🚀 go-pugleaf

Shawk wrote:
> Walt's confident that no decent person would be driven to behaving like 
> a criminal even if people consistently treat them as criminals and I'm 
> sure he's right for a percentage of people.

"Criminal" is a pretty loaded word.  Laws have a wide range of 
seriousness, and there's lots of evidence that many (maybe most) people 
don't consider some of them (say, speeding laws, or jaywalking laws) to 
be so serious as to be worth obeying if it's inconvenient to do so.

It has long been clear, since at least the days of cheap photocopying 
and cheap audio cassettes, that a large fraction of the public has 
trouble taking copyright seriously.  I can easily imagine people who 
never bothered to figure out how to pirate anything suddenly getting 
pissed off enough about laws they barely respect in the first place to 
start downloading, just because of DRM.

I am not trying to justify breaking any such laws.  While the Pirate Bay 
article may well have been trying to do so, I think many newly-minted 
pirates might just be saying to themselves "f**k it, that rule is just 
as silly as a 100km/hr speed limit on the 401".  They might think of 
their one download as pretty much equivalent to driving 105km/hr instead 
of 100.