However, I am only too happy to download pirated movies right now, because the user experience is often superior to that granted when you purchase a DVD or Blu-ray. You don’t have to jump through a series of trailers and other bits of studio marketing before being allowed to view the main menu. You don’t have to watch an unskippable studio ad equating copying with theft after you’ve bought the damn DVD. You aren’t subjected to the hideous blue-background, likewise-unskippable FBI warning. You don’t have to wait for your retarded Blu-ray player to laboriously load disc content while drawing a “progress bar” which you realize is meaningless when it’s erased and drawn again. And again. And again. You don’t have to download a Windows-only executable that turns out to be a self-extracting archive of an ISO in order to update your player’s firmware so that you can actually watch the damn movie you just paid for. (This has screwed up two movie nights so far. Yes, I’m aware that it wouldn’t be necessary were we using a PS3 or other network-capable Blu-ray player, but you use what’s there when you’re visiting your parents. While we’re on the subject, though, anyone care to recommend a Blu-ray player with a particularly pleasant user experience?)

Don’t even get me started on the buggy DirecTV on-demand box that wanted us to switch from the existing HDMI connection to a component-cable one before it would let us watch a movie we’d already paid for. (Yes, HDMI to component. I’m aware that’s completely back-asswards.)

Anyway, the bottom line is that where movies are concerned, I find myself wanting to pirate them, not out of cheapness but rather spite against an actively customer-hostile industry. Does this make me a hopeless morally bankrupt hypocrite?

This has nothing to do with benefitting corporations. It has to do with personal ethics.

All of the examples you erroneously cite — all of them — involve someone deciding to give away something that they own, which is to say something that they have the right to give away. Freecycle? Awesome. Second-hand shops? Love ‘em. Garage sales? Great. Hand-me-downs? Fabulous. In all of those situations, the person who is reselling or giving an object away already has a moral right to do so. The fact that the company that originally sold the item doesn’t get paid twice doesn’t make it wrong. And if you don’t get paid for singing or for giving away your ideas, that’s your choice. They’re your ideas. You have a moral right to them.

None of this, however, is any sort of a justification for giving away or selling objects or products that you don’t have a moral right to. And if you think the existence of garage sales makes it OK to steal other people’s stuff, then I don’t think you’re qualified to lecture me — or anyone else — about the meaning of the word “injustice.”

There truly are a whole lot of assumptions being made about some complex philosophical, ethical and moral questions, when someone so blithely says scoring some free music or software makes you a ‘bad’ person, whereas paying for it makes you ‘ethical and good’.

Bad luck, you say, OP writer, you don’t have the money to pay what corporations are asking for some of their products. Get out there and be a ‘good person’ and support the capitalist way. That’s all I’m hearing.

What about freecycle? Is that immoral too? After-all…wouldn’t the ‘right way’ really, be to throw out and completely destroy what you don’t want or need anymore so no-one gets any free-use of a product they should, by your standards, have payed for?

You’re not supporting a deeper, more ethical way of being…you’re just upholding standard Western values…and guess what…Standard Western Values have been based on a whole lot of REAL injustice in the first place and like KFW points out, perhaps you need a walk through history and you can have a few hidden realities pointed out along the way, such as…how much of the Western world has been built on slave labour and exploitational wages in the first place.

BTW….I sing for free and it pleases a lot of people, because I’ve got a damn good voice. And I give out a lot of my ideas, everyday, for free, and help a lot of people, for free. I have to make a living, sure. And I do. An honest living. And right on KFW…I don’t expect people to be paying for my services for the rest of world history and sit back raking in the profits of my sweat and tears of labour til the day I die.

Get off your simplistic high-horse and open your eyes to some of the real bloody injustices going on in the world.

1. You DON’T automatically have the right to get paid for something just because you did it.

2. Our patent law, for example, clearly articulated its purpose – the public good, not private profit. It ALLOWED private profit only to the extent necessary to see potentially valuable devices got BUILT, not just dreamed of.

3. Historically, “intellectual property” has NOT always existed – it’s a new concept, and new laws, and currently they’re being written almost exclusively by a fanatical special-interest group – corporations.

4. It would be reasonable if all intellectual property protection ceased as soon as the creator stopped providing and updating their “property”, i.e. keep it in print or it goes public domain. Build and sell your invention, or someone else gets to. Support your software, or stop complaining when it enters the world of garage sales, giveaways, and hand-me-downs.

5. If you want work you do while young to support you when you’re old, get a retirement fund or petition your legislators to make Social Security work – but don’t expect people to pay for your whole life for some disposable pap you whipped out when you were 21. Slinging words or images isn’t any more valuable than slinging groceries or drywall. Do I get a royalty from every house I’ve put drywall in whenever a new tenant moves in? Should I?

6. There’s a difference – a profound difference – between entering someone’s home and taking their only copy of some object and making a copy of a mass-produced object they sell. It’s the “entering someone’s home” part that gets people shot, not the hypothetical income loss. If our laws respected this common sense and kowtowed to corporations less, they’d get respected a lot more.

7. You can’t fairly judge ANY activity or tool based on the way that the stupid use it. The stupid are stupid, and stupidity pretty much dominates the more subtle issues.

8. Last but not least – in order to really have a sensible discussion, the entire article would have to be deconstructed word by word, as there are SO many assumptions made about the concepts the author is trying to convince us of.

Doesn’t anyone else ever respond to the first line with a response on the order of “No. It isn’t stealing. It isn’t wrong. And if you want to walk with me through the process by which we acquired laws claiming it is, I’ll be happy to study that history (again) with you – but it will take as long as, say, learning vi.”

Seriously, though, there’s a wealth of information coming together that pretty much confirms the viewpoint that most pirates (of any media) are not paying customers anyway, and so copyright violation isn’t really “shrinkage” (what shops call shoplifting). This may be less so in the music space, though – I note that Country as a genre has excellent profits because of the abundance of Christians in the fanbase, and most Christians don’t pirate!

With one exception (that I won’t name), I try to make all of my software legal. The remaining exception I steal because (and this is a dodgy justification to be sure) of the pain and suffering the software company caused me during the 1990s. Rather than tie up the courts in a trivial lawsuit about my pain and suffering, I prefer to steal their software for reparations. I don’t defend my actions in this regard, however, merely report them!

One instance in which I regular commit copyright violation is the downloading of old black and white Doctor Who serial reconstructions. I can’t buy these, but they are shared via torrents. It really doesn’t feel like stealing to download something so roughly construed that it is barely of saleable value – more like participating in a grey market library. And, crucially, I would happily pay for the service to download these if it was available. In the absence of that availability, I commit “theft”. And I don’t see it as immoral, in this case.

Similarly, if people in Australia have to pirate videogames because no publisher will release them in their territory, I see this as fair game. Which brings me back to my opening remark: copyright violation *is* theft, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong.

Best wishes guys!

The market doesn’t care what you think is stupid. The market ruthlessly sets prices and allocates capital to the highest return projects.

If it’s really true that there are all these projects out there begging for a low cost copy of orcad, maybe that’s really the biggest asset your company has? You could grow by taking on all these projects?

The only versions that I know of are so expensive that they block the idea of a garage-startup. This is stupid in my opinion. The only way I know around this for said startups is to pirate the software until you make some revenue. I was asking for other ways of doing it.

Also, your analogy is wrong. If I was starting a small business and pirated orcad, I would not be selling copies of it in competition with Cadence. There would be no change in Cadence’s profit based on my actions. If a chinese company copied my product and started selling it they would be reducing my revenue. This is different. I am not saying that justifies the action of pirating software, I am just saying they are not the same thing.

I was asking for other peoples opinions on where not paying for software until you can afford the price they charge would sit in their ethical meter amongst stealing, pirating, and playing good. I believe it not as bad as pirating in general, no where near as bad as stealing, but worse than playing well. However if someone claims that is what they would do but never gets around to paying for it then that is worse than pirating because it also includes dishonesty.

The single price argument doesn’t fly either. You are talking about price discrimination which companies do try to take advantage of to an extent, see some software pricing models, airline tickets, etc. Would you agree to the converse? That once you start making a whole bunch of money, their software charge increases proportionally?