As others have pointed out, RMS doesn't seem to realize that Not Everybody Is A Programmer, and even more interesting, that Not Everybody Wants To Be A Programmer.
This isn't his point though, his point is that if you use Free software then you can have it fixed or customized to your needs should you so desire. Whether this is achieved by you coding the changes yourself or by you getting someone else to do it is not important, what is important is that you can make it happen without a lot of trouble. It may cost you money to get this done of course but it is also not his point that Free software must be free of cost.
It is a horrible aspect of human behavior that enables us to believe things without good reason or evidence and I will be the first to admit that I am also guilty of such behavior and inclination, but when it is recognized and identified, however harmless, I find it to be repugnantly ignorant.
I don't find it horrible so much as a vital first step on the path to curiosity. Humans seem to have a very deep need in them to understand the world around them, to know why things happen. When something happens that we do not understand it leads to a cognitive dissonance that screams to us for resolution: We see something new and our brain says "x just happened - strange - why why why why". It is the curse of earlier civilizations that they had no good way of actually finding these things out, however, and they compensated by just making stuff up and thereby satisfying their need to understand.
These days, we think we're onto something better what with the scientific method and all but had we not had that deep urge within us that led to the superstitions of earlier times, we probably would never have come up with the scientific method at all because we wouldn't see the need. We would see something new and our brains would just tell us "x happened, didn't particularly affect us so who cares, get on with life".
Also, what you are saying implies the President and anybody acting under his orders truly is above the law, since they'll never prosecute themselves, and you don't want subsequent administrations to do so either.
It is quite clear that the US presidency is above the law. The only thing that varies a bit is how blatant they are about it. Of course, some laws are probably easier to ignore than others. Nobody wants to do a Nixon so expect the President to be careful about unlawfully wronging the opposition.
As it is, I am really starting to question whether the Nuremberg trials were just "victor's justice."
To an extent it was of course (this is unavoidable after a war I expect), but I also think that the victors in this particular case were incredibly lucky in that their enemy actually/was/ as despicable and vile as you'd like a defeated enemy to be. There probably wasn't a whole lot of spin added, because the spin was not necessary. It is probably more interesting to examine the spin needed to make the Soviet Union a palatable Ally, or the spin created/during/ the war, before the true extent of nazi war crimes was known - all about the evil Hun etc. I expect, recycled propaganda from The Great War.
The whole "the victor writes our history books" tendency is, of course, multiplied tenfold when it comes to copyright since not only are our history books written by the people who won the copyright wars of several centuries ago, but additionally they all have (or at least think that they do) personal vested interest in the continuation of these laws. It is therefore only natural that people of today tend to think of copyright as a natural right rather than the rather blatant violation of individual rights that the US constitution effectively acknowledged it as. (Why else would it see the need to dedicate a portion of its Bill of Rights to specifically point out that copyright should be legal, other than the realization that had it not done so then the remainder of that document would automatically outlaw it?)
Unlike the Allies during WW2, however, the copyright lobby is not blessed with an enemy that is very easily vilified. They tried, with great success, to associate copyright infringers with the most despicable villains of the time: the pirates of the high seas - hoping that this would doom the infringers to lives of scorn. Instead of the term rubbing off on the infringers however, the infringers rubbed off on the term. "Pirate" and "piracy" are today rather benign terms as a consequence - the Somali national economy notwithstanding. What this tells me is that our culture as a whole completely fails to see what is so wrong about copying cultural works, and that the notion of "sharing is caring" remains so strong within our communities that what used to be an uphill struggle for the media cartels is rapidly turning into a sheer cliff. The more recent movement to label infringers thieves is unlikely to see much more success than the previous piracy campaign, and there is some hope that the general empowerment of the individual that the Internet has brought us will finally see the end of the media monopolies. Then/we/ will be the ones writing the history books and we'll need to find some suitably villainous labels for Sony et al.:-)
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it.
What this situation calls for is a decent privacy law; co-opting copyright laws to cover this is little more than an ugly hack. A decent privacy law might state that identifiable pictures of a person's death are private and so come under its protection.
This virus is killing healthier people. Clearly the solution is to eat terribly and weaken your immune system.
Or perhaps the Pope was right all along: just say no to condoms.
Somewhat less tastelessly though, if this flu really is killing people with good immune systems then it's not as if we haven't invented immunosuppressants, or are afraid to use them.
What's the point in that? He'd either have to carry both desert and urban camo (for middle-east incursions at least), and swap half way through, or they'd have to be butt-naked all the time.
If they can put this in skin they can probably put it in clothes too.
The first person to purchase a game isn't charged $1,000,000. Each person pays a small amount so the original company can make up the cost of creating it (and hopefully, a profit).
And it's not necessary for the first person to be charged $1M, of course. It's just that selling copies to obtain that money is increasingly going to fail.
I guess if you want to see the entire gaming industry destroyed, you can keep promoting your ideals.
I rather expect the creativity of authors, game designers, publishers and their partners to be able to overcome your gloom and doom scenario.
The "scheme" is a good business model.
It was until it started failing.
A company creates something of value, and if you like it, you pay for it (and if you don't like it..you don't download it or pay for it).
But that was not the business model. The business model was to sell copies of digital information through high-cost distribution networks. This model has started to fail and it won't be long until it does so rather spectacularly.
Don't worry, eventually all software will be service-based.
Perhaps, but that does require something of a change in the expectations of the buying public. If they can pull that off and can provide services with acceptable uptimes this may be a winner.
Um... How is software piracy ethically different from stealing material goods?
On an ethical scale, that remains to be seen. The wholescale and unquestioning labelling of copyright infringement as theft is an attempt to circumvent any debate of the matter, however, which is a problem.
I do have a suspicion that when the previous attempt along these lines (co-opting the word "piracy") was as much of a failure as it was(*), this new effort is probably doomed also. But these are different times so who knows.
Or for that matter, different from copying (I'd say stealing) somebody's code or art by copying it without permission? I'd say they're all in the same class, ethically speaking
Sounds to me like copyright infringement also and absent other distinguishing characteristics is presumably much the same thing.
* The term stuck, but by taking on this meaning lost its sting which was presumably not the intention of the pro-copyright lobby at the time. If the modern public also sees copyright infringement as a relatively benign activity, the net effect will probably be to water down the unethicality of "stealing" and "theft".
"But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such."
you aren't producing anything, you are making digital copies. It is still just as difficult to create the original.
How is this relevant to the cost of creating copies? In this day and age it is the inherent nature of information that the full cost is in creating the first copy, all subsequent copies are effectively free of cost.
Publishers like to pretend that this is not the case so that they may amortize their expenses over millions of copies but this pretense comes at the cost of flying in the face of reality, and this inevitably causes them some difficulties.
If you want to take a look at the world of games without commercial backing, look at tuxRacer. It will be the future of the industry if companies know they will not be able to make a profit.
Publishers will need to find a means of getting customers to finance the first copy, it is only a matter of time before the amortization scheme finally keels over and dies.
The value of a game (the value we are talking about here) is how much money somebody is willing to pay for the game. As it becomes more readily available online for free (through torrents, google, etc.), this value approaches 0 (because more and more people know that they can get it for free and think that it's not worth anything).
But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such.
Nope - you're buying the media the copyright product came on, and you have a combination of rights - those granted by copyright law, and those granted by the author by license (as per copyright law).
If the author chooses to grant an automatic license for some use beyond what copyright law allows automatically then, sure. Most customers will not need this however.
You do NOT get the right, even under copyright law (except by permission of the rights-holder), to make and distribute additional copies.
For this you/would/ definitely need some additional license. Again, most people will not particularly need this.
Stop trying to justify it by saying it's "only" copyright infringement. It's both copyright infringement AND theft. One doesn't preclude the other.
I'm not trying to justify it, I am pointing out a factual error. Copyright infringement is not jaywalking, it is not genocide, nor is it littering or even assault with a deadly weapon. Finally, it is not theft. It is copyright infringement or, as has become an established usage, it is piracy.
It's closer to counterfeiting currency than it is stealing physical property. Think about what happens when fake currency is injected into an economy (inflation..or..the devaluation of the said currency).
This is exactly what happens to software that is pirated. It's devalued...which is worse than stealing. At least with stealing, there is only a loss of that individual item.
How do you conclude that it's devalued? The value of a game depends upon the perceived quality of the entertainment it provides and not actually being a unit of currency, the value of a copy of a game does not depend on how many other copies of the game that exist. Are you thinking of the second-hand market?
it's the same law that makes "unauthorized taking" of your car, or your wireless, or your social security number and bank information, or all the money in your bank... you mean that law?
Except it's not. Those are entirely different laws altogether.
A better example for piracy might be trespassing on your fenced property, or breaking and entering in to your home. After all, it's just your "space" somebody in your house at 2am hasn't actually STOLEN anything yet, maybe they are just lost or sick and don't know better.
If you break and enter you have destroyed property, which is different from both trespassing and from copyright infringement. People's homes also have very special status in our laws and traditions and it's entirely unclear how this relates to copyright at all.
Following the above quote you appear to veer off into completely uncontrolled ranting. If you could please point out how your rant relates to my original post I shall attempt to address it.
Well, how about I just steal your GPL code and embed it in my application without following it's terms? In fact, I plan to sell it and make a million bucks off your GPL code!
Well, first of all it's difficult to steal a copyright and the code itself is not an object that/can/ be stolen - if you succeed in robbing me of it it's because my backup procedures suck. If you can make a million bucks off my code it will be because you are a world class salesman, not because you had any particular need for my code.
Does that make you hot and bothered?
Eh, no.
If it does, you now have a reason to be pissed about piracy too.
Actually, the content - the particular pattern of bits - DOES belong to them - that's the only reason they're entitled to license it out. You bought a license to use those bits - you don't own them, and you have no right to copy them extant an agreement to the contrary.
You do not buy a license when you buy a copyrighted product - you buy the product. You only need a license if you want to do something with it that copyright law doesn't already let you do. For most people this is not necessary.
You just made my argument for me. The only reason there's an empty seat is because they didn't sell out - so it was a "potential" sale. And yet, you argue that you have actually taken something away from the owner - one seat he could have (but didn't) sell to someone else.
In the hypothetical case where there was a free seat and the theatre has no actual expenses resulting from one additional guest, there is just trespass.
Also, even if you remained standing the whole movie, you're still stealing, it's still theft of service - the law doesn't care for your position - sitting, standing, or whatever.
A theatre isn't limited just by the number of physical seats. Other qualities such as ventilation, fire safety and acoustics also tend to be sensitive to the size of the audience. Again, in the hypothetical case where no such limitation is compromised by the trespasser there is no cost involved.
This is rapidly turning into a very theoretical theatre though.
You "in practice" lost it the same way that the game publisher "in practice" lost their money... you still have your identity, it's just worth less, same as game publishers lose financially when people steal their shit.
It seems to me you drastically underestimate the consequences of having one's identity stolen. When this happens then, no, you do/not/ have it yourself any more because you will find that when you try to use it, it doesn't actually work. This is in stark contrast to copyright infringement, which a publisher doesn't at all notice is happening until they spend tremendous resources trying to measure it.
The disk might not belong to the pubisher ay more, but the content does.
No, it does not. He has certain limited exclusive rights to it but it does not in any way belong to him.
Copying the content falls under the "taking something that doesn't belong to you" aspect of stealing. Or did your mother not teach you not to take that which doesn't belong to you without asking first?
The air that I breathe does not belong to me, yet I breathe it all the time and don't at all feel guilty about it. Please explain how you reconcile this with the notion that "taking something that doesn't belong to you" is necessarily unethical.
If you're "trespassing" inside a movie theatre, it's called theft of service.
And only because you are actually taking something away from the owner: one seat he could have sold to someone else. There is no such cost to the copyright holder when you make a copy of a copyrighted work.
All the people trying to justify/rationalize stealing - what are you going to call it when someone steals your identity? "Identity infringement?" After all, you still have your identity. They didn't "really" steal it... (but they did).
When someone steals your identify you do in practice lose it since you will soon find that companies and institutions disbelieve you when you try to explain who you are. If all an identify theft resulted in was theft of your money (from your bank account most likely) then calling it identify theft would be unwarranted, but this isn't what usually happens with a truly stolen identity. Victims of such activity invariably need to put in some real hard work to regain their identity so they can get on with their lives.
It wouldn't be theft as defined in law, but it most certainly is stealing in the colloquial meaning of the word. Stealing can mean an awful lot of things, just consider "stealing time" or "stealing a girlfriend".
But by this very loose colloquial meaning, pretty much anything can be theft. For instance, by provoking me into writing this reply you have stolen of my time, does this mean that your post was unethical? By writing this criticism of your post, I have stolen from you whatever time you needed to determine whether to waste any/more/ time on writing a response and if you/do/ write that response I have stolen even/more/ time from you. Is this post therefore unethical because it steals your time?
When copyright defenders use the term theft it is quite clear that they are using it in the most derogatory manner that they know how - they do not, in my opinion, refer to the harmless colloquial meaning that you describe above but they refer directly to unethical theft that robs someone else of their lawful property. It is therefore this meaning that needs to be attacked.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is very simple: Pirating software is taking something you're neither supposed (as intended by the creator) nor allowed (as defined by law) to take without paying for it. Taking something in this way is stealing. Therefore piracy is stealing.
Is this some sort of ethical argument based upon the idea that the law is always ethically correct?
Or better yet, give the game away for free and charge for an account.
I expect there are some very difficult economic decisions involved here. The "buy a boxed game" and the "buy a game subscription" markets are most likely two very different ones and while undoubtably some segment of the buying population is in both of them there is more than likely a whole lot of people who just stick to one.
Stardock is presumably here trying to tap the "buy a boxed game" market with an online multiplayer game of some sort. If they had gone for wholesale competition with WoW et.al. the economics of the situation might have looked much different. This decision is therefore not a copyright-based one and so I doubt such considerations would have any impact on it.
let's not get into the semantics of "I didn't steal it - they still have their copy", because we know that it also means taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners' permission
It does not. When you copy a game from a friend, the disc you are copying from does not belong to the publisher, the bits on it do not and the disc you are copying to also do not. All the publisher has is a small set of exclusive rights regarding the content. In violating these rights you are not stealing from him anymore than you would be stealing from someone by trespassing on their physical property. (Note, the latter is trespass, also not theft.)
Yeah it's a promotional tool for your friend to pirate it too. Doesn't exactly help the developer does it? Oh but you got something for nothing so it's all OK isn't it?
It does since there is now one additional promoter of the game. Of all the people who learn of it from their pirating friends, some percentage is actually going to buy it and this/does/, obviously, directly benefit the publisher. Whether this percentage is 1% or 90% or somewhere in between is open to conjecture, of course, but since the publisher has no cost associated with pirates making copies of the game the percentage is pure profit.
If the publisher was silly enough to include some per-copy cost to itself without properly doing the loss-leader maths on it (e.g. have each game connect to its servers each time it is run) then this changes the calculation. It is not clear that it necessarily leads to a net loss, however, this would depend on the percentage above and the processing cost per connection. If the cost per game being run is such that it actually matters at all then the publisher would probably be well advised to run with some sort of paid subscription model to those services.
Calling someone who downloads a copy of Skip Spence's Oar from 1969 using a TPB torrent a "pirate" at a time when there are real pirates doing violence and holding human hostages is purely propaganda and a misuse of La Lingua. It was thus in Daniel Defoe's day and it is thus today.
Indeed, but that is not particularly relevant. What is relevant is that the use of "piracy" for copyright infringement has gained widespread pulic support and so has become part of the modern language. The use of e.g. "right to life" for anti-abortionism at present only has rather narrow support and has not become part of the language's vocabulary. Maybe it will some day, but it has not happened yet.
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As others have pointed out, RMS doesn't seem to realize that Not Everybody Is A Programmer, and even more interesting, that Not Everybody Wants To Be A Programmer.
This isn't his point though, his point is that if you use Free software then you can have it fixed or customized to your needs should you so desire. Whether this is achieved by you coding the changes yourself or by you getting someone else to do it is not important, what is important is that you can make it happen without a lot of trouble. It may cost you money to get this done of course but it is also not his point that Free software must be free of cost.
It is a horrible aspect of human behavior that enables us to believe things without good reason or evidence and I will be the first to admit that I am also guilty of such behavior and inclination, but when it is recognized and identified, however harmless, I find it to be repugnantly ignorant.
I don't find it horrible so much as a vital first step on the path to curiosity. Humans seem to have a very deep need in them to understand the world around them, to know why things happen. When something happens that we do not understand it leads to a cognitive dissonance that screams to us for resolution: We see something new and our brain says "x just happened - strange - why why why why". It is the curse of earlier civilizations that they had no good way of actually finding these things out, however, and they compensated by just making stuff up and thereby satisfying their need to understand.
These days, we think we're onto something better what with the scientific method and all but had we not had that deep urge within us that led to the superstitions of earlier times, we probably would never have come up with the scientific method at all because we wouldn't see the need. We would see something new and our brains would just tell us "x happened, didn't particularly affect us so who cares, get on with life".
Also, what you are saying implies the President and anybody acting under his orders truly is above the law, since they'll never prosecute themselves, and you don't want subsequent administrations to do so either.
It is quite clear that the US presidency is above the law. The only thing that varies a bit is how blatant they are about it. Of course, some laws are probably easier to ignore than others. Nobody wants to do a Nixon so expect the President to be careful about unlawfully wronging the opposition.
As it is, I am really starting to question whether the Nuremberg trials were just "victor's justice."
To an extent it was of course (this is unavoidable after a war I expect), but I also think that the victors in this particular case were incredibly lucky in that their enemy actually /was/ as despicable and vile as you'd like a defeated enemy to be. There probably wasn't a whole lot of spin added, because the spin was not necessary. It is probably more interesting to examine the spin needed to make the Soviet Union a palatable Ally, or the spin created /during/ the war, before the true extent of nazi war crimes was known - all about the evil Hun etc. I expect, recycled propaganda from The Great War.
The whole "the victor writes our history books" tendency is, of course, multiplied tenfold when it comes to copyright since not only are our history books written by the people who won the copyright wars of several centuries ago, but additionally they all have (or at least think that they do) personal vested interest in the continuation of these laws. It is therefore only natural that people of today tend to think of copyright as a natural right rather than the rather blatant violation of individual rights that the US constitution effectively acknowledged it as. (Why else would it see the need to dedicate a portion of its Bill of Rights to specifically point out that copyright should be legal, other than the realization that had it not done so then the remainder of that document would automatically outlaw it?)
Unlike the Allies during WW2, however, the copyright lobby is not blessed with an enemy that is very easily vilified. They tried, with great success, to associate copyright infringers with the most despicable villains of the time: the pirates of the high seas - hoping that this would doom the infringers to lives of scorn. Instead of the term rubbing off on the infringers however, the infringers rubbed off on the term. "Pirate" and "piracy" are today rather benign terms as a consequence - the Somali national economy notwithstanding. What this tells me is that our culture as a whole completely fails to see what is so wrong about copying cultural works, and that the notion of "sharing is caring" remains so strong within our communities that what used to be an uphill struggle for the media cartels is rapidly turning into a sheer cliff. The more recent movement to label infringers thieves is unlikely to see much more success than the previous piracy campaign, and there is some hope that the general empowerment of the individual that the Internet has brought us will finally see the end of the media monopolies. Then /we/ will be the ones writing the history books and we'll need to find some suitably villainous labels for Sony et al. :-)
What this whole situation shows is that "intellectual property" is still a good idea, if legislators hadn't completely distorted it.
What this situation calls for is a decent privacy law; co-opting copyright laws to cover this is little more than an ugly hack. A decent privacy law might state that identifiable pictures of a person's death are private and so come under its protection.
This virus is killing healthier people. Clearly the solution is to eat terribly and weaken your immune system.
Or perhaps the Pope was right all along: just say no to condoms.
Somewhat less tastelessly though, if this flu really is killing people with good immune systems then it's not as if we haven't invented immunosuppressants, or are afraid to use them.
What's the point in that? He'd either have to carry both desert and urban camo (for middle-east incursions at least), and swap half way through, or they'd have to be butt-naked all the time.
If they can put this in skin they can probably put it in clothes too.
The first person to purchase a game isn't charged $1,000,000. Each person pays a small amount so the original company can make up the cost of creating it (and hopefully, a profit).
And it's not necessary for the first person to be charged $1M, of course. It's just that selling copies to obtain that money is increasingly going to fail.
I guess if you want to see the entire gaming industry destroyed, you can keep promoting your ideals.
I rather expect the creativity of authors, game designers, publishers and their partners to be able to overcome your gloom and doom scenario.
The "scheme" is a good business model.
It was until it started failing.
A company creates something of value, and if you like it, you pay for it (and if you don't like it..you don't download it or pay for it).
But that was not the business model. The business model was to sell copies of digital information through high-cost distribution networks. This model has started to fail and it won't be long until it does so rather spectacularly.
Don't worry, eventually all software will be service-based.
Perhaps, but that does require something of a change in the expectations of the buying public. If they can pull that off and can provide services with acceptable uptimes this may be a winner.
Um... How is software piracy ethically different from stealing material goods?
On an ethical scale, that remains to be seen. The wholescale and unquestioning labelling of copyright infringement as theft is an attempt to circumvent any debate of the matter, however, which is a problem.
I do have a suspicion that when the previous attempt along these lines (co-opting the word "piracy") was as much of a failure as it was(*), this new effort is probably doomed also. But these are different times so who knows.
Or for that matter, different from copying (I'd say stealing) somebody's code or art by copying it without permission? I'd say they're all in the same class, ethically speaking
Sounds to me like copyright infringement also and absent other distinguishing characteristics is presumably much the same thing.
* The term stuck, but by taking on this meaning lost its sting which was presumably not the intention of the pro-copyright lobby at the time. If the modern public also sees copyright infringement as a relatively benign activity, the net effect will probably be to water down the unethicality of "stealing" and "theft".
"But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such."
you aren't producing anything, you are making digital copies. It is still just as difficult to create the original.
How is this relevant to the cost of creating copies? In this day and age it is the inherent nature of information that the full cost is in creating the first copy, all subsequent copies are effectively free of cost.
Publishers like to pretend that this is not the case so that they may amortize their expenses over millions of copies but this pretense comes at the cost of flying in the face of reality, and this inevitably causes them some difficulties.
If you want to take a look at the world of games without commercial backing, look at tuxRacer. It will be the future of the industry if companies know they will not be able to make a profit.
Publishers will need to find a means of getting customers to finance the first copy, it is only a matter of time before the amortization scheme finally keels over and dies.
The value of a game (the value we are talking about here) is how much money somebody is willing to pay for the game. As it becomes more readily available online for free (through torrents, google, etc.), this value approaches 0 (because more and more people know that they can get it for free and think that it's not worth anything).
But this isn't caused by piracy, this is the very nature of digital information. The cost, and value, of one extra copy is always going to be negligible now that we have ubiqutous and efficient machinery for producing such.
Nope - you're buying the media the copyright product came on, and you have a combination of rights - those granted by copyright law, and those granted by the author by license (as per copyright law).
If the author chooses to grant an automatic license for some use beyond what copyright law allows automatically then, sure. Most customers will not need this however.
You do NOT get the right, even under copyright law (except by permission of the rights-holder), to make and distribute additional copies.
For this you /would/ definitely need some additional license. Again, most people will not particularly need this.
Stop trying to justify it by saying it's "only" copyright infringement. It's both copyright infringement AND theft. One doesn't preclude the other.
I'm not trying to justify it, I am pointing out a factual error. Copyright infringement is not jaywalking, it is not genocide, nor is it littering or even assault with a deadly weapon. Finally, it is not theft. It is copyright infringement or, as has become an established usage, it is piracy.
It's closer to counterfeiting currency than it is stealing physical property. Think about what happens when fake currency is injected into an economy (inflation..or..the devaluation of the said currency).
This is exactly what happens to software that is pirated. It's devalued...which is worse than stealing. At least with stealing, there is only a loss of that individual item.
How do you conclude that it's devalued? The value of a game depends upon the perceived quality of the entertainment it provides and not actually being a unit of currency, the value of a copy of a game does not depend on how many other copies of the game that exist. Are you thinking of the second-hand market?
it's the same law that makes "unauthorized taking" of your car, or your wireless, or your social security number and bank information, or all the money in your bank... you mean that law?
Except it's not. Those are entirely different laws altogether.
A better example for piracy might be trespassing on your fenced property, or breaking and entering in to your home. After all, it's just your "space" somebody in your house at 2am hasn't actually STOLEN anything yet, maybe they are just lost or sick and don't know better.
If you break and enter you have destroyed property, which is different from both trespassing and from copyright infringement. People's homes also have very special status in our laws and traditions and it's entirely unclear how this relates to copyright at all.
Following the above quote you appear to veer off into completely uncontrolled ranting. If you could please point out how your rant relates to my original post I shall attempt to address it.
Well, how about I just steal your GPL code and embed it in my application without following it's terms? In fact, I plan to sell it and make a million bucks off your GPL code!
Well, first of all it's difficult to steal a copyright and the code itself is not an object that /can/ be stolen - if you succeed in robbing me of it it's because my backup procedures suck. If you can make a million bucks off my code it will be because you are a world class salesman, not because you had any particular need for my code.
Does that make you hot and bothered?
Eh, no.
If it does, you now have a reason to be pissed about piracy too.
And what if, as it happens, it does not?
Actually, the content - the particular pattern of bits - DOES belong to them - that's the only reason they're entitled to license it out. You bought a license to use those bits - you don't own them, and you have no right to copy them extant an agreement to the contrary.
You do not buy a license when you buy a copyrighted product - you buy the product. You only need a license if you want to do something with it that copyright law doesn't already let you do. For most people this is not necessary.
You just made my argument for me. The only reason there's an empty seat is because they didn't sell out - so it was a "potential" sale. And yet, you argue that you have actually taken something away from the owner - one seat he could have (but didn't) sell to someone else.
In the hypothetical case where there was a free seat and the theatre has no actual expenses resulting from one additional guest, there is just trespass.
Also, even if you remained standing the whole movie, you're still stealing, it's still theft of service - the law doesn't care for your position - sitting, standing, or whatever.
A theatre isn't limited just by the number of physical seats. Other qualities such as ventilation, fire safety and acoustics also tend to be sensitive to the size of the audience. Again, in the hypothetical case where no such limitation is compromised by the trespasser there is no cost involved.
This is rapidly turning into a very theoretical theatre though.
You "in practice" lost it the same way that the game publisher "in practice" lost their money ... you still have your identity, it's just worth less, same as game publishers lose financially when people steal their shit.
It seems to me you drastically underestimate the consequences of having one's identity stolen. When this happens then, no, you do /not/ have it yourself any more because you will find that when you try to use it, it doesn't actually work. This is in stark contrast to copyright infringement, which a publisher doesn't at all notice is happening until they spend tremendous resources trying to measure it.
The disk might not belong to the pubisher ay more, but the content does.
No, it does not. He has certain limited exclusive rights to it but it does not in any way belong to him.
Copying the content falls under the "taking something that doesn't belong to you" aspect of stealing. Or did your mother not teach you not to take that which doesn't belong to you without asking first?
The air that I breathe does not belong to me, yet I breathe it all the time and don't at all feel guilty about it. Please explain how you reconcile this with the notion that "taking something that doesn't belong to you" is necessarily unethical.
If you're "trespassing" inside a movie theatre, it's called theft of service.
And only because you are actually taking something away from the owner: one seat he could have sold to someone else. There is no such cost to the copyright holder when you make a copy of a copyrighted work.
All the people trying to justify/rationalize stealing - what are you going to call it when someone steals your identity? "Identity infringement?" After all, you still have your identity. They didn't "really" steal it ... (but they did).
When someone steals your identify you do in practice lose it since you will soon find that companies and institutions disbelieve you when you try to explain who you are. If all an identify theft resulted in was theft of your money (from your bank account most likely) then calling it identify theft would be unwarranted, but this isn't what usually happens with a truly stolen identity. Victims of such activity invariably need to put in some real hard work to regain their identity so they can get on with their lives.
They supported and endorsed Obama
1: who still thinks wiretapping americans is okay
2 who put bunch of RIAA lawyers on his team
any questions?
What was the alternative like?
I swear, someone come up with something that meets all these criteria and I'll pay them outright.
You mean you /would/ pay them, if only you could find them.
It wouldn't be theft as defined in law, but it most certainly is stealing in the colloquial meaning of the word. Stealing can mean an awful lot of things, just consider "stealing time" or "stealing a girlfriend".
But by this very loose colloquial meaning, pretty much anything can be theft. For instance, by provoking me into writing this reply you have stolen of my time, does this mean that your post was unethical? By writing this criticism of your post, I have stolen from you whatever time you needed to determine whether to waste any /more/ time on writing a response and if you /do/ write that response I have stolen even /more/ time from you. Is this post therefore unethical because it steals your time?
When copyright defenders use the term theft it is quite clear that they are using it in the most derogatory manner that they know how - they do not, in my opinion, refer to the harmless colloquial meaning that you describe above but they refer directly to unethical theft that robs someone else of their lawful property. It is therefore this meaning that needs to be attacked.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is very simple: Pirating software is taking something you're neither supposed (as intended by the creator) nor allowed (as defined by law) to take without paying for it. Taking something in this way is stealing. Therefore piracy is stealing.
Is this some sort of ethical argument based upon the idea that the law is always ethically correct?
Or better yet, give the game away for free and charge for an account.
I expect there are some very difficult economic decisions involved here. The "buy a boxed game" and the "buy a game subscription" markets are most likely two very different ones and while undoubtably some segment of the buying population is in both of them there is more than likely a whole lot of people who just stick to one.
Stardock is presumably here trying to tap the "buy a boxed game" market with an online multiplayer game of some sort. If they had gone for wholesale competition with WoW et.al. the economics of the situation might have looked much different. This decision is therefore not a copyright-based one and so I doubt such considerations would have any impact on it.
let's not get into the semantics of "I didn't steal it - they still have their copy", because we know that it also means taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners' permission
It does not. When you copy a game from a friend, the disc you are copying from does not belong to the publisher, the bits on it do not and the disc you are copying to also do not. All the publisher has is a small set of exclusive rights regarding the content. In violating these rights you are not stealing from him anymore than you would be stealing from someone by trespassing on their physical property. (Note, the latter is trespass, also not theft.)
Yeah it's a promotional tool for your friend to pirate it too. Doesn't exactly help the developer does it? Oh but you got something for nothing so it's all OK isn't it?
It does since there is now one additional promoter of the game. Of all the people who learn of it from their pirating friends, some percentage is actually going to buy it and this /does/, obviously, directly benefit the publisher. Whether this percentage is 1% or 90% or somewhere in between is open to conjecture, of course, but since the publisher has no cost associated with pirates making copies of the game the percentage is pure profit.
If the publisher was silly enough to include some per-copy cost to itself without properly doing the loss-leader maths on it (e.g. have each game connect to its servers each time it is run) then this changes the calculation. It is not clear that it necessarily leads to a net loss, however, this would depend on the percentage above and the processing cost per connection. If the cost per game being run is such that it actually matters at all then the publisher would probably be well advised to run with some sort of paid subscription model to those services.
Calling someone who downloads a copy of Skip Spence's Oar from 1969 using a TPB torrent a "pirate" at a time when there are real pirates doing violence and holding human hostages is purely propaganda and a misuse of La Lingua. It was thus in Daniel Defoe's day and it is thus today.
Indeed, but that is not particularly relevant. What is relevant is that the use of "piracy" for copyright infringement has gained widespread pulic support and so has become part of the modern language. The use of e.g. "right to life" for anti-abortionism at present only has rather narrow support and has not become part of the language's vocabulary. Maybe it will some day, but it has not happened yet.