I want. :-|

I'm willing to buy your views for 5$ each, so that I get a loan in a bank worth 995 x number of views of his post.

Agreed..

Nope, it isn't. Cars aren't just copied, and won't be in the near future. Not to mention houses bound to land, space. The above analogy of property & information is stupid, which I've been trying to highlight.

I stole from you if and only if you lost something. If I illegally copy a game which I would've never bought in either case, I did not steal it as you did not lose anything.

Append:

In order for it to happen, humans privacy will have to be bridged(as otherwise it won't be simple to prove I downloaded anything illegally).
Furthermore, fines ain't going to change my opinion. One step further: I'm not justifying piracy as well, but only in certain cases.
And by the time this(if ever) going to reach India or Russia(with latest having a "nation torrent tracker" with virtually anything you can imagine perfectly indexed and validated by admins so that quality of a download exceeds original content by far)- life quality in these countries will certainly be close enough to the one in U.S(well if the growth trends somewhat continues)- that me nor ML won't be considering to be justifying piracy in these countries.

Yhea... Yhea... Whatever... Tell it to the FBI.

Not me

Under this circumstance all the natural resources are stolen. That includes all land.

USA is big, it includes some 6 geographical and three political timebelts.. 0.0

I can't know why of course, but here's a version:
You want to be creating your great games, and you feel like pirates(of which Spain is full of) gonna ruin your career.
If your games will be good, they won't. Honestly

Russia, specifically. Both Steam and iTunes have done a lot to convert pirates to actual legitimate paying customers, in a country where piracy is insanely common. Hmmm.

This is somewhat applicable.

I was just telling a friend how things like forums and facebook have replaced a lot of what used to be the "TV time" from when I was a kid.

For all the hate people sometimes put on Facebook for sucking people's time up, it does beat sitting mindlessly in front of a tv, even if the "social interactions" are fake

There's no moral reason why making a copy of something is wrong. What is wrong is taking credit for somebody else's achievements without giving them their share of the credit. The copyright laws are intended to make it possible for authors to profit from their work, as an incentive to create them. So copying is not wrong (in the sense of lost return on investment), except for in a society where authors depend upon free market trade in exchange for their works (and even that is not predictably so, as already explained above).

You need to understand that society only agrees to this because it is believed to be better for society as a whole. It's not about the individual author getting rich; society doesn't care about that person any more than it collectively cares about you (not much; ask anyone out of work, or suffering with health problems, etc.). It's about authors being encouraged and rewarded for exploring intellect and expressing ideas in new and interesting ways. However, the corporations that combat piracy are not the authors of these works, and in most cases are the real freeloaders, enslaving the authors and hoarding most of the profits for themselves.

I have heard that many of the world's biggest music stars don't even make money until their second or third album. Sure, their albums go multiplatinum, but all of the money allegedly goes to the recording company to cover its investment. IOW, all of those sales accomplish nothing more than paying back the machine that forced the intellectual works down the throats of the consumers. In most cases, it sounds like both authors and consumers alike get fucked; only the corporations benefit (I imagine most of the employees of said corporations get fucked as well).

Imagine a Star Trek like era where physical objects can just be "replicated" at negligible or no cost. Say you could replicate a car. Does it hurt anyone to replicate said car? Not really. They probably aren't even aware that you did it (maybe you fell into a wormhole and got transported to a different quadrant ).

In short, nobody is debating that there's potential for lost sales from copyright infringement, and it is illegal under first-world jurisdictions, but governments (AKA corrupt people) do not get to decide what is morally right or wrong. That is determined by the collective, and on a personal level, by every one of us.

I don't currently use "file sharing" applications to acquire music, movies, video games, or any software that I like (though in very rare circumstances I have and do use it to acquire things that I can't overwise acquire, like discontinued albums, or songs that are only released in certain countries). In fact, I think I nearly gave Dario a heart attack when he saw that I had "switched sides" in this debate. I've traditionally been on the anti-copyright infringement side (search the forums). That said, I have slowly begun to understand that it's not just cheap or selfish people that violate copyright laws, and the corporations that are crying about it are far more villainous and damaging than the collective effective of piracy worldwide.

I rather liked how innocently, and yet how accurately Richard Stallman described it in one of his free software speeches. Something along the lines of:

Certainly authors of intellectual works will need to be supported in order to create said works, but the industries that currently dominate these industries are the real leeches, exploiting said authors and reaping most of the benefits. I now believe that the existing system is highly flawed and that the world has changed so drastically that the entire problem needs to be rethought freshly without historical biases. We ideally want to maximize the value of intellectual works, and I don't think that maximizing private corporations' profits at the expense of authors and consumers alike is working.

Well put.

QFT. Laws are written by humans. The same imperfect beings that smoke, drink, steal, and lie (and rape and kill and on and on and on...). Don't assume that the law is the absolute moral truth.

Shhhhhh! Don't give them any ideas. Errr... I mean, intellectual property?

This isn't a fact. It's just as undefined as N pirated copies is $X lost in sales. There is a sweet spot that maximizes profits and I'd be surprised if it changed as a direct result of piracy unpermitted copying. I don't suddenly want to pay more just because other people are getting their copies for free (with the possible exception of supporting my favorite authors that I want to encourage to continue authoring, at my risk). I would expect that increasing the price to counter piracy would actually decrease profit.

Speaking of Native Americans (or Canadians), whose land, freedom, and way of life our forefathers took...

_{Disclaimer: This post was written over the course of approximately 12 hours; keeping up with this thread has proven difficult. I'm sure there are another 10 or 20 (edit: it's actually only 5 though) new posts that I haven't read yet, but if I think it's time to commit anyway and merge later if necessary.}