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Originally Posted by syrguy1969
I appreciate your time and effort in posting this, but you can't mean that stealing AND distributing information that has the distribution rights owned by a person/corporation is not considered stealing? I an not saying your incorrect, I just can't seem to wrap my mind around the fact that if my sole income was a line of applications unique in nature that I developed and sold is ripped off, and distributed widely for free is not stealing!
I don't know the inner workings of developing/distribution, but it seems certain rights, and (for lack of better term) copyrights would be affected here, and from what I DO know of copyright law, that is wrong.
Besides, you contradicted yourself arguing there is nothing wrong with piracy, but it is still wrong....you can't have it both ways, either it is right or wrong!!
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I did not say it isn't wrong because it is not stealing. That is something you have read into my arguments. I have stated it is neither theft nor stealing according to a legal definition. I may have not been clear. For theft you are prosecuted in a criminal trial. For copyright you are sued under civil statutes. Those are two completely different things. There has been one criminal prosecution recently for copyright and the conviction will likley be overturned on appeal as it was based on a bad reading of law.
It is wrong because you have not been given permission by the person who owns the rights to the software. Theft requires physical property. This is why if you steal a CD you go to jail. If you offer, for sharing or download, copyright material the RIAA, <insert organization or developer here>, takes you to court for a monetary judgement and there is no jail time involved. It is simply not theft by the legal definition of the word. To call it theft and to call pirates thieves is an attempt to play on emotion, an emotion which the pirates likely care little about, and it is also a bad use of language. When you speak of legal concepts you should be clear on the concept.
Infringing copyright is wrong. It is not wrong because it is theft. It is wrong because the person, organization, or so on has not granted you permission to use their non-physical data in the manner in which you are using it. This is not theft but rather infringement. You have not stolen any property from them. You could make a case for stealing their right to control their ideas but that is also not theft. You do not call someone who infringes on a civil right a thief because they have done so. Much like pirates infrginge upon the creators right to control distribution. It is an infringement of rights not a theft.
My argument is for the developers to make a coherent argument and not use inflated numbers to prove losses that, in all reality, do not exist. TO be perfectly frank I use the GiMP for my photo editing needs. I cannot afford Adobe CS 3. If I did download it and use it could not be a loss for Adobe because I am incapable of purchasing it to begin with. That is where my argument is based and not in that piracy is wrong but it is not wrong.
Piracy is wrong because it is an infringement of rights and not because it is theft. There doesn't have to be any monetary loss at all for piracy to be wrong or for rights to be infringed. My argument is against the namecalling and the leveling of inaccurate terms in the debate. The namecalling has happened right here in this thread, and it always does in this debate, as has the argument:
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Originally Posted by ironliver316
I haven't paid for any of the apps or games on my ppc, but if there weren't piracy and torrents or any other ways to get them for free, I still wouldn't buy them. It really wouldn't hurt me not to have them, and the devs still wouldn't have made any profit from me.
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The argument I am making shows this to be still be the wrong attitude. The person quoted above has taken the rights of the people who make the software away from them. He has not done them any monetary damage because, by his own admission, he wouldn't have bought the programs anyway. He has still harmed the developers by stepping on their rights. His argument is a moot point and fallacious on many levels. It is pure justification without regard to the rights of others. It is a childish argument based on a selfish desire to use the work of others without regard for the rights they have to that work. It matters not one bit that there are no monetary damages the quoted poster is still morally wrong.
I hope I have cleared up any misconceptions about the argument I am trying to make. For the record every piece of code I have ever written is under the GPLv2 and freely available. However I am not an OSS bigot. I fully support the right of any developer to close his source and try to make a profit. I think that business model has seen its day based purely on the laws of economics but anyone is free to try and make it work and likely still can for a short while (please note: the "short while" referenced is a reference to history and not meant to say that the software industry will fall apart in the next decade).
The argument may better be illustrated through an OSS example. My code is available for anyone to use with the sole restriction, for the most part, that they have to share the code they changed, added on, etc. If someone were to take my code, against the license, and roll it up into a closed source piece of software they have stolen nothing from me. They have violated my right to control how my code is used. There is no monetary value attached to my code because it is GPL but I still have rights. My rights as a developer are still violated in exactly the same manner as the developer of closed source software having his programs pirated and yet no theft has taken place.
I am rambling again. I am pretty sure I summed up everything a couple of paragraphs up so I am going to stop before I go too deep into the rabbit hole.