For example there is nothing telling you that you can't thrown the bottle through my window (and thus breaking the glass), despite you owning that bottle, yet you can't do that because law regulating damaging of others property forbids it, this is regardless of if you own what you throw or not.
But that's nothing at all to do with it being a bottle of Coke, or ownership. That's to do with not being allowed to throw anything through your window. If it was a bottle that I'd manufactured, containing liquid that I'd made myself, I would still not be allowed to throw it through your window. That law has absolutely nothing to do with 'ownership'. I'm not allowed to copy the recipe and pass off bottle of Coke as my own. That's fine - that's trademark violation, but Coca Cola is not forcing any special restrictions on my use of this specific bottle, or its contents, because it's "their" drink.
You might own a stereo equipment, yet is not allowed to play it, at night at increadible high volume if you live in an appartment.
Again nothing to do with ownership of the stereo - I'm also not allowed to shout at very loud volumes and disturb my neighbour, and if I'd built the stereo myself, I still wouldn't be able to play it very loud. And whoever manufactured the stereo, I'm not aware of any restrictions placed on it by the manufacturers, patent holders etc, forbidding me from using the stereo to play music in public, or from lending the stereo out.
For example, despite owning a car, you might not be allowed to drive it if you don't hold a valid driving license.
And once again, nothing to do with ownership. If I'd built the car from scratch, I still wouldn't be allowed to drive it on a public highway without a licence. Ford don't place any special restrictions saying that I'm not allowed to use the car to carry passengers or lend it out to my mates do they?
Small nitpicking, you are the owner of *A COPY* of the music.
I'm not nitpicking. This is fundamentally different with music (and films) and I am talking specifically about the single instance of the music recorded on the single CD that I've just purchased (the equivalent of the specific 1 1/2 litres of Coke in my bottle that I was allowed to share with my friends without breaching Coke's rights).
If I had written and recorded my own music, I could broadcast it, lend it out, play it in public and do just about anything I wanted with it (except throw it through your window or play it very load at night). If I actually own the CD, I should be allowed to do any of those things - there is nothing fundamentally illegal about performing those activities with a CD. However, copyright protection prevents me from doing those things, therefore I have less rights on what I'm allowed to do with (what is allegedly) my CD. I fully understand why I'm not allowed to copy the CD and sell it down the local market (or even give that copy to someone), but I don't understand why I'm not allowed to lend the CD that I supposedly own to someone else, or play it out loud in my office (assuming that no-one else in my office minded).
Re:Explain the fricken 12,000 bucks for this...
on
WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
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· Score: 1
1. Hush money - they pay the $12k and insist that the user sign an agreement not to realse it to anyone, ever.
But a competition like this with a $12K prize will attract more than one competitor and even if the first person were paid off, there would almost certainly be others not far behind. So unless Apple were prepared to pay off every single person that did it, I can't imagine this would be a sensible plan for them.
I usually end up hitting the end of the list in no time
And so do I, which is usually quite annoying as I'm rarely after the last artist in my library. While I think the iPod has got closer to handling large libraries than any other MP3 player that I've used, but it's still far from ideal.
If we stick to music in general, yes it is yours, those specific copies of the music are.
Not as far as I can tell it isn't. Most CDs say somewhere on the case something along the lines of "no unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, reproduction, public performance or broadcasting of the work". If I was the actual owner of the music that I'd just purchased, why is anyone else able to put those restrictions on what I do with it?
If I buy a bottle of Coke, I'm not told that I wouldn't be allowed to serve it at a public gathering, or let my friends have some of it, would I? In that instance I own the Coke in that bottle to do with pretty much as I see fit.
And if the employee does install it, hold that person liable for the data transfered.
Unfortunately it's not that easy. In the UK at least, it's the company's responsibility under the DPA to look after the data that it holds on a customer. If you as a company have not put adequate safeguards in place around data (and "I told him not to do it") is extremely unlikely to wash as 'adequate', then you (and more specifically, the directors) will be in rather a lot of legal hot water.
Every time there's an article about smartphones, someone posts something almost identical to this. And every time I point out that just because you don't want a phone that does anything other than make phone calls, it doesn't mean that the whole idea is "a crock".
I have an Orange SPV 500 smartphone, and I love it. I can check diary and my email (and the web if I need to - it has proved invaluable on at least a couple of occasions) and play games without the need to be carrying a PDA. I could survive without it, but it makes things so much more convenient for me.
And as for your tool analogy - separate ones may be better, but I know that when I go on holiday I will be packing my multi-function Leatherman rather than my toolbox.
Personally, because I use my laptop while sat in front of the TV. A desktop would be useless - the monitor would fall off my lap, but I still want to be able to run pretty powerful apps (database, app server, Football Manager etc). I rarely carry it anywhere, and rarely use it unplugged.
And in case you've never flown commercially... you have to stow everything during take off and landing
Not on any flight I've ever been on (and I tend to fly around 10 or so times/year). I've never been asked to put away my book/pen for crossword etc. On Syrian Air last year, I couldn't even convince the stewards to do anything about family of 5 all stood up looking out the window behind me as we came into land.
Have you ever considered you might be on the wrong site?
Much as I can't be bothered to play the "my data centre's bigger than yours" game, I'm not going to mock those that want to. Most people come here (I assume) to discuss geeky stuff, and you must be pretty desperate to prove your superiority if you think that taking the mickey out of the/. crowd for doing that is big/clever.
It's doing the trick on me at the moment. I'm not the earliest of early adopters for home entertainment stuff, but I'm usually not far behind, and have spent many thousands on kit for the house.
I'm in the market for a new HD-TV now (I bought a widescreen TV when they first came out, but it's a big fat CRT and I want a nice shiny thin LCD/plasma to hang on the wall and play XBOX-2 games on), but I aint buying while there's so much confusion/disagreement on standards. I don't mind (too much) paying early adopter prices for kit that's going to be half that cost by next year, but I'm not going to pay early adopter prices for kit that's likely to be pretty much obsolete (and replaced by something more restrictive) by next year.
The problem is that I suspect there's a fair few people like me out there, and if people like me aren't buying the kit now, then it's unlikely that manufacturers will be in a position to lower the price in the near future, so the mass market will never take it up either.
I'm a little confused. When I buy a CD, am I buying the physical disc, in which case I surely get the right to do with it as I see fit, or I'm buying the right to listen to the music, in which case the media that it's on should not be relevant.
I can fully understand (assuming that I am only buying the rights) that I can't legally copy the music and give/sell that to someone else, but I'm no longer clear on what 'buying' a CD actually buys me.
That would be considered non-elective surgery, which is a form of assault {at least common assault, and maybe ABH or even GBH if an allergic reaction or septicaemia develops} -- and therefore illegal. Note also that you cannot consent to assault, and just because you said it was OK the perpetrator can still be prosecuted.
Whether you can or can't consent to assault is irrelevant, as by agreeing to have the surgery, it would become elective and there would be no assault to consent to.
From people I know and have talked to about it, pretty much everyone that had ever seen/read/heard HHG before thought the movie was a big disappointment, whereas those that hadn't come across it before in any form thought the movie was great. I was firmly in the former camp.
I suspect you wouldn't if you'd been accused of a crime and the media had decided that you were guilty before the trial started. Don't know where you're from (I guess the US) but if it's anything like over here, when someones accused of a high profile crime it's often more like a witch hunt than a trial in the press (and that's WITH the reporting restrictions).
In an ideal world we wouldn't need such things, but we're far from that and it's actually quite an important part of getting something approaching a fair trial.
I already have MSN Messenger on my phone and although I don't use it a great deal, it's great for a quick chat with my wife while I'm sat in a boring meeting, or on the bus without having to disturb anyone (I could use SMS, if she'd ever got her phone turned on or could actually type a message on her phone!).
You can also have multi-person conversations a lot easier than with SMS - handy if you're trying to meet up with a group of people.
I'm not very familiar with English law, but I thought free press was part of it!Evidently not.
Reporting restrictions are pretty common in the UK in relation to ongoing legal proceedings, such as not being allowed to publish stuff that could not be used in the trial itself while the trial is in progress. For instance, you cannot report previous convictions if they've been ruled inadmissible in the trial. What you will often see is that the second the trial is finished, the newspapers and TV will be full of "the complete story".
I know of at least one pretty major trial that one of my friends was defence lawyer for where a mistrial was called as a result of unacceptable press reporting (and either the editor or the reporter, can't remember which, was done for contempt of court).
I've heard rumours of the same policy being introduced at our place. It's absolute madness, IMO. I regularly go looking back through old emails (often 2+ years old), and I ain't going to be able to find what I want somewhere in 10,000 sheets of paper. Only yesterday, I dug up an email from about three months ago to prove that someone had been sent (and had approved) a particular document.
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
While it may not always be sensible to use one single language across the entire enterprise, there is a very good reason to limit the number that you do use. A very specific example from where I work - we currently have desktop apps written in Java, Delphi, C++ and VB. Apart from the Delphi one, these are very rarely altered. As a result, where the people mainaining those apps have left there has never been a great call to replace them with people of similar skills.
For the Java clients, this is no major problem, as most of our backend systems are written in Java (or COBOL), and therefore they already have the skills. However, we do not have a single person left in our development teams that actually knows VB or C++, so on the odd occasion that we do need to amend them, we usually end up with someone who's never seen the language before attempting to do a bug fix. Had we standardised on a single language for desktop UI development, this would not have been an issue.
"Its pretty sad when its obvious to everyone what the problem is, yet its still the same thing after what, six years?"
It seems to me that if it hasn't been changed in six years then it's not that great of a problem for most users
You're possibly right, but I guess it's a pretty major problem for a lot of non-users. I bet a fair few potential users will have loaded it up, gone 'WTF' and gone back to their previous image editing tool of choice. I know I did.
Much as I support the idea of a powerful, free graphics package, I really could not be bothered with trying to get past (in my view) one of the most user-unfriendly UIs that I've seen for a very long time. I also couldn't be bothered to go and code my own amended UI (I want to edit images, not develop the tool) or go start harassing the actual dev community, who would quite likely come back with either "Well, we like it" or "Well, go write your own".
At the end of the day, I'm happy enough with Photoshop Elements for most of what I want to achieve, and therefore can't be bothered to spend any significant time trying to make GIMP better (if it were improved, I may well go back and give it another go, however).
My suggestion to all the people bitching about how GIMP sucks and how much they hate using it (why are you using it then?) is to become a part of the community. Contribute and if enough of you contribute enough then your needs will probably be taken care of too. Failing that you could always take up a collection and offer a bounty.
And this is exactly the sort of response that I'm talking about. I am interested in a decent, usable graphics editor. I don't really care what that tool is. I am not bitching about the UI, and saying that it should be changed. I simply care that the graphics tool that I use has a UI that I can get on with. GIMP doesn't, so I don't use it. I don't actually care enough about GIMP as a project to spend valuable time working to improve it. If that means I will never get a decent free graphics app, and instead have to stump up £50 or whatever to get Photoshop Elements, then so be it.
I think it's a little unseemly to bash people who give you something for free. If you don't like it you are under no obligation to use it. Just steal photoshop like everybody else at/. does.
And yet you're bashing someone who's giving you advice for free. As you say - if you don't like it, your're under no obligation to use it. But if you're actually interested in creating a tool that people will use, not because it's free, but because it's better, then you might want to consider the views of the people that don't currently use it.
And don't try to take the stance that the only choice is GIMP or theft. As I've said, I use (and have bought) Photoshop Elements (I've also bought the ACDSee suite, but decided that Photoshop was better, I would have been happy to use - even pay for - GIMP had been been usable enough for me).
Luckily for 'your friend' there are many legal options to do this. Both Amazon.com and iTunes offer preview copies of songs
One of the reasons "my friend" has not done this kind of thing since the early '90s, but even with Amazon/iTunes, a 30 second sample of the track isn't the same as putting the entire album on and seeing if you think it's worth buying.
So now we have a consumer who has gained $10 in music and the label who has not been reimbersed the $5 it cost them. So the customer gains and the label loses (albeit half of what the consumer gains).
I think you're missing the point about someone not intending on buying it anyway.
Let's take your album example. The album costs $5M to record, and the amount of CDs sold (or copies made) has absolutely no effect on that figure. It is a fixed cost.
Once the album is made, I have three options relating to it 1) Buy the album - I get the album. The record company gets their $10. 2) Don't aquire the album at all - I don't get the album. The record company get $0. 3) I get the album illegally - I get the album. The record company gets $0.
As mentioned, none of this has made the slightest difference to the $5M cost to produce.
The question is, what would I have done if I couldn't have done #3? If it was #1, then by pirating the album, I've deprived the company of $10 that they would have got. If it was #2, I've not deprived them of anything.
A more obvious example - I know plenty of people who do still pirate software, and in most (admittedly not all) cases, the people would not have bought the software if they could not have got hold of it for free. For instance, I know a fair few people using pirate versions of Office who, if they could not have got hold of the pirate version, would have used Open Office instead (let's ignore the 'Open Office is better anyway' discussion). In this situation, who is being deprived of what by these people pirating Office?
The only difference between "stealing" digital content VS. physical content is the reproduction costs and ease of access.
No. The major difference is that when someone steals physical content, the original owner no longer has that content. If I walk into a CD shop and nick a CD, then the shop no longer has that CD. This is a clear, direct loss.
If you download the album off of someone else's computer, no-one has directly lost anything. You could argue that the band/label have lost their opportunity to sell you it, but
a) you may never have planned to buy it in the first place (in which case, who's lost what?) b) you may like it so much that you actually go out and buy it (in which case, everyone's gained.
So there is a possibility of actual loss in this situation, but it's no more than that.
As an example, back in the Amiga days, I will admit that 'a friend' (gotta be careful what I admit to) got copies of virtually every Amiga game that ever came out. If 'the friend' found himself playing the game for more than a day, he then (every single time) went out and bought it, including several that he hadn't even considered buying before playing. What actual damage was done there? Contrast that with a hypothetical situation where someone nicked a copy of every single game from Game and then went back and paid for the ones he liked.
I'm not claiming that there is never any loss as a result of piracy, but it is nowhere near as clean cut as some people claim (and in at least some cases there is gain instead) and claiming that it's pretty much exactly the same as physical theft is just ridiculous.
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But that's nothing at all to do with it being a bottle of Coke, or ownership. That's to do with not being allowed to throw anything through your window. If it was a bottle that I'd manufactured, containing liquid that I'd made myself, I would still not be allowed to throw it through your window. That law has absolutely nothing to do with 'ownership'. I'm not allowed to copy the recipe and pass off bottle of Coke as my own. That's fine - that's trademark violation, but Coca Cola is not forcing any special restrictions on my use of this specific bottle, or its contents, because it's "their" drink.
You might own a stereo equipment, yet is not allowed to play it, at night at increadible high volume if you live in an appartment.
Again nothing to do with ownership of the stereo - I'm also not allowed to shout at very loud volumes and disturb my neighbour, and if I'd built the stereo myself, I still wouldn't be able to play it very loud. And whoever manufactured the stereo, I'm not aware of any restrictions placed on it by the manufacturers, patent holders etc, forbidding me from using the stereo to play music in public, or from lending the stereo out.
For example, despite owning a car, you might not be allowed to drive it if you don't hold a valid driving license.
And once again, nothing to do with ownership. If I'd built the car from scratch, I still wouldn't be allowed to drive it on a public highway without a licence. Ford don't place any special restrictions saying that I'm not allowed to use the car to carry passengers or lend it out to my mates do they?
Small nitpicking, you are the owner of *A COPY* of the music.
I'm not nitpicking. This is fundamentally different with music (and films) and I am talking specifically about the single instance of the music recorded on the single CD that I've just purchased (the equivalent of the specific 1 1/2 litres of Coke in my bottle that I was allowed to share with my friends without breaching Coke's rights).
If I had written and recorded my own music, I could broadcast it, lend it out, play it in public and do just about anything I wanted with it (except throw it through your window or play it very load at night). If I actually own the CD, I should be allowed to do any of those things - there is nothing fundamentally illegal about performing those activities with a CD. However, copyright protection prevents me from doing those things, therefore I have less rights on what I'm allowed to do with (what is allegedly) my CD. I fully understand why I'm not allowed to copy the CD and sell it down the local market (or even give that copy to someone), but I don't understand why I'm not allowed to lend the CD that I supposedly own to someone else, or play it out loud in my office (assuming that no-one else in my office minded).
But a competition like this with a $12K prize will attract more than one competitor and even if the first person were paid off, there would almost certainly be others not far behind. So unless Apple were prepared to pay off every single person that did it, I can't imagine this would be a sensible plan for them.
And so do I, which is usually quite annoying as I'm rarely after the last artist in my library. While I think the iPod has got closer to handling large libraries than any other MP3 player that I've used, but it's still far from ideal.
Not as far as I can tell it isn't. Most CDs say somewhere on the case something along the lines of "no unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, reproduction, public performance or broadcasting of the work". If I was the actual owner of the music that I'd just purchased, why is anyone else able to put those restrictions on what I do with it?
If I buy a bottle of Coke, I'm not told that I wouldn't be allowed to serve it at a public gathering, or let my friends have some of it, would I? In that instance I own the Coke in that bottle to do with pretty much as I see fit.
Unfortunately it's not that easy. In the UK at least, it's the company's responsibility under the DPA to look after the data that it holds on a customer. If you as a company have not put adequate safeguards in place around data (and "I told him not to do it") is extremely unlikely to wash as 'adequate', then you (and more specifically, the directors) will be in rather a lot of legal hot water.
Every time there's an article about smartphones, someone posts something almost identical to this. And every time I point out that just because you don't want a phone that does anything other than make phone calls, it doesn't mean that the whole idea is "a crock".
I have an Orange SPV 500 smartphone, and I love it. I can check diary and my email (and the web if I need to - it has proved invaluable on at least a couple of occasions) and play games without the need to be carrying a PDA. I could survive without it, but it makes things so much more convenient for me.
And as for your tool analogy - separate ones may be better, but I know that when I go on holiday I will be packing my multi-function Leatherman rather than my toolbox.
YMMV.
Personally, because I use my laptop while sat in front of the TV. A desktop would be useless - the monitor would fall off my lap, but I still want to be able to run pretty powerful apps (database, app server, Football Manager etc). I rarely carry it anywhere, and rarely use it unplugged.
Not on any flight I've ever been on (and I tend to fly around 10 or so times/year). I've never been asked to put away my book/pen for crossword etc. On Syrian Air last year, I couldn't even convince the stewards to do anything about family of 5 all stood up looking out the window behind me as we came into land.
They are in Britain :)
Have you ever considered you might be on the wrong site?
/. crowd for doing that is big/clever.
Much as I can't be bothered to play the "my data centre's bigger than yours" game, I'm not going to mock those that want to. Most people come here (I assume) to discuss geeky stuff, and you must be pretty desperate to prove your superiority if you think that taking the mickey out of the
It's doing the trick on me at the moment. I'm not the earliest of early adopters for home entertainment stuff, but I'm usually not far behind, and have spent many thousands on kit for the house.
I'm in the market for a new HD-TV now (I bought a widescreen TV when they first came out, but it's a big fat CRT and I want a nice shiny thin LCD/plasma to hang on the wall and play XBOX-2 games on), but I aint buying while there's so much confusion/disagreement on standards. I don't mind (too much) paying early adopter prices for kit that's going to be half that cost by next year, but I'm not going to pay early adopter prices for kit that's likely to be pretty much obsolete (and replaced by something more restrictive) by next year.
The problem is that I suspect there's a fair few people like me out there, and if people like me aren't buying the kit now, then it's unlikely that manufacturers will be in a position to lower the price in the near future, so the mass market will never take it up either.
And I'd then ask "If they're so low, why don't they just give replacements away, considering the fact that I've already paid for it once."
I'm a little confused. When I buy a CD, am I buying the physical disc, in which case I surely get the right to do with it as I see fit, or I'm buying the right to listen to the music, in which case the media that it's on should not be relevant.
I can fully understand (assuming that I am only buying the rights) that I can't legally copy the music and give/sell that to someone else, but I'm no longer clear on what 'buying' a CD actually buys me.
Whether you can or can't consent to assault is irrelevant, as by agreeing to have the surgery, it would become elective and there would be no assault to consent to.
No. I'd guess that you'd more likely fall into the camp of people that I didn't know and hadn't talked to about it.
I'm sure that there are many people that don't fall into the two categories that I mentioned, but none of those are amongst my friends.
Or maybe most of the jokes in it were just done better in the book/radio/TV versions.
From people I know and have talked to about it, pretty much everyone that had ever seen/read/heard HHG before thought the movie was a big disappointment, whereas those that hadn't come across it before in any form thought the movie was great. I was firmly in the former camp.
I suspect you wouldn't if you'd been accused of a crime and the media had decided that you were guilty before the trial started. Don't know where you're from (I guess the US) but if it's anything like over here, when someones accused of a high profile crime it's often more like a witch hunt than a trial in the press (and that's WITH the reporting restrictions).
In an ideal world we wouldn't need such things, but we're far from that and it's actually quite an important part of getting something approaching a fair trial.
I already have MSN Messenger on my phone and although I don't use it a great deal, it's great for a quick chat with my wife while I'm sat in a boring meeting, or on the bus without having to disturb anyone (I could use SMS, if she'd ever got her phone turned on or could actually type a message on her phone!).
You can also have multi-person conversations a lot easier than with SMS - handy if you're trying to meet up with a group of people.
I'm not very familiar with English law, but I thought free press was part of it!Evidently not.
Reporting restrictions are pretty common in the UK in relation to ongoing legal proceedings, such as not being allowed to publish stuff that could not be used in the trial itself while the trial is in progress. For instance, you cannot report previous convictions if they've been ruled inadmissible in the trial. What you will often see is that the second the trial is finished, the newspapers and TV will be full of "the complete story".
I know of at least one pretty major trial that one of my friends was defence lawyer for where a mistrial was called as a result of unacceptable press reporting (and either the editor or the reporter, can't remember which, was done for contempt of court).
I've heard rumours of the same policy being introduced at our place. It's absolute madness, IMO. I regularly go looking back through old emails (often 2+ years old), and I ain't going to be able to find what I want somewhere in 10,000 sheets of paper. Only yesterday, I dug up an email from about three months ago to prove that someone had been sent (and had approved) a particular document.
While it may not always be sensible to use one single language across the entire enterprise, there is a very good reason to limit the number that you do use. A very specific example from where I work - we currently have desktop apps written in Java, Delphi, C++ and VB. Apart from the Delphi one, these are very rarely altered. As a result, where the people mainaining those apps have left there has never been a great call to replace them with people of similar skills.
For the Java clients, this is no major problem, as most of our backend systems are written in Java (or COBOL), and therefore they already have the skills. However, we do not have a single person left in our development teams that actually knows VB or C++, so on the odd occasion that we do need to amend them, we usually end up with someone who's never seen the language before attempting to do a bug fix. Had we standardised on a single language for desktop UI development, this would not have been an issue.
It seems to me that if it hasn't been changed in six years then it's not that great of a problem for most users
You're possibly right, but I guess it's a pretty major problem for a lot of non-users. I bet a fair few potential users will have loaded it up, gone 'WTF' and gone back to their previous image editing tool of choice. I know I did.
Much as I support the idea of a powerful, free graphics package, I really could not be bothered with trying to get past (in my view) one of the most user-unfriendly UIs that I've seen for a very long time. I also couldn't be bothered to go and code my own amended UI (I want to edit images, not develop the tool) or go start harassing the actual dev community, who would quite likely come back with either "Well, we like it" or "Well, go write your own".
At the end of the day, I'm happy enough with Photoshop Elements for most of what I want to achieve, and therefore can't be bothered to spend any significant time trying to make GIMP better (if it were improved, I may well go back and give it another go, however).
My suggestion to all the people bitching about how GIMP sucks and how much they hate using it (why are you using it then?) is to become a part of the community. Contribute and if enough of you contribute enough then your needs will probably be taken care of too. Failing that you could always take up a collection and offer a bounty.
And this is exactly the sort of response that I'm talking about. I am interested in a decent, usable graphics editor. I don't really care what that tool is. I am not bitching about the UI, and saying that it should be changed. I simply care that the graphics tool that I use has a UI that I can get on with. GIMP doesn't, so I don't use it. I don't actually care enough about GIMP as a project to spend valuable time working to improve it. If that means I will never get a decent free graphics app, and instead have to stump up £50 or whatever to get Photoshop Elements, then so be it.
/. does.
I think it's a little unseemly to bash people who give you something for free. If you don't like it you are under no obligation to use it. Just steal photoshop like everybody else at
And yet you're bashing someone who's giving you advice for free. As you say - if you don't like it, your're under no obligation to use it. But if you're actually interested in creating a tool that people will use, not because it's free, but because it's better, then you might want to consider the views of the people that don't currently use it.
And don't try to take the stance that the only choice is GIMP or theft. As I've said, I use (and have bought) Photoshop Elements (I've also bought the ACDSee suite, but decided that Photoshop was better, I would have been happy to use - even pay for - GIMP had been been usable enough for me).
One of the reasons "my friend" has not done this kind of thing since the early '90s, but even with Amazon/iTunes, a 30 second sample of the track isn't the same as putting the entire album on and seeing if you think it's worth buying.
So now we have a consumer who has gained $10 in music and the label who has not been reimbersed the $5 it cost them. So the customer gains and the label loses (albeit half of what the consumer gains).
I think you're missing the point about someone not intending on buying it anyway.
Let's take your album example. The album costs $5M to record, and the amount of CDs sold (or copies made) has absolutely no effect on that figure. It is a fixed cost.
Once the album is made, I have three options relating to it
1) Buy the album - I get the album. The record company gets their $10.
2) Don't aquire the album at all - I don't get the album. The record company get $0.
3) I get the album illegally - I get the album. The record company gets $0.
As mentioned, none of this has made the slightest difference to the $5M cost to produce.
The question is, what would I have done if I couldn't have done #3? If it was #1, then by pirating the album, I've deprived the company of $10 that they would have got. If it was #2, I've not deprived them of anything.
A more obvious example - I know plenty of people who do still pirate software, and in most (admittedly not all) cases, the people would not have bought the software if they could not have got hold of it for free. For instance, I know a fair few people using pirate versions of Office who, if they could not have got hold of the pirate version, would have used Open Office instead (let's ignore the 'Open Office is better anyway' discussion). In this situation, who is being deprived of what by these people pirating Office?
No. The major difference is that when someone steals physical content, the original owner no longer has that content. If I walk into a CD shop and nick a CD, then the shop no longer has that CD. This is a clear, direct loss.
If you download the album off of someone else's computer, no-one has directly lost anything. You could argue that the band/label have lost their opportunity to sell you it, but
a) you may never have planned to buy it in the first place (in which case, who's lost what?)
b) you may like it so much that you actually go out and buy it (in which case, everyone's gained.
So there is a possibility of actual loss in this situation, but it's no more than that.
As an example, back in the Amiga days, I will admit that 'a friend' (gotta be careful what I admit to) got copies of virtually every Amiga game that ever came out. If 'the friend' found himself playing the game for more than a day, he then (every single time) went out and bought it, including several that he hadn't even considered buying before playing. What actual damage was done there? Contrast that with a hypothetical situation where someone nicked a copy of every single game from Game and then went back and paid for the ones he liked.
I'm not claiming that there is never any loss as a result of piracy, but it is nowhere near as clean cut as some people claim (and in at least some cases there is gain instead) and claiming that it's pretty much exactly the same as physical theft is just ridiculous.