Views on Piracy?

[The Man]

What is YOUR personal view on Piracy on the internet. I am in no way advocating piracy, but I thought this would be an interesting topic.

[Apoi_Viitor]

I do it all the time.

[AnonymousOne]

What is YOUR personal view on Piracy on the internet. I am in no way advocating piracy, but I thought this would be an interesting topic.

I am, in principle against theft. I would think it would be a "dickish" thing to do to take someone's bicycle. They wouldn't have access to it, and it would be unfair.

However, the beauty of piracy is that, instead of just taking the bike away from you and giving it to me. I make a copy of your bike and can use it as well. I support all instances of violating intellectual "property".

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[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I think more importantly we should be asking why the fuck are we paying anything up to thousands of dollars (some software) for data that in actual material terms costs what, the couple of millipenny's worth of electricity it takes to copy it?

[OhYesIdid]

I do it all the time.

Me too, I believe in a free culture, digital anarchism, or whatever the buzzword is these days. If I could choose I'd say Buccaneer. I steal cattle.

[Zav]

I am a pirate, hence my avatar, user title, and signature. The video posted by AnonymousOne is pretty cute, and it shows the basic principle behind piracy. Intellectual property is an artificial extension of real-world scarcity and needn't exist. Copyleft prevents the evils of both copyright and piracy: artificial scarcity in the former, and using a free product for profit in the latter. All media should be copylefted, in my opinion. It would make both creators and users happy.

[OhYesIdid]

Copyleft...yes, this'll do

[CommunityBeliever]

Sharing is caring.

[Kamos]

I don't pirate games, because if the game developers don't get their profits, we'll get no more games. However, there are situations in which I think piracy is acceptable.

[Ocean Seal]

Piracy is not just convenient, its desirable for society. Any attempt to stop piracy just shows that the capitalist class is inefficient. Because if we can create abundance of something, and they stop us, they withhold progress. Imagine that we could feed any child in the world at the click of a button by copying food. Would that be piracy, because it would cut into the profits of food companies? They would say so, but any reasonable person would infer that the system is what's wrong, and that instead of a market system we require the planned economy so that everyone who works on products which can be infinitely reproduced, gets a reasonable compensation for their labor. But that cannot exist with the market economy. Piracy is in effect a reason to abolish capitalism, because capitalism cannot deal with abundance which piracy creates.

[pax et aequalitas]

In case of music it is sometimes even better for the artist. In the Netherlands so far downloading of music has been legal, though uploading was not. Now they want to make it illegal and the union for the musicians said they are against it.

The reason why is simple: Most artists don't earn fortunes from the selling of CDs, they earn their bread mostly through concerts and thanks to the internet their music can spread all over the world much easier and quicker. The selling of CDs mostly earns the labels money as well.