The main problem is that code under the BSD license can be taken by major companies, embraced and extended, and leave the actual authors of the code as second-rate citizens of their own project. If this happens there is no legal protection. It's open to the dirty tricks companies like Microsoft like to pull. Even being under the LGPL instead of the BSD license, KHTML was plundered this way by Apple for quite some time before they started playing nicer. BSD code has been built into OS X and Windows with no legal room for demanding that changes, to maintain compatiblity, share features, etc be returned to the original authors. When people use BSD licensed code they can force the original author to keep reinventing the wheel to keep up with their own project.
I don't really care a lot if other people want to use the BSD license but I can't see why anyone that isn't a masochist would want to. The GPL is like loaning your neighbor your lawnmower and expecting it back when they're done. The BSD is like loaning your neighbor your lawnmower and letting them just keep it when they're done.
From a legal standpoint, as well as fairness, I think it's always important to give proper credit. I think, as part of that, that you can't actually relicense someone elses BSD code but you can use it, make changes, and you don't have to share your own changes. Other than that I don't see that there was anything to make a fuss about. You can include BSD code in a GPL program without any legal issue. That's why they took off the advertising clause.
I think the need to multi-license code is one of the stickiest points of open licenses. The biggest issue of course is that a single logical segment of code may not have been authored by a single individual and in that case no single individual may have the right to release the entire logical segment under additional licenses. On the one hand this makes it harder to re-close open code but on the other it's also harder to relicense or multi-license code.
From a practical point of view, multiple owners of a code stack is something of a pain. If I want to dual-license a program I wrote under GPL and a closed license (ie for money you can license the code and not return your changes) I can do that but the issue becomes stickier if I merge changes submitted by others back into my code tree. If I don't merge those changes back into the code tree then much of the benefit of making it GPL is lost.
This stems, mostly, from confussion over the BSD license I think. It's accepted that you CAN just take BSD code and build it into your own code without returning anything back. It seems the major issue was the lack of credit given and that the changes from the BSD version to the GPL version were really minor.
It seems kind of petty to whine about someone stealing your code if you're releasing it under the BSD license though. By using the BSD license instead of the GPL you're choosing to let people take from you without giving back. I frequently hear the argument that BSD licensed code is really free, and the GPL isn't, over exactly this issue.
This is such a stupid worry. We're kept from having a really useful tool because somebody could, possibly, break it? Just encase it in something really hard to break and let it fly. I can't think of anyone that's accidently broken a laptop battery open anyway and if they do it on purpose then it's no different than if they went out of their way to do something else dangerous. We didn't ban smoke detectors and microwave ovens because some looney could possibly use them to make a radioactive mess.
I've had such bad experiencs with eBay, and PayPal since eBay bought PayPal, that I refuse to use Skype or any eBay property so long as they are owned by eBay. They produce bad technology and their busienss tactics are slimey - I don't need any more of that in my life.
I'll consider using Skype, PayPal, etc again when they are no longer owned by those eBay nazis.
Who needs language protectionism? Let language evolve to fit our changing needs. I think it's quite obvious that we live in a communications culture where communication happens much more often, between more people, and much faster than ever before. If anything we're becomming better at expressing ourselves. English and Japanesse are probably the most used languages among this high-communications culture with bits of other languages likely to be mixed in as needed and to fit native speakers of other languages. Words are getting more abbreviated and less punctuation is being used. What punctuation remains has been changed into emoticons. The written language is undergoing a massive change but I don't think it's a problem.
If you want to use a given language or stick to rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling then go for it. There is plenty of room for everyones way of expressing themselves. I encourage you to put content online so that future generations can use it as a reference. Eventually the language will decide to move back towards a more rigid grammar and spelling and by leaving content online it'll be easier for future generations to fo this.
I expect language will mostly move in the direction of a single language with a lot of flux though. Our technology is tearing down the walls of distance and culture and causing our society to undergo increasingly rapid changes. Language needs to be able to deal with that. Unknown words are easy to look up now - if you find a word you don't grok then just Google it.
If they did then the phone companies would sue for unfair competition and get the projects shut down. It's not fair for citizens to compete with their corporate overlords.
Thanks. I'll look it over. At this point I'm not to worried about being sued but I am worried about some ISP cutting my service to avoid being sued. I need an ISP that won't scare just because someone's sue happy legal department sends a threat. Mostly the service I have uses BitTorrent and a few clever tricks to make remote backup and restoring of your systems fast and easy. I'd not be surprised though if someone sued for making and distributing unauthorized copies of files even if those files originally came from the person who is receiving them.
Probably a good idea. I hate how credit makes you waste so much time just to live. That's part of the reason I've always tried to live free of credit. I hate how it's impossible to rent an apartment, get most phones, etc without using credit. Even if you're paying in advance they treat it like credit. Then they screw things up and it looks bad on you.
If the **AA would just stop whining because the world's changed they could make a bundle off the changes. They could provide authorized content to ISPs for redistribution and ISPs could offer upsell opportunities for the content owners. When someone downloads your song don't try to stop them - instead offer the CD, posters, concert tickets, etc. Offer faster downloads for paying subscribers - not throttling normal connections but offering highspeed boosts exclusive to paying customers. There would be many chances to make money off downloaders. How much could they save in advertising? The system would work best without exclusive content deals - exclusive deals would immediately cause people to download from third party trackers again. So long as the authorized versions were of better quality and free there'd be no reason for third party competition.
With IT professionals there is another possiblity. Often we can work from home so we still only need one car per household. I can cheat further because I live close enough to walk to work easily. I would like a nice bicycle but sadly I can't even afford that.;)
I probably agree with your statement but I think it doesn't matter as offshoring of jobs is probably a bigger issue. Even if only one person in every couple was holding a job so the workforce was more scarce and wages would go up it'd not really matter because we'd offshore more jobs to places that are cheaper. If they didn't then prices would probably go up and consumers would complain. It's all a nasty cycle.
I know my family and know who I can and can't trust. I have extended family I wouldn't trust because they are demented criminals. My family I'd trust for a short while but not for extended periods because they aren't that responsible. My wife's family I'd trust completely. As with any situation it's a matter of being able to know who to trust. You should know your family and friends better than you know a stranger but some people just keep blinders on when it comes to people they want to trust.
I think that is explained by the fact that a lot of freaks decide to homeschool their kids. It's the freaks in any group that stick out. I know a lot of geeks that are socially retarded but that doesn't mean that I think all geeks are. Or it could mean that you have a skewed sense of what is healthy and are just misjudging people as social retards when they are perfectly normal.;)
Do you remember your childcare professions from when you were a young child? I don't know about you but I got stuck with a lot of weirdos. If kids spending all their time with kooky parents is damaging what does it do to be exposed frequently to kooky care givers?
Off the top of my head I remember one lady who decided I was her dead son, one that would handcuff the children to a bedpost and leave them there until either her husband, a cop, came home and smacked them, or their parents came and unknowingly rescued them, and one who fed us nothing but mayonnaise and made us stay in the walk-in closet with ancient nasty toys while she watched MTV. I've seen some pretty bad childcare places in recent years too - my sister-in-law quit one a few months ago because the owners were so psycho. A co-worker that was leaving her kids there a few months ago stopped because they managed to let one of her kids leave with someone elses parent.
Not to say all childcare is bad but I think it's difficult for parents to know which is which. How things look and reviews from other parents don't always mean much. I don't think I'd risk leaving my children with strangers. But then I have enough family and friends I can trust that I wouldn't need to use childcare. I would like to have childcare offered by my employer though - if I could walk in at any time throughout the day and see how things were and watch over web cams I'd feel much better about it.
My wife is probably a bigger distraction than kids. She always wants to talk to me while I'm working, or just sit and watch me, which makes it so I can't concentrate on what I'm coding. Luckily my job is such that I can work frequently from home and take the kids to the office with me when I need to but I have to be careful about getting distracted. It's all to easy to let the wife talk me into watching tv with her or going somewhere. I'm sure kids will be distracting too but at least I don't want to go clean peanut butter off the floor or see who is teaching the cat to swim whereas I do want to hang out with my wife.
Mostly because my wife wants to be a stay at home mother. Since that is what she wants and I think it's healthiest for the children that is what I want to provide. In her spare time she wants to go back and finish her degree and work on running her own business. Not quite sitting on the ass.
My goal for income, in the next couple years, is only about $40000/yr. That is hardly big bucks especially since I am doing all our programming, db work, web design, sysadmin work, I fill in as helper for our network/windows admin (and am somewhat teaching since I know the stuff better), and I manage the Internet/Intranet/eCom needs and staff. We currently have four websites and an Intranet site, we're about to open another website, and have several more planned over the next couple months. Three of the websites are eCom sites and the Intranet site has replaced many of the old enterprise apps we were using. Eventually, I want to spin off a couple of my jobs onto other hands, when I find someone that will do a good enough job, but I still think it's a job role worthy of making a decent income.:)
I'm thinking that what happened to me was that I probably told them I had to go in the middle of their rant and that they just told me okay, by which I assumed I was done, and they then didn't completely cancel my account. I probably should complain to somebody over the situation but as it hasn't shown up on my credit report it hasn't been worth the hassle yet.
My current solution is to have a Net10 (no contract, no fees, and a flat rate) prepaid cell phone and to just avoid dealing with phone companies any more than I need to. Usually I'm at home or the office so I can use email, im, or video/voice chat as needed. The cell phone is mostly for the rare emergency when the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. If I need to make a call to some outdated place, such as my bank, I do it from work but that is pretty rare.
The phones I got were supposed to be good for any SIP network. I wasn't aware when I bought them that I was buying a branded version that had been locked to Vonage. Supposedly the exact same phones also come in unlocked and Packet8 (which are supposed to be easy to unlock) versions. Again - they didn't bother printing any sort of a warning on the box. Rat bastards. Oh well - they weren't THAT good of phones. Only about $200 each. That's just enough to piss me off and keep me from buying new phones for their service.
I get several gigs of email a day. I pull in system updats for half a dozen systems at a time. Etc. I'd need high speed even without BT. As it is, my puny cable, dsl, and T1, connections are wussy enough to keep me from doing useful things with the Internet I could otherwise do. If I had a 100Mb conenction up and down that was affordable I could do some really awesome businesses. It makes me want to move somewhere that has real broadband.
What ISP do you work for? I've got a quasi-legal project (if YouTube is legal than my project is legal) that I've been working on but need an ISP where I can get servers with at least 1TB of space each and a fast Internet connection with lots of alloted monthly bandwidth. About the best I've found here offers 5TB of monthly transfer volume for US$400/mo. The biggest problem I have with that is they don't offer any LAN access to transfer data between servers without it coming out of your monthly transfer volume. They also don't offer anything bigger than 1TB of space.
ISPs cause a lot of their own problems. Mostly because they don't develop resources for local users to create and share content amongst themselves. If they'd offer file sharing, forums, etc between their own users they could minimize such traffic. Some BT clients will attempt to optimize bandwidth by trying to opt for users that are on the same ISP or LAN. If ISPs would work with popular BT clients and trackers they could probably cut their bandwidth needs a lot. If they offered their own trackers, available only to their users, they could eliminate most casual BT users' bandwidth (most casual users I think stick to newly released content - speciality users go to places like Demonoid for harder to find stuff).
If ISPs had more content providers rather than just content consumers they could probably get better terms on their bandwidth. Nobody really wants to support a bunch of leeches they aren't getting much money to deal with but everybody wants to offer access to good content. Of course, in the end, protocols like BitTorrent are here to stay and they're in demand for uses ranging from legal to illegal. If networks have to be redesigned to deal with it then it'll have to be done. BT is the way the Internet is supposed to work. It's supposed to be decentralized with everyone being both a consumer and provider.
I use Demonoid mostly to download music of all kinds. I mostly just download anything that comes in a discography. I probably have downloaded around 500GB of music that way. The funny thing is it's so much music that it'd take me several years to listen to it all and probably several decades for me to figure out, and rate, which songs I like and songs I don't. The RIAA bitching that I've stolen their songs would be pointless because I hear most of the songs a lot more often on the radio than I'd ever hear from my own iTunes collection. On the other hand I have discovered, or re-discovered, quite a few songs and artists I like and may buy their music in the future. Having easy access to music and movies is a great form of advertising. I'm more likely to purchase music after downloading it than I'd be if I hadn't downloaded it. The exceptions are the groups' music that I buy on CD anyway because I am a fan and like to collect their stuff.
I do use Demonoid a lot to find stuff I can't find anywhere else. For example, my little sister wanted a copy of Mr. Boogety to watch for Halloween. It wasn't sold anywhere I could find. Demonoid had it for download. So I downloaded it for her. For my wife I downloaded the Muppets version of the Frog Prince for the same reason. If things aren't available to purchase it can hardly be called piracy to share old copies amongst ourselves.
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The main problem is that code under the BSD license can be taken by major companies, embraced and extended, and leave the actual authors of the code as second-rate citizens of their own project. If this happens there is no legal protection. It's open to the dirty tricks companies like Microsoft like to pull. Even being under the LGPL instead of the BSD license, KHTML was plundered this way by Apple for quite some time before they started playing nicer. BSD code has been built into OS X and Windows with no legal room for demanding that changes, to maintain compatiblity, share features, etc be returned to the original authors. When people use BSD licensed code they can force the original author to keep reinventing the wheel to keep up with their own project.
I don't really care a lot if other people want to use the BSD license but I can't see why anyone that isn't a masochist would want to. The GPL is like loaning your neighbor your lawnmower and expecting it back when they're done. The BSD is like loaning your neighbor your lawnmower and letting them just keep it when they're done.
From a legal standpoint, as well as fairness, I think it's always important to give proper credit. I think, as part of that, that you can't actually relicense someone elses BSD code but you can use it, make changes, and you don't have to share your own changes. Other than that I don't see that there was anything to make a fuss about. You can include BSD code in a GPL program without any legal issue. That's why they took off the advertising clause.
I think the need to multi-license code is one of the stickiest points of open licenses. The biggest issue of course is that a single logical segment of code may not have been authored by a single individual and in that case no single individual may have the right to release the entire logical segment under additional licenses. On the one hand this makes it harder to re-close open code but on the other it's also harder to relicense or multi-license code.
From a practical point of view, multiple owners of a code stack is something of a pain. If I want to dual-license a program I wrote under GPL and a closed license (ie for money you can license the code and not return your changes) I can do that but the issue becomes stickier if I merge changes submitted by others back into my code tree. If I don't merge those changes back into the code tree then much of the benefit of making it GPL is lost.
This stems, mostly, from confussion over the BSD license I think. It's accepted that you CAN just take BSD code and build it into your own code without returning anything back. It seems the major issue was the lack of credit given and that the changes from the BSD version to the GPL version were really minor.
It seems kind of petty to whine about someone stealing your code if you're releasing it under the BSD license though. By using the BSD license instead of the GPL you're choosing to let people take from you without giving back. I frequently hear the argument that BSD licensed code is really free, and the GPL isn't, over exactly this issue.
This is such a stupid worry. We're kept from having a really useful tool because somebody could, possibly, break it? Just encase it in something really hard to break and let it fly. I can't think of anyone that's accidently broken a laptop battery open anyway and if they do it on purpose then it's no different than if they went out of their way to do something else dangerous. We didn't ban smoke detectors and microwave ovens because some looney could possibly use them to make a radioactive mess.
I've had such bad experiencs with eBay, and PayPal since eBay bought PayPal, that I refuse to use Skype or any eBay property so long as they are owned by eBay. They produce bad technology and their busienss tactics are slimey - I don't need any more of that in my life.
I'll consider using Skype, PayPal, etc again when they are no longer owned by those eBay nazis.
Who needs language protectionism? Let language evolve to fit our changing needs. I think it's quite obvious that we live in a communications culture where communication happens much more often, between more people, and much faster than ever before. If anything we're becomming better at expressing ourselves. English and Japanesse are probably the most used languages among this high-communications culture with bits of other languages likely to be mixed in as needed and to fit native speakers of other languages. Words are getting more abbreviated and less punctuation is being used. What punctuation remains has been changed into emoticons. The written language is undergoing a massive change but I don't think it's a problem.
If you want to use a given language or stick to rigid adherence to rules of grammar and spelling then go for it. There is plenty of room for everyones way of expressing themselves. I encourage you to put content online so that future generations can use it as a reference. Eventually the language will decide to move back towards a more rigid grammar and spelling and by leaving content online it'll be easier for future generations to fo this.
I expect language will mostly move in the direction of a single language with a lot of flux though. Our technology is tearing down the walls of distance and culture and causing our society to undergo increasingly rapid changes. Language needs to be able to deal with that. Unknown words are easy to look up now - if you find a word you don't grok then just Google it.
I haven't used the MS API but I've done lots of things with the Google API and have found it quite easy to use.
If they did then the phone companies would sue for unfair competition and get the projects shut down. It's not fair for citizens to compete with their corporate overlords.
Thanks. I'll look it over. At this point I'm not to worried about being sued but I am worried about some ISP cutting my service to avoid being sued. I need an ISP that won't scare just because someone's sue happy legal department sends a threat. Mostly the service I have uses BitTorrent and a few clever tricks to make remote backup and restoring of your systems fast and easy. I'd not be surprised though if someone sued for making and distributing unauthorized copies of files even if those files originally came from the person who is receiving them.
Probably a good idea. I hate how credit makes you waste so much time just to live. That's part of the reason I've always tried to live free of credit. I hate how it's impossible to rent an apartment, get most phones, etc without using credit. Even if you're paying in advance they treat it like credit. Then they screw things up and it looks bad on you.
If the **AA would just stop whining because the world's changed they could make a bundle off the changes. They could provide authorized content to ISPs for redistribution and ISPs could offer upsell opportunities for the content owners. When someone downloads your song don't try to stop them - instead offer the CD, posters, concert tickets, etc. Offer faster downloads for paying subscribers - not throttling normal connections but offering highspeed boosts exclusive to paying customers. There would be many chances to make money off downloaders. How much could they save in advertising? The system would work best without exclusive content deals - exclusive deals would immediately cause people to download from third party trackers again. So long as the authorized versions were of better quality and free there'd be no reason for third party competition.
With IT professionals there is another possiblity. Often we can work from home so we still only need one car per household. I can cheat further because I live close enough to walk to work easily. I would like a nice bicycle but sadly I can't even afford that. ;)
I probably agree with your statement but I think it doesn't matter as offshoring of jobs is probably a bigger issue. Even if only one person in every couple was holding a job so the workforce was more scarce and wages would go up it'd not really matter because we'd offshore more jobs to places that are cheaper. If they didn't then prices would probably go up and consumers would complain. It's all a nasty cycle.
I know my family and know who I can and can't trust. I have extended family I wouldn't trust because they are demented criminals. My family I'd trust for a short while but not for extended periods because they aren't that responsible. My wife's family I'd trust completely. As with any situation it's a matter of being able to know who to trust. You should know your family and friends better than you know a stranger but some people just keep blinders on when it comes to people they want to trust.
I think that is explained by the fact that a lot of freaks decide to homeschool their kids. It's the freaks in any group that stick out. I know a lot of geeks that are socially retarded but that doesn't mean that I think all geeks are. Or it could mean that you have a skewed sense of what is healthy and are just misjudging people as social retards when they are perfectly normal. ;)
Do you remember your childcare professions from when you were a young child? I don't know about you but I got stuck with a lot of weirdos. If kids spending all their time with kooky parents is damaging what does it do to be exposed frequently to kooky care givers?
Off the top of my head I remember one lady who decided I was her dead son, one that would handcuff the children to a bedpost and leave them there until either her husband, a cop, came home and smacked them, or their parents came and unknowingly rescued them, and one who fed us nothing but mayonnaise and made us stay in the walk-in closet with ancient nasty toys while she watched MTV. I've seen some pretty bad childcare places in recent years too - my sister-in-law quit one a few months ago because the owners were so psycho. A co-worker that was leaving her kids there a few months ago stopped because they managed to let one of her kids leave with someone elses parent.
Not to say all childcare is bad but I think it's difficult for parents to know which is which. How things look and reviews from other parents don't always mean much. I don't think I'd risk leaving my children with strangers. But then I have enough family and friends I can trust that I wouldn't need to use childcare. I would like to have childcare offered by my employer though - if I could walk in at any time throughout the day and see how things were and watch over web cams I'd feel much better about it.
My wife is probably a bigger distraction than kids. She always wants to talk to me while I'm working, or just sit and watch me, which makes it so I can't concentrate on what I'm coding. Luckily my job is such that I can work frequently from home and take the kids to the office with me when I need to but I have to be careful about getting distracted. It's all to easy to let the wife talk me into watching tv with her or going somewhere. I'm sure kids will be distracting too but at least I don't want to go clean peanut butter off the floor or see who is teaching the cat to swim whereas I do want to hang out with my wife.
Mostly because my wife wants to be a stay at home mother. Since that is what she wants and I think it's healthiest for the children that is what I want to provide. In her spare time she wants to go back and finish her degree and work on running her own business. Not quite sitting on the ass.
:)
My goal for income, in the next couple years, is only about $40000/yr. That is hardly big bucks especially since I am doing all our programming, db work, web design, sysadmin work, I fill in as helper for our network/windows admin (and am somewhat teaching since I know the stuff better), and I manage the Internet/Intranet/eCom needs and staff. We currently have four websites and an Intranet site, we're about to open another website, and have several more planned over the next couple months. Three of the websites are eCom sites and the Intranet site has replaced many of the old enterprise apps we were using. Eventually, I want to spin off a couple of my jobs onto other hands, when I find someone that will do a good enough job, but I still think it's a job role worthy of making a decent income.
I'm more into lipstick lesbians. The butch thing doesn't really work for me.
I'm thinking that what happened to me was that I probably told them I had to go in the middle of their rant and that they just told me okay, by which I assumed I was done, and they then didn't completely cancel my account. I probably should complain to somebody over the situation but as it hasn't shown up on my credit report it hasn't been worth the hassle yet.
My current solution is to have a Net10 (no contract, no fees, and a flat rate) prepaid cell phone and to just avoid dealing with phone companies any more than I need to. Usually I'm at home or the office so I can use email, im, or video/voice chat as needed. The cell phone is mostly for the rare emergency when the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. If I need to make a call to some outdated place, such as my bank, I do it from work but that is pretty rare.
The phones I got were supposed to be good for any SIP network. I wasn't aware when I bought them that I was buying a branded version that had been locked to Vonage. Supposedly the exact same phones also come in unlocked and Packet8 (which are supposed to be easy to unlock) versions. Again - they didn't bother printing any sort of a warning on the box. Rat bastards. Oh well - they weren't THAT good of phones. Only about $200 each. That's just enough to piss me off and keep me from buying new phones for their service.
I get several gigs of email a day. I pull in system updats for half a dozen systems at a time. Etc. I'd need high speed even without BT. As it is, my puny cable, dsl, and T1, connections are wussy enough to keep me from doing useful things with the Internet I could otherwise do. If I had a 100Mb conenction up and down that was affordable I could do some really awesome businesses. It makes me want to move somewhere that has real broadband.
What ISP do you work for? I've got a quasi-legal project (if YouTube is legal than my project is legal) that I've been working on but need an ISP where I can get servers with at least 1TB of space each and a fast Internet connection with lots of alloted monthly bandwidth. About the best I've found here offers 5TB of monthly transfer volume for US$400/mo. The biggest problem I have with that is they don't offer any LAN access to transfer data between servers without it coming out of your monthly transfer volume. They also don't offer anything bigger than 1TB of space.
ISPs cause a lot of their own problems. Mostly because they don't develop resources for local users to create and share content amongst themselves. If they'd offer file sharing, forums, etc between their own users they could minimize such traffic. Some BT clients will attempt to optimize bandwidth by trying to opt for users that are on the same ISP or LAN. If ISPs would work with popular BT clients and trackers they could probably cut their bandwidth needs a lot. If they offered their own trackers, available only to their users, they could eliminate most casual BT users' bandwidth (most casual users I think stick to newly released content - speciality users go to places like Demonoid for harder to find stuff).
If ISPs had more content providers rather than just content consumers they could probably get better terms on their bandwidth. Nobody really wants to support a bunch of leeches they aren't getting much money to deal with but everybody wants to offer access to good content. Of course, in the end, protocols like BitTorrent are here to stay and they're in demand for uses ranging from legal to illegal. If networks have to be redesigned to deal with it then it'll have to be done. BT is the way the Internet is supposed to work. It's supposed to be decentralized with everyone being both a consumer and provider.
I use Demonoid mostly to download music of all kinds. I mostly just download anything that comes in a discography. I probably have downloaded around 500GB of music that way. The funny thing is it's so much music that it'd take me several years to listen to it all and probably several decades for me to figure out, and rate, which songs I like and songs I don't. The RIAA bitching that I've stolen their songs would be pointless because I hear most of the songs a lot more often on the radio than I'd ever hear from my own iTunes collection. On the other hand I have discovered, or re-discovered, quite a few songs and artists I like and may buy their music in the future. Having easy access to music and movies is a great form of advertising. I'm more likely to purchase music after downloading it than I'd be if I hadn't downloaded it. The exceptions are the groups' music that I buy on CD anyway because I am a fan and like to collect their stuff.
I do use Demonoid a lot to find stuff I can't find anywhere else. For example, my little sister wanted a copy of Mr. Boogety to watch for Halloween. It wasn't sold anywhere I could find. Demonoid had it for download. So I downloaded it for her. For my wife I downloaded the Muppets version of the Frog Prince for the same reason. If things aren't available to purchase it can hardly be called piracy to share old copies amongst ourselves.