As is this. If I stole something did I steal something? Uh, yes. Did you copy it? No. Wait, they are the same aren't they? I'm confus!

Ok, I'm bored now. I agree on the moral aspects of why piracy or rather copyright infringement is bad, and there are better ways to try to solve issues than doing what the article said. But the legal term of "stealing" as defined by criminal law in most, or not all, countries is still about losing property or goods in a way where you cannot possess it anymore. Copying doesn't do this. The end results are not the same, as in exactly the same, as indicated by != previously. But this horse is dead and beaten and decayed for many arguments ago.

& where did this happen?
& is there a proof for reply to the above question?

& well.. I do agree piracy may harm creators of the goods, but it makes less harm than the "anti-piracy".

Also the copyrighters of course attempt to earn as much as possible, and push the line as far as possible, thus often successfully keeping intellectual property which belongs to "humanity". (patent wars?)

All this mentality of all-in profit has ill effect on human minds, making authors often unwilling to share their knowledge, and to let people learn from it.. It also pushes various industries to suck money from "people" indirectly (study books, it's insanity in the U.S. afaik)..

Yes there should be various limitations to honor intellectual property, but they must not be any close to where they are now.

What can we do with it? I ignore what I don't like.

Yeah well, it's my point as well.. Out of 10 pirates one for the most is actual potential client. Furthermore, perhaps two out of ten legal users have "pirated" the software before or after buying it. I downloaded(from thepiratebay) SC2 twice, although I bought it legally. I guess you can say Blizzard has lost two potential buyers..

Right.

But the store is out something that actually cost them money to have (purchase, ship, and store). With copying say a song, it didn't cost the producer's anything AT ALL for you to make that copy, and its very unlikely that you'd have bought it anyway, meaning you aren't a potential customer, which means they didn't lose any potential earnings.

I'm not saying its right to commit copyright infringement. But its no where near as bad as real theft.

And I will bet someone a lot of money (a lot to me) that if the content industry got its act together and actually provided a service people want (for what they feel is a reasonable price, or even slightly more than that), people will go out in hordes and pay for stuff. It's a crazy concept, I know. Giving people what they want (convenient, quality content, for a reasonable price). It's insane I tell you.

I'd probably pay for hulu or netflix right now if either one of them had a (decent) service in canada (hulu has none, and netflix canada's library is a tad small).

I hate the "well they weren't a customer in the first place" argument. They obviously did want what was for sale as so were a potential customer. But instead they stole it.

When you make a digital work, you still put every bit of hard work into it that goes into a physical work, with the expectation that if people want it, they'll pay you for it. Because that's the law. The original isn't harmed by copying the bits, but the author is. If his works were going to be taken for free he wouldn't be the time (money) and money into making the product. Just because it's easy to steal it doesn't make it right. All you pirates are basically saying that digital works aren't as valuable as physical ones because you can copy them.

I'm a pirate because I have too many bills to blow money on other things. Ultimately everything will be online and pirating will no longer be an issue, copyright infringement will always be an issue as artists/musicians/etc don't want to have their hard work taken without some kind of compensation as they have to make a living too .

If the bootlegger paid for his copy, he isn't stealing anything

I think this is the crux. How much money is lost by piracy is a matter of guessing. If you can make money by tipping over the estimate one way or the other, there are people willing to do that. There are probably corporate fuckheads who would want to make you pay for driving by an ad of theirs. You know: people who primarily care about money. In a sense all proponents of piracy also do it for the money.
I think the ideal world would be anarchy... and everybody would have perfect judgement. The real value of any good can't be determined yet. And some goods get more value, because corporations have a large industry they are willing to pump money in for expected returns. Too bad a part of that value is 'publicity'. You'll be paying for that. That is also the value you actually increase by pirating... So the sellers feel more peeved about getting no money (I guess).
Wow, it does feel like desecrating a dead horse
[edit]
Forgot to say, the article surely has a sympathetic argument. Also I hate it when I can't play DVD's on the PC. I have a PC set up as DVD-player. I rarely pirate. Only if the internet is the only place where I know I can find it. (Some obscure movies can't even be found there.)
Making laws that devaluate what I have in my hands; that makes me angry.

A while back, there was a claim by the music industry that they'd lost X amount of dollars due to piracy, when somebody checked the figures, it turned out that X amount was several times larger than the total amount of money in the entire world.

Is stealing the formula to turn lead into gold a crime? What if it was stored digitally? It's the taking of intellectual property that is wrong, not the stealing of 1's and 0's.

Excuses.

So I'm going to go in to Blockbuster with this spiel:

"I want to rent a movie, I thought it starred Jimmy Stewart, but the Wikipedia filmography for Jimmy Stewart doesn't have a plot like this. Anyway, he takes in a young teenaged girl who is actually a full grown woman (I forget why she pretends to be a teenager) but this woman starts to fall for him so she lets the facade slip. This girl reminded me of a girl I was going out with at the time, and I'd like to see it again, it seemed to be from the '30's or '40's and I saw it on TV sometime around 1983. Do you have it in stock?"

[EDIT]

That reminds me, the blank CD's and DVD's you buy are substantially more expensive because the media industry did a pre-emptive strike to recoup the piracy losses that those blanks are enabling.

Why do people think they're entitled to the kind of treatment they want from everyone? Here's news for you: You're not entitled to ANYTHING. Especially movies and music and stuff that you in no way need whatsoever. The only people standing up for piracy are the thieves themselves. It helps them sleep at night.