Piracy, warez and You.

[flesh99]

Piracy does not equal theft. This is a common misconception thrown about by people who are on one side of the issue and upset about piracy and rightfully so. You can try and equate piracy to theft of physical property and every single analogy falls flat because programs/music/movies are not physical property. Piracy is not charged in criminal courts by law enforcement officials but rather in civil courts by the person who own the rights to the digital good in question.

I am not an advocate of warez or piracy but I am advocate of using the proper terms to describe what is happening. There is no theft taking place, there is no stealing taking place, there is a violation of the civil laws covering copyright. It is a different matter altogether. I believe the morality of the issue is clear and that copyright shouldn't be infringed but even if it is it is not theft.

The supposed losses from software/music/movie piracy are inflated from the very beginning of any discussion and there are no actual studies to back the figures cited by the likes of MS, Adobe, RIAA, MPAA, and so on. They claim every single piece of infringing material is an actual loss which is complete dross. However the developer posting here claims 10% of the downloads could be losses and while likely a much better number I suspect the true figure is much lower. For there to be an actual loss involved the person who pirated the software would have had to be willing to pay for it in the first place which is easy to see isn't true by reading here and many other places with the same kind of discussion.

To look at from a real perspective the only possible loss from someone who wouldn't have bought the software to begin with is the time invested in development and that loss is spread out amongst all legitimate and illegitimate users so that even with a small platform like WM6 the loss per piece is unquantifiable.

I don't believe the numbers tossed out by the development side of the argument and I don't buy the arguments tossed out by the other side. It is morally wrong to pirate software regardless of your reasons but the development side of the argument shoots themselves in the foot by tossing out bogus numbers and trying to use words like "theft" and "stealing" to describe piracy.

Check any basic economic theory book and you will find that with an infinite good the cost WILL approach zero. It is happening with software and music right now. The business models that allowed these to scarce goods no longer exist or are on their last legs. This law of economics does not mean piracy is alright but rather that the old model of selling software will come to an end.

The long and short of this post, which was rambling and confusing most likely, is that piracy is NOT theft in any shape form or fashion and that it is still wrong without being that. Please do yourself a favor if you are going to argue the morally right side of the issue and don't resort to blatantly false accusation and name calling to try and prove your point.

[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!!

[[sammich]]

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!!

I think he means stealing in the sense of taking and not having for yourself. As in if I stole your car. I would have it, but not you. If it were a digital car, I could 'steal' it from you, but we would both have one.

[flesh99]

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!!

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:

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.

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.

[syrguy1969]

You did explain it a bit better, I do see where your coming from, basically your agreeing with the original intent of this thread....piracy and warez are wrong, but like most things, something developers and us have to deal with (unfortunatly spyware and viruses as well, but thats another thread LOL!!!).

P.S. I would love to see what typw of apps you develope, if you would like to post a site, or something, I am always curious as to what is out there!!! Thanks

[flesh99]

Originally Posted by syrguy1969

You did explain it a bit better, I do see where your coming from, basically your agreeing with the original intent of this thread....piracy and warez are wrong, but like most things, something developers and us have to deal with (unfortunatly spyware and viruses as well, but thats another thread LOL!!!).

P.S. I would love to see what typw of apps you develope, if you would like to post a site, or something, I am always curious as to what is out there!!! Thanks

I don't do apps. I have a patch in an driver for an obsolete webcam for Linux. I am in the process for two plugins for nagios which will be up on nagiosexchange.org sometime soon. I did a backup solution for hacked webservers running the Ensim control panel about 5 years ago that migrated all web sites from an old drive to a new drive preserving account data and capable of migrating from an older version to a newer version. My development right now is pretty much strictly dealing with Nagios in large scale environments, specifically high performance computing, and integration with Ganglia data. But as soon as my plugins are done I'll link ya to 'em.

I also failed at writing a cdg/mp3+g player for Linux because I gave up. I have the decoding done but the interface never seemed to be inspiring enough to work on any further.

[syrguy1969]

That is more than I have been able to fathom of actual app programming....skinning is one thing, but my hat is off to the actual original developers!!

[darster]

The reason why they take piracy to civil courty, is that it is much easier being awarded monetary damages in civil court vs criminal court, and that is the heart of the issue. If you don't own it, it's not yours to take or use without consent of owner. Piracy arises when someone does not purchase the right to USE the product. You really never own the product, just the right to use for personal use. When you purchase the software, you always must click that you agree to their terms before it will download. Pretty simple, but of course people think they can come up with a loophole to justify in their mind that their actions are legitimate.

[jrbaker748]

Many people visit the Warez sites because of the ease of downloading a CAB to use as a trial. If you are looking for a particular program you may have to join several different sites to download what you need to try. With a good Warez site I only need to use one site to find what I need. I know that this is my strategy. I do purchase what I like but most of the programs I use are freeware.

[DavidinCT]

For all the people who are trying to justify piracy, think about it this way.

You work a job, 40+ hours a week, you get your check at the end of the week and it's about 25-40% short, you ask why. Your HR department says "some pirate on the internet took your money, nothing we can do it about it and it will continue to happen."

Think about it this way, then sit back and ask youself why you do it. People need to feed their families too.

Would you create a business just to not make any money ?

I'm not a developer, and not perfect on this subject but, this is the way you should look at it...