I state that, because a good 90% of the fools around here don't know a DAMNED THING about computing other than @ user level
That's probably because it's news for nerds, not news for computer engineers. The days when there was a natural bias on the internet towards computer geeks is over. Nerds on the internet come in all flavours now.
Since how ripping your OWN movie is pirating anything ?
It's not.
You want to stop piracy ? Give people what they pay for in an easy and compelling way and for an honest price.
Here's the problem: when completely free is an alternative, no price significantly above zero will seem honest for long. Look how quickly the "It's just a copy. It doesn't cost anything." bullshit spread around slashdot. Look at the piracy rates of mobile apps. It's so very, very easy to rationalise your way out of feeling guilty for weaselling out of the smallest fees.
I'm not saying that pirates are like Darth Vader in every way, I'm saying for the purposes of this analogy, the black leather glove fits much better on the pirates than the publishers. Some of the things I've heard pirates say right here on/. almost transliterates to "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.". Now, I can tell by your proudly one-eyed, cherry-picked assessment of the **AA that you're not their biggest fan, but the fact is they have no real power over the pirates.
They made their deal with the pirates (foolishly, as some may say) that they would invest hugely in entertainment for them in exchange for honouring certain exclusive distribution rights, and the pirates decided instead to simply alter the deal, threatening that they would alter it further if they fought back at all. The analogy is so completely self-evident, I don't know why more people haven't picked up on it. Of course, when the publishers fought back, pirate revisionists jumped on the opportunity to retroactively blame all their behaviour on the evil companies, but neither I nor congress have forgotten the true order of events.
However, as you pointed out, when you extend the scope somewhat, the publishers can also lay claim to the role of Darth Vader. The problem is that both sides are a bit evil, a bit power-crazed, and a bit socially irresponsible, so Vader's leather glove changes hands from time to time, given the analogy. Fuck both sides of this issue. Currently, fuck pirates that little bit extra. At least the studios try, from time to time, to compromise, and deliver more along the lines of what pirates want. The only pirate I'd ever met who actually compromised the other way in the last decade was me.
Do you know why that Darth Vader meme doesn't work exactly? It's because you've got the roles reversed. It's the pirates who are Darth Vader, not the MPAA. Think about it: the pirates have almost all the power, and it's gone straight to their heads. They are in the position to make veiled threats about altering deals, the deal in this case being copyright law in general. Well, not the law as in what's written on paper, rather what they choose to obey and when. If the publishers fight back, the pirates just alter the deal further, by refusing to buy their stuff on some kind "moral" ground (and download it anyway on the side). In fact, the pirates have altered the deal quite significantly. Apparently now game developers have to include dedicated server support in order for the pirates to consider not ripping them off.
So pirates, ask yourself this: Exactly how much can we condemn the publishers for lashing out as we force-choke them?
And I'm not generally optimistic about human nature. But cell phone usage, I just don't see how this can go on very much longer as it is -- I mean, it's raw uncut assholishness, all the time, and everyone KNOWS it, but for now, they all DO IT anyway.
Well, not quite everyone. I, for one, have never felt that it's raw uncut assholishness. I've never experienced a conversation on a mobile phone that I've actually found obtrusive (although I'm sure they could be made so if someone put in a concerted effort). I guess I've never thought that we are entitled to peace and quiet in public places, certainly not at the expense of our entitlement to communication, so I've never felt that it was rude.
There a huge difference. You can indeed steal Internet service - you are not making a copy - you are actually taking something someone else paid for, i.e. theft.
Do you know how much the artist paid for the copies you take? They have donated both their time and their money into creating it. It's not like they come to them for free, it's just that most of the cost is incurred very early in the creation process.
It depresses me that people think that some people it takes material profit in order to make fraud and theft of service immoral. Apparently you can't commit a crime against a rich person, unless you become one in the process.
If you don't know enough about computers to install Python, you probably don't know enough about computers to learn how to code.
Coding is not a computer skill, it's a logical skill. It's about translating abstract intentions into a well-defined precise logical language. The skill is knowing how to efficiently turn your ideas into instructions that a machine can carry out. That's why it's so transferable between platforms and languages, because it's really a skill that's independent of a computer. It would be more than possible, for example, to teach someone who's never seen a computer to write pseudocode.
Of course, if you care more about convenience than you do about their censorship and not standing up for what's right if it might cost them a buck, go ahead.
Thank you, I certainly will.
If I want erotic fiction with incestuous fantasies, I will simply turn to a store with payment methods other than Paypal. In fact, in light of these events, I would expect stores who do stock such fiction to offer other payment methods anyway. How Paypal is run is Paypal's business, and whether I use it is between me and the sellers. The only negative repercussions that their censorship has, to anyone other than potentially themselves, is a slight inconvenience when changing to a different system of payment. Forgive me if I can't muster the necessary outrage over that.
Well, there's no way for me to say this without sounding like a self-righteous prick, but here goes:
To keep things in perspective though, is a speeding fine was 25 cents, would you be very observant of the rules yourself?... Bottom line is that we're pretty much *all* selfish, we just can't all afford to be.
I'm not that selfish. The penalties are irrelevant to me, because I believe that the traffic rules are important to respect for the safety of all of us, and if I break them, I feel bad within myself, with or without a fine. If I begin a journey late, I simply drive at the speed limit and arrive late, in the hope that the horrible stressful feeling will be my incentive to be more punctual next time, rather than pushing the consequences of my mistake on everyone else on the road, in the form of unsafe driving.
This is what it means to be "moral". It means striving to do the right thing, even when it hurts you personally, regardless of the size of the gun aimed at your head. And no, not everyone is an amoral person.
It's a sad, narrow minded overreaction to the injustices of the past.
This is a common misconception. A hate crime is not a crime against an oppressed minority, it's a crime against both an individual, and a community. While the individual is harmed exactly the same as if it had been levelled at anyone else, it is also designed as a general threat to every other member of the victim's race/sexuality/whatever else the perpetrator took offence to. The crime has more negative consequences than merely the effects to the individual victim alone. To ignore this would be an injustice.
Also, it doesn't even have to be against a minority. For example, we might one day find a white person dead and scalped, with a message "We should have scalped you a long time ago", or something like that. This would be a hate crime.
Because the groupthink does not want you to know it exists, let alone that it controls/. with an iron fist. Surely the groupthink can't exist if it leaves posts like this? No! Don't be fooled by its wily doubletalk! It's just trying to confuse you, so you slip further under its control.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the groupthink wrote that post itself. Hmm...
Here's another example, different in flavour to yours: Braid. At no point does Braid become repetitive or thin. It's consistently challenging, stimulating, and lots and lots of fun throughout its relatively short span. And while it has some semblance of a plot, by no stretch of the imagination does it drive the gameplay.
The yelling "fire" in a theatre scenario is an example of speech having negative physical consequences, contrary to those who claim that free speech is harmless. Actually, free speech is definitely not harmless, and that is one of the reasons we enshrine it so. It is a powerful weapon against corruption and conspiracy. It damages corrupt governments and other organisations. It is precisely because it is so powerful that we find it necessary in our society. But I digress. Let's get back to your issues.
First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel. Slander and libel laws are violations of free speech. Please do not use the analogy to support those (many, many people have... and been wrong).
I agree that this analogy alone cannot justify slander/libel. The situations are functionally quite different. Like I said, the fire scenario is more supposed to be an example of negative consequences from speech, not to justify specific censorship laws. At most, it should be used to open the table up to discussion about censorship laws in general, now that it has been established that there can be significant trade-offs to having absolutely free speech. To justify slander/libel, another argument, specific to these laws, is needed. Specifically, does spreading lies about a person deliberately harm that person, and does the harm from this outweigh any chilling effects that this law would cause? I think the answer to the first question is an easy "yes", but the second question is a lot harder to answer.
Second problem: why is it never the fault of the people trampling others, or the organizers who set the situation up to be dangerous to begin with? Of course, it would be quite annoying if people constantly were yelling fire... yet, false fire alarms are actually pretty common. False security lock downs, too. Essentially, at what point is it the fault of the people listening to the guy yelling fire and trampling someone? I'd say, from the moment it happens. Consider if there actually was a fire - how does the situation change? Where does the fault go for someone being trampled if it was really a fire and it happened? If it can't rest with the person raising the alarm, where is it? Was it there all along?
Fault often cannot be ascribed to a specific party. Sometimes the independent actions of several people are all causally relevant to some kind of detrimental event occurring. Sometimes there is no fault at all. As such, it's not really valid reasoning to deduce fault by eliminating various parties.
In the case of people being trampled without a fire, I would blame (in no specific order) the person who called fire, the people who trampled the victim (or who otherwise behaved in a reckless manner), the theatre for not having sufficient fire exits (if that's an issue), and the victim if there was any stupid behaviour that caused him specifically to be trampled. With a fire, I would also blame the fire (and whoever caused it), and blame the guy who called "fire" significantly less. The person who calls fire simply unleashes the inherent danger of the situation, but this does not make him blameless. His choices and corresponding actions caused the situation to be such that someone dies. Without that action, that person would have lived.
Perhaps we need a better example. Let's say I ring a very large hospital, and claim that there are several high-powered explosives hidden about the building, and that I'm going to detonate them in exactly 30 minutes. There are no explosives, but they don't know this. They proceed to evacuate the building, costing them many, many thousands of dollars, and possibly causing some of their sicker patients to deteriorate (maybe if they're in quarantine, or something like that). Where does the fault lie? It's not going to be the hospital staff for believing me. They must tak
It's really not true, at least, not 100% true. I've met some stunning women (like model material; some of them actually working as models), all of whom were very nice, and only a few of which were perennially insane. Most of the perennially insane ones were only insane when they were having some kind of drama with their boyfriend. If you're happy not to get into a relationship, they're often perfectly lovely people. If you're looking for a relationship, you do need to be a little more careful, but it's still possible to find a well-rounded, seriously hot girlfriend. It can happen!
I guess the implicit assumption that we do not share here is that you are not necessarily in the wrong morally for violating someone's legal rights. I would say (and have argued this extensively for various cases in the past) that it is morally wrong to violate anyone's rights, be they moral or legal, thereby breaking the distinction between them. Without going into an extensive discussion about it, the meat of my argument is that, simply by our society granting people their right, they are led to expect that right of theirs to be honoured. In breaking this expectation, you can (and often do) harm people, in the same way that breaking a promise or contract can harm the other party.
Copyright is an excellent example of this. Many, many artists create their works under copyright. They are told by our society that in creating and releasing their works to the public, we will give them the exclusive power to copy it (to within fair use, for a given period of time). So, the artist outlays whatever time/money commitment is necessary (they might have to scale back their job, leave it altogether, take out a bank loan for equipment, etc), creates the work and distributes it to the country. He knows that there is no guarantee that his work will sell anything, but he can expect the work to return an amount proportional to demand, like any other industry has come to expect.
Now, when people copy this, they break this promise to the artist. It means that the artist is robbed of the proportional returns that he is entitled to. It also means the artist's chance of repaying any bank loans has diminished, and that scaling back his job was no longer a sensible decision. This may be one of the slightly more extreme examples, but at least you can see that violating a person's legal rights, such as copyright, can actually harm the person. That's why I don't place a distinction between moral and legal rights, or at least why I think copyright is also a moral right.
Again, absolutely no regard for my point. Again, no rebuttals offered against my arguments. All you've done is managed to do is (attempt to) insult me. Classic propaganda.
Oh, and who says I can't present a cogent argument while pissed off? If you don't want me pissed off, then perhaps you should actually put forward something decent in this discussion. Otherwise, I would advise not replying, and thereby further digging yourself into this hole.
Sarcasm? I meant every word. You are a slimy little hypocrite. What makes you think propaganda is so evil? I'll give you a hint: it's not the people who produce it. It's the propaganda itself: senseless drivel often spouted by shills and scumbags, who care not about the truth, about education, or about reason. It is characterised by its total lack of any kind of sensible reason, relying on the comfortable fallacies (ad hominems, strawmen, repetition of slogans, appeal to authority, etc) to push certain views onto people while dissuading them from using common fucking sense in case they see that it's full of shit.
All I read from your post was such senseless drivel. You want my point? Why not start with my original post? It probably should have been read before you replied, but reading now would be better than dragging out yet another canned response for a strawman argument.
See here's the issue: I hate propaganda, no matter who spews it. Calling me myopic, I can take, especially if you have a good reason for doing so. I like good reasoning, but when mine is countered with such tawdry, run-of-the-mill sloganist excrement, I get a little pissed off. Oh, "blah blah blah coporate propaganda blah blah blah brainwash blah blah sheeple". Great argument. You said that I would look stupid if I disagreed with you. I don't want to look stupid, so I should just agree with you. Hooray for thinking for myself!
It only pisses me off because people fall for it when they really, truly shouldn't. And you know people fall for it; it's a tried and true method. Whatever it takes to brainwash the masses into agreeing with you, so you can mould the laws the way you prefer them. Jesus christ, if you don't already work for the RIAA or MPAA, they should hire you ASAP; I'm pretty sure you do the whole propaganda thing more effectively than both put together.
I'd argue that running a site like ThePirateBay requires significant work and provides value to its users. It would be just as silly to say Google has made every single dollar at the expense of someone else. Or that the yellow pages make their money at the expense other people...
Sure, running any kind of operation, legitimate or not, requires work. Sure, perhaps whatever seedy clientele you may attract, be they looking for a free song or a contracted hit, may find your services quite valuable. But that alone does not justify your actions, or even have any moral bearing whatsoever. It is not incorrect to claim that the success of a firm of hitmen comes at the expense of human lives, even though significant work is put into making the trade.
This is what it all boils down to and I wholeheartedly disagree.
Well, if this is indeed what your agreement boils down to, then I've more or less done my job. You at least see that, if the behaviour that the pirate bay encourages, and makes its living off, is morally wrong, then it itself is morally wrong. If this is not the case, then I wouldn't really say that it boils down to this issue.
It's interesting that you didn't so much pull me up on whether copying is moral or not, rather you disagree that it's a right. I'm not really sure how you can disagree with that; it's a legally granted right. I mean, perhaps you don't believe that violating someone's rights isn't necessarily immoral, but disagreeing that it's a right in the first place doesn't seem sensible.
a) Failed to produce any actual reasoning (just stated some random bs) b) Failed to acknowledge my reasoning (let alone address it), and c) Presented some bullshit that's designed to convince through ad hominems and pre-packaged slogans, while d) Accusing another party of of propaganda?
Did anyone order a metric fuckton of irony? Because I sure as hell didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
They already have a microtransactions store. It's called iTunes.
That's probably because it's news for nerds, not news for computer engineers. The days when there was a natural bias on the internet towards computer geeks is over. Nerds on the internet come in all flavours now.
It's not.
Here's the problem: when completely free is an alternative, no price significantly above zero will seem honest for long. Look how quickly the "It's just a copy. It doesn't cost anything." bullshit spread around slashdot. Look at the piracy rates of mobile apps. It's so very, very easy to rationalise your way out of feeling guilty for weaselling out of the smallest fees.
I'm not saying that pirates are like Darth Vader in every way, I'm saying for the purposes of this analogy, the black leather glove fits much better on the pirates than the publishers. Some of the things I've heard pirates say right here on /. almost transliterates to "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.". Now, I can tell by your proudly one-eyed, cherry-picked assessment of the **AA that you're not their biggest fan, but the fact is they have no real power over the pirates.
They made their deal with the pirates (foolishly, as some may say) that they would invest hugely in entertainment for them in exchange for honouring certain exclusive distribution rights, and the pirates decided instead to simply alter the deal, threatening that they would alter it further if they fought back at all. The analogy is so completely self-evident, I don't know why more people haven't picked up on it. Of course, when the publishers fought back, pirate revisionists jumped on the opportunity to retroactively blame all their behaviour on the evil companies, but neither I nor congress have forgotten the true order of events.
However, as you pointed out, when you extend the scope somewhat, the publishers can also lay claim to the role of Darth Vader. The problem is that both sides are a bit evil, a bit power-crazed, and a bit socially irresponsible, so Vader's leather glove changes hands from time to time, given the analogy. Fuck both sides of this issue. Currently, fuck pirates that little bit extra. At least the studios try, from time to time, to compromise, and deliver more along the lines of what pirates want. The only pirate I'd ever met who actually compromised the other way in the last decade was me.
Do you know why that Darth Vader meme doesn't work exactly? It's because you've got the roles reversed. It's the pirates who are Darth Vader, not the MPAA. Think about it: the pirates have almost all the power, and it's gone straight to their heads. They are in the position to make veiled threats about altering deals, the deal in this case being copyright law in general. Well, not the law as in what's written on paper, rather what they choose to obey and when. If the publishers fight back, the pirates just alter the deal further, by refusing to buy their stuff on some kind "moral" ground (and download it anyway on the side). In fact, the pirates have altered the deal quite significantly. Apparently now game developers have to include dedicated server support in order for the pirates to consider not ripping them off.
So pirates, ask yourself this: Exactly how much can we condemn the publishers for lashing out as we force-choke them?
Well, not quite everyone. I, for one, have never felt that it's raw uncut assholishness. I've never experienced a conversation on a mobile phone that I've actually found obtrusive (although I'm sure they could be made so if someone put in a concerted effort). I guess I've never thought that we are entitled to peace and quiet in public places, certainly not at the expense of our entitlement to communication, so I've never felt that it was rude.
Do you know how much the artist paid for the copies you take? They have donated both their time and their money into creating it. It's not like they come to them for free, it's just that most of the cost is incurred very early in the creation process.
It depresses me that people think that some people it takes material profit in order to make fraud and theft of service immoral. Apparently you can't commit a crime against a rich person, unless you become one in the process.
We all know Sony will just remove the cell processor functionality in a few updates time.
Coding is not a computer skill, it's a logical skill. It's about translating abstract intentions into a well-defined precise logical language. The skill is knowing how to efficiently turn your ideas into instructions that a machine can carry out. That's why it's so transferable between platforms and languages, because it's really a skill that's independent of a computer. It would be more than possible, for example, to teach someone who's never seen a computer to write pseudocode.
Thank you, I certainly will.
If I want erotic fiction with incestuous fantasies, I will simply turn to a store with payment methods other than Paypal. In fact, in light of these events, I would expect stores who do stock such fiction to offer other payment methods anyway. How Paypal is run is Paypal's business, and whether I use it is between me and the sellers. The only negative repercussions that their censorship has, to anyone other than potentially themselves, is a slight inconvenience when changing to a different system of payment. Forgive me if I can't muster the necessary outrage over that.
What an excellent quote! I've never heard that one before.
Well, there's no way for me to say this without sounding like a self-righteous prick, but here goes:
I'm not that selfish. The penalties are irrelevant to me, because I believe that the traffic rules are important to respect for the safety of all of us, and if I break them, I feel bad within myself, with or without a fine. If I begin a journey late, I simply drive at the speed limit and arrive late, in the hope that the horrible stressful feeling will be my incentive to be more punctual next time, rather than pushing the consequences of my mistake on everyone else on the road, in the form of unsafe driving.
This is what it means to be "moral". It means striving to do the right thing, even when it hurts you personally, regardless of the size of the gun aimed at your head. And no, not everyone is an amoral person.
I get the aversion to influenza; it makes you sick. What do the homosexuals do to you?
This is a common misconception. A hate crime is not a crime against an oppressed minority, it's a crime against both an individual, and a community. While the individual is harmed exactly the same as if it had been levelled at anyone else, it is also designed as a general threat to every other member of the victim's race/sexuality/whatever else the perpetrator took offence to. The crime has more negative consequences than merely the effects to the individual victim alone. To ignore this would be an injustice.
Also, it doesn't even have to be against a minority. For example, we might one day find a white person dead and scalped, with a message "We should have scalped you a long time ago", or something like that. This would be a hate crime.
Because the groupthink does not want you to know it exists, let alone that it controls /. with an iron fist. Surely the groupthink can't exist if it leaves posts like this? No! Don't be fooled by its wily doubletalk! It's just trying to confuse you, so you slip further under its control.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the groupthink wrote that post itself. Hmm...
Here's another example, different in flavour to yours: Braid. At no point does Braid become repetitive or thin. It's consistently challenging, stimulating, and lots and lots of fun throughout its relatively short span. And while it has some semblance of a plot, by no stretch of the imagination does it drive the gameplay.
The yelling "fire" in a theatre scenario is an example of speech having negative physical consequences, contrary to those who claim that free speech is harmless. Actually, free speech is definitely not harmless, and that is one of the reasons we enshrine it so. It is a powerful weapon against corruption and conspiracy. It damages corrupt governments and other organisations. It is precisely because it is so powerful that we find it necessary in our society. But I digress. Let's get back to your issues.
I agree that this analogy alone cannot justify slander/libel. The situations are functionally quite different. Like I said, the fire scenario is more supposed to be an example of negative consequences from speech, not to justify specific censorship laws. At most, it should be used to open the table up to discussion about censorship laws in general, now that it has been established that there can be significant trade-offs to having absolutely free speech. To justify slander/libel, another argument, specific to these laws, is needed. Specifically, does spreading lies about a person deliberately harm that person, and does the harm from this outweigh any chilling effects that this law would cause? I think the answer to the first question is an easy "yes", but the second question is a lot harder to answer.
Fault often cannot be ascribed to a specific party. Sometimes the independent actions of several people are all causally relevant to some kind of detrimental event occurring. Sometimes there is no fault at all. As such, it's not really valid reasoning to deduce fault by eliminating various parties.
In the case of people being trampled without a fire, I would blame (in no specific order) the person who called fire, the people who trampled the victim (or who otherwise behaved in a reckless manner), the theatre for not having sufficient fire exits (if that's an issue), and the victim if there was any stupid behaviour that caused him specifically to be trampled. With a fire, I would also blame the fire (and whoever caused it), and blame the guy who called "fire" significantly less. The person who calls fire simply unleashes the inherent danger of the situation, but this does not make him blameless. His choices and corresponding actions caused the situation to be such that someone dies. Without that action, that person would have lived.
Perhaps we need a better example. Let's say I ring a very large hospital, and claim that there are several high-powered explosives hidden about the building, and that I'm going to detonate them in exactly 30 minutes. There are no explosives, but they don't know this. They proceed to evacuate the building, costing them many, many thousands of dollars, and possibly causing some of their sicker patients to deteriorate (maybe if they're in quarantine, or something like that). Where does the fault lie? It's not going to be the hospital staff for believing me. They must tak
It's really not true, at least, not 100% true. I've met some stunning women (like model material; some of them actually working as models), all of whom were very nice, and only a few of which were perennially insane. Most of the perennially insane ones were only insane when they were having some kind of drama with their boyfriend. If you're happy not to get into a relationship, they're often perfectly lovely people. If you're looking for a relationship, you do need to be a little more careful, but it's still possible to find a well-rounded, seriously hot girlfriend. It can happen!
They didn't find out about each other, did they? That would have been awkward...
I guess the implicit assumption that we do not share here is that you are not necessarily in the wrong morally for violating someone's legal rights. I would say (and have argued this extensively for various cases in the past) that it is morally wrong to violate anyone's rights, be they moral or legal, thereby breaking the distinction between them. Without going into an extensive discussion about it, the meat of my argument is that, simply by our society granting people their right, they are led to expect that right of theirs to be honoured. In breaking this expectation, you can (and often do) harm people, in the same way that breaking a promise or contract can harm the other party.
Copyright is an excellent example of this. Many, many artists create their works under copyright. They are told by our society that in creating and releasing their works to the public, we will give them the exclusive power to copy it (to within fair use, for a given period of time). So, the artist outlays whatever time/money commitment is necessary (they might have to scale back their job, leave it altogether, take out a bank loan for equipment, etc), creates the work and distributes it to the country. He knows that there is no guarantee that his work will sell anything, but he can expect the work to return an amount proportional to demand, like any other industry has come to expect.
Now, when people copy this, they break this promise to the artist. It means that the artist is robbed of the proportional returns that he is entitled to. It also means the artist's chance of repaying any bank loans has diminished, and that scaling back his job was no longer a sensible decision. This may be one of the slightly more extreme examples, but at least you can see that violating a person's legal rights, such as copyright, can actually harm the person. That's why I don't place a distinction between moral and legal rights, or at least why I think copyright is also a moral right.
Again, absolutely no regard for my point. Again, no rebuttals offered against my arguments. All you've done is managed to do is (attempt to) insult me. Classic propaganda.
Oh, and who says I can't present a cogent argument while pissed off? If you don't want me pissed off, then perhaps you should actually put forward something decent in this discussion. Otherwise, I would advise not replying, and thereby further digging yourself into this hole.
Sarcasm? I meant every word. You are a slimy little hypocrite. What makes you think propaganda is so evil? I'll give you a hint: it's not the people who produce it. It's the propaganda itself: senseless drivel often spouted by shills and scumbags, who care not about the truth, about education, or about reason. It is characterised by its total lack of any kind of sensible reason, relying on the comfortable fallacies (ad hominems, strawmen, repetition of slogans, appeal to authority, etc) to push certain views onto people while dissuading them from using common fucking sense in case they see that it's full of shit.
All I read from your post was such senseless drivel. You want my point? Why not start with my original post? It probably should have been read before you replied, but reading now would be better than dragging out yet another canned response for a strawman argument.
See here's the issue: I hate propaganda, no matter who spews it. Calling me myopic, I can take, especially if you have a good reason for doing so. I like good reasoning, but when mine is countered with such tawdry, run-of-the-mill sloganist excrement, I get a little pissed off. Oh, "blah blah blah coporate propaganda blah blah blah brainwash blah blah sheeple". Great argument. You said that I would look stupid if I disagreed with you. I don't want to look stupid, so I should just agree with you. Hooray for thinking for myself!
It only pisses me off because people fall for it when they really, truly shouldn't. And you know people fall for it; it's a tried and true method. Whatever it takes to brainwash the masses into agreeing with you, so you can mould the laws the way you prefer them. Jesus christ, if you don't already work for the RIAA or MPAA, they should hire you ASAP; I'm pretty sure you do the whole propaganda thing more effectively than both put together.
Sure, running any kind of operation, legitimate or not, requires work. Sure, perhaps whatever seedy clientele you may attract, be they looking for a free song or a contracted hit, may find your services quite valuable. But that alone does not justify your actions, or even have any moral bearing whatsoever. It is not incorrect to claim that the success of a firm of hitmen comes at the expense of human lives, even though significant work is put into making the trade.
Well, if this is indeed what your agreement boils down to, then I've more or less done my job. You at least see that, if the behaviour that the pirate bay encourages, and makes its living off, is morally wrong, then it itself is morally wrong. If this is not the case, then I wouldn't really say that it boils down to this issue.
It's interesting that you didn't so much pull me up on whether copying is moral or not, rather you disagree that it's a right. I'm not really sure how you can disagree with that; it's a legally granted right. I mean, perhaps you don't believe that violating someone's rights isn't necessarily immoral, but disagreeing that it's a right in the first place doesn't seem sensible.
Wait, so you:
a) Failed to produce any actual reasoning (just stated some random bs)
b) Failed to acknowledge my reasoning (let alone address it), and
c) Presented some bullshit that's designed to convince through ad hominems and pre-packaged slogans, while
d) Accusing another party of of propaganda?
Did anyone order a metric fuckton of irony? Because I sure as hell didn't.