🚀 go-pugleaf

"David Alex Lamb" <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca> wrote
> 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.

I've resisted the temptation to join this thread so far, but I just have to
say that that's the best explanation for why DRM is a bad thing that I've
ever seen.

Thanks David.

CC