Disclaimer: This post contains hypothetical examples and shouldn't be considered admission or approval of anything.
a thief is a thief is a thief. I have about as much respect for a theif as i do a rapist. I think every single one of em should be persicuted, prosicuted, fined, jailed, etc.
Interesting. Do you also think rape and theft should be punished equally?
What about petty theft and murder? Do you respect a pickpocket less or more than a murderer?
Also, persecution is a process in which individual or group is illegitimately harassed, accused or punished for something (anything that the persecuting group or person can think of). Prosecution is a legal process of officially accusing a person of committing a crime.
People shouldn't steal something and think that it was okay because the likely hood of them getting caught is slim. That's just straight bs. Why anyone would support this behavior and mentality is beyond me... get off your bum ass and go pay for your ****!
You're making an assumption that people think piracy is ok because risk of getting caught is negligible. In fact, I believe people pirate stuff because they do not view it as being wrong, even though they might know it to be illegal.
Also, theft incurs a loss. What is being stolen, though? The typical argument against piracy involves a lot of hypotheticals, including "possible sales" or "lost revenue". I like to call these "virtual losses" since it's obvious they aren't real losses, and it's hard to determine their potential impact on the sales just by equating each downloader as one lost buyer.
By the way, are we making an assumption here that there should always be a price paid by the user for viewing a film or listening to music or playing a game? Perhaps instead of a physical media, we should be buying licenses or permissions to use some media - maybe even include a clause that says how many times we are allowed to watch a movie with certain license, or maybe a limited time frame during which we may use the media as much as we can or want?
If so, should that price be uniform and always the same? What about renting a movie/cd/game instead of buying a copy of your own? Or how about borrowing it from a friend to watch it, then returning it?
That said, should the government spend millions of dollars to enforce copywright laws? I don't believe that to be the answer. It should lie solely in the hands of the manufacturers to protect their works... if someone steals it, go to the police file a report... just like any one of us would have to do if someone breaks into our homes, our car, etc.
These folks work too damn hard (most of the time) to keep the world entertained and if they want to charge people to use it, so be it, thats up to them. If you don't like it, too f'n bad, either pay for it or do with out.
Ah, but I do want to be entertained! The problem here is, does the price tag match the value that the product gives to me in my opinion? If not, can I haggle the price lower? Can I return the product if I think it wasn't worth the price?
What you're saying is that for entertainment industry, people should just accept that they have to buy a pig in a poke.
Luckily, there are perfectly legitimate methods of watching movies and listening to music without any specific cost to them.
It's called public libraries, and they sometimes also offer books for free, and indeed I have heard of some libraries borrowing computer games as well.
Imagine that - being able to borrow something like that, and not having to ever touch the internet to do it.
Now, you might argue that the libraries pay royalties for their right to borrow items, and you would be right to say that. They are usually funded by tax money and provide a wonderful service.
However, ethically this presents an interesting dilemma. If I can get a film from a library, or I can get the same exact film from some torrent, without the trouble of actually walking into the library and grabbing the physical copy of the film, I can obviously get the same entertainment experience from it either way, and with same cost to my person.
Is there some significant difference between the method of acquisition that makes one way a theft and one way legitimate?
Same can be applied to public broadcasts of TV series and films. It is trivial to save a broadcast for personal use, and peruse it at any later date, instead of buying an outrageously priced (but possibly nicely packaged) DVD box set of the series, or a movie. The broadcast is paid, and generates revenue for the artists, producers and distributing company, and everyone is happy - but somehow, if I download an episode of tv-series or a movie, it becomes piracy.
There's a mismatch here somewhere, and I don't know where.
By the way, people have been doing this ever since VHS - digital TV just makes things even more convenient.
In fact, here we get into the core of the issue. The entertainment industry, like any business, relies on the laws of supply and demand to run itself. But with digital copying, it is trivial to make a copy - so this means there is much more supply than demand, and the prices should technically go down - except they're being hiked up in desperate attempt to cover virtual losses, which further reduces the demand of the legitimate copies.
Some of you might be familiar with the term
artificial scarcity. That's what the entertainment industry is forced to try to maintain, even with the overabundant supply of (illegitimate) digital copies.
Your point about the people working hard to keep us entertained is a perfectly legitimate one; however, looking at the way of living of the most visible members of entertainment industry, it doesn't occur to most people to think that they require economical support.
To be plain, people think it's unnecessary to give their money to them so they can have another solid gold Humvee. And I'm not talking just about the artists - they get only a fraction of the price you pay in royalties. The rest goes to fund the enormous bureaucracy of the media giant corporations that run the whole business (again, based on artificial scarcity).
Small name artists who DON'T yet have a solid gold Humvee, only have one or two albums out... to them, recognition is probably more valuable than the direct royalties from album sales. Their stuff being distributed online from peer to peer can be a very powerful advertising channel, especially if the majority of their revenue comes from live gigs rather than studio album sales. But this argument has been played through a lot of times, and there are people with strong opinions for and against - thus I would leave this for individual artists to decide.
What I'm saying here is that right and wrong, good and bad don't always coincide with lawful and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate. It is difficult to use existing terms to describe what goes on, but "theft" is a decidedly inaccurate term to describe online piracy. "Exploitation" might be a better term, but then we all exploit methods of getting the same goods by paying less (such as libraries or borrowing a game or movie or music album from a friend).
It is hard to draw a line between downloading something and borrowing something from a friend physically.
Now, re-distributing things, that's where things get hairier. Technically, the P2P networking (torrents) means you're continuously distributing the stuff you're downloading, which is the same as making a copy of the media you borrowed from library or a friend, then making copies of it to hand forward.
This, also, has been going on for as long as C-cassettes have been in existence. People have been making copies of LP albums of music, copies of VHS films, copies of CD audio, DVD films, and copies of BluRay films. There really is nothing conceptually new in this behaviour, only the response from the entertainment industry has changed.
Why? Because they haven't been able to enforce private taxes on every new storage media to cut their virtual losses, like they did to C-cassettes, VHS cassettes and optical storage medias (CD/DVD-R's). I know they are trying hard to have that private tax on storage medias such as USB sticks, SD cards, cell phones, hard disk drives and probably paper since you can print copyrighted words on it.
This private tax is essentially something that is supposed to rely on assumption that some of the storage media sold will be used for illegal copying, but somehow it still doesn't justify the copying done (one would think that since they get compensated for it from the price of these products, it would be okay to copy anything on these medias, eh?), and only serves to hike up the prices of said medias to inconvenience everyone - including those who have no interest in using the media for any illegitimate purposes at all.
All in all, I'll say this: I have infinitely more respect towards the artists who actually make this stuff, than those who distribute it, set an arbitrary price tag for it, and give the scraps to the aforementioned artists, and rest is used to fund the distribution business and bureaucracy, lobby for some more draconian copyright laws to preserve the status quo, and to pay for lawyers.