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[Yanlin]

Steal from the rich and give to yourself!

[Okenido]

Yanlin do you even know how bittorrent even works?

[Yanlin]

Sort of. You downloads bits of the file from different sources and put it back together into the whole file. Kind of like regular P2P only faster.

Not really, no. I was making a joke anyway. Please enlighten me.

[Cthulhu]

It's still theft.  Dehumanize the "faceless corporations" behind them all you want, make them horrible, evil monsters, make the pirates as helpless and sympathetic as you can, but it's still theft.

[Idiom]

Pirating can be considered a form of protest, right?

[Yanlin]

Protest can be considered a form of crime, right?

[Sean Mirrsen]

No, as long as the protest is justified.

[Yanlin]

But is this one justified? This is theft by definition. I don't give a shit that it makes a copy and not removes the original. It's like you take your car and create millions of exact copy cars for completely free and distribute them.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'd do that if I could btw. It's a natural desire of a human to help another. I consider helping others rather pleasing, as long as it does not limit my own resources and doesn't mean going too far out of my way. If I happened to have a matter replicator working off zero point energy, I'd likely go and flood the neighborhood with various expensive items, just because I'd be able to. It just happens to work the same with data and the Internet - sharing doesn't mean going out of your way (since you're rarely actively monitoring it) and it's no loss to you - so why not?

[Cthulhu]

You're helping a few people, but you're hurting the people that originally designed the whatever.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Could it be that the designer people are doing it wrong? The game these forums are about is the case in point - you cannot pirate it even if you try. Maybe all entertainment should switch to this method? Data is a unique form of matter (not physically speaking), in that it can replicate itself. Therefore, if you sell data, you get a theoretically infinite source of money. The universe has taught us that nothing can be infinite, even theoretically, therefore selling data is wrong (lousy argument, I know). If your product is a work of art, then sell it as a work of art - contained in one unique physical form. Artificially limiting something as natural as data copying is never going to work.
OnLive may be a step in the "work of art" direction - you wouldn't be selling data, just the ability to go and see/use it, like they do in museums with paintings. It would be "right" in the universal sense, but wrong on other levels if it is established as the only means of playing games or accessing software.

p.s.: [/rant], you're free to take none of the above seriously.

[Sowelu]

If you could push a button and duplicate a car, that would be awesome.  But there wouldn't be many new models of cars after that--and if there were, I sure wouldn't want to ride in them.

Creating worthwhile data is hard.  REALLY hard for engineering, but creative work is not exactly a cake walk either.  And in general, the people who hire engineers (or artists) says, "How much money can we make off this?  Okay, let's see how much we're willing to invest or risk".  If the money to be made is only enough donations to pay one automotive engineer's salary for three months, you're not going to have a very good car at the end.

[Slappy Moose]

DEMOMAN IS UNDERPOWERED!

[Sean Mirrsen]

O RLY? Take a step further with that technology - and any home PC will turn into a designer's workshop more powerful than all custom car 'shops of the world combined. Take AutoCAD, throw in a plugin to link with the matter replicator, and design away! Sure, the design could be replicated later by others, but that would be different - you could judge how good your work is by how many copies of your car are made. Some people might like the design enough to give something to you - not money, since it'd lose value when everything can be replicated - but something else. They might lend you a hand in designing an additional room for your house. They might invite you to a party, team up with you in Counter-Strike 4D, defend you in court, whatever. Material wealth would be no more, and humanity might finally improve.

Uh.. yeah, I tend to drift off on philosophical tangents at times.

[Mel_Vixen]

Well designers can life on donations, like toady shows with DF. And people can go with public-projects like programming Linux (or the rapid prototyping community). I mean look an MS and then at the Linux/Unix community, in my eyes the later is the more flexible and creative even thought they dont have copyrights or income form theyr programming. Also "Copyright" is something the modern society has created.

Thousands and thousands years before everyone just could copy a book or learn a song. This way we got Shakespear, the storys gethered by the brothers grim etc. I dont see why out of whim suddenly this should be illegal.

What if some greeks would suddenly pop and say that by there 5000 years copyright noone is allowed to use anything that bases on old greek inventions/math?