http://forum.sharereactor.com/viewtopic.php?t=63714 tickle-trunk ShareReactor Visitor Joined: 02 Jan 2002 Posts: 22 What I see in the piracy thread shocks me. I had no idea that I was involved in a community (and I've been here right from the start, and have been using edonkey almost from its birth) that thinks of itself as such a raving bunch of pirates. I'm even more astonished by how many people believe they can find moral loopholes. If you believe getting copies of files is basically wrong, then these funny tricks like believing it's okay to try before you buy or it's not wrong because the companies are rich are obviously ridiculous. How do you live with yourself when you see yourself as such an obvious excuse-making petty thief? Some of you claim to have no conscience, but if so, what is making you post an answer? If you really don't care why tell someone about it? Perhaps your efforts not to care aren't quite fully successful. All I can say is thank God you people haven't found a way to burglarize without getting caught. What is it like to live your life just waiting for the opportunity to do whatever wrong thing you don't think you'll get caught for? When you see an old lady on an empty, night time street, are you sizing her up too? Disgusting. Even Hobbes would roll in his grave, I think. The difference between you self-described pirates and me is that my conscience is clear. Not only that, but I believe I am contributing a wonderful good, the spreading of information. In some small way I am taking part in the creation of a new printing press, one that makes information, music, art, and knowledge obtainable like it has never been before. I'm here because I believe I am contributing to a wonderful, revolutionary good. I am not just unashamed, but extremely proud. Obviously, I believe that file-sharing is not piracy (or theft, or criminal in any remote sense). All that we are doing is having our machines communicate 1s and 0s and record them. Nothing is lost by anyone anywhere except an outdated way of making an income. Why, please tell me, is it a crime to make someone's way of making money obsolete? Once, in ancient Greece, many people made a living by memorizing long poems and then reciting them. Someone invented writing and these poor saps were out of a job because people could write the information down (yes, even as they themselves recited it) and these memorizers were not needed anymore. The similarity with media today is clear. Imagine what a world we would live in now if our ability to use pen and paper was handcuffed 3000 years ago by narrow minded, economically static people who insisted on banning all technological freedom to maintain the source of income of certain people. The idea is absurd, and thank God the Greeks had more forsight than we seem to. Henry Ford put millions of horse breeders out of business and changed our world. Thank God we do not pay royalties today to horse breeders when we buy a car. Can you imagine the absurdity? Many people argue that because file-sharing will have bad effects that it is wrong. This is interesting. Let's look at some of these alleged effects: 1. People will stop making music/movies. What crap. The creative urge will go on even if all the profitability of media making completely disappears, and quite frankly the ugly taint of the desire for profit would be refreshingly absent. People who make music for money make crap. Everyone knows this. Besides, music and movies will always be profitable (not ridiculously so, but ridiculous profit only comes with monopolies) because people will always pay to see live concerts and first/authentic/in theatre releases. So we aren't ruining anyone's entire revenue anyway. Moreover, the drive for fame and achievement have always been the best motivators. If the media industry loses its chokehold on the world, we will experience a renaissance of media the likes of which will rock the world. Imagine it! 2. The quality will go down. Good lord, I think that people who believe this have so little understanding of media mass production it's scary. Is it not a wonder of the modern world that we have 6 billion human beings and only 15 original ideas in media creation? Profitable monopolies are not concerned about quality at all--and their results clearly show this. They are concerned with control, predictable profit, and lack of change. We see the same movie over and over, with slightly different names, actors, and plots, because this is what serves the monopolistic industry. We hear the same music over and over (in fact, much of it is written by the same few song writers who mass produce self-described crap because they get paid to do so) because it is good for the industry for us to hear it. Our media industries are the equivalent of the old catholic church. They stifle us, make us conform, and destroy our potential. The quality of our media couldn't get worse. And this is not a slight against our creative people--I know that they could do amazing things if they had any control of their own. The problem is that they have to beg at the media Pope's feet to please produce exactly what they are told to or else do nothing. That is sick. 3. The economy will suffer. No, it won't. People spend where their interests lie. If they love music or movies they will spend their money in order to best enjoy those things. They might buy different things from different people, but the spending power and the interest will still be there. Certain industries will suffer, of course, but if no industry is suffering from out-datedness then all the economy is clearly suffering from a lack of ingenuity and progress. Even in Stalin's U.S.S.R. certain industries became out-dated and were replaced. Why do we owe it to certain large companies to make sure that they forever make the same profit doing the same thing they've always done? Worse, how has it come to be that these big companies have made so many of us feel that it is wrong to do something that hurts their income? Again, the Catholic church made a fine example of this and it was disgusting. If one more person tells me that copying information (music or whatever) from a cd or dvd is just like going into a store and stealing a cd or dvd, I think I'm going to wretch. How, please God tell me, is it at all the same? In order to steal, something has to be missing. Notice, you can't steal the color red, the number five, or tomorrow's sunset because these things cannot go missing. You can't steal information if you do not destroy anything. Information is abstract and it is only instantiated in particular physical objects. You can copy something that someone really wants you to buy instead, but their desire for you to pay them does not make it stealing. How dare anyone dictate the meaning of right and wrong to us only according to how they profit or lose. The audacity! Many people believe copyright came about because people were worried that without it creative work would never come about. These people need to read even the slightest bit of the actual history of the matter. Copyright exists because wealthy creative people saw that it would make them even wealthier. It is astonishing that Disney alone has more control over our actual copyright laws then all of our politicians put together. In fact, as Disney ages, our copyright laws change almost identically. Does anyone really think that Disney (the corporation, not the dead founder) is really worried that if their astonishing profit margins are not there that they will not be able to produce creative work, for fear that they will not make any money? What would it even mean to say that Disney is worried about its creativity? Today our dna pattern is being copyrighted, and, astonishingly, we will have to pay various copyright holders money in order to cure ourselves of various diseases, NOT because the copyright holders do anything for us or because they advanced the well-being of mankind in any way whatsoever, but because they owned the particular scientist who was the first lucky duck to chart whatever chunk of DNA. (By owned, I of course mean paid by, but today there is really little difference. One corporation owns Harvard microbiology. They decide what Harvard studies, and they own, in advance, all the results. Let us hope that Harvard microbiology never again discovers anything that people will die without.) Copyright is disgusting. I am very passionately in favour of not stealing the credit for creative work. Taking something and saying that you created it when you didn't is something entirely different. At the very least you are lying, and worse you are distorting history. But copying work while still giving credit to its source is nothing like this. It saddens me to no end that if aliens dropped off, for our benefit, a food replicating machine that would feed the world by making perfect copies of whatever food item was put in it we would quickly destroy the machine and call it evil. After all, it would be stealing a farmer's product, a chef's cooking, a shipper's shipping, etc. Sad that people would have to keep on starving, but we couldn't let such an evil machine exist, now could we? Sadly, mankind has found medicines that effectively cure or curb numerous diseases. If only they weren't patented and doled out at extremely high cost by perhaps the most profitable industry ever imagined, millions of innocent diseased people wouldn't die this year. So no, file-sharing is not piracy and it is not wrong. History will look back at this era and see it as either the birth of mass creativity or the death of it. Even if it must be the death, please, let's none of us let a wealthy industry tell us that it is all for the moral best. It is an atrocity. It stinks as badly as the Catholic church inventing purgatory in order to charge money from people to buy their dead relatives passage into heaven. (If you are not aware of this invention, please read up. The profit motive and disgusting behaviour involved is painfully relevant.) Please, let's think for ourselves. If you must be raped, at least don't let the rapist con you into believing that struggling against them is morally wrong. Open your eyes.