Seeing the wall of text appear after the party is over made me giggle a bit.

Chances are if someone stole something thats software then it implies they are too broke to begin with and can't afford it because the economy has been ruined from mass outsourcing of real jobs to foreign countries.

Who said that?

Yea, exactly.

Don't hide your passions, Matthew!

How about abandonware? Suppose the company itself has gone out of business years ago.

Someone still owes the rights

I agree that there is a violation, however you have yet to demonstrate a loss of any money.

1) Poor people already legally steal, depending on where you live this may be called welfare or some other provision that aids those that are less financially fortunate. As a society we find that to be moral and acceptable and for good reasons.
2) I see no wrong in poor people "stealing" if nobody is harmed. If a restaurant was about the throw away its excess food to the city dump but some poor person "broke into" their trashcans and took the food to feed himself I would find no fault in his actions. We are of course still arguing whether or not someone is harmed if these people "pirate", but the argument that "piracy" is acceptable if no one is harmed still stands.

I'll stop for a second and agree with you that if someone "pirated" a game/movie/song it proves that he find some value in the product, however I would also point out that most likely this value is much lower than the asking price of the product.
A poor unemployed kid in a poor country might have purchased the game of it cost 0.50$ because that is all that he can afford, but no one would sell the game to him for that amount of money. It appears to me he represents a lost sale of 0.50$ and not the original asking price (for this example lets say 50$)
A rich spoiled kid in a rich country might have purchased the game if it cost 40$, representing a lost sale of 40$.
Even better though, if someone had offered a way for kid #1 to get a license for the game for 0.50$ without receiving official product support or updates and without reducing the producer's resources by receiving a physical copy or even using their bandwidth for download, effectively charging him 0.50$ for a license to copy the game from whatever stranger offered him a copy, I'm sure he would take it and the game industry would be 0.50$ richer.
Kid #2 would probably also be better served by offering him a direct download option for exactly those 50$; The only reason he "pirated" the game was because he was lazy, had you only given him what he wanted you would have been that much richer.
So in conclusion, both kids definitely do not represent a lost sale of 100$ (two products) but much less and if only someone would cater to them they would represent no loss whatsoever. Additionally, while there is a lost sale of 40.50$ it does not mean a loss of 40.50$ for the game company; Had "piracy" not existed, kid #1 would definitely not play the game at all and should not even be considered, and kid #2 would either have or have not purchased the game at the given 50$ and so at best would represent an unknown loss of value (of somewhere between 0$ and 50$).

So how much is "piracy" hurting the game/movie/tv/music industry? Does it even harm them at all? Does it perhaps benefit them? The only thing I can be certain of is that it is not hurting them as much as they claim it is.

On the subject of PIPA/SOPA, it is not the prevention of piracy that angers me; While I and many other people would greatly suffer if piracy was entirely gone this is not the issue at hand and not the reason I find these laws to be flawed. The real problem is that this legislation essentially transfers the claimed loss of money to piracy from the X^[1] industry to other companies, organizations and people around the world. Essentially the X industry would say that they are losing 5,000,000$ to "piracy" (which they aren't) and that Google (for example) is responsible of preventing that loss and they should expend those 5,000,000$ from their own money to prevent that loss. Google does not make 5M$ from "piracy", DNS companies do not make 5M$ from "piracy" etc. and they should not be forced to pay that money because of "piracy". A much more correct course of conduct is perhaps what happened with MegaUpload, a concerted multinational effort to bring to justice a company that thrives on illegal activity. (Though I will not claim to understand that specific case in depth, this statement is only a shallow one from my understanding of the event)

In conclusion, I hope everyone has a happy day ahead

@Slardarbeast:

Yeah, and what about the people who actually used MEGAUPLOAD.COM for storage/backup, and generally paid for the service's legal activities. Did the FBI refund them, compensate them for lost access to data that is needed here & now?

I consider the raid to be such a nonsense to be honest.

I don't see where it's mentioned that the US doesn't really have any business arresting Dutch citizens in New Zealand (megaupload). Can you imagine the shoe were on the other foot?

If a business partner of yours was jailed for drunk driving, would the cops be responsible for the business?

Usually the rights are sold during bankruptcy. If they were not, then of course nobody will be around to enforce the copyright. However, I do not believe that there is any legal concept of abandonware, so it probably is still technically illegal.

From a moral perspective, I generally don't see anything wrong with it. Some would disagree, but I wouldn't really care to argue this subjective point.

It's not the fault of law enforcement if you have been scammed into supporting an illegal business. You would need to sue the business.

Oh really? I din't know it, thank you.

So you know what you're doing... eh... And I was losing my time with someone like you... Yes indeed I think pirates (people like you), could ruin my career.

Again... Go tell it to the FBI...

Yhea he see what he wants... I think he's mad just because there is no more free movies for him...

Read the FBI's report. They aren't about to shut down things with international support if they don't have solid proof. The whole point of the new SOPA/PIPA laws was to make it easier to do this ... to shut down things with limited proof and no cooperation from other countries.

This is much different from the Pirate Bay. Megaupload hosted content and allowed people to share it. If the government can prove that they knowingly infringed and weren't taking serious steps to avoid copyright infringement, then they (Megaupload) will lose their case in court.

And it would seem to me that if they were able to go through legal channels to preemptively shut down the site, they must have a lot of evidence.

This is how the legal system is supposed to work. Now if Megaupload wins the case and can prove that the FBI made things up or purposely misled the courts, then they will no doubt be awarded compensation for monetary loss due to the raid.

True. The difference here is that Megaupload actually will get an opportunity to defend themselves in court. Taking computers as a means of collecting more evidence is quite common. It prevents evidence from getting destroyed, etc.

But is there the possibility that the government is abusing their authority? Absolutely.

Some think both are wrong, some think neither are wrong, and some make the distinction. I would argue that hosting the content is illegal, while providing links is not. But I agree that it's somewhat arbitrary.

The reason I am not against links to content is simply that where do you draw the line? If I link to Google in good faith, and they have a search link to a pirated page, it seems ridiculous to blame me. You can probably get to any website from another by just following links, which would imply that we need to prosecute everybody on the Internet.