for them to pirate, they require other people to pay and support the industry.
Let me answer one or two objections that are very common on slashdot. I am not a lackey of the software industry, or a hireling for Bill Gates (my favorite), or a secret agent for the RIAA. Even if I were, it logically changes nothing.