🚀 go-pugleaf

Rick Warfield <arc...@earthlink.net> wrote:


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

Pretty easy not to take a real stand, eh??

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

I don't give a rat's butt if it's politically correct or not. 

>    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.

Correct.

>    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.

Correct.

>    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.

Correct.

>Piracy opponents:

>    The fact that piracy is illegal does not make it wrong.

Right and wrong are opinions. What's so is this : It is illegal to
pirate software. If you do, you break the law.

>  The law is
>not self-justifying.

It doesn't have to be. It simply is.

>    Piracy is not logically equivilant to theft of physical property. 

Perhaps not, but it is still theft. And still against the law. 

>Violating someone's intellectual property obviously does not take
>anything away from him in the same way that taking his physical property
>does.

I do not agree. Niether do the people who enacted the law, nor the
ones who more recently upheld it. Lucky for us, they did not share
your view and are held in much higher regard than the likes of you, by
and large, for reasons you probably wouldn't understand. 

>    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.

No, but prevention of theft does. 

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

Not worth discussing, since it will never happen.

>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.

Yes they do. This has already been decided by people with more sense
than you.