Warez Site Gets Owned (from ATSNN)

I have a friend, a religious guy who donates his tithe of 10% to the church, who downloads songs and feels that these companies are not losing his money because he would not buy this material anyway. I've tried explaining that if you use, view or listen to copyrighted material without paying for it then you're stealing. You can't go steal a Porsche and drive it and say no one is losing money because you couldn't afford to buy the car anyway.

Originally posted by redhat
I have a friend, a religious guy who donates his tithe of 10% to the church, who downloads songs and feels that these companies are not losing his money because he would not buy this material anyway.

If he wouldn't buy it anyway, the music industry has lost no money, the artists have gained support and an audience for their music. A man who gives 10% to his ideological controllers should be encouraged to think outside the box once in a while.

Originally posted by redhat
I've tried explaining that if you use, view or listen to copyrighted material without paying for it then you're stealing. You can't go steal a Porsche and drive it and say no one is losing money because you couldn't afford to buy the car anyway.

Information should be free. Porsches are not constructed of 0's and 1's hovering in a digital non-space. Porsches are inventory, bought and stored at enormous cost, up front cost, and the only way to mitigate that cost is to sell the car for a profit. When you steal a car, you not only steal the sellers profit, you steal their material investment.

That is not the case with information. If you take information from some one, they have lost no material investment, and they are still free to give or sell the information to other people. Copyright laws are a good idea to prevent plagiarism, but clearly that's not the issue in this case.

When the cure for AIDS gets trademarked and copyright protected, do people have the right to steal it to cure themselves? Of course they do. Intelectual property grants inteligence to those who receive it. Inteligence cures ignorance. Ignorance is a fatal disease.