begin quoting Jeff Dooley as of Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 05:56:35PM -0700: > On 9/2/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >This is incredible....I can't believe Pirate Bay is doing > >what they are doing. > > I don't quite understand it either. People who cheer the GNU GPL are > cheering for copyright protection too.
And not just any old copyright protection, but a rather grasping sort of copyright that seeks to bring all under it's view of the world. > Setting aside the DMCA, DRM, > lawyers, and other really obnoxious MPAA & RIAA behaviours, isn't > dling content still unethical behavior? If you go around downloading copyrighted material that is widely available just to avoid paying for it, then that's pretty close to a cut-and-dried "yes" as I can think of. (You set aside DMCA/DRM/etc., which go a long way towards making a work _not_ "widely available".) > If I politely ask you to choose between paying for an entertainment > service, or doing without, wouldn't ethics demand you abide by my > simple request? I'd say no, as your asking make no difference. If you print, in the frontspiece of a book, a polite request that the reader pay the publisher (and by implication, the author) for each an every time they choose to read that book, the reader is in no way obligated to respect that request. If that book (or DVD) is in a library, and a patron checks it out, they are likewise not (ethically) obligated to respect that request. So "politely asking" isn't sufficient. > Is it okay to sneak into the baseball park or should > you have to buy a ticket like everyone else? Are you causing harm? Would you have purchased a ticket otherwise? Are you taking up space or other resources that paying patrons would benefit from? Are you interfering with the enjoyment of the game by the paying patrons? Are you causing damage to anything not owned by you (e.g. cutting locks)? > If you release a program under GPL, and somebody else "pirates" it, > aren't you going to get upset? (and by pirate, I mean copy it and > release only a binary) This is where we see that the RIAA and the MPAA aren't *that* out of line with "average human behavior"... :) > If I think watching Cars is overpriced, can't I just choose to do > without? This definitely doesn't count as stealing bread to survive, > does it? Absolutely not. And if you liked it enough to steal it, why wouldn't you buy it, so that more of that sort of thing will be made? I try to make it a point to go see some movies in the theater -- mostly Pixar, hong kong (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, anything with Jackie Chan, etc.), and many movies adapted from comic-books -- even with the inflated prices, just because I want to encourage more such movies to be made. A "put your money where your mouth is" kinda thing. It was very sad that _Serenity_ didn't do well enough in the theaters to make it viable. But at least I know that I did my part, and didn't hurt the chances of having additional movies in that series by playing the part of a thief. > My only problem with BigMedia is that they're insisting that Copyright > last forever when clearly it shouldn't. Eventually it needs to go into > the public domain. But I don't necessarily think that needs to be the > very day it hits the big screen. Oh, and yeah... the US doesn't get to > dictate the law everywhere on the planet either, but I don't mind > content owners taking true, and deliberate thieves to task (to a > reasonable level... obviously not hundreds of thousands of dollars). Yup. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
