🚀 go-pugleaf

rabBit wrote:
> 
> >>
> >so what your saying is that even though the true market value of said
> >os is apparently only a few dollars it is OK to force me to pay one
> >corporation ten to thrity times that price because i am not shelling
> >out additional $$$$ to a different corporation at the same time?
> 
> As a programmer myself, I know how many months and years go into the
> production of a single piece of software. Since the profit of that
> software is the only way to pay hundreds of people for years of work,
> the price has to be higher than it's 'Material' cost. The iron and
> steel used to build a car would only cost a few hundred dollars, but
> it's the labor you are paying for.
> 
> When someone pirates software, we don't get paid for our work. A
> single person pirating won't effect us that much, and would be
> immeasurable. But it is so wide-spread that it really hurts us.
> 
> There is a simple way to determine the ammount of piracy going on, and
> that is to compare how many people are using that software (easy to do
> with online games like Quake) as opposed to number of copies sold.
> This can be done easily with cookies. When the usage outnumbers the
> copies sold, then there is some piracy going on.

Yes, but the mere existance of illegal copies does not prove that
profits are being lost.  As has been said a thousand times, a person who
pirates a game would not necessarily buy it if it were not available to
him illegaly.

> Imagine if I had you do a job for me, and then refused to pay you,
> claiming I was only 'Previewing your skills', it ammounts to the same
> thing.

No it doesn't.  It's more like you paid me to build something, then made
exact copies of my work and distributed them without my knowledge.

> Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail sent to this address will result
> in either a mailbomb campaign or a virial attack, depending upon
> the nature of the offending E-mail and my mood. By sending E-mail
> to this address, you agree to these terms.

People on both sides of this debate need to get a clue (actually, quite
a few clues).  Remember:

Piracy advocates (is that a politically-correct term?):

    Piracy is illegal.  There is no question about that.  Copyright law
has been upheld by the courts many times; there's no point in trying to
legally justify what you're doing.

    You do not own the software that you buy, you only own a licence to
use it.  This is not because of the license that comes with the
software; it's just a fact of copyright law.

    The fact that copyright law makes it illegal for you to do something
you want to do does not in and of itself make the law wrong.

Piracy opponents:

    The fact that piracy is illegal does not make it wrong.  The law is
not self-justifying.

    Piracy is not logically equivilant to theft of physical property. 
Violating someone's intellectual property obviously does not take
anything away from him in the same way that taking his physical property
does.

    The fact that the rights granted by copyright law create the basis
of one of the largest industries in the world does not justify the law.

    If we did away with copyright law, software production would not
suddenly cease entirely.

Basicly, it comes down to the question of whether or not people who
write software (and other forms of intellectual property) have the right
to control its distribution if that right interferes with the rights of
others to exert full control over their physical property.

Polar bear